The strange history of Tisquantum/Squanto

Squanto was the last survivor of the tribe of the Patuxet, who had once farmed the coastal land west of Cape Cod Bay. According to a comment later made by Squanto, the Patuxet once numbered some two thousand men, women, and children. They spoke a dialect of what we now call Eastern Algonquian, which was spoken by all the peoples living between the Plymouth area and Narragansett Bay to the west. At some time in the past it seems that the Patuxet had been brought into the orbit of the Pokanokets, over whom Massasoit was the chief. This group of native peoples we now remember as the Wampanoag confederacy, although the name was not actually used until the 1680s. Like many of the peoples of the East Coast, they had split the year between winter in the forested areas of the interior and summer at the cornfields on the coast, where they also fished. Edward Winslow wrote of how Squanto was skillful at catching fat, sweet-tasting eels with his feet. Like the other tribes in the area, they would have been ruled over by a sachem (usually male but it could be a woman) who might have lesser sachems below them and higher ones acting as their overlords. Massasoit was just such an overlord. The English referred to him as a “king.” It was due to his authority that Massasoit could order Squanto to go and live among the Pilgrims.

Among the Pokanokets and others in the Wampanoag confederacy, in addition to the sachems (who were sometimes referred to as sagamores), there were warriors called pnieses, who collected tribute for the sachems and who were renowned as elite, hardened fighters. Another Native American, named Hobbomock—who was also to live among the Pilgrims—might have been a pniese. In addition, there were leaders known as pau waus (the English called them pow-wows) who were believed to be able to mediate between ordinary people and the native god of healing (known as Abbomocho).

It is now hard to work out exactly what the status of Squanto was, but we can piece together how he came to know English so well and also how he came to be the only survivor of his once populous tribe.

According to some historians, Squanto was first captured as a young boy way back in 1605, by an Englishman named Captain George Weymouth. Weymouth was investigating the coastal lands of Maine and Massachusetts for a wealthy patron named Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who himself never actually made it to North America but who was promoting the setting up of colonies there. However, Maine was not Squanto’s home (as revealed by other evidence), and his name does not appear among those stated as taken then, in an account written by one of the Englishmen involved. In fact, it would be some fifty years, until 1658, before Gorges wrote a pamphlet, entitled A Brief Narration of the Original Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations into the Parts of America, where he mentioned Captain Weymouth kidnapping a Native American named Tisquantum from the coast of Maine in 1605. By this time, the fame of Squanto seems to have caused him to be annexed to the story; a literary kidnapping to mirror the actual one. The actual event that caused Squanto to be able to speak English almost certainly occurred about ten years later.

In the year 1614 an English expedition, consisting of two ships under Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame, sailed into Massachusetts Bay and also explored as far north as Maine. They were collecting fish and furs and mapping the area around Cape Cod. Smith had an interest in eventually founding a colony in New England. Engaging local tribes in trade would facilitate that and perhaps avoid something of the conflict that was brewing at Jamestown (albeit prompted by Smith’s own heavy-handed treatment of indigenous peoples). Smith eventually returned to England and left an associate named Thomas Hunt to continue the exploration in a second ship. Hunt’s job was to continue fishing and then transport the catch to Málaga, in Spain, where there was a high demand for dried fish.

However, Hunt was an entrepreneur of an antisocial kind and decided to add to the value of the voyage with some human cargo. It was this that brought him to what would later be known as Plymouth Harbor in order to “trade” with the Patuxet. Having recently gotten wise to the valuable trade goods that could be had in exchange for furs, Native Americans were only too keen to trade with Hunt. This fur trade, first started by Newfoundland fishermen and then developed by French and English merchants, had destabilized the traditional trading networks of the tribes on the northeastern coast of North America. Now, instead of varied local products, one item dominated everything: animal pelts, and especially beaver fur. The Patuxet were finally plugging into the network. It was a decision they came to regret.6 As a result of their desire to trade, Hunt was able to lure about twenty of the Patuxets, including the man we would come to know as Squanto, aboard his vessel. Once on board they were kidnapped. Then the duplicitous Hunt sailed across Cape Cod Bay and stole seven more people from among the Nauset. He then sailed to Málaga with his wretched cargo of stolen human beings. This act explains the hostility of the Nauset tribe to the Pilgrims, which is remembered today as the First Encounter.

Echoes of this human trafficking later united the three threads of the Nausets, the Pilgrims, and Squanto, since he later translated during a meeting between the Pilgrims and the Nauset on Cape Cod. There the English met an old woman, whom they thought was at least one hundred years of age, who could not look at the visitors “without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively.” Hunt had taken her three boys, and, as a consequence of his slaving, “she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age.”7 This meeting took place at what was then called Cummaquid, but now Barnstable, Massachusetts, on the southern shore of Cape Cod Bay. They were fed by the local sachem, who was less than twenty-six years old and—in the rather patronizing tones frequently used by the settlers, even of those Native Americans they liked—“very personable, gentle courteous . . . indeed not like a savage, save for his attire.”8 Incidentally, the Pilgrims and their translators were seeking a boy from the colony who had gotten lost in the woods. The fact that they were received in a friendly fashion and that the boy was soon returned by the Nausets, safe and sound, shows how much things had improved since the terrible damage done to relationships by the earlier actions of Hunt.

When he finally heard of Hunt’s actions, John Smith disapproved and later commented that Hunt had acted

most dishonestly, and inhumanely, for their kind usage of me and all our men, carried them with him to Málaga, and there for a little private gain sold those silly savages for rials of eight [Spanish coins].9

There is a later tradition that Spanish friars, looking to spread the Christian faith, rescued Squanto from this captivity and converted him to Roman Catholic Christianity, but the evidence for this is thin. We do not know how long Squanto lived in Spain, what he did there, or how he made it to England. However, from what he told the Pilgrims, we know that he eventually ended up living in the district of Cornhill in the City of London. He lived there with one Master John Slanie, who was one of the Merchant Adventurers hoping to make a profit from colonizing North America and who earlier had invested money in the East India Company. By the time Squanto arrived, Slanie was heavily involved in funding English settlements in Newfoundland, an area famed for its abundant sea fish stocks. So, there is a possibility that this may explain how Squanto got from Málaga to London. Slanie was, no doubt, on the lookout for natives who could provide translation assistance, and he might have been the one responsible for getting Squanto from Spain to London. So it was that a native of the Patuxet village by the sea ended up in the busy, noisy, and smelly city of London, by way of Málaga in Spain. It reads like a novel, but it really happened. What he made of the place is anyone’s guess. We would like to know, but his thoughts are lost to us.

The reality of this trade in human beings can be witnessed in the same Shakespearean play we came across with regard to Stephen Hopkins. This provides evidence that by 1611, the sight of Native Americans on public display in England was sufficiently commonplace to cause Shakespeare to make a joke of it in The Tempest (act 2, scene 2, lines 31–33). The Londoners, he says, are so entertained by the sight of the exotic and so hardened to human suffering that

when they will not give a doit [small Dutch coin] to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.10This is not a happy insight into the attitudes to be found among many in 17th-century London, but it is all too believable. And it was among them that Squanto now found himself. There on Cornhill he lived on one of the three low hills that dominated the ancient City of London, the others being Tower Hill, where the Tower of London is sited, and Ludgate Hill, where St Paul’s Cathedral stands. In Charles Dickens’s story A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit, the underpaid clerk of Ebenezer Scrooge, slides down Cornhill twenty times in celebration of Christmas Eve. But all that lay far in the future when Squanto lived there. When he went out the door it was just a short walk to the bustling markets of The Poultry or the merchants parading down Lombard Street. As a member of the household of a leading Londoner he would have been expected to attend church with his master’s household and so would have been an exotic sight at either St Michael, Cornhill, or St Peter upon Cornhill. It was all a long way from the lobster and eel fishing of Cape Cod Bay, the cleared fields of corn, catching migrating wildfowl in the fall, and deer hunting in the winter woods. Did Squanto dream of returning to that lost world? It is reasonable to think that he did. And he was shrewd enough to know that if that ever was to occur, then making himself useful to a London businessman who had a financial interest in North America might make the dream a reality. For if Master John Slanie was intent on using Squanto, then Squanto might also have hoped to use his master’s curiosity in order to get home. In this way, the stolen Native American was not quite as powerless as his predicament indicated. When Slanie sat beside his evening fireside and quizzed his servant Squanto about the furs, woods, fisheries, and peoples of New England, the familiar landscape formed once again in Squanto’s mind and memories peopled it with those he knew and loved, and once had thought lost forever. For what had seemed utterly stolen as he’d cowered in the fetid hold of Hunt’s ship now appeared graspable again as he answered the questions of the London merchant. Home might yet be attainable if he was patient and if he was useful.

However, while Squanto was away in Spain and then in England, a disaster occurred among the Patuxet. A killer epidemic devastated the southern part of New England. Today nobody is entirely sure which disease or combination of diseases struck, but we may be absolutely sure that it was an unintended consequence of European exploration. The Native Americans were collateral damage in the European trading obsession with fur and also with whale oil and cod. English explorers observed the horrors at the time without understanding what had caused them. In Maine, one of Ferdinando Gorges’s employees, named Richard Vines, spent the winters of 1616 and 1617 there among the native peoples, but he and his companions seemed immune to the crippling headaches that accompanied an illness that left the countryside “void of inhabitants.” A man named Thomas Dermer—also in the employ of Gorges—sailed down the New England coast in 1619, towards the colony in Virginia, having sent a shipment of furs and fish back to London. In an account of what he found there, he recorded seeing “the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of such as usually die.” In 1692 one who had conversations with some very old native people concluded that from their memories of the events of their distant childhood, “the bodies all over were exceedingly yellow.”11 Headaches, sores, jaundice, fever, and bleeding from the nose were all described by those who witnessed the horrors. Yellow fever, smallpox, bubonic plague have all been suggested as possible causes.12 At present, we can only guess.

