{K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TITLE-PAGE} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: by Alfred de Grazia A Personal History of Attempts to Establish and Resist Theories of Quantavolution and Catastrophe in the Natural and Human Sciences, 1963 to 1983. by Alfred de Grazia Metron Publications Princeton, N. J. Notes on first printed version of this book ISBN: 0-940268-08-6 Copyright (c) 1984 by Alfred de Grazia All rights reserved Printed in the U. S. A. Limited first edition of 300 copies. Address: Metron Publications, P. O. Box 1213, Princeton, N. J., 08542, U. S. A. Cosmic Heretics was processed by the Princeton University Computing Center, using the processing language called Script. Photocomposition, printing, and binding were accomplished by the Princeton University Printing Services. The text is set in 10 and 9 point Times Roman. The Author thanks Rick Bender, Steve Pearson, and Skip Plank for managing ably and considerately the production of this and other works of the Quantavolution Series, and also thanks Marion Carty for her contributions to the designs and formatting of the books. On the cover, Isodensitometer tracing of comet Morehouse 1908 III, in J. Rahe et al., Atlas of Cometary Forms (Washington: NASA, 1962), 63-4. This book is dedicated to whoever figures in it, whether or not by name. The most elementary books of science betrayed the inadequacy of old implements of thought. Chapter after chapter closed with phrases such as one never met in older literature: "The cause of this phenomenon is not understood;" "science no longer ventures to explain causes;" "the first step towards a causal explanation still remains to be taken;" "opinions are very much divided;" "in spite of the contradictions involved;" "science gets on only by adopting different theories, sometimes contradictory." Evidently the new American would need to think in contradictions, and instead of Kant's famous four antinomies, the new universe would know no law that could not be proved by its anti-law. To educate -- one's self to begin with -- had been the effort of one's life for sixty years; and the difficulties of education had gone on doubling with the coal-output, until the prospect of waiting another ten years, in order to face a seventh doubling of complexities, allured one's imagination but slightly. From : The Education of Henry Adams : An Autobiography. Privately published in 1906, in 100 copies, and sent to interested persons for comment. General publication ensued in 1918. In 1975 republished by Berg: Dunwoody, Georgia. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T TABLE OF CONTENTS} {S - } COSMIC HERETICS by ALFRED DE GRAZIA TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE-PAGE FOREWORD: IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST PART ONE 1. ROYAL INCEST 2. THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE 3. CHEERS AND HISSES 4. A PROPER RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY 5. THE BRITISH CONNECTION PART TWO 6. HOLOCAUST AND AMNESIA 7. FROM VENUS WITH LOVE 8. HOMO SCHIZO MEETS GOD PART THREE 9. NEW FASHIONS IN CATASTROPHISM 10. ABC'S OF ASTROPHYSICS 11. CLOCKWORK PART FOUR 12. THE THIRD WORLD OF SCIENCE 13. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK 14. THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS PART FIVE 15. THE KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY 16. PRECURSORS OF QUANTAVOLUTION 17. THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE EPILOGUE {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P - } {Q - } {C - } {T FOREWORD: } {S : IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST } COSMIC HERETICS: by Alfred de Grazia FOREWORD IN SEARCH OF TIMES PAST I did not obtain Alfred de Grazia's materials for this book without remonstrance and persiflage. I had thought that he would be pleased to have someone writing about his activities, especially someone like myself who could be counted upon for sympathy, and indeed intended to do so, in several volumes, no less. Strange, for Immanuel Velikovsky had responded to me in the same way! When I muttered something about reminiscence and the consolations of old age, he was primed for the retort, and I learned that Leonard Woolf had written his autobiography in his eighties, in five volumes, and Woolf was then old enough to be his father, and Bertrand Russell at the same age in three volumes. And I had better read them. Furthermore, said he, I have a lot to recount, think of it, a boyhood spent sniffing the stench of the Chicago stockyards, shivering in the icy blasts off the prairies, a small critter's glance up the skirts of the Roaring Twenties. Then the University of Chicago in the heyday of Robert Maynard Hutchins. And more, seven campaigns of World War II, and still more, an island of the Aegean Sea, an experimental college in the Swiss Alps, intelligent women, singular, even beautiful, women, even beautiful men, for that matter. No, I can't let you take it away, there's too much to say. Let me try, I said, there'll be no conflict of interest. I'll hew to the line of the Cosmic Heretics as they tried to break into the halls of science. It's got to be dull. It'll save you doing the chore. I can't take in your enfants terribles or your politicking, your love affairs or your friends who escaped your involvement in cosmic heresies. Or your poetry or attempts at educational revolution. No Naxos, not the beautiful ideas by half. No grueling trips, failures, pains, unless they're