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Music in Search of Home Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall

    
  
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Journeys with a Botanist through Transit Disaster
Rainforests, Swamps, and Mountains A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric

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Contents April 6, 2023

JUSTICE
6 ............................................. James Fenton Here’s Looking at Yew
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves,
Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
FOR ALL
10 ....................................... Frances Wilson Descriptions of a Struggle
The Diaries by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
16 ..................... Christopher de Bellaigue Erdoğan in the Ruins
Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria by Gönül Tol
20 ............................................. Martin Filler The Architect of Subtraction
Ornament and Crime: Thoughts on Design and Materials by Adolf Loos,
translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
Essays on Adolf Loos by Christopher Long
The Looshaus by Christopher Long
Adolf Loos: Works and Projects by Ralf Bock, with photographs by Philippe Ruault
The Private Adolf Loos by Claire Beck Loos, translated from the German
by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, and edited by Carrie Paterson
Adolf Loos: The Last Houses by Christopher Long
Adolf Loos on Trial by Christopher Long
26 ............................. Christine Smallwood The Exorcist
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
30 ................................. Anahid Nersessian The Couple Form
Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner JUDI T H L . HE R M A N , MD
A Queen in Bucks County by Kay Gabriel
33 .............................................. Amy Knight Putin’s Folly
Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival TRUTH AND
by Luke Harding
36 ...................................... Darryl Pinckney Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire
Black and Female by Tsitsi Dangarembga
REPAIR
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice
The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
39 .................................... Anna Della Subin A Body That’s Divine “Through masterful storytelling,
God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
41 .......................................... Andrea Cohen Poem
Judith Herman charts the
42 ........................................... Orville Schell Appeasement at the Cineplex course from trauma to justice
Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy
by Erich Schwartzel
and compels us to follow it.
Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market An inspiring and practical call
by Ying Zhu
to action, Truth and Repair
44 .................................. Alejandro Chacoff The Unbearable Weight of Levity
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector, translated from celebrates survivors’ wisdom and
the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
their power to heal themselves
46 .......................................... Oleh Kotsarev Poem
47 .......................................... Phillip Lopate Drowned Worlds
and the world we live in.”
Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City — A N I TA H I L L
by Lucy Sante, with photographs by Tim Davis
49 .................................. Ingrid D. Rowland An Exceptional Witness
One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World “A magnificent and inspiring
by Michael Frank, with illustrations by Maira Kalman
51 ...................................................... Ed Park Becoming Enid Coleslaw
contribution with profound
The Complete Eightball: Issues 1–18 by Daniel Clowes implications for the healing pro-
54 .......................................... Susan Neiman Longing for Reconciliation
Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes by Jerry Z. Muller
fessions and for society at large.”
56 .................................................. Zuyi Zhao Poem — B E S S E L VA N DE R K O L K , M D,
57 ................................... Gary Saul Morson The Master of Toska author of the #1 New York Times
Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius: 1886–1887 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score
by Bob Blaisdell
63 ................................................. Eric Foner A Regional Reign of Terror
By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham
“This book is a revelation.
65 ....................................... Karan Mahajan Avoidance Issues
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid With careful precision and
67 ................................................ Nick Laird Auden’s Dialectic dogged research, Herman offers
Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson
us not only a diagnosis of our
70 ......................................... John J. Lennon True Crime and Punishment: An Exchange with Adam S. Wilkins, Ruth Klassen
Andrews, James Palmer, and Sarah Weinman most pressing social ailments,
but a prescription for healing.
Rarely does a book offer this level
of insight, hope, and remedy.”
—R ACHEL LOUISE SNYDER,
nybooks.com Tareq Baconi: Outsourcing Violence in the West Bank
Liza Batkin: A Spurious Legal Threat to Abortion Drugs author of No Visible Bruises
Lucy Ives: How to Read Renee Gladman’s Drawings
Moises Saman: Photographing the Iraq War basicbooks.com
Jon Allsop: France’s Socialist Party at the Crossroads

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at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at
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3
Contributors
Christopher de Bellaigue’s most recent book is The Lion House. Editor
Emily Greenhouse
Alejandro Chacoff is the author of Apátridas, a novel, and the Literary Editor of piauí
magazine. He is based in Rio de Janeiro. Deputy Editor
Michael Shae
Andrea Cohen’s latest book of poems is Everything. Her next collection, The Sorrow Executive Editor
Apartments, will be published in 2024. Jana Prikryl
James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999 he was Oxford Senior Editors
Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is the author Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein,
of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and, most recently, Yellow Hasan Altaf
Tulips: Poems, 1968–2011. Contributing Editors
Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Martin Filler’s latest book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni
Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages. Art Editor
Leanne Shapton
Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia. His books
Managing Editor
include The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the Pulitzer Lauren Kane
Prize for History, and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877.
Online Editors
Amy Knight’s most recent book is Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Lucy Jakub, Max Nelson
Murder. She is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Associate Editor
Oleh Kotsarev is a Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, and journalist who lives in Daniel Drake
Bucha. His latest book, Evakuacija (Evacuation), was published last year. Tatiana Assistant Editors
Retivov is a poet and translator. Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman

Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, and ex-lawyer who taught for many years in the US. He Copyeditors
is now the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. Sam Needleman, Will Palmer
Editorial Interns
Phillip Lopate’s most recent book is A Mother’s Tale. He is a Professor in the MFA Jordi Anaya, Yadira Gonzalez
nonfiction writing program at Columbia.
Editor-at-Large
Karan Mahajan is the author of two novels, including The Association of Small Bombs, Daniel Mendelsohn
which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is an Associate Professor in
Literary Arts at Brown.
Publisher
Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities Rea S. Hederman
and a Professor in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Northwestern.
Associate Publisher, Business Operations
His new book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions
Michael King
and Why Their Answers Matter, will be published in May.
Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
Susan Neiman is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Germany. Her new book is Left Janice Fellegara
Is Not Woke. Her first novel, Nine Stories: A Berlin Novel, will be published in September.
Advertising Director
Anahid Nersessian is a Professor of English at the University of California at Los Lara Frohlich Andersen
Angeles. A new edition of her book Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse was published in Contracts Director
November. Jean Marie Pierson
Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams, Rights
which will be published in November. Patrick Hederman
Type Production
Darryl Pinckney’s memoir, Come Back in September, was published last year.
Will Simpson
Ingrid D. Rowland is a Professor of History, Classics, and Architecture at the Production
University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway. Her latest books are The Collector Kazue Jensen
of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, cowritten with Noah Charney, and
Web Production Coordinator
The Divine Spark of Syracuse. Maryanne Chaney
Orville Schell is Vice President of the Asia Society, the Arthur Ross Director of Advertising Manager
its Center on US–China Relations, and a former Dean of the Graduate School Sharmaine Ong
of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He is a coauthor, with John Delury, of Wealth and Advertising Assistant
Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century. His most recent book is a Lucie Swenson
novel, My Old Home.
Fulfillment Director
Christine Smallwood is the author of the novel The Life of the Mind. Janis Harden

Anna Della Subin is the author of Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine. Circulation Manager
Andrea Moore
Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence won the 2022 BIO
Publicity
Plutarch Award. Nicholas During
Zuyi Zhao studies religion and computer science at Stanford. Design Director
Nancy Ng
Special Projects
Angela Hederman
Office Manager
Diane R. Seltzer
Comptroller
Max Margenau
Assistant Accountant
Vanity Luciano

Founding Editors
Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)

Cover art
Rutu Modan, 2023
Series art
Armando Fonseca: Mi Casa es un Volcán, 2023

rachelcomey.com

April 6, 2023 5
 Here’s Looking at Yew
James Fenton

English Garden Eccentrics: and political interests of the age are

Three Hundred Years of reflected in the choice of contents of
Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, the garden—botany, as you would ex-
Mountains and Menageries pect, but also geology and archaeology.
by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. For Alexander Pope, devising his cel-
London: Paul Mellon Centre for ebrated grotto at Twickenham, it was
Studies in British Art, 392 pp., $40.00 not enough to line a cavern with the
(distributed by Yale University Press) most valuable stones. The materials
had to be geologically correct (What
What counts as eccentric in the gar- was the proper stone for the floor of
den, and what counts as a folly? As a a cave? And what for the ceiling?) and
child I used to be taken on Sunday they had to be beautiful. They didn’t
walks to the Needle’s Eye in Went- have to be rare—“glittering tho’ not
worth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp curious” was the way Pope put it, “as
pyramid of stone some forty-five feet equally proper in such an Imitation
tall and pierced by an arched passage. of Nature.” This imitation of “Nature”
It was erected in the early eighteenth extended to such considerations as
century by the Second Marquess of the striations of the rocks used and to
Rockingham, who wanted to make good the architecture of the grotto, which
on a bet that he could drive a coach- was not regular but was supposed,
and-four through the eye of a needle. with its pillars and groins, to resem-
If he could do that, the implication ble supporters left in a quarry—that
was, it shouldn’t be hard for him, a rich is, rough-hewn and irregular pillars
man, to enter the kingdom of heaven— carved from the living rock.
whatever Jesus says in Matthew.
That is a folly in one sense of the
word—a highly extravagant, eccentric
architectural gesture of no practical
purpose. The second meaning of the
C learly a lot of thought went into
this grotto, which was some-
thing far more substantial than the
French word folie overlaps with the average Renaissance or mannerist
English term. It refers to a kind of shell-decorated cave, meaninglessly
house—une petite maison (though they dedicated to some goddess or nymph.
were not in fact very small) built typ- Pope was serious. He adorned his cave
ically during the Régence (1715–1723) with an inscription in honor of the Rev-
in what were then the suburbs of Paris erend William Borlase, the geologist
for the mistresses of very wealthy men. who had advised him. The aesthetic
They were called folies after the foliage of the project was quasi-scientific, as
that supposedly grew up around them noted in a contemporary description:
to protect the identities of their own-
ers. Of course, by the time the foliage We are presented with many Open-
had grown enough to conceal them, John Oldfield: The Harlington Yew, circa 1820. The tree, which is thought to be at least ings and Cells, which owe their
little mystery might remain as to the a thousand years old and still stands on the grounds of St. Peter and St. Paul Church in Forms to a Diversity of Pillars and
identity of the owner, the lover, the Harlington, England, was clipped into this shape until 1825. Jambs, ranged after no set Order
eccentric night visitor. or Rule [that is, not Ionic or Co-
In their afterlife these follies and to cover Kew at its inception in 1759. It synagogue. Wörlitz is the epitome of rinthian], but aptly favouring the
their creators may appear in their most was, as has been said, like a world’s fair. a princely education, a vast souvenir particular Designs of the Place:
eccentric light. They are the ruins of of a Grand Tour. They seem as roughly hew’d out of
ruins, like the unique house built in the In the centuries before mechani- Rocks and Beds of mineral Strata,
form of a section of a massive broken
pillar in the Désert de Retz, François
Racine de Monville’s garden at Cham-
T he kind of enterprise we mean by
an English Garden—whether it is
fitted into a somewhat tight irregular
cal diggers, it was a costly—because
labor-intensive—business to remove
all traces of a Dutch garden when it
discovering in the Fissures and an-
gular Breaches, Variety of Flints,
Spar, Ores, Shells, &c.
bourcy, or the Ruined Bridge at Kew, space, like Kew, or allowed, like Stowe, had gone out of fashion. One simply,
over which real cows would pass. His- to command the local landscape—dif- where possible, superimposed the En- It is this sense of Man the Geolo-
tory was often unkind to these follies. fers from its historical predecessor, glish plan on its Dutch predecessor. gist discovering the structure of the
Invading armies were billeted in them. the Dutch garden, in avoiding straight It sometimes happens that, in times earth beneath him and making that
They were neglected or considered ri- lines and geometrical figures. It re- of drought, the ghostly outlines of a his theme, this romance of science,
diculous. But where, by some stroke of joices in winding paths, contrasts of “Dutch” garden become visible in the that imparts its peculiar excitement
fortune, they have survived, or where sun and shade, varieties of mood (very shallows of an “English” lake. This has to Pope’s now-vanished Twickenham
for instance some part of a typical much like New York’s Central Park, been observed at Blenheim Palace in garden. An architecture without order,
group of follies has clung on, as in with its lawns and lakes, crags and ki- Oxford and at St. James’s Park in Lon- without rule—quite the opposite of
the great landscape garden at Stowe osks). Ideally it was supposed to lead don, but it could happen all over Eu- what one would expect from the classi-
(a stately home that became a boys’ you through a gamut of emotions, in- rope, wherever the English style once cizing poet—was chosen to body forth
boarding school), then they cease to ducing pleasures of a rustic kind, in prevailed over the Dutch. The plants an inquiry that, in due course, would
seem eccentric. They seem important contrast to, some steps further on, awe and the beloved box hedges have long gain the strength to challenge the bib-
instead, and we lose the bad habit of at the mighty forces of nature: that is, since been dug up, but the gravel paths lical cosmogony. The impetus of that
laughing up our sleeves at them. from the picturesque to the sublime. remain discernible, with some of their inquiry derived in part from antiquar-
Kew Gardens is a grand example of To this end, it might include poetic old edgings perhaps. I knew a garden ianism and its allied sciences (in the
an English landscape garden surviv- inscriptions, monuments (Rousseau’s of uncertain age whose paths were spirit of figures like John Aubrey and
ing by passing itself off as a scientific island tomb in its glade of poplars), a lined with an astounding collection John Evelyn) and in part from the di-
institution. Some of its follies and ec- dairy (for a refreshing dish of cream), of empty stoneware gin bottles. A dif- rect legacy of Sir Francis Bacon.
centricities have been tidied away. Sir an aviary (to guarantee birdsong), a ferent sort of Dutch garden indeed. For it was Bacon’s former laboratory
William Chambers’s Pagoda and the grotto with a real hermit, and perhaps Someone had been hitting the Bols. assistant, Thomas Bushell, who, after
Ruined Bridge remain, together with a menagerie (once again like Central Variety was at a premium in the En- repenting his former debauched life
CI TY OF LONDON CORPOR ATION

a real royal residence (Kew Palace). Park). The English garden at Wörlitz glish garden: architectural variety, im- (Bacon was well known for his peder-
But how many visitors are aware that in Saxony-Anhalt features its own itating Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, and asty, and Bushell had entered his ser-
there was once, in the same garden, Vesuvius, which can still be made to variety of landscape. Eccentricity and vice at the age of fifteen, so we don’t
a House of Confucius, a Mosque, and erupt, and next to Vesuvius its own variety went hand in hand. The follies need to be told what they meant by “de-
an Alhambra, together with a Gothic Villa Hamilton, in honor of Sir William might serve as markers for a journey bauchery”) and a period of hermit-like
Cathedral (in wood) and various tem- Hamilton, the vulcanologist husband from vista to vista, and there might retreat on the Isle of Man, emerged
ples (in stucco)—the whole amounting of Lady Emma, Admiral Nelson’s mis- be guidebooks and maps for the con- from his seclusion, prudently married
to an essay on international architec- tress. It also welcomed, in its enlight- venience of the visitors. Nor is it sur- an heiress, and discovered a curious
tural styles? Eccentric does not begin ened way, the inclusion of a prominent prising to find that the intellectual rock that he proceeded to beautify and

6 The New York Review

 Yale university press

“Ward emerges from Richard

Blackett’s superb biography as a
towering presence in the international “The publication of this book is a
Ŕ >$@VPDUWEUDFLQJERRNRIUHŵHFWLRQ
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Even people with some experience “A vivid view of the half-century of
in his pursuit of racial justice.”—Julie “A masterful achievement.”—Piotr
of dance and lifetimes of attending SROLWLFDOOHJDODQGVRFLDOFRQŵLFWV
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Color: The Life of James Forten
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Obscure anecdotes and facts are justice, sexuality, regional and class
scattered throughout, little gifts to differences.”—Martha Minow, Harvard
the reader.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall University „ “A must-read for those
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“The energy, the sass, the inexhaust-

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yalebooks.com

April 6, 2023 7
to turn into a “waterworks”—in modern iness of this passage reminds us that more than once a year. Shaped to re- made at the breeding level, long before
parlance, a complex water feature, in a the early holiday spots, such as hot semble, say, chess pieces or peacocks the shears come into play.
desolate underground spot, with stalac- springs, were places that tolerated, and (two popular themes), they soon lent
tites and other strange natural forms. even encouraged, licentious behavior. an air of establishment, even antiq-
This was not unique in England.
Petrifying streams (in which an ob-
ject such as a hat, hung up for a while,
This is what the practical jokes such
as water-squirts, built into the design,
were about—an element of garden-
uity, to a garden. But they were apt
to divide horticultural opinion. Pope
clearly thought they were lower-middle
I t has been observed of the English
that their upper and lower classes in
some matters share a particular taste
becomes encrusted with lime) were making that has fallen into desuetude. class and suburban: that eludes the middle rank, the bour-
associated with witchcraft. Mother geoisie. Toffs and touts, for instance,
Shipton’s Cave, in North Yorkshire, has People of the common Level of both on occasion wear bowler hats
been operating as a tourist attraction
since 1630, officially the oldest such
attraction in the country. Bushell’s wa-
T odd Longstaffe-Gowan, who in his
admirable English Garden Eccen-
trics introduces us to Thomas Bushell,
Understanding are principally
delighted with the little Niceties
and Fantastical Operations of Art,
(toffs in the City, touts at the race-
course). The people in between do not.
This exclusion of the middle can be
terworks at Enstone in Oxfordshire among many others, clearly has some and constantly think that the fin- seen in garden literature, where for
may have been somewhat older—“to private criteria for what counts as ma- est is least Natural. A Citizen is no decades a war was waged against car-
enstone” may mean, apparently, “to terial for inclusion on the dotty side. sooner Proprietor of a couple of pet bedding, that is, the designing of
petrify”—while the extraordinary cave Pope, for instance, is not considered Yews, but he entertains Thoughts a garden in great decorative blocks
complex at Wookey Hole in Somerset dotty, despite his degree of obsession. of erecting them into Giants, like of color, using hundreds, maybe thou-
was inhabited in Roman times and be- I think this is right: Pope’s place is those of Guild-hall [famous figures sands of identical bulbs and annuals,
fore. (Its constant temperature of 52 not on the margin, where dottiness of Gog and Magog]. which were replaced each season.
degrees Fahrenheit makes it an ideal thrives, but at the center—wherever The disapproval of such bedding
place to mature cheddar cheese.) he hung his wig. If Pope’s heroes (fig- What is being attacked here is inap- schemes was almost total, but the taste
Enstone, then, is one of a group, a ures such as Lord Bathurst) are not propriate horticultural ambition. What hung on in certain local government
“desolate Cell of Natures rarities,” as always our heroes, Pope’s enemies (say, is not, by any means, being attacked parks by the seaside, where gardeners
Bushell described it, with human em- Lord Hervey) stand very little chance is the kind of horticultural ambition delighted in recreating, in flowers, dec-
bellishments such as of becoming our friends. Pope is always that led Lord Bathurst in 1720 to plant orative clocks or the arms of the mu-
so vehement. If he is on one side of the his colossal yew hedge at Cirencester, nicipality. Inevitably, in the end, this
artificial Thunder and Lightning, argument, it requires a special effort today at 45 feet the tallest in the world, prejudice against bedding came under
Rain, Hail-showers, Drums beat- to argue the opposite case. 15 feet thick at the base, 510 feet long, attack, but from the top. It amused Lord
ing, Organs playing, Birds sing- Consider the question of yew topi- and requiring two men twelve days for Rothschild, a few years ago, to recreate
ing, Waters murmuring, the Dead ary, an art that Pope mocks. Not every its annual trim. It was a good invest- the floral schemes of his ancestors at
arising, Lights moving, Rainbows tree or shrub will take kindly to a cut- ment (Pope’s epistle to Bathurst was on Waddesdon. It was the right house, and
reflecting with the beams of the ting regime. Yew is better than most. the subject “Of the Use of Riches”) and the right garden, for that overdue revolt.
Sun, and watry showers springing It has traditionally been cultivated in continues to give pleasure. The lon- But it ought also to be said that summer
from the same fountain. churchyards or enclosed gardens be- gevity of yews is impressive—some of bedding schemes have an unanswerable
cause its leaves are poisonous to cattle. the trees, which began dying of a mys- justification in resort towns where the
Among the beautifications was a sil- It was valued all over Europe as the terious ailment in England last sum- gardeners are working specifically for
ver ball kept aloft on a jet of water preferred wood for longbows, but after mer, are estimated to be a thousand the pleasure of summer visitors.
where “some-times fair ladies [who] the bow went out of use as a weapon, years old. Where they have been shaped Visitors to Worcestershire may come
cannot fence the crossing” are caught yew trees retained or acquired a dec- over the centuries, as in the gardens at across the gargantuan ruins of Wit-
“flashing and dashing their smooth, orative purpose. They are long-lived Levens Hall in Cumbria (one of the ley Court, a nineteenth-century house
soft and tender thighs and knees, by a and, once established, somewhat slow- most beautiful of English gardens and so enormous that, when it partially
sudden inclosing them in it.” The sex- growing—they don’t require trimming said to be the oldest topiary garden in burned down in 1937, nobody had the
the world), they sometimes, not sur- effrontery to rebuild it. The park and
prisingly, begin to go their own way its colossal fountain remain, rivals
in the matter of shape. They become to Versailles, with a stone group of
intractable and incomprehensible. Perseus and Andromeda estimated
Nobody, I think, turns up his nose as “probably the largest sculpture in
at a yew hedge, or at a pyramid bal- Europe” and one spout alone of which
ancing its base on a barely credible reached over a hundred feet “with the
sphere. Nobody turns his nose up at roar of an express train.”
abstraction in the garden, or the solid The Earls of Dudley had bought and
geometry of the clippers. What calls expanded this house (originally built in
forth protest is the act of representa- the seventeenth century), adding layer
tion—a bush in the form of a dolphin, upon stylistic layer, extending terraces
a shrub “tortured” into the likeness and colonnades, until the historic core
of a unicorn. But here is the popular of the building had probably been for-
gardening guru of the Victorian age, gotten. The gardens were designed by
Shirley Hibberd, defending the art of William Nesfield, the High Victorian
the shears: landscape architect, master of the
preposterous parterre. But one remote
It may be true, as I believe it is, that section of the vastness displayed its art
the natural form of a tree is the on a more modest, more human scale.
most beautiful possible for that This was “My Lady’s Garden,” named for
particular tree, but it may hap- Rachel, the wife of the Second Earl of
“I wanted furniture I From Dan H, pen that we do not always want Dudley, a woman determined to make
New York to the most beautiful form, but one herself useful, which she did as vice-
could grow old with... Seattle of our own designing, and expres- reine of Ireland: she founded Lady Dud-
Vitsœ provided just that.” sive of our ingenuity. ley’s Scheme for the Establishment of
District Nurses for the Poor in Ireland.
This puts its finger on a distinction In her spare time at Witley Court,
sometimes made between the natural when she was not, as it were, trailing
beauty of a plant growing “the way it’s her fingers in the waters of the deafen-
Until recently, Dan shared this If you’re planning your first system, supposed to” and the pleasure to be ing fountain, Lady Dudley would comb
apartment – right across the street moving it to a new home, or gained from revealing some surprising the surrounding countryside, looking
from Vitsœ’s New York shop – reconfiguring a decades-old system, capacity not normally seen, as when for topiary specimens in the places
with his dog, Sullivan. our team offers expert help and advice, apples are induced to follow the curve she preferred to find them—not in the
free of charge. of a crinkle crankle wall. The wall, with nursery catalogs but in the gardens of
They’ve since switched home – and its serpentine design, makes a feature the cottagers. It was another of these
DPBTUs – for a new life in Seattle, Founded 1959 of the apple’s rigorous training—the happy confluences of the taste of the
Washington, together with their Design Dieter Rams tight sequence of annual cuts, the poor and that of the very rich indeed.
treasured Vitsœ shelving system. Delivered worldwide
stretched wires, things ugly enough The cottagers appreciated Lady Dudley
Whether you’re just over the road, or New York in themselves, for some tastes. But and spoke of her warmly decades later.
on the other side of the globe, Vitsœ’s Los Angeles the freestanding fruit tree has its own And she no doubt appreciated them—to

.
planners are on hand to take care of vital regime: the grafting of the scion the extent that these things can ever be
you personally. vitsoe.com to the stock, the regular pruning of measured or described. The house was
new growth, the decisions made as to sold in 1920, and then came the great
the optimal size of the tree—decisions fire of 1937. Dereliction followed.

