A Matter of Style

By William F. Buckley, Jr.

I Feel the need to admit that I have not given much explicit thought to the definition of style, notwithstanding that I am said to possess it, by which a compliment is sometimes but not always intended ("style" is widely misread as affectation). But finding myself in the pressure cooker, it came to me after very little ratiocination that style is, really, timing. Let me tell you, by giving you a story, what I mean by this.

It is a story by one of the 19th Century Russians, and timing here is one reason (concluded on page 261)Style/Buckley(continued from page 112) for not going to the trouble of finding out which one it was, since it doesn't matter. Tolstoy, I think; but, in any event, f read the story some time during my teens. It was about a very rich young prince who one evening engaged in a drinking bout of Brobdingnagian dimensions with his fellow bloods, which eventually peaked, as such affairs frequently did in that curious epoch of genius and debauchery, in a philosophical argument over the limits of human self-control. The question was specifically posed: Could someone succeed in voluntarily sequestering himself in a small suite of rooms for a period of 20 years, despite the fact that he would always be free to open the door, letting himself out or others in? In a spirit of high and exhibitionistic dogmatism, the prince pronounced such hypothetical discipline preposterous, and announced that he would give 1,000,000 rubles to anyone who succeeded in proving him wrong.

You will have guessed that a young companion, noble but poor, and himself far gone in wine's litigious imperatives, accepted the challenge. And so, with much fanfare, a few days later, the rules having been carefully set (he could ask for, and receive, anything except human company), Peter (we'll call him) was ushered into the little subterranean suite of rooms in the basement of the prince's house.

During the first years, he drank. During the next years, he stared at the ceiling. During the years after that, he kept ordering books, more books and more books. Meanwhile, the fortunes of the prince had taken a disastrous turn, and so he schemed actively to seduce Peter to leave his self-imposed confinement, dispatching letters below, describing evocatively the sensual delights Peter would experience by merely opening the door. In desperation, as the deadline neared, he even offered one half the premium.

The night before the 20th year would finish at midnight, half the town and thousands from all over Russia were outside to celebrate and marvel over the endurance of Peter upon his emergence. One hour before midnight, the startled crowd saw the door below street level open prematurely. And Peter emerge. One hour more and he'd have earned 1,000,000 rubles. But he had, you see, become a philosopher; and in all literature, I think, there is no more eloquent disdain for money.

What style, you say; and I concur. But what is it about that one hour that speaks so stylishly, in a sense that one year before the deadline would not, lacking as one year would be in drama; or, at the other end, before midnight, one minute overfreighted in melodrama?

It is style, surely.

Even so the speed of human responses, which, indicating spontaneity, can suggest integrity. "Is it all right if I bring Flo's sister and her husband along for the weekend?" demands instant assent; the least pause is, to the quick ear, lethal. When such a proposition is posed, the man of style will make one of two decisions, and he must here think with great speed. He will either veto the extra guests, going on to give whatever reason he finds most ingenious—or he will accept them on the spot. Absolutely nothing in between. In between is many other things defined as lacking in style.

It is so, I think, with language, and with that aspect of language on which its effectiveness so heavily relies—namely, rhythm. It matters less what exactly you say at a moment of tension than that you say it at just the right moment. Great speed may be necessary, as above; or such delay as suggests painful meditation, as required to ease, console or inspirit the other person. Style is not a synonym for diplomacy. Style can be infinitely undiplomatic, as in the stylish means selected by John L. Lewis to separate his union from the CIO. "We disaffiliate," he wrote on an envelope, dispatching it to headquarters. It is some times stylish to draw attention to oneself, as Lewis was doing. Sometimes, the man of style will be all but anonymous. Some men are congenitally incapable of exhibiting a stylish anonymity. Of Theodore Roosevelt it was said that whenever he attended a wedding, he confused himself with the bride. The queen of England could not feign anonymity; neither could L.B.J, or Mr. Micawber. But whichever is sought—being conspicuous or inconspicuous—timing is the principal element. Arrive very early at the funeral and you will be noticed, even as you will be noticed arriving at the very last minute. In between, you glide in, on cat feet.

In language, rhythm is an act of timing. "Why did you use the word irenic when you say it merely means peaceful?" a talk-show host once asked indignantly. To which the answer given was: "I desired the extra syllable." In all circumstances? No, for God's sake.

In the peculiar circumstances of the sentence uttered, those circumstances were set by what had gone just before, and with some intuition as to what would probably come just after. A matter of timing. A matter of style.

