COSMIC HERETICS: Part 1 :
by Alfred de Grazia
CHAPTER ONE
The men changed, the world of science changed, too, and also the political world, yet this latter less; for, after all, one man died and the other grew old, whereas science and politics, those statistical behemoths of collective behavior, go on forever, compounded of many millions of individuals whose average age hardly varies, exhibiting trends whose progress, if it could be called such, is hardly discernible and might indeed have constituted a regression. At least so it seemed to these two men who were trying to affect the science and politics of their time.
Velikovsky died a heretic, with scattered generally unfavorable press, while his friend de Grazia moved on with a spirit that could be called existential, convinced as before that politics (and he insisted upon regarding science, too, as politics and often included politics in psychopathology) -- that politics, although probably irredeemable, was the elemental hydrogen of human behavior, no matter how compounded into life styles.
As the winter days of 1962 became 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, 08540 U. S. A., families and friends gathered into clusters like the last of the leaves, so the half-consciously and driven by eddies of customs and calendar, de Grazia saw more of his friends like Livio Catullus Stecchini and of his brother Sebastian. He did not know Velikovsky, and if he had been asked about him, he would have replied that he had never heard of him.
This may appear strange, considering that Deg was to be numbered, by whatever scales a social psychologist might invent to distinguish the "informed and involved" from the "ignorant and apathetic," as a high-scorer on information and involvement. He had enough children in the Princeton school system, a half-dozen, to catch the sound of names from all quarters. He spent part of each week in New York City and at Greenwich village where, of all places, the name of Velikovsky might have been brutted about. He had since 1957 published and edited a magazine, the American Behavioral Scientist, which pretended to cover those matters that were or should be the concern of social scientists. He personally
scanned a hundred and fifty magazines in the social sciences and current affairs each month. He had many students, several of them close friends. His parents and the families of two brothers were living most of the time at Princeton.
He was not socially pretentious, nor a prideful man, not a University snob, and had had to pawn his professional reputation several times on behalf of scholarly and political iconoclasm. Withal, when it came down to it, he claimed that he had never heard of a man about whom a million or more Americans could have delivered him a rancorous account. One feature that makes mass society a horror-show is the actual anonymity of the famous. (However, the mass scatoma of social realities may be a worse feature.)
This he confessed when Livio Stecchini, as they walked a along Nassau street on that cold day, brought up the matter, disjointedly, as happens with men walking down the street to no end, intellectuals with minds chock-full of oddly related and far-off affairs, old friends whose thoughts needed no introduction nor conclusion. Knowing the two men, I imagine that their conversation would have gone something like this:
Deg was skeptical. Although his American Behavioral Scientist would stop at nothing, every scientist had his one or two little scandals of defamation, every professor his Dean's crime, his edgy paranoia, and you had to take his word for it. It was the same in politics, dirty tricks everywhere and defamation as a matter of course. As for the juggernaut of science, it rolled along smashing unconscionably the god's celebrants who crowded in upon it from all sides with fresh ideas and reputations.
A few days later Stecchini received a phone call from Deg. Deg had been to dinner at Sebastian's home. There was the usual babble and movement afterwards. He circled around the front room with its piles of papers and open bookshelves, pausing at the one where books of high mobility and heterogeneity sunned themselves for a few days. He picked out a forcefully jacketed book, Oedipus and Akhnaton, the author: Velikovsky. First the large photograph of the author, then the flyleaf, then the table of contents, then the index
-- he is grasping now for the thesis: the ill-fated incestuous Oedipus was none other than the Egyptian monotheistic pharaoh Akhnaton -- more riffling of pages -- the small definite sparking of the book browser.
"What's this?" He poked the book at Sebastian. "Any good ?" Sebastian was non-committal: probably he had not read it. "Mind if I borrow it ?"
He began to read it that evening. It was "True Detective," connecting two eminent figures never before joined. He finished it the next day.
How did he find the time to read it so promptly? A man who attends to a wife, a passel of kids, a dog, a cat, a station wagon, a large house with many doors and windows to mind, fireplaces to dampen, a busy telephone, a fat folder marked "action now", with half a dozen jobs, including a professorship and an editorship, with a propensity to daydream, and in that American society which tries in a hundred ways to pry into one's time and makes life tough for readers, and needing seven hours of sleep -- how does he read a book? They say, "When you want something done, go to a busy man." His urges are compelling.
