CALENDAR     

Back in August, I made a note to write about the cuisine at home. Jill began with me as the worst cook imaginable. She had to be taught to fry an egg. When John Hess brought his early love, an ingenue type as they said in stage circles, to visit me when I lived on Maryland Avenue briefly with Aaron Bell, Jill acted as chef and burnt several minute steaks that were abominable to begin with. But then over time her natural intelligence, her dim memories of a home in which food meant something and of a father who liked to eat at Luchow's at lunch time, began to take effect. She is now and has been for years a first-class cook, of the type of our mother or of Ann Oppenheim, San Francisco style that is, a combination of French-Italian-English broil-Western American. It is, I believe, America's future cuisine, richer and more varied than any other for it carries apple pie and Chinese-American chop suey, corn on the cob, and such extraordinary items alongside the best of Western Europe. Salads are a-plenty, potatoes less so and never French-fried, the coffee is usually strong but American style, fish is broiled or stewed, meats are crusted with fire and red inside, spaghetti is al dente, and the bread is absent or is French-Italian, heated with butter and garlic in the oven. The night I thought to say this was in August and the occasion was a dinner of spaghetti verde with a sauce of garden tomatoes that had just been plucked from their neat row along the base of the back fence, and clams that had come from Stone Harbor, New Jersey. There was a French stew whose smallest parts had retained their individuality while still immersed in a superlative sauce.

Our children will probably never need to educate themselves as Jill had. They show signs of understanding and appreciating the table. A reaction is always possible, of course; they may revert in apathy and defiance at some time to hamburger and peas, steak and potatoes, French-fried chicken, and dry prepared cereals.

Suzy is up, and summer is over. Jill and I drew it up the bank and carried it back on the car to the yard where it sits awaiting paintbrushes and filling with the leaves falling in droves. A bare two months ago - ages away on this cold day - it carried us on a grand exploratory trip with turtles as our target, up Stony Creek, sweating at the oars in a blazing sun past the Princeton boathouse to where Lake Carnegie narrows into the canal, passes under the Pennsylvania Railroad shuttle bridge, and so into the creek. We had skated miles up the frozen creek last winter; this was our furthest voyage since then. We found our passage blocked at one

point a mile up by a great complicated tree that had slipped into the water creating at the same time a difficult obstruction to navigation and a set of small, cool pools, into one of which I fell with my clothing on while pushing the rowboat through a slight shallow channel that seemed to offer passage. I was happy with the swim. Jill jumped in after me. Then came Jessie, leaving only Johnny, who needed a little coaxing.

We found that we might jump from some of the higher branches into the deep holes whose bottoms carried cold water most pleasant to feel. We dried as we rowed back and caught not a single turtle of those that we espied perched on sticks stuck in the shallow bottom. "Suzy" will be painted well; she gave everyone a good time, including the small boys who stole her three times; Cathy rowing out to watch and disturb the Princeton crew at practice; Vicky in turtle hunts; Jessie, Paul, and John at fishing; Jill and I just rowing ourselves or rowing with the smallest, or boating with Gil and Liz Bettman laughing at ourselves and admiring the dusk.

The boys became better swimmers. Paul has especially good form. He moves fast and powerfully through the water. He might become a great swimmer; I think style and power in water are beautiful sights, but I cannot recommend the boring and exhausting sessions of tank swimming that competitive excellence requires. Swimming, rowing and football are alike bad in this way - tiresome, prolonged exertions endlessly repeated over years. The basic exercises of boxing and wrestling are more pleasant. So are those of tennis. Also handball. Baseball and golf, which I dislike for other reasons, though I played ball delightedly as a boy, give more pleasant experiences to the person in training. Cathy swims well too, Jessie next best, and then Vicky - age considered. Chris just began to swim. It took me two hours to introduce him to the water of our 18'-diameter pool, which he avoided for the first several weeks, and thereafter he practiced until he might now swim the length. Carl and John have good form and might develop well. It is a little early to guess.

Cathy's tennis has come along well. She has power, speed, and determination. She suffers from self-consciousness and from having too little time to spend at the sport. Also her friends are, alas and naturally,girls, and their unathletic conduct draws her back. She should find boys to play with. By next summer she will play well enough to match some of the beginning college players and might be able to give me a small battle. Paul will do well. The racket is far too big for his medium stature and nine years, but he manages, remarkably, to get it on a great many of the balls that come his way. Like Cathy, he has the virtue of bold play; he gives the ball a hefty swat and will never therefore have to unlearn his form to hit hard and decisively.

The seagull died. He came back with us from Stone Harbor and thrived in our fresh water pool and on the clams that we fed him. One day the driver of the Parkway Press truck delivered PROD and ran over him while leaving. He must have thought that a bird would fly away, but the gull couldn't fly and had lost his fear of strange moving things. So he was crushed, and we buried him below the front porch, with ten children in attendance. Jill was sad; so were we all. A fine wild thing among us, an unnecessary death.

The girls have been to New York City overnight. Sleeping in the city makes the experience of it far different. Vicky and Jessie stayed at my apartment with Eileen as their guardian. Cathy and Barbara Epstein were together there for a week. They visited museums, saw a play, shopped and walked interminably. The older girls, I think, also simply laid back with their feet high and enjoyed plain liberty - no hours, no parents, no duties.