8 The New York Review

 “A tender…moving IN THE BELLY OF THE
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 Descriptions of a Struggle
Frances Wilson

The Diaries fire to it. The clarity of all the events

by Franz Kafka, makes them mysterious, just as a park
translated from the German fence gives the eye rest in contem-
by Ross Benjamin. plation of vast fields of grass and yet
Schocken, 670 pp., $45.00 inspires our inferior respect.” Dorothy
Wordsworth kept her modest journals
Kafka wrote bedtime stories in the of life in Grasmere in order to give her
sense that he wrote about the ter- brother William “pleasure,” and Kafka’s
rifying things that might happen in diaries were written, at least in part,
bed. No sooner has the father in “The to give pleasure to Brod. “New Year’s
Judgment” pulled the covers high over Eve,” Kafka wrote at the close of 1912:
his shoulders than he condemns his
son to death by drowning; the doctor I had planned to read to Max from
in “A Country Doctor” is tucked in by the diaries in the afternoon I had
the villagers beside a patient with a been looking forward to it and
worm-ridden wound in his side; the didn’t manage to do it. We didn’t
huge stoker in “The Stoker” suggests feel in harmony, I sensed in him
to Karl, lost in the bowels of the ship, that afternoon a calculating pet-
that he stretch himself out on the tiness and haste, he was almost
bunk because “you’ll have more room not my friend, but still dominated
there.” K. in The Trial is in bed when me to the extent that I saw myself
they come to arrest him, and Gregor through his eyes leafing uselessly
Samsa in “The Metamorphosis” is through the notebooks again and
transformed overnight into a “mon- again and found this leafing back
strous vermin,” first discovering his and forth, which showed the same
new shape when he wakes up in bed. pages flying by again and again,
As for the intimacies of married life, abhorrent.
Kafka’s horror is summed up in his
diaries by his mention of “the sight of
the nightshirts on my parents’ beds.”
He also wrote his stories at bedtime.
This is because he had difficulty sleep-
D espite his deathbed instruction
that the diaries, which he con-
sidered worthless, be burned along
ing—but he had difficulty sleeping, he with his other unpublished material
realized, because he wrote, which made (effectively his entire oeuvre), Brod
him susceptible to the kind of states preserved all Kafka’s manuscripts,
“that would tear me open and could taking them with him to Palestine in
make me capable of anything.” Writ- a suitcase when the Nazis occupied
ing involved a fight that Kafka rarely Prague in March 1939. Having first en-
won. In his diaries’ opening pages sured Kafka’s fame through the publi-
he describes writing as having to be cation of the novels and stories, Brod
“wrested from me, from this heap of Franz Kafka; illustration by Sophia Martineck then prepared the diaries for press,
straw that I have been for five months bowdlerizing them in the process. They
and whose fate, it seems, is to be set although he lived for almost all of his starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, appeared in English in two volumes
alight in the summer and to burn away forty years with his middle-class par- internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, in 1948–1949, the first translated by
before the spectator can blink.” Sitting ents (a further reason for confining insertions, marginalia, aphorisms, Joseph Kresh and the second by Mar-
at the desk in his bedroom at 10:00 PM himself to his bedroom) in central drafts of letters, drafts of stories, self- tin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt. In
on November 15, 1910, he reported on Prague. Despite his aversion to his reflections, reconstructions, character homage to his friend, Brod replaced
his attempts to write a second ver- bullying father and the dullness and sketches, and scenes from family life the comic self-portrait of the anxious
sion of “Description of a Struggle”: “I claustrophobia of family life, Kafka that, like this entry from December author leafing uselessly through his
won’t let myself get tired. I will jump couldn’t risk leaving home because of 10, 1911, are often very funny: notebooks with a more streamlined,
into my novella even if it should cut his health, which he believed, long be- serious, and altogether less vital figure.
up my face.” fore he became tubercular in his mid- When my mother returned from Kafka saw his work as broken, un-
Kafka wrote at bedtime because his thirties, to be fragile. (“With such a my sister the day before yester- finished, and fragmented. The diary
stories were “a kind of closing one’s body nothing can be achieved,” he day at 1 o’clock at night with the entry for November 5, 1911, describes
eyes,” and he needed to reach a semi- wrote in November 1911.) news of the boy’s birth, my father the “bitterness” he felt hearing one of
conscious state in order to draw from These were the Promethean con- moved through the apartment his stories read aloud by Brod:
the depths. He therefore observed ditions he chose for himself because in his nightshirt, opened all the
himself like a watchman (“Someone daily anguish, entrapment, and unre- doors, woke me the maid and my The disordered sentences . . . with
must watch. . . . Someone must be solvable obstacles were essential to sisters and announced the birth gaps through which one could stick
there”) even as he slept. “I am prac- the special nature of his work, whose in such a way as if the baby had both hands; one sentence sounds
tically sleeping next to myself,” he central comedy, or tragedy, is that not only been born but had also high, one sentence sounds low as
wrote on October 2, 1911, and he felt being bound to a rock is unbearable already led an honorable life and the case may be; one sentence rubs
he was writing into the darkness as but being unbound is even worse. His had its funeral. against the next like the tongue
though into a tunnel. “When I can’t writing therefore kept alive the ha- against a hollow or false tooth;
chase the stories through the nights,” treds of his father, his job, and his It was Max Brod, a fellow student one sentence comes marching
he recorded on January 4, 1915, “they goldfish-bowl existence. “I’m living at Prague’s Charles University, where up with so rough a beginning that
escape and get lost.” When his fiancée, as unreasonably as possible,” Kafka Kafka studied law between 1901 and the whole story falls into morose
Felice Bauer, suggests in a letter that wrote on August 15, 1912, which might 1906, who encouraged him to keep astonishment.
she keep Kafka company, he sends her serve as the diaries’ epigraph. the diaries. Kafka was shy and diffi-
a panicked reply: “One can never be dent and Brod, his closest friend, first In the diaries such rough, atonal, and
alone enough when one writes . . . there reader, and, later, literary executor, was potholed sentences were smoothed
can never be enough silence around
one when one writes . . . even night is
not night enough.”
D iary writing is itself, habitually,
a nocturnal activity, and Kafka’s
Tagebücher, as he called the twelve
fluid and confident; before his name
was attached in small print to Kafka’s
own, Brod was the celebrated writer
by Brod into a coherent narrative; he
cut passages, constructed paragraphs,
erased the lines Kafka had drawn be-
He had other reasons for writing quarto notebooks and two bundles of and Kafka the acolyte. The seriousness tween various entries, added dashes
at night, such as his day job at the loose pages in which he observed “this with which Kafka treated his task can at the ends of sentences Kafka had
Workers’ Accident Insurance Insti- creature on the ground which is me,” be seen by his close reading of other left without periods (suggesting, there-
tute, where he handled appeals and follow the logic of his night-watching. diaries, such as Goethe’s, which he par- fore, a suspended rather than a dis-
processed compensation claims. It Beginning in 1909 when he was ticularly admired. “Read Goethe’s di- carded thought), altered real names
was a job he loathed but was afraid twenty-five and ending in 1923, the aries a little,” he wrote on December to protect identities, censored sexu-
to leave because he doubted his ability year before his death from tubercu- 19, 1910. “The distance captures this ally explicit content as well as con-
to support himself by literature alone, losis, the diaries are made up of false life already calmed, these diaries set tent that might reflect unfavorably

10 The New York Review

 S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

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The Jews of Summer
Who Needs Gay Bars? Summer Camp and Jewish
Bar-Hopping through America’s Culture in Postwar America
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Daniel Kiel
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the struggle against wage questions of race, the Constitution,
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Dust on the Throne Daughter of History

The Search for Buddhism in Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood
Modern India Susan Rubin Suleiman
Douglas Ober S TA N F O R D S T U D I E S I N J EW I S H
S O U T H A S I A I N M OT I O N H I S TO RY A N D C U LT U R E

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centuries, and how the religion with the violent history of the
shaped modern Indian history. twentieth century.

In the Shadow of
the Wall The Shadow of
The Life and Death of Jerusalem’s the Empress
Maghrebi Quarter, 1187–1967 Fairy-Tale Opera and the End
Vincent Lemire, of the Habsburg Monarchy
Translated by Jane Kuntz Larry Wolff
In the Shadow of the Wall is the A beguiling exploration of
first global history of the Maghrebi the last Habsburg monarchs’
Quarter, from its founding by grip on Europe’s historical
Saladin, through its destruction and cultural imagination.
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April 6, 2023 11
 on Brod himself. He ironed out the continuation of “The Stoker” (the first lightly built houses that extended
Austrian, Jewish, Czech, and Prague- chapter of Kafka’s unfinished novel along the river.
German inflections (Kafka, like Brod, Der Verschollene, translated by Benja-
was a German-speaking Jew in a prin- min as The Missing Person as against Georg has finished a letter to his
MILITARY STUDIES cipally Czech-speaking Catholic city; Pasley’s superior, to my ear, The Man friend who now lives in St. Peters-
he was fluent in Czech and he spoke Who Disappeared, and renamed Amer- burg; he needed to tell him that he
The Development and Termination
Yiddish) in order to present his voice ika by Brod). has become engaged to a young woman
of War Between States: A Strategy
in High German. He organized the Der Verschollene was begun in late named Frieda Brandenfeld from a
Kwang-Jin Kim, 224 pgs. textual chaos of the notebooks into September 1912 in the sixth notebook well-to-do family. With the letter in
Islamic Asymmetric Warfare: chronological chapters titled “Diaries before Kafka ran out of space, con- his pocket, he checks on his elderly
The Principles of Muhammad 1910,” “Diaries 1911,” and so forth, add- tinuing it in the blank pages at the father in the next room. His father, sit-
Russ Rodgers, 404 pgs. ing subtitles that referred to subject end of the second notebook. The third ting in the dark like “a giant,” refuses
matter (“The Dancer Eduardova,” “My notebook then starts on October 26, to believe in the existence of Georg’s
Middle East Nuclear Proliferation education has done me great harm”). 1911. Brod, who deals with the muddle friend and accuses his son of other de-
Steven Spiegel, Jenn Kibbe, 392 pgs. He cut words that seemed to him non- by getting rid of the second notebook ceptions besides. Concerned that the
War in the Central Highlands sensical, such as Notstich (translated altogether and then stitching the Oc- old man is getting overwrought, Georg
of Vietnam 1968-1970 here as “emergency puncture”), which tober 26, 1911, entry immediately after carries him in his arms and places him
James T. Gillam, 364 pgs. Kafka used on February 15, 1914, in a the October 24 entry (at the end of in bed. Getting into bed transforms
sentence that would otherwise read: the first notebook), can be forgiven for us—“No sooner was he in the bed than
The Moro Wars in the Philippines “Met Krätzig in the tram ‘emergency cutting and pasting the text into a se- everything seemed good”—but it is
Ben Kadil, 300 pgs. puncture.’” quence that makes sense to the reader. now that the father utters his terrible
The Armenian Genocide: Brod rationalized the entries’ ellip-
A Personal Account tical and cryptic system of dating—
Henry Morgenthau, 276 pgs. Kafka often wrote the day and the
year in Arabic digits and the month
The Nuremberg Trial of Julius in Roman numerals (his “19 II 11” be-
Streicher: Incitement to Genocide comes Brod’s “19 February” in the
Margaret Eastwood, 292 pgs. section “Diaries 1911”)—and silently
The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: corrected the days and months that
The Complete Transcript (134 vols.) Kafka, in his haste and exhaustion, got
wrong. “The text of the diaries,” Brod
Did the Atomic Bomb Cause explained with breathtaking disinge-
the Surrender of Japan? nuity, “is as complete as it was possible
Brien Hallett, 96 pgs. to make it.” Not only did he harmonize
what Kafka called “the general noise
The Diary of an Army Baker,
that is in me,” he got rid of the tex-
Southwest Pacific, 1942–45
tual cacophony that reminds us that
John Wilson, 204 pgs. the diary is the work of a living hand.
Eyewitness Accounts of the World
War II Murmansk Run, 1941–1945
Mark Scott, editor, 244 pgs.
The Poems of Gen. George S. Patton
B rod’s editorial interference is ex-
asperating, and Ross Benjamin,
whose translation is the first complete
Carmine Prioli, editor, 212 pgs. and uncensored edition of the Dia- Sketches by Franz Kafka, circa 1905
British Strategic Bombing Policy ries to be made available to an English
Harvey Tress, 450 pgs. readership, is duly exasperated. Basing Benjamin’s edition, effectively a fac- curse: “I sentence you . . . to death by
this new version on the German critical simile of the notebooks themselves, drowning!” Propelled by an extraordi-
Military Aviators in World War I
edition published by S. Fischer Verlag offers us another order of experience nary force, Georg leaves the apartment
Rhonda L. Smith-Daugherty, 140 pgs. and edited by Hans-Gerd Koch (1990), entirely; it is less like peeking into a and crosses the road to the water where
The First World War in Africa with 1,403 abridged and adapted end- messy bedroom than finding yourself he swings himself over the railing and
Justin Corfield, 220 pgs. notes, Benjamin begins from scratch in one of Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, “let[s] himself fall.” “At that moment,”
the whole business of restoring to the a torture chamber without entrance or Kafka wrote in the story’s final sen-
Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean
notebooks their “provisionality, mate- exit, walls or ceilings, with flights of tence, “a positively endless stream of
General Karl Haushofer, 444 pgs. riality, and mutability,” including the stairs going everywhere and nowhere. traffic was going over the bridge.”
William Biss’ Civil War Diary, 1864 impossible-to-follow dates. His loose- The difference between the Benjamin Brod cut from his edition of the dia-
Earl Anderson, 400 pgs. limbed translation gets off on exactly and Brod editions is like night and day. ries this word-perfect first draft of the
Karl Marx’s Letters on Abraham the right note with the first entry, “The Judgment,” presumably because
which replaces Kresh’s “The onlook- it had been published already in the
Lincoln’s Strategic Civil War Goal
Louis Gesualdi, 116 pgs.
ers go rigid when the train goes past”
T he theme of Kafka’s diaries, be- June 1913 issue of the journal Arka-

ARDON BAR HAMA/ LI TE RARY ESTATE OF MAX BROD/NATIONAL LIBRA RY OF I S RAE L, J ERUSALE M
with “The spectators stiffen when the cause diaries have themes, is the dia, which he also edited. The omission
The Seminole-Negro Army Scouts train passes.” Kafka always had dev- fear of writing and, necessarily, of not (repeated with “The Stoker,” a story
Thomas A. Britten, 140 pgs. astating opening lines. writing. “Wrote nothing,” he records on Kafka began two days after “The Judg-
Benjamin’s aim is to give us the August 10, 1912. “Nothing, nothing,” he ment”) is like removing a nose from a
Napoleon’s Military Administration
writer in his “workshop,” blotting the repeats on August 11. On August 13 he face. The stories grew spontaneously
Everett Thomas Dague, 248 pgs. page, changing his mind, running at meets for the first time Felice Bauer, out of the notebooks, and the resto-
The English Colonization of Ireland a sentence a dozen times and still not to whom he will twice become engaged, ration of “The Judgment” allows us to
Scott Hendrix, 404 pgs. getting it right. He therefore maintains but the encounter is not recorded until be present at what Kafka described on
Basil I and The Military History the hasty punctuation, garbled syntax, August 20, when he describes her ap- February 11, 1913, as a “veritable birth
indecipherable ideas, and slips of the pearance: “Bony empty face, which covered with filth and slime.” We wit-
of the Byzantine Empire in the 9thc
pen, keeping the various spellings of wore its emptiness openly. . . . Almost ness not only the birth of his story, but
Norman Tobias, 420 pgs. New York (“Newyork,” “Newyorck,” broken nose. Blond, somewhat stiff the birth of Franz Kafka himself. The
Vlfberht, The Sword Master: 9–11c “Newyort”). Replacing Brod’s chrono- charmless hair, strong chin.” night of September 22–23, 1912, was
Anne Stalsberg, 72 pgs. logical reordering with sections titled On September 18 Kafka notes down Kafka’s own metamorphosis, when he
“First Notebook,” “Second Notebook,” what he hears in the office about how drew from the depths the full possi-
The Duties of a Cavalry Officer
and so forth, Benjamin restores Kaf- to eat a live frog and the best way to bilities of his writing.
Xenophon, 100 pgs. ka’s not inconsiderable textual confu- kill a cat (“One squeezes the neck be- The following day’s diary entry de-
sions together with the passages Brod tween a closed door and pulls on the scribes, in what is effectively another
NYRB Price: $39.95 chose to cut. “First Notebook,” for ex- tail”). On September 19 he gives a de- story, the labor pains (“Only I have the
Titles are Abbreviated ample, contains entries written be- tailed account of two boys who drink hand that can penetrate to the body
tween May 1910 and October 24, 1911, congealed goose blood in coffee. And and has the desire to do so”):
Phone 1-716-754-2266 while “Second Notebook” begins with then, during the night of September
a draft of “Unhappiness” (published 22–23, he writes “The Judgment”: This story “The Judgment” I wrote
Do you have letters, diaries, in Kafka’s first collection of stories, at one stretch [in einem zug—liter-
photos or stories to publish? Betrachtung, translated by Benjamin It was on a Sunday morning at ally: “on one train”] on the night of
We will do it for you for free. as Contemplation and by Malcolm Pas- the height of spring. Georg Ben- the 22 to 23 from 10 o’clock in the
ley as Meditation), followed by entries demann, a young businessman, evening until 6 o’clock in the morn-
[email protected] written between November 6, 1910, and was sitting in his private room on ing. My legs had grown so stiff from
March 1911, after which there is the the second floor of one of the low sitting that I could hardly pull them

12 The New York Review

 Photo: ©Filipe DeAndrade

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April 6, 2023 13
 out from under the desk. The ter- gloom was not Kafka’s only mood. His what sort of calm it would be, on To show “humility” on arrival, Kafka
rible strain and joy, how the story “good humour,” says Brod, can be seen what it would be based, and I could looks for a “ridiculous place” to put
unfolded itself before me how I in the travel journals (included in Ben- say only that it would merely be a his hat, which he finds on “a small
moved forward in an expanse of jamin’s edition) and the letters to Fe- calm for its own sake, an incom- wooden stand for lacing boots.” He
water. Several times last night I lice. Diaries, Brod reminds us, can give prehensible mercy, nothing else. then, “facing the window,” “press[es]
bore my weight on my back. How a “false impression” because we tend forward” with a long and convoluted
everything can be risked, how for to record what is “oppressive or irritat- The self here is studiedly performa- “prepared speech” that he frames as a
all, for the strangest ideas a great ing”; they therefore “resemble a kind tive. Kafka was fascinated by theater; question. The gist of it is that he feels
fire is prepared, in which they die of defective barometric curve” that the second notebook is taken up with attracted to theosophy but at the same
away and rise again. How it turned registers the lows but not the highs. his visits to a Yiddish theater troupe time afraid of it:
blue outside the window. . . . The ap- The blackest band of the baromet- from Lemberg, in Prague between Sep-
pearance of the untouched bed, as ric spectrum has never been my ex- tember 1911 and January 1912, with I’m afraid, namely, that it will
if it had just been carried in. . . . Only perience of Kafka’s diaries, which I whom he became friends. The entry bring about a new confusion, which
in this way can writing be done, only have always found elevating, energiz- describing the formal dissolution of would be very bad for me since my
with such cohesion, with such com- ing, and utterly joyful, with Benjamin’s his first engagement to Felice on July present unhappiness itself con-
plete opening of the body and the wild edition increasing my pleasure 23, 1914, is set out as stage directions: sists of nothing but confusion.
soul. Morning in bed . . . thoughts tenfold because he allows us to en- This confusion lies in the follow-
of Freud naturally. . . counter them in their complete he- The tribunal in the hotel. The ride ing: My happiness, my abilities and
roic excess. Kafka’s diaries—in which in the carriage. F.’s face. She runs any possibility of being in some
His thoughts of Freud continued on it is often unclear whether what we her hands through her hair, wipes way useful have always resided in
February 11, 1913, when Kafka, correct- are reading is a factual account or her nose with her hand, yawns. the literary realm.
ing “The Judgment” for publication, fictitious reverie—contain too much, Suddenly gathers herself together
probed his unconscious as though an- they go too far, they break the sound and says well-thought-through, What follows is a tangled account
alyzing a dream: barrier of self-reflection and allow a long-saved-up, hostile things. of the dreariness of his day job and
glimpse of what writing can be. Like the requirements of his night job, to-
The friend is the connection be- The Thousand and One Nights, they Entries such as “Sunday, 19 June gether with the well-rehearsed reasons
tween father and son, he is their are a potentially infinite book, and it [19]10 slept woke up, slept, woke up, why he can’t leave the insurance office
greatest commonality. Sitting only ends because Kafka reaches, in miserable life” are the sort to be and devote himself to writing. Kafka’s
alone by his window Georg rum- 1924, the zenith of his life. found in Sue Townsend’s The Secret question, tagged onto the end of the
mages voluptuously in this com- His diaries make me laugh, and I be- Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾—a monologue, is whether Steiner thinks
monality, believes he has his father lieve I am laughing with him. His style novel that, in its fond parody of an it wise to add theosophy as a third
in himself and regards everything reminds me of something Anthony Pow- angst-ridden teenager with intellec- problem to “these two never-to-be-
as peaceful but for a fleeting sad ell once said: “Any piece of human be- tual pretensions, might have been in- balanced endeavors. . . . Will I, already
reflectiveness. The development haviour will seem absurd if described spired by Kafka, who identified with at present such an unhappy person be
of the story now shows how from precisely enough.” Kafka’s “inescapable moles. His final story, “The Burrow,” able to bring the 3 to a conclusion?” All
the commonality, the friend, the duty of self-observation,” as he called written six months before his death, the while, not looking at the anxious
father rises forth and sets himself it in one of his final entries (November is the monologue of a mole-like crea- young man, Steiner works his hand-
up in opposition to Georg. 7, 1921), frequently seems absurd. Take ture with excessive reasoning powers kerchief “deep into his nose, one fin-
the entry for December 11, 1913: (“You do not know me if you think I am ger at each nostril.” Kafka’s attention
afraid, or that I built my burrow sim- to noses is a rich vein in his comedy.

A pologizing in the postscript to

his own edition for the darkness
of the diaries, Brod reassures us that
When I imagined today that I
would definitely be calm during
the presentation, I asked myself
ply out of fear”). Kafka’s animal alter
egos are always wittily done. “Was to-
gether with Blei, his wife & his child,
Nothing more is said in the diary
about either Steiner or theosophy, but
a similar encounter can be found in
at times heard myself in myself,” he “A Report to an Academy: Two Frag-
notes on May 18–19, 1910, “roughly like ments,” a story Kafka drafted in April
“He should have had three Pulitzer prizes…. the whimpering of a young cat.” “I’m 1917. Having seen the world-famous
One reads him with wonder and admiration.”—Guy Davenport. really like a lost sheep in the night,” he Rotpeter onstage, the narrator meets
writes on November 19, 1913, “or like a him in his hotel room the next day:
sheep that is running after this sheep.” “When I sit opposite you like this, Rot-
peter, listening to you talk, drinking
your health, I really and truly forget—

Oscar Mandel
D escribing himself both as oth-
ers see him (“leafing uselessly
through the notebooks again and
whether you take it as a compliment
or not, it’s the truth—that you are a
chimpanzee.”
again”) and also as his own double, I am not alone in thinking Kafka
OTHERWISE POEMS Kafka created self-perspectives that, a comic genius. He was “known,” he
1. Places; 2.Busy Eros; 3. Names; 4. Poems with animals; 5. Tenebrae; like his cartoon-style doodles, are elon- told Felice, “as a great laugher.” He
6. Torpors and diminutions; 7. The Poet; 8.Poems in French. gated, foreshortened, and frequently worked himself “into a frenzy” when
surreal—these are now, for the first he read “The Metamorphosis” to Brod
time, collected in their entirety in the and his circle, an occasion when every-
magnificent Franz Kafka: The Draw- one let themselves go “and laughed a
ings, edited by Andreas Kilcher.* “Yes- lot.” Brod describes, in his Biography
terday evening on Mariengasse I held of Franz Kafka, being part of a group
out both my hands to both my sisters- that “laughed quite immoderately”
in-law at the same time with an adroit- when Kafka read aloud the first two
Open Letter to God
ness as if they were two right hands chapters of The Trial; Kafka himself
Sir, I’ve been looking up statistics. and I a double person.” Then there are was laughing so much that he had to
Each 8 seconds a baby’s born, each 20 the Jewish jokes: “What do I have in stop reading altogether.
1 wretch gets removed. Tick tock it goes. common with Jews? I have scarcely In a 1998 speech called “Some Re-
I find, considering this exercise anything in common with myself.” It marks on Kafka’s Funniness from
In conclusionless logistics, is easy here to imagine the laughter of Which Probably Not Enough Has Been
The come-and-go is useless. For, you see, Kafka’s friends. Equally comic are the Removed,” David Foster Wallace said
Life nicely wins, but death never loses. arguments for and against marriage to that he gave up teaching Kafka because
Since we (next point) are quite as good Felice. Number one on the list, “Inabil- his students didn’t get the central joke,
As Babylon or Komwatmay, stop birth, stop death, ity to endure life alone”—Kafka’s only “that the horrific struggle to establish
Stick with us: it’s good sense, it’s even charity. argument in favor of the marriage—is a human self results in a self whose
I add, being old, I think each day better followed in the next six entries by his humanity is inseparable from that
Of your creation, and shall be glad fear of never being alone again. horrific struggle.” But even if we do
To settle for good on your ground floor. His account, in late March 1911, of understand the joke, laughing at Kaf-
an audience with Rudolf Steiner in his ka’s diaries has, until now, felt like a
Thank you, Sir, for your attention to this letter. hotel room after hearing him lecture misreading because Brod projected his
on the occult, is written as a one-man own seriousness onto his friend. Ross
show. Kafka consults the theosophist Benjamin’s carnivalesque translation
as though, like Sigmund Freud or Sher- licenses our laughter by confirming,

.
lock Holmes, he held the key to unlock- as Kafka put it in The Trial, that “the
Amazon, et al., 137 pages, $16. Of equal interest: Otherwise Fables (2014) and ing an otherwise unsolvable problem. right perception of any matter and a
Last Pages (stories, drama, poems, essays, 2019). misunderstanding of the same matter
*Yale University Press, 2022. do not wholly exclude each other.”