The coastal devastation stretched from the Kennebec, in the north, to southwest of Cape Cod. The tribes who lived in the vicinity of what would one day be New Plymouth—the Pennacook, Massachusett, and Pokanoket—suffered very badly indeed. That the disease did not impact on the Narragansetts, to the west of the Pokanokets, was probably because the former traded with the Dutch, whereas the latter and those to their northeast traded with the French, who were probably the ones who inadvertently introduced the contagion. No wonder, as we shall shortly see, that Massasoit of the Pokanoket was so eager to do a deal with the Pilgrims, having seen his people crushed by disease and now reduced to living in the shadow of his traditional enemies, the Narragansetts.

When Edward Winslow later made his first journey inland to the village of the Pokanoket, he saw the appalling evidence left behind by the disease:

Thousands of men have lived there, which died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.13

Not many years later, in 1625, Thomas Morton walked the forests around Boston Harbor and saw how

in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left a live, to tell what became of the rest, the livinge being (as it seemes) not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites, and vermin to prey upon. And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations, made such a spectacle after my comming into those partes, that, as I travailed in that Forrest nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new-found Golgotha.14Later 17th-century traditions would claim that the cause was the enslavement of French traders who brought the diseases into the Native American settlements to which they were taken. The Puritans who later recounted the tradition claimed that this demonstrated the actions of God against the heathens who had seized the Frenchmen. In 1702, the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather considered the epidemic—which he reported took away nineteen out of every twenty Native Americans—to be the divine means by which “the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for a better growth.”15 It was not a kind assessment of the suffering experienced by fellow human beings, but, sadly, it was par for the course among many of the settlers in New England.

Return to North America

William Bradford’s journal, Of Plymouth Plantation, corroborates the version now accepted by most historians, that after Spain and London, Squanto was taken to Newfoundland, in 1617. He worked there for the governor of the Newfoundland Colony, before being taken back to England, in about 1618, in order to act as an interpreter for Captain Thomas Dermer, an employee of Gorges, who was tasked with further exploration of the coast of New England in order to exploit the resources of beaver fur. The employment of Squanto offered the possibility of reestablishing constructive relations with the tribes there, which had been so badly damaged by Hunt’s kidnapping exploits.

In 1619, Gorges sent Squanto with Dermer on a trip to New England to trade with local Native Americans. We have already heard Dermer’s account of the impact of disease, but now Squanto was about to discover how that disease had had an impact on his own plans to get home to his people. For, as Dermer and Squanto sailed along the New England coast towards Squanto’s village, Dermer recorded his findings in his journal:

[We] passed along the coast where [we] found some ancient [Indian] plantations, not long since populous now utterly void, in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness . . . When [we] arrived at my savage’s native country [we found] all dead.16What a homecoming after such a terrible adventure. Looking around him at the skeletal scenes of devastation, Squanto must have wondered which was worse: to have been enslaved for all those years but to have been spared the pestilence? Or to have remained at home and so to have died with all his family and friends? It was a bitter homecoming indeed. It would soon transpire that Squanto was the last of the Patuxet.

While Squanto left Dermer in an effort to track down any survivors from his village (he failed to do so), Dermer had three run-ins with Native Americans who clearly distrusted his intentions. And he lacked his native guide to persuade them otherwise. He was finally taken prisoner by the Nauset in the vicinity of Cape Cod, only to be released as a result of Squanto’s intervention. But things continued to go badly for him. On Martha’s Vineyard he was again attacked by a local sachem named Epenow, who himself had once been kidnapped by the English and exhibited in London before being brought back to North America in the hope that he would lead his English captors to sources of gold. However, he had escaped. And it was now payback time. Most of the English crew were killed, and Dermer was seriously wounded, although he escaped and later died at Jamestown.

In the meantime, Squanto had been taken in by the tribe of the Pokanokets. It is unclear to what extent he was a free man who had been admitted to the tribe, or a man distrusted by his fellow Native Americans and a virtual captive due to his suspiciously close associations with the English. But in one capacity or the other, this is where he was in the fall of 1620 when the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived at Cape Cod. So it was that in March 1621, Massasoit, of the Pokanokets, and the leader of the Wampanoag confederacy, put Squanto’s English language skills to the test with the newcomers who had set up home among the abandoned fields of the Patuxets, Squanto’s former tribe.

Whether a free agent among the Wampanoags or a virtual prisoner up to this point, Squanto was now allowed to have free access to the Pilgrims so that he could act as a guide and interpreter for the colony. In fact, he lived in the colony for almost two years after his initial meetings with the Pilgrims. He was soon regarded as an integral member of the Plymouth Colony, engaged in both translating and negotiating between Plymouth’s early governors (John Carver, then William Bradford) and local tribal leaders. All in all, things seemed better because of his involvement: peace was made with the Nausets and with other groups within the Wampanoag confederacy. As a guide, he took settler ambassadors through unfamiliar territory and helped them establish trading relations with their Native American neighbors. This played a vital role in linking them into the highly profitable fur trade. It was on such a foray in August and September 1621—to what we would now call the southern shore of Boston Harbor—that they gained considerable numbers of furs from the Massachusett people and ascertained that disease now prevented this tribe from posing any threat to the colony at Plymouth. Squanto recommended taking the pelts by force from those he considered “a bad people,” but in this instance, the English were more diplomatic than their translator and traded fairly with the depleted Massachusetts. Incidentally, some of the colonists also looked enviously at the deep water anchorage and concluded they had settled in the wrong place! But that is another story.

Squanto is also recorded as giving the Pilgrims practical advice on survival in New England. This included instructions on how to plant Indian corn and other local plants and how to fertilize the seed by planting it with a dead fish. It is an image that appears in school textbooks and is now woven into the mythology of Plymouth Colony. The English clearly believed that this practice of fertilizing with fish was a local tradition, although some historians have suggested that Squanto learned it in Europe or Newfoundland. With his assistance, the Pilgrims grew enough food to survive the winter of 1621–22, and they invited Massasoit, along with ninety of his tribe, including Squanto, to the first Thanksgiving feast in the fall of 1621, following a successful harvest that saw them stocked up for the coming winter. If the tradition about the Catholic friars being responsible for Squanto’s conversion is true, then it was a Roman Catholic who helped make possible the Puritans’ Thanksgiving.17 Though how far Squanto understood the rivalries between Protestants and Catholics, and the fact that he had signed up to one side or the other in the quarrel, is rather open to question.

Looking back, William Bradford referred to Squanto as “a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.”18 They even launched a rescue mission, led by Myles Standish, to rescue him when his life was in danger because a jealous tribal rival named Corbitant (a sachem formerly subservient to Massasoit) held him prisoner and might even have been intent on overthrowing Massasoit, the ally of the Plymouth colonists.

However, life can be very complex, and in time, Squanto gained a reputation for being manipulative and self-serving. Rumors reached the Pilgrims, via another of Massasoit’s people who lived at Plymouth, that all was not as it seemed with regard to Squanto. The informant was Hobbomock, whom we referred to a little earlier. Both Edward Winslow and William Bradford record their mounting concerns at what they heard about Squanto’s secret strategies. The accusation was that over the winter of 1621–22, Squanto had been claiming that he alone could decide if the English were inclined towards peace or war and that only if he was rewarded by other Native Americans would he protect them from the newcomers. It seems that he hoped to gain power as a native leader; he might also have been motivated by a desire for revenge against Massasoit and others among the Wampanoags for holding him prisoner in the past. He was very aware that the local tribes feared both the guns of the settlers and the diseases that struck in the wake of the newcomers. Seeing how the settlers stored their gunpowder underground, he came up with the ingenious claim that this was, in fact, where they stored their stock of diseases, and unless he was rewarded, he would get the English to release the plague against his enemies.

In March 1622, Squanto went a step too far. He began spreading a rumor that Massasoit was conspiring with both the Narragansetts and the Massachusetts to wipe out Plymouth Colony. The end game for Squanto was clear: out of the ruins of Massasoit’s power, he hoped to elevate himself to become the key player in the inter-ethnic politics of the bay area. But he was found out when the colonists investigated the matter. And Massasoit was, understandably, beside himself with anger. He invoked the March 1621 treaty of mutual assistance and demanded Squanto’s life. He was not too concerned how this was achieved, for while he preferred it if the traitor was handed over to him, he told Bradford that it was acceptable if the colonists did the job and simply sent him the head and hands of the slippery Patuxet survivor!

William Bradford was reluctantly close to turning Squanto over for execution, when a ship appeared. In the resulting alarm over whether it was “friend” (English) or “foe” (French), the matter of Squanto was put to one side. It turned out that it was the shallop of a ship called the Sparrow that was bringing the advance party of a new (and it transpired, poorly equipped) group of settlers to start a second colony at nearby Wessagusset (in present-day Weymouth, Massachusetts). That venture turned out very badly indeed, and we will hear more of them under the Mayflower Life of Myles Standish. What is relevant here is that the disturbance caused by its unexpected arrival got Squanto off the hook—or in this case, the “knife” sent by Massasoit. Besides which, Squanto was needed more than ever as a translator in order to settle the new arrivals through negotiations with nearby sachems. Massasoit was angry, but he accepted the inevitable and was reconciled with Plymouth when—in March 1623—Edward Winslow visited him and tended him during a serious illness.

Despite Squanto’s duplicity, the alliance with the Wampanoag confederacy had survived this rocky patch. The Wampanoags and the English of Plymouth Colony maintained a friendship until Massasoit’s death in about 1660. It was an alliance that Squanto had helped establish, even if later he almost ruined it. Only in the next generation would it fall apart in bloody warfare.

