“O kine no longer mine. . . .”

  and containing grave breaches of Christian philosophy. Mr. Underwood said, “Cows don’t go to heaven,” to which Mrs. E.C.B. replied, “Well, this one did,” and explained poetic license. Mr. Underwood, who in his time had published memorial verses of indeterminate variety, said he still couldn’t print this because it was blasphemous and didn’t scan, so to mark her displeasure Mrs. E.C.B. unlocked a frame and scattered the Biggs Store ad all over the office. To mark his displeasure, Mr. Underwood drank an enormous slug of cherry wine in her face, swallowed it down, and cursed her all the way to the courthouse square. After that, instead of having them appear in the Maycomb County Tribune, Mrs. E.C.B. had her works published privately by a firm in Tuscaloosa. The county felt the loss.

  “You know—”

  She came down from the ceiling.

  “You know, they had the same kind of spirit we were raised on. That’s why I can’t get enough of them,” Talbert was saying. “Especially when I’m stuck off up there at Northwestern. People don’t seem to have much human nature up there—they’re not like us.”

  “It seems to me,” she said, making a feeble last-ditch stand, “that if you were homesick you’d naturally turn to Faulkner or somebody.”

  “I find Faulkner completely unreal.”

  What he saw in her face made him smile. His smile broadened into a grin and he rubbed the left side of his nose with his right forefinger.

  Lord, she thought, he has even acquired their gestures. “More coffee, Talbert?” she said.

  “Yes, please.”

  As she went toward the kitchen, she stopped in the door, turned around, and said, “Talbert, do you by any chance play golf?”

  “Why, yes.”

  She washed and dried the cups, put on a fresh pot of coffee, and while she waited for it to come to a boil, she wondered why she had ever doubted that all things happen for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.

  Essays and Miscellaneous Pieces

  Love—in Other Words

  Vogue, April 15, 1961

  MANY YEARS AGO AN AGING member of the House of Hanover, on learning that the duty of providing an heir to the throne of England had suddenly befallen him and his brothers, confided his alarm to his friend Thomas Creevey: “. . . It is now seven-and-twenty years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived together; we are of the same age and have been in all climates, and in all difficulties together, and you may well imagine the pang it will occasion me to part with her. . . . I protest I don’t know what is to become of her if a marriage is to be forced upon me. . . .”

  Amused by the Duke of Kent’s predicament, Mr. Creevey recorded the incident in his diary and preserved for us a timeless declaration. The man who made it was not overly endowed with brilliance, nor had he led a noteworthy life, yet we remember his cry from the heart and tend to forget his ultimate service to mankind: he was the father of Queen Victoria.

  What did the Duke of Kent tell us? That two people had shared their lives on a voluntary basis for nearly thirty years—in itself a remarkable achievement; that they had survived the fevers and frets of intimate relationship; that together they had met the pressures and disappointments of life; that he is in agony at the prospect of leaving her. In one graceful sentence, the Duke of Kent said all there is to say about the love of a man for a woman.

  And in so saying, he tells us much about love itself. There is only one kind of love—love. But the different manifestations of love are uncountable:

  At an unfamiliar night noise a mother will spring from bed, not to return until every corner of her domain is tucked safely round her anxiety. A man will look up from his golf game to watch a jet cut caterpillar tracks through the sky. A housewife, before driving to town, will give her neighbor a quick call to see if she wants anything from the store. These are manifestations of a power within us that must of necessity be called divine, for it is no invention of man.

  What is love? Many things are like love—indeed, love is present in pity, compassion, romance, affection. What made the Duke of Kent’s statement a declaration of love, and what makes us perform without second thought small acts of love every day of our lives, is an element conspicuous by its absence. Were it present, the Duke of Kent would have left his mistress without a pang; the sound barrier breaking over her head would not rouse the mother; sinking his putt would be the primary aim of the golfer; the housewife would go straight to the store with no thought of her neighbor. One thing identifies love and isolates it from kindred emotions: love admits not of self.

  Few of us achieve compassion; to some of us romance is a word; in many of us the ability to feel affection has long since died; but all of us at one time or another—be it for an instant or for our lives—have departed from ourselves: we have loved something or someone. Love, then, is a paradox: to have it, we must give it. Love is not an intransitive thing—love is a direct action of mind and body.

  Without love, life is pointless and dangerous. Man is on his way to Venus, but he still hasn’t learned to live with his wife. Man has succeeded in increasing his life span, yet he exterminates his brothers six million at a whack. Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: depend upon it, he will—should he cease to love.

  The most common barriers to love are greed, envy, pride, and four other drives formerly known as sins. There is one more just as dangerous: boredom. The mind that can find little excitement in life is a dying one; the mind that cannot find something in the world that attracts it is dead, and the body housing it might as well be dead, for what are the uses of the five senses to a mind that takes no pleasure in them?