14 The New York Review

April 6, 2023 15
 Erdoğan in the Ruins
Christopher de Bellaigue

Erdoğan’s War: during the civil war has also come back
A Strongman’s Struggle to haunt him. Since the earthquake
at Home and in Syria anti-Syrian feeling, strong already,
by Gönül Tol. has intensified, with nationalists ac-
Oxford University Press, cusing refugees of hogging aid and
333 pp., $37.50 social media awash with videos that
show Syrians being beaten and hu-
The earthquake that struck southern miliated after they were purportedly
Turkey and northern Syria on Febru- caught looting.
ary 6 killed around 40,000 people in In 2019 the AKP lost the crucial may-
Turkey alone, destroyed or severely oralties of Istanbul and Ankara. In Is-
damaged 200,000 buildings, and left tanbul the election was annulled, and
around 1.5 million people homeless. in the rerun Ekrem İmamoğlu, the can-
Miners, construction workers, and didate of the opposition Republican
other volunteers converged on the People’s Party (CHP ), won by a much
stricken area to pull survivors from wider margin than in the first one.
the rubble, while across the country On March 6, an alliance of six opposi-
people lined up to donate food and tion parties chose Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu,
clothes. These acts of solidarity did the CHP ’s veteran leader, to be their
not mask the country’s divisions for unified candidate in the presidential
long, however. The government’s slug- poll, and the country’s main Kurdish
gish distribution of emergency aid, its party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party,
venomous response to criticism of the which isn’t in the alliance, indicated
relief effort, and the growing realiza- that it may throw its support behind
tion that the entombment of people Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at right, viewing earthquake damage in his candidacy.
in their homes was the consequence Kahramanmaraş, southern Turkey, February 8, 2023 Erdoğan is arguably the world’s
of substandard building practices and most successful electoral politician.
official corruption opened still-deeper government daily newspaper Sabah on folding the offices of prime minister And he never lets a crisis go to waste.
wounds of anger and shame. (not that the qualification is really and president into one. The govern- On February 9 the Turkish parliament,
The earthquake is the worst disas- necessary—it’s impossible for a big ment marketed the amnesty with a which is dominated by the AKP and
ter in the century-long history of the daily to survive without being pro- slick TV ad that has received more crit- its far-right allies, imposed a state
Turkish Republic, and its effects will government) wrote: icism since the earthquake than it did of emergency in the earthquake zone,
be felt for generations. The only good at the time. In it a middle-aged woman augmenting the president’s already
that might emerge from it, I was told From coup plotters who have fled confesses a little bashfully that she has considerable latitude to govern by de-
by my Turkish friends, will be if vot- abroad to “opposition” politicians built “a couple of units” on the sly and cree. Pliant judges have already been
ers recognize the failure of President and journalists at home, all are lives in fear that the authorities will stacking the odds in his favor, as hap-
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Jus- engaged in the same dirty work. demolish them. Not to worry, replies a pened last December when İmamoğlu
tice and Development Party (AKP ) to Their only goal is to create paral- man with a white beard and the kind of was sentenced to two and a half years
prepare for and respond to the earth- ysis and chaos and lay the ground voice you can trust, “the government is in jail and banned from politics for
quake as the crowning abomination for civil war. here to solve people’s problems,” and calling election officials “idiots.” He
of their long misrule and eject them he urges her and others to grasp the remains in office pending appeal.
from office in elections in May. Only state’s “hand of tenderness.” An elderly Whether it’s as a democrat, an Is-
then will Turkey be able to rebuild,
not just in the physical sense but
in the way someone rebuilds men-
A fter the 1999 earthquake Turkey
imposed stringent construction
standards but did not have the will
man shuffles forward and asks if the
house he has built in his garden for
his hard-up son and daughter-in-law
lamist, or most recently a nationalist,
Erdoğan’s instinct is for the political
center, where the most votes lie. Hav-
tal and emotional capacities after a to enforce them. Reducing the num- will also benefit from the peace. “Don’t ing made his name in the 1990s as an
long and increasingly unendurable ber of stirrups—the steel loops that worry, dear uncle,” comes the beaming efficient young mayor of Istanbul, he
incarceration. stop load-bearing columns from buck- response, “it suffices for you to reg- won power nationally in 2003 by har-
In the days after the earthquake ling—makes buildings cheaper and ister the house online!” Erdoğan won nessing a widespread desire for a more
Erdoğan toured the affected area, quicker to build. Exceeding the per- election to the superpresidency with pious political culture after decades of
giving speeches in which he glided mitted number of floors seems like a 53 percent of the vote, 22 percentage dominance by an out-of-touch secular
over “delays” in the provision of relief, harmless way to make a few extra lira. points more than his nearest rival. elite. He spent his early years as prime
promised to complete reconstruction In the cozy world of owners, builders, The following year, in a visit to Kah- minister making Turkey’s authoritarian
and recovery “within one year,” and and inspectors, money changes hands ramanmaraş, Erdoğan told a cheer- political system more democratic and
warned the media to give no credence and deals are sealed over a good lunch. ing crowd that the building amnesty thus more reflective of the religiously
to “provocateurs,” by which he meant (In all but the town of Erzin, it seems, program had “solved the problems” observant Sunni majority. He stopped
the parliamentary opposition and the which despite lying near the epicen- of 144,000 of the city’s residents—a the police from torturing dissidents
few independent Turkish journalists ter of the quake suffered not a single piece of good fortune for which many and started a peace process with the
who haven’t been imprisoned, driven loss of life, in part because its mayor paid with their lives in February. In Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK ), which
abroad, or bullied into silence. When is a stickler for construction rules that an interview with the BBC after the had taken up arms against the Turkish
Turkey suffered its last very costly were ignored elsewhere.) earthquake, Pelin Pınar Giritlioğlu, a state. His economic reforms ushered
earthquake, in 1999, the death toll Presiding over local malfeasance is leading figure in the country’s engi- in a period of growth and prosperity—
was 17,000 and the government then a national government that sees ille- neers and urban planners union, es- what emerging-market fund managers
in power was excoriated for its lack gal construction not as an evil to be timated that up to 75,000 buildings around the world called the “Turkish
of preparedness. Almost a quarter suppressed but an udder to be milked. in the affected area had received miracle.”
of a century later, the ragged rem- Since it came to power in 2002, it has construction amnesties. If Erdoğan As a Muslim-majority NATO member
nants of Turkey’s once-cacophonous introduced six amnesties under which prioritizes speed over quality in the espousing democracy and pluralism in
civil society are being pilloried for substandard buildings are made legal reconstruction, as he seems resolved the aftermath of September 11, Tur-
pointing out shortcomings on an even in exchange for a fine. Murat Yetkin, an to do, there is every chance that the key seemed like a model for avoiding
bigger scale. opposition journalist, summarized this next generation of Turkish buildings a “clash of civilizations”; there was, as
One of the Erdoğan government’s process on his YouTube channel: “You will be no more earthquake resistant the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke
first actions after the February 6 earth- take money, you declare the building than the last. put it, “no country in the world of more
TU RKI SH PRE S IDE NCY/AP I MAG ES

quake was to create an app enabling safe. . . . My friends, you might be able strategic importance.” In 2005 the
people to report “disinformation.” On to cheat the laws of politics, but not European Union rewarded Erdoğan’s
February 15 the interior minister is-
sued a veiled threat of legal action
against Haluk Levent, an aging rock
the laws of nature!”
The most recent “construction
peace,” in the government’s euphe-
E rdoğan looks threatened in the
coming election, due to be held
on May 14. Inflation is running at 57
efforts by opening negotiations for
Turkish membership.
But before long it became clear that
star whose public health and poverty mism, came into effect in May 2018, percent, in large part thanks to his re- EU leaders like France’s Nicolas Sar-
alleviation NGO , Ahbap, has received a few weeks before Turks went to the fusal, born of an ideological aversion kozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel had
large sums from people who don’t trust polls to elect their first executive or to usury, to raise interest rates. His no intention of letting a big Muslim
the government’s emergency relief or- “super” president endowed with addi- decision to take in 3.6 million Syrian country into their club. The Kurds also
ganization. A columnist at the big pro- tional powers following a referendum refugees who fled across the border snubbed Erdoğan, demanding political

16 The New York Review

 Books to look
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religious life and its promised happiness.

cambridge.org/highlights

April 6, 2023 17
autonomy beyond the cultural rights In Erdoğan’s War, Gönül Tol writes ing a government-produced Kurdish the Kurds in Syria, the Turks not only
they were offered, while liberals and that under “Erdoğan’s electoral au- translation of the Quran while cam- allowed ISIS what Tol calls “freedom
the Alevis, members of a quasi-Shia thoritarianism” elections are emotion- paigning in the Kurdish areas, and of action in border towns,” but also
minority numbering perhaps 15 million ally taut “events” in which voters renew he taunted the Kurdish nationalists let them use Turkey as a conduit for
people, were repelled by his increas- their allegiance to the “embodiment for their indifference to religion. In revenue they received from oil sales
ingly intolerant, pro-Sunni rhetoric. of the nation.” Tol’s telling, his admiring references in their territory.
Gradually the basis of Erdoğan’s pol- Tol, a respected Washing ton, to his longing to pray at the Umayyad
itics changed from conciliation to D.C.–based analyst of Turkish affairs, Mosque in Damascus, a hugely signif-
grievance. Into a growing circle of foes
went his former ally Fethullah Gülen,
a preacher who immigrated to Penn-
happened to be in Turkey with her sis-
ter when the earthquake struck. As she
recounted in a recent podcast, they
icant Sunni place of worship, and to
Salahuddin Ayyubi, the Sunni Kurdish
leader known to his Crusader foes as
B y 2015 Erdoğan’s Syria policy
was a mess, and in elections that
June the AKP lost its parliamentary
sylvania in 1999 and whose followers awoke that morning to learn from Saladin, “highlighted Erdoğan’s Sunni majority. Over the next few months
wielded much power in the police, ju- Tol’s brother-in-law that his family vision for both Turkey and post-Assad a wave of bombings—which the gov-
diciary, and education system; Syr- had been buried under the rubble in Syria.” He also counted on support ernment blamed variously on ISIS , the
ian president Bashar al-Assad, whose Antakya. They rushed to the city, but from Turkey’s Kurds for his plans for PKK , and, implausibly, a coalition of
“godless” regime Erdoğan vowed to not until many lives had ebbed away, a superpresidency. “Are we ready to the PKK , ISIS , and Syrian government
topple at the outset of the Syrian civil including those of Tol’s relatives, did realize the goals of new Turkey,” he agents—killed hundreds of people
war; the “interest rate lobby” (finan- rescue workers show up, and even then asked a Kurdish crowd in 2014, across the country and prompted ac-
ciers, particularly Jews); and much of cusations that Erdoğan had unleashed
the perfidious West. only to tell us that they could not adopt a new constitution, switch to the darkest forces of the deep state to
No matter how fervently his oppo- help us because they had been a presidential system and resolve create chaos. By the time new elec-
nents hope that a weakened Erdoğan given instructions to focus their the Kurdish issue? Give us 400 tions were held that November, Er-
has been weakened further, he’s come rescue efforts somewhere else. seats [more than the two thirds doğan had shelved his Kurdish Quran
back from positions of acute vulnera- There were no agencies in the of parliament he needed in order and wrapped himself in the Turkish
bility in the past. In December 2013, first forty-eight hours, there was to change the constitution] and star and crescent. He campaigned
when he was prime minister, more no one, there was no civil soci- let us solve this peacefully. before flag-draped coffins of soldiers
than fifty of his most powerful allies, ety, the military hadn’t been dis- who had been killed in clashes with
including bankers and construction patched, so people were basically Erdoğan’s government urged the the PKK , and his majority was duly
magnates, were hauled in for ques- left alone. Obama administration to commit restored. Two years later, when Er-
tioning on corruption charges by to regime change in Syria, and Tur- doğan narrowly won the referendum
Gülenist prosecutors. As the net One rescuer Tol encountered had spe- key became the organizational hub on setting up a superpresidency, he did
tightened around Erdoğan and his cific instructions to find a home be- of the Syrian opposition. His foreign so with the support not of the Kurds
family home in Istanbul was placed longing to relatives of a member of minister at the time, an Ottoman re- but of a far-right party of extreme
under surveillance, he phoned his son parliament. vivalist named Ahmet Davutoğlu, as- nationalists—Turkey’s new political
Bilal several times from the capital, Tol’s fascinating book tells the story sured him that Assad would fall in a center.
Ankara. Their conversations were of Erdoğan’s career by following his matter of weeks and that “we will re- With the divergence of Turkish and
taped by the Gülenists and uploaded policy toward Syria, which, to anyone unite with our brothers” and “render US interests in Syria, a strategic part-
to YouTube. interested in Turkish politics, has the the borders meaningless.” But Davu- nership that had defined Turkish for-
Millions of Turks heard Erdoğan tell effect of shining a new light on famil- toğlu was wrong. Assad didn’t fall and eign policy since the Korean War came
his son in the gravelly tones of the all- iar events. Erdoğan once referred to the Kurds had another kind of reuni- to an end. Erdoğan has since launched
powerful paterfamilias to get rid of the Syria as a “domestic matter.” The coun- fication in mind. A Syrian offshoot of several military offensives against the
at least €50 million in cash that was in tries’ long land border and unresolved the PKK took advantage of the fight- Syrian Kurds, with the acquiescence
the family safe. They heard him warn territorial disputes, their overlapping of his new ally, Russia. His aim is no
Bilal to be careful with his words, for Kurdish minorities, and the five cen- longer Assad’s overthrow. It is to end
“we are being monitored.” Kılıçdaroğlu turies that Syria spent as an Ottoman the Kurds’ experiments with auton-
dubbed Erdoğan the country’s “thief- province have left many modern Turks omy and to carve out a “safe zone” into
in-chief.” Much of the media, less con- with a sense of noblesse oblige. which Turkey’s Syrian refugees can be
strained than it is now, declared the The modern Republic of Syria is repatriated. In the words of one Syr-
prime minister’s career over. led by its Alawite minority, hetero- ian rebel commander, embittered by
But Erdoğan did not succumb. He dox Shias who are distantly related Erdoğan’s abandonment of the cause,
struck back, purging the judiciary of to Turkey’s Alevis and have a history “dirty, secret deals between Ankara
Gülenists and turning the following of suppressing homegrown Sunni Is- and Damascus gave Erdoğan the Kurds
year’s municipal elections into a ref- lamists. Erdoğan is a Sunni Islamist. but sacrificed the revolution.”
erendum on his rule, which the AKP But at the beginning of his rule his “Despite the zigzags in his Syria
won easily. Two years later he used policy of cultivating smooth relations policy,” Tol writes, “Erdoğan has al-
an attempted coup by Gülenist army with Turkey’s neighbors engendered ways had one primary goal in the war-
officers as a pretext to bring millions strong commercial and cultural ties torn country: to consolidate his rule.”
of his supporters into the streets and between the two countries. Erdoğan Looked at from this angle, Erdoğan’s
to purge hundreds of thousands of op- referred to Assad as his “brother,” and War, for all its rich detail, is not really
ponents—not all of them Gülenists the two leaders vacationed together ing to seize tracts of northern Syria about Syria and still less about the
by any means—from the army, the with their wives. and set up self-governing Kurdish countless Syrians whose lives were
bureaucracy, the media, and the Fraternal feeling lasted only until cantons that attracted many of their ended, immiserated, or impoverished
universities. the Arab Spring, however. For empire Turkish kin. Erdoğan’s offer to Tur- as he tried and failed to realize his
nostalgists like Erdoğan, the toppling key’s Kurds of Sunni solidarity paled ambitions there. It’s about the cor-
of authoritarian dictators in Egypt and in comparison with the pleasures of rupting effect of power.

T he longer authoritarians stay in

power, the more necessary it be-
comes to eject them from office and
Tunisia was an irresistible invitation
to spread a “Turkish model” of devel-
opment and Sunni piety across the for-
liberation being enjoyed across the
border, and he feared that the enclaves
would grow into a Kurdistan extending
“In 2008,” an Economist report on
the country said recently, “Turkey
aligned itself with 88% of the EU’s
the harder it becomes to do so. Er- mer Ottoman world; and in March 2011, across both countries and dominated foreign-policy decisions and declara-
doğan isn’t simply the head of a gov- when the Syrian revolt began, it looked by the PKK . tions. By 2016 that share had fallen by
ernment. He has built a regime in his as though Assad would fall next. Erdoğan also underestimated half to 44%. Last year it was only 7%.”
image in which no major institution is Obama’s distaste for regime change. Countries can be lost. Europe’s leaders
free of his influence. In the perceptive In 2014 the US president decided his share the blame in this case: having
words of the country’s most prominent
Kurdish politician, Selahattin Demir-
taş, tweeting from his prison cell (this
F or Erdoğan, foreign policy is at
least partly about his domestic
position, and Tol is at her most illumi-
priority wasn’t overthrowing Assad
but countering the emerging threat
of ISIS , and to this end he airdropped
promised Turkey a future in the EU,
they took that future away. The Turk-
ish precedent should be in the minds
is where being Kurdish and perceptive nating when she describes Erdoğan’s ammunition to Kurds who were fight- of today’s EU and NATO leaders as
gets you), Erdoğan’s twenty-one years conception of Sunni solidarity as a ing the group. “Our NATO ally is arm- they make promises to another aspi-
of political dominance have means of reformulating national iden- ing terrorists,” Erdoğan fumed, but rant, Ukraine. As for the Turks, instead
tity along sectarian lines, binding the when Tol related his words to a US of having a retired prime minister
gone by under such heavy pres- (mostly Sunni) Kurds to himself and official who had been trying to per- whom history would have judged to
sures that many people think that creating an internal enemy in the form suade Turkey to stop helping jihadi be one of the ablest and most effec-
Erdoğan is the state. They [by of the Alevis. Kılıçdaroğlu is an Alevi; groups, the official replied, “He now tive politicians of his generation, they

.
which Demirtaş means the pres- at the peak of the fighting, Erdoğan knows how we feel.” Earlier that year are saddled with a forever president
ident’s propaganda machine] have taunted him that Syrian freedom fight- Turkish intelligence had been caught whose only trick is to present himself
succeeded in making people think ers were getting rid of “their CHP .” by its own gendarmes sending arms as the solution to crises of his own
that as soon as Erdoğan goes the As part of his overture to Turkey’s across the border to ISIS -controlled making.
state will collapse. Kurds, Erdoğan took to brandish- parts of Syria. In return for fighting —March 8, 2023

18 The New York Review

 MAKING SENSE OF AMERICAN
DRUG POLICY & CULTURE

A highly entertaining and user- “A little-known side battle in

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www.ucpress.edu.edu

April 6, 2023 19
 The Architect of Subtraction
Martin Filler

who were drawn there by commercial

interests and were unusually recep-
tive to advanced directions in art. They
made up a significant proportion of
his clientele throughout his career, a
tendency often repeated in the history
of Modernism.
Although the Viennese upper classes
remained inherently conservative, the
city seethed with artistic ferment that
arose in opposition to the mossbacked
academicism of its state-sponsored
culture. In 1897 a fractious coalition
of painters, sculptors, and architects
resigned from the establishment Asso-
ciation of Austrian Artists and formed
the Vienna Secession, through which
they sought to advance an alternative
aesthetic that reflected their modern
attitudes. Six years later several Se-
cession members founded a decorative
arts affiliate, the Wiener Werkstätte
(Viennese Workshop), to put their re-
formist theories into action by man-
ufacturing and selling objects that
embodied their new philosophy.

T he Secession’s mercantile offshoot

furthered its conviction that or-
nament must be fully integrated into
a design and strictly controlled. This
paralleled Loos’s radical experiments
in paring down architecture to its
most basic elements and purging it
of what he considered to be socially

SCHLOSS CHARLOTTENBURG, BERLIN/ALAMY/© 2023 FONDAT ION OSKAR KOKOSCHKA/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/PROLITTERIS, ZÜRICH
harmful propensities. Yet he decried
the Wiener Werkstätte’s output as in-
sufficiently different from the routine
Adolf Loos; portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, 1909 consumer goods it purported to im-
prove upon, and mockingly referred
to the group as das Wiener Weh (the
body—and the rise of civilization: “I nament and Crime” consolidated his Viennese woe).
1. have made the following discovery and renown as a fearless gadfly. He wanted a clean sweep—the
Several of modern design’s most fa- given it to the world: the evolution of Loos astutely established his pro- complete rejection of needless sur-
miliar shibboleths were not first stated culture comes to the same thing as the fessional practice in Vienna, capital face additions to architecture and fur-
as they are now commonly quoted. For removal of ornament from functional of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian nishings. This has become his most
example, Louis Sullivan’s supposed objects.” This was a radical proposition Empire, which had been cobbled to- enduring legacy as well as the most
pronouncement “Form follows func- at a time when design of all sorts, from gether during the nineteenth century controversial principle of Modernism:
tion” appears in his prophetic essay high to low and from historicizing to from several Central European poli- the moral superiority of refusal. Loos’s
“The Tall Office Building Artistically avant-garde, was rife with applied dec- ties, including his native Moravia, and stance was widely cited in the 1970s
Considered” (1896) as “Form ever fol- oration. Coming after Loos’s laser-like was ruled from the revolution of 1848 and 1980s during the brief ascendancy
lows function,” a small but important critiques of everything from footwear to World War I by the long-lived and of Postmodernism, which called for
distinction. Many Anglophones trans- to glassware to underwear—the texts reactionary emperor Franz Joseph I. a turn away from High Modernism’s
late Le Corbusier’s definition of the of which are included with the essay At the empire’s epicenter, Loos availed enforced austerity and a return to
house—une machine à habiter, first in a recent Penguin paperback—“Or- himself of numerous Jewish patrons pattern and ornament in the applied
set forth in his book Vers une architec- arts. Although Postmodernism helped
ture (1923)—as “a machine for living,” to free architecture and design from
whereas it properly means “a machine Books Discussed in Adolf Loos: Works and Projects the prohibition against surface em-
for dwelling in.” And despite Ludwig This Article by Ralf Bock, with photographs bellishment that had prevailed since
Mies van der Rohe’s being credited by Philippe Ruault. the 1930s—in no small part because
with the aphorism Weniger ist mehr Milan: Skira, 302 pp., $90.00 of the Museum of Modern Art’s exclu-
(Less is more), it was actually formu- Ornament and Crime: sionary preference for the reductive
lated by the eighteenth-century Ger- Thoughts on Design The Private Adolf Loos International Style (and because it was
man poet Christoph Martin Wieland and Materials by Claire Beck Loos, translated much cheaper to build without labor-
as Minder ist oft mehr (Less is often by Adolf Loos, translated from the German by Constance C. intensive decorative flourishes)—the
more). Similarly, Ornament ist Ver- from the German Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, residue of M oMA ’s narrow-mindedness
brechen (Ornament is crime) is the by Shaun Whiteside. and edited by Carrie Paterson. and Loos’s oft-misquoted catchphrase
most famous thing never said by Penguin, 343 pp., £9.99 (paper) DoppelHouse, were underscored by a recent coffee-
Adolf Loos (rhymes with “gross”), the 239 pp., $14.95 (paper) table book titled Ornament Is Crime:
early-twentieth-century Austro-Czech Essays on Adolf Loos Modernist Architecture (2017).
Modernist architect, interior designer, by Christopher Long. Adolf Loos: The Last Houses Contemporary critics have discerned
social critic, cultural agitator, and con- Prague: KANT , by Christopher Long. strong indications of misogyny and
victed pedophile. 165 pp., €19.00 (paper) Prague: KANT , racism in some of Loos’s positions.
Today Loos’s incendiary essay “Or- 159 pp., €55.00 (paper) Although his attitudes toward women
nament and Crime,” which he first pre- The Looshaus were not much different from those
sented as a lecture in Vienna in 1910, by Christopher Long. Adolf Loos on Trial of his Viennese contemporary Sig-
is better known than his architecture. Yale University Press, by Christopher Long. mund Freud and should be under-
In this cleverly argued polemic, he 256 pp. (2012) Prague: KANT , stood (though hardly excused) within
draws subjective but intriguing links 173 pp., €19.00 (paper) the values of their cultural milieu, his
between decoration—of architecture, condescending if not contemptuous
utilitarian objects, even the human appraisal of indigenous societies is

20 The New York Review

April 6, 2023 21
harder to rationalize today. For in- Beaux-Arts Classicism of the widely ing of 1909–1911 in Vienna, familiarly had a full beard, as it were, an im-
stance, he considered tattooing—a praised “White City.” Louis Sullivan called the Looshaus. Still his best- pression given by the lushly streaked
Bronze Age introduction that recurred denounced what he called this “Colum- known architectural work, it is the dark-and-light-gray marble panels that
as a nineteenth-century fetish and is bian Ecstasy” as “bogus antique” and subject of a definitive monograph by cover the building’s lower half down
now a postmillennial mania—to be a accurately predicted that “the damage Long. This mid-rise, mixed-use scheme to the sidewalk. That commercial zone
reliable indicator of human devolu- wrought by the World’s Fair will last was erected on Michaelerplatz, a semi- is dignified by a monumental though
tion. As he wrote in “Ornament and for half a century from its date, if not circular plaza laid out in 1725 by the much simplified Classical order that
Crime”: longer.” Eventually Loos was hired as architect Joseph Emanuel Fischer von contrasts dramatically with the proto-
a draftsman in a New York architec- Erlach as a forecourt for the St. Mi- modern grid of square apartment win-
The child is amoral. For us, so is tural office, and during his three-year chael’s Wing, his proposed addition to dows punched through the walls above
the Papuan. The Papuan slaugh- sojourn in this country he came to ad- the Hofburg, the sprawling complex it. Franz Joseph was so enraged by the
ters his enemies and devours mire Americans’ open-minded accep- that served as the Habsburg dynasty’s Looshaus that he henceforth refused
them. He is not a criminal. But if tance of pragmatic modernity. winter residence as well as the em- to leave the Hofburg via the Michael-
modern man slaughters and de- After his return to Vienna, Loos pire’s governmental headquarters. His erplatz portal in order to avoid seeing
vours someone, he is a criminal or began writing provocative columns grandiose Baroque design, which fea- this affront to civic decorum.
a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos on design for the city’s leading liberal tures a floridly embellished concave Loos’s oeuvre was primarily res-
his skin, his boat, his rudder, in daily, the Neue Freie Presse, and soon façade surmounted by three domes, idential, and one of his most auda-
short everything that lies to hand. became a cultural celebrity, a position was not executed until 1889–1893 (with cious compositions was the Steiner
There are prisons in which 80 per he maintained for the rest of his life Fischer von Erlach’s original plans al- house of 1910 in Vienna. Its charming
cent of the inmates have tattoos. thanks to his keen instinct for pub- tered by Franz Joseph’s court archi- two-story street front, with a metal-
The tattooed people who are not licity. His first architectural jobs were tect, Ferdinand Kirschner). clad half-barrel-vault roof that im-
in jail are latent criminals or de- parts the air of a storybook cottage,
generate aristocrats. . . . fits right into its quiet neighborhood
The man of our own times, who in the city’s affluent Hietzing district,
follows his innermost urgings to not far from Gustav Klimt’s villa and
smear the walls with erotic sym- Schönbrunn Palace, the summer resi-
bols, is a criminal or a degenerate. dence of the Habsburgs. But the slop-
What is natural in the Papuan and ing garden side of the Steiner house is
the child is a manifestation of de- stunningly different from its modest
generacy in modern man. façade. There, a sheer cliff of white
stucco rises three stories between two
In his excellent compendium Essays squared-off towers that frame a wider,
on Adolf Loos, Christopher Long, a pro- recessed central portion with paired
fessor of architecture at the University rectangular windows as unadorned as
of Texas at Austin, notes: those at the Looshaus. Understand-
ably, the rear of the Steiner house has
The writings of the Italian crim- been reproduced countless times in
inologist Cesare Lombroso . . . architectural history books as a foun-
probably inspired Loos’s fusing of dational example of minimalism long
ornament and the behavior of the before the term existed.
criminal underworld. . . . In L’uomo Particularly fascinating are Loos’s
delinquente [The Criminal Man] . . . 1927 plans for an unexecuted Paris
he writes: “Tattooing is one of the house for the expatriate African Amer-
striking symptoms of humans in ican entertainer Josephine Baker. Flat-
a raw state, in their most primi- The Steiner house, Vienna; designed by Adolf Loos, 1910 roofed, rectangular in ground plan,
tive form.” with a cylindrical tower at one cor-

