WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER

The extraordinary life
of Sir Rex Harrison

by Nick Zegarac

“In many ways he did live for the moments when he could show himself through a part… and he always seems to me to be more alive in those moments than I knew him to be off stage.”
– Carey Harrison

Indeed, this statement by Rex Harrison’s younger son is most telling to the outsider admiring the actor’s formidable body of work. For in Harrison there is much more than the lion’s share of being deviously deceptive; an almost chameleon-like ability to blend, blur and even obliterate the line between man and myth. When he is on the screen in My Fair Lady he is Professor Henry Higgins; in Cleopatra – Julius Caesar. We believe him implicitly when he sells us a bill of goods that he can talk to the animals in Doctor Doolittle and proves as much by warbling inaudible grunts and moans to a cavalcade of real and imagined beasts.

Rex Harrison lived a life of extremes. In his youth, his outward persona tottered between that of a wellborn cultured jetsetter who, in reality, had little clout or money to his name. As his stature as an actor grew, his personal life became unsteady and insecure. Married six times, yet desperately claiming the constant love of one woman, Harrison was an electrifying mass of contradictions. Though he created a myriad of indelibly complex characters on both the stage and big screen, arguably the most compelling part he ever played was his own life.

NO ORDINARY MAN – the journey begins…
Reginald Carey Harrison was born to privilege in Heighton, England on March 5, 1908. In truth, there was very little about his youth that foreshadowed greatness. Reginald’s father William was a flirtatious and handsome sport who preferred the social graces to a steadfast work ethic. If William was a lax blueprint for Reginald’s upbringing, his mother, Edith more than amply balanced her husband’s wayward nature with a rigid set of finite values that she instilled in her son and Reginald’s two older sisters, Sylvia and Marjorie.

Still, with young Reginald’s health often teetering between virulent bouts of influenza and phenomena, Edith was a doting and loving matriarch whose pampering led to Reginald becoming a confirmed mama’s boy. After a particularly nasty plague of measles, the recovering Reginald was taken to the local live theater to get his mind off his woes. Basking in the afterglow of footlights and thundering applause, the young Reginald returned home to begin practicing his own bows in his living room. The die had been cast. Reginald Harrison was going to become an actor.

EARLY BREAKS AND HEARTACHES

“Tomorrow is a thief of pleasure.” – Rex Harrison

At the age of ten, Reginald traded his conventional upper English Christian first name for ‘Rex’ – with its ancient connotations of kingly inheritance and infinitely more manageable placement on the bill of a theater marquee and program. On November 11, 1918, Rex made things more official with a move to Sefton Park and enrollment in their dramatic society. As expected, though paved with good intensions, this road was hardly smooth or glamorous.
At 14, Rex made his debut in the society’s production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and very quickly came to the realization that there was quite a bit more to acting than taking bows. To be truly great he would have to succumb to expert tutelage. For Rex, the very idea seemed distasteful. “(He was) very rebellious,” son Noel has said of his father, “He would never conform to what people expected of him to do.” Still, it was a means to an end – and so the pupil began his exercises.

By 1925, Rex was accepted under theater director William Armstrong into the Liverpool Repertory Company as their ‘actor in residence.’ But the 17 year old was confined mostly to odd jobs backstage. A bright spot for Rex materialized in a cameo for the company in Thirty Minutes in A Street. Despite the briefness of his appearance, Rex managed to catch the eye of a few critics who thought him a worth addition to the cast.

Unfortunately, ‘Liverpool’ did not pay the bills. Even so, Rex had already managed to adapt his stage persona to life; developing into a randy rake about town, the sort of good time Charlie who caroused a lot with other people’s money and squired the ladies with effortless charm and sophistication. For Rex, these were the happiest of times. His exploits, however, did come with minor fallout; they earned the actor the moniker ‘Sexy Rexy.’

By 1927, Rex Harrison had managed a minor coup; he had become a prolific commodity – a man of envy to most others his own age and a real charmer with the fairer sex. Yet, nothing short of perfecting his craft would satisfy the egotistical actor. And so, in September of that year, Rex moved to London where he began a 12 week tour in Charlie’s Aunt. His part garnered rave reviews in the press.

Unfortunately for Rex, he followed up this performance for the Cardiff Repertory Company with an inconsequential bit in The Ninth Moon – a terrific flop. For the next six years, Rex toured with Cardiff all over the English countryside – appearing in a different play nearly every month and a different town every week. He created dozens of indelible characters and became a fine actor besides.

But in 1933, Rex fell for a glamorous model; Noel Marjorie Colette Thomas. This immediate attraction came with obvious perks. First, Colette (as she was known to friends) came from a well connected and affluent family. As a social climber, Rex aspired to this sort of classis snobbery that Collette had been born into. She also had the spirit and temperament that were well matched to Rex’s ego. But most important of all, Colette knew the sort of people that could help advance Rex’s career.

Colette’s father was no fool. He adamantly disapproved of his daughter’s match to Rex. Despite these strenuousness objections, Colette became Mrs. Rex Harrison in January 1934. It was the beginning of a great love affair that would gradually dissolve into a troubled marriage.

BED OF ROSES/BED OF THORNS

During their formative married years, Rex continued to find steady work as an actor on the stage. He had small roles in The Great Game (1930), School for Scandal (1930) and Leave It To Blanche (1934). If, at least artistically, the parts were increasing in stature, Rex’s pay for the work remained meager at best – a bone of contention that often strained his home life with Colette who had been accustom to more than the actor’s current salary could provide.

