Quartet for the End of Time (64 page)

Yes, he will say. It is into this—last scattering of vowels—that they come. In every imaginable shape and color and creed.

At last. Ascending.

Behold! he will say: A white horse!

And the one sitting on it? With a countenance more in sorrow than in anger?

My father's spirit in arms.

Alas. Poor ghost …

If it is, indeed, thee, Father—answer me this. Why make of the night such a hideous darkness, and of us such fools? Why shake our dispositions in this way—and so horridly—with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

He says nothing. And yet—it
is
he. It is.

Unquestionably, it is.

Why else—I ask you—would all the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, also follow him on white horses?

Or from his mouth come a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations; which he will rule, from this day forward—just as those who came before him—with a rod of iron?

Acknowledgments

With gratitude to Olivier Messiaen's
Quartet for the End of Time
, and the many histories, personal narratives, and works of art that inspired this book; to my editors, Jill Bialosky and Nicole Winstanley, for their guidance and belief in this project; to my agent, Tracy Bohan, for her friendship and support; and to my husband, John, for being my first and most devoted reader, and my best friend.

Art Title Index

E
PIGRAPH
:

Bars of music demonstrating use of peonic, or cretic rhythm, with augmentation and diminution in Olivier Messiaen's “Joie et Clarté des Corps Glorieux.”

INTER LUDE:

p. 187
  The candidate of many parties. A phrenological examination to ascertain what his political principles are.

Henry R. Robinson, New York: Lithographed & published by H. R. Robinson, 1848.

p. 188
  Unidentified officer on horseback.

Alfred R. Waud (Alfred Rudolph), artist, between 1860 and 1865.

p. 189
  Unidentified woman, possibly Mrs. James Shields, in mourning dress and brooch showing Confederate soldier and holding young child wearing kepi (cap worn by soldiers on both sides of the conflict in the American Civil War).

Unknown photographer, between 1861 and 1865.

p. 190
  American Army field hospital inside ruins of church, France.

Unknown photographer, 1918.

p. 191
  Holes torn out by huge shells. Where our boys fought in Belleau Wood, France.

Keystone View Company, photographer, 1919.

p. 192
  Group of railroad officials under Russian banner of freedom, Trans-Siberian Railway.

Unknown photographer, February 27, 1918.

p. 193
  Big Fish, Little Fish.

Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, artist, 1557. Engraving; first state of three.

p. 194
  Bonus veterans. Indian bonus veteran.

Theodor Horydczak, photographer, ca. 1920–ca. 1950.

p. 195
  On to Washington, we want the bonus. Ambridge, Pennsylvania, Veterans.

Harris & Ewing, photographer, 1932.

p. 196
  Group (Bonus Army?) in front of U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.

Harris & Ewing, photographer, 1932
.

p. 197
  Vacated Bonus Army camp (?).

Harris & Ewing, photographer, 1932 or 1933.

p. 198
  The bonus division where the many clerks figure the amount of the bonus each veteran is entitled to.

National Photo, between 1909 and 1932.

p. 199
  Making some history. President Roosevelt, standing on the rostrum of the House chamber, makes A bit of history by appear
ing before A joint session of Congress to deliver A veto of the Patman Bonus Bill. This is the first time such action was taken by A president, and marks A new high for presidential vetoes of the veteran bonus legislation. Vice President Garner, seated left under the flag, and speaker Joe Byrns, seem very impressed.

Harris & Ewing, photographer, May 22, 1935.

p. 200
  CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) boys at work, Prince George's County, Maryland.

Carl Mydans, photographer, August 1935.

p. 201
  The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of A homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa.

Russell Lee, photographer, December 1936.

p. 202
  Hurricane shelter under construction, Matecumbe Key, Florida.

Arthur Rothstein, photographer, January 1938.

p. 203
  Family walking on highway, five children. Started from Idabel, Oklahoma. Bound for Krebs, Oklahoma, in Pittsburg County. In 1936 the father farmed on thirds and fourths at Eagleton, Oklahoma, in McCurtain County. Was taken sick with pneumonia and lost farm. Unable to get work with Work Projects Administration and refused county relief in county of fifteen years' residence because of temporary residence in another county after his illness.

Dorthea Lange, photographer, June 1938.

p. 204
  Opens for business as usual. Washington, D.C., October 26, 1938. Despite President Roosevelt's rebuke of the House committee investigating un-American activities the day before, Chairman Dies opened his committee room for further hearing of witnesses.

Harris & Ewing, photographer, October 26, 1938.

p.205
  Untitled photo, possibly related to abandoned mine, Goldfield, Nevada.

Arthur Rothstein, photographer, March 1940.

p. 206
  The German Wehrmacht Enigma machine.

This cipher machine was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius and used to encipher and decipher messages. The English mathematician Alan Turing, widely considered the founder of artificial intelligence and modern computer science, managed to crack the Enigma code. Crucial to his breakthrough was the repetition of “Heil Hitler” at the end of Hitler's birthday missives, 1940.

p. 207
  “No. 8. Original Drawing. Mr. Birchall and Miss Relph. No. 8. Reproduction.”