  Having at long last realized that he must love or destroy himself, man is proceeding along his usual course by trying to evolve a science for it. The ultimate aim of psychoanalysis, when its special brand of semantics is put to rout, is to release man from his neuroses and thus enable him to love, and man’s capacity to love is measured by his degree of freedom from the drives that turn inward upon him. As one holds down a cork to the bottom of a stream, so may love be imprisoned by self: remove self, and love rises to the surface of man’s being.

  With love, all things are possible.

  Love restores. We have heard many tales of love’s power to heal, and we are skeptical of them, for we are human and therefore prone to deny the existence of things we do not understand and cannot explain. But this tale happened:

  On an August evening in a tiny Southern hospital, an old man lay dying. His family had been summoned, among them his eldest grandson, a boy of sixteen. The boy’s relationship with his grandfather had been a curious, almost wordless one, as such things often are between man and man. All that day the boy said nothing. It seemed that he could not talk. He would not wait out the old man’s dying with the rest of his family in the hospital lobby; instead, the boy found a chair and stationed himself in the corridor beside his grandfather’s door, where he sat all day, oblivious to the starched scurryings of hospital routine. Late in the evening the family ’s doctor found the boy still sitting, still silent. The doctor said, “Go home, son. There’s nothing you can do for your grandfather.” The boy took no notice of him, and the doctor went into the room only to emerge moments later, looking bewildered. “Er—son,” said the doctor. The boy looked up. “He’s asking for something to eat. He’s better.” Showing no sign of surprise, the boy nodded: “I reckoned it was about time he was hungry,” he said, his first utterance of the day. Then he picked up the chair, put it back where he found it, and walked down the corridor, stretching his lanky frame and yawning. “Where are you going, boy?” called the doctor. “To get him a hamburger,” answered the boy. “He likes hamburgers.”

  There is no satisfactory explanation for extrasensory perception—it simply is. There was no rational explanation for the old man’s recovery—it simply happened. One may only wonder.

  Love transforms. Why is it that the quotation we are seeking, when we can’t find it in the Bible or in Shakespeare, most often turns up in Don Quixote? Because Cervantes, from sheer love of life, made the nuances of life immortal. Why, when we are familiar with every line, must we still stop and listen when the Messiah is playing? Because every note was born of a man’s love for his God, and we hear it. Try this experiment: catch (if you can) someone who loathes baroque music; play for him any part of Semele, then sit back and watch his polite attention turn to compulsive attention—see your captive become Handel’s captive. Avarice never wrote a good novel; hate did not paint The Birth of Venus; nor did envy reveal to us that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. Every creation of man’s mind that has withstood the buffeting of time was born of love—love of something or someone. It is possible even to love mathematics.

  The history of mankind contains innumerable testaments to the power of love, but none touches the transformation undergone by the otherwise cantankerous St. Paul when he addressed himself to the subject: loving, he wrote of love itself, and he gave us a miracle. Listen:

  “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

  “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. . . .”

  After St. Paul, we have done our best, but our best has never come near him.

  Love purifies. Suffering never purified anybody; suffering merely intensifies the self-directed drives within us. Any act of love, however—no matter how small—lessens anxiety’s grip, gives us a taste of tomorrow, and eases the yoke of our fears. Love, unlike virtue, is not its own reward. The reward of love is peace of mind, and peace of mind is the end of man’s desiring.

  Crackling Bread

  The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook, 1961

  FIRST, CATCH YOUR PIG. THEN ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:

  1 ½ cups water-ground white meal

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1 egg 1 cup milk

  Bake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).

  Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.

  Christmas to Me

  McCall’s, December 1961

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I WAS living in New York and working for an airline, so I never got home to Alabama for Christmas—if, indeed, I got the day off. To a displaced Southerner, Christmas in New York can be a rather melancholy occasion, not because the scene is strange to one far from home, but because it is familiar: New York shoppers evince the same singleness of purpose as slow-moving Southerners; Salvation Army bands and Christmas carols are alike the world over; at that time of year, New York streets shine wet with the same gentle farmer’s rain that soaks Alabama’s winter fields.

  I missed Christmas away from home, I thought. What I really missed was a memory, an old memory of people long since gone, of my grandparents’ house bursting with cousins, smilax, and holly. I missed the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing. I missed my brother’s night-before-Christmas mask of rectitude and my father’s bumblebee bass humming “Joy to the World.”

