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unimaginable, try as hard as one might to imagine—what? An empty room where one is not? Put out the light and then put out the light? For the young, death is supremely unnatural. For the old, it is so natural that it is not worth thinking about.
    As I had never for an instant believed in an afterlife, I suppose that all I could come up with, at twelve, was the formulation that as one was not before birth, one will not be after death, and so there you are, or not, as the case may be. For some, the notion of images impressed on celluloid provides a spurious sense of immortality, as does, indeed, the notion that those light rays which record our images will keep on bending about the universe forever. There are those who find comfort in such concepts. I don’t.
    Errol Flynn saves the prince in the wood, and as the pauper is about to be crowned king, the true prince is restored, and all is right with a world where a good boy-king will stand up to evil, whether played by Claude Rains or by Hitler.
    So, in a single film, screened at the susceptible time of puberty, one experienced the shock, as it were, of twinship. Also, the knowledge of how to exercise power. Also, the contrast between rich and poor that even I had been made aware of as the Depression deepened, and there was no help on earth for the poor except from the king, if he be good and well-informed. This was much the attitude of the American people at that time to their sovereigns, Franklin and Eleanor, who were opposed, as was the good prince, by evil lords. Finally, there is the impact of imminent death upon a twelve-year-old. Of all the facts of life, death is the oddest. Suddenly, there it is, in a moonlit forest, at the hand of a traitor with a knife; and then no more life. No anything. Nothing.
    Underlying the film, there is an appeal to altruism. Now altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred. Yet the prince in the film is obliged to note that there are others in the world beside himself (not to mention a pauper duplicate), and to those others he must be responsible. This is a highly un-American point of view but not without its charm for the youthful viewer, who will discover for himself, more soon than late, that one must always put oneself first, except when the American empire requires a war and then,
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
. I believe that my generation of Americans was the very last even to begin to take seriously that once-powerful invocation.
    But now the feature film’s over. The newsreel begins. The Japanese sink an American gunboat on a river in China. Senator Gore is defeated for a fifth term. “All is lost,” he declares, “including honor.” The House Un-American Activities Committee is formed. The director of air commerce resigns. The Munich Agreement is signed. Hitler takes over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
    I used to chat with Prince Philip of Hesse, the only person I ever knew who knew Hitler. Philip was son-in-law to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, and Italy was a founding member—with Germany—of the Axis powers. Prince Philip was always regarded with suspicion by Hitler, and, eventually, his wife, Princess Mafalda, was sent off to a German concentration camp where she died during an air raid—Puccini had dedicated
Turandot
to her. Prince Philip was rarely revelatory. Like his class, he regarded Hitler as a cheap demagogue, who was bringing a degree of order to the country. I asked about anti-Semitism. Prince Philip said he thought at first it was just pandering to voters. “Later, of course, when friends of mine were proscribed, I tried to intervene. Hitler was always agreeable. He even protected them for a time. But I never got him past his usual point: ‘in the professions they should never number more than their proportion in the general population,’ which made no sense to me.”

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