By Larry L. King

My style is to get it when you can, where you can, and don't trouble to look over your shoulder with a lot of fuddy-duddy moralizing in mind. I excuse this by believing that should you permit yourself to grow up poorer than orphan shit, then you naturally shall be tempted by riches early on.

Never mind I was raised a raggedy-ass yellow-dog Democrat; I wanted to be what we in Texas called a bidness man. Them suckers ran thangs, I observed, and hardly ever got caught at sweat work, (continued on page 258)Style/King(continued from page 113) A fascinating combination.

I did not, you understand, thirst to be the kind of mom-'n'-pop-store bidness man who kept dusty ledgers and faithful hours. No, I pined to be a get-rich-quick man. I eventually discovered it was my ambition and my style to be an entrepreneur.

It took me a while to get the hang of it. My first venture, in the fourth grade of the Putnam (Texas) school, was to write everybody's English themes for five cents the pop. Unfortunately, I used the same handwriting, tablet paper and ink color often enough to arouse official suspicions. I didn't mind the shame so much; what hurt was having to refund all those nickels.

Next I sold autographs of the famous. Business, admittedly, was slow while I depended on the signatures of local luminaries, county commissioners, preachers and such. There was a dramatic upsurge in the summer of 1939, when I made available the autographs of Tom Mix, Tarzan and F.D.R. When I offered the signature of Jesus Christ at 15 cents each or two for a quarter, I suddenly found myself back in the restitution business.

The problem, I decided as I grew and matured, was that I had not thought big. In 1957, I began to think big. Real big. Quite by accident, I stumbled onto a surefire way to make $500,000 with only a minimum of heavy lifting required.

I was then working on Capitol Hill for a Texas Congressman who would just as lief I not report his name. One day, I noticed a newspaper item beckoning me to riches: Lumber being used to construct the Inauguration platform from which President Dwight D. Eisenhower was scheduled to take his oath for a second term would be sold after the festivities to the highest bidder. Surely, such historic wood could be put to profitable use.

I approached a friend, Glen P. Wilson, an employee of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson; we got our thinking caps on. Wilson had been selected as my potential partner because he, too, thirsted to be an entrepreneur. Never mind he had failed as the inventor of a three-dimensional game board that boasted several clear-glass platforms permitting players to compete simultaneously at chess, Chinese checkers, mah-jongg, dominoes and, maybe, pole vaulting. Perhaps the game board failed because it was bigger than an oil derrick or required too much concentration for the TV generation to handle; at any rate, the large concept qualified Wilson as an Olympian thinker. I wanted him on my side in the Eisenhower-plaque bidness.

No way the Eisenhower-plaque enterprise could fail, Ike having amassed 35,000,000 votes in his second trouncing of Adlai Stevenson and being the most beloved American since Lassie. We hired a fellow with a slide rule, who calculated we could cut 550,000 little square plaques from the historic wood. Our calculations were that by selling them for one dollar each, we would easily clear a cool half million—probably more. After all, our only expenses would be the lumber itself, a couple of electric saws, a gold-stamping machine, small cardboard boxes in which to ship the historic plaques, a bit of newspaper advertising, postage and rental on P.O. Box 1956, Washington, D.C. We budgeted not a dime for labor costs, figuring we would do the dirty work ourselves until the first 100,000 plaques had been sold. Then, perhaps, we might hire friends and illegal aliens at hourly rates so cheap the costs would be laughable consequences to a couple of rich swells.

We successfully bid the lumber at a cost of only $3200, plus the interest on our bank loan. We bought two electric saws, for a total of $1400, and a gold-stamping machine, which would imprint in gold letters on the wooden blocks this legend: This historic plaque is certified as part of the official inaugural platform of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 35th President of the United States, from which he took his oath of office on January 21, 1957. It was a steal at a mere $800 and change.

Wilson approached The New York Times, The Des Moines Register, the Chicago Tribune and many other newspapers, as well as, cleverly, the G.O.P. national house organ. The cost of the resulting ads—tiny and positioned back by the patent-medicine and truss ads in most cases—totaled a mere $4717.36. The dignified New York Times, however, insisted on official assurances that our wood blocks were pedigreed. We got a letter from the Architect of the Capitol appropriately pedigreeing them. Then we had a new inspiration: Perhaps we should supply our customers with small individual certificates signed by the Architect of the Capitol. These spiffy numbers, on old parchment to lend a touch of class, were fashioned for only five cents each. Unfortunately, the aggregate sum for the first 20,000—we would have the remainder delivered later from profits—strained us an additional $1200.