No less an expert on (and agent of)

societal decline than Donald Trump
for residential and commercial interi-
ors within existing buildings: a café, a
villa, two apartments (one of them for
T he palace extension was thus less
than twenty years old when the
proprietors of the Goldman & Salatsch
ner, its exterior would have been boldly
surfaced with alternating horizontal
bands of black and white marble. The
has expressed a typically opportunistic himself and his first wife, Lina Ober- men’s clothing company announced a most remarkable feature of Loos’s ver-
view of the recent resurgence of this timpfler), and an example of the new design competition for a new flagship itable domestic stage set was to be
ancient form of self-ornamentation. tavern format known as an American store on the prestigious site directly an indoor swimming pool illuminated
Michael Wolff reported in Land- bar, differentiated from the tradi- across from the Hofburg. Bounded by by a skylight and accessible only to
slide: The Final Days of the Trump tional sit-down Lokal by its stand-up two streets that radiate outward from the owner through her private quar-
Presidency (2021) that although the counter, a New World innovation previ- Michaelerplatz, the wedge-shaped plot ters, but not to guests. They, however,
ex-president was repelled by the wide- ously unknown in continental Europe. determined the project’s basic config- could gather in a peripheral corridor
spread fondness for inking among his During his early career he completed uration. The building is equally divided to watch this joyous exhibitionist ca-
political base, he regretted not having just one freestanding structure: the between its dual functions, with the vort: large plate-glass windows set
invested in a chain of tattoo parlors imposingly foursquare, corner-turreted lower three stories occupied by the beneath the waterline promised an
to profit from it. Villa Karma of 1904–1906 in Clarens, upscale clothier and orchestrated by aquatic spectacle that capitalized on
Switzerland, a thoroughgoing expan- the architect into one of his brilliant La Baker’s image as a free spirit who
sion of a smaller house on the shores multilayered spatial compositions to personified the 1920s Années folles.
2. of Lake Geneva. accommodate reception areas, display
Adolf Franz Karl Viktor Maria Loos It was built for Theodor Beer, a phys- spaces, changing and fitting rooms,
was born in 1870 into a Catholic fam- iology professor at the University of behind-the-scenes ateliers, and stor- 3.
ily in the city of Brno, now part of the Vienna, who in 1905 was tried for mo- age. Above them are another four Unlike many of his most talented con-
Czech Republic. His father, a stonecut- lesting two boys he had photographed floors of spacious apartments and of- temporaries, especially Frank Lloyd
ter, died at an early age, after which his nude and for being a practicing homo- fices, capped by an attic under a man- Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
mother assumed control of the family sexual. In 2012 the architectural his- sard roof, where tailoring apprentices and Josef Hoffmann, Loos did not
business. The young Loos wanted to torian Frederic J. Schwartz revealed originally worked. insist on outfitting his architecture
become an architect, but as a trou- that Loos was implicated in the case, The structure is supported by an solely with designs of his own, even
bled adolescent he never completed both as a character witness for Beer internal reinforced concrete frame- though he devised many superb pieces
his secondary education. Thus disqual- and because (as he later confessed to work, then a relatively new concept. of furniture, including several distinc-
ified from earning a higher degree, he his second wife, the operetta star Elsie (The first skyscraper to employ that tive six- and eight-legged round tables.
took sporadic architecture courses at Altmann) he hid his client’s incrimi- transformative engineering method He tended to be disdainful of rapid
Dresden’s Technical University and nating pictures to prevent their dis- was Elzner & Anderson’s sixteen- changes in fashion, and in “Ornament
Vienna’s Academy of Arts. But he was covery. Beer was convicted, served a story Ingalls Building of 1903 in Cin- and Crime” deplored novelty-seeking
a natural autodidact, and his extraor- prison sentence, went bankrupt, and cinnati.) But what really grabbed consumers who
dinary conceptual abilities compen- killed himself in 1919, as his preg- public attention was the Looshaus’s
sated for his lack of formal education. nant, much younger wife had done startlingly stark exterior, the white want to have something new,
At twenty-two he took off for the US soon after he was found guilty. This stucco upper half of which is so de- “fashionable,” “modern.” They even
to visit an uncle who had immigrated sad chain of events now seems eerily void of the period’s usual florid orna- want to have an “artistic design.”
to Philadelphia. predictive of the sordid scandal that mentation—even basic window frames And in four years they will want
He then went to see the World’s Co- engulfed Loos five years before his and narrow “string-course” moldings another “artistic design,” because
lumbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago death and cast a permanent shadow were omitted—that Viennese wits they will find that their furniture
but was most impressed by the innova- over his reputation. dubbed it das Haus ohne Augenbrauen is entirely unmodern, and very new
tive tall buildings of that burgeoning Loos’s big breakthrough had come (the house without eyebrows). But if artistic designs are being made.
metropolis, rather than the pompous with his Goldman & Salatsch build- it lacked those defining features, it That’s terrible! It’s a waste of

22 The New York Review

 New from Duke University Press
Glyphosate and the Swirl The Autocratic Academy Crisis to Catastrophe
An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities Lineages of the Global New Right
VINCANNE ADAMS TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN LEAH FELDMAN and
Critical Global Health AAMIR R. MUFTI, issue editors
The Latinx Guide to An issue of boundary 2 (50:1)
On Learning to Heal
or, What Medicine Doesn’t Know
Graduate School
GENEVIEVE NEGRÓN-GONZALES Introducing Practices,
ED COHEN
Critical Global Health and MAGDALENA L. BARRERA a New Series Edited by
MARGRET GREBOWICZ
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Reading for Infrastructure
Experimental Music and Sound on the Worlds Made and Broken Running
Brooklyn Waterfront ADRIANA MICHELE CAMPOS JOHNSON LINDSEY A. FREEMAN
CISCO BRADLEY and DANIEL NEMSER, issue editors
An issue of Social Text (153) Raving
Alternatives to the Anthropocene MCKENZIE WARK
An issue of Radical History Review (145) Being Dead Otherwise
Fly-Fishing
ANNE ALLISON
CHRISTOPHER SCHABERG
New Growth
The Art and Texture of Black Hair The Journal of Asian Studies Juggling
JASMINE NICHOLE COBB JOSEPH S. ALTER, editor
The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diaspora
STEWART LAWRENCE SINCLAIR
Now published by Duke University Press

dukeupress.edu

April 6, 2023 23
 energy, work, money; this does terning in wall paneling and floors, by Frank Lloyd Wright around 1900 As Long documents, there was wide-
terrible economic damage. along with the deeply saturated colors and codified by Le Corbusier as le plan spread child prostitution in early-
he favored in those materials. This re- libre (literally “the free plan,” though twentieth- century Vienna, where
Too few historians have emphasized sulted in the characteristic darkness today more commonly called “open youngsters of both genders often wan-
that Loos’s objection to extraneous of his interiors, which convey an en- concept” in English), one of his canoni- dered unsupervised through the ex-
ornament was based in part on eco- veloping sense of protective enclosure cal “Five Points of a New Architecture” tensive public park system. Although
nomics, not solely morality. He was quite different from the light-flooded (1927), and thereafter a central tenet this clandestine pedophile subculture
well aware that most people could transparency we usually associate with of Modernism. A bastardized applica- has led some apologists to argue that
not afford the costly handwork fa- Modernist interiors. tion of Loos’s Raumplan is detectable Loos’s behavior must be seen within
vored by the English Arts and Crafts in the contractor-designed split-level its time and place, Long refutes
Movement in reaction to the cheap houses that became popular in subur-
machine-made goods that prolifer- 4. ban American subdivisions after World those who claim . . . that Loos’s al-
ated during the Industrial Revolution, Apart from his impassioned advocacy War II. Their greater distribution of in- leged crimes with children were
and that the crafts-centered Wiener of simplification, Loos’s greatest ar- teriors on multiple levels—though ar- simply a common practice at the
Werkstätte, despite the up-to-date ap- chitectural contribution was what he ranged without the intricacy of Loos’s time and had a different value
pearance of its products, was thus a termed der Raumplan—“the room schemes—could give growing families then. Such relativizing has im-
socially retrograde rather than pro- plan,” in its literal but wholly inade- more separate spaces without a pro- port for cultural understanding.
gressive endeavor. quate English translation. Whereas we hibitive increase in overall expense, But sex with minors in Austria in
An Anglophile who dressed in be- might think of a room plan as a two- because the building’s footprint did the 1920s was viewed unequivo-
spoke suits, Loos believed that “an dimensional diagram depicting the not need to be larger than that of the cally as an offense.
English club armchair is an abso- layout of an interior space, Loos had usual two-story tract house.*
lutely perfect thing.” This enthusi- something quite different in mind. He How the Raumplan was implemented Elsewhere he writes:
asm was later shared by Le Corbusier, conceived architecture in three dimen- is made incomparably clear in Adolf
who like Loos often specified generic sions—an ability not to be taken for Loos: The Last Houses, an illuminating The authorities, based on today’s
leather-upholstered club chairs from granted among his co-professionals— monograph by Long, which analyzes practices and even what was being
the stolidly middle-class London fur- and felt that too much of buildings’ the architect’s late series of intricately recommended by the profession-
niture retailer Maple & Co. Another internal volume was wasted by ceil- worked-out residential designs. One als who dealt with children in such
taste the two architects shared was ings needlessly high for the func- of the several well-illustrated proj- cases at the time, mishandled the
an admiration for the elegantly time- tions carried out beneath them. He ects included here is the Villa Win- investigation. They should have im-
less yet democratically affordable realized that a good deal more usable ternitz of 1931–1932, designed by Loos mediately called in the child psy-
bentwood furniture made since the area could be coaxed out of a struc- in collaboration with the generation- chiatrists, and they should have
mid-nineteenth century by the Vienna- ture without expanding its outer di- younger Czech architect Karel Lhota, conducted the questioning with
based firm Thonet, which epitomized mensions if multiple interstitial levels with whom he had already worked on greater care. Whether the girls
the Modern Movement’s egalitarian were introduced rather than the usual the better-known Villa Müller of 1928– [aged eight and ten] were telling
but sometimes elusive desiderata of laterally uniform stories. 1930, also in Prague. the whole truth is, from our remove,
beauty, utility, and economy. Loos In her anecdote-packed and highly Color photographs of the Villa Win- impossible to say. But anyone now-
wrote in “Ornament and Crime,” “A revealing memoir Adolf Loos Privat ternitz reveal decor notably less lush adays reading the police file objec-
Thonet chair is the most modern chair.” (The Private Adolf Loos, 1936), the ar- than the colored marble and rare tively and carefully will come away
Although a pioneering minimalist, chitect’s third and last wife, the Czech wood paneling of Loos’s earlier inte- with a strong sense of Loos’s guilt.
Loos was no stranger to luxury and photographer and writer Claire Beck riors. In their place we find humble
refinement. He believed that the exte- Loos (who was Jewish and was mur- Flemish bond red brick employed to The graphic evidence against the
riors of new urban architecture should dered in a Nazi concentration camp at create a dado—the traditional waist- defendant in the court file is pow-
be recessive enough to create a har- age thirty-seven), records the archi- high differentiation of a vertical wall erful, and it confirms that he should
monious ensemble accented by the oc- tect’s own explanation of the Raum- treatment—with plain white plaster have been found culpable of the two
casional singular landmark, no matter plan concept: extending above it to the ceiling. This most serious charges: having “sexually
how elaborate the interiors of those visual tour through the structure be- abused persons under the age of four-
buildings might be. He never consid- The ship is the model for a mod- gins with an entry vestibule reminis- teen years for his own pleasure” and
ered the Looshaus to be a disruptive ern house. There, space is totally cent of a terra-cotta-hued Mondrian, inducing them “to engage in indecent
interloper, merely a neutral element. utilized, no unnecessary waste of which leads via a narrow stairway acts.” As it was, he was judged “guilty
Undeterred by restrictive notions of space! Nowadays, with building (Loos believed that interstory steps of causing [the girls to commit] ob-
modernity, Loos regularly incorporated sites being so expensive, every need be no wider than a ship’s passage- scene acts” and was given four months
a very specific roster of antiques into inch of space must be used. . . . I way) up to a mezzanine that overlooks in prison. (The legal distinction be-
his decorative schemes. English Queen have not only got rid of ornamen- a cozy dining room with a redbrick tween “indecent acts” and “obscene
Anne and Chippendale high-backed tation, I have discovered a new way hearth down to the left, and up to the acts” may be hard for lay readers to
chairs were recurrent components, of building. Building into space, right to a sun-flooded living room, a discern, but Long quotes enough ex-
as were Chinese porcelains, Dutch the Raumplan, spatial design. I do vertical progression that feels like an plicit and stomach-turning testimony
brasses, and rugs from the Near East not build in flat planes, I build in ascent to domestic heaven. It seems from Loos’s victims to leave no un-
and Central Asia, which he often se- space, in three-dimensions. This is eminently habitable, and much more certainty about his final assessment.)
lected for exact positions within his the way I manage to accommodate to contemporary tastes than some ear- However, accounting for time already
carefully considered household ensem- more rooms into a house. The bath- lier efforts by the architect that now served and with the rest of the sentence
bles. He eschewed both the cluttered room does not need to have a ceil- feel rather dated. suspended for three years of probation,
eclecticism of the earlier Makartstil ing as high as the living room. . . . Loos was released, doubtless because
(the fashionable Aesthetic Move- The rooms are nested into each of his prominence. Long concludes his
ment variant popularized by the mid- other, each has a height and size 5. skillful analysis of this indefensible ep-
nineteenth-century Viennese painter corresponding to its purpose. . . . Loos died a year after the completion isode by acknowledging that it is now
and decorator Hans Makart) and the of the Villa Winternitz at age sixty- impossible to be certain what trans-
sparse functionalism of the later In- This reference to ship design echoes two, nominally from a stroke but pre- pired between Loos and the minors he
ternational Style. Thus Loos’s rooms, Le Corbusier’s contemporaneous sumably from the tertiary effects of claimed to have been interested in only
though always restrained, were also praise for nautical prototypes in syphilis, which he likely contracted at as nude models for his sketching, as if
much more livable than puritanical Vers une architecture, and his Purist a brothel in his early twenties. That he were some avuncular Egon Schiele.
Modernist environments that sacri- houses of the 1920s with their hori- once-incurable venereal disease is The supercilious replies Loos gave
ficed comfort to appearance. zontal handrails have been likened to thought to have contributed to the de- under oath at his trial—which bring
Handsome color photographs of the superstructures of ocean liners, mentia that he exhibited by the late to mind Oscar Wilde’s flippantly self-
Loos’s surviving interior settings, illustrations of which he included in 1920s, although his behavior could be destructive performance on the wit-
taken by Philippe Ruault, help make that hugely influential publication as erratic even before then. ness stand three decades earlier—only
Ralf Bock’s new monograph, Adolf perfect examples of rational design The most troubling aspect of assess- increase one’s impression that he saw
Loos: Works and Projects, an indispens- in the industrial vernacular. ing Loos is his predation of underage nothing fundamentally wrong with in-
able (though atrociously translated) Loos’s architecture was distin- girls, which in 1928 led to his prosecu- dulging his natural instincts. With a
reference. They convey an accurate guished not only by its severe exte- tion and conviction on charges of child sour irony that recalls the flavor of
idea of the nuanced chromatic val- riors—cubic, flat-roofed, and clad in sexual abuse. In Adolf Loos on Trial, Loos’s seemingly offhanded but pre-
ues of Loos’s work that get lost in the white stucco, anticipating Le Cor- Long goes back to what remains of the cisely aimed feuilletons about con-
period black-and-white pictures that busier’s houses of his so-called He- original legal records and gives us a temporary culture, Christopher Long,
were long our sole source of visual in- roic Period—but also by a multiplicity scrupulously laid out but altogether our finest present-day interpreter of
formation about it. As we can see from of discrete spaces of varying heights dispiriting account of this sorry foot- this complex, contradictory, but ulti-

.
these more realistic views, although fitted together with the ingenuity of note to modern architectural history. mately confounding modern master,
Loos eschewed applied ornament he a Chinese puzzle box. This provides gets it absolutely right: “It may be that
exploited the inherent decorative po- a direct contrast to the lateral flow *See my “Living Happily Ever After,” The there is no truth after the fact without
tential of wood grain and marble pat- of interconnected spaces pioneered New York Review, April 21, 2016. ornament.”

24 The New York Review

 Puppet Flower The #MeToo Effect
The American Stamp A Novel of 1867 Formosa What Happens When Freedom Reread
YAO-CHANG CHEN We Believe Women
Postal Iconography, Democratic L. GIBSON
Citizenship, and Consumerism Translated by Pao-fang Hsu, LEIGH GILMORE
Ian Maxwell, and Tung-jung Chen “What can reading Franzen tell us
in the United States “A thoughtful and thorough about fiction and what we want
LAURA GOLDBLATT “This well-wrought book transports us consideration of from it, and don’t, and how that
AND RICHARD HANDLER to a complicated yet majestic period a global movement.” changes? Gibson pushes past both
in Taiwan’s history. A significant novel, —Publishers Weekly eyerolling dismissals of Franzen
“Beautifully written and
steeped in this unique place while and the uncritical accolades of
compellingly argued, this book
echoing around the world.” Oprah and Time magazine and
shows that the United States
—Lu Ping, author of takes the novels seriously as
postage stamp is as complex,
Love and Revolution complex, if flawed, works of fiction
fraught, and contradictory
that inspire and reward immersive
as the nation itself.”
and close reading.”
—Elizabeth Chin, author of
—Briallen Hopper, author of
My Life with Things:
Hard to Love: Essays and
The Consumer Diaries
Confessions
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

From Whispers The Narrow Cage

to Shouts and Other Modern
The Ways We Talk About Cancer Fairy Tales
ELAINE SCHATTNER VASILY EROSHENKO
“In her innovative and insightful Translated by Adam Kuplowsky.
book, physician and cancer Foreword by Jack Zipes.
survivor Elaine Schattner
“Eroshenko’s fairy tales are by
explores the ways that we tell
The Curious History Harvard Square turns quaint and heartbreaking,
the story of cancer—and the
engrossing and thought-
ways we often fail to tell the real of the Heart A Love Story
provoking. Their evergreen
story of this notably complex and A Cultural and Scientif ic Journey CATHERINE J. TURCO messages—pertaining to equality,
treacherous disease. The result is
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for thought.” come through each page.”
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winning science writer —Publishers Weekly —Lea Carpenter,
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author of Eleven Days
and Red, White, Blue: A Novel

April 6, 2023 25
 The Exorcist
Christine Smallwood

The Shards at New Hampshire’s Camden College

by Bret Easton Ellis. (a thinly disguised Bennington), who is
Knopf, 594 pp., $30.00 back home in Los Angeles on a break.
Clay drives around, does drugs, goes
Bret Easton Ellis first saw the Paul to parties, and remembers his dead
Schrader film American Gigolo in Feb- grandparents. He sees his therapist
ruary 1980, the month it opened, when and lends money to a friend—the
he was fifteen years old. He has since word suggests a degree of warmth
seen it more than thirty-five times. and intentionality utterly lacking in
“Looking back,” he wrote in the essay his world—named (in a nod to Ameri-
collection White (2019), “the impact can Gigolo) Julian. But Julian is a drug
American Gigolo had on me is impos- addict in debt to a pimp, and the only
sible to tally.” Many of us were per- way for Clay to get his money back is
manently marked by the culture we to go with him to the Saint Marquis
consumed at fifteen—or ennobled, or hotel, where a customer has requested
enlarged, in some cases even perverted two boys—one to have sex with, and
or ruined, if we were unlucky or foolish one to watch them:
enough to imprint on the wrong object.
What American Gigolo handed Ellis And in the elevator on the way
was a loaded sensibility. It had to do down to Julian’s car, I say, “Why
with masculinity and sex and Los An- didn’t you tell me the money was
geles and the way that Richard Gere’s for this?” and Julian, his eyes all
sad, blank, beautiful Julian—“less a glassy, sad grin on his face, says,
character than an idea”—seems to “Who cares? Do you? Do you really
elude definite categories of gay or care?” and I don’t say anything and
straight, how he “just exists, floating realize that I really don’t care and
through this world, an actor.” There is suddenly feel foolish, stupid. I also
a plot in American Gigolo, in which Ju- realize that I’ll go with Julian to
lian is framed for murder, but what im- the Saint Marquis. That I want to
pressed Ellis was the mood and style see if things like this can actually
and surface. It was an early encounter happen. And as the elevator de-
with what he calls “the dream.” scends, passing the second floor,
Still, when you’ve sat through a and the first floor, going even far-
movie three dozen times you get to ther down, I realize that the money
wondering about it. Ellis’s new idea, doesn’t matter. That all that does
which he mentioned in January while is that I want to see the worst.
introducing a screening of American
Gigolo in New York City, is that actu- Sensationalism had been done be-
ally, Julian isn’t framed. That he did fore, but Ellis made it new by cloaking
commit the murder. It’s not surprising it in cool, hard, gleaming prose—
that Ellis would be more interested in Bret Easton Ellis; illustration by Kristina Tzekova Stephen King by way of Joan Didion.
perpetrators than so-called victims. He The idea is an old one: that beneath
has never written a character who is working on the book that will one day a writer so preoccupied with innards.) the surface of the dream factory—the
blameless or pure of heart. His nov- become Ellis’s first novel, Less Than The Los Angeles of The Shards, like city of Los Angeles, the life of privi-
els are filled with beautiful actors in Zero (1985). At night, to help him sleep, the Los Angeles of American Gigolo, lege and celluloid—is hell, and the only
nightmarish dreamscapes who seem he takes Valium supplemented with conceals a horrible, hidden reality way to get out of hell is to not care
innocent but are revealed to be guilty. heroic doses of marijuana. The reason of violence. As Bret put it in Lunar about anything, to become numb to
(At other times they are only guilty in he can’t sleep is that he suspects that Park, “There was another world un- the pain of others and your own pain.
their own imaginations; the dream is a handsome new student at Buckley, derneath the one we lived in. There Clay can’t care, about Julian or any-
nothing if not ambiguous.) Robert Mallory, is really a serial killer was something beneath the surface one else, because if he did, he would
“Many years ago I realized that a known as the Trawler, who has been of things.” But reality for Ellis is as never escape, and escape is the only
book, a novel, is a dream that asks it- kidnapping and mutilating teenagers. slippery as a pool of blood; it is not alternative to death in Less Than Zero.
self to be written” is how his new novel, When Matt is gruesomely, floridly mur- reliably real. There’s a serial killer But Clay is not indifferent. He wants
The Shards, his first in thirteen years, dered, Bret is the only one who cares. in Lunar Park, but he’s copying the to look, and he has to. Only when he
begins. It is narrated by Ellis’s alter Buckley; Less Than Zero; refer- plot of American Psycho, in which a knows what’s there can he leave it
ego, a fifty-six-year-old writer named ences to Todd, Ellis’s real-life boy- status-obsessed Wall Street banker behind.
Bret, and is, as Ellis has described friend; mentions of vacations with named Patrick Bateman may or may Ellis’s work posits an inevitable re-
American Gigolo, “a kind of sunlit neo- Jay McInerney—from the beginning, not commit a number of nauseatingly lationship between wealth and the de-
noir, heavy on dread, heavy on menace.” The Shards is playing a long game with described, extravagantly sadistic mur- sire to “see the worst”; money creates
The dream is a place, Los Angeles, and truth and fiction. We first met Bret, ders; meanwhile a demon is haunting a frictionless existence that demands
it’s also a time, the early 1980s. Bret or a looking-glass version of him, in Bret, appearing in the guise of a hairy, to be jolted with reality. But what will
is a senior at Buckley, the elite prep Ellis’s novel Lunar Park (2005), when hungry thing from a story Bret wrote do it? Inequality isn’t “the worst” in
school Ellis himself attended. His par- he was coming down from the trip as a little boy. There is a megaloma- his work; neither is losing a job or your
ents have gone to Europe for three of publishing American Psycho (1991) nia at play here, a belief in the writ- mind or being diagnosed with a fatal
months, leaving him in the care of the and Glamorama (1998). At that time er’s powers of creation, but Ellis also illness or any other form of common
mostly absent housekeeper. He drives “Bret” seemed like a solution to the understands that the things we make unhappiness. Death itself isn’t even
his Mercedes to school and sometimes problem of Ellis’s celebrity, specifi- make us. Whatever fear or anxiety enough. The secret he buries beneath
borrows his mother’s Jaguar. He is best cally how celebrity splits a person. Ellis readers felt about American Psycho— the surface is a frenzy of violence, the
friends with the homecoming king and had become too famous—and too in- the book was widely banned, and Ellis deranged exercise of power of one body
queen and dates Debbie Schaffer, the terested in his fame—to do anything received numerous death threats— over another. Less Than Zero descends
daughter of a Hollywood producer and but make it the subject of his fiction. was nothing compared to how it made into a snuff film and the gang rape of
the hottest girl in the class. He’s also But where Lunar Park treated Ellis’s Bret feel. Writing itself—what we put a child. American Psycho is infamous
secretly gay. He’s spent much of the biography like a piece of taffy, some- into the world—is the source of hor- for its depictions of torture, dismem-
summer in the bed of a classmate, a thing to stretch out and play with, ror. Just doing it makes you guilty of berment, etc. (The Shards does stuff
lonely, green-eyed stoner named Matt The Shards earnestly buttonholes the something. with pets.)
Kellner—“my first love.” reader, like a horror movie that trades One problem with wanting to see the
Bret listens to bands such as Ice- in being a true story: “I had to write worst is that you never get there; as
house and Ultravox (he especially likes
the song “Vienna,” with its soaring,
mournful refrain, “This means noth-
the book because I needed to resolve
what happened—it was finally time.”
The need to resolve and the urge to
E llis published Less Than Zero when
he was a twenty-one-year-old stu-
dent at Bennington College. Its cul-
Edgar in King Lear knows, “The worst
is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the
worst.’” Another is that Ellis’s desire
ing to me”) and spends weekends at confess are related. (The desire to spill tural impact is hard to overstate. The to see the worst is so all-consuming
parties or the movies, or in his room one’s guts will have extra meaning for book is narrated by Clay, a freshman that it blinds him to anything else. He