A record of telepathic experiments conducted by F.W.H. Myers, and included within the 1903 publication,
Human Personality and Survival of Bodily Death.

p. 208
  London is still “taking it.”

Photographer unknown, December 1940. Photo shows St. Paul's Cathedral, London, amid smoke and flames of night air raid.

p. 209
  “Thematic relationship—textural relationship—relationship of style, tempo, tonality and theological idea” diagram, from the chapter “The Works of the War Years” in Robert Sherlaw Johnson's
Messiaen
.

The shape of Olivier Messiaen's
Quartet for the End of Time
as A whole is achieved through the intersection of, and tension between, various thematic and textural relationships, as depicted by this diagram by Robert Sherlaw Johnson.

p. 210
  Frequencies of One Million Digits.

From
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal
Deviates,
published in 1955 by the Rand Corporation. The numbers were produced by an electronic “roulette wheel,” which, after ensuring the numbers and their progression contained absolutely no information, were then transposed. The need for large quantities of random numbers began with electronic calculating machines, and the Manhattan Project's development of the atomic bomb. As the largest known source of random digits, the Rand book has become A standard reference for engineers, statisticians, gamblers, physicists, poll-takers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and quality control engineers. The New York Public Library had yet another take on the project, originally filing it in its “Psychology” section.

p. 211
  High school Victory Corps. Invading A field previously almost exclusively masculine, this girl at Polytechnic High School, Los Angeles, California, takes her radio and code instruction seriously.

Alfred T. Palmer, photographer, September–October 1942.

p. 212
  Argonis, Kansas. Crossing wheat fields along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Wellington, Kansas, and Waynoka, Oklahoma.

Jack Delano, photographer, March 1943.

p. 213
  New York, New York. A soldier and his girlfriend dancing at the Hurricane to the music of Duke Ellington.

Gordon Parks, photographer, April 1943.

p. 214
  Female French collaborator having her head shaved during liberation of Marseilles.

Carl Mydans, photographer, Time+Life Pictures—Getty Images, December
31
, 1943.

p.215
  London, England. Crowd on Armistice Day.

Unknown photographer, 1945.

p. 216
  Benny Goodman.

Unknown photographer, ca. 1920s.

p. 217
  Two elderly men, one wearing the armband signifying blindness, the other his helper, sitting on A crate amid the rubble, Berlin.

Yevgeni Kaldei, photographer, 1945, probably printed 1955.

p. 218
  Water scenes. Water and sky I.

Theodor Horydczak, photographer, ca. 1920.

Sources and Inspirations

Quartet for the End of Time
, by Oliver Messiaen.

The Doughboys,
by Gary Mead (Overlook, 2000).

The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956, an Experiment in Literary Investigation I–II,
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Translated by Thomas Whitney (Harper & Row, 1973).

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America
, by Ted Morgan (Random House, 2003).

Macbeth,
by William Shakespeare (Norton, 1997).

War, Women and the News: How Female Journalists Won the Battle to Cover World War II,
by Catherine Gourley (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007).

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
by James Agee and Walker Evans (Houghton Mifflin, 1941).

“The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” by Richard Wright. From
American Stuff: WPA Writers' Anthology
, 1937.

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,
by F. W. H. Myers (University Books, 1961).

The Island of Dr. Moreau,
by H. G. Wells (Dover, 1996).

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death,
by John Gray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

Reporting World War II, Part II: American Journalism, 1944–46,
The Library of America. In particular: Martha Gellhorn's “Surely This
War Was Made to Abolish Dachau,” from
Collier's
, June 23, 1945, and Virginia Irwin's “A Giant Whirlpool of Destruction,” from
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, May 9–11, 1945.

Homage to Catalonia,
by George Orwell (Harcourt, Brace, 1952).

The Best Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant
, by Guy de Maupassant (Airmont, 1968).

Suite Francaise,
by Irene Nemirovsky (Vintage Canada, 2007).

Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance,
by Patrick Marnham (Random House, 2000).

The Miracle of Stalag VIII-A—Beauty Beyond the Horror: Olivier Messiaen and the Quartet for the End of Time,
by John William McMullen (Bird Brain Publishing, 2010).

Messiaen
, by Robert Sherlaw Johnson (Omnibus Press, 2009).

Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935–1939
. Collected and translated by Stephen Broad (Ashgate Press, 2012).

Messiaen Studies
, edited by Robert Sholl (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet,
by Rebecca Rischin (Cornell, 2003).

The Man Who Never Was: World War II's Boldest Counter Intelligence Operation,
by Ewen Montagu (Montagu Estate, 1952; Blue Jacket Books, 2001).

Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, by Sigmund Freud (Broadview, 2011).

Hamlet,
by William Shakespeare (Norton, 1997).

The Book of Revelation, verse 19.
The Holy Bible
(Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1952).

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