Then Mom and Dad came to visit us at the end of August and stayed until October 7, the day after Sebastian returned. Dad turned to gardening and restored Sebastian's yard to order. He collected the few good apples remaining, and Mom made several delicious pies and torts. Vicky willingly began a strict regimen of daily clarinet lessons, tootling until her lip was sore. I played the trumpet, blew a few notes on the trombone, and plucked at a guitar, my happy responses to my father's presence. He is slightly less able to hear this year than last. I cannot judge whether this affects his musicianship and conducting in Chicago. It must, at least to a small degree. He will not speak of it. Only I, with my streak of righteous frankness, will mention it to him, and I urged him to use a hearing-aid.

But he minimizes its need and insists that his musical career will be damaged if he must carry a hearing instrument. Perhaps so. How many men and women carry their weaknesses to the last moment when the outside world must crash in. Shouldn't Woodrow Wilson have given up his office when known to be so sick? Should Eisenhower have given up his: he is well now. Should my Uncle Charlie have quit with a broken jaw in the second round of a fight; he clenched his teeth, refused water for round after round to the amazement of his seconds, and won in fifteen rounds. If Dad were not so inflexible, he might wear the instrument part of the time so that we might enjoy freer conversation and then remove it while in the presence of his musicians. But no, it would violate his character; it would force a concession, weaken his morale to practice a deviousness, while an almost unconscious delusion keeps him strong.

We talked again about their moving to Princeton. For ten years I have spoken of our living together or nearby. But motive or money is always lacking. We might separate an apartment from the rest of our house easily for them. Perhaps next year, or the next, or the next. Chicago gives them independence and familiar surroundings. My father goes regularly to the musicians' union, a combined hiring hall, news center, and social club. He has done so for over forty years. He is one of the oldest musicians. He pays no dues. He knew Petrillo when Jimmie was a young, brash, and mediocre cornetist. He is regularly granted the leadership of concerts sponsored by the Union in conduction with the City of Chicago, the Board of Education, and other institutions of the area. His exactly kept library of music, carefully arranged, is wanted by other bandmasters and conductors. He dispenses many jobs, not important or financially vital ones to be sure, but the kind that make a musician's life interesting, that take them out of their regular occupations (for few musicians can depend upon their music for a living), and create for a few hours a profitable and uplifting way of life. There is something always creative and novel about gathering a band or orchestra together. I don't believe there is much like it among most other occupations. It is like getting a political faction organized, or combining a business syndicate, or arranging a symposium of authors for a book or scientists to appear at a convention or an actors' troupe.

Why should we then wonder that he denies not to hear and declines our kind but intrusive hospitality? These past few years have been the happiest of any for him since we were a small family of four in the twenties and musicians still commanded large personal audiences, before the phonograph and radio, sound movies, juke-boxes, and silent funerals, before the Great Depression and before my father and his friends had taught thousands of young musicians to take their places in American life, crowding upon a profession whose opportunities were already closing to all save a few. So much had musicians in common with baseball players, boxers, and other vocations expanded at the top by the mass media and large-scale organizations, but contracted at their base.

Jill and I took advantage of the folks' presence to visit Washington together briefly on August 27 and 28. Steve drove us to the Trenton train station, and we thought we might barely catch the twelve noon train. I ran down the stairs and along the platform ahead of Jill. But the signal had been given to start the train, and, even though I was actually aboard, the conductor, by starting to close the steel door, forced me to choose to stay aboard alone or get out. So I skipped out and scolded my slowly trotting spouse, who in turn blamed her tight skirt for hobbling her. Whereupon we walked across the street from the station to an excellent restaurant and ate as fine a lunch of clams, lamb chops, and Danish beer as could be had anywhere. Certainly the lunch on the train would have been much worse, so regularly bad has the food and all other service become on most American railroads.

In Washington we retired to a majestic room on the eighth floor of the Hay-Adams overlooking Lafayette Square and the White House. We bathed, made love, had a Scotch with water, lolled about, made a telephone call to Miriam, and then went to the Turkish Embassy annex where Altemur and Asuman Kilic were receiving friends in honor of Altemur's triumphant departure to take up his duties as Director of Press and Tourism. Because of the dullness of the affair, we left early and sought dinner companionship. I telephoned the Merriams, and we journeyed out to Chevy Chase for a visit with Bob and Marguerite. We ate in a bower at the rear of their garden, with only Morna of the children present. The conversation was not distinguished, but it was open, frank, argumentative now and then, some of it about politics, then about families, as always some talk about Paris, also on mental illness and a personal note here because of Marguerite's sad experiences with her first husband, Eiger. We left after midnight. The next day was spent in business calls. Jill obtained some amusing photographs for her book from the Ghana Embassy and lunched with Miriam. We were home that night, driving with Yalcin Kerman who was coming up from North Carolina to New York and who wanted to speak to me about his schooling problems and the threats of the Turkish authorities to withdraw his passport. Yalcin stayed the night. I am afraid that my temporary ward is somewhat lazy and over-indulged, and he does not have the breeding to dress up his vices. He is, in short, uninteresting. He will not do much towards the new Turkey although he will not obstruct good forces. He is amiable and obliging. He learns moderately well. He is quite unoriginal, exotic in no way at all, a low-brow American type indistinguishable from his comperes from the Southern towns at the textile college. I try to raise his standards and meet with a pleasant, mostly verbal acceptance. What good I can do is not as much as I should wish to do for his father's sake.