26 The New York Review

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April 6, 2023 27
has a once-in-a-generation talent for by translating from one medium to an- his own interiority through a screen aside, Bret is frequently dissociated.
conjuring dread and disgust and ex- other, Ellis has backed into something and writing down everything he sees. He feels “numb” and also speaks of
posing them as the consequences of a interesting. He has always tended to (At one point he describes his point of being “an actor.” He calls the role he
sick, hollow, and narcissistic culture; “lean toward” (his words) long run-on view on a room as “my tracking shot.”) plays “the tangible participant.” When-
he’s also funny. But the truth that sentences, but The Shards indulges Or maybe the style is Ellis’s comment ever anxiety threatens to puncture his
lies beneath the surface of the world them to excess, one flowing to the on retrospection—not that life is a stoned haze, the tangible participant
is not that we are depraved authors next, to hypnotic effect. Some of them movie, but that memory is: tries to keep him focused on playing
of Boschian nightmares; it’s that our run away like the last rays of sunset the part of the normal kid who isn’t
Boschian nightmares exist alongside on a darkening ocean, and others cir- The opening of “Rapture” by obsessed with the Trawler, to soothe
acts of love, compassion, faithfulness. cle, manically, as if covering a set of Blondie was playing as we moved him with a reminder that “none of this
Ellis’s stark and unsentimental moral tracks. They pull the reader in, creat- down the entrance hall, where is real.”
vision is blind to half of human truth, ing a sense of intimacy and complic- only a couple of bare lightbulbs Bret’s real trauma isn’t seeing the
and in this way has remained as child- ity in a world that otherwise wants illuminated a concrete floor and photographs of Matt. It’s his sexuality.
like as the innocence it wants to dispel. to deny both. Pepto-Bismol-pink walls, the paint “I had no stakes in the real world—
The Shards stages the desire to see There is a compulsiveness to the peeling away in great patches of why would I?” he writes. “It wasn’t built
the worst quite literally, when Bret narration of The Shards, an exhaustive black and silver, and Junior, a tall, for me or my needs or desires.” Bret
goes to Matt’s house after his death level of information—who sat with thin Jamaican wearing a black suit has his heart broken first by Matt (“You
and Matt’s father shows him the pho- whom at the lunch table, who looked with a white shirt and a black tie think we’re gonna be boyfriends? Are
tographs of his son’s defiled body. at whom at the homecoming game— and a porkpie hat, was sitting on you fucking crazy?”), then by another
These images split Bret’s life in two: that is engrossing and ultimately has a a high wooden stool and hugged classmate, Ryan Vaughn. He is in love
purpose. Bret has to keep talking, tell- Debbie while the dreamily om- with his friend Thom Wright and angry
The secret story about Matt was ing every single thing that happened, inous first verse of “Rapture” that this desire can’t be reciprocated.
my loss of innocence, my first mo- from every angle, to sew the reader played out softly past the door- At a climactic moment in the book,
ment of adulthood and death, and more tightly into his point of view, his man—I remember this so clearly he has an explosive encounter with
I never moved through life again version of the truth. Long exchanges and I remember looking behind Robert Mallory. But Robert doesn’t
unaffected by the trauma this of dialogue shore up the pretense of me to see if anyone was following stab him. His weapons of choice are
caused, everything changed be- objectivity. The point is control. (There us down the hallway. seduction and humiliation:
cause of it, and, even more pain- is also an “unedited” version of the
fully, I realized—and this was the book available on Ellis’s Patreon page The passage is heavy on color and vi- I looked up at his face and the sexy
truer, starker loss—that there was that apparently contains an additional sual detail but, more than anything, grin was gone and he pushed back
nothing I could do. This was life, 90,000 words, which suggests, at the movement. Even the paint is in mo- and sat on the edge of the bed and
this was death, nobody cared in heart of the novel, a Borgesian desire tion, “peeling away.” We move (we don’t then looked down at me and with
the end, we were alone. for a map as detailed as the territory.) walk, amble, or dawdle; we move, as a faint trace of disgust wiped his
One of the things that makes a if impelled by someone or something mouth with the back of his hand
The Trawler considers himself an novel different from a film is that else, some external force) down the and muttered, “Fucking faggot.”
artist. He describes the grotesquely every reader is free to picture the hall with Bret, smoothly taking it all in. And then, “I knew it.”
desecrated bodies of his victims as events in her own way. No two peo- If you know “Rapture,” you can hear it,
“treasures” or “alterations.” (Before ple will “see” the same face or room twice, pulling Bret closer to the door. Teen heartbreak always feels like life
killing someone, the Trawler also or light falling on the water at just the If you don’t, you’ll miss an important and death, but in The Shards it literally
breaks into his or her home and re- same angle. (Even if the language is emotional cue. You’ll have the sense is. There are probably a dozen pages
arranges the furniture. This Manson clichéd, yielding stock images in the of motion and the idea of something of explicit violence in the novel, but
Family–style “creepy crawling” also mind, there are many different stock “dreamily ominous.” But you won’t hear every paragraph is humid with adoles-
takes place in Lunar Park and Impe- images to choose from.) When text the synthesizers tolling, or the voice, cent desire and the fear of discovery.
rial Bedrooms, from 2010.) I think Ellis becomes image, it gets fixed, deter- high and breakable as glass. Bret is an obsessive observer of his
wants us to understand The Shards as mined; there is one face, one hue, one environment and peers, and much of
an alteration of another kind. Yet it’s set of props in the room. The freedom the terror of the book unfolds as a fo-
not quite right to say that Bret was
entirely innocent before. Like Clay,
Bret came to Matt’s house because
is reversed: we now all see the same
face, but can describe it in different
words. Bret’s paranoid and exhaustive
W hether it’s Patrick Bateman in
American Psycho talking about
Whitney Houston or Clay thinking
rensic accounting of social dynamics.
He sees others because no one can see
him—or so he thinks. But the point
he wanted to know more; he wanted descriptions, by not leaving any space about the Beach Boys, Ellis’s charac- remains that the paranoia of the novel
to see the worst, he just didn’t know for the reader’s imagination, make the ters often listen to and comment on is the paranoia of the closet. Bret can’t
what it was. I would say more about book feel like a film we are watching. music. His novels are soundtracked talk to anyone about Matt’s death be-
this, but I can’t. Whenever I come to Ellis tells us what Bret is thinking to an unusual degree. Or perhaps it’s cause no one knows, or is supposed
a passage of explicit violence in Ellis’s but, more importantly, he puts us in better to say that they work like mix- to know, that he knew Matt at all.
work, I try to skip ahead. It doesn’t Bret’s gaze. We notice what Bret no- tapes; the references create an atmo- Matt’s murder becomes, in the novel’s
work; my vision always snags on a line tices, and what Bret notices most of sphere. Bret lives in an exclusive world dream logic, the expression of sexual
that then persists in my mind in the all are bodies: of codes and style, and doesn’t much guilt.
form of intrusive, disturbing thoughts. care who is left out. It’s not going too
(Do I want to see the worst, or don’t I?) Robert cannonballed into the far to say that “in” and “out” are ev-
pool and swam sloppily to the
shallow end, where he stumbled
erything in Ellis’s work. Is the ano-
mie inside Clay or outside of him? Do S o far, so traumatized. (Not that
Ellis would agree. In a recent in-

E llis’s essay about American Gigolo

is less laconic than my quotations
above may have suggested. Here is the
up the steps and padded over to
the diving board, completely wet
and naked, and I homed in on his
the events of American Psycho occur
out there in reality or only in Patrick
Bateman’s mind? There’s something
terview he claimed that The Shards
explores gay relationships “a little
bit,” which is like saying that Ameri-
full sentence: tight, smooth ass and I was sud- terribly literal about where Ellis takes can Psycho is “a little bit” about Wall
denly unable to breathe. this problem—serial killers turning Street.) But to get the full picture of
Looking back, the impact Amer- bodies inside out, making “alterations” what Ellis is doing with trauma, it
ican Gigolo had on me is impos- Cannonballed, swam, stumbled, pad- of one kind or another. helps to look back at White, a book
sible to tally, and it’s not as if ded, and, most importantly, homed— Music helps us hear the atmo- of screeds against liberal “snowflakes,”
this is a great film—it’s not, and everything is motion, the camera sphere, and it helps Bret write, too. “micro-aggressions,” and the “rage ma-
even its director agrees—but in moves across the pool following Robert He explains that while working on the chine” of the political left. In White
the way it changed how we look until it zooms in, holds, so Bret can book he drank heavily, took Xanax and Ellis remembered reading horror nov-
at and objectify men, and altered find the breath to keep talking. Ativan, and watched old music videos els as a child and being fascinated, at
how I thought about and experi- It’s not enough for The Shards to on YouTube. He discovered that the age seven, with Thomas Tyron’s The
enced LA, its influence was vast show us things in motion; the sen- songs don’t mean what they once did. Other, especially its pitchfork death
and undeniable. tences ask us to move with them: “I He thought they were about freedom, scene, which he read over and over,
parked on the street, jumped out of but they’re really about “desperate de- trying to understand it “on a techni-
This sounds like a spoken monologue the car, unlatched the side gate, and sire and rejection and running away.” cal level”—“how the author linked the
because it is. The essays in White first walked the pathway to the backyard He thought they represented “a child words up to give this scene its charge.”
took form as texts that Ellis read aloud directly to the pool and the guesthouse who became a man,” but now that he He loved horror movies, too, and in-
on his podcast, as did The Shards. Ap- beyond it.” There is no purpose to nar- is fifty-six, they represent “a man who sists that he and his peers weren’t
parently, like a modern-day War of the ration like this except to make sure stayed a child.” “wounded” by repeated viewings of
Worlds, the podcast so seduced listen- the reader is with Bret, accompany- To stay a child, frozen in time, is The Omen at age eleven; on the con-
ers with its veneer of veracity that they ing him, walking next to him, seeing a typical trauma response, and The trary, “it probably made each of us less
became convinced that all the events what he sees when he sees it, entirely Shards, in several ways, is a novel of a wuss.” In other words, Ellis isn’t a
in the book were true. controlled by his direction. In this as about trauma. There is, first of all, traumatized person traumatizing his
It is not easy to write narration well as its long, wordy dialogue, The Bret’s seeing the photographs of Matt readers; he is dispensing benefits as
that reads like spoken language, but Shards reads as if Bret were watching Kellner’s body. But even putting those salutary and bracing as a plunge into

28 The New York Review

 “Breathtakingly beautiful…[a] magical take on Africa
Photo: Matt Bray

before the arrival of the Atlantic slave ships—a world of art

and artists, lovers, storytellers and philosophers.”
—THE INDEPENDENT

The Last Gift of the Master Artists

BY THE BOOKER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR BEN OKRI

“One of the most “A convincing

beautiful and cautionary tale of
profound novels absolute power…
I’ve read in ages. A master storyteller
It also packs an unsettling …Okri prompts readers to
punch…Okri never dwells reflect on the mistakes of
on the horror of slavery the past and consider the
itself—instead, he makes us ways in which they are
fall in love with the world repeated.”
it’s about to destroy.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
—WASHINGTON POST

“Takes on the great

“Ben Okri is riddles of existence
that rare thing, —freedom and consciousness,
a literary and truth and illusion, suffering
social visionary, and transcendence—spin-
ning them into shimmering,
a writer for whom all three
allegorical texts…at a time of
—literature, culture, and
deep reckoning and crisis…
vision—are profoundly
his work feel[s] all the more
interwoven.”
prescient.”
—ALI SMITH
—NEW YORK TIMES

OTHER PR E SS otherpress.com

April 6, 2023 29
cold water. If you do feel traumatized, as if Ellis, annoyed at a culture that Perhaps the trauma that is hitting still working through the success of
you should work that out, preferably in finds injury everywhere, has written Bret hardest has to do with one that Less Than Zero. But while his last
private: this book to up the ante, to show us all everyone must eventually face: get- novel, Imperial Bedrooms (2010), the
what real trauma is. But then he trolls ting old. At the end of the introduction, metafictional sequel to Less Than
This widespread epidemic of self- the trauma plot by casting doubt on Bret, in the present day, writes about Zero, was an attempt to destroy the
victimization—defining yourself Bret’s story, by showing that Bret is buying a reproduction of Images, the characters who made him famous, The
in essence by way of a bad thing, a not the good detective, by suggesting, 1982 Buckley yearbook: Shards is a cry of nostalgia tinged
trauma that happened in the past in the end, that Bret is culpable for with rage. “Sometimes I dream about
that you’ve let define you—is actu- certain horrifying events. He’s not a I was haunted by the fact that out Robert,” Bret writes in the final lines
ally an illness. It’s something one victim. Even when Bret is coerced into of the sixty seniors from that of the book. He is “mostly young,
needs to resolve in order to partic- sex with Debbie’s father in a bungalow class of 1982 five were missing— and staring at me fixed in that mo-
ipate in society, because otherwise at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Bret insists the five who didn’t make it for var- ment of his teenage beauty, a place
one’s not only harming oneself but that he, an underage teenager, is re- ious reasons—and this fact was where he would always reside—he
also seriously annoying family and sponsible. “You did this to yourself,” he simply inescapable: I couldn’t would never age.” The book’s violent
friends, neighbors and strangers says to his reflection in the bathroom dream it away or pretend it wasn’t deaths may be nothing more than

.
who haven’t victimized themselves. mirror. “You wanted to come.” It’s a true. the fantasies of a middle-aged writer
conversation with the reader. You did searching for an image that can ex-
The events of The Shards are trau- this to yourself, I hear him saying. You Bret is as captivated by his youth as press the shock and horror of his own
mas by any measure of the word. It’s wanted to read it. Ellis himself, who, forty years on, is mortality.

The Couple Form

Anahid Nersessian
selves, into half or identical rhymes
that are sometimes uneasy, some-
times rapturous. “She asked you,”
one goes,

to unclasp your bra; you did; to

rub yourself against her till you
came; you did; to read her the
erotic poem you loved; you did;
to remove your pants; you did; to
let her taste you; you did; to come
again, inside her mouth; you did; to
penetrate her gingerly; you did;
to get out of bed at last; you did; to
go get pizza down the street; you
did; to eat it on the sidewalk in
the snow; you did; to go back home
with her; you did; to sleep there
one more night; you did;
to stay until the sun came up;
you did.

Readers of Middlemarch have long

objected to Will Ladislaw, a gifted
but aimless intellectual with a well-
developed “sense of the ludicrous.”
“Ladislaw . . . seems,” one observed
in 1873, “to be a favorite” with Eliot,
but charm alone shouldn’t earn the
sublime and sensitive Dorothea, for
whose “lofty yearnings” Will presents
a “meagre consolation.” Henry James
put it even more bluntly: Ladislaw
“has not the concentrated fervor es-
sential in the man chosen by so nobly
strenuous a heroine.” “He is,” James
sighed, “the one figure which a mas-
culine intellect of the same power as
Lily Ludlow: Untitled 7, 2011 George Eliot’s would not have con-
ceived with the same complacency;
he is, in short, roughly speaking, a
Couplets: A Love Story Dorothea Brooke, she is passionate between us like a ray, the knowing woman’s man.”
by Maggie Millner. and restless, qualities that don’t al- gaze
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ways serve her desire to be a good of Destiny, which Eliot would say
108 pp., $25.00

A Queen in Bucks County

person. She is also in a relationship
with a man who cuts a familiar figure:
nice, but boring. Over drinks with the
stood by

sarcastic with our dramatis

C ouplets is a queer book about
queer love, and Millner has no
fixed ideas about who ought to want
by Kay Gabriel. second woman, she silently compares personae what or whom and why. She makes
LI LY LUDL OW/CANADA, NE W YORK

Nightboat, 72 pp., $17.95 (paper) her boyfriend to Mr. Casaubon, Doro- explicit what James leaves tacit or
thea’s sexless windbag of a husband, folded in her hand. may not even recognize: her narrator,
Early in Maggie Millner’s Couplets, a and her date to Will Ladislaw, Casau- like Dorothea, needs to get fucked,
book-length narrative poem that might bon’s dashing cousin with whom Dor- Barely hesitating, the protagonist of and great sex is a lot more than a
also be called (or so its author sug- othea falls helplessly in love. “I was Millner’s poem is soon drawn into meager consolation for the difficulties
gests) True Life: Turning Twenty-Eight too skittish,” Millner writes, the other woman’s apartment. Most of adult life. With his “pure enjoy-
in Brooklyn, a young woman meets up of Couplets is written (as you might ment of comicality” undiluted by any
with another young woman at a bar. and caught up have guessed) in couplets, but it in- “sneering and self-exaltation,” Will
The first woman is reading Middle- in my charade to feel, charging the cludes blocks of prose whose last two is all but advertised as an excellent
march. Like George Eliot’s heroine, space sentences fall, like the couplets them- lover, playful and empathetic where

30 The New York Review

Casaubon is prohibitive and mean.
The woman who bookends orgasms
with poetry and pizza likewise offers
E ver since John Milton decided to
equate rhyme with bondage in his
introductory note to Paradise Lost,
clean, smoothing its ruptures with
the “regular sing-song” of perfectly
turned verse.
who has another girlfriend, and while
the arrangement is supposed to be
“equitable . . . though also not exactly
relief from a heterosexual schedule of the couplet—an especially constric- It’s hard to argue with the idea that democratic,” it drives the narrator up
“kale and NPR ,” and if she is not cruel tive rhymed form—has had a reac- there’s something tyrannical about the wall. She pulls out her hair, claws
she can still ply cruelty’s more gra- tionary reputation. The Augustans, couplets. They are very neat, the hos- her arms, and insists that she’d “feel
cious arts: Pope first among them, liked in the pital corners of English poetry. Mill- more free if more constrained.” Even-
couplet what Milton abhorred, namely ner’s volatile meter and enjambed lines tually she gets her wish: “She asked
Everyone had the same Ikea bed. its capacity to set things to order, to draw attention to the discipline be- if we/might date, from there on out,
She tied my wrists to hers, above balance opposing energies and reduce hind them, a reminder that even the exclusively.”
my head them to a mixed but settled unity. For most riotous experiments in love and There are only so many ways to in-
Pope couplets could resolve in lan- art almost never escape the pressures habit the couple form. What seemed
(She liked what she called clean guage the contradictions, both per- of tradition. No sooner does the pro- airless and burdensome in one rela-
lines, I would learn; sonal and collective, that threaten to tagonist of Couplets leave monoga- tionship quickly becomes the desider-
her major had been architecture.) tear us apart. Reason and passion, my’s narrow room for the “big happy atum of another, and it is this specific
he observed, “answer one great aim,” treeline” of an open relationship than compulsion to repeat that Millner’s
Sometimes when I lay there, so “true self-love and social are the she buckles under the agonizing de- couplets movingly execute. The ex-
waiting, bound or free, same.” When William Hazlitt called mands polyamory places on the ego, tended bit about Middlemarch makes
I’d envision its assembly: Pope the poet “of polished life,” he beginning to long once more for the plain this book’s wish to be read like a
meant that Pope buffed a class- polished life of a closed coupling. Her nineteenth-century novel—a story in
the tiny standard-issue wrench that stratified society until it was squeaky new girlfriend has another girlfriend which love, “above all things,” serves as
torqued
the socket of the bolt, drawing the
particleboard

flush against the rails. The hundred

SPRING BOOKS FROM THE NEW PRESS
screws. (THAT THE RIGHT WING DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ)
The greasy crossbar with its queues

of stapled slats. The wooden dowels,

Which had seemed too large to fit
their holes,

that gently she’d forced in. The

plastic pegs.
The vinyl footboard, trussed
between the legs.

There are seven couplets here, or four-

teen lines, making this a Clare son-
net, after the English Romantic poet
John Clare. Clare’s own sonnets use
heroic couplets with a tight, almost
punishingly regular iambic pentam-
eter. His couplets are usually closed, “A well-researched, impactful “An impassioned critique of
:lah\dbg`%a^Zkm&k^g]bg`
so that each line seems to present a account of the inequities in K^in[eb\ZglmZm^h_Û\bZel_hkma^ report from the front lines of the
complete thought. Millner favors open the legal justice system.” harm they cause their most Covid-19 pandemic in China.”
over closed couplets, running each line —Library Journal (starred review) vulnerable residents.”—Kirkus Reviews —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
into the next so that if you imposed
a colloquial rhythm over the under-
tow of her prosody, Couplets could al-
most sound like someone talking. Both
poets get a kick out of lacing orthodox
“With lucid,
forms with socially specific vernacu-
“An ambitious compelling prose,
lars. For Clare it’s a regional peasant
and frequently Sommers challenges
dialect (“proggle” for poke, “crumpt”
disturbing history. . . . the reductive,
for crunched, “mare blobs” for mari-
A forceful critique
golds), for Millner the glossary of un- conventional
of the roots of
derpaid adjuncts and editors like her narrative around
the carceral state.”
and her girlfriend: “Ikea,” “her major,” the 1968
—Publishers Weekly
“particleboard.” rebellions in DC.”
Millner’s Clare sonnet is a sex scene —Michael Eric Dyson
doubling as an ars poetica. She’s not
the first to associate the pleasures
of literary convention with those of
sadomasochism, but she may be the
first to use mass-produced furniture
as an objective correlative for the ap-
petite to subdue both words and her
personal autonomy, “to feel the snug-
ness of the fit./To turn the lock. To
hear the little click.” When it succeeds,
the rote labor of putting one thing into
another—a dowel into a hole, a word
into a line—can furnish a space of im-
perfect beauty (squeaky slats, slant
rhymes) and improvised joy. Poetry
has its routines and so does love; even
cheating, which is the background con-
dition of this interlude, is formulaic.
Such rituals and norms, habits and
cycles can be oppressive or dull, but
they are also necessary for building
the skills that allow happiness, in sex Hg^h_ma^fhlmbgÜn^gmbZe[hhdl The foundational essay
or writing, to persist over time. Who- of the past twenty years
ever masters these, Millner suggests, thenewpress.com collection to understand the
(Chronicle of Higher Education) intellectual movement
is worth a hundred screws and then a
hundred more.

April 6, 2023 31
what Millner calls “the engine of/self- gle with verse at once comic, tender, mother?” and “What are the conse- jection rather than ordinary, everyday
knowledge.” This is certainly what love and rueful: quences of silence?” intimacy and exuberance.
does for Dorothea Brooke, as for Jane This is all to say that Bucks County A predictable question, but one
Eyre, Bathsheba Everdene, Catherine Wouldn’t you know, I slept it off. places Gabriel firmly within a late- worth asking, is whether poetry
Linton, and Elizabeth Bennet before Caught the bus in time modernist genealogy of queer poets might provide an alternative to this
them. But the Victorian fiction Cou- and writers. (There are some postmod- propulsive will toward closure. Mill-
plets most closely resembles is Eliza- to encounter a wash of junk, ern touches too. “I am not Kay Ga- ner seems to think so. In verse, she
beth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a derelict, a diva shrine. briel,” Turner insists in one letter, “but says, characters can “transform as
a long narrative poem in blank verse. Wasn’t this what I was looking for? I am the stinker holding the gun.”) And many times/as time allows,” and be-
Both are narrated by women who are yet if her thickly erotic prose para- sides, in poems “there are barely any
also poets, and both are about coming Aggro make-out sesh in a setting graphs owe something to, say, Rob- characters.” Instead they might have
to realize that, through love, we are (in ripe for genre fiction, ert Glück, they also have the raunchy speakers or speaking parts, personae,
Barrett Browning’s words) “unmade a leading man, an audience on glue vividness and buoyancy of an ancient figures, voices, acoustic effects that
from [the] common” without neces- Greek epigram: exert the pressure of a personality.
sarily being “completed to [the] un- Everything even the photographer The gamble here is that the looser,
common.” Love complicates us exactly in neon and vinyl I want to kiss before hyperbole— less purpose-driven shape of the poem
the same way it complicates everyone No rain on a Sunday and the buses that’s more than a feeling. In June might limn adult sexuality as it really
else. That’s not a defect, but neither free I backed my boyfriend into a rail is—messy, unfinished, a work forever
is it an advantage. yard, piled his cock out of his in progress—while also acknowledging
Aurora Leigh ends the way many I am corrupt and going finally jeans and jerked him off between that there really is nothing “outside”
novels of its time do, with its hero- to bed in an unprecedented way the freight cars, on a bed of shale. form, that relationships, like works of
ine winding up with a man she once as if I said I love you! I guess I don’t really know from art, settle often very quickly into the
rejected but to whom she’s circled rocks, or decency. . . . We tight- patterns that make them legible and
back, Odysseus-like. This is not the Gabriel does not so much cite other ened in on each other, flush in sustainable. “I broke up with lineation,”
way of Couplets. Instead we get the poets as quietly tune into and out of case a window we couldn’t see brags the compulsively lyrical Turner,
cautious but ultimately triumphant their distinctive tones and prosodic cut through the canopy behind us. but wait: “that’s a lie.”
realization of “I am my own husband,” textures. It’s allusion as flirtation, tak- Did I mention the L train going O’Hara famously described the style
a sly wink at the opening sentence of ing someone else’s words and manner by, or the cemetery behind it? We of his poems (or, at least, of some of
the last chapter of Jane Eyre: “Reader, and testing them in your own mouth, stopped close enough to see the them) as “I do this I do that”: “It’s my
I married him.” Here there is no hus- to see how you like them. Like flirt- graveside decorations, pink and lunch hour, so I go/for a walk among
band, no wife, no partner, no other, ing, mimicry always lies close to ridi- plastic, and then his cock stood the hum-colored/cabs,” or “It is 12:20
only a woman who declares that she cule, but when Gabriel decides, as she over the hem of his clothes plump in New York a Friday/three days after
is “bonded/to myself by my author- does here, to sound like Frank O’Hara, and upright like a water tower. . . . Bastille day, yes/it is 1959 and I go get
ity alone./No one beside me. No one the impersonation is generous and af- Through an eyes-closed kiss I felt a shoeshine . . .” This deceptively mod-
on the phone.” The poem concludes, fectionate. The first line of the poem his blood pulse through the head est mode, which packs a great deal of
tellingly, with a couplet that is both above recalls O’Hara’s “Essay on Style” of his cock, as if, had he climaxed complexity and paradox into a very
open and notched with a deliberately (1961), which begins: right then, that’s the fluid that small frame, is also Gabriel’s. “Men
unsatisfying slant rhyme (“foot in/. . . would’ve slathered us both. buy me things,” she writes; “I return
looking”), as if Millner really were say- Someone else’s Leica sitting on them for the cash.” Or elsewhere: “I’ll
ing good-bye to all that: fixed form, the table The passage begins by undercutting die with heaps of laundry/mildewed in
euphony, the frenzied and unthinking the black kitchen table I am erudition and sentiment (“I want to crummy weather./In this poem I do it
urge to promise someone else your painting kiss before hyperbole”) with a pop- twice . . .” For her, dailiness and its ritu-
life. the floor yellow, Bill is painting it culture reference to the song “More als—work, sex, chores, commutes, naps,
wouldn’t you know my mother Than a Feeling,” a staple of classic-rock writing—expose the indignities of a
would call radio by the 1970s arena band Boston life shared with slumlords and trans-