Despite these tensions, Rex and Colette had a son, Noel on January 29, 1935. The following year, Rex’s professional prospects began to improve when at the age of 28 he was cast to great effect in Terrance Ratigan’s French Without Tears (1936). The play would go on to become the most widely acclaimed production in the history of London’s prestigious West End.

At roughly this same juncture the movies decided to capitalize on Rex’s popularity. In Britain he made his filmic debut with Storm in A Teacup (1937), opposite a young Vivien Leigh. Rex’s reviews were solid. Based on his performance as Frank Burdon – a small time reporter who is put in charge of a Scottish newspaper – director King Vidor offered Rex a major role in MGM’s The Citadel (1938) – costarring Robert Donat. At long last, Hollywood would hear of the young actor that Britain had already hailed as their ‘most popular.’ Sadly, The Citadel was not the smash hit that either Vidor or Rex had hoped for.

With the advent of World War II looming on the horizon, Rex returned to England to enlist in the Armed Forces. He was rejected from active service due to poor eyesight. Years before, a bout of measles had nearly blinded him in his left eye. Disillusioned and disappointed, Rex opted to return to the London stage rather than accept a contract from MGM. But on September 3, 1939, the fear of regular bombings from Hitler’s army officially closed most of London’s film and theatrical establishments. Rex was out of a job.

During the early part of the war years, Rex toured the countryside in plays as he had done in his youth for the Cardiff Company. If on the surface, this move appeared to be a retread or two steps back in the wrong direction there was one great difference this time around. Rex was a seasoned professional, embraced by the public and critics alike.

His wife, Colette now worked for the Red Cross. Her separation from Rex afforded him the lifestyle of a bachelor – enough time for Rex to become smitten with 25 year old Lily Palmer; a multifaceted novelist, painter and stage performer. The two began a torrid affair that continued as Rex separated from Colette in the spring of 1940. Imagining his new romance at the crux of historically great theatrical husband and wife couplings like Lunt and Fontanne, Rex and Lily set up house in Chelsea.

Rex appeared as Adolphus Cusins in the filmic version of George Bernard Shaw’s stage success, Major Barbara (1941) opposite gifted actress, Wendy Hiller, and for the first time in his career took astute direction from the 84 year old playwright. Though Shaw considered Rex’s interpretation the definitive of his masterwork, the film was not a commercial success and so it was back to repertory work and meager salaries.

By now, these stalemates in his professional career were becoming too much to bear. Thorny and determined as ever to distinguish himself during the war years, Rex appealed his rejection into the Armed Services and was rewarded for his obstinate perseverance with an appointment to the RAF where his duties included guiding British planes safely back to their launching pads after aerial combat missions. During his tenure, Rex also decided to make an honest woman of Lily. The two were wed on January 25, 1943 and for two years thereafter, Rex and Lily enjoyed what appeared to be an ideal union. Their son, Carey Alfred was born on February 19, 1944, the same year Rex was honorably discharged from active service.

At war’s end, Rex and Lily appeared together in The Rake’s Progress (1945), a film that caught the eye of producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Zanuck offered Rex a seven year Fox studio contract at $4,500 per week. The couple moved to Hollywood, renting a suite at the fashionable Beverly Hills Hotel.
For his debut project, Rex was cast opposite Irene Dunne in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). Rex excelled as the aggressive and curmudgeonly potentate, though initially he had had misgivings about the part – even going so far as to hire an acting coach to ease him into the character. Never one to take direction well, Rex and his director, John Cromwell did not get on. In fact, on several occasions noted in the Fox memo archive, Cromwell urged Zanuck to reconsider and/or recast the part. To his credit, Zanuck quietly ignored these complaints, affording Rex his first major Hollywood success.

Rex’s follow up was even more suited to his temperament; as the wily, gruff, yet sustainable romantic, Daniel Gregg in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). In the film, Rex is a deceased sea captain who carries on a forty year platonic affair with a flesh and blood woman played by the sultry Gene Tierney. Unfortunately for Rex, old habits died hard. He constantly clashed with Mankiewicz over his performance, quietly cementing his reputation around the backlot and the rest of Hollywood as being a ‘difficult actor.’ Despite these backstage clashes, the film was a colossal smash hit, elevating his stature and importance in the film making community.

Living high and mighty, Rex indulged his every whim off camera, beginning a rather sordid extramarital affair with Fox contract player, Carole Landis. But the Hollywood of his generation was not that illustrious Babylon of decadence that it has become today. Under the rigid conservatism of a studio system, actors were expected to maintain a relatively untarnished surface sheen and to behave properly at all times while working long hours six out of seven days a week. To many, Rex’s devil-may-care attitude in general and very public affair with Landis in particular seemed a glaring and spiteful tweak to these artistic sensibilities. Landis, however, was no stranger to bad press.

By the age of 28, Carole Landis had been a divorcee four times removed with several botched suicide attempts feathered in for the tabloid fodder. For studio chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, she was increasingly becoming a bad risk at the box office and her star had slowly begun to decline. To Rex however, Landis embodied the sort of free-wheeling excitement he sorely lacked at home. Hoping that their affair would eventually lead to marriage, Landis pursued the relationship long after Rex’s lust had begun to cool.