A week later, Bus arrived from Europe on the Cristoforo Colombo. A dock strike was on, and, though I had arrived with the station wagon at nine, it was two-thirty before we were able to leave the pier. The children - Greta, Iano, and Marco - were cheerful as usual. Anna Maria was declaiming against the system from time to time. She had had all the time in the world but looked as if she had only a moment to dress following a collision with an iceberg. She wore a purple gown over her impressive pregnancy, carried a bulky camel's hair coat, and sported old flat shoes, from only one of which appeared a man's stocking, from the other nothing. I fed them across from the pier in a restaurant frequented by the striking dockers, while Bus dug out the remainder of twenty pieces of baggage from the confused mass and trundled it to the elevator and then to the sidewalk below. I returned to NYU while he drove to Princeton.

Anna Maria continues to be annoyed and somewhat ill with her unborn baby. She and Roselyn Freylingheusen are two of the most amusing enceintes I have known. They are bored, angry, and funny. Jill used to paint walls and wash floors when pregnant. She was cheerful and indefatigable. We thought of this the other night when she helped me paint the third floor guest room for a few minutes, after I had with terrific labor over ten hours steamed off the wallpaper. But now she has better things to do.

She is thoroughly revising a book of instructions and personal accounts of community development in Ghana for Monsignor O' Grady. All the cliches of the oppressed writer that I had uttered over fifteen years have come back to my ears in a month: "Let me alone, can't you see I'm busy." "I don't have time to cook." "I wish I weren't too sleepy." "May be if I nap a little, I can stay up later." "Look at that; the day is shot and nothing written." "I'll never make my deadline." "What junk." "I really should rewrite the whole thing." "No matter how much go I over it, it is clumsy and bad." "You are not much help". She has been more than ordinarily irritable, aggressive, and depressed. Her cooking has taken short-cuts via hot dogs. She rather welcomes my periods in New York City, when she can dispense common food, work in peace, and stay up late.

I read the completed manuscript night before last. It is good. She has kept the color and innocence of the original accounts, and some of the cases are delightful. Her style is rusty but essentially fine. She can be a successful writer, if she would, but she is admirably unimpressed by this prospect, and I at least have known and asserted this fact for fifteen years or more. She has been much better off for not being a writer, and she will in the future be a much better writer for the reading, reflections, and experiences with another way of life that she has had.

My own writing in the last two months has been sporadic. I shipped off the manuscript of my "General Theory of Administration" to the Behavioral Science Quarterly, and soon thereafter received two phone calls and a letter from Fred Bent saying that the editors believed the lengthy study one of the best that they had received. I am suspicious of anyone's ability nowadays to judge anything but naturally feel encouraged by this opinion. I must divide the piece and make a few changes so that it will go into two parts for next fall's publication. The study was originally written at Stanford seven years ago, dictated from notes that went back to 1951 at Brown University. It was part of a book of studies that I could not get the Stanford Press or Random House-Knopf to take interest in. I let it stand around. I split up the work finally two months ago and am feeding the parts around. A few revisions are needed to each. I am also sending the studies of monetary and non-monetary welfare processes to the journals, trying to market the citizens' survey of welfare, thinking about the revision of the Elements and American Way of Government, and a few other things. My fresh writing is going into PROD and Center Study designs for the moment. I look forward however to the welfare philosophy book and to the play on Aaron Burr.

I have been reading Goethe's autobiography, a full but uninspiring work, and his Annals. Goethe is a good boy feeling deeply by the numbers. His virtuosity is considerable. He is full of egoism and posterity. He writes like a crowded and misty eighteenth century landscape, missing the stark brilliant desert of the Enlightenment and the profound subjectivity of the later Romantics and Impressionists.

I have also begun to read Elsa Morante's novel, Arturo's Island. She is charming and gifted, but I cannot read about "individuals growing up to perceive reality," and I am momentarily bored by elaborations of environments in novels. Activist phase - perhaps. But more than this, it is my theory of poetry - I am abstractionist, directly communicative, reject the work of non-fiction as it intrudes into fiction. Elsa is better than Alberto [Alberto Moravia] as a writer, but Alberto has a masculine drive to compete and outstrip that hardens and multiplies his work. Elsa told Bus one time, apropos of my brief work in Rome at the occupation in 1944, "Would that all the liberators were like your brother." But Alberto would never admit his rescuer was more than a friend. His Two Women does not mention me at all, nor, worse, any of the ideas or actions I represented. He swallowed me up in himself. I reciprocate perhaps by being honestly bored with his book and have lost it, with its inscription, perhaps because he didn't write on the flyleaf what he said at that moment, "You must have a copy. You are the only one who knows about the scenes."

Shah's long-promised books on Gandhi and Bhave arrived, and I glanced through them, pausing here and there to extract the essence of the novelty of the philosophy. (I read like a bumble bee gathers honey.) I have also gone through various books of art - Japanese and others, particularly the nice little magazine published in Italy called Le Arte, and I go through a fair number of books that are sent me or that are in the libraries that I find myself next to in New York or Princeton. I am reading Plato's Statesman now, also selections from Simmel, and a book on people's lives in the Middle Ages.