As for Squanto, as Edward Winslow later recollected, there was now no future for him (or assurance of safety) outside the boundaries of Plymouth. He was shunned by all of the Wampanoags and totally dependent on the Pilgrims, to whom he continued to offer service as a translator, if a chastened one.

In November 1622, with the arrival of yet more English settlers who were badly prepared for the oncoming New England winter, food was again an issue in the colony. So, Squanto guided an expedition led by William Bradford, to trade with Cape Cod communities for additional supplies of corn and beans. They traveled south on the ocean side of Cape Cod and sailed into Manamoyick Bay (now Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod) because bad weather was approaching. It was to be his last mission for the Pilgrims, for he soon fell ill, with what William Bradford described as an “Indian fever,” suffering from bleeding from the nose. He informed Bradford that this was a sure sign of death among his people. He asked Bradford to pray for him so that he could go to the Englishman’s God in Heaven, so it seems that his days among the Christian godly (perhaps also the Spanish friars too?) had impacted on his outlook and beliefs. Then he asked Bradford to distribute various items as gifts to his English friends back home in Plymouth. He died within just a few days. Tisquantum, known affectionately to the Pilgrims as Squanto, was buried in an unmarked grave, in an unknown location. He passed from history into legend.

What was his legacy? In the mythology of Plymouth Colony he is remembered as the one who brokered peace with the Wampanoags and helped the colonists grow crops in an alien land. As such, he plays a key part in explaining how the Pilgrims survived their first, critical year. On the other hand, his attempts to manipulate the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags came close to undermining the peace between them.19 This leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth and means that his legacy is mixed. But what might Squanto have said if he had been given free voice instead of forever having his words “spoken” by others? Perhaps it might have been something like this:

I was stolen from my people and my land. The same people that stole me then stole my people from me by pestilence. They made me utterly powerless and, even when I was finally back among those who spoke the language of my birth, I was regarded as an outsider, an alien, one without a people. This was because all that would have challenged that status had been stolen from me. But I survived. With only myself to rely on, I survived. By my wits I survived. Others I assisted, but knew that there was no one to look out for me. For always I was the last of the Patuxet and alone. And only if you have traveled the road I traveled, could you judge me. . . .

One of the striking ironies of the life of the interpreter we know as Tisquantum is that all his thoughts have been communicated to us by others. They have become his interpreters, and we always have that nagging doubt that something essential about the man has been lost in translation.

MAYFLOWER LIVES

Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience

MARTYN WHITTOCK

Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem

Crack me up. Archaeoraptor turned out to be a bird-dinosaur chimera, not a missing link.

A booming fossils market has resulted in a flood of “improved,” reconfigured, and composite specimens; many are finding their way into China’s museum

BEIJING—Frozen in time, the 5-meter-long ichthyosaur embedded in dark limestone seems to be darting after prey in a turbid Triassic sea. But look more closely at the startlingly lifelike skeleton here in the Geological Museum of China, and you will see that something isn’t quite right. The beast’ s lower jaw and shoulder girdle are visible, which requires a ventral view—but the lower body is a lateral-dorsal view. Such an odd juxtaposition can mean only one thing, says Li Chun, a marine reptile expert here at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP): The centerpiece of the museum’s prehistoric life exhibit is a composite of two individuals, and possibly more.

Specialists and collectors around the world have long decried the flood of sham fossils pouring out of China. But Science has learned that many composites and fakes are now finding their way into Chinese museums, especially local museums. “The fake fossil problem has become very, very serious,” says Peking University paleontologist Jiang Dayong. Li estimates that more than 80% of marine reptile specimens now on display in Chinese museums have been “altered or artifi cially combined to varying degrees.”

Geological Museum officials are not inclined to remove the fishy ichthyosaur, from southwestern China. “Farmers prepared the specimen. They might have made some mistakes when they put it together, but it is not a fake. You can call it a kind of model,” says Lu Liwu, director of prehistoric life research at the museum.

Nevertheless, Li is concerned about what he deems a misleading display. “This is a national museum,” he says. Another Geological Museum exhibit, a pair of huge dinosaur eggs embedded in siltstone, is also a sham: Large chunks of the shell are not the original material, says Li. Lu says the museum intends to add signage to clear up any misconceptions. Outside of Beijing, curators are not so conscientious. Chinese and Western paleontologists concur that many provincial museums are chock-full of composites, chimeras, and other phony fossils. But several contacted by Science said they are reluctant to speak out. “We would seriously jeopardize our own opportunities to work with our Chinese colleagues on very important material,” says one Western paleontologist, who requested anonymity.

One consequence of the fakery is an erosion of trust in museums, which are supposed to enlighten—not con—the public. Scholars, too, pay a price: They waste time sifting authentic specimens from counterfeit chaff. And a genuine blockbuster fossil can be destroyed by attempts to enhance its appeal. “A fake part in a fossil ruins the value of the entire specimen,” says Ryosuke Motani, a paleontologist at the University of California, Davis. “Even though the genuine part of the same specimen may provide important infor-mation that is otherwise unknown,” he says, “skepticism emerges as to whether we can trust it or not.”

“Normally we know right away if a fossil is fake, although it can take some time to be sure,” says IVPP Director Zhou Zhonghe. But fraudulent specimens can end up in the peer-reviewed literature. For example, the holo-type—for which a species is named—of Typi-cusichthyosaurus tsaihuae, a marine reptile from southwestern China, is “a forged specimen” with carved features, says Motani. (Li and other paleontologists agree with that analysis; the team that described the species could not be reached for comment.) More controversially, an IVPP paleontologist asserts that a 2009 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describing a new species of early cheetah is based on a forged skull; he has demanded a retraction.
The authors insist the skull is authentic and stand by the report, as has the journal.

Stamping out sham fossils will require a crackdown on how fossils are collected and sold in China. A new law that comes into force next month aims to protect fossils of high scientific value (Science, 17 September, p. 1453). But experts doubt that the law will pose a sufficient deterrent: Forging fossils is simply too lucrative, they say.

The art of faking fossils has a long history. Perhaps the most infamous fraud is Piltdown Man, a skull, unveiled in 1912, that was touted as a missing link between humans and apes. It was exposed as a hoax in 1923, when a German anatomist determined that Piltdown was a chimera: a modern human skull and an orangutan jawbone. In another notorious case in the annals of bogus fossils, noted paleontologist Friedrich von Huene described in 1966 a juvenile Leptopterygius from Germany. Von Huene, 91 at the time, had not realized that the ichthyosaur was a total fabrication: Its “bones” were carved from the substrate.

China, too, has suffered a Piltdown moment. “Archaeoraptor,” purported to be a missing link between birds and dinosaurs, made its debut in the November 1999 issue of National Geographic. Rumors that the skeleton, unearthed in northeastern China’ s Liaon-ing Province, was a fake began to swirl even before publication, says Zhou. Archaeoraptor was later thoroughly discredited as a chimera consisting of the body of Yanornis martini— a primitive fish-eating bird—and the tail of Microraptor zhaoianus, a feathered dinosaur.
Now, an IVPP paleontologist fears that a prestigious peer-reviewed journal has published a fake. In a 13 January 2009 report in PNAS, Per Christiansen of the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen and Ji H. Mazák of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum presented a nearly complete skull of a primitive cheetah, which they have said was unearthed from a fossil layer in Gansu’s Linxia Basin dated to around 2.2 million to 2.5 million years ago. Christiansen and Mazák describe a “unique combination of primitive and derived traits” that places the species, which they named Acinonyx kurteni, as “the most primitive cheetah known to date.”
When IVPP’s Deng Tao saw the PNAS paper, he says, “I knew immediately the skull was a fake.” Deng says the published photos show that several features of the skull had been concocted from bone or plaster.

For example, he wrote in a 16 January 2009 letter to PNAS, “the parietal area is glued by some bone pieces to imitate the skull of a modern cheetah, but the forger did not make the parietal crests.” With that one slip-up, Deng says, the forger “gave the game away.” According to Deng, who has collected fos-sils in Linxia every year since 1998, it is common there to encounter dealers peddling fake skulls. “Unqualified collectors are often cheated,” he wrote to PNAS. Because the paper’s “unfounded” conclusions are “based on a fossil forgery,” Deng urged the authors or the journal to retract the paper. IVPP’s Qiu Zhanxiang, an academician and top specialist on mammalian fossils, says he concurs with Deng’s opinion that the skull is a composite and that the paper should be retracted.

Mazák, whose birth name is Huang Ji, told Science that the skull is genuine and that Deng’s concerns amount to a “scientific dispute” because the PNAS paper did not cite Deng’s 2004 description of a primitive cheetah from Linxia, Sivapanthera linxiaensis.

Mazák declined to explain how he obtained the skull, and Christiansen, now at the Zoological Garden in Ålborg, Denmark, did not respond to requests for comment. In a 4 Feb-ruary 2009 letter to Deng, PNAS declined to publish Deng’ s letter and stated that his observations “can be explained by sloppy preparation, incomplete preservation of the skull, or as characters that differ from Deng’ s expectations that are based on an a priori hypothesis of relationship or ancestry.” Deng says he has not pursued the matter further because Mazák has declined to give him access to the skull.

The growing problem of faked specimens stems from China’s fossil economy. Most fossils, including prized specimens, are unearthed by farmers, who often gussy up specimens to make them look more complete or unusual and thus fetch a higher price. Some dealers are fooled, and some also engage in such chicanery, says Zhou. Few buyers are discerning.