cosmical. No Vietnam, no University life. Then Deg began to reproach me for taking a person's life out of its context, arguing that you have to talk about everything to say the truth about anything, whereupon I argued that no field of science could exist if most of everything weren't left out of the investigation of single thing. Well certainly, he granted, you'll have a better chance of excising the insignificant details of life. Yes, exactly, I said, but I thought there's the problem and the genius of biography, fixing upon the details which may be the fulcrum of a change of life, precisely the sort of thing that is often lost in sociology and history. Where will it start, where will it end, he wondered. I'll start, I said, at the time when you met Immanuel Velikovsky, the beginning of 1963, and carry it down to the publication of your Quantavolution Series, that is, the beginning of 1984. Not in chronological order of course. The story will lurch from side to side and pitch and roll. Using your iconoclastic word "quantavolution" will help to define the dramatis personae. If a person's been observed by you amidst the melee provoked by the claim that nature and mankind have been fashioned by disaster, then that person belongs to the cast of characters. Deg told me that the cosmic heretics were many, and their number would grow with the acceptance of the heresy. But, he warned me, if the heresy were to fail, I would be guilty of slandering decent citizens by inclusion. In either event, he said, history will be rewritten; it always is. To whom will you dedicate your book, he asked, which was tantamount to giving his blessing to the project. To the Cosmic Heretics, naturally, I answered Anyhow, I have already taken care of Velikovsky with the dedication of my first book in the field. V. died four years ago, seventeen years after we met, and before we met had done almost all of his writing. For my own part, previously I had done a lot in political behavior and methodology, but nothing that might be called quantavolution. It was a sociological problem that brought us together in the first instance -- the reception system of science I called it afterwards. Although I might have known better, I almost immediately entered into the substantive theory of catastrophe; I couldn't resist the challenge. And I am just about finished now. (I grinned, and so did he.) I'm beginning to repeat myself, too, so it's not a bad time to end with your book. By the way, have you read everything that I've ever written? Yes, of course. Just wondering, he mused, because V. tried never to talk to a person about his works who hadn't read the pertinent volumes. It makes sense and saved his time. I don't feel strongly about it: my books are children who have gone off somewhere, on their own responsibility. I don't possess them, though I ask that they not be mistreated -- the same as I would for other people's children. Who is entirely read, anyhow, he asked of me almost angrily, as if I had raised the subject. I said I didn't know. Once I had met a psychologist who had read the 24 volumes of Freud's collected works. Still, commented Deg, some of his pieces escaped the Hogarth Press. William Yeats dedicated his autobiography "to those few people mainly personal friends who had read all that I have written," but probably no one qualified. It's good that nobody has read everything of anybody. It might abet the idea that where the pen stops the person vanishes. Rather, although the powers of expression tower above life, life rampages uncontrollably below. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 1: } {T ROYAL INCEST } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER ONE ROYAL INCEST Alfred de Grazia was entering his forty-fourth year when he met a self-styled cosmic heretic, Immanuel Velikovsky, who was already sixty-seven, and for the next twenty years a wide band of life's spectrum was colored by their relationship. As with a love affair, all that happened in the beginning presaged what would happen later, stretched out on the scale of time, themes doubling back upon themselves, attractions and reservations never to be erased, continuing accumulations. The men changed, the world of science changed, too, and also the political world, yet this latter less; for, after all, one man died and the other grew old, whereas science and politics, those statistical behemoths of collective behavior, go on forever, compounded of many millions of individuals whose average age hardly varies, exhibiting trends whose progress, if it could be called such, is hardly discernible and might indeed have constituted a regression. At least so it seemed to these two men who were trying to affect the science and politics of their time. Velikovsky died a heretic, with scattered generally unfavorable press, while his friend de Grazia moved on with a spirit that could be called existential, convinced as before that politics (and he insisted upon regarding science, too, as politics and often included politics in psychopathology) -- that politics, although probably irredeemable, was the elemental hydrogen of human behavior, no matter how compounded into life styles. As the winter days of 1962 became 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, 08540 U. S. A., families and friends gathered into clusters like the last of the leaves, so the half-consciously and driven by eddies of customs and calendar, de Grazia saw more of his friends like Livio Catullus Stecchini and of his brother Sebastian. He did