There is never time enough to read of which this….. {Page missing}

(Manuscript could not be followed. Hence, we were unable to type.)

Stephanie asked me to recommend her for a Fulbright scholarship Wednesday and dropped by with the description of the project and a blank form. I filled it with favorable comment. To go 10,000 miles to study a small group of unhappy Indians who call themselves Jews is a little bizarre, but I suppose one can do a good case study there on the effects of nationalism upon the Hindus and of Zionism and Israel upon the Jews, crossing the whole with the irony of separating some brown skins from others and putting them among light-skins in Israel. One can study anything anywhere if it's science we speak of; only current importance otherwise dictates the choice of subject and area. And, as I told Stephanie, the Jews are such a large part of the intelligentsia that any study of Jews is ipso facto important by the second criterion; furthermore, they are so large a part of the book-buying public that anything about Jews sells. So perhaps she will go off next year with her well-matched accessories and gay walk, looking like the American models who are shipped off in planeloads to advertise products against the ancient walls of Rome, the bistros of Paris, and the elephants of Siam. To act as if I would miss her is not fair.

Midday

The thought has occurred to me over the past several months that I might become mayor of New York City, and I have even mentioned the idea to my close friends, Mike Nalbandian and Laura Bergquist, and to Sebastian. I have the informal eligibility and am now registered as a Republican in the First District from 12 Perry Street. I have always been more interested in New York City than in New Jersey or than in California or Illinois. I am, of course, woefully ignorant of the details of the City's government but am bound rapidly to learn them, since the Center is so involved in research on some of the City's problems. I am confident of my strength in all things that would achieve the post save one, and twenty years of politiking have taught me that that one is very important - the high evaluation of the business (not the philosophy, the reforms, the grand rhetoric) of politics. My chief opposition, which would amaze all those who would otherwise be most amazed at my feeling confident of succeeding, is my own reluctance to admit that the happiest and best thing I could do with my life would be to immerse it in politics. I know that many ways please me - the way of the soldier, the way of the traveler, the way of the business developer, the way of the musician, and the way of politics, but I should long ago have been crippled in all of these ways so that I might have followed the best and true way, that of the philosopher of ethics and science, writing in the language of science and poetry. (Being a father, even a good father and a father of seven, is important but is a natural part of one and, along with love, or being a lover, is not to be called a way of life, to my view; I do not believe the good father is domesticated or uxorious, and therefore that fatherhood is not the worthy claim of man to a complete life.)

Now should I go into politics again actively and over a period of years I should have to abandon, I fear, the more tender prospects I hold out to myself of the good life of the intellectual - the long hours with inspiring and controversial ideas, the sessions of writing and polishing, the communion with scholars, the disdain for the irrelevant and worthless that drown out ordinary lives, the leisurely travel to sweet and beautiful places around the world, the secrecy of one's being oneself wherever one is, the peace of a long twilight to life rather than a harsh, clangorous final act with a brief few moments of stillness at the end perhaps, which are jammed with the noisy echoes of the prior madness however.

Reading a study, "U.S. Foreign Policy: Western Europe," prepared by the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania (October 15, 1959), which was sent me, I see that it is like the vast majority of policy reports, memoranda, and studies. It typifies the product of traditional ways of doing political research. Given $30,000 (I do not know how much was paid for the report) and a general directive to give the committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate useful information and guidance, what does one do?

I suppose that scarcely anyone think of ways to work off the track of this and the others. If so, political science cannot advance much farther. And rational decision-making will not proceed any more rapidly. Here as with 90% of all such studies in government, universities, business corporations, and voluntary associations, it can be predicted that solely an iota of the information will reach the decision-makers and there it will find its place with a million other ideas and facts and the whole will germinate better policy only and exclusively if the leaders are already good and intelligent. The whole policy process happens in the head, so to speak. These reports are like a great sack of mixed seed sown over a marked-off large plot of ground; the sowers depart. The cultivation, harvest, and use are left to the policy-makers, and they are confused throughout by the variety of seeds, which they scarcely can recognize and can hardly cultivate.

There is an alternative. It requires a wrench of the typical way of looking at social research. It bears no more relation to the traditional method than the automobile to the bicycle. One has to change his perspective completely first, and then he will understand what the new method is and how it will work. It requires at first the complete appreciation of what an intelligent decision is and an acceptance that Messrs. X and Y should make it, in accord with their preference systems. Then what kind of research can help X and Y? It is not a compendium of fact and a glossary of terms. These are already overabundant, and the utility is exaggerated. Nor can we, in the present context, ask for billions for the new research; we must assume only so much as for the old.

First, then, the policy-makers must want the research.

Second, they must examine their schedules and say, "Yes, I have probably twelve hours in the next eight months (sic) to give to it." (If this is so, I should say that research is off to a good start.)

Third, the policy-makers should be subject to intensive interview by a trained team of psychiatric-sociological interviewers with the aim of determining their perspectives, their preferences, their fund of information, and their decision-type of character (three-hours).

Fourth, when the researchers are satisfied that they have understood the policy-makers, then they should play back by a report and second interview what they have understood (three hours more of the policy-maker's time).