“For officials and businessmen, beautiful fossils can upgrade their reputation. For some researchers, strange fossils mean they may have a chance to publish in a top journal and get more funding and a higher position,” says Jiang. “In this hurried and blundering situation, anything may happen.”
Exacerbating the problem is a recent boom in museum building across China that has resulted in sizable acquisition budgets and competition for prize specimens. In October, the Shanghai History Museum invited Zhao Lijun, curator of paleontology at the Zheji-ang Museum of Natural History (ZMNH) in Hangzhou, to examine fossils it intended to purchase for an exhibition hall to open in 2012. Zhao identified a dozen specimens, including a 15-meter-long ichthyosaur, that were “totally fake,” she says. “When I told them the truth, they were astonished.” To its credit, Zhao says, the Shanghai museum canceled the deal. Many other museums, however, snap up fossils with inept or derisory expert advice. As a result, Li says, many “local museums are full of fakes.” One remedy is for museums to create closer ties with academics; few now have paleontologists on staff. A rare success is “Sea Monsters,” a yearlong exhibition of marine reptile fossils that wrapped up last month at ZMNH. Zhao joined IVPP’ s Li and others in the field for a few summers to collect fossils for the exhibit; other specimens were on loan from IVPP. “Without IVPP’s cooperation, we would not have been able to do this,” says ZMNH Director Kang Xi Min.

Another boost would be a training program for fossil preparators. And preventing fake fossils from contaminating the scientifi c literature, says IVPP’s Xu Xing, “can be easily avoided by careful and experienced scientists.” But Li and others admit they don’t have a strategy for combating the root of their ills: a legion of fakers assiduously despoiling China’s paleontological riches. “Our fossils are some of the best in the world,” says Li. “But they are being destroyed, and there is little we can do about it.”

–RICHARD STONE

24 DECEMBER 2010 VOL 330 SCIENCE
www.sciencemag.org

Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal

 Madagascar, or Robert Drury’s Journal

A book titled Madagascar; or Robert Drury’s Journal, during fifteen years captivity on that Island was published in England in 1729. In it, Robert Drury described how, almost forty years earlier, he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar, survived the slaughter of his shipmates by hostile islanders, and then spent the next fifteen years living as a slave, fighting in local wars, taking a wife, and eventually escaping on a slave ship back to England.

The story was accepted as true during the eighteenth century. In fact, it served as one of Europe’s main sources of information about the faraway island of Madagascar. But during the nineteenth century scholars started to question almost everything about it. In particular, there were suspicions that the book was actually a fictional account written by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinsin Crusoe, and that Robert Drury didn’t even exist.

However, the controversy has come full circle, because modern scholars suspect the work may not be a hoax after all. In 1996, Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at Sheffield University, published evidence suggesting not only that Drury had lived, but that his description of early 18th century Madagascar was highly accurate... far too accurate to have been invented by Defoe.

Therefore, while it’s impossible to say for sure, Robert Drury’s Journal may be a case of a factual narrative mistaken for a hoax.

The Electric Kite Hoax

On October 19, 1752, the Pennsylvania Gazette published a brief description of an experiment recently conducted by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, the article said, had flown a kite in a thunderstorm, causing electricity to be conducted down the line of the kite and electrifying a key tied to it. This demonstrated that lightning, as many had speculated, was a form of electricity.

Franklin’s electric kite became the most famous experiment of the eighteenth century, helping to make Franklin famous throughout Europe and America. And yet, some historians argue that it probably never happened.

They point to a curious lack of details about the experiment. It is not known exactly when the experiment occurred. Sometime in June, 1752 was the closest Franklin ever came to an exact date. Nor did Franklin ever write a formal report about it. The only witness to the event was Franklin’s son, who never said a word about it. Finally, such an experiment would have been extremely dangerous, possibly fatal, as Franklin knew.

Historian Tom Tucker suggests that Franklin originally proposed the idea for the experiment as a joke. Frustrated because the British Royal Society had been ignoring his letters to them about his earlier electrical research, he might have proposed the deadly experiment as a subtle joke. It was his way of saying, Go fly a kite in a storm! But when his suggestion reached France, where people took it seriously, Franklin decided to play along and claimed he really had conducted the experiment.

Tucker’s theory remains controversial. Other historians argue that Franklin would never have risked being exposed as a liar by the scientific community.

(...)

The Turk

Enlightenment thinkers were fascinated by machines called automata whose sole purpose was to mimic living objects, and they built some amazing examples of them. The frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical duck that quacked, ate food, and defecated just like the real thing. But no automaton was more praised or more famous than the Great Chess Automaton of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.

The Great Chess Automaton consisted of a wooden figure dressed in Turkish clothes (and usually referred to as the ‘Turk’) whose trunk emerged out of a large wooden box filled with gears and wires. When wound up, the figure played chess against human opponents.

But this wasn’t a machine that simply mimicked the movements of a man playing chess. The Great Chess Automaton actually moved pieces on its own, planned strategy, and responded to the actions of its opponent. To top it all off, it was an excellent player. It almost always won. In other words, this was not a mere mechanical contraption, such as Vaucanson’s duck. This, in the words of its inventor, was an actual ‘thinking machine.’

Kempelen, who was a Hungarian nobleman, built the chess automaton in 1769 and toured throughout Europe with it, exhibiting it before audiences filled with royalty and aristocrats. He typically invited audience members to challenge his automaton to a match, and these challengers invariably lost. The automaton even defeated Benjamin Franklin.

In 1790 Kempelen finally dismantled the machine and stored it away. But this was not the end of its career, because in 1805, after Kempelen had died, his family sold the machine to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a German university student.

Maelzel reconstructed the automaton and toured with it throughout Europe before bringing it to America in 1826. There it again entertained and fascinated audiences, while regularly beating challengers.

The means by which the automaton operated was a source of constant speculation. Before each show, Kempelen made a point of opening sliding doors on the side of the box to prove that it was occupied only by clockwork gears, and each time the automaton moved the noise of grinding machinery could be heard. Still, most people suspected that there had to be someone hidden in there, somehow. They just couldn’t figure out how. Perhaps, they theorized, it was a dwarf. But there were also many who were convinced that the automaton was an actual thinking machine.

While it was touring America, Edgar Allan Poe had a chance to watch it in action, and he wrote an article in which he tried to use strict logic to solve its mystery. He theorized that a man was hidden in the body of the turk itself. He was almost right, but not quite.

The real secret was revealed on February 6, 1837, almost seventy years after the automaton’s creation, in a tell-all article published by the Philadelphia National Gazette Literary Register. Hidden inside the box out of which the body of the Turk emerged (not in the body of the Turk, as Poe thought) was a full-sized man. The identity of the hidden man varied, but Kempelen and Maelzel tried to use chess champions, one of whom wrote the exposé. Among the chess masters who served as the automaton’s hidden operator were Johann Allgaier and Aaron Alexandre.

A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton’s operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a ‘pantograph’ device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.

So the Great Chess Automaton was not sentient after all, but only a hoax. This disclosure proved its undoing. Its mystery snatched away, it was relegated to a warehouse, where a few years later, in 1854, it perished in a fire.

(...)

The Prince of Abyssinia

On February 7, 1910 the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were received with full ceremonial pomp on the deck of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the British Navy’s most powerful battleship. Although the Commander-in-Chief of the Dreadnought had only received a last-minute warning of the Prince’s arrival, he had the sailors standing at attention when the Prince arrived. The Abyssinian party acknowledged the greeting with bows as they shuffled onto the ship, dressed in their long, flowing robes, and for the next forty minutes the Commander gave them a guided tour of the vessel. The Abyssinians paused at each new marvel while murmuring the appreciative phrase “Bunga, Bunga!” in their native tongue. Finally the royal visitors departed as “God Save the King!” played in the background.

The next day the Navy was mortified to learn that the party they had escorted around the warship had not been Abyssinian dignitaries at all. Instead it had been a group of young, upper class pranksters who had blackened their faces, donned elaborate theatrical costumes, and then forged an official telegram in order to gain access to the ship. Their ringleader was a man named Horace de Vere Cole, but the entourage also included a young woman called Virginia Stephen who would later be better known as the writer Virginia Woolf.

By February 12 the British newspapers were full of the story of the stunt. “Bunga Bungle!” the Western Daily Mercury trumpeted. For a few days the Navy was the laughingstock of Britain. Sailors were greeted with cries of “Bunga, Bunga” wherever they went. One newspaper suggested that the Dreadnought change its name to the Abyssinian.

Humiliated and furious, the Navy sent the warship out to sea until the episode blew over. It wanted to bring formal charges against the pranksters, but dropped the idea for fear that it would simply attract more publicity to the case. Finally it settled on a more informal punishment. In the style of British boarding-schools, the participants (though not Virginia Stephen) were each symbolically tapped on their buttocks with a cane. None of the participants went on to perpetrate any more hoaxes except for Cole, who was known throughout his life as an inveterate prankster.

(...)

Naked Came the Stranger

In 1969, Newsday’s Mike McGrady conspired with twenty-three fellow writers and literature critics to produce a work that reflected the poorly written texts that were quickly becoming favourites among American audiences. Each of the contributors penned a single chapter and combined them together under the title, “Naked Came the Stranger”, with the writing credit given to imaginary author ‘Penelope Ashe.’ The book describes the erotic adventures of Gillian Blake, following the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. For publicity purposes, McGrady’s sister-in-law acted as Penelope Ashe, thereby furthering the hoax’s execution.

The book quickly became a widespread hit, earning itself the number one spot on the New York Times Bestseller list for a week. The authors, having each made a good-deal of money from the book’s sales, eventually decided to expose the hoax on the David Frost Show, thereby ending the ruse. The book continued to sell, and was eventually adapted into a pornographic film of the same name.

(...)