not know Velikovsky, and if he had been asked about him, he would have replied that he had never heard of him. This may appear strange, considering that Deg was to be numbered, by whatever scales a social psychologist might invent to distinguish the "informed and involved" from the "ignorant and apathetic," as a high-scorer on information and involvement. He had enough children in the Princeton school system, a half-dozen, to catch the sound of names from all quarters. He spent part of each week in New York City and at Greenwich village where, of all places, the name of Velikovsky might have been brutted about. He had since 1957 published and edited a magazine, the American Behavioral Scientist, which pretended to cover those matters that were or should be the concern of social scientists. He personally scanned a hundred and fifty magazines in the social sciences and current affairs each month. He had many students, several of them close friends. His parents and the families of two brothers were living most of the time at Princeton. He was not socially pretentious, nor a prideful man, not a University snob, and had had to pawn his professional reputation several times on behalf of scholarly and political iconoclasm. Withal, when it came down to it, he claimed that he had never heard of a man about whom a million or more Americans could have delivered him a rancorous account. One feature that makes mass society a horror-show is the actual anonymity of the famous. (However, the mass scatoma of social realities may be a worse feature.) This he confessed when Livio Stecchini, as they walked a along Nassau street on that cold day, brought up the matter, disjointedly, as happens with men walking down the street to no end, intellectuals with minds chock-full of oddly related and far-off affairs, old friends whose thoughts needed no introduction nor conclusion. Knowing the two men, I imagine that their conversation would have gone something like this: There is a man in Princeton with good material on the scientific establishment... Cosmogonist... They suppressed his books." "What do you mean, suppressed his books ?" "They smeared him." "Like Reich? Like Semmelweis?" "Yes." "What does he do?" "He lives here. He writes." "About what?" "Mythology, astronomy, the Bible, ancient catastrophes." "What does he live on?" "His books. They are very well sold." "That's not our topic." "No. The ABS could take up the sociological side. It's rich. Deg was skeptical. Although his American Behavioral Scientist would stop at nothing, every scientist had his one or two little scandals of defamation, every professor his Dean's crime, his edgy paranoia, and you had to take his word for it. It was the same in politics, dirty tricks everywhere and defamation as a matter of course. As for the juggernaut of science, it rolled along smashing unconscionably the god's celebrants who crowded in upon it from all sides with fresh ideas and reputations. His materials are rich." Again that remark. "Really?" "I can introduce you. We can go to his house. He lives on Hartley Avenue." "Down near the Lake." "To take a look at his stuff." "Maybe... What's his name?" "Velikovsky." "Never heard of him. A few days later Stecchini received a phone call from Deg. Deg had been to dinner at Sebastian's home. There was the usual babble and movement afterwards. He circled around the front room with its piles of papers and open bookshelves, pausing at the one where books of high mobility and heterogeneity sunned themselves for a few days. He picked out a forcefully jacketed book, Oedipus and Akhnaton, the author: Velikovsky. First the large photograph of the author, then the flyleaf, then the , then the index -- he is grasping now for the thesis: the ill-fated incestuous Oedipus was none other than the Egyptian monotheistic pharaoh Akhnaton --more riffling of pages -- the small definite sparking of the book browser. "What's this?" He poked the book at Sebastian. "Any good ?" Sebastian was non-committal: probably he had not read it. "Mind if I borrow it ?" He began to read it that evening. It was "True Detective," connecting two eminent figures never before joined. He finished it the next day. How did he find the time to read it so promptly? A man who attends to a wife, a passel of kids, a dog, a cat, a station wagon, a large house with many doors and windows to mind, fireplaces to dampen, a busy telephone, a fat folder marked "action now", with half a dozen jobs, including a professorship and an editorship, with a propensity to daydream, and in that American society which tries in a hundred ways to pry into one's time and makes life tough for readers, and needing seven hours of sleep -- how does he read a book? They say, "When you want something done, go to a busy man." His urges are compelling. This act of devouring the book was typical of Deg. He would seize things out of his life-stream like a bear grabbing fish and do something with them, a compulsion to undertake and a compulsion to complete, not unlike Velikovsky, and the tie between the two men had something to do with V.'s recognition of this similarity, and perhaps with his growing problem of completion after the compulsion to take on matters lingered: but both men too sometimes had to drop affairs that needed completion or stuck to them beyond their point of pay-off, beyond hope also, so I would not stress the trait, and I even think that it may be so common as to be undistinguished. Velikovsky had made wide turns in his life too, architecture, medical