Fifth, the research should focus now upon the individual or, at worst, modal needs of policy-makers. Traditional data-gathering may take place now, but every attempt should be made to keep on target, not to gather only what is known because it is known or to present what the researchers believe.

There should be constant communication here between the psychiatric and field or library researchers, to determine whether the work of the latter meets the specifications of the former. The former should come to play the role of the research sponsors, the policy-makers. They should criticize, reject, and emphasize those items presented to them that they know will be received and attended to by the policy-makers. They will send back for new materials and intelligence on the spot, so as to avoid waiting for the end of the study for criticism or disappointment to be manifest.

The final research results should be transmitted to the leader in carefully-constructed ways. Almost never should it reach him as a dozen copies of a thick printed report appearing on his work table one day. The form should be a single interview or series of interviews in which the psychiatric staff meets with him and explains the materials (after he has spent say two hours with it). This interview(s) would take two hours. Two hours more later on with the information specialist would complete the work of research.

Time and timing are vital factors in policy research.

Policy research must be operational and instrumental.

The role of the policy-makers, to save their energies, must be projected onto surrogates systematically, and finally fed back. This requires psychiatric skills.

No irrelevant and surplus data or conclusions should be reported.

Knowledge of who uses the research and how they use it is as important as the quality and extent of knowledge of the subjects of the research.

The amount of static, traditional research in government can be cut by 80% with net gain, and the money saved, if put into the new research, will be more than ample.

Ate lunch and repaired two lamps. The usual difficulty finding tools, and the usual inadequacy of materials. Our house requires a full-time handyman to keep it in trim, just as the interior needs a full-time maid. We do pretty well under the poor circumstances. Having small children constantly about is a guarantee that nothing will ever remain in its place, and that everything will be lost or damaged in quick time. Parents ought to be allowed accelerated depreciation on their property by Internal Revenue.

I brought John over to sit for his portrait for Anna Maria. His is the first of seven scheduled portraits until all the children are on canvas. With Anna Maria's temperament, it is impossible to speak of scheduling without laughing, however. I photographed John in various poses she thought suitable, so that she might get help from the picture when he wasn't around, and then she did two sketches, very rapidly and well.

She is a charming and lovable person, tired or vivacious in fast succession, full of clear and passionate declarations. Her dark red hair, down to the shoulders, and her brown eyes and ruddy skin never cease to interest the eye. Her painting has a true autonomous style, a little too weak in coloring sometimes, a little too dim in thought perhaps. Still she measures up to something as a painter. She is always dissatisfied with her work, complains constantly about it, drives me out of patience sometimes; she tears up work that is good and keeps some things that are bad; who knows why?

She burdens Sebastian unceasingly, but he seems to do well with her. They like the same kinds of people, both have artistic sense, he thinks she is a great painter, she responds little to his work and is as far from a theorist of a systematic kind as can be imagined. But she is without possessiveness in the petty sense of "Where are you going? Whom were you with last evening? Let me be part of your thoughts and work? etc.," and he enjoys here more for it.

Night before last, they visited with us after dinner, when Mike Nalbandian and his wife, his mistress of five years, were with us. Betty is a tall and blond Swede, Mike the somewhat short, thickset, dark Armenian type. They are twenty years apart in age, but there is every good prospect for their marriage; as Burgess wrote, a long engagement is good for a successful marriage (but he didn't define engagements to my recollection). Mike is incorrigible, extravagant, and generous. He claims the world as friends, but his friends can't help him much. Last month he needed $2500 to put through the purchase of his mother's house. She wanted to transfer title before she died and is near death now. I borrowed $2500 and lent it to him to complete the transaction. His mother then gave him back the money, and he just returned it to me. With anyone but Mike this would have been a transaction without risk. I couldn't imagine how he might have mixed it up, but he has a genius for doing so and nothing would have surprised me. He owes me $150 and carries more than that in a roll in his pocket, not much, but something considering that it is all the money he has. He just received it from NYU, for I had put him on the Center payroll a month ago. He obviously would have been hurt to pay it to me now, so I didn't ask for it; he wants an extravagant week and is having his honeymoon. I am confident he could spend a million dollars in a month without trying; it would be a wonderful sight. He has no sense of money's worth at all nor any sense of how big things are made of small things; he will initiate the most expensive deal and then leave it hanging in the air while he goes after something else. He has little conception of what is possible. I have tried to teach him priorities of time and decision, but to no avail. When my back is turned, his facade of system and logic comes tumbling down. He whirls and thumps and moves with ever more noise and speed.

He speaks of the world in deprecating terms, heaps abuse upon mankind, uses foul cursewords constantly, and makes indecent propositions to all women to whom he is slightly attracted as a form of compliment. But these mean little, for he is kind, broadly educated, and of excellent taste in food, drink, clothes, women, cars, books, paintings, and plays. When I can sit on the son of a bitch, he is even productive in research, but what a chore that is. He can ruin my work and my time, even while he is providing enjoyable company. He will call to say that Jed Harris, the theatrical producer, has a good idea to make a fortune by setting up a string of yachting installations and asks me to join them to talk about it. I do, and Jed is as muddy-minded financially as Mike. Mike tells me that Barnes, head of SBA, will help raise a loan. Luckily I refuse to go along on the trip; Barnes is friendly but can do nothing. That is Mike's trouble. He believes that a person who is friendly is bound to do something for him. Not at all. Often people are friendlier in order to make up for not being able to do anything for one.