“I n order to write about the ten-

derness of love,” Vladimir Ma-
yakovsky advised in his 1926 essay
up
and complain?
and a perfect exemplum of straight
American taste. This drollery then tilts,
unexpectedly, into a romantic urban
phobes, but also the joys of constancy,
or the faithful labor of keeping friend-
ship, lust, one’s self, and one’s art alive.
How Are Verses Made?, “take the bus Gabriel borrows O’Hara’s “wouldn’t you pastoral, with beds of shale instead of Naming friends and correspondents
No. 7 from the Lubyansky Square to know” and, via the metonym of “the green rolling grass. It’s a sweet, sexy in turn, Turner assures Kay that Ste-
Nogin Square. The appalling jolting photographer,” his Leica. Meanwhile scene, but it’s also laced with the real phen, Jo, Connie, and Niel—like “the
will serve to throw into relief for you, “I love you” is one of O’Hara’s favor- fear of being noticed. There’s always bourgeois O’Hara” and “Nick Cage in
better than anything else, the charm ite phrases. (Off the top of my head, the possibility that someone leaning Moonstruck”—“are not the opposite
of a life transformed.” The reader of I can’t think of a poet who uses it as out that undetected window might of a good time,”
Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Bucks County often or as well.) It appears memora- decide to meet this couple, and this
often confronts the tenderness of love bly, not once but twice in succession, coupling, with violence. Like the grave- no more than intimate addressees
as well as the menacing shadow of its in his great poem “Mayakovsky,” whose yard in the background and the fantasy no more than minor personality
absence. She also finds herself on a lot “thick” liquids and sad rain, maudlin of an ejaculation made of blood, that no more than an impressive
of public transportation, on the move questions (“Mother, mother/who am threat grips Gabriel’s prose with an paunch
between Brooklyn, Queens, and vari- I?”), and achingly goofy exclamation underlying anxiety, contracting around no more than months of back pay
ous towns in “a sullen Jersey.” “Dear points Gabriel draws into her own it as the lovers are “tightened in on (credit)
Kay,” the book begins, “I’m writing lines. And then there is her final tercet, each other.” To kiss with closed eyes no more than land and water
you perpetually in transit, shuffling in which archness and vulnerability in an inhospitable world is always a no more than sleepless want
somewhere, en plein air, a lollipop on form a carapace around the poet, clos- risk, one it is hard to take and harder
SEPTA .” ing her (as O’Hara puts it) like a fist. still to live without. “Not the opposite of a good time” is
This “I” is a character named Turner, hardly utopia. Nonetheless, the phrase
“a persona in a bag” who is and is not names a refuge of shared pleasure in
the book’s author, and whose days are
structured by the relentless naviga-
tion of promise and threat. Sometimes
S imilar moments are threaded
throughout Bucks County. In Ga-
briel’s “All I’ve got is men, poems,
I n a recent essay in The Yale Review,
Gabriel writes pointedly of the ways
that realist novels about trans people
straitened circumstances, points of
contact that stretch a luminous net
over the void.
Turner gets lucky, sleeping on the ride work, rent, disgust and transit” there “use narrative form to secure and en- “This thing,” Turner declares, “is
home if the conductor doesn’t ask for a is a reply to Eileen Myles saying, in force expectations about the limited multiform, contingent, ambivalent,
ticket. Yet vigilance is always required: Chelsea Girls, “If I wasn’t either” drunk scope and trajectory of trans lives.” and I call her my sex. Even if I make
“A couple days ago en route to the or in love, “I simply needed my rent, Because realism favors linear models choices I still like everything.” Bucks
Sterling St. 2/5 some teens said fag- cigarettes, and coffee, simple enough. I of plot and character—people start County imagines desire as a constant,
got very loud. You know what I mean really liked the life of the poet.” A por- out single and end up married, become not a crisis, but it is a constant that
when I say they’re not wrong,” Turner tion of the book is written as a series older and wiser, settle down, grow up, is flexible and porous, with a poetics
adds, “a white queer in Flatbush is a of prompts—“1. What teenaged mis- and generally acclimate themselves to to match. Its formal omnivorousness
walking icon of rent going up.” take do you intend to repeat?”; “3. Tell what once seemed insupportable—it makes it by turns friendly and rebar-
Like Couplets, A Queen in Bucks me an origin story involving first writ- also tends to make covert moral claims bative, breezy and firm, offering a
County is a narrative poem that flips ten then visual pornography”—that about what kinds of lives are good and solid reminder that the most hereti-
between prose sequences and lyric might recall the questionnaire Jack what kinds of people deserve to live cal attitudes toward form often give
interludes, though it balances them Spicer developed as part of his 1957 them. To the extent that “trans real- the strongest evidence of what it can
differently. Most of the book is epis- workshop called “Poetry as Magic,” or ism” treats “being trans as a matter of do. If form is a figure for the ways we

.
tolary, composed as a series of letters, maybe Bhanu Kapil’s 2001 collection solitary events endured alone rather are bound, always, to the demand to
in prose, to Turner’s friends Stephen, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, than a form of social life that a lot of make sense to others, it is also a means
Connie, Niel, Jo, and (more trickily) in which the reader is asked, “Who was people experience and enjoy together,” by which we unravel, exultantly, from
Kay. These alternate and intermin- responsible for the suffering of your it produces stories of isolation and ab- ourselves.

32 The New York Review

 Putin’s Folly
Amy Knight

Invasion: sumptions that appear never to

The Inside Story of have been challenged.
Russia’s Bloody War
and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival Among those assumptions was that
by Luke Harding. there were sufficient Russian troops
Vintage, 312 pp., $18.00 (paper) to achieve the ambitious multipronged
attack and that these forces, trained
Luke Harding, a journalist for The for defensive military operations,
Guardian who spent several years as would be capable of implementing
a correspondent in Moscow before a large-scale offensive mission. Be-
being expelled in 2011, was in Kyiv the cause of poor planning and a short-
night before Russia invaded Ukraine age of skilled, motivated infantry,
on February 24, 2022, having dinner the Russians suffered heavy losses of
at the home of the famous Ukrainian equipment. They also had logistical
novelist Andrey Kurkov. While the difficulties, including bottlenecks in
guests enjoyed borscht and honey conveying fuel and munitions to front-
vodka, Harding recalls in his book line troops, and because of a paucity of
Invasion, Kurkov passed around files secure communications, they had prob-
from the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret lems coordinating their attacks. When
police, that he had used for his latest Russian soldiers resorted to using ci-
novel. The papers, which included in- vilian cell phones, their units became
terrogation records, covered 1917 to vulnerable to targeting by Ukrainian
1921, when the Red Army had invaded artillery.
the recently independent Ukraine and Another problem was the Russian
incorporated it into Lenin’s newly cre- susceptibility to battlefield decep-
ated Union of Soviet Socialist Repub- tion because of flaws in its command-
lics. Harding describes Kurkov as an A Ukrainian military vehicle firing at Russian positions near Kharkiv, February 25, 2023 and-communication structure: false
“optimist” but says that he himself Ukrainian signals traffic led to waste
felt “increasingly gloomy”: “Was his- “special military operation” to “demil- parity with the conventional forces of of munitions and loss of Russian air-
tory repeating itself a century later, itarize and denazify” Ukraine, it was the United States. craft. Thanks to Ukraine’s powerful air
with Moscow once more snuffing out clear that the intention was to over- It was not long before Putin’s blitz- defense—strengthened with Western
Ukraine’s independence with another throw the government in Kyiv and oc- krieg against Ukraine turned into a aid—Russia, which entered the con-
invasion?” cupy the country. The main enemy, of series of military failures. The Russian flict with insufficiently trained pilots,
Harding had good reason for gloom. course, was the morally bankrupt West, army was unsuccessful in its efforts to was unable to achieve air dominance
Russia had amassed 190,000 troops which, according to Putin, responded capture Kyiv, and in early April began over Ukraine.
along Ukraine’s borders, and the to Russian efforts to reach agreement to scale back operations in Kyiv’s sur-
White House had been warning of with nato on security issues with “cyn- rounding areas after Ukraine’s recap-
an imminent Russian invasion for
well over a week. Just two days ear-
lier, on February 21, Vladimir Putin
ical lies” and “blackmail.” As Harding
notes, Putin had long resented nato’s
encroachment into Russia’s neighbor-
ture of Bucha, Irpin, and Hostomel.
Russia then “redefined” its war aims
and focused on consolidating control
A s Harding points out, the Krem-
lin’s underestimation of Volody-
myr Zelensky’s leadership qualities
had called a televised meeting of his hood—most notably the inclusion of in Luhansk and Donetsk. In mid-April was another serious error. In fact, it
security council to have the members the Baltic states and countries of the the Russian military suffered a huge came as a surprise to many when Ze-
endorse—some with obvious reluc- former Soviet bloc into the nato alli- setback when the Ukrainians sank the lensky, a forty-four-year-old former
tance—his decision to recognize the ance—and now “wanted nothing less Moskva, the flagship of its Black Sea comedian with a public approval rating
independence of the Donetsk and Lu- than a new world order.” fleet. In May Russian forces finally of 25 percent, emerged as a power-
hansk regions of Ukraine (the Donbas), took control of Mariupol, a strategi- ful wartime president whose courage
which paved the way for sending in cally important southeastern city that and communication skills inspired his
Russian troops.
On the way back to his hotel, Har-
ding received a phone call confirm-
A ccording to a report by the UK’s
Royal United Services Institute
(rusi), Putin’s plans for the invasion
had been under siege since February.
But that same month Moscow with-
drew its forces from around Ukraine’s
people to ferociously resist the in-
vading Russians. Zelensky also used
his oratorical skills to win over nato
ing his fears from a contact who had were drawn up in great secrecy by a second-largest city, Kharkiv, which its governments, giving brilliant, rous-
served in Ukraine’s foreign minis- very small group, which included Rus- troops had been trying to seize since ing speeches (remotely) to countless
try. Russia would begin an invasion sian defense minister Sergei Shoigu; the beginning of the invasion, and by democratic assemblies, including the
of Ukraine in the early hours of the Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general September most of the Kharkiv area British House of Commons and the US
morning. At 4:30 AM Harding awoke staff of the Russian military; and a few was back in Ukrainian hands. Russia’s Congress, where a few members were
to the sound of explosions and alarms officials from the Federal Security Ser- humiliating retreat from the city of moved to tears.
across Kyiv. The Russian onslaught vice (FSB ) and the presidential admin- Kherson, which its forces had seized By April the Biden administration
had begun. “Russia’s invasion would istration. The military-strategic tasks in March, came in November. had allocated $33 billion for the de-
become the largest armed conflict on were as follows: destroy Ukraine’s air, Putin’s announcement of a conscrip- fense of Ukraine. Other nato countries
European territory since 1945,” Har- maritime, and air defense forces; de- tion of 300,000 soldiers in Septem- made hefty contributions of aid and
ding writes, “an attempt by one nation feat Ukrainian ground forces by con- ber and his increasing dependence armaments, and joined the US in im-
to devour another.” taining them in the Donbas (where on the notoriously brutal paramil- posing crippling economic sanctions
The initiator of this conflict, Putin, they were concentrated); eliminate itary forces of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s against Russia, including Russian en-
had made his intentions for Ukraine Ukraine’s political and military lead- Wagner Group—consisting mainly terprises and members of the coun-
clear in a seven-thousand-word essay, ership; and occupy Ukrainian centers of convicts—and Chechen president try’s government and business elite.
“On the Historical Unity of Russians of political and economic power. Ramzan Kadyrov’s battalions were In addition to energizing nato, the
and Ukrainians,” published in July The rusi report notes that a spe- clear demonstrations of the failure of Kremlin’s military aggression inspired
2021. “I am confident that true sov- cial directorate created within the FSB his “special military operation.” The Russia’s Nordic neighbors Sweden and
ereignty of Ukraine is possible only in in July 2021 to plan for the invasion reasons for this failure are many. Ac- Finland to announce plans to join the
partnership with Russia,” Putin wrote. had conducted surveys that painted cording to the rusi report: alliance. (At the beginning of last Feb-
“Together we have always been and a picture of a politically apathetic ruary, 44 percent of Finns supported
will be many times stronger and more Ukrainian populace, unlikely to put Russian military personnel—even joining nato. By May, that had grown
successful. For we are one people.” He up much resistance to Russian occu- up to deputy heads of branches to 76 percent.)1
also described an “anti-Russian proj- piers. Meanwhile the Russian military within the Russian General Staff— Harding writes that
VADIM G HI RDA/AP IM AGE S

ect” sponsored by the West in Ukraine, leadership, in particular Gerasimov, were unaware of the intention to
and made a point of saying, “We will had assured the planners that after invade and occupy Ukraine until Putin’s gravest mistake in the
never allow our historical territories more than a decade of modernization, days before the invasion, and tac- spring of 2022 was to misread the
and people close to us living there to Russian forces were sure to defeat the tical military units did not receive
be used against Russia.” Ukrainians on the battlefield. Gera- orders until hours before they en- 1
For more on Finland’s response to the in-
When Putin announced in a tele- simov had even told his counterparts tered Ukraine. . . . The tiny pool of vasion, see Gordon F. Sander, “Finland’s
vised address on February 24 that in the British defense establishment personnel involved [in planning] Turn to the West,” The New York Review,
Russian troops were carrying out a that the Russian military had achieved contributed to a range of false as- March 9, 2023.

April 6, 2023 33
 unyielding mood of the Ukrainian ers’ expense. Navalny’s researchers his fear of Covid,2 Putin might have who was forced to flee Russia in 2021,
people. . . . It was a remarkable also discovered that General Sergei been looking even further back in his- captured the irony of Russia’s isolation
failure for a man who considered Surovikin, recently demoted from his tory, to early August 1999, when Boris when she tweeted a photo of Russian
himself to be a superb intelligence post as commander of Russian forces Yeltsin announced that Putin was not foreign minister Sergei Lavrov seated
professional. in Ukraine, was the beneficiary of lu- only his new prime minister but also casually at an outdoor patio table, with
crative financial deals involving the his designated successor as presi- the following comment:
Indeed, Putin should have known bet- businessman Gennady Timchenko, a dent. As the Russian human rights
ter than to accept the FSB ’s predic- close friend of Putin’s. Timchenko’s activist Sergei Kovalev observed in Lavrov has an iPhone, and is wear-
tions that Ukrainians would greet his company was mining phosphates in these pages, Yeltsin’s announcement ing an Apple watch and a T-shirt
troops with open arms. He had been Syria when Surovikin was in charge was greeted with widespread ridicule: with the name of American artist
closely monitoring Ukrainian politics of Russia’s brutal campaign there (for “Putin, a man with a professionally Jean-Michel Basquiat on the front.
for years, motivated by his concern which he became known as “General nondescript face, previously the di- And they call me a foreign agent?
about the dangers of democracy spill- Armageddon”). rector of the FSB (the KGB ’s successor What happened to Putin’s import
ing over to his country. The power of organization), was virtually unknown substitution?
Ukrainian democratic forces, in large to the public at large.”3 Putin had little
part directed against Moscow’s in-
fluence, was on full display during
the Orange Revolution of late 2004,
I t seems that Putin was so driven by
his mission of subjugating Ukraine
and thereby ensuring his place in his-
chance of defeating the experienced
politicians who would be candidates in
the scheduled 2000 presidential race,
Sobol was alluding to Russia’s for-
eign agent law, which was recently
expanded to require anyone “under
which was ignited by election fraud. tory as a great leader that he chose and Yeltsin was so unpopular that his pressure or influence from foreign ac-
Similarly, when Ukrainians took to the to ignore reality. He turned seventy endorsement was a drawback. Kova- tors” to register as a “foreign agent,”
streets during the 2014 Maidan protests last October, and the 2024 presiden- lev concluded that “the only way Putin and to the Kremlin’s vigorous promo-
against the government of Viktor Yanu- tial elections, though two years away, could manage a political victory over tion of “import substitution,” intended
kovych, a Moscow ally, the widespread were already causing speculation about his Moscow competitors was to achieve to reduce Russians’ dependency on the
anti-Russian sentiment was apparent. whether he would run again. He had a military triumph.” foreign-made products that are be-
Putin must have been aware that his recently declined to say what his plans Putin did just that. Following a se- coming increasingly scarce.
generals had been siphoning off funds were because “it would make the [po- ries of terrorist attacks in Russia in
from the military budget for their own litical] situation unstable.” Putin’s ap- September 1999—which were falsely
enrichment. Since his appointment
as minister of defense in 2012, Ser-
gei Shoigu has presided over a sup-
proval rating at the end of 2021 was
at 65 percent, which is on the low side
for him, and Russian living standards
blamed on Chechens, although over-
whelming evidence points to the
FSB —Putin launched a brutal war in
W riting in Foreign Affairs after
Russia’s retreat from Kherson
in November, Tatiana Stanovaya, a
posedly sweeping program of military were declining. His rating had been Chechnya that devastated the small scholar at the Carnegie Endowment
modernization, costing the Kremlin similar in early 2014, but after Russia Muslim republic, killing tens of thou- for International Peace, portrayed a
billions of dollars, but—as shown by invaded Crimea in February–March of sands. By late November 1999 Putin’s divided political elite in Moscow. So-
the Ukraine campaign—with unim- that year his popularity soared, and popularity had soared, and his path to called realists are increasingly ques-
pressive results. In the meantime, ac- by June 2014 his approval rating had the presidency was assured. tioning the invasion, because they
cording to the investigative team of reached 86 percent. The message was The Russian journalist Andrei Koles- don’t think Russia has the resources
Alexei Navalny, Shoigu, who regularly clear: Russians rally around a force- nikov has described the similarities be- to win. Some are even wondering if
accompanies Putin on Siberian fishing ful leader who affirms their country’s tween Stalin toward the end of his life Putin is fit to continue as the Krem-
and hunting trips, acquired a lavish greatness with military aggression. and today’s Putin, both men securely in lin’s leader. The ultranationalist
mansion outside Moscow, valued at Putin may have decided it was time power after establishing ruthless dic- hawks, on the other hand, are push-
$18 million, and once flew a group of to recreate the “Crimea effect.” tatorships. “As with the Soviet Union ing for complete victory, calling for a
generals to the Seychelles for a costly Isolated at his Novo-Ogaryovo res- under Stalin, one gets the impression full mobilization of eligible Russians
fishing vacation at Russian taxpay- idence outside Moscow because of that Russia today has no alternative and possibly a deployment of nuclear
to Putin,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. weapons in a fight to the bitter end.
“This means that there is no alternate But, Stanovaya said, the radical
path to anything he says or does: it hawks dominate the public discourse,
seems that it is useless to oppose and even the realists are not pre-
him.” But Stalin was in a strong posi- pared to support a peace that would
James Gilligan & David A.J. Richards tion because he had presided over the
Soviet Union’s victory against German
entail Russia’s losing the territory it
has gained since the invasion began.
FEATURING invaders; Putin ordered an invasion of A humiliating Russian defeat would
a country that posed no military threat, threaten their political futures—given
and Russia is losing the conflict. Also, that Putin has enlisted all of them,
Stalin was surrounded by slavishly loyal whatever their doubts, into the war ef-
subordinates, who had little better to fort—and possibly result in war crimes
do than spend late nights at their mas- charges for some members of his rul-
ter’s dacha getting drunk. ing circle. She concluded, “The coun-
The members of Putin’s elite, long try’s elites will not dare turn against
accustomed to Western pleasures, are Russian President Vladimir Putin. For
a different breed. One wonders how all his failures, Russia’s leader remains
they feel about being ostracized by the their best bet for preserving the re-
West and told by their leader that gime that keeps them safe.”
they are better off living in a country Stanovaya is probably right. But this
that is being cleansed of the Western does not rule out the emergence of dis-
contagion of homosexuality, decadent sent at lower levels in the government,
anti-Christian morals, and Hermès even in the military, whose officers
scarves. Harsh sanctions imposed by were forced into a conflict for which
the West against Putin’s elite mean they were ill-equipped. It is also pos-
no more Swiss boarding schools for sible that, if Russia loses more ground
their children and grandchildren, no in Ukraine or fails to achieve a decisive
more Paris shopping trips for their victory in the next few months, Putin
wives and mistresses, and no more and his team will face serious public

AudioBook Available Now! sunbathing on the French Riviera.

Those whose financial assets abroad
discontent. The Russian independent
news website Meduza reported in late
have been frozen could eventually see November on the results of an opinion
their money used for war reparations. poll commissioned for internal use by
FEATURING John Douglas Thompson whom The New York Times
Lyubov Sobol, a former lawyer for Russia’s Federal Guard Service show-
called “perhaps the greatest Shakespeare interpreter in contemporary Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation ing that 55 percent of Russians favored
theater,” Nigel Gore, and Tod Randolph, this tour de force audio negotiations with Ukraine, and only
production belongs in the listening library of everyone who loves 2
25 percent supported a continuation
Putin’s fear of getting Covid bordered on
Shakespeare and is curious about what causes and what prevents of the war. Back in July the numbers
the irrational. Before his annual press con-
were reversed: only 32 percent wanted
violence in the contemporary world. ference on December 23, 2021, the Krem-
negotiations, and 55 percent favored
lin spent close to $20,000 on disinfection
continuing hostilities.
booths, where members of the press were
GilliganRichards.com sprayed with antibacterial silver particles
Similar polls conducted at the end
of February by the Levada Center, an
and given special protective masks.
independent Russian polling agency,
3
“Putin’s War,” February 10, 2000. show the percentage of those favoring

34 The New York Review

peace negotiations declining slightly lensky is adamant that a peace deal tems (HIMARS ) to strike a military gar- country as the guy who is responsible
since October, but still at 50 percent. must require Russia to relinquish not rison in the Russian-occupied town for what is going on.”
According to the center’s director, only the area it has seized since Feb- of Makiivka on New Year’s Day, re- On New Year’s Eve twenty-three
Denis Volkov, it was Putin’s Septem- ruary 2022 but all Ukrainian territory portedly killing hundreds of Russian years ago, Russia was also at war, in
ber mobilization decree that caused that has been occupied by Russia or servicemen, Girkin and other pro-war Chechnya. Putin gave his first address
the shift in the public’s mood. This is its proxies since 2014, including parts military bloggers were scathingly criti- as acting president and then flew, on
probably why Putin, in his February 21 of the Donbas and Crimea. cal of military commanders for storing January 1, 2000, to Chechnya to visit
address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, As for Putin, he announced in ammunition in the same building that Russian soldiers. He was accompa-
did not announce a further mobiliza- September that the four regions of housed troops. And Prigozhin, anx- nied by then FSB chief Nikolai Patru-
tion of troops to serve in Ukraine. Ukraine that Russia “annexed” and ious to prove his worth to Putin, has shev, who, as head of Russia’s security
The war in Ukraine needs to end. that his troops partly occupy (Donetsk, been claiming that his Wagner Group, council, remains one of Putin’s clos-
No one doubts that, and some foreign Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia) which captured the city of Soledar in est advisers. Not much has changed.
policy experts have urged the Biden will belong to Russia permanently, and mid-January, is superior to the regu- Russia’s military strategy in Chechnya
administration to push for a negoti- he has demanded that Ukraine recog- lar military. was similar to that in Ukraine: demol-
ated peace. They acknowledge that jus- nize Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea “So, who’s in charge?” the retired ish urban areas while terrorizing the
tice for Ukraine means that Russia as part of any peace agreement. Mos- lieutenant general Ben Hodges, who inhabitants. Then, it succeeded; by
should withdraw completely, given the cow also wants legally binding guaran- commanded US Army forces in Eu- May 2000 Russian forces had control
devastation it has wrought there, but tees that Ukraine will not join nato, rope from 2014 and 2017, wondered of the breakaway republic, although
there is little guarantee, they say, that which Kyiv would never agree to. aloud in January, noting that Prigo- the Chechen insurgency continued
a continued conflict would achieve that zhin doesn’t take orders from Russia’s for years.
end, and if the war continues Russia generals. “They don’t have a coherent In Ukraine, however, Russia faces
might gain more territory or use nu-
clear weapons. So better to put a stop
to the bloodshed and destruction by
P utin, yet again, seems to be un-
derestimating his adversary. In
early December, responding to Rus-
plan. They really, fortunately, have still
not learned and fixed all the institu-
tional flaws that they showed back in
a far greater challenge—an oppo-
nent armed by the West with ad-
vanced weapons (another US packet
pressuring Ukraine to give up its de- sia’s extensive missile attacks against February, March.” of $2 billion for military aid was an-
mands for a full Russian retreat and Ukraine’s infrastructure, Ukraine used The criticism has thus far not been nounced in February, and other West-
come to the negotiating table. The low-flying Soviet-era drones to strike directed at Putin. When Putin gave ern governments have scaled up their
punishment Russia has suffered be- two air bases deep inside Russia. For his annual New Year’s Eve address, a support) and with an unwaveringly
cause of its invasion—close to 200,000 the first time in the conflict, Russian group of Russian troops was shown resilient population.4 As Harding ob-
casualties, a depletion of its military territory was under attack. Mean- behind him—a clear message that the serves of Ukraine, it is “one of his-
armaments, economic decline, and while, on December 6 Igor Girkin, a country is at war, not just conducting tory’s survivors: of two world wars,
crippling Western sanctions—would former Russian military commander a special military operation, and that Stalin’s famine, the Great Terror,
be lesson enough to the Kremlin that and a hard-line critic of Moscow’s war he is leading the effort. But as the and the Chornobyl explosion.” To be
further military aggression against leadership, wrote on Telegram after leader encourages his people to sup- sure, the Russian war machine is more
Ukraine or other countries along its visiting Russian troops in the Don- port their country’s soldiers, he will than capable of a sustained military

.
western border would be folly. bas that they were “fighting by iner- increasingly be blamed for mounting engagement with Ukraine. The crucial
But Biden and most of his fellow tia,” with no idea of Russia’s strategic Russian casualties. Putin could face a question is how long Putin can sur-
nato leaders believe, with good reason, goals. Ukraine’s troops, Girkin added, public backlash. vive as the Kremlin’s leader without a
that allowing Moscow to emerge from were much better motivated and, after In early January the Russian opposi- victory.
the conflict with any military gains their autumn victories, “will only fight tion democrat Vladimir Milov, Putin’s
would embolden Putin to threaten more fiercely and more stubbornly.” former deputy minister of energy, ob- 4
See Timothy Garton Ash’s account of na-
Russia’s western neighbors with ad- When Ukraine used US-supplied served, “We are just a few steps away tional solidarity, “Ukraine in Our Future,”
ditional armed incursions. And Ze- High Mobility Artillery Rocket Sys- from Putin being named across the The New York Review, February 23, 2023.