practice, psychoanalysis, politics, and now all this catastrophism which had something of everything. Outwardly, they differed most apparently. Deg of medium height and compact build, V. tall and spare, the one with a midwestern back ground and accent, the other with a heavy Russian accent, Jewish above all. To V outrage was a simple, direct emotion; Deg had the youngness of Americans that comes from promiscuous outrage and wide dispersal of feelings inimical to authorities. Pablo Picasso used to tell Gertrude Stein: "They are not men; they are not women; they are Americans." So how could Deg become outraged at the enemies of V.? Living was parceled among sporadic outrages; indignation cropped out all over the American landscape. While I am at it, I might say something, too, about Deg's attitude to his own writing because this also explains how he might view V.'s troubles. It is also about Gertrude Stein: " In those days she never asked anyone what they thought of her work, but were they interested enough to read it. Now she says if they bring themselves to read it they will be interested." Victim of the Rule of Three, Deg added a first phrase: at first he thought what he wrote was interesting and everyone should be required to read it. Then, after he had passed most of his life in Gertrude Stein's second stage, he postulated a final stage, a nirvana where what he wrote was objectively of interest but neither he nor anyone else should be interested to read it. This is too early to be analyzing character, but I cannot refrain from another comparison, a fatal difference. Whatever V. completed, he fiercely possessed; whatever Deg completed he relinquished. This made their cash flows, you might say, very different. And their advice to each other very different. Deg was saying to V.. "Give it away. Let it go !" and V. to Deg, baffled; "Why didn't you hold on to that?" Moreover V. overvalued whatever he gave, and undervalued what he received. Halfway through the book -- before Akhnaton had espoused his own mother. Queen Ty, Deg was committed to V., the author. A literary tour de force of the rarest kind, it succeeds in making a single person out of two of the most famous heroes of antiquity. Nor are they of the so numerous type of military heroes. They are the active substances of the raging intellect, flourishing amongst squirmy snakes of psychology and religion. Should the temporal sequence be right, then the book would be valid, that Moses preceded Akhnaton and Akhnaton came before Oedipus. The legendary, historical, psychological and archaeological evidence marched in brilliant composition and concordance on behalf of V.'s thesis. That Moses had come first follows from V.'s book, Ages in Chaos, already a decade old, which was to be read and to convince Deg in a matter of weeks. That the Oedipus legend developed after the history of Akhnaton was established in the book itself to Deg's satisfaction, and he confirmed it once again when it came time to write The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, years later. By then he was convinced of V.'s theory that Greek Dark Ages were in fact several centuries that had never existed, and then, within a couple of years, the masterful work of young Eddie Schorr effectively closed up the gap in two articles on Mycenae, Pylos, Troy, Gordion, and other sites. Velikovsky himself here speculated that Nikmed of Ugarit became Cadmus the founder of Thebes and carried the Oedipus legend from the East to the North. V. 's reconstructed chronology closed the centuries like a vise, to where Akhnaton could readily reach to Nikmed and Nikmed to Cadmus and out of it all came the Oedipus Rex of Thebes, the fabled character who gave name to the most popular concept of Sigmund Freud, and it was Freud who had brought on all of this work by his psychoanalytic disciple, but had himself missed both the precession of Moses and the identity of Oedipus as Akhnaton, although he had written directly about all three figures. The book was the best produced of V.'s which were ordinarily drab. Oedipus and Akhnaton carried many fine illustrations, a superior jacket, an excellent typeface, and good printing paper. Still, it did not sell as well as any of a dozen detective novels of the day, and, vibrant and valid, was marked by its publisher for abandonment in 1984. Deg could be sure that practically none of his hundreds of friends and colleagues, students and acquaintances had yet read the book or would ever do so... But then he, too, had written books of which none but the textbooks had sold over a thousand copies. And he could recite the names of many distinguished scholars whose books had sold less. The dream of best-selling great books nevertheless carries on, a myth, deadly to most and profitable to a very few. {K QUANTAVOLUTION & CATASTROPHE} {V COSMIC HERETICS: } {P PART 1: } {Q - } {C Chapter 2: } {T THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE } {S - } COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 : by Alfred de Grazia CHAPTER TWO THE PRODIGAL ARCHIVE The other book, that which won Velikovsky fame, income, and scientific disgrace, was a happy accident of publishing. It could hardly have become a best-seller on its merits; very few books do, and this one was not easy to read or flamboyant. Worlds in Collision was reluctantly published, deceptively publicized, and foolishly attacked. It was written in the 1940's, after Ages in Chaos had been completed and had been circulating among publishers and collecting one