This weekend he had me ready to go up to Providence with him. I finally decided not to and am happy. But he was persuasive: he had the civil defense people of Rhode Island ready to talk with me about a large civil defense project; he had Jenkins coming down from Boston to discuss presenting a research proposal to the American Railroad Association; Eddie Higgins was hoping to see me; all sorts of great people were to be at a post-Brown-Harvard-game cocktail party given by young Hinckley; and so on. No question there was a point to it, but I would be full of drink and food and company, and I would not have had time to spend like this, and I would have had much annoying travel to endure. I shall go up when the projects are nearer the critical point.

We went out in evening dress on Tuesday to celebrate Mike's wedding. We saw Ibsen's Enemy of the People, with Arthur Miller's Adaptations, and ate at O'Henry's steak house on sixth Avenue and Third Street, with coffee and dessert at the Pompeian across the street. The Ibsen play was better than I had expected. It should have ended, however, when the crowd chanted "Enemy of the People" at the end of the second act against the doctor who had foolishly expected the people to support him in a brave frontal attack on the town fathers who were defending an unhealthy spa that brought prosperity to the town. The last act was composed of attempts to reconcile the doctor by one manner or another of bribes to the status quo, permitting him to be brave for a few minutes longer and to decide to fight the siege in his own town rather than to escape to America. The device of placing the players in a meeting among the real audience and having the cat-calls, threats, applause, and shouts come from our very midst served to involve everyone in the play, very uncomfortably so at times. I said to Mike that if we had a couple of extra drinks before coming into the theatre we might have started a row to defend the doctor from the rowdies in the audience.

Science, say most, is a struggle to discover facts.

This is only a small part of science.

Science, truly, is a struggle to determine what facts are worth knowing.

Thence the discovery usually apace.

Andre Gide in his fortieth year, 1909-10, is occupied in his journal with a humorous incident concerning the power of prayer to cure; reviews of his book, La Porte étroite; sayings of Degas; the death of a dear friend, Charles-Louis Philippe and his funeral; the meaning of sincerity; annoyance at a dress suit, showing his boredom with "society;" visit with Madame de Noailles; lunch with Gabriele d'Annunzio and others (he is ambivalent to d'Annunzio but speaks negatively); attacks St. Paul and praises Christ; discourses on the hardships the beautiful has in life, whether plant or man, through the medium of a man who wants to pull weak flowers to make room for the strong; says the character in drama must necessitate the event (Hamlet), or else the event should already have taken place and should be progressively explained (Sophocles) (are these the only possibilities?); on speedsters versus travelers; a ridiculous fall in the dark in Andorra; a hike in Andorra; impressions of the square and people; more impressions of Spain, both passages beautiful examples of psychological-aesthetic writing; vignette of a trial of a lad for theft; he finishes a novel; he dines with a friend.

Day after Thanksgiving, 1959

A quiet morning. The little boys (Carl and Christopher) are pushing a wheelbarrow outside. The household is slow to bestirring. Cathy has begun to play the piano in the basement room. Breakfast was juice, coffee, enough after yesterday's feast: a compact, modern-age, post-Beltville turkey of twenty pounds, a casserole of corn soufflé, whipped sweet potatoes, stuffed mushrooms the size of half-dollars, a tossed salad a la Franco-Italian (more Italian because of the olives), cranberries, ice cream, wine, coffee - all wonderfully prepared by Jill and not too complicated and ornate. We were fifteen at the single long table. I placed Anna Maria at the one end because of her heavy pregnancy, my brother next to me, Jill next to Anna Maria, and the eleven children in-between as they were least likely to fight and most likely to enjoy their pals.

After dinner, about six o'clock, we descended to the piano room and played jazz, Joe on the clarinet, Sebastian at the piano, and I on trumpet. We didn't do particularly well since I play scarcely half a dozen times a year. My embouchure began to collapse in twenty minutes and I resorted to all the old tricks of the trumpet player with the tired tip that I had learned many years ago while playing long band concerts and long dances - dropping octaves, taking all the breaks possible, giving breaks to the others, using fortissimo volume only where essential, slurring more & tonguing less - but still my upper lips felt like a pounded raw minute steak at the end.

Afterwards we played a game called "Detective" that the children implored

******** (Manscript could not be understood. Hence could not be typed.)

On the differences between France & Germany, Gide speaks nicely (294-5) (1918), asking for understanding and attacking materialism. His remarks are not original and he makes the error of deploring the error that they cannot get along with each other. They can and they can't. They do and they don't. War is a form of social intercourse, just as competition is a form of cooperation. Our scientific language is far too weak to say better those things that are said all the time: "Everything that sets the interests of France & Germany in opposition to one another is injurious to both countries at once." This is not true, but the watered-down version becomes somewhat unclean, i.e., "most things … etc."

Eg., also Gide in praise of youth. On PP.312-3. Pretty, but nonsense-untrue, and a harmful myth at that.