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April 6, 2023 35
 Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire
Darryl Pinckney

Black and Female of the native to accept his dependence.

by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Descriptions of a desperately hoped-
Graywolf, 158 pp., $23.00 for paternal relationship between the
white man and the black man were
Nervous Conditions a familiar feature of white writings
by Tsitsi Dangarembga. about Africa. Wright was looking for
Graywolf, 298 pp., $16.00 (paper) explanations of what happened to the
personalities of both conquerors and
The Book of Not indigenous people in their confronta-
by Tsitsi Dangarembga. tions. He was gripped by Mannoni’s
Graywolf, 302 pp., $16.00 (paper) “Prospero complex”: the proposition
that the history of European colonial-
This Mournable Body ism since the fifteenth century was
by Tsitsi Dangarembga. a saga of unconscious, impatient, re-
Graywolf, 284 pp., $16.00 (paper) pressed, often sexual desires that re-
vealed more about where such people
The mental derangement of colonial- came from than about the places they
ism was Doris Lessing’s first subject. invaded. However, Frantz Fanon, while
In her early stories, set in Southern using Mannoni’s research, was never-
Rhodesia, where she grew up nearly theless scathing about him in Black
a century ago, racism is learned be- Skin, White Masks (1952): “It is utopian
havior. The white child is taught to to try to ascertain in what ways one
take black people for granted. They kind of inhuman behavior differs from
are as remote as rocks. Except that another kind of inhuman behavior.”
they aren’t. As white children become The first examinations in fiction in
socially conscious, white mothers rush English of Rhodesian colonial society
to keep them from playing with black from a black point of view were his-
children. For a white youth to accept torical novels such as Stanlake Sam-
the brutal hypocrisies of the way kange’s On Trial for My Country, which
things are is a rite of passage. White was published in 1966, the year the
people let their dogs chase a black man black nationalist guerrilla war against
down the road or up a tree. The black the white supremacist regime began.
man is to be laughed at, his English, Thirteen years of fighting ended in a
his wives, his labor. But, Lessing notes, negotiated peace in 1979 that estab-
it is the laughter of fear. The arrogance lished a black-majority democracy. A
of white people says that black people few Zimbabwean writers who pub-
are dangerous. lished abroad had become known to
The question of who owns Rhode- an English-speaking audience.
sia is present in the dignity of an old For example, Dambudzo Marechera,
black chief, the stubborn resistance of who died in 1987 at the age of thirty-
a house servant, or the sheer sullen- Tsitsi Dangarembga; illustration by Johnalynn Holland five, wanted release from the imper-
ness of a work crew, people turned into atives of protest. His collection of
migrants in their own country. If an- authority over the workers when her nent black characters do not figure in experimental stories, The House of
gered, they could set fire to your house. husband is suffering from malaria her semiautobiographical novels set Hunger (1978), and his stream- of-
Lessing’s Rhodesia is bush farmland, brings her to violence. in Salisbury, Rhodesia, and published consciousness novel, Black Sunlight
acres rewarded to discharged soldiers, They engage as their “houseboy” a in the 1950s and early 1960s. (1980), attack African identity when
promises made to the urban overflow muscular black man she had struck used as an element of coercion by au-
back in British cities. The word veld, with a sjambok two years before. One thoritarian regimes. Black Sunlight
one white girl observes, is not in the
books she reads; the oaks she’s never
seen are more familiar to her than
morning she happens upon him naked.
“A white person may look at a native,
who is no better than a dog.” The evi-
T he white people drawn to the co-
lonial enterprise were the dis-
possessed and embittered of Europe,
was banned by Robert Mugabe’s new
Zimbabwean government because of
its “Euromodernism.” Chenjerai Hove,
the trees of her surroundings. In Les- dence of what grows between them is Octave Mannoni speculates in Pros- born in 1956, drew on his Shona heri-
sing’s stories, colonial wives are baking accidentally revealed by her tone when pero and Caliban: The Psychology of tage for his allegorical novels, such as
scones in a rage at eleven o’clock at she addresses the houseboy in front Colonization (1950). A French psycho- Bones (1988), about the sufferings of
night or confined to a sickbed filthy of other white people, and by the ma- analyst and former colonial official in the black peasantry during the war for
with disappointment. Lessing’s women levolent look he returns to white men: Madagascar, he offered the theory that liberation. He was critical of the black
have dreams of thatched homesteads colonized countries were similar to state as well as the colonial legacy and
and are unprepared for the reality of a “White civilization”. . . will never, the archetypical desert island, and the died in Norway in 2015, having been
mud hut. White failure is contagious, never admit that a white person, “native” was both Friday and the can- driven into exile by Mugabe in 2001.
a threat to the colonial order. It’s one and most particularly, a white nibals. Mannoni viewed the European
thing for black people to live too well, woman, can have a relationship, colonial in psychoanalytic terms, as
but another for them to see a white
man living worse off than they are.
Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is
whether for good or for evil, with
a black person. For once it admits
that, it crashes, and nothing can
someone manifesting infantile com-
plexes not resolved in adolescence
and lacking awareness of a world in
T sitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Con-
ditions (1988) was the first novel
in English published by a Zimbabwean
Singing (1950), is a relentless chronicle save it. which there were others who must be woman. Born in Southern Rhodesia
of human disaster. Every character, respected. Caliban wasn’t resented for in 1959, Dangarembga, a playwright,
black or white, is someone that it’s too In The Grass Is Singing, Lessing his appearance but for claiming to be filmmaker, and former Cambridge Uni-
bad another character has met. A mis- moves away from what she called her a person in his own right. The dam- versity medical student, seems to have
matched white couple inept at farming social stories into psychological real- aged, neurotic European knew that the reached around any black male pre-
sinks into humiliating poverty. They ism. She respectfully avoids getting psychological situation of being else- decessors in Zimbabwean fiction in
are from South Africa, just over the inside her black character’s head, but where favored him. He could act out, order to let Doris Lessing know why
border. They know little about Cecil the sexually liberating power of the compensate, be what he had not been she kept her waiting.
Rhodes, but they consider themselves black body for trapped white people back home. The psychological satis- “The first wound for all of us who
English, which is essential to their set- was already a well-established motif factions of domination were a more are classified as ‘black’ is empire,”
tler psychology. Race is the equivalent of literary modernism. What is origi- dangerous motive than profit. Dangarembga declares in Black and
of class. The miserable wife has no ex- nal about Lessing’s portrait of colonial Richard Wright approved of white Female, her collection of three es-
perience of black people or country Rhodesia is that every white in it is people struggling to understand them- says about the challenges she faced
life. She cannot speak to a “native” a loser. Even rich settlers are losers. selves in relation to the larger world, to become a writer. The slave trade is
without irritation. That is her terror of Lessing’s work was banned in South and in Black Power: A Record of Re- original sin. Trade is desire, a desire
black people. White farming requires Africa and Rhodesia in 1956, by which actions in a Land of Pathos (1954) he without love, and this lust, this imper-
the cheap black labor that she drives time she, a former Communist, was glossed over what Mannoni had to say sonal desire, is personally, socially, and
away; her determination to assert her a feminist living in London. Promi- about the psychological predisposition globally dangerous. The losers came

36 The New York Review

and found us wanting; how to stop She learns English quickly. “Most clusive convent school, at a time when to desist from chopping away lips, ears,
making it about them, she asks. Not of me sought order. Most of me was most Europeans liked being smiled at. noses and genitals from the bodies of
much is known about the damage to concrete and categorical.” Sin was defi- Dangarembga depicts what it is like people’s relatives by the elder siblings.”
communities from which black bodies nitely black, she is taught in the mis- to be crammed into inferior, segre- The guerrilla war had been distant at
had been stolen, she goes on to say, sion’s Sunday school. gated living spaces on a campus of first, the sounds of mortar attacks on
and she testifies for them, the “mela- Her uncle and patron, Babamukuru, luxury, barred from sports, insulted some tobacco farm or wattle plantation
nated people,” those who stayed behind likes to expound, make speeches, im- in classroom, dining hall, and corri- in the mountains beyond the school
and were offered the modesty of cloth- press, as “an early educated African, dor, humiliated, judged, patronized, gardens. There are curfews and army
ing because their own cultures were as headmaster, as husband and father, forgiven daily by teachers and staff; patrols back at the mission, but “what
deemed inadequate. Mannoni reasoned as provider to many—in positions that to cope with the destructive rivalries I was most interested in was myself
that a man as naked as the African enabled him to organise his immediate among the black girls, the deforming and what would I become.” The division
would accept a garment with joy, but world and its contents as he wished.” rivalries with the white girls, the white in contemporary African societies be-
Dangarembga, characterizing herself He has plenty of power and money, in fear of coming into direct contact with tween city and countryside, modernity
as an existential refugee, rejects it as her view, because of his education. He black skin, the anxiety of the black girls and tradition, is revised in the novel as
a vicious condition imposed on her. defied the wizard of poverty, but his that they might accidentally touch a those places where Tambudzai hides
Black and Female contains an angry nerves are bad because he is so busy. white student—it is every bit as awful out from the war—first in the convent
history of the late-nineteenth-century In 1960 he and his wife, Maiguru, were as Jane Eyre’s Lowood Institution. “I school, then in the better section of
theft of the territories that became sent to university in England and re- resorted to the usual way out of not Harare—and the homestead that she
Zimbabwe, land divided into European turned in 1965. “I was astonished the feeling anything,” reflects Tambudzai. avoids visiting because the war has
and non-European areas when it was day I found out how highly educated It is difficult to convey the emotional been there. The Book of Not has a grisly
Rhodesia and black people had no free- my aunt was.” atmosphere of The Book of Not, the de- scene of Babamukuru being savagely,
dom of movement. Her rage calls to Their daughter, Tambudzai’s cousin moralizing strife and terror and loneli- ritually beaten as revolutionary jus-
mind Jamaica Kincaid’s fury at her co- Nyasha, has come back from England ness of even the white girls. Tambudzai tice, an overflow of resentment against
lonial education in A Small Place (1988). “Anglicised.” She smokes, wears short should have won the top honor at her his good fortune all those years. The
Colonialism as trauma is Dangaremb- skirts, teaches Tambudzai about tam- graduation, but the nuns gave it to a novel even opens with Tambudzai’s
ga’s subject in her fiction, too, but there pons, meets white boys. She is glamor- cheerful white girl. “I emerged from my younger sister, a guerrilla fighter, los-
is another layer of oppression that has ous, but her classmates at the mission studies to a new dispensation.” ing a leg to a land mine. There are as
to be scraped off before Nervous Con- school do not like the way she speaks, An undistinguished sociology degree many ways to be inhuman as there are
ditions arrives at its moral about how because she sounds like she thinks she from the University of Zimbabwe leads people scarred by inhuman treatment,
Africans, in order to achieve provisional is white. When she suffers a break- Tambudzai to a job as a copywriter at Dangarembga seems to say.
membership in “Englishness,” had to down, a white psychiatrist in Salis- an advertising agency in Harare and a
become unrecognizable to themselves. bury tells her parents that a black girl room in a women’s hostel clinging to
It is a coming-of-age story about having
to contend with the authority of black
men compromised by their subservi-
cannot have psychological troubles.
White people in the novel are pe-
ripheral until, irresistibly, Tambudzai
the old standards. “Words—you could
do so much with words. You could maul
them and twist them and tear them,
T he large cast of characters in The
Book of Not—classmates, teach-
ers, work colleagues, fellow tenants,
ence to the racialized authority white is recruited by white nuns, the kind of but if you did they would not dance.” A and especially family—returns in This
men have over them. It is a black story white people who come to give, not to senior copywriter, a white man, takes Mournable Body, which finds Tam-
that cannot escape its white frame, but take. She performs brilliantly on her credit for her work. A person comes budzai more alienated from herself
the immediate conflict in the novel be- examinations. You are allowed to as- “to a point where a person was against and others than ever. Thirty years sep-
tween the social being and the inner similate if you behave, her cousin jeers. everything”: she resigns and leaves the arate the publications of This Mourn-
personality is a woman’s. But to go to the convent school is a hostel to become “a new Zimbabwean.” able Body and Nervous Conditions,
Dangarembga’s narrator, Tambudzai step toward freedom and away from But the unasked question is what kind and in the third novel, Dangarembga
Sigauke, claws her way to an education flies, disease, rags, and her parents. of future comes from a people’s “desire switches from the first person to
in rural Southern Rhodesia the 1960s. Tambudzai didn’t then believe that her
Her family in a village near the town of uncle was a “historical artefact; or that
Umtali is so poor that her father has advantage and disadvantage were pre-
no cattle for bride prices. Tambudzai’s determined.” Yet what he wanted for
father is agitated by the sight of his her stunted her critical faculties and
daughter reading, because ideas will sapped her energies.
make her unsuitable for the tasks of
“feminine living.” Her mother tells her
that when there are sacrifices to be
made, women are the ones to make
them, and she must prepare for dis-
T ambudzai’s story about feeling un-
natural and guilty forms a trilogy
of novels. Nervous Conditions was fol-
appointment. The father is proud of lowed by The Book of Not (2006) and
her brother’s English as the first step This Mournable Body (2018). Nervous
toward a position and the material Conditions is set during the emergency
emancipation of the family. Tambudzai that resulted from the white minority
is thirteen in 1968 when her brother declaring Rhodesia independent of
dies suddenly. Her uncle, the head of Britain in 1965 and the beginning of
her father’s family, lets her take his the guerrilla war a year later. Given
place at the mission school. how quickly independence had been
Tambudzai exchanges the squa- achieved in other colonies in the early
lor of her family homestead for the Sixties, Zimbabwean black national-
baked-brick house of her uncle’s mis- ist movements thought that once the
sion, where people eat with knives and people had acclaimed them as their
forks and drink tea. That the new food liberators, the minority-white regime
is interesting makes her suspicious. would crumble. The optimistic phase
“The self I expected to find on the mis- of the independence struggle coincides
sion would take some time to appear.” with Tambudzai’s awakening. There
She recalls—the story is told looking had been ominous signs; the atroci- NEW FROM
backward—her struggles to adjust and ties carried out by both sides turned
her “masochistic . . . wallowing” in her out not to be isolated events.
imagined inadequacies. Thinking of When the civil war ended and Zim-
her mother, “who suffered from being babwe became an independent na-
female and poor and uneducated and tion under black rule in 1979, “people
black so stoically,” makes her ashamed thronged the streets rejoicing so thor-
of her weakness. oughly that there was no place for re-
Dangarembga’s style is meticulous, membering the acts their hands and
an immersive realism full of a fluency their feet, and their teeth, and the fin-
of detail. “These were complex, dan- gers, boots, and mouths of their chil-
O NLI NE AT ZONEBOOKS.OR G
gerous thoughts that I was stirring dren committed,” Tambudzai recalls in
D IS TRIBUTE D BY
up, not the kind you can ponder safely The Book of Not. Dangarembga resumes P RINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
but the kind that become autonomous Tambudzai’s story in her second novel
and malignant if you let them.” As a at the point where the first novel left
narrator, Tambudzai is steely in her it, some years before independence, as
observations, never more so than when she is about to become one of the few
analyzing herself. black scholarship students at an ex-

April 6, 2023 37
the second person. Tambudzai slides seems at the end willing to surren- ditions because of its young female and four decades of black totalitarian-
downhill, from the white hostel to a der the individualized African psyche person’s subjectivity, she says. Zimba- ism. Several young Zimbabwean writers
greasy bungalow in a part of Harare that is her defense to a larger iden- bwean publishers tended to be young have emerged in this time; NoViolet
where the lawns are patchy and left- tity, though she has always been clear men educated abroad. Programmed Bulawayo, an advocate of “Writivism,”
over women and widows have a dull- about the forces that suppress the re- by “empire” to “waste themselves” in is one of the most prominent. The ques-
ness to their skin. She is trapped, on a alities of women. She accepts some “self-anaesthesia,” they had returned tion the new generation must ask, some
proud person’s starvation diet among responsibility for the women in her to Zimbabwe after independence. They of them have said, concerns the differ-
rats gnawing at soiled cotton wool. family who could not raise themselves “looked down their noses” at her work. ence between writing about Zimbabwe
Listless, dispirited, Tambudzai is or who did so on their own. Everything The government promoted a literature and writing for Zimbabwe.
getting too old to be at the start of a else she tries is a failure. But hers has that glorified the armed struggle. In- Dangarembga says that her kind of
brilliant career. A dramatic point of been a vigilant, alert, totally expressive dividual experience had no value or feminism has always pitted her against
Dangarembga’s trilogy stems from the dysfunctionality. was a problem in victory culture. The the mainstream, leaving her “othered
lunacy of Tambudzai’s faith in lacer- pressure on her not to be herself was at its fringes.” When she talks of what
ating self-improvement through ed- intense, she recalls. can make “writing back against em-
ucation in a convulsed society where
security is an illusion more cruel than
love. Only at the end does Tambudzai
B lack and Female reads like a con-
cordance to the novels. For one
thing, it emerges that Tambudzai’s
A family member burned her writ-
ing, including several plays, among
them The Lost of the Soil, which
pire a site of potential for healing,” she
means holding on to where she came
from in some way. After all, she has
see the cost for a black woman to be- cousin Nyasha has been given Dan- Dangarembga has described as being lived in Britain and Germany. But it
come a part of a white-defined, male- garembga’s life of an education in about the effect of the independence is not just romantic convention that
dominated black elite, maybe because Britain, film school and film work in movement on the Zimbabwean com- makes the pathos of distance import-
she never gets there. The instability Berlin, the German husband and two munity in London. But the manuscript ant when writing about the troubles
of the times creates a bureaucratic daughters, and the return to Zimbabwe of Nervous Conditions happened to be back in the place you got out of in
need for her, but her position as a bi- at the Women’s Press in London. Three order to think. Born in Iran, Doris
ology teacher at an indifferent high years after she finished the book at Lessing could be said to have been
school ends in her having a spectacu- the University of Zimbabwe, where she able to carry her Englishness with her.
lar breakdown. “Now you understand. had continued her education after hav- But the deeper point might be that
You arrived on the back of a hyena.” ing been for two years the only black the English language was her home.
She seriously injures a student in a woman at Sidney Sussex College, Cam- For Tambudzai, the English language
violent assault and endures a bleak bridge, her novel’s publication showed is a door, and Dangarembga remem-
hospitalization. her what it meant to write while being bers language, writing, as her obsessive
Tambudzai craves escape, as does all black and female: “Writing assures me activity, her closest companion when
of Zimbabwe. “Then it was in the bush, that I am more than merely blackness she was growing up. Classmates stole
but now it is in the home. And still no and femaleness. Writing assures me I and read aloud from her journal, and
one talks. They just say it happened, am.” Yet the opportunities for women it is her writing that she accuses of
or they even say it didn’t happen, and to found a cultural center, while Tam- were narrow when her first book came having betrayed her.
then ignore it.” The masses need to budzai, the country cousin who never out, and she gave up on ever having In Black and Female Dangarembga
be demobilized. Her visiting relatives left, is, as a main character, a strategy. a literary career. Attempts to make a confides that she was taught to mis-
bring the unresolved with them: Dangarembga does not write in either film life in Berlin went no better. No- trust happiness, a disposition she
Shona or Ndebele, and of the different body wanted to hear her story, she felt. struggles to overcome. One of her
It takes them a moment or two of styles of English that her ear catches Traditional patriarchy changed plays was about relationships at the
silence to leave plains ankle deep in her novels—village, mission, city after 1980, when Mugabe’s party, the University of Zimbabwe: the girl who
in men burnt crisp, black and small vernacular, politically twisted—the ZANUPF, came to power. The guer- dresses up for class ends up pregnant
as babies, infants who throb red strongest by far is standard English, rilla fighters preached the doctrine of and abandoned. Broken hearts are for
blood from every orifice, the faces the language of her narrator’s literary class struggle to the people, but class old-fashioned novels, a male character
of men who watch their daughters voice. Tambudzai tells us that an im- struggle, Dangarembga notes, did not says in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.
cut off their husbands’ genitals, portant part of her education was her account for the abuse of women in guer- That Tambudzai has no romantic rela-
and pieces of women, scarlet dec- saturation in the novels she got from rilla camps. The women’s wing of the tionships in three novels has to mean
orations, that bob on the branches her cousin’s library, among them those ruling party had nothing to do with something to the integrity of the point
of forests. of the Brontë sisters. women’s emancipation, and the mili- of view, like Janie’s childlessness in
Dangarembga’s parents were high tarized patriarchy of the guerrilla lead- Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were
Guerrilla fighters are despised when school teachers, the products of the ers reproduced colonial hegemonies. Watching God. The unencumbered
they return home. It wasn’t only what Methodist missionary education sys- Though Dangarembga has contempt for woman. Never does Tambudzai even
was done to Zimbabweans, it was what tem in the self-governing crown colony a concept of maleness based on valida- kiss a man, though at one point she
they did to one another. of Southern Rhodesia. Dangarembga tion through hurting others, she wants fantasizes about stealing a neighbor’s
In spite of the general feeling that denounces the missionary schools for to shift the blame back to where she boyfriend because of the presents he
no one wants to talk about it, the re- their mixture of colonialism and reli- believes it belongs: the black men who could bring her.
cent past drugs the present. “The gion, which “undermined the existing see women as being merely useful had Pleasure was as mysterious to her as
women from war are like that, a new personhood of African populations.” already been robbed of their person- Great Zimbabwe, Tambudzai says. But
kind of being that no one knew before, Missions reinforced the colonial cat- hood by the ongoing legacy of settler co- she has seen the punishments meted
not exactly male but no longer female.” egories of black people, such as those lonialism. “Colonial rule was practised out to her women relatives back in her
There was more war in her country’s who spoke Chirungu, “the language of through a brutal private property-based village who tried to exercise control
way of peace than she had expected. the white ones,” and those who spoke and racially exclusive patriarchy,” she over their romantic destinies and sex-
Eventually Tambudzai finds refuge ChiVanhu, “the language of the people.” writes. White men initially saw African ual choices; humiliations wait every-
with Nyasha, who has come back home But at the same time, Dangarembga women as the victims of African men, where for women in the capital city.
with a too-progressive German hus- wants to point out that her mother making black women minors in the eyes At first it seems that Tambudzai is
band, two carefree daughters, and the was the first black woman in South- of the law, and justifying white control putting off a personal life until she
dream of turning the decayed, aban- ern Rhodesia to obtain a bachelor’s of black men’s bodies. has made it. But after a while, her not
doned mission into a social center. degree, from King’s College, London, being a wife and mother is subsumed
At some point, the fearsome realism and then a master’s degree from Uni- in her overall failure to be an authen-
of This Mournable Body slides into an
uneasy satirical tone in relating Tam-
budzai’s fresh start working for the
versity College London.
Dangarembga says that her mother
was aware when she died that she
O n September 29, 2022, a Zimba-
bwean woman magistrate found
Dangarembga guilty of inciting vio-
tic person to herself: “My mouth was
sour with too many angers.” The trilogy
isn’t about the absence of romance or
ecotourism company founded by the should have done more, been encour- lence. She was given a six-month sus- sexuality, but rather the prison of gen-
white classmate for whom the nuns aged to achieve more. Dangarembga’s pended sentence and made to pay a der. Tambudzai is the Not-I; her body a
robbed her of her prize. It isn’t clear family went to England in 1961. While £200 fine. The suspension is in place terror to herself, in hiding. The anger is
how much time has gone by. Finally her parents were in London, she and for five years. The charges arose from repressed so that she can keep quiet in
her mother destroys the camera Eu- her brother were given working-class her participation in a peaceful pro- her hiding place in her head. Nervous
ropeans have brought to her village white foster parents paid for by the test in 2020 that called for reform. Conditions, The Book of Not, and This
in order to film the hoped-for naked British government. She wasn’t black The government has been cracking Mournable Body are steeped in shame,
breasts of African women dancing. or female, she was a toddler, until a down on opposition figures. In con- in Tambudzai’s dread of others, her
Grief breaks through in Tambudzai; white person let her in on her iden- versation with Margo Jefferson, Dan- tormented inability to communicate,
she is weeping with the understand- tity: “Now I had a word for what I was: garembga explained to a Cooper Union trust, or connect with others. She can
ing that her mother, collapsed at her ‘piccaninny.’” audience in New York in January 2023 only watch herself lose more and more
feet, battered, superfluous, had, like Feminist theory explained to Dan- that she would go on living in Zimba- of herself as nothing, nothing, works

.
her, once longed to be someone. garembga why her possibilities were bwe in order to address young people, out for her, ever, rather like Charlotte
This Mournable Body ends too sym- predetermined, but patriarchy, like to help them to understand things. It is Brontë’s sacrificial Lucy Snowe in Vil-
bolically, but it is a work seeking relief racism, was not an abstraction. No- a country that has yet to come to terms lette, one of the most depressed women
from its extreme elements. Tambudzai body was interested in Nervous Con- with eighty years of white colonial rule in English literature.