The Real Rampa

The Third Eye, by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was first published in 1956. It purported to be his autobiographical account of growing up in Tibet and studying Tibetan Buddhism.

Rampa claimed he had been born into a wealthy Tibetan family and at the age of seven had joined the Chakpori Lamasery in Lhasa where he studied medicine, astrology, Tibetan history, telepathy, hypnotism, and the theory of reincarnation. He also underwent a painful operation to open up the “third eye” in the middle of his forehead. This operation had bestowed upon him amazing psychic powers.

Rampa’s book sold well, but soon questions began to be raised about his identity. People wondered why he spoke English like a native-born speaker if he had, as he claimed, learned the language in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Scholars also pointed out numerous errors in his book. For instance, they noted that in Tibetan culture the “third eye” was understood to be a psychical centre that was supposed to be opened by meditation, never by surgery.

Keen to debunk what he was sure was a fraud, the Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer hired a private detective, Clifford Burgess, to determine the validity of Rampa’s tale.

Burgess published the results of his investigation in February, 1958 in the Daily Mail. He revealed that Rampa had never been to Tibet, nor had he ever had any operation done to his forehead. Instead Rampa was actually Cyril Henry Hoskins, born in Devon, England, and son of a plumber. He had worked first as an assistant to his father, then as an employee of a surgical-implements firm, and later as a clerk in a correspondence school.

But Cyril, it turned out, had always been interested in the study of the occult. He had studied it as much as he could in his spare time. And one day he had taken his interest a step further by growing a beard, shaving his head, and changing his name to “Dr. Kuan-suo.” He later changed it again to Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.

When his true identity was exposed, Hoskins was initially nowhere to be found. But reporters eventually tracked him down to Ireland, where he said he was too ill to receive visitors. Eventually he offered an explanation for his dual identity. He said that it was true he was born Cyril Henry Hoskins, but that the soul of Rampa had transmigrated into his body. Therefore, according to him, all the information in his book was true.

Despite having been proven to be a phony – a plumber’s son posing as a Tibetan monk – a market still existed for Rampa’s writings. So he continued on with his career as Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, authoring numerous books before his death in 1981. However, none of them sold as well as The Third Eye.

(...)

The Sokal Affair

The Sokal affair was a hoax by Alan Sokal (a physicist) perpetrated on the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, he submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon to see if the journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in “Science Wars” that year. On the day of publication, Sokal announced (in a different paper,) that the article was a hoax. He said that Social Text was “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”. Much heated debate followed, especially regarding academic ethics.

Another recent example of this same situation is the 2005 Rooter Paper; this was a paper randomly generated by a computer which was submitted – and consequently approved as legitimate – to a scientific conference.

61 True Stories of Gereat Hoaxes & Pranks 

Vikas Khatri 

Nabokov - quotes selected from interviews

 Do you still feel in Exile?

Art is exile. I felt an exile when I was a child in Russia among other children. I kept goal on the soccer field, and all goalkeepers are exiles.

Does being a refugee mean being rootless?
Rootlessness is less important than a confirmed refugee’s capacity to branch and blossom in a complete—and very pleasant—void.

In which language do you think, count, and dream?
I do not think in any language, I think in images, with some brief verbal surfacing of a utilitarian sort in any of the three tongues that I know, such as “damn those trucks” or “espéce de crétin.” I dream and count mostly in Russian.

How far do you get involved with your characters while writing? Do you think of them after the book has been published?
I suspect that the Almighty’s interest in Adam and Eve was neither very sincere nor very enduring, despite the success, on the whole, of a really marvelous job. I, too, am completely detached from my characters, while making them and after making them.

What is your opinion of the hippies and the student revolts?
I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate drug-dazed hoodlums I have happened to observe, but I do not assume that all hippies are violent cretins. Many of them are young conformists following an American fad, and some are intelligent political agents disguised as students.

What do you think of efforts to enlarge the field of our sensibility and experi- ence’ What do you think of drugs?
Drugs are as degrading as drunkenness. The hallucinations that they arouse ruin health while remaining at the level of the hypnagogic kaleidoscope too well known to the healthy but overworked brain, or of these insipid mirages of mystical neurosis that go back to the Middle Ages. One must be very stupid to follow a fashion which only those whose task is to destroy the mental resistance of still-free nations could approve.

Whom do you write for?
I must say, I have never been interested in commercial success; in other words, I’ve never sought to push my books. I’ve never written except for a single reader, Mr. Nabokov, for him alone. I have a vague impression that my first English books, written and published in the United States—books like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the story of Professor Pnin—found readers here and there, for intellectual life in America has an incomparable intensity and variety, but I didn’t pay much attention to this little plashing of gray glory. Then, when I published my Lolita (almost ten years ago), I was at first surprised by its success. To tell the truth, I sometimes think that people buy this book for reasons not artistic, but, how shall I put it, erotic, but all this doesn’t concern me, although I’m very comfortable that this lovely child is made so much of.

Do you feel that your novels are larger than life?
I’m not sure this isn’t an illusion. For me, life is not an independent, objective entity. Its image depends on the observer. And there are too many observers—coming and going, and turning away, and looking again, and shading their eyes again—too many changing observers and changing lights, too many of them to enable one to establish an average picture of life. If you find I see life larger than life, this implies only a difference between you and me—not between life and my vision of life. We all are the makers of reality, and there are as many makers of reality as there are men. The real unreality is the conventional and the common.

Sartre explains your distance from your characters in Despair in terms of your uprootedness, your émigré status.
I think he’s wrong. I’m not rootless. Even if the Revolution hadn’t happened in Russia, I would have lived in France or Italy. My family, which was politically liberal and cosmopolitan, had me live in an international climate where French and German took the same place as Russian. I am not, as Bunin was, a representative of traditional Russia. I feel much closer to Kafka, for example. And after all I am very close to French literature, and I’m not the first Russian writer to say that!

On his new wealth

Now I don’t need to earn a living, I have a girl called Lolita who earns it for me. In short I’m an old pimp and I have a girl who’s on the game... . Oh, don’t write that. ... What do you think, Véra? All right, do as you like.

Should there be co-education at high school?
Young girls mature so much faster than boys. They become voluptuous and get into the habit of wearing tight woollen sweaters that make for enormous distraction. That just defeats the whole process of education.

Pornography?
Have you read the Marquis de Sade? The orgies? Things start with one person, then five, then fifty, then they invite the gardener! (Enormous laugh.) ‘There’s your pornography: quantity without quality. It’s banal, it’s not literature. The intention of art is always pure, always moral. ...
I hate the Marquis de Sade.
**
Psychoanalysis?
A disgusting racket. Psychoanalysis has something Bolshevik: internal police. And the symbols: those umbrellas, those staircases! Good for the Viennese, perhaps. But for an American of our time, who has no umbrella and uses only elevators? .. . Let’s be serious: Freudianism is dangerous for art: symbols kill the thing, the individual dream. And sexuality! But this depends on art, not the other way around, you see: it’s poetry that has refined love, over the centuries.
**
“Freudian voodoo!” Nabokov replied vehemently. “That's my béte noire. I think he has been one of the most pernicious influences on literature, children and schools. It’s a medieval mind dealing in medieval symbols.

The initial witch doctor and all the little witch doctors. The rather complicated question on which I will write later. A craze that’s passing ..

And why do you object to Freud so strongly?
For the same reason that I object to kitsch and astrology.
**
When did you start learning English?
English was the fashionable language in the kind of Russian family to which I happen to belong. We had English nurses, English governesses, English tutors; and my first books—the books that were read to me—were English books. In the morning Miss Sheldon would read to me Little Lord Fauntleroy; in the afternoon Mademoiselle Miauton, [my French] governess would read to me Les Misérables. And of course I remember all the pictures in Chums or in the Boys’ Own Paper, and later on there was my father’s library, which was full of English and French books; and I just read and read and read.

“I read English before I read Russian. I spoke English with my mother and my nurse—with my brother, I remember, I always spoke French. That was typical. The children would speak one language together and another language at table and another with their father and mother. Sometimes as many as four languages would be spoken.

“After I started going to school, at 11, my tutor stayed on and would tutor me at night for the next day. You learned a great deal that way.

“And we had wonderful courses in French literature. The French governess would read to us three hours a day—the English governess, too. We had all the English magazines and some of the American ones—Little Folks and St. Nicholas.

"I started reading Turgenev and Tolstoy when I was very small. My wife read Anna Karenina at 6. Her nurse said, ‘Come, come, Ill tell that to you in my own words.’ “Even then she knew to beware of condensations,” Nabokov added, laughing.

“I started writing Russian verse very early—when I was 13—and published a little book of verse when I was 15.”
***
Which are your favorite contemporary writers?
Shakespeare.
We said “contemporary.”
Always Shakespeare.

And which Italian writers do you like most?
I know only three languages, Russian, English and French, and hardly ever read translations. In any period of, say, twenty-five years, there is a very small number of absolutely first-rate living novelists, three or four, with that je ne sais quoi about them which designates them as certain to survive.

On D’Annunzio
I read him as a young man, I liked “The Rain in the Pine Forest”. I never knew a man whose head so surprisingly resembled an egg as that of D’Annunzio. .. . I read little, and almost nothing of modern literature. | read a D’Annunzio book in a French translation, but I do not know if the translation was good or bad. So I can’t express an opinion.

Have you read Marcuse?
I have seen excerpts. I wonder if anywhere—perhaps in some African or Asiatic tongue—“Marcuse” is a diminutive of “Marx.” Perhaps the youngest Marx Brother. What I read was intolerably trivial.

Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint?
It is a ridiculous book. It has no literary worth whatever. It is so obvious and not at all funny—a ridiculous book.

