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officials of foreign chancelleries, and when he looked at the careers of expatriate artists and ambassadors, he sometimes was very disappointed by the drabness of his native land. And here, too, was one of the most absorbing puzzles of his life: when Americans went abroad they were simple, straightforward people; when they stayed abroad they became cynical climbers. A man who had spoken contemptuously of knee-breeches in New York harbour, was soon photographed smiling at the Pope, or lounging in a punt on the Thames with the daughters of a titled brewer. A man who had painted tall corn since puberty was found in the studio of a Parisian abstractionist. A new Secretary of State, who had never even stirred from home and had harried his predecessor with demands for a “genuinely American” foreign policy, soon began arranging trade-treaties with the most contemptible foreign elements. This sort of apostasy struck Divver with special shame—because it reminded him of himself. He, too, was unable to resist the colour and brilliance of the European opera, any more than he could resist the glamour of a full-blown psychosis. Whole chapters of his books were given over to the richest details of ornate banquets, Foreign Office interiors ,interviews with peers, cardinals, pro-consuls, academicians, visits to country houses, symbolical weather conditions. But Divver always made clear that these glamorous accounts were included simply as an overture to honest indignation of the kind that had caused his work to be known as “fearless” and “cuts to the bone.” “As I sat sipping Turkish coffee in this luxurious home,” he would write, “I thought of how many centuries of exploitation had gone into its making. I thought of the man I had seen barely an hour earlier, pushing his junk cart toward an East End market, one in whom I had detected a natural, open vitality and generosity of feeling which was certainly not visible in those who now surrounded me. I also thought of Garibaldi, and of Lincoln, in whose faces, when I recalled them at this moment, I recognized that self-same mark of … etc., etc.” In his books there were also pages devoted to the life of the underprivileged; but these were usually more sketchy, because such common people were the ground on which Divver planted his feet in order to see what went on above his head, and he had no wish to break up with analysis what he found so stable as a mass. He also found it easier to enter palaces than cottages, and so his writing about cottagers was based mainly on hand-outs from trustworthy sources, short trips through depressed areas, remarks overheard in bars and buses, and humane conclusions evoked by the sight of a farmhand covered with manure.
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    Early one Saturday morning, in May, 1939, Divver realized that the pain in his left ear was a growing boil. The sun edged in through slits in the closed venetian blinds and shaped itself on the bedroom floor in powdery markings, bringing a dim light into the room. Lily was still asleep; Divver heard the morning paper flop outside the hall door; in the next room Home On The Range was being sung in a subdued butquerulous soprano, his son Arthur’s warning that worse would come if he were deprived of many more minutes of another glorious day. Divver propped himself against the bedhead with two pillows, easing himself up with the heavy breathing and muted grunting of a man who is determined that no matter how great his agony, his wife shall get her full sleep. He held his head gingerly on one side, brushed his throbbing ear gently with four fingers, and finally delicately inserted his crooked little finger and probed into his ear-hole, edging in further and further, his features expressing excruciating wariness. Soon, a stab of pain rewarded him; Divver gave a sharp hiss, and, his guess that he was in pain being now confirmed, let his face rise into ridges of suffering, while a muted whistle came from his lips. His wife