rejection after another. Evidently the later work had the better chance, because of its larger, more explosive message. But Worlds in Collision, too, was rejected time after time, this all during a period of high prosperity when publishing company shares boomed on the stock market and practically anything might be brought out. Velikovsky was desperate. One evening he walked the Upper West Side of Manhattan with Elisheva, telling her of how he would buy a typesetting machine and they would compose the book at home and he would sell it himself. He would have done so. All of his publications before then -- there were not many -- had been in some sense subsidized, the articles appearing in psychoanalytic journals, supported by small intellectual circles, the pamphlets appearing under the shadowy imprint of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when this was only a few dedicated utopians enjoying an impetus from Simon Velikovsky's purse. V. knew something about publishing, as he did about many things. V. would never have been "himself", a revered image to countless readers and a buffoon to scientists and scholars, had he not fallen into the crazy typical pattern of a popular author. He was able to catch the attention of John J. O'Neill, Science Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who was thrilled by the manuscript and wrote about it in an article of August 11, 1946. James Putnam, an Editor of Macmillan Company, took it up, praised it among his acquaintances, processed it through several readers, and achieved a favorable vote. A chapter of the book was sold to the Reader's Digest and other selections to Collier's Magazine. Collier's, struggling for circulation, took a large ad in the Herald Tribune, headlining that modern science had now proved the Bible correct, while the Reader's Digest carried the story of the Sun's standing still at Beth-Horon by the command of Joshua, so as to let the Israelites finish off their enemies. Both stories and the publicity attendant upon them played directly to a large audience of bemused Jews and "Old Testament" Christians, including what would be called creationists and millennialists. Then, even before its readers could discover that it was not quite what they had expected, the wrath of scientists descended upon the book. Velikovsky's figure, until then only that of a minor personage in psychoanalytic reading circles, was elevated to a pyre of fame and burned to the ground. Macmillan hastily sold its rights to Doubleday publishers. Of all this that occurred between 1950 and 1962, Deg learned upon his first meetings with V. "I want you to read everything," he said and handed over to him two monumental manuscripts entitled Stargazers and Gravediggers. "Everything" meant also Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos. Deg complimented him upon the Oedipus book and wondered at the documentation piled upon the living floor for examination. Velikovsky wondered, too for none came to him as innocently as his new acquaintance. He was thankful but also dismayed at this walking effect of the suppression of his books. (It hardly occurred to him that his book might have sold under a thousand copies if it had been published by a university press without the publicity that he himself found rather obnoxious, in which case practically everyone might have been expected to be ignorant of it, but the ilk of Deg might have known it). V.'s correspondence was still heavy after a dozen years. His readers sent him every scrap of publicity that they found and he kept it all and tried to reply, far more so than any other author of Deg's acquaintance. A large public was out there somewhere, a heterogeneous network of bright students, people suspicious of the scientific and academic establishments, Bible believers in profusion. Mrs. V. was present; she tried always to be on hand when visitors came and to Deg at least, hers was always a welcome presence. V. kept nothing from Elisheva that he was not also keeping from his visitors. Sheva's grand piano stood in the next room, between a desk loaded with papers and a great cabinet stuffed with books. In the front room were couches and chairs, none too comfortable, and a large coffee table accommodating the tea, crackers and cheese, cakes and dry Israeli white wine that would be brought forth. There were ashtrays, too, for then many were smokers, not V., for he had quit years before after he had suffered a stomach cancer, whose removal had forced a lightened diet as well. Oriental rugs stretched across the floors. The ponderous front porch let in little light, nor did the rooms have much place for an elegant style; or perhaps they reflected an empiricist, not a philosopher. Their charm depended upon the objects in themselves: Sheva's piano and the music resting on it, her strong marble sculptures, several handsome and less useful books on art and archaeology that had entered lately, like those at Sebastian's from which Deg had plucked Oedipus and Akhnaton. From the porch, one penetrated into the sitting room through heavy gray stone walls in five stages: first up the flagstone walk through thick bushes, then up the stairs, then through the first heavy door into a tiny hall, then another heavy door, then an anteroom with a mail- cluttered table and clothes-closet, and finally into the front room. Elisheva, like her husband, had a strong character and great energy. She had large hands and a solid body, maintained a direct and friendly stare through thick glasses, and was