Pasternak?
Pasternak is a poet, not a prose writer. Dr: Zhivago, as a novel, is nowhere—though quite in line with the Soviet conservative literary style. It wanders like Gone with the Wind and is filled with all kinds of blunders and melodramatic situations. Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.

Doctor Zhivago?
A mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies. It is an antiliberal work, undoubtedly pro-Bolshevik, even if anti-Stalinist. The book is badly written, very badly. Pasternak was never a good prose writer. He is, of course, a good poet. Not as great, of course, as Blok, but good.

Pasternak?
Doctor Zhivago is false, melodramatic, badly written. It is false to history and false to art. The people are dummies. That awful girl is absurd. It reminds me very much of novels written by Russians, of, I am ashamed to say, the gentler sex. Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar. Simple. If you take his beautiful metaphors there is nothing behind them. Even in his poems: what is that line, Véra? “To be a woman is a big step.” It is ridiculous.

This kind of thing recurs. Very typical of poems written in the Soviet era. A person of Zhivago’s class and his set, he wouldn’t stand in the snow and read about the Bolshevist regime and feel a tremendous glow.

There was a /iberal revolution at that time. Kerensky. If Kerensky had had more luck—but he was a liberal, you see, and he couldn’t just clap the Bolsheviks into jail. It was not done. He was a very average man, I should say. The kind of person you might find in the Cabinet of any democratic country. He spoke very well, with his hand in his bosom like Napoleon, because it had almost been broken by handshakes.

Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they give her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her.

He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy in one of his novels gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them.

And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say “as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel” (he said, looking out at the rain), it would be a beautiful metaphor.

But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress.

As a translator of Shakespeare he is very poor. He is considered great only by people who don’t know Russian. An example. (His wife helped him to remember a line of a Pasternak translation.) What he has turned it into in Russian is this: “all covered with grease and keeps wiping the pig-iron.” You see. It is ridiculous. What would be the original?

GILLIATT: “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?” Yes. “Keeps wiping the pig-iron”!

Pasternak himself has been very much helped by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliché—you know, a cloud has a silver lining—it can sound like Milton because it is in another language.

***
Switzerland?
It is the most pleasant and poetical country in Europe. Gogol, Tolstoy, Byron, Dostoevsky walked here. Gogol wrote Dead Souls here. Dos- toevsky found himself penniless here. Tolstoy caught a good case of venereal disease here. As I say, it is a poetical country.

What do you think of Switzerland?
It’s perfect, but I don’t like the cows much. They drive off the butterflies.

***
Helen Lawrenson’s article, “The Man Who Scandalized the World,” in your issue of August 1960, contains some absurd misstatements: (...)
Finally, let me quote this incredible passage: “He . . . of course, feels that in the good old days of the Czar, ‘a freedom-loving Russian had more freedom than under Lenin,’ without, however, specifying whether he meant freedom-loving aristocrats or freedom-loving serfs.” Irony, of course, is all right, but when starved by ignorance it chokes on its own tail; for surely any schoolgirl should know that no serfs existed in Russia since 1861, one year before the liberation of slaves in this country, and all lovers of freedom certainly realize that it was Lenin who restored serfdom in Russia.

I’m afraid I must ask you to print the following correction to the article published in her memory in Russkaya mysl’ (no. 2048).' The article contains a phrase (supposedly said by me to Princess Shakhovskoy) foisted on me by Mr. Berezov’s imagination: “But what am I to do, Aunt, if American readers are only interested in such themes?” I could not have said this, not only because I never called Princess Shakhovskoy “Aunt,” or discussed Lolita with her, but, most important, because I consider Lolita my best book. Only buoyant blockheads who haven’t actually read the work they’re criticizing could explain away its composition as a vulgar calculation to please some vulgar taste. I doubt that Mr. Berezov was consciously trying to join their number.

Think, Write, Speak
Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV 

Sex Differences in Intelligence The Developmental Theory

 Introduction  A number of books and many thousands of papers have been published during the last century and a half on sex differences in intelligence as defined by Johnson, Carothers and Deary (2009) “to mean the ability to use combinations of pre-existing knowledge and abstract reasoning to solve any of a variety of problems designed to assess the extent to which individuals can benefit from instruction or the amount of instruction that will be necessary to attain a given level of competence” and measured as the IQ derived as the average of cognitive abilities obtained in tests like the Wechsler, the Stanford-Binet, the Cattell Culture Fair and numerous others. From the early twentieth century, virtually all authorities have contended that males and females have the same average intelligence. This book disputes this position and presents the developmental theory which states that in infants aged up to 4 years, girls have a higher average intelligence than boys, from the age of 6 to 15 there is little or no sex differences in intelligence, while from the age of 16 males begin to have higher average intelligence than females reaching an advantage of 4 to 5 IQ points in adults aged 21 and older.

The Nineteenth Century  In the nineteenth century, several authorities contended that men have a larger average brain size than women, that brain size is a determinant of intelligence and consequently that men have a higher average intelligence than women. This contention was advanced by Paul Broca (1861), the French physician and professor of medicine at the University of Paris, who is best known for his discovery that language is normally located toward the front of the brain’s left hemisphere, a region that is known as Broca’s area. A decade later, the same contention was asserted by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man: “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain — whether requiring deep thought, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands” (Darwin, 1871). In the next decade, George Romanes, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, took the same view: “Seeing that the average brain weight of women is about five ounces less than that of men, on merely anatomical grounds we should expect a marked inferiority of intellectual power in the former… In actual fact, we find the inferiority displays itself most conspicuously in a comparative absence of originality, and this more especially in the higher levels of intellectual work” (Romanes, 1887).

The Twentieth Century  With the invention of the intelligence test in the early twentieth century in France by Binet & Simon (1905a, 1905b), studies began to be published on sex differences in intelligence in which most authorities asserted that there is no difference between males and females. One of the first to advance this conclusion was Thorndike (1910, p. 35), who wrote of “the trivial difference between the central tendency of men and women which is the common finding of psychological tests”. This contention was also advanced in early studies in the United States by Terman (1916), who wrote that in the American standardisation sample of the Stanford-Binet test on 4–16 year-olds “the superiority of girls over boys is so slight … that for practical purposes it would seem negligible”, and in England by Burt & Moore (1912).

In 1932, this contention was confirmed in the survey of the intelligence of all 11-year-olds in Scotland, in which boys (N=44,210) obtained a score of 34.506 and girls (N=43,288) obtained an almost identical score of 34.411 (Scottish Council, 1933). This study also found that the range of IQs was significantly greater in boys than in girls, given as IQ standard deviations of 14.9 for boys and 14.1 for girls by Deary (2020, p. 41). The effect of this is that 58.6 per cent with IQs below 60 were boys and 57.7 per cent with IQs above 130 were boys. Many later studies have confirmed that males have greater variance of intelligence than that of females, e.g., Lohman & Lakin (2009). 

Many subsequent studies repeated the contention that males and females have equal intelligence. Thus Roberts (1945, p. 727): “It is a striking fact that in mean performance on intelligence-test scales there should be no difference between boys and girls”; Cattell (1971, p. 131): “It is now demonstrated by countless and large samples that on the two main general cognitive abilities — fluid and crystallized intelligence — men and women, boys and girls, show no significant differences”; Hutt (1972, p. 88): “There is little evidence that men and women differ in average intelligence”; Maccoby & Jacklin (1974, p. 65): “It is still a reliable generalisation that the sexes do not differ consistently in tests of total (or composite) abilities”; Brody (1992, p. 323): “Gender differences in general intelligence are small and virtually non-existent”; Eysenck (1981, p. 40): “Men and women average pretty much the same IQ”; Herrnstein & Murray (1994, p. 275): “The consistent story has been that men and women have nearly identical IQs”; Jensen & Johnson (1994, p. 330): “It remains a major unresolved puzzle in differential psychology and neuroscience that the large sex difference in head and brain size is not reflected by the mean IQ difference between males and females, which is virtually nil”; Mackintosh (1996): “There is no sex difference in general intelligence worth speaking of”; Geary (1998, p. 310): “The overall pattern suggests there are no sex differences, or only a small and unimportant advantage of boys and men, in average IQ scores”. 

The assertions that males and females have the same average IQ continued to be made in the twenty-first century. Thus: Lubinski (2000): “Most investigators concur on the conclusion that the sexes manifest comparable means on general intelligence”; Colom et al. (2000): “We can conclude that there is no sex difference in general intelligence”; Loehlin (2000, p. 177): “There are no consistent and dependable male-female differences in general intelligence”; Lippa (2002): “There are no meaningful sex differences in general intelligence”; Jorm et al. (2004): “There are negligible differences in general intelligence”; Bartholomew (2004, p. 91): “Men on average have larger brains than women but display no significant advantage in cognitive performance”; Anderson (2004, p. 829): “The evidence that there is no sex difference in general ability is overwhelming”; Haier, Jung, Head & Alkire (2004, p. 1): “Comparisons of general intelligence assessed with standard measures like the WAIS show essentially no differences between men and women”; Camarata & Woodcock (2006, p. 231): “There appears to be general consensus for the view that males and females are not different in terms of general intellectual ability”; Spelke & Grace (2007, p. 65): “Men and women have equal cognitive capacity”; Hines (2007, p. 103): “There appears to be no sex difference in general intelligence; claims that men are more intelligent than women are not supported by existing data”; Haier (2007): “General intelligence does not differ between men and women”; Halpern (2007, p. 123):“There is no difference in intelligence between males and females…overall, the sexes are equally smart”; Pinker (2008, p. 13): “The two sexes are well matched in most areas, including intelligence”; Mackintosh (2011, p. 380): “The two sexes do not differ consistently in average IQ”; Halpern (2012, p. 233): “Females and males score identically on IQ tests”; Lakin (2013, p. 263): “Research indicates that men and women have equal or nearly equal ability in general intelligence”; Dunst, Benedek, Koschutnig, Jauk & Neubauer (2014): “There are no sex differences in general intelligence”; Sternberg (2014, p. 178): “There is no evidence, overall, of sex differences in levels of intelligence”; Ritchie (2015, p. 105): “Women tend to do better than men on verbal measures, and men tend to outperform women on tests of spatial ability; these small differences balance out so that the average general score is the same”; Saini (2017, p. 85): “When it comes to intelligence, it has been convincingly established that there are no differences between the average woman and man”; Halpern & Kanaya (2017): “There are no overall differences in female and male intelligence”; Toivainen, Papageorgiou, Tosto & Kovas (2017, p. 81): “Sex differences in general cognitive ability are overall small, if not negligible”; Ackerman (2018, p. 8):“There are negligible gender differences in omnibus IQ assessments”; Warne (2020, p. 245): “Males and females are equal in average intelligence”; Halpern & Wai (2020, p. 335): “Data showing differences between men and women in intelligence do not support the notion of a smarter sex”; Deary, Cox & Hill (2021): “There are very small or no sex differences in mean intelligence”. 