The poetry of St. John Perse. His lines break in many ways, like a swell on jagged shoals. His meanings are implicit in the break of the line, but what will a Chinese, an Arab, a Jew do with the typography. Mustn't we be West Europeans or more, the few who have thought of such things, to understand anything from the positions of the lines and words? Why not up and down or as Lewis Carroll had the line behave, in the shape of a dog's tail as the poem told how the mouse was captured. Typography is a way to poetic communication surely but is bound by the culture of those who mean certain things when typefaces are placed in certain ways and sizes. Why doesn't St. John Perse, carry through by using the different faces and sizes, old face, small caps, italics, 6 point, 12 point, and so on to hundreds of variations all with some meaning to the eye, as the advertisers know.

First of poetic excellences comes truth, then imagery, then sound, then grammar, then arrangement. The procession should move backwards: all should help establish the truth and make it tolerable. Let the truth be one, or one of many. No matter. The priorities of excellence hold.

Are colleges outmoded and defunct. Observe "Parkinson's Law" that says bureaucracies thrust into their greatest physical splendor when they are no longer very useful.

Keeping this in mind, we need not be too abashed at the magnificence of the [?] to which we refer when we say "colleges are defunct". Main reason for colleges is to do something to the minds of the 16-22 year old group that couldn't be done otherwise, that should be done in preference to other things using scarce resources.

[passage indecipherable]

Perhaps new forms of communication & sorting people by machines could permit much better forms of organization learning.

I should have been in New England today. I was to leave New York on the 9:15 PM to Providence, there to be picked up by car and brought to Mike Nalbandian's soirée where sundry friends and interested parties were assembled. We were to talk about financing a new social research building at NYU and about Rhode Island state support for a metropolitan research program on the Providence area. Today we were to have driven to Boston to see a Dr. Jenkins about related research matters.

But I missed the plane. Driving as fast as possible through heavy traffic, I arrived at the airport seven minutes late, and no other plane would have carried me north at a decent hour. So I called Mike, swore my regrets, and headed back to Princeton, nearly skidding off the damp road at the first bridge over the canal on Harrison Street. I brought the car to a stop just on the brink of the twelve-foot drop, marvelously, since I had thought a second before that all I might hope for was a gentle drop of the big machine into the ditch.

What made me late for the plane was the same mysterious anti-timing mechanism that governs my rational powers on numerous similar occasions. I wanted to go to New England, I had "good reason" to go, I held a ticket and reservation, and I could have broken off my dinner with Lasswell a few minutes earlier. I did not. I ate with the amenities, bid Lasswell adieu with calm courtesy, and thus paved the way for my own frustration. I did not of course want greatly to make the trip. That was the basic condition setting in motion my self-defeating behavior. But it is not good to go so far and then withdraw. Contrariwise, would I ever do a number a things that I do if I waited to be fully sparked and agitated for the move? Perhaps better these failures sporadically and occasional offences to friends. At home afterwards, I spent a pleasant and unplanned for two hours with Jill, Cathy, and Vicky.

It's been many months since I've seen Lasswell. He seems unchanged. At first he talked a little too rapidly about unimportant things; we exchanged too many formal questions about one another's affairs. They helped us warm up to our old friendship. We have, of course, been corresponding at intervals, but letters do not keep a personal spirit alive, especially with someone like Lasswell, who carries on an essentially formal life. Only after an hour had passed were we back to the quick and enthusiastic exchange that marked our ordinary meetings of past years. Then we were belting down the cocktails and ordering the finely cooked fish and driest white burgundies, traveling conversationally over many miles of journals, universities, new intellectual movements, foreign countries, and mapping some of the future. We thought it should be most useful to begin a journal called "Man in Space" and others, that I suggested , on research administration and metropolitan research, including Sebastian's "Man and Machine," and also we talked of going abroad together next summer, I suggesting that Cathy might accompany us. (This was my hope and the idea of Lasswell's joining me was a new and happy one). We had such good trips together in California, perhaps six years ago, when we would spend a Saturday driving to Point Reyes or Half-moon Bay, dinning wherever we could find a pleasant prospect, viewing the beautiful country, and conversing all the while on every imaginable subject. We would always try to end the day drinking in whisky and a marvelous view, of Seal Rocks, of San Francisco Bay, of the Napa Valley. I am sure that we have always disagreed strongly on some essential points of happiness, God, and human relations, but we have never seemed to be able to reach these points of disagreement, so cordial has been our understanding of the many things we have talked about and the points of view brought forth. Is there such a thing as "good will," "men of good will," or the like, a quality that is beyond argument even over fundamental things? How frustrating to philosophy, if true! Yet it does seem so with us.

I have known Harold Lasswell, intermittently through war and physical distances, since 1940, and the only expression he ever offered that is the type that sets up psychic distance was at our very first meeting when, to my lament at my unhappiness at the Columbia University Law School, he offered the sympathetic remark that I was more sensitive than most, not fully acclimated to the crudities of American life. True in large part, yet an insult, for my excessively complicated defenses, to my inordinate variety of impulses, wishes, and abilities. "Do you not know," I thought then nineteen years ago as I would now, "how capable I am of living a life of barbarism as well as one of delicacy, of how I never have only one eye turned to a situation?" He has never since then implied any categorization of my type: whether or not he sensed an error of tact or of fact, (and that he would have remembered this through the years is doubtful), and in turn, it may be that I have similarly imposed no restraint of mind or physique upon him, taking him as he me for whatever we say or think or do, and not marking it according to its conformity or lack of such to a preconceived type. I do not treat Harold as scholar or adventurer, old or young, good or wicked, woman-loving or man-loving, hermit or sybarite, but of all of these together. The only clear expectation is that he understand everything and that he have a positive view of constructive action in the universe. These turn out to be small demands upon him; it must be those who fail to make these demands who are offensive or who take offense; he is without question the greatest of political scientists of our age and, if I were to cast about carefully among the other social sciences, I doubt that there too I should find his equal. So it is that I am always delighted with his hefty, gray, goggled presence, suave and mysterious, sanguine unfailingly.