Meanwhile, 40 year old Rex began work at Fox on Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours (1948) – a film about a philharmonic conductor who plots diabolical and blood-thirsty revenges for his wife that he suspects is having an affair on him. Throughout the shoot, Rex was distracted by his turbulent relationship with Landis. Eventually, he openly admitted that he had no intension of marrying her and Landis – in a state of complete rage and shock – made her final suicide attempt. She died of an overdose on July 4th, 1948 – at approximately the same time as Unfaithfully Yours hit theater screens. The net result for Rex was both a professional flop and a very public scandal.

In support of the negative press, Fox canceled Rex’s contract. He retreated, though not in shame, with Lily to New York City for more than a decade’s worth of solid performing on the stage; beginning with a turn as Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days (1949). The play ran for 288 performances and earned Rex his first Tony Award. He followed this success with Bell Book and Candle in 1950, costarring with Lily to great acclaim. The couple next appeared as a pair of newlyweds in the classy film comedy, The Four Poster (1951).

But the strain of constantly being together had worn thin the last remnants of their eroding relationship. Lily retired from performing and Rex went on to make The Constant Husband (1954); an ironic tale about a man with six wives.

At approximately this same juncture, 46 year old Rex fell in love with the irrepressibly luminous Kay Kendell. At 26, Kendell was already an exuberant veteran of film work. A vivacious raconteur, Kendell easily won Rex’s heart and the two became lovers. After 11 years of marriage, Rex and Lily separated.

HITTING THE HIGH NOTES

– the definitive Rex Harrison

“Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what’s wrong with it.” – Rex Harrison

To say that My Fair Lady came to Rex Harrison at a time when any other actor of his generation might not have hoped for as much is an understatement. Based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Frederick Lowe and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical about an English elocutionist’s growing affections for his cockney protégée was both a financially reward and an artistic blessing – the much needed shot in the arm that Rex required at precisely that point in his career.

The stage version’s debut at the Mark Ellinger Theater on March 15, 1956 was an unabashedly sentimental and personal triumph, and an overwhelming critical success. To many sitting in the audience, the part of Professor Henry Higgins seemed more Rex Harrison than Rex Harrison himself. Indeed, as an actor’s actor, Rex was in his element. He seemed to take dastardly delight in the sharp tongue lashings Higgins gave Eliza (Julie Andrews on the stage). There was a meter, a distinct tempo and cadence all his own, a seamless blending of the man and mythology of his character. The role earned the 48 year old actor his second Tony Award.

While starring to sell out crowds, Rex moved in with Kay Kendall at a home they rented on Long Island. It was the beginning of the end of their mutual fascination for all things effortless and playful with one another. Unbeknownst to Kendall, she had been diagnosed with inoperable leukemia; a fate confided to Rex by her private physician. Distraught, and still married to Lily, Rex relayed the tragic news to his wife who – with characteristic nonchalance instructed her husband to divorce her and marry Kay for as long as she had left to live; further vowing to return to Rex once the inevitable had occurred.

On June 23, 1957 Rex married Kay and MGM fashioned a star vehicle for the couple to star in – The Reluctant Debutante (1958) the one bright filmic spot on Rex’s otherwise inconsequential Hollywood career. But on September 6, 1959, Kendall died at the age of 32 from her ailment, leaving Rex devastated and alone for the first time in his life.

Unable to draw any sort of clarity or meaning from the loss, Rex retreated to London; accepting a standard actor’s salary to star in Chekov’s Platonov at the Royal Court Theater. The play was a hit, winning the prestigious Evening Standard Award. It also marked the beginning of Rex’s most complicated and troubled relationship; to 33 yr old Rachel Roberts.

In the meantime, 20th Century-Fox approached Rex with the prospect of co-starring in their mega-budgeted spectacle, Cleopatra (1963). Though Rex agreed to appear in the film as Caesar – turning in yet another powerful performance – his presence in the film was all but eclipsed and overshadowed by the scandalous affair between costars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The most expensive movie ever made to date, not even Cleopatra’s $24 million dollar box office gross could offset the film’s epic budget. For years afterward, it would remain on the Fox’s ledgers as the film that nearly sank the studio. If the release of Cleopatra did nothing to further Rex’s career, it equally did nothing to hamper it either.

In fact, Rex was at the cusp of screen immortality when Warner Brother executive chief, Jack L. Warner hired him to reprise his role in the filmic version of My Fair Lady (1964). Reportedly, upon getting the offer, Rex was to have thrown the telephone high into the air and loudly declare “By George, I’ve got it!” Indeed, he had. My Fair Lady was an unstoppable movie experience; winning nine Oscars, including one justly deserved for Rex’s fine performance.

Unfortunately for Rex, his relationship with Rachel Roberts had already begun to crumble. A manic depressive with dependencies on pills and alcohol, Roberts quickly became the unmanageable portion of Rex’s life. Throwing himself into work on his latest project, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Rex excelled as the unrelentingly severe Pope Julius II who commissions Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “Rex was in fact a kind of a thorny guy,” Heston relayed years later in reflection on their costarring, “There you are. But he was so good, it was worth the trouble it took.”

A compelling character study, the film was not a huge success for Fox, and it was followed by two more ill received projects. The first, The Honey Pot (1967) cast Rex as a man faking his own death to quietly observe who among his closest friends would turn on him for their share of his inheritance; the second - Doctor Doolittle (1967) proved an elephantine musical with only mediocre songs.