We found it necessary to return to the bankers. Our total cost had now exceeded $12,000—not counting the postage we'd need. Our original banker, faced with our burgeoning capital requirements, suddenly developed an ongoing lack of enthusiasm. Through relatives and friends, we raised another $5000, plus more lectures and horselaughs than we found seemly.

Eventually, our raw lumber was delivered to the basements of our respective homes in Alexandria, Virginia. We sighed and wrote off the resulting window breakage and wall damage to future profits.

For days, King/Wilson, their wives and a few believing friends sawed, stamped and certified historic wood around the clock. As the appearance of our first ads approached, our main worry was that the 15,000 Eisenhower plaques we had readied would not suffice to meet the initial flood of orders. We hired a lawyer. For a mere $500, he pledged to stall malcontents until income exceeded outgo and we could fill orders in a timely fashion.

Came the marvelous Sunday our ads appeared across the width and breadth of the United States. Wilson and your present hero made a midnight raid on P.O. Box 1956, Washington, D.C. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. That was OK. We hadn't really expected to find orders that early; our visit to the P.O. was more of a dry run, for practice, like you'd conduct just before robbing a bank.

Monday's postal run proved exactly as productive as Sunday's. Well, what the hell; the mails required a while. Tuesday morning, we discovered nine letters ordering 11 plaques. We hugged and danced and went home on our lunch hours to produce another few dozen of our hot item before the deluge.

Tuesday afternoon brought a dozen letters ordering as many historic plaques. "These are only the airmail orders," we assured each other. "Wait until the regular-postage letters and postcards start coming in!" We returned, perhaps a bit apprehensively, to our saws and stamping machine.

A week later, we had sold 49 Historic Eisenhower Plaques. At one dollar the item. Wives began to caterwaul; friends quit volunteering their services on our assembly line; bills began to visit P.O. Box 1956, Washington, D.C.

I telephoned Jim Hagerty, Ike's press secretary, to say that while I admittedly was a registered Democrat, I was big enough to rise above petty partisanship: How about Ike's plugging our entrepreneurship at his next press conference, waxing eloquent about this fine example of free enterprise, and so on? Alas, the nameless secretary to the Presidential press secretary coolly proclaimed that Mr. Hagerty was far too busy to be bothered and that the White House never, but never, endorsed commercializations of The Highest Office in the Land. Click.

A month later, having sold a total of 76 plaques, we began the painful process of liquidation. You'd be surprised how many people had no use for a gold-stamping machine. Our ad in trade journals brought a single postcard, from a man in North Carolina. We rapidly called him.

"He don't do no talkin' on the phone," a woman said before hanging up.

We called back. She explained that her husband was "deef and dumb." We told of her husband's interest in buying our spiffy gold-stamping machine. She laughed and laughed: "He ain't got thutty-fie cents. Fact is, he's a ward of the state."

"So are we," I said glumly to my partner.

We sold our gold-stamping machine at junk weight and unloaded the twin electric saws for one third of what we had in them.

Davis Carter, a colleague on Capitol Hill, paid $300 for the unsawed remainder of our historic Ike wood and used it to build a back-yard fence. He added insult to injury by adorning it with a number of those accursed plaques.

A few nights later, I hosted a to-hell-with-it party in my own back yard. Highlight of the evening was the ceremonial public burning of 15,000 little wooden plaques, give or take a few dozen. The Alexandria Fire Department came to the party, without invitation, to douse the fire. The fire marshal handed me a $50 summons for unauthorized trash burning. He was certainly right about what I had burned.

The lifestyle of the entrepreneur is difficult to give up, however. I always look for the main chance. When the editors of Playboy asked me to write this piece, I said I would do it for one dollar per word.

Per word. Per word. Per word. Per word. Per word.

By D. Keith Mano

I know you, compadre. You deal with style the way pliers would deal with a hemorrhoid. But don't let it sprain your heart. Cheer up. I, too, gave my parents empty-nest syndrome at birth.

Hey, so what if you corn-row your armpit hair? So what if you grew a mustache to look more mature and found out that it really meant "Kiss me, I'm gay"? So what if you requested day rates at the Carlyle Hotel? So what if you just bought a Cuisinart turntable (concluded on page 262)Style/Mano(continued from page 113) and a Braun motorcycle, not to mention that new Betamax (all you need now is the TV)? So the waiter said, "White wine or red, sir?" and you asked him what other color he had. So what if you've got dumb old gonorrhea when all your sharp brethren have herpes and GRID? Never mind that your designer warm-up suit was designed by H & R Block. If you were a priest, you'd have little alligators on your vestments. Don't worry: I'm just like you. And take it from me: As Dr. Johnson said, "Style is the last refuge of a Spaniard."