perhaps of his age. She had mastered the arts of music and sculpture. Perhaps all the laborious functionalism of its occupants gave the rooms a lack-luster belying the considerable value of their contents. Poor cooks have dazzling automated kitchens; disemployed people have smart interiors. Much later on, when he finally released his books to Dell Publishers for publication in paperback and received a hundred thousand dollars, V. went into a fit of remodeling, building a garage and new airy light-struck rooms, redistributing books and papers for greater efficiency, buying flashy cars for himself and his grandchildren, reminding Deg of Parkinson's "Law", that, as an Empire enters upon its finale, it builds extravagantly. Deg had often to consider, when he taught courses on leadership and creativity, whether a person's appearance correlated with his mind and effectiveness. The stereotype is, of course, "Yes, it does." A great general has a martial air, a scholar looks like a parsnip, an athlete is muscle-bound, and so on. Deg had arrived at the all-answering concept of sociology -- the mutual interaction of physique and role. Little Napoleon looked more imperial than tall de Gaulle, who was an obstinate dumb- bell. But de Gaulle thought he looked like a Great Leader and worthy husband to La Belle France, and played the part and became a great leader. (" France is a widow," Pompidou orated when De Gaulle died.) "The Russian Jews are the handsomest of all," Stephanie Neuman told Deg, and he, looking at her, had of course to agree. The best explanation of the phenomenon comes in a note by V. himself, published posthumously. The "lost Tribes of Israel" had been moved North, and passed through the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas into the lower Volga River Basin. There they mingled genetically with the ever-changing population, with always at least a critical fraction maintaining the Judaic culture-core. Deg had won a piece of the action; his wife's family, with its cluster of Teutonic cognomens - Oppenheim, Lauterbach, Weinstein, Fleishacker, etc. - had managed some handsome blonde alternatives in the aftermath of the Diaspora. "But see here..." to use a common interjection of V. Velikovsky stretched his large spare frame a full two meters, his face will all its big bones and high forehead was clean-shaven and forceful, his large brown eyes open and direct behind his reading glasses, his movements from his favorite low chair, up and down, across the room, were untiring and easy, not graceful but neither awkward. His voice was sure, slow, deep, his words marvelously well-chosen, uttered in the language that he knew least well of Russian, Hebrew, and German, while Arabic and French came after. He couldn't match Stecchini, who had these, plus Italian, Latin, Greek and Arabic, plus the dead languages of Babylon and Egypt, while Deg with his modest portions of French and Italian and smattering of German, Latin, and Spanish was in a pitiable state. V.'s English was formal, never Americanized; his dignity forbade slang or the vernacular, though it amused him to have the vernacular explained. Deg was fond of H. L. Mencken and played loose with the language when let off the field of science. "Sand-bag them," he remarked when V was expostulating over the attempts of a panel of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to get hold of his finalized paper without revealing to him their final replies to it. "What does 'sand-bag' mean?" V asked. "It's what thugs use to hit people with from behind. Let them have the paper; let them rewrite their papers; then withdraw your paper." Then he explained how in some impolite poker games, if you have a good hand, you sometimes pass on it, enticing the other players to bet on their own hands, then double their bets. That's sand-bagging, too. V. wrote well, better than Deg, I think, although he denied it and had to make liberal use of copy-editors. For he explained his every step carefully and was rarely abstract or harsh, whereas Deg usually wrote condensedly, abstractly, and stridently. Looking at V. in these first meetings in a more analytic way. Deg questioned whether a person so physically modeled to the ideal expectation of a heroic figure could nevertheless be a genius and not an actor, an honest victim and not a charlatan. Of what could V complain; he was famous; his books sold by the tens of thousands; his messages had carried throughout the English- speaking world, into several language-areas of the western world besides. Deg flipped through the loose-leaf volumes as they talked. He could read fast and V. was alternately suspicious and admiring of this facility. "I am a slow reader," he announced on occasion. "Yes, but I don't have your memory," grumbled Deg. V. had a superb memory for details. Deg gulped down batches of material, retained their forms, and excreted the details. This is what happened when he read; the stuff was gobbled up by pre-existing forms. Every detail of the volumes before them was remembered by V., though he could hardly have seen most of it for some years. Every few pages contained another foolish review, comment or letter by a scientist or historian or archaeologist. Just to be preserved and collected, side by side, they damned themselves and each other as envious, illogical, irrelevant, ignorant, narrow, and incompetent. Why haven't you published this, it's great? he asked V. V. had strung together a large and complicated story with only rare descriptions and without editori