In a last ditch effort to save his relationship with Rachel, Rex appeared to minor effect opposite Roberts in A Flea in Her Ear (1968). A year later, Rex would leave Rachel and costar in his most bizarre film to date; Staircase (1969) playing half of a homosexual couple opposite his old Cleopatra costar, Richard Burton.

CURTAIN CALLS

“Whatever it is that makes a person charming, it needs to remain a mystery. Once the charmer is aware of the mannerism or characteristic that others find charming, it ceases to be a mannerism and becomes an affectation.”

– Rex Harrison

The last acts of Rex Harrison’s life were hardly what one might have expected. In 1971, he married again for the fifth time – to Elizabeth Harris; a 35 year old divorcee with three young children. But Rex was not a family man. Amidst a flurry of personal tensions, Rex managed to pen a well received memoir. For two years thereafter, he toured the country in six plays, including a one man show based on Shaw’s theater critiques.

Then, in 1977 while at a New Year’s celebration, Rex met Marcia Tinker who would become the sixth and final Mrs. Harrison. Despite severe blindness and the onset of age, Rex also embarked upon an ambitious roster of stage productions including Shaw’s Heartbreak House, The Kingfisher (costarring Claudette Colbert) and the 25th anniversary of My Fair Lady. “I’m at the age,” Harrison mused, “where I’ve got to prove I’m just as good as I never was.”

Yet, perhaps the greatest accolade of his final years came when at the age of 82 Rex received a knighthood from the Queen of England. The precedence of this remarkable appointment cannot be overstated. Until Rex’s time, no British subject who had been married more than once or had lived abroad would have been considered for such an honor. Still, when asked by a reporter if any special consideration had been afforded, Rex was his usual glib self.

“Alas no. In the old days, I believe, you got a couple of horses out of the deal.” Internally though, Harrison was deeply moved. It was his crowning achievement, a moment unsurpassed and in a career that had yet to reveal its final act.

That last curtain call came when Rex accepted an invitation to star on Broadway in The Circle (1989) with Glynis John and Stewart Granger. By now, he was nearly blind and gave his performance by pacing out the stage ahead of time. Six months into the run, Rex conceded that ill health precluded his continuation. On June 2, 1990, Rex Harrison died at the age of 82. At his own request his remains were scattered across the Mediterranean.

“There is always a struggle,” Rex once suggested in an interview, “…a striving for something bigger than yourself in all forms of art…and even if you don’t achieve greatness – even if you fail, which we all must – everything…is somehow connected with your attitude toward life; your deepest secret feelings.”
@2007 (all rights reserved).

THE VERSATILE CLAUDE RAINS

"He was born on the wrong side of the Thames. He was one of twelve children and all but three of them died from poverty-related illnesses. He never went to school beyond second grade, had a strong Cockney accent and a terrible lisp. But he fixed all that by himself when he was 18 or 19." – daughter Jessica Rains about her father

He was born William Claude Rains on November 10, 1889 in London England; the impoverished son of a British stage actor. But Claude Rains was doing more than simply following in his father’s footsteps when he embarked on his own acting career. He was creating a legacy of indelible portraits along the way. A brilliant character actor who regrettably appeared in too few films as ‘the star’, Rains inimitable acting style graced nearly 70 films during his illustrious Hollywood career.

He gave his first theatrical performance at the age of 11 in Nell of Old Drury (1900) and thereafter quickly acquired the technical end of his craft by working his way up from pageboy to stage manager at His Majesty’s Theatre during the next seven years. On June 28, 1911 Rains appeared in his first adult role as Slag in Gods of the Mountain. But by later that same year he was again serving as the stage manager for the touring company of The Blue Bird. He returned to acting in bit roles on the London stage in 1912, but was increasing becoming bored with his lack of progress.

After making his first U.S. appearance in Harley Granville’s repertory company in 1913 – and his American stage debut as Spintho in Androcles And The Lion (1914-15), Rains returned to England, served in the Scottish Regiment during WWI. His regiment was gassed at Vimy Ridge and Rains was transferred over to the Bedford regiment for the duration of the war. In 1918, he once again began to establish himself in the ‘legitimate’ theater during the postwar period. He married for the first time to actress, Isabel Jeans that same year. Unfortunately for the couple, personal differences coupled with conflicting schedules ended in divorce two years later. He was also featured in one obscure British silent film, Build Thy House.

In 1920, Rains was a member of the teaching staff at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He also married for the second time to Marie Hemingway. But like his first marriage, this one ended quickly in divorce. Still, Rains maintained an aura of the amiable about his own romantic past. Sir John Gielgud, then a student at the Academy reflected years later about Rains that he was “…extremely attractive to women. He was divorced several times, and once appeared ...with Beatrix Thomson, to whom he was then married, in a cast that included two of his former wives. Needless to say, all the girls in my class at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was one of the best and most popular teachers, were hopelessly in love with him."

Rains threw his heart into the ring again in 1924; wedding Beatrix Thomson. This marriage would see him through his transition from distinguished faculty member to contract player and a 1932 screen test for Universal Pictures that forever changed the course of his professional career.

Although Rains had tried out, and would have preferred to have been cast in David O. Selznick’s A Bill of Divorcement (1933), he was rejected for the role of Hilary by the producer – a part he had already played with considerable conviction on the stage in 1921. However, on vocal ability alone, Rains was hired by director James Whale for The Invisible Man (1933) instead; a role that kept Rains from view behind gauze bandages and through the magic of special effects. Nevertheless, the tangibility of Rains’ performance remained palpable.