First, remember this: Anybody who must adopt style is deep down insecure. Man, if he was secure, why would he have to go around dressed like someone else? Huh? Answer that for me. Why would he hack out a whole new persona: cowboy, biker, gourmand, punk, iron pumper, Anderson voter, I Ching tosser, neurasthenic, Swedenborgian—whatever. I mean, keeping this other guy is more expensive than keeping a mistress: You need two wardrobes and one full-time librettist. Only some real-far-gone snow blower would require an alias, an alibi, a cover—which things are, no more and no less, what passes these days for style. Now, me: I don't have style; I have this condition. I'm so styleless I've got an unnumbered Swiss bank account in Nigeria. I buy Doan's Pills from my pusher. Shees, if I were an airline seat, I'd recline forward. Yet I get by; just listen how.

God, see, He put a stop payment on my body. Clothes? No matter what I wear, still I look like something very trapezoidal wrapped by a six-year-old. Organ banks won't extend me credit. At 5'4", I've got the profile of a chopped-down Toyota hatchback: Much, much, much goes over my head—which head is 7-7/8 and oblong as a Delco Freedom battery. For suppleness and grace you could compare me to, oh, George Wallace going uphill on cobblestones. I'm the only man around with no biorhythm whatsoever. I do not, you catch, have great faith in Visible Me. Yet I appear supermasculine: muscular and hirsute. Mostly, I suspect, I resemble a Mason jar full of testosterone.

All this, please note, does not give me mental scoliosis. When facing Mr. Gold Earring and Raisin-Dyed-Interlock-Beaver Poncho beside his silver gull-wing De Lorean, I'm a one-man group session, a human Place of No Qualms. This brine shrimp is in trouble. Anyone with that many accessories has to feel as inadequate as a square paint roller. He will need me. Hell, I'm such a safe space that they bought my air rights for some kind of adult retirement home. I'll do foot reflexology on his head, improve his tantrie canasta and, in general, validate him half to death. I'm your cheap therapist is what.

I'll come at him all improper fractions and cheerful ineptitude—plus the energy of an entire emerging nation. From handshake onward, he'll know he has just met Dr. Double Fault himself. "Hi, they call me Mano, and my new novel sold seven copies last week. One a day. Gee, I really appreciate the guy who went out and bought it on Sunday." Or "Gladda meetcha, you notice I don't have a natural-shoulder body. Careful of my Lycra spandex suit, I'm sorta held together the way those toothpicks with red-plastic fur on them hold your club sandwich together." And people think, Who is this poor-drainage area? But, believe me, it works better than Lamaze on the soul. Soon, les chics are telling me about their trouble—which is très important and never laughable, like mine inevitably is.

And, boy, do I listen to Mr. Style. I can give six people my undivided attention at once. Right here, 8:20 P.M., August 3, 1982, he is the most significant person I've ever met. What? He invented the traffic cone? Sensational. Huh? He can make weird noises with his groin? Jesus, Merv Griffin; he has just got to wire Merv Griffin about that. He's a cabby, a plumber, an anchovy farmer, a poltroon, an unprincipled opportunist—by me, he's the best at it ever, not even close. And he'll get even better. He'll make a cover of Cosmopolitan en Español. He'll be in the public domain. I promise and I care. Baby, you are listening to the Confidence Man.

Am I sincere? Is Mean Joe Greene with all his clothing off basic black? Listen, I write 16 hours a day. I get out maybe once per solstice. Doesn't matter who I'm with—whether he matriculated at rat obedience school or he unfolds other people's origami for joy—he hasta be more fun than a 1000-word article on Old Church Slavic or whatever I'm writing today. I'll make him a star, like Leopold and Loeb or Mother Cabrini. I love that Old Buddy, no balloon juice, right from the clavicle, straight.

But, someone over there is saying, how can this nonconductor, this complete flame-out inspire cheerful times and confidence? Because, Spud Hole, I have a very deep voice. I am where the big-band sound went. I mean, I'm half Orson Welles and half that old poop who can make Smith Barney sound like someplace where they tie your scrotum off for being late to work. My voice has six knobs on it, including High Mesmerize—plus a fuzz box and an optional wa-wa pedal. I could announce immediate nuclear holocaust and people would just smile, then run out to buy five-year T-bills. Cultivate a deep voice: Doesn't count if you trip over your shoe-shine or look dull as two Mennonites; even the highest stylist will nod and say, "Yassuh, I'll buy one, and could you inseminate my daughter, please, while you're at it?"