I breakfasted with the family save the two youngest; all had wheat cereal, but I had creamed fish on toast. Worked most of the day on PROD. By nine-thirty I had written the editorial, which I then read and edited several times in the course of the day. Explained some details of work to Jean, who has a bad cold. I revised the table of contents. My piece on facts and values in teaching held up well under another reading -- but still changes were to be made. A work of the mind is never perfected. The cover picture gave me trouble, and I finally decided to seek a scene from a political play or novel to go with the Kroll article, Ted being delegated to the search. Jill was off to the bank to cash a $210 check (of which I have pocketed $100 for expenses) and to the Princeton University Press to consult on the printing of her edition of community development In Ghana. I've had sharp words with her all day. She seems tired. The little ones stayed at home today with fancied ills that she tolerated. No reason to it, for they were boisterous all day long. Pretty black Annabelle was in, ironing and cleaning quietly all the day long. Ted came in about ten with Erika, his girl, just back from Germany. She will help mail out about 2,000 back issues of PROD to rid us of surpluses and get a few subscribers. Ted and I worked for an hour together in my office, had a sandwich and coffee, and then went to the Firestone Library where he pulled down the latest issues of a hundred-odd journals, and I selected those to be annotated for the next bibliography.

We worked at this until three-thirty, and I returned home. I called Mr. Wulf and arranged to have him install an exhaust fan in the kitchen, where fumes from the stove have often bothered us. I also hired Braxton Ellerbe to bring his crew in on Friday to sand the boards of the third floor and the stairway leading up to it. I called several dealers concerning aluminum doors for the kitchen and utility room, without getting anyone in his shop. Bus gave me the name of a carpenter for a wall of my study, and Ted promised to speak to a man named Carter who lays concrete patios and driveways. I could spend all of my time directing and painting. [?] So does some of the basement office. Wallpaper is badly needed on the third floor and in the halls. The outside of the building needs touching up here and there. The grounds are badly in need of raking, the garage is not neat, and the shrubs and trees need pruning. I wish that I might spare $60 a week for a handyman but cannot. Yet I know that my time might be more profitably spent than in this kind of work. I suppose that I shall continue as I have for ten years, keeping one step ahead of a general collapse of maintenance (as Jill has done indoors with furnishings, clothing, and other housework). The car needs attention too. It should be painted on spots that have rusted. The tires should be rotated to get more tread on the front wheels.

Letters came in today from Jim Pollock (University of Michigan) and Vince Ostrom (UCLA). Letters went out to V. Bornet, T. Stevenson, Clyde Hart, Steve Irmo, Eileen Lanfeld, and Jack Honey. I must write checks to my father and Yalcin Kermen yet tonight, for tomorrow I leave for New York City by car at 8 AM. Sebastian was in before supper for a chat. We dined on veal stroganoff, rice, diced eggplant, and cauliflower. The white wine, a cheap California product, was slightly revolting, and Jill and I were disgusted with the kind of person who would sell such a bad product, no matter how low its price; there is a point beyond which a man in all decency should resign his work rather than excuse himself for its defects on grounds of price. Back to work after dinner, reading a little, editing a little, advising Cathy concerning her school paper on several writers about Chicago - Algren, Farrell, Wright, Upton Sinclair. I added Wendell Wilcox. She worries lest her teacher would reject "unknown" writers. "Do what is good and right," I said. "But, you know" said she, "how it affects one's grade, and that affects your college admission." "Too bad" replied I, "if you have to compromise yourself so passively. You will be rendered mediocre by the things that are supposed to be improving you. Better not to go to college." "I've been thinking," she declared, "that college is not of much use. Why should I be anything? Why shouldn't I just get along in life." "Nonsense," I retorted. "you will want friends and where will they be, going to college while you sit around, being nobody in a dull way." "I don't really care for my friends." "Is that why you've spent the last hour on the phone with them." "Well, they call me." "They call you and you talk eagerly enough." "I can't help being friendly." What logic! Why argue? While I try to make her understand that her integrity should not be sacrificed under the mildest of pressures (much less than under greater ones, which didn't enter the argument at all), she jumps far over the question of the value of formal education at all.

Then Vicky and I played a game of chess. Then Paul and I played. I won both times, not without a little difficulty, but I play poorly and they are beginners. Anna Maria entered, of a mind to sketch Jessie. I put together In the News and The Gamebag for PROD. Last night I complied several excerpts to be printed as Et al. and gave them captions today. I read In Samuel Pepys of the Great London Fire of 1666. I did "bed-check" on the children, locked the doors, flicked off a few lights around the house (there are always several uselessly lit and a door is often half-open). I drove Anna Maria home. The house is finally still; seven children, the dog and cat, and I shall soon be in bed. Perhaps Jill is awake, reading.