“Claude…was what we call an actor’s actor,” admits costar Gloria Stuart, “…he was very involved with himself and his performance.”

Years later, the validity in Stuart’s statement would bear itself out on a cold December afternoon when Rains and his adult daughter, Jessica attended a revival screening of The Invisible Man. Reportedly Rains, all bundled up in his coat, hat, scarf and glasses attempted to purchase two tickets for the show, whereupon the ticket seller immediately recognized Rains by his voice and admitted him into the screening without charging for the price of admission.

Rains returned to the stage for They Shall Not Die (1934) with his first hint of international success tucked firmly under his belt. Even so, Universal saw little in the diminutive Rains to illicit a long term contract. In fact, Rains was deemed ‘not leading man material.’ Rather than risk his career on subsequent substandard productions, which is where he felt Universal had pegged his marketability, Rains opted to buy out his own contract. He relocated and redoubled his efforts, eventually landing a deal with Warner Brothers in 1935.

He also remarried for the fourth time to Frances Propper in April of that same year. Only his professional association proved a fortuitous union however, and Rains spent the bulk of his ‘30s tenure at Warner appearing in some of the studio’s most celebrated melodramas, adventures and comedies, including Anthony Adverse (1936), The Prince and the Pauper (1937) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

1938 was also marked by two watershed occasions; Rains became an American citizen and celebrated the birth of his only daughter, Jessica. Rains also began work on Four Daughters (1938). He had worked with the irascible director, Michael Curtiz before, but on this film the association proved particularly arduous as Curtiz attempted to get as much mileage out of his cast by spurring them onward even through their scheduled lunch breaks. Rather than confront the director, Rains decided on a practical joke instead. He hid an alarm clock on the set and timed it to go off during the casts scheduled lunch, declaring loudly to Curtiz – still working on setting up his shot – “Good lord…it must be lunch time!”

In 1939, Rains was loaned out to Columbia Pictures for Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes To Washington – a film considered so scandalous in its indictment of graft within the federal government that it was denounced on the floor of Congress. Nevertheless, it afforded Rains the opportunity to play yet another meaty role, as Senator Joseph Payne – the one time loyal friend to incumbent, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) late father.

A chameleon, Rains glided effortlessly between playing the compassionate everyman and diabolical rogue. In accordance with his formidable talents, he was often billed in bold letters comparable to star billing immediately following the title card of a movie. On occasion, he even had more screen time than the ‘star’ – an unheard of gesture in scripting. In Juarez (1939) for example, Rains is given more dialogue and appears in more scenes than the film’s star, Paul Muni. "I was in awe (of Claude),” costar, Bette Davis admitted years later, “I was thrown for a loop. At the time he scared the life out of me."

By 1940, Rains was a hot commodity in Hollywood. His tenure of contributions to the Warner product of this vintage reads like the pedigree of a seasoned headliner. He appeared to stunning effect in a series of memorable melodramas and war time adventure yarns. Never a recipient of the coveted Academy Award, Rains was first Oscar-nominated in 1939 for his performance as the corrupt politico in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington; then as the slippery and silken womanizer, Louie Renault in Casablanca (1942); for his sympathetically tragic performance as the long suffering husband of Bette Davis in Mr. Skeffington (1944) and for his quietly bitter, yet polished Nazi in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).

He also appeared to stellar effect in The Sea Hawk (1940); as the empathetic doctor curing mental illness in the Bette Davis weepy, Now Voyager (1942) and in the Ronald Reagan classic King’s Row (1942). For this latter effort, Rains dominates the middle third of the melodramatic action as a physician who murders his troubled daughter (Ann Sheridan) to prevent her from succumbing to hereditary family madness, then commits suicide.

By now, Rains was a big draw to audiences. In accordance, he was afforded several disastrous attempts at helming an entire production. Universal cast him as the scarred music lover who haunts the Paris Opera house in their lavish remake of The Phantom of the Opera (1943). Unfortunately, the focus of Universal’s script was on the musical program provided by Nelson Eddy and others and did not afford Rains the opportunity to exercise his talents in a positive light.

He returned to Warner Brothers, relatively unscathed from this initial experience as a lead to costar with Humphrey Bogart in Passage to Marseilles (1943). The film was a solid performer for the studio. In his next film, Mr. Skeffington (1944), Rains once again played second fiddle to Bette Davis; the grand dame of the Warner lot was rounding out her contract for her alma mater. In the film, Davis is Fanny, a superficial flapper whose beauty is ravaged by diphtheria. Rains played the title character, a Jewish man rebuked by his wife, then cast aside, but eventually reconciled with after the war has blinded him. Though successful enough, the film was eventually edited to tone down its rather obvious theme of anti-Semitism.

Rains’ next film was Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) – a stylish entrée in which, as a suave Nazi supporter living in Mexico City, he attempted to poison his wife (Ingrid Bergman) under the watchful eye of an FBI agent (Cary Grant). A formidable success at the box office, the film seemed to place Rains in the envious position to draw star billing once more. However, that same year, Rains became the first actor to request a one million dollar retainer for his services in the epic, Caesar and Cleopatra (1946) – costarring Vivien Leigh.

The choice of Rains for the title character must have seemed like a natural. Though he had never appeared as Caesar or in any of Shaw’s great works, Rains had had prominent roles in two theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1919-1920). Unfortunately, the film was a rare but unqualified disaster – its box office returns unable to recoup production costs and unfairly blamed on Rains’ performance. Quite suddenly, Rains discovered his services as a character actor were no longer in top demand – not only at Warner Brothers but anywhere inside Hollywood.