Well, gotta head on now. But I wantcha t' know this was the most touching and perceptive one-way conversation I've ever had. Your wife looks swell, especially how her canine teeth overlap one another. Junior can't miss; 17 is just the right age for repatterning his crawl. Wow, lookit him go: like A. J. Foyt with knees. And you—gosh, getting your eyelids removed was so modish. Wait'll they hear about it at Andy Warhol's Interview. Think of all the time we waste blinking. Uh-huh, you sure do have style. And it doesn't in the least detract from your exquisite lack of personality.

By Leonard Michaels

One Sunday, watching the New York Knicks on TV, I saw Walt Frazier get the ball near the top of the key, start to his left with a sort of no-beat dribble, then break to his right, heading for the basket at a hard slant with his opponent going just as fast for two or three steps, then not fast enough. Frazier went by untouched, soaring toward delivery. The ball whispered through the net before he touched the floor. From beginning to end, the move took maybe one second, yet it seemed packed (continued overleaf) with sensational detail; and I felt strangely unbalanced, because I was alone and had nobody to confirm that it had really happened. Then, Bill Russell, who was commenting on the action, said, "Frazier doesn't look fast, but that's because he's so smooth." Russell often says things better than the game itself, but this struck me as what I needed. More than a confirmation of my impression that a great deal had happened in very little time, Russell said what I had actually seen. Frazier was so smooth, he looked almost slow. He had the clarity of tremendous style.

Years ago, sitting in the bleachers of Yankee Stadium, I'd watch Joe DiMaggio take off after a long fly ball in the vast plain of center field, and I would think he wasn't going to catch it, he wasn't running fast enough, until the ball vanished in his glove. Then, with a slight shock, I'd feel ordinary life resume and the long, hallucinatory moment would return to me in memory: DiMaggio gliding into the depths of center field beneath a speeding white speck, which I detected before I heard the crack of the bat or understood why DiMaggio was moving, and, just as I was about to go insane worrying that he wouldn't catch it, he would let the ball vanish in his glove as if he'd known all along that his glove was the only place the ball wanted to go.

Such impeccable agreement between men and the laws of ballistics is tremendous style. I call it clarity because I didn't simply watch Frazier and DiMaggio. By virtue of style, they gave me to see.

One night, in a bar called Basin Street, in Greenwich Village, Miles Davis offered a similar experience—virtually a lesson in style. He did it by turning his back to the audience, then shaping the finest phrases with his horn. I don't know what he intended, but when he turned, he faced the same direction as the audience and symbolically became one of us. It was as if he had said, "Don't look at me. Listen to it." His style had the clarity I'm talking about—special independent life, other than himself.

Some artists never distinguish themselves from their work, as was the case of a friend of mine who published a novel that was much praised and made him a lot of money. One day, I visited his apartment and found him sitting at his typewriter, high on cocaine, smiling, shaking his head at the keys and saying repeatedly, "I'm so good that I don't even have to write." His work was himself; he had nothing more to do but be. I saw him again, months later, drunk, pissing against a wall. He didn't look good. His novel, however, had changed not one bit.

If someone studies a painting and says, "That's a Matisse," it's not the same as saying "That's a Chevrolet" or "That's a chicken." To hang a man's name on the indefinite article—a Matisse—is to burden the tiny word with terrible weight. Thus, we acknowledge the mysterious, awesome power of style—to seem personal and impersonal at once. Matisse names a style as separate from the man as a shooting star, yet names the man who sickens and dies.

When you see rotten style, you see nothing but the man. For example, the infamous secret tapes of Richard Nixon, full of mean-minded ideas and gratuitous obscenities; or Henry Kissinger's description of his diplomatic style as that of a cowboy gun fighter. On the other hand, if it is deliberately, outrageously, publicly rotten, it's not the man. Punk-rock star Johnny Rotten, for instance. His real name is Lydon. Rotten refers to the actual condition of his teeth, as well as to the message of his group, The Sex Pistols. Here are two lines from one of their songs:

God save the queen.

She ain't no human being.