Despite the contention of all these numerous experts that there is no sex difference in intelligence, there remains the problem noted by Paul Broca, Charles Darwin and George Romanes that males have a larger average brain size than females, that there is a positive association between brain size and intelligence, and that it appears to follow from this that the larger average brain size of men should give them a higher average IQ than that of women. 

Subsequent work has confirmed these associations. The positive association between brain size and cognitive ability was first shown quantitatively by Galton (1888) in a study of students at Cambridge University that reported a correlation of .11 between head size and examination results. Although this correlation is positive, it is quite low because examination results are only a moderately good measure of intelligence and the restriction of range of the sample. Subsequent studies have reported higher correlations. A review of studies of head circumference and IQ giving a correlation of .30 was reported by Van Valen (1974). Brain size is measured more accurately by MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and the first study of the association of this with intelligence was carried out by Willerman, Shultz, Rutledge & Bigler (1991) and reported the correlation as .35. This association has been confirmed in subsequent studies, e.g. at r = .43 (Raz, Torres, Spencer et al., 1993), at r =.40 for college students in Turkey (Tan, Tan et al., 1999), at r = .43 (Gignac, Vernon & Wickett, 2003) and at r =.33 in a meta-analysis of 37 studies (McDaniel, 2005). In a more recent meta-analysis, a lower correlation of r = .24 was reported by Pietschnig, Penke, Wicherts, Zeiler & Vorocek (2015) but Gignac & Bates (2017) showed that this result needs to be corrected for restriction of range and data quality to r = .31. These results have been further confirmed in a study by Van der Linden, Dunkel & Madison (2017) that reported partial correlations (controlling for body height) of brain size with the g factor of .245 for men and .265 for women. It has also been shown that cortical thickness is positively correlated with intelligence (Karama, Ad-Dab’bagh, Haier & Deary, 2009; Karama, Colom, Johnson & Deary, 2011). 

The larger average brain size of males than of females is also well-established. It is present in the fetus (Wheelock, Hect, Hassan et al., 2019) and at birth, when the average male brain is approximately 12 percent heavier than that of females (Swaab & Hoffman, 1984). The larger average brain size of adult males was shown when controlled for body size by Ankney (1992) and Rushton (1992). It was confirmed in a meta-analysis of 77 studies of sex differences in human brain structure by Ruigrok, Salimi-Khorshidib, Laia, Baron-Cohen et al. (2014), who concluded that men have a 12 percent greater average brain volume than women. These results have been further confirmed in a study by Ritchie, Cox, Shen et al. (2018) that compared 2,750 females (mean age = 61.12 years, SD = 7.42, range = 44.64–77.12) and 2,466 males (mean age = 62.39 years, SD = 7.56, range = 44.23–76.99) and reported that average male brains were larger with a 1.4d effect size, meaning that 92% of men have a brain size above the mean for women. 

Thus, the problem remains that brain size is positively associated with intelligence, and that males have a larger average brain size than females. It appears to follow that males should have a higher average IQ than females, yet numerous experts have asserted that males and females have the same average intelligence. There has been some acknowledgement of this problem. Butterworth (1999, p. 293) noted the problem, writing that “[w]omen’s brains are 10% smaller than men’s, but their IQ is on average the same” but he did not offer a solution. Halpern (2012, p. 233) also noted that women have a smaller average brain size than men but asserted that “[t]here is no evidence that larger brains are, in any way, better than smaller brains”. This is a remarkable contention in view of the results of the numerous studies noted above, including the meta-analysis of 37 studies by McDaniel (2005) concluding that brain size is positively correlated with intelligence at .33. 

An attempt to resolve the problem was made by Jensen (1998), who suggested that females have the same number of neurons in the brain as males but these are smaller and more closely packed. This is an improbable hypothesis and has been shown to be incorrect by Pakkenberg & Gundersen (1997), who reported that men have an average of four billion more neurons in the brain than have women, a difference of 16 percent. Further data showing that men have more neurons than have women have been given by Pelvig et al. (2008) and by Escorial, Roman, Martinez et al. (2015). Deary, Cox & Hill (2021) have also noted the problem, writing that “[t]he fact that there are substantial sex differences in brain size but very small or no sex differences in mean intelligence is likely to be because multiple aspects of the brain’s structure, function, and connectivity are compensatory for any apparent brain size difference”. They do not elaborate this suggestion.

Richard Lynn

Nabokov on the pleasure of being knocked out

 Play (Breitenstrater—Paolino) (Essay, 1925)

(...)
Nabokov—who had been taught boxing at home as a child and was ready to use it at school to defend victims from bullies, and was an occasional boxing coach in the mid-1920s—here exults in boxing, its traditions, its champions, its artistry, its courage. He exults even in the pleasure of being knocked out. Most surprisingly of all, this non-crowd-lover, this resolute individualist, exalts the crowds who come to watch boxing in a spirit very much like his.
**
Everything in the world plays: the blood in a lover’s veins, the sun on water, and a musician on a violin.

Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and homespun puns—is play. And when we actually play—whether we’re knocking down a tin battalion with a pea or meeting over the barrier of a tennis net—what we feel in our very muscles is the essence of the play engaged in by the marvelous juggler who tosses from hand to hand, in an unbroken sparkling parabola, the planets of the universe.

People have played as long as they have existed. There are eras— humanity’s holidays—when people particularly take to games. So it was in bygone Greece, in bygone Rome, and so it is in the Europe of our own day.

A child well knows that in order to play to his heart’s content he must play with someone else or at least imagine somebody, he must become two. Or, to put it another way, there is no play without competition; which is why some kinds of play, such as those gymnastic festivals in which fifty-odd men or women, moving as one, form patterns across a parade ground, seem insipid, since they lack the main thing which gives play its ravishing, thrilling charm. That’s why the communist system is so ridiculous, since it condemns everyone to performing the same tedious drills, not allowing that anyone should be fitter than his neighbor.

Not for nothing did Nelson say that the Battle of Trafalgar was won on the football and tennis grounds of Eton.' And the Germans, too, have lately realized that the goose step won’t take you far, and that boxing, football, and hockey are more valuable than military or any other drills. Boxing is especially valuable, and there are few sights healthier or finer than a boxing match. A highly strung gent, who dislikes washing stark naked in the mornings and inclines to surprise that a poet working for two and a half connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who works for a crowd of many thousands (a crowd which, by the way, has nothing in common with the so-called masses and is filled with a delight far more pure, sincere, and good-natured than that of the crowd welcoming home its civic heroes), this highly strung gent will feel indignation and disgust toward a fistfight, just as in Rome, probably, there were people who frowned at the sight of two huge gladiators demonstrating the very best in the gladiatorial arts, slugging each other with such iron blows that not even the pollice verso” was necessary, they’d finish each other off anyway.

What matters, of course, is not at all that a heavyweight boxer is a little bloodied after two or three rounds or that the white waistcoat of the referee looks as though red ink has leaked out of a fountain pen.

What matters is, first, the beauty of the very art of boxing, the perfect accuracy of the attacks, the side jumps, the dives, the range of blows— hooks, straights, haymakers—and, second, that fine manly excitement this art arouses. Many writers have depicted the beauty and the romance of boxing. Bernard Shaw has a whole novel about a professional boxer.’ Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Kuprin have all written on the subject. Byron, that darling of all Europe, except exacting England, eagerly befriended boxers and loved to watch their fights, just as Pushkin and Lermontov would have loved it, had they lived in England. Portraits have survived of the professional boxers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The famous Figg, Corbett, Cribb’ fought without gloves and fought skillfully, honorably, tenaciously, more often to utter exhaustion than to a knockout.

And it was not at all the commonplace of humaneness that led to the appearance of boxing gloves in the middle of last century, but, rather, a desire to protect the fist, which could otherwise be too easily broken in the course of a two-hour bout. They have all long since stepped down from the ring, those famous, champion pugilists, having won their supporters quite a few pounds sterling, and lived to a ripe old age, and in the evenings, in taverns, over a pint of beer, they would talk with pride of their former exploits. They were followed by others, the teachers of today’s boxers: the massive Sullivan, Burns, with his looks of a London dandy, and Jeffries, the son of a blacksmith, “the white hope,” as they called him, a hint that black boxers were already becoming unbeatable.