Though he continued to work steadily enough, the films he was being offered now were substandard to his abilities, and worse, the size of the roles were considerable smaller than those he had been offered in the past. On April 19th 1949, Rains gave a benefit concert, reading spoken lines for A Lincoln Portrait – an event that brought about particular personal satisfaction.

He was cast in Where Danger Lives (1950), an inconsequential film where he nevertheless gave his all and was appreciated and admired by the rest of the cast. Reflecting years later on her experience working on the film, actress Faith Domerque remembered that, “I had some very difficult scenes to do with Claude Rains, and Mr. Rains was, indeed, a very formal man. You didn't call him Claude! He always came in very prepared with his lines learned right down to the last apostrophe. We would run through the scenes at night on the set with new lines added. We would have a fresh scene written every night, and we would rush to our dressing rooms to relearn the newly added lines because this had been done at night and we were doing the scenes in the morning. Claude Rains found this difficult to adapt to. He was never bad tempered but was a very structured actor, a splendid actor. He brought nuances to the part of the husband which were just incredible."

Buffeted by a series of changes in technologies and audience tastes in contemporary entertainment that rocked the very foundations of the studio system, and in an effort to economize their own studio by streamlining the star system, Warner Brothers quietly bought up the rest of Rains’ contract in 1951. Yet, there was still enough fire in Rains’ personality and determination to light up the stage. He returned to Broadway in 1951’s Darkness at Noon – a colossal success. The play earned the prestigious New York Critic’s Circle Award and garnered Rains a Tony as Best Actor. Still, Hollywood ignored him.

Rains next moved into the popular ‘new’ medium of television. His debut on Medallion Theatre in The Man Who Liked Dickens on August 1, 1953, led to a series of memorable performances on shows like The Kraft Television Hour and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1952-56).

In 1956, Rains divorced Propper – a move that would impact his personal life until 1959 when he married in rapid succession, Agi Jambor, then Rosemary McGroarty Clark (1960) Despite the latter union being a reasonably happy one, Clark would die of pancreatic cancer in 1963. After six concerted attempts at marital bliss, Rains decided to remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. During this fallow romantic period it was his daughter, Jessica – always a constant in his life – who became his most devoted and life long companion and friend.
In 1962, director David Lean tapped him for the prominent role of Mr. Dryden in his epic, Lawrence of Arabia. It was an outstanding offer in a decade of otherwise undistinguished film and television work, capped off by Rains’ token cameo as King Herod in George Steven’s epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Claude Rains rounded out his career, prolifically enough, as it had begun – appearing on the stage in So Much of Earth, So Much of Heaven (1965). He died on May 30, 1967 at the age of 77.
Reflecting on Rains as a man first, his daughter Jessica has said, “He was a terrific father. He adored me and I absolutely adored him.” At once, her candor seems both genuine and reflective of the sort of nurturing that Rains afforded every life he came in contact with.

Sir John Gielgud recalled in a later interview that “I found him enormously helpful and encouraging to work with and was always trying to copy him in my first years as an actor…until I decided to imitate Noel Coward instead!” Gielgud also recalled how, during their tenure together on The Insect Play, “Claude Rains led the cast, acting three different parts with his usual versatility. He acted with striking virtuosity and the London stage suffered a great loss when he deserted it forever.”

London’s staggering loss/Hollywood’s impressive gain; in the final analysis, the life of Claude Rains very much resembles that kindly quote his character Dr. Jacquith delivers to Charlotte Vale in Now Voyager. “Take part. Contribute. Be interested in everything and everybody.”

In his career, Rains took part in the legacy of Hollywood film making. He is forever immortalized in our collective consciousness – a contribution the likes of which any great actor of any generation might take great pride in. He was a man disciplined, well versed and greatly admired by all his contemporaries. When asked to summarize the art of film making Rains reportedly said, “Often we’d secretly like to do the very things we discipline ourselves against Isn’t that true? Well…in the movies I can be as mean, as wicked as I want to – all without hurting anybody.” His advice to actors was more short shrift. “Learn the lines and pray to God.”

@Nick Zegarac 2007 (all rights reserved).

Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance": Every Man For Himself

EMERSON'S "SELF-RELIANCE": EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” is universally cited by authorities in the field of American Studies as one of the key cornerstones of the American character. That's why I wrote an earlier version of this essay in April 1975 for a Princeton class in American Studies while a sophomore.

“Self-Reliance”’s influential philosophy links a huge number of figures in American life, from Melville’s Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener to, in our own day, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Were he to hear Emerson’s famous pronouncement, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” what would Bush do but laugh heartily in approval?

“Self-Reliance” is an incredibly provocative intellectual statement, and I have responded accordingly. There is much to be said for Emerson encouraging us to be strong and independent, and as someone from a colonial New England background, I regard some of Emerson’s exhortations are very inspirational; but there is a much darker side to what Emerson said—a position that comes close to, “Full speed ahead and the devil take the hindmost!” and, “Fuck you, jack, I’ve got mine.” It’s every man for himself.

We can’t understand the present unless we comprehend the past, and we can’t come to grips with America’s current tragic state until we fully absorb the import of what Emerson is telling us—a philosophy that promotes competition rather than cooperation, that places the desires of the individual above the needs of the community. It’s resulted in what sociologist Philip Slater called in his landmark 1970 book The Pursuit of Loneliness.