Whatever the queen ain't, she is certainly the epitome of style. For just that reason, one could say she seems nonhuman. The same is often said of high-fashion models, who deal in the depersonalizing, dehumanizing effects of sheer style. At the opposite extreme are such figures as Einstein and Socrates, famous for genius and simplicity. In their case, no style is the man.

One of the best and happiest treatments of the idea—that style is the man—is Cole Porter's song You're the Top as rendered by Anita O'Day. The song is all about style, and nobody has ever had that very thing more splendidly than O'Day. In the lyrics, a lover is celebrated as "the top" and is said to be a Shakespeare sonnet, the Eiffel Tower, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, the Nile, Mickey Mouse, the smile on the Mona Lisa, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Lena Horne, Benny Goodman and other miracles of artistic pleasure and nature.

All in all, the song is classy, witty, down-home, deliriously high and marvelously loving, but whatever it tells you or makes you feel, it's clear that the celebrated lover is everything wonderful except himself. It mustn't be imagined that I'm contradicting Porter and O'Day. If they believe the style is the man, that's good enough for me. Nevertheless, in my heart, I also believe the man is not the style.

The idea, though simple, is like water: difficult to hold on to. I'll give you a concrete picture.

A friend of mine has a 15-year-old daughter. She has a small head, an elegant neck and long, slender, muscular legs. She's beautiful, and you can see, instantly, that she's a ballet dancer. She eats hardly anything but fast food and candy, and she never goes out on dates. When you talk to her, she answers pleasantly but not as if it really matters whether or not you're talking to her. She is always flexing her legs, as if on the verge of a magnificent leap across the living room. In the Manhattan apartment, she looks totally unnatural. I can imagine how, flying across a stage, pursued by spotlights, she would look supernatural. That's where she belongs; that's where she lives in her mind and heart. She is possessed by ballet, enslaved by style from her head to her pointed toe.

My friend notices all this only to criticize her. He says she's too intelligent for a completely physical life, and her dancing should be a hobby, nothing more. He says her decision not to go to college, not to become a tax accountant like himself, is driving him crazy. He says this to her. She stands like a beautiful giraffe, gazing at him from an immense and invincible distance, as if he were an insect; yet they have the same eyes and the same color hair. He refuses to accept the distinction between himself, good, practical man, and his daughter, grand creature of style. She is me, he insists, not unearthly style. No, she thinks, the style is herself. Between them, compromise is not possible. It's a fight to the death.

In ballet, as in athletics, jazz or fiction, great style is great physics, a human gift for creating relations among physical things—sounds, colors, bodily motions—in a way that seems to have clarity and life independent of the one responsible for it. This might suggest that I'm talking about God, but He has no style. He made nature. When physicists describe a theory as elegant or beautiful, they don't mean it's necessarily true but only that it has style, in contrast to nature, which can seem problematic and messy. But there would be no such thing as style, effective or rotten, if it didn't answer to forces already built into the structure of the universe. We recognize great style because its look or feel is already in our skin and bones and muscles and the purely impersonal configurations of the distant nebulae.

Even haiku, very delicate and sublime poems, fall into this idea of style, for they are essentially physical, being (concluded on page 258)Style/Michaels(continued from page 114) made of air. The long, long, lugubriously brainy sentences of Henry James are also physical, being like intestinal pipes through which food slides in a process of slow, infinitely thorough digestion. Works of so-called primitive art, especially African masks, impress you very directly with the mysterious power of style. They have an impact that is rarely—maybe never—felt in "civilized" art, because their style is dominant, superb and radically physical. When the anonymous Ibo genius hacks terror or ferocity into wood, it can sometimes seem that his work does not represent anything, certainly not himself. His piece of sculpture isn't metaphorical; it simply is terror, is ferocity. To make this clear, think of the reports from reliable witnesses who say that people in a religious trance lacerate themselves with whips and even stab themselves with knives, and shortly afterward, the wounds close and heal, leaving no scar. If this isn't a lie, a delusion or a trick, I don't know what it is supposed to be called. But the same phenomenon—the incredible unity of body and mind—is in the masks, in the style of primitive art.

I think this is like the experiences I talked about earlier: the rare and hallucinatory moments of clarity achieved by athletes and musicians and writers who have tremendous style. Perhaps, in those moments, style returns us to the home we lost long ago in the dynamic structure of the nonhuman universe—the Garden of Eden, where body and mind were one thing and desire flowed continuously into fulfillment. Isn't that where we want to go? Don't we recognize that dreamy trip in moments of tremendous style, in the way the speeding ball seems to want DiMaggio's glove?