Those who had hoped that Jeffries would beat the black giant Johnson lost their money. The two races followed this fight closely. But despite the furious enmity between the white and black camps (the event took place in America twenty-five or more years ago), not a single boxing rule was broken, even though Jeffries, with every one of his blows, kept repeating, “Yellow dog ... yellow dog.” Finally, after a long, splendid fight, the enormous Negro struck his opponent so hard that Jeffries flew backward from the ring, over the surrounding ropes, and, as they say, “fell asleep.” Poor Johnson! He rested on his laurels, gained weight, married a beautiful white woman, began appearing as a living advertisement on the music-hall stage, and then, apparently, ended up in jail, and only briefly did his black face and white smile flash out from the illustrated magazines.

I was lucky enough to see Smith, and Bombardier Wells, and Goddard, and Wilde, and Beckett, and the wonderful Carpentier, who beat Beckett. That fight, which paid the winner five thousand, and the runner-up three thousand pounds, lasted exactly fifty-six seconds, so that someone who had paid twenty pounds for his seat had only enough time to light a cigarette, and when he looked up at the ring, Beckett was already lying on the boards in the touching pose of a sleeping baby.

I hasten to add that in such a blow, which brings on an instantaneous blackout, there is nothing terrible. On the contrary. I have experienced it myself, and can attest that such a sleep is rather pleasant. At the very tip of the chin there is a bone, like the one in the elbow which in English is called “the funny bone,” and in German “the musical bone.” As everyone knows, if you hit the corner of your elbow hard, you immediately feel a faint ringing in the hand and a momentary numbing of the muscles. The same thing happens if you are hit very hard on the end of the chin.

There is no pain. Only the peal of a faint ringing and then pleasant instantaneous sleep (the so-called knockout), lasting from ten seconds to half an hour. A blow to the solar plexus is less pleasant, but a good boxer knows just how to tense his abdomen so that he won’t flinch even if a horse kicks him in the pit of the stomach.

I saw Carpentier this week, on Tuesday evening. He was there as trainer to the heavyweight Paolino, and the spectators seemed not to recognize immediately, in that modest, fair-haired young man, a recent world champion. His fame has faded now. They say that after his fearsome fight with Dempsey he sobbed like a woman.

Paolino appeared in the ring first and sat down, as is customary, on a stool in the corner. Huge, with a square dark head, and wearing a magnificent robe down to his heels, this Basque resembled an Oriental idol.

Only the ring itself was lit, and in the white cone of light falling on him from above, the platform looked like silver. This silvered cube, amid a gigantic dark oval, where the dense rows of countless human faces called to mind kernels of ripe corn strewn against a black background— this silvered cube seemed lit up not by electricity, but by the concen- trated force of all the gazes fixed on it out of the darkness. And when the Basque’s opponent, the German champion Breitenstriter,  stepped onto the bright platform, fair-haired, in a mouse-colored robe (and for some reason in gray trousers, which he immediately began to pull off), the enormous darkness trembled with a joyful roar. The roar did not die down when the photographers, jumping onto the edge of the platform, pointed their “monkey-boxes” (as my German neighbor called them) at the fighters, at the referee, at the seconds, nor when the champions “pulled on their boxing gloves” (which reminds me of “the young oprichnik and the valiant merchant”). And when both opponents threw off their robes (and not “velvety furs”) from their mighty shoulders and rushed toward each other in the white gleam of the ring, a slight moan went through the dark abyss, through the rows of corn kernels and the misty upper tiers, for everyone saw how much bigger and stockier the Basque was than their favorite.

Breitenstrater attacked first, and the moan turned into a rumble of delight. But Paolino, hunching his head into his shoulders, answered him with short uppercuts, and from almost the first minute the German’s face glistened with blood.

With every blow that Breitenstrater took, my neighbor took in air with a whistle, as if he himself were taking the blows, and all the darkness, all the tiers croaked a kind of enormous supernatural croak. By the third round it became noticeable that the German had weakened, that his punches could not push off the hunched orange hill moving toward him. But he fought with extraordinary courage, trying to make up with his speed for the fifteen pounds by which the Basque outweighed him.

Around the luminous cube, across which the boxers danced with the referee twisting between them, the black darkness froze, and in the silence the glove, shiny with sweat, smacked juicily on the live naked body. At the start of the seventh round Breitenstriter fell, but after five or six seconds, jerking forward like a horse on black ice, he stood up.

The Basque fell upon him immediately, knowing that in such situations you must act decisively and swiftly, put all your strength into your punches, for sometimes a blow that is stinging but not firm will, instead of finishing off your weakened opponent, enliven him, wake him up.

The German bent away, clinging to the Basque, trying to win time, to make it to the end of the round. And when once more he went down, the gong did in fact save him: on the eighth count, he got up with great difficulty, and dragged himself to his stool. By some sort of miracle he had survived the eighth round, to mounting peals of applause. But at the start of the ninth round Paolino, striking him beneath the jaw, hit him just the way he wanted. Breitenstriter collapsed. The darkness roared furiously, chaotically. Breitenstrater lay twisted like a pretzel.

The referee counted down the fateful seconds. He kept lying there." So the match ended, and when we had all emptied out onto the street, into the frosty biueness of a snowy night, I was certain that in the flabbiest family man, in the humblest youth, in the souls and muscles of all this crowd, which tomorrow, early in the morning, would disperse to offices, shops, factories, there would be one and the same grand feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two excellent boxers, a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, courage, inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more valuable and purer than many so-called higher pleasures.

***
A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine (Review, 1927) Lovers of the art of chess will find this small book a most entertaining novel, or, rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only now really clashed, and the future holds no shortage of entrancing tussles. Znosko-Borovsky, a talented player himself, writes about chess in a masterly way. The book begins with the story of how the bright, intoxicating combination play of former years (Anderssen, Pillsbury, et al.) turned into positional play under the influence of Steinitz, Schlechter, Rubinstein, Lasker, cold masters, admirers of rigor and dryness in chess.

“Capablanca,” the author writes, “brought chess back from the province of severe science to the sphere of jolly and joyful art,” and goes on to describe his wonderful career, his defeat of Lasker, triumphs, triumphs, an unexpected period of weakness, and again triumphs.

There’s “play in space,” characterized by a concern for the safety and strength of every position, and “play in time”—1.e., a play of motion, of development. And this is Capablanca, a dynamic player, the “knight of fast-flowing time.” Znosko-Borovsky is just as accurate in describing Alekhine’s game. Comparing him with Capablanca, he refers to the latter as classical and technical, and Alekhine as romantic and tactical.

Capablanca is calm, and in his play there’s the harmony of genius; Alekhine is fiery, his imagination knows no limits, his combinations are fantastical. “His game spreads out like a fan, which will snap shut only at the moment of the final blow.”

The text comes furnished with some interesting diagrams, and at the end of the book there are fourteen selected chess Capablanca-Alekhine games with splendid brief commentaries.

I would like to mention the unusual vividness of some of the author’s expressions, and the brisk, heady pace of the whole narrative. Znosko-Borovsky writes about chess with gusto, juicily and aptly, just as a mas- ter should write about his art. The undersigned, a humble but ardent admirer of Caissa,' welcomes the appearance of this thrilling book.

***
Although Nabokov’s reviews of other émigré writers in the mid- 1920s are sporadic and mostly negative, in the late 1920s he began to review frequently and mostly enthusiastically. He reported with glee on another sport or game with which we associate him much more than we do boxing, in his review of a chess book on Alekhine and Capablanca. Two weeks before Alekhine became world champion, Sirin recommended this “thrilling” book as “a most entertaining novel, or rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only ” He particularly relished the characterization of now really clashed, the contrasting styles of the two grandmasters. About fifteen months later, he would conceive of and rapidly compose his own chess novel, The Luzhin Defense, named perhaps with a nod to the famously bold Alekhine Defense, just as the beginning and end of Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin’s name, if not his chess style, also seem a nod to Alekhine.

Like the nonfiction chess reporting that Nabokov extols as a “novel,” his own novel would reach a high point in the description of the final tussle between the styles of a Russian master and his Latin opponent (the fictional Turati replacing the real-life Capablanca).

Think, Write, Speak

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV

What connection do you see between chess and the work of art?

There’s no connection between literature and the game of chess. But there’s certainly a connection between the art of literature and the art of chess problems. Problems and games are two different things. It’s not easy to speak of these two things, because not everybody, not even all chess players, can appreciate the difference between the game of chess, which is journalism, and the chess problem, which is poetry.

The link between the composition of a chess problem and that of a novel lies in the originality of the combinations and the economy of their realization.

It’s a magnificent, complex, and sterile art, akin to the ordinary form of the game only to the extent, for example, that a juggler, in inventing the interlacings of a new sleight-of-hand trick, draws on something in the properties of a sphere. In fact, most chess players, masters and amateurs, take only a moderate interest in these refined enigmas, purely invented and requiring great specialization, and although they appreci- ate a problem with a trap inside, they would be absolutely disconcerted if they were asked to compose one.

In common there are themes, stratagems, ambushes, sacrifices, pinning and unpinning, and all sorts of maneuvers, but combined in a certain way. Because it’s the combination of the different themes that makes a problem. Deceit pushed to the point of diabolism. In this sense, I think one can find a certain parallelism between the chess problem and the problem of literary compositions.

And on the level of characters’ strategies?

No, that’s something else. This is becoming allegory. One thinks of those chess figurines.

(...)

When a chess problem comes into my mind I don’t see the chessboard, I don’t see squares as they are, I see perhaps little abysses, not holes, but different tensions, positive, negative. It’s not a question of form. It seems to me that in literary art there’s no privileged form, at the com- positional level. One could speak of a spiral, of a certain structure, but these are metaphors.

In terms of form, it would be, rather, “anything goes,” everything works, doesn’t it, all is allowed. I always have an interesting combination, complicated and with a certain form, but not each part of the combination.

Vladimir Nabokov

SPEAK, MEMORY

An Autobiography Revisited