It was Guy Dubord, the author of The Philosophy of the Spectacle (1967), the bible of French Situationism and the most compelling work of radical thinking since the end of the Second World War, who pointed out in the Sixties that the two most significant commercial inventions of the twentieth century—the automobile and television—were designed to isolate people, not bring them together. To that I would add the personal computer, another means of atomizing the individual from the social mass. But, gentle reader, we wouldn’t know anything about that, would we?

Before I begin my essay, I’m presenting a series of the most notable quotes from “Self-Reliance” (illustrated, as usual, with photos), and at the conclusion of this essay, I’m reproducing the text of “Self-Reliance” itself, so you can read for yourself what I’m talking about. See if you agree with my stance.

As Jack Ruby asked Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Warren Commission hearings: “Do I sound dramatic? Off the beam?”

* * * * *

A Selection of Provocative Quotations from "Self-Reliance"

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

The Ballad of Narayama (1983): a great Japanese film that deals with a horrifying secret reality in premodern scarcity societies--the fact that the old, the infirm, and the deformed were left in the wilderness to die when food was limited

• To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

• Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

• And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

• Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

• No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.

• If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, “Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.” Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

• Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

• It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

• What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind.

• If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.

• The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.

• And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

• Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually.

• Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.

• Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

A CRITIQUE OF EMERSON'S "SELF-RELIANCE": EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

As the intellectual leader of Jacksonian America, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the godfather of the emerging American self, and his influence on American intellectual history cannot be understated. His milestone essay “Self-Reliance” is universally recognized as one of the cornerstones of the foundation of the American character.

In "Self-Reliance," Emerson sought to forge a philosophy to teach the citizens of a newly-freed nation to be independent. He preached self-reliance for the same reason he discouraged Americans from traveling abroad (1): Americans’ impulse to abandon the past (embodied by Europe) was fuelled by their social insecurity and cultural inferiority compared to Continental sophistication, which made them feel that they were a people without a background.

Like dismissing the Continent, self-reliance allowed Emerson to rationalize this insecurity. Self-reliance liberated the American psyche, just as ignoring the world outside America did, but at the same time, that energy, once released, lacking any controls that Emerson might have imposed, bore tremendous destructive potential.

It is difficult to criticize the thought of a man who stated openly: "Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today." He added, "Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh." (3)

However, Emerson would want us to regard his ideas with the same spirit of skepticism and free inquiry that he asks us to apply to the ideas of others. Many times a beacon that can cast a strong light can also throw a stark shadow. Emerson’s philosophy might have contained darker implications than he himself realized.

He sets the tone of his argument with the two verses he uses to preface his essay. The first is notable for its statement that man is an independent being whose will can transcend, indeed determine, his destiny:

Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate. (4)

The second verse celebrates a brutal Spartan attitude towards the treatment of the individual, in the hope that it will foster what we would call today social Darwinism.

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet. (5)

These two strains of thought, the transcendence of the will and social Darwinism, dominate “Self-Reliance.”

Emerson hopes that through the power of the will, the individual can transcend his present state of being and achieve one of higher integrity and truth. He is aware of the real state of human nature in his society, but he refuses to accept it.

Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. (6)

Yet, in believing that greatness calls for every man, he fails to see that he too is asking people to rely on "an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force." In reference to the average man, he writes,

To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forboding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, "Who are you, Sir?" Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. (7)

In calling upon men to embark on grand adventures, he fails to understand that they may be doomed to the same failure, and for the same reason, because of bad luck or simply because of lack of talent. So he is surprised and disgusted that, "If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart." (8)

He does not realize that perhaps such failure is crushing because the competitor's expectations are unrealistic. In Emerson's eyes, these people just lack spunk.

Not surprisingly, his ideals are self-reliant men who radiate confidence. "Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought." (9) "What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind." (10) By exhorting his readers to aim solely for grand and grandiose achievements, Emerson leaves no place in his ideals for failure. He denies a tragic view of life.

The end result of this tremendous confidence is supposed to be transcendence. "This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE." (11)

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way.,.. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well...

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. (12)

The danger of Emerson's self-reliance is that its mystical exultation exhilarates the self, causing one to believe "all things go well" and thus denying a tragic view of life; plunges one into the present moment to the exclusion of the experience learned from the past and the possibilities inherent in the future; and worst of all, institutes moral relativism. Here transcendence joins social Darwinism, for as one comes to believe that, "No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature," (13) one becomes like the imaginary willful little boy (Tom Sawyer?) whom Emerson praises as an ideal of independence: "He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you." (14)

The basis of all relationships becomes self-interest; before one acts, one asks, What have you done for me lately? Nowhere does this sentiment emerge more clearly than in the following passage:

Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. (15)

When dealing with human suffering, Emerson asks us to follow this dictum:

Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. (16)

"For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?" (17) asks Emerson. The answer is, Certainly not in Emerson, who apparently has forgotten Christian charity and that we are all our brother's keeper. His self-reliance is now revealed to be naked self-interest, to the exclusion of the needs of all others. Such a philosophy will produce situations such as Melville described in his short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener," where a sensitive young man withdraws completely from the world, eventually starving himself to death, because no one cares; in fact, the above passage ("Discontent...") could well have been voiced by the lawyer who is responsible for Bartleby's fate. (See my essay "Bartleby the Scrivener: Who Cares?")