This act of devouring the book was typical of Deg. He would seize things out of his life-stream like a bear grabbing fish and do something with them, a compulsion to undertake and a compulsion to complete, not unlike Velikovsky, and the tie between the two men had something to do with V.'s recognition of this similarity, and perhaps with his growing problem of completion after the compulsion to take on matters lingered: but both men too sometimes had to drop affairs that needed completion or stuck to them beyond their point of pay-off, beyond hope also, so I would not stress the trait, and I even think that it may be so common as to be undistinguished. Velikovsky had made wide turns in his life too, architecture, medical practice, psychoanalysis, politics, and now all this catastrophism which had something of everything.
Outwardly, they differed most apparently. Deg of medium height and compact build, V. tall and spare, the one with a midwestern back ground and accent, the other with a heavy Russian accent, Jewish above all. To V outrage was a simple, direct emotion; Deg had the youngness of Americans that comes from promiscuous outrage and wide dispersal of feelings inimical to authorities. Pablo Picasso used to tell Gertrude Stein: "They are not men; they are not women; they are Americans." So how could Deg become outraged at the enemies of V.? Living was parceled among sporadic outrages; indignation cropped out all over the American landscape.
While I am at it, I might say something, too, about Deg's attitude to his own writing because this also explains how he might view V.'s troubles. It is also about Gertrude Stein: " In those days she never asked anyone what they thought of her work, but were they interested enough to read it. Now she says if they bring themselves to read it they will be interested."
Victim of the Rule of Three, Deg added a first phrase: at first he thought what he wrote was interesting and everyone should be required to read it. Then, after he had passed most of his life in Gertrude Stein's second stage, he postulated a final stage, a nirvana where what he wrote was objectively of interest but neither he nor anyone else should be interested to read it.
This is too early to be analyzing character, but I cannot refrain from another comparison, a fatal difference. Whatever V. completed, he fiercely possessed; whatever Deg completed he relinquished. This made their cash flows, you might say, very different. And their advice to each other very different. Deg was saying to V.. "Give it away. Let it go !" and V. to Deg, baffled; "Why didn't you hold on to that?" Moreover V. overvalued whatever he gave, and undervalued what he received.
Halfway through the book -- before Akhnaton had espoused his own mother. Queen Ty, Deg was committed to V., the author. A literary tour de force of the rarest kind, it succeeds in making a single person out of two of the most famous heroes of antiquity. Nor are they of the so numerous type of military heroes. They are the active substances of the raging intellect, flourishing amongst squirmy snakes of psychology and religion. Should the temporal sequence be right, then the book would be valid, that Moses preceded Akhnaton and Akhnaton came before Oedipus. The legendary, historical, psychological and archaeological evidence marched in brilliant composition and concordance on behalf of V.'s thesis. That Moses had come first follows from V.'s book, Ages in Chaos, already a decade old, which was to be read and to convince Deg in a matter of weeks. That the Oedipus legend developed after the history of Akhnaton was established in the book itself to Deg's satisfaction, and he confirmed it once again when it came time to write The Disastrous Love Affair of Moon and Mars, years later.
By then he was convinced of V.'s theory that Greek Dark Ages were in fact several centuries that had never existed, and then, within a couple of years, the masterful work of young Eddie Schorr effectively closed up the gap in two articles on Mycenae, Pylos, Troy, Gordion, and other sites. Velikovsky himself here speculated that Nikmed of Ugarit became Cadmus the founder of Thebes and carried the Oedipus legend from the East to the North. V. 's reconstructed chronology closed the centuries like a vise, to where Akhnaton could readily reach to Nikmed and Nikmed to Cadmus and out of it all came the Oedipus Rex of Thebes, the fabled character who gave name to the most popular concept of Sigmund Freud, and it was Freud who had brought on all of this work by his psychoanalytic disciple, but had himself missed both the precession of Moses and the identity of Oedipus as Akhnaton, although he had written directly about all three figures.
The book was the best produced of V.'s which were ordinarily drab. Oedipus and Akhnaton carried many fine illustrations, a superior jacket, an excellent typeface, and good printing paper. Still, it did not sell as well as any of a dozen detective novels of the day, and, vibrant and valid, was marked by its publisher for abandonment in 1984.
Deg could be sure that practically none of his hundreds of friends and colleagues, students and acquaintances had yet read the book or would ever do so... But then he, too, had written books of which none but the textbooks had sold over a thousand copies. And he could recite the names of many distinguished scholars whose books had sold less. The dream of best-selling great books nevertheless carries on, a myth, deadly to most and profitable to a very few.