  In New York, I usually spent the day, or what was left of it, with my closest friends in Manhattan. They were a young family in periodically well-to-do circumstances. Periodically, because the head of the household employed the precarious craft of writing for their living. He was brilliant and lively; his one defect of character was an inordinate love of puns. He possessed a trait curious not only in a writer but in a young man with dependents: there was about him a quality of fearless optimism—not of the wishing-makes-it-so variety, but that of seeing an attainable goal and daring to take risks in its pursuit. His audacity sometimes left his friends breathless—who in his circumstances would venture to buy a town house in Manhattan? His shrewd generalship made the undertaking successful; while most young people are content to dream of such things, he made his dream a reality for his family and satisfied his tribal longing for his own ground beneath his feet. He had come to New York from the Southwest and, in a manner characteristic of the natives thereof, had found the most beautiful girl in the East and promptly married her.

  To this ethereal, utterly feminine creature were born two strapping sons, who, as they grew, discovered that their fragile mother packed a wallop that was second to nobody’s. Her capacity to love was enormous, and she spent hours in her kitchen, producing dark, viscous delights for her family and her friends.

  They were a handsome pair, healthy in mind and body, happy in their extremely active lives. Common interests as well as love drew me to them: an endless flow of reading material circulated amongst us; we took pleasure in the same theater, films, music; we laughed at the same things, and we laughed so much in those days.

  Our Christmases together were simple. We limited our gifts to pennies and wits and all-out competition. Who would come up with the most outrageous for the least? The real Christmas was for the children, an idea that I found totally compatible, for I had long ago ceased to speculate on the meaning of Christmas as anything other than a day for children. Christmas to me was only a memory of old loves and empty rooms, something I buried with the past that underwent a vague, aching resurrection once every year.

  One Christmas, though, was different. I was lucky. I had the whole day off, and I spent Christmas Eve with them. When morning came, I awoke to a small hand kneading my face. “Dup,” was all its owner had time to say. I got downstairs just in time to see the little boys’ faces as they beheld the pocket rockets and space equipment Santa Claus had left them. At first, their fingers went almost timidly over their toys. When their inspection had been completed, the two boys dragged everything into the center of the living room.

  Bedlam prevailed until they discovered that there was more. As their father began distributing gifts, I grinned to myself, wondering how my exceptionally wily unearthments this year would be received. His was a print of a portrait of Sydney Smith I’d found for thirty-five cents; hers was the complete works of Margot Asquith, the result of a year’s patient search. The children were in agonies of indecision over which package to open next, and as I waited, I noticed that while a small stack of presents mounted beside their mother’s chair, I had received not a single one. My disappointment was growing steadily, but I tried not to show it.

  They took their time. Finally she said, “We haven’t forgotten you. Look on the tree.”

  There was an envelope on the tree, addressed to me. I opened it and read: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

  “What does this mean?” I asked.

  “What it says,” I was told.

  They assured me that it was not some sort of joke. They’d had a good year, they said. They’d saved some money and thought it was high time they did something about me.

  “What do you mean, do something about me?”

  To tell the truth—i f I really wanted to know—t hey thought I had a great talent, and—

  “What makes you think that?”

  It was plain to anyone who knew me, they said, if anyone would stop to look. They wanted to show their faith in me the best way they knew how. Whether I ever sold a line was immaterial. They wanted to give me a full, fair chance to learn my craft, free from the harassments of a regular job. Would I accept their gift? There were no strings at all. Please accept, with their love.

  It took some time to find my voice. When I did, I asked if they were out of their minds. What made them think anything would come of this? They didn’t have that kind of money to throw away. A year was a long time. What if the children came down with something horrible? As objection crowded upon objection, each was overruled. “We’re all young,” they said. “We can cope with whatever happens. If disaster strikes, you can always find a job of some kind. Okay, consider it a loan, then, if you wish. We just want you to accept. Just permit us to believe in you. You must.”

  “It’s a fantastic gamble,” I murmured. “It’s such a great risk.”

  My friend looked around his living room, at his boys, half buried under a pile of bright Christmas wrapping paper. His eyes sparkled as they met his wife’s, and they exchanged a glance of what seemed to me insufferable smugness. Then he looked at me and said softly, “No, honey. It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.”

  Outside, snow was falling, an odd event for a New York Christmas. I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle. Christmas trees blurred softly across the street, and firelight made the children’s shadows dance on the wall beside me. A full, fair chance for a new life. Not given me by an act of generosity, but by an act of love. Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best not to fail them. Snow still fell on the pavement below. Brownstone roofs gradually whitened. Lights in distant skyscrapers shone with yellow symbols of a road’s lonely end, and as I stood at the window, looking at the lights and the snow, the ache of an old memory left me forever.

  Gregory Peck

  Special Program from the American Film Institute, 1989

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN CALIFORNIA to watch the first week’s filming of To Kill a Mockingbird, I was not in a state of complete innocence. Having been acquainted with the work of the producer, director, screenwriter and star, I knew that the novel was in good hands. All were gifted, consummate professionals.