In this light, Emerson's self-reliance has deep implications for the individual's relations with both others and his society. "As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg."' (19) Indeed, he will demand relationships from others with total confidence in the rightness of his own feelings, never considering that his feelings might be wrong.

Live no longer to the expectations of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, "O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after-appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's..... I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.... If you are noble, I will love you; if not, I will not hurt you and myself with hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth as with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.” (20)

Similarly, the self-reliant individual considers his society as a whole to be his adversary rather than his ally.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. (21)

Emerson is quite aware he’s rejecting the idea of the social contract here. He proposes a community (whether it could be called a society is questionable) comprised of individuals seeking only their own interests and never considering that of the body politic; he seems to ignore that all societies, merely to function, must impose a certain amount of conformity in the form of consensus.

If he was unaware of the consequences of such a social arrangement, then we certainly are aware, for we are its inheritors. The outcome is a fragmented society of alienated individuals pursuing their own ends solely, crushed by failure and often left unsatisfied by success.

However, Emerson anticipated his critics and supplied them with this answer:

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standards, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.

But the law of consciousness abides.... I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others! (22)

No doubt Emerson was sincere; this critique assumes that; but the folly of his assumptions is plain. His is a Romantic view of human nature, and totally unrealistic. He believes that man, a vessel of frailty, illusion, and irrationality, can be entrusted with the responsibility of godhood. What man has the right to assert that he possesses "something godlike in him"? What man can claim of himself that "High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight"? Most of all, what man is equipped to be a "law, to himself"?

Human history, especially in our century, has been peopled with such men, and it is not unfair to criticize Emerson's Romantic beliefs in light of their death at the hands of the twentieth century, for his worship of destructive self-interest and his offhanded lack of concern for others is evidence of his own very human weakness. In Emerson's own time, Melville certainly detected these same flaws in his thinking, to the extent that he personified the darker implications of the above passage in the character of Ahab.

It is a valid question to ask whether Emerson was only voicing the underlying assumption that this country has always been based upon, rather than formulating any new philosophical creed. Since the days of the first settlers, Americans have always had to depend wholly on themselves. In America a man has to stand alone. An inability to do so implies weakness.

The consequences of the self-reliance Emerson presents have been disastrous. Socially and economically, Americans are obligated to establish their self-worth purely on the merits of their financial success and worldly fame, resulting in our desperate drive toward competition—and corruption—and coupled with this fact, this impulse toward independence has left Americans stranded in spiritual isolation.

As a result, America is an emotionally sterile land. How many of us actually know the members of our families? With how many of them are we true friends? (As Sinclair Lewis wrote in Babbitt, "Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather liked her..." [23])

The brilliant American character actor Edward Andrews played George Babbitt in Elmer Gantry (1960), directed by Richard Brooks and starring Burt Lancaster. If only Andrews had been able to star in a film adaptation of Babbitt itself! What masterpieces have eluded us! (Imagine Marlon Brando as Jake Barnes in a 1955 production of The Sun Also Rises. Or as Jay Gatsby.)

Emerson concludes "Self-Reliance' by admonishing us to ignore the role of Fortune, or personal tragedy, in our lives, by simply imposing our will hard enough; without the aid of others, he tells us, we can determine the direction of our lives.

Nothing else matters. "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself," he says. "Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles." (24) Unfortunately, the principles of self-reliance are empty and their peace, barren.

Paul Newman as Hud (1963), an amoral, brutal, selfish Texas rancher and a classic Emersonian "self-reliant" individual--a riveting portrayal of the birth of the new American fuck-youism, which started with Goldwater, changed into Reagan, and then mutated into George W. Bush

* * * * *

ENDNOTES

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1950), p. 164.
2. Ibid., p. 152.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 145.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 161
7. Ibid., p. 145.
8. Ibid., p. 153.
9. Ibid., p. 154.
10. Ibid., p. 154.
11. Ibid. p. 159.
12. Ibid., p. 158.
13. Ibid., p. 148.
14. Ibid., p. 146.
15. Ibid., 149.
16. Ibid., p. 163.
17. Ibid., p. 167.
18. Melville includes a passage in "Bartleby" describing the lawyer’s ruminations on Bartleby that nearly matches the sixteenth quotation of this paper from Emerson, sentiment for sentiment: "My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew in my imagination, did the same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into revulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to eventual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach." Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener," The Portable Melville (New York, 1952), pp. 488-9. The similarities between the two passages are so striking that one wonders whether Melville is not consciously commenting on "Self-Reliance." However, it is entirely possible that Melville, as perceptive as he was, was merely commenting on the very same self-reliant mindset that he had perceived in his society.
19. Emerson, p. 163.
20. Ibid., p. 160.
21. Ibid., p. 148.
22. Ibid., p. 161.
23. Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt (New York, 1950), p. 188.
24. Emerson, p. 169.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance." The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 1950.

Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. New York: The New American Library, 1950.

Melville, Herman. "Bartleby the Scrivener.” The Portable Melville, ed. by Jay Leyda. New York: The Viking Press, 1952.

Like Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman was greatly influenced by Emerson. Yet he infuriated Emerson by quoting the sage of Concord's private praise of Leaves of Grass on the flyleaf without his permission. Melville was simply horrified by Emerson. See his short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" and his modernist novel masterpiece The Confidence-Man

Self-Reliance

from Essays: First Series (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Ne te quaesiveris extra."

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

ESSAY II Self-Reliance

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.

If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love.

Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind.

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, —

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours;
Our valors are our best gods."

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

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