38 The New York Review

 A Body That’s Divine
Anna Della Subin

God: An Anatomy
by Francesca Stavrakopoulou.
Knopf, 592 pp., $35.00

If human eyes could look at God’s

body, what would we see? In God: An
Anatomy, Francesca Stavrakopoulou
catalogs the anthropomorphic refer-
ences to God in the Bible, from his
feet to his scalp, in order to gain a
clearer picture of what the deity en-
shrined in its pages looks like. A pro-
fessor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient
religion at the University of Exeter,
Stavrakopoulou draws on the testi-
mony of those who saw God or were
in his physical presence, including
Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, and
Ezekiel. She searches the Bible not
only for body parts but also for God’s
very human behaviors, emotions, and
appetites. (God is, in her reading, un-
questionably male.) She returns often
to the original languages of the scrip-
tures and corroborates her findings
with archaeological evidence and older
mythology underlying the figure of
Yahweh.
Stavrakopoulou’s study also recounts
the disappearance of this body, almost
like a missing-person report: while the Ezekiel and the hand of God; fresco from the synagogue in Dura Europos, near Salhiyah, Syria, third century CE
ancient scribes of the biblical texts
imagined God as embodied, over the the mind’s eye. Contemporary studies, that copied the models of other cur- century-BCE Jerusalem; the coins
course of centuries of Jewish and such as one from 2020 led by research- rencies featuring gods, perhaps from functioned like phones with a di-
Christian doctrinal formation, rabbinic ers at Stanford, have shown that in Egypt or Greece. rect line to the deity. It was unclear
commentary, ecumenical debates, and the United States God continues to “Praise Yah, for Yahweh is good- whether God would listen, but his
influence from Greek philosophy, his take the form of an old bearded white looking!” Psalm 147 sings in Stavra- eyesight was acute: he could see ev-
body “gradually vanished,” becoming man. He reaches out to us from chapel kopoulou’s translation. While most erything happening in human society
increasingly incorporeal, occulted, and ceilings, reveals himself in Google English translations render such and could even peer past the lining of
abstract. (Although her references rove image searches, and teases us in exaltations as “good” or “gracious,” the womb into the land of the unborn.
across time, from the medieval Mai- pop lyrics. she argues that the original Hebrew “My frame was not hidden from you,
monides to Jeff Koons, she does not It may be that God is just a slob like terms tob and na‘im were more often when I was being made in secret,” a
consider the impact of Islam on con- us, but because he created man in his used to describe things as visually psalmist sang. “Your eyes beheld my
ceptions of God’s nature.) This vanish- own image, anthropomorphism is al- attractive rather than abstractly unformed substance.” Stavrakopou-
ing culminates in God’s alleged death ways political. God’s body is our battle- virtuous. In her reading, when God lou infers that Yahweh’s eyes were
with the complicity of modern athe- ground. In the late nineteenth century, steps back from his creation in Gen- lined with dark kohl, like the udjat,
ism and science. The book ends with as mass-produced religious imagery of esis on the sixth day to admire his or Eye of Horus amulet found across
the image of a divine hulk stretched a white Christ flooded America, Bishop work, he sees not that it was good but Egypt and the Levant. His booming
out on a cold marble slab; traces of Henry McNeal Turner declared that rather that “it was very beautiful.” voice was said to raze everything in
human blood remain beneath his toe- God has black skin. When a newspa- Our world was made to standards of its path, breaking cedar trees in half,
nails, from stamping on populations per editorial attacked him, the bishop, beauty, not of righteousness, for God as Psalm 29 revealed. The purpose of
as if they were grapes. who had been appointed by Lincoln as is an aesthete. incense, lit by temple priests, was so
Her project resembles an earlier the first Black chaplain to the Union Fragments of an earlier body of po- that God could smell it—it made his
book called God, Jack Miles’s 1996 Pu- Army’s troops, replied, “We do not be- etry that made its way into books such breath visible in the world as he in-
litzer Prize–winning work that used lieve that there is any hope for a race as Deuteronomy suggest that Yahweh haled and exhaled billowing tendrils
literary criticism to depict God as the of people who do not believe that they had begun his divine career in the Late of smoke.
protagonist of a great epic. Stavrako- look like God.” Bronze Age, Stavrakopoulou writes, as
poulou’s forensic approach loses the From this standpoint, Stavrakopou- “a minor but ferocious storm deity”
poetic beauty of the scriptures, which
Miles so brilliantly brought to the fore.
She rejects metaphor, allegory, and any
lou’s investigation takes on greater
significance. What would it mean to
have a more “accurate” portrait of what
dwelling in a marginal wasteland south
of the Negev desert. Yet by the time
the First Temple was built in Jerusa-
I n Mesopotamian myth, gods were
said to “gather like flies” around
sacrifices of meat; Yahweh shared
other veil of mystery through which God in the Bible actually looks like? lem around 950 BCE , the warrior Yah- the dietary preferences of his divine
humankind has usually encountered Would it alter our sense of who should weh had not only usurped the throne of forebears. His penchant, as Abel knew,
and described the divine. But her reign on earth? The corpse still has a his father, El—who was often evoked was for roasted firstborns of a flock,
method has its own delights. Much pulse, and it is our own. as the “Bull” and who ruled a polythe- especially “their fatty parts,” which
like a fundamentalist who insists sto- istic household of deities that also in- Stavrakopoulou glosses as “the suc-
ries such as Noah’s ark are historical cluded sons such as Baal and Mot—but culent slipperiness coating the in-
fact, Stavrakopoulou takes literalism
as far as she can: here we meet a God
who eats several of the ark animals
O n a silver coin from Judah now
held in the British Museum, dat-
ing to the fourth century BCE , Yahweh
had become him, taking on his name
and attributes, including his horns.
(In the Book of Numbers, the prophet
testines, kidneys and liver, plus the
spongy thickness of the lamb’s tail.”
God preferred to eat his meat not
when they are grilled after the flood. sits on a winged wheel, a popular vehi- Balaam exclaims, “God . . . has horns only well-done but still on fire. His
On the autopsy table, God’s belly is cle for archaic Levantine deities. His like a wild ox!”) “I am Yahweh,” he an- priests searched the flaming offer-
PICTU RE ART COLLE CTION/ALAMY

“swollen with spiced meat, bread, beer body is lean and muscular; he has a nounced to Moses in Exodus 6:2–3. “I ings for signs such as “the changing
and wine.” long nose, high cheekbones, and thick, appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob direction of the smoke’s progress”
Her emphasis on the disappearance well-groomed hair pinned in curls. He as El Shadday, but by my name Yah- and “the precise moment at which
of the corporeal God sits uneasily with sports a flowing beard, a symbol of weh I did not make myself known to incinerated-food remains collapsed
the fact that God’s body has never sovereignty so ubiquitous in the an- them.’” El Shadday is often translated on the altar,” Stavrakopoulou writes,
really gone away. Even if we consider cient world that queens were known as “God Almighty,” but Stavrakopoulou “to discern the difference between a
God to be nonexistent or unknowable, to wear prosthetic ones to mark their notes that it is more correctly “El of rejected sacrifice and the mysterious
or if we abide by religious prohibitions own power. It is unusual to find such the wilderness.” mechanics of divine consumption.” It is
against imagining his physique, we Judaic depictions of Yahweh; the coin Yahweh’s ear was depicted on other likely that Yahweh drank: his predeces-
still have a living picture of him in was likely made in a minting workshop currency in circulation in fourth- sors, such as the Sumerian god Enki,

April 6, 2023 39
consumed wine and beer as a way of
“transgressing their own cosmic rules.”
A story on a fourteenth-century-BCE
ylon in the sixth century BCE , Ezekiel
sees Yahweh atop a chariot of lapis
lazuli:
as a bedroom for the dead. There is
evidence that Solomon’s temple in Je-
rusalem housed her cult statue and
O ne might wonder the same watch-
ing the strip search of God. In her
section on genitals, Stavrakopoulou
clay tablet from the ruins of Ugarit, in that her sacred tree was planted next arrives at a portrait of God as “a pred-
northern Syria, told of how El became Upward from what looked to be his to Yahweh’s altars. The word asherah atory alpha male” who has sanctified
so drunk at a feast that he “fell down motnayim, I saw it sparkling like occurs in the Hebrew Bible forty times, millennia of misogyny. “The biblical
like a corpse.” amber, it seemed to be enveloped but it is often rendered in English as God cannot and should not be let off
In Genesis, God arrives in human all around by fire. And from his “grove” or “sacred pole.” the hook,” she writes in a presentist
size and is initially mistaken for an motnayim downward I saw some- With the building of the Second and activist mode. She connects the
ordinary man, as when he appears to thing like fire. And brilliance sur- Temple came an era of theological girth of Yahweh’s biblical penis in the
Abraham at the door of his tent and rounded him. Like the bow in a reform. As Stavrakopoulou writes: Book of Habakkuk to our own “cultural
shares a meal of a tender calf, or when cloud on a rainy day, this was the phallocentrism,” and recounts how
he wrestles with Jacob, dislocating his appearance of the brilliance all The traditional polytheism of the Donald Trump taunted Kim Jong-un
thigh. In Exodus, he gives precise around. past was remodelled in the image over the larger size of his nuclear but-
toilet instructions to the fleeing Is- of what is sometimes described ton. Her descriptions of ancient “alpha
raelites, lest he step in human feces, The Hebrew motnayim is usually trans- as an “emergent monotheism,” masculinity”—“a rock-hard erection,
“because Yahweh your god walks in lated as “waist” or “loins” but more but is more accurately under- powerful jets of semen . . . an insatiable
your camp.” The Book of Chronicles stood as a radical form of pan- libido and penetrative domination”—
relates that he likes to put his feet theon reduction: Yahweh lost his could have come from Reddit. Yahweh,
up on the Ark of the Covenant, using wife, while other members of his she later repeats, was “the paradig-
it as his footstool. divine council were downgraded matic alpha-male,” but the alpha male
The temple built by King Solo- from deities to minor divine be- is only a figment that sprang out of
mon in Jerusalem provided a physi- ings, heavenly messengers, or cos- zoology into mass consciousness
cal residence for Yahweh, yet with its mic abstractions. about forty years ago. God’s body, in
destruction in 587 BCE the idea be- this chapter, resembles a cartoon of
came commonplace among his exiled Asherah was branded a prostitute, our own present-day supreme beings.
worshipers that God “could voluntarily a temptress who led Yahweh’s fol- For rabbinic sages, God’s male body,
abandon a temple” and the world would lowers astray, or she was entirely rather than endorse a bellicose mas-
still be filled with his presence and suppressed by biblical scribes. The culinity, challenged the idea of human
power. After the Babylonian conquest, Hebrew rendering of her name was manhood itself. As Howard Eilberg-
Stavrakopoulou writes, material ren- mispronounced to sound like “shame.” Schwartz has shown in his study God’s
derings of Yahweh came to be seen Yet she is still present in an incanta- Phallus, in ancient Jewish societies
“as religiously dangerous”; they were tion in Genesis under her sobriquet, in which sex acts between men were
too fragile, too vulnerable to an at- Breasts-and-Womb, and appears in harshly punished, the sexual meta-
tack, and, worse, they constrained and ritual depictions in Jeremiah in which phors for capturing God’s bond with
immobilized “an increasingly tran- women burn incense to “the Queen Israel put male worshipers in an im-
scendent deity.” He still received of- of Heaven.” possible homoerotic position. If male–
ferings of dinner at the altars of the Stavrakopoulou draws links between female is the pairing of religious
Second Temple, built in 516 BCE , but Asherah and Eve based on common devotion, human women become the
Yahweh was becoming more aloof, epithets and the language of Gene- natural lovers of a male God, render-
and around the same time the prohi- sis 4:1. It leads her to the unexpected ing human men as irrelevant as Joseph
bition of graven images entered the claim that it was Yahweh, rather than would be to Jesus’ birth—or perhaps
Ten Commandments. Adam, who fathered Cain. Rejoicing at as irrelevant as Adam was to Cain’s.
His footstool grew—it became the the birth, Eve declares that she has This tension, Eilberg-Schwartz ar-
entire earth, as Isaiah revealed—to ac- “acquired” or “gotten” a child with the gues, contributed to the feminization
commodate God’s increasingly cosmic- “help” of the Lord, as her words are of men in rabbinic thought, fostering
sized feet, as he sat enthroned in a The god El; bronze statue with gold conventionally translated. The scholar a soft, unwarlike ideal type that the
heaven ever more distant from earth. overlay, Ugarit, near Latakia, Syria, David Bokovoy has demonstrated how scholar Daniel Boyarin has sought
As preserved in the Shi‘ur Qomah late fourteenth century BCE linguistic evidence more strongly sup- to reclaim as “the eroticized Jewish
(Measurement of the Body), a set of ports the meaning that she has “pro- male sissy.”
anatomical calculations that circulated correctly refers to the genitals, Stavra- created . . . with Yahweh,” capturing a These other masculinities are also
by the twelfth century CE , Jewish mys- kopoulou writes. While for humans the sense that the deity had an active part present in God, but they appear at
tics tried to measure his feet. Taking genitals must be concealed, here is a in human conception. Stavrakopoulou a distance from the divine “phallic
Isaiah’s claim as their benchmark, they vision of God in which everything is takes this further to suggest sex in warrior.” Had Stavrakopoulou placed
determined that the length of his soles hidden except the private parts, as the Garden between God and Eve but them in dialogue with one another, it
was approximately 90 million miles.1 if to underscore the difference be- leaves the idea dangling, like a piece might have deepened her portrait of
They used the figure to illustrate that tween mortal and divine. (Stavrako- of forbidden fruit as yet unripe. God’s manhood and the complexity of
God’s body was ultimately incompre- poulou does not draw distinctions Yahweh reveals himself as “a pow- its consequences for how men ought
hensible to the human mind. To repeat between images of God seen in vi- erful sexual predator,” she writes, in to live on earth. Because God is orga-
such numbers in an incantation, again sions or dreams versus more concrete passages that biblical scholars tend to nized as an anatomical diagram, it is
and again, was thought to induce a encounters.) label “pornoprophetic” and that bring by nature reductive, to each body part.
trancelike state in the mystic. For rabbinic commentators, the us to the limits of Stavrakopoulou’s It risks oversimplifying biblical lines,
penis posed a problem. If Adam was method. In Ezekiel, God finds Israel so often read and interpreted toward
made in the image of God, and Adam in the form of an infant girl, with um- contradictory ends.

S eeking an uncensored view of

God’s physique, Stavrakopoulou
renders scriptural verse in a way that
was circumcised, then God too must
have had his foreskin removed—but
who circumcised God? An ancient
bilical cord still protruding, covered in
the blood of childbirth, and left in the
wilderness. The deity rescues her, then
Scholars in the second century CE
such as the Rabbi Yohanan deduced
that the deity dressed in a rabbinic
tends to be unpoetic. “I saw the Lord Phoenician myth, preserved by the notices her again when she has grown style, covering his shoulders with a
sitting on a throne, tall and lofty!” second-century-CE writer Philo of By- breasts at puberty. “You were at the fringed shawl or tallit, still worn today
cries Isaiah in her translation. “His blos, reported that El (like Abraham) age for lovemaking,” Yahweh recalls by observant Jews. Each week God
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SYRIA, DAMASCUS/INTERFOTO/ALAMY

lower extremities filled the temple!” took matters into his own hands. In of her nakedness. “You became mine.” kept Shabbat with his angels, as the
While the Hebrew term shul is nearly a different, Ugaritic version, El left it When his bride is unfaithful, the di- Book of Jubilees revealed. He joined
always translated reverently as “the to horticultural specialists—experts vinity commits acts of gruesome sex- study groups that labored to parse his
train of his robe,” Stavrakopoulou ar- at pruning grape vines—in prepara- ual violence. While second-century-CE sacred word. Drawing on evidence in
gues that it is more often deployed by tion for consummating his marriage. rabbis banned these verses from syn- Deuteronomy and other scriptures, the
biblical authors “to pointedly allude Like his predecessor, Yahweh had a agogues, early Christian interpreters fourth-century-CE Rabbi Avin inferred
to the fleshy realities of the sexual wife: her traces still pervade the scrip- refused to see God in the lines at all. that God also wore tefillin, small, tal-
organs.” Entering the inner sanctum tures. El was wedded to the powerful As the theologian Origen wrote: ismanic boxes containing Torah verses
at Jerusalem, hit with a rush of smoke Athirat, a goddess worshiped across and bound with leather straps to the
and fiery seraphim wings, Isaiah is the Levant who had birthed seventy di- Let them give an opinion on this, upper arm and forehead. God prayed—
flashed by God. vine sons and breastfed human kings. I ask: Jerusalem has breasts, and “May it be My will” 2—and offered sac-
The priest Ezekiel also caught a Taking her Hebrew name, Asherah, she at one time they are not bound, rifices to himself, often amid human
glimpse. In a vision from exile in Bab- became Yahweh’s consort. Several in- and at another they are made firm, war. He wept for tragedies that he had
scriptions from the eighth century BCE and she has an umbilical cord and caused.
1
The mystics also named his feet: “The convey blessings from “Yahweh and is reproached because “it was not
name of His right foot is Parsamyah, At- his Asherah” at sites such as Khirbet cut.” How is it possible to under- 2
Kimberley Christine Patton, Religion of
raqat, Shamah, and the name of His left el-Qom in the West Bank, where the stand these things without alle- the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity
foot is Agometz.” words grace a burial chamber laid out gorical interpretation? (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 251.

40 The New York Review

 The Talmudic treatise Avodah Zarah into long hair, and skin painted red. redness into incandescence recalls the more incorporeal, as Jesus’ incarnate
described God’s daily schedule, which The encounter occurred during the changing qualities of divine skin in the body in many ways took the place of
included late mornings first spent ghost dance at Wounded Knee Creek, ancient world. From around 1000 BCE his father’s. God had grown old in the
“judging the entire world,” then turn- only a few months before the massa- “the dazzling, blazing radiance of the dreams of the writer Daniel: in the
ing to mercy when God realized—as cre of hundreds of Lakota people by gods’ bodies had come to be a defining second-century-BCE text, Yahweh ap-
if anew each day—humanity’s hope- US soldiers. Of all possible shades of characteristic of divinity,” Stavrako- pears for the first time as “the Ancient
less self-destructiveness. While in the the divine, what Black Elk saw comes poulou writes. The Assyrians called of Days.” Daniel witnesses the elderly
afternoons God did the tiring work closest to what Stavrakopoulou argues this glowing aura of fire the melammu deity seated on a fiery throne, with hair
of giving sustenance to all creatures, was the original complexion of God and depicted it in iconography as ab- “like lamb’s wool” and dressed in robes
in the evenings he would relax with in the Bible. As attested by a terra- stract, wavy lines emanating in a cir- “white as snow.” In the visions of John
his pet sea monster. “There is the cotta divinity dated to around 1850 cle. It was hot enough to boil water: of Patmos in Revelation, the heavenly
sea, great and wide . . . and Leviathan BCE and unearthed in the Sumerian the warrior goddess Ishtar boasted, son resembles his father: “His head
whom you formed to play with!” ex- city-state of Ur, red was once the hue “My melammu cooks the fish in the and his hair were white as white wool,
claims Psalm 104. Although God de- of cosmic bodies across Mesopotamia, sea.” In Hebrew the word is kabod, the white as snow.” The phrase “white as
lighted in his monster, it was said that Egypt, and the Levant. Crimson pig- brilliant glory to which Ezekiel was snow” conveys both purity and disease
Leviathan was destined to turn from ment made things come alive: it trans- exposed in his priapic vision. At the in the scriptures. It appears several
pet to food. Several texts written in an formed objects into animate beings or peak of Mount Sinai, Moses begged times in the Old Testament to describe
apocalyptic moment, after the destruc- resurrected them, from the red painted to see the kabod and was given a view leprosy: Yahweh temporarily turns Mo-
tion of Jerusalem at the end of the onto neolithic skulls to the red resin of God’s hindquarters so luminescent ses’s hand “leprous as snow”; Moses’s
first century CE , describe how, when used in Egyptian mummification rit- it transfigured Moses’s face. Across sister Miriam becomes “leprous, white
God gathers the righteous for a last uals. The color embodied a certain the testaments, Yahweh appears, as as snow;” a servant in the Second Book
supper, the sea serpent will be served “warrior erotica,” as human fighters in Psalm 104, “wrapped in light as of Kings meets the same fate. The as-
as the messianic meal. Drawing on a stained their bodies red before bat- with a garment,” a searing glare that sociation with skin lesions contrasts
verse in Job, the rabbis determined tle. “My beloved is radiant and ruddy,” is, Enoch related, too bright even for the crystalline perfection of divine
that Leviathan is a kosher fish, “for it declares the Song of Songs, exalting angels to look at. When Yahweh dined and angelic bodies, which are, in the
is written: ‘His scales are his pride.’” a body so sublimely perfect that early on sacrificial meat still on the grill, New Testament, often described as
rabbis supposed it could only belong his own fieriness engulfed the flam- white. The Gospel of Mark evokes a
to God himself. ing food. hue beyond any human manufacture:

B ut what of God’s skin? In the sum-

mer of 1890 the Lakota holy man
Black Elk received a vision of a di-
“While I was staring hard at him,
his body began to change and became
very beautiful with all colors of light,”
In Greek the word is doxa, and in
the New Testament it describes Jesus’
illuminated splendor, the blinding
when Jesus stands at the peak of a
mountain, “his clothes became daz-
zling white such that no one on earth
vine man with markings in the palms Black Elk related, “and around him light that converted Paul. With the could bleach them.”
of his hands, an eagle feather tucked there was light.” This shifting from idea of the Trinity, God became ever As Christian theologians forged an
embattled new faith, the radiant doxa
of Christ was frequently pitted against
symbols of darkness and sin. While
in Jewish and Greco-Roman societies
dark skin “might be variously identi-
fied with beauty, majesty and wealth,
as well as foreignness, erotic exoticism,
Purchase or xenophobic danger,” Stavrakopoulou
writes, it would become “a means of
John Bronzina, I That’s what life is, John—people colouring sinners in need of Christian
think you could save me. opening. You know this, you salvation.” While the priest Jerome
You have green eyes live in Connecticut. You know caricatured “Ethiopians” as “black
and have completed the president and CEO and cloaked in the filth of sin,” the
your training for CPR of the Invisible Bridge Corporation. Alexandrian pope Athanasius imag-
for children and adults. His card is in your wallet. Maybe ined the devil as a small black child.
John, I am in the latter you applied for a job there. Maybe In the religious art of Western Europe,
category, and though you got it. I had a job once “the golden hues of Christ’s divinity
my breathing is fine at Tollbooths of America, but were increasingly concentrated in his
now, things change rapidly. they let me go. Or more accurately, halo, while his skin grew ever lighter
You know this because you I preferred the short-term pain and whiter.” It was this white-skinned
have a card for emergency of leaving to the long-term injury Christ who presided over the geno-
roadside service. John, of staying in one place. What cide and enslavement of people across
it is expired. You are your goals, John Bronzina? the earth, as Christian conversion was
have a dental appointment Do you think about how you’ll feel used to sanctify acts of dispossession,
in six days. Don’t when you get where you’re exploitation, and brutality in the build-
miss it. You have headed? I never think about a place ing of European and American em-
credit cards and debit until I’ve left it. Things pires. Stavrakopoulou deftly captures
cards and what you do take time, John. You’ll come how a primeval theology of light has
at the Lemming Emporium to understand that. You have given way to our present-day divinity
is your business. But I a birthday coming up. You’ll of whiteness. It is a shame she buries
wonder: What were you doing be twenty-five. On your her analysis between sections on the
when you lost that wallet? driver’s license, you’re trying belly and the bowels.
When I found it, I’d stopped to smile. You’re an organ The effect of God’s alleged whiteness
my car on Ocean View to look donor. Parts of you may “is contemptuous and degrading,” ar-
at a house being built on stilts. one day spill into others, gued Bishop Turner in a prescient 1898
It’s behind a fence that says the way your wallet response to his critics. It is not simply
KEEP OUT . Nearby there’s a pile tumbled from you, the that the racialization of God’s body
of beer cans and I wonder way your cards and badges acts as a metaphor for supremacist
if you had something and cash flew into the bazaar ideologies: the images themselves pos-
to do with that. Maybe of salt air and sea grasses sess a disconcerting power. A 2017 ex-
you sat back under the scrub where there’s nothing periment at Tufts demonstrated this:
pines getting drunk with friends to buy or sell, just another over a hundred white Americans were
or on your own. Maybe you trespasser in soft sand subliminally exposed to different im-
were imagining you lived there, struggling for what we ages before answering a set of sur-
that you’d gotten locked out and sometimes—where I vey questions. In their responses, the
were waiting for your wife come from—call purchase. group primed with portraits of a white
or your boyfriend Jesus displayed significant increases
or both of them to let you in. —Andrea Cohen in anti-Black racism than those who
had seen pictures of a Black Jesus,
which had no discernable prejudicial
effects. Stavrakopoulou’s postmortem

.
is an illuminating thought experiment,
but the white God who lives among us
simply rises from her autopsy table
and walks away.

April 6, 2023 41
 Appeasement at the Cineplex
Orville Schell

who had never lost their innate dis-

trust of Hollywood’s penchant for just
wanting to tell a good story and make
a lot of money, grew restive. And when
US imports began generating huge box
office revenues, with James Cameron’s
Titanic (1997) capturing 28 percent of
Beijing’s ticket sales, alarms began
ringing. By the end of the decade, Zhu
writes, “American mega-productions
had captured about 70 percent of Chi-
na’s film market, leaving approximately
100 domestically made films with only
30 percent market share.”
By then Hollywood moguls were
drooling over the prospect of not
only infiltrating China’s multiplexes
but pixilating this “people’s republic”
with capitalist amusement parks and
entertainment-related merchandise.
Such fevered reveries were reminis-
cent of the nineteenth century, when
British industrialists dreamed, as one
put it, that if only they “could add an
inch of material to every Chinaman’s
shirt-tail, the mills of Lancashire could
be kept busy for a generation.”
But as soon as China’s film industry
began developing and being well re-
ceived in China, the party wanted to
limit Hollywood’s soft power. Many of-
Performers at a promotional event for Iron Man 3 before its Chinese release, the Forbidden City, Beijing, April 2013 ficials still viewed American films not
as a harmless form of entertainment
but as an incipiently “hostile foreign
Red Carpet: China’s story well,” as the country’s “people’s republic” and refers to con- force” that would undermine China’s
Hollywood, China, and the Global current leader, Xi Jinping, later put it. certs, plays, museum exhibitions, and “socialist” value system. And they were
Battle for Cultural Supremacy For example, realizing that the word films as “cultural industries” that are not entirely wrong, for Hollywood was
by Erich Schwartzel. “propaganda” sounded indelibly malign still supposed to adhere to command- part of the American hope that open
Penguin Press, 380 pp., $28.00 to Western ears, the Propaganda De- ments laid down by Mao in 1942 at his markets would inevitably goad this
partment changed its name (but only Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. formerly revolutionary land toward
Hollywood in China: in English) to the “Publicity Depart- Under Mao, literature, art, entertain- greater cultural and political openness.
Behind the Scenes of the World’s ment.” At the same time, encouraged ment, culture, and media were not to The two were, as the old Chinese aph-
Largest Movie Market by Washington’s policy of “engage- be outlets for individual artistic self- orism puts it, “sleeping in the same
by Ying Zhu. ment,” which sought to transform the expression but obedient megaphones bed but dreaming different dreams.”
New Press, 370 pp., $32.99 Sino-US relationship through the al- for the party’s unfailingly “correct” po- With Chinese films competing so
chemy of increased interaction, Hol- litical line. Although some of Mao’s poorly against US blockbusters, Bei-
Although Beijing and Hollywood in- lywood executives began to be enticed political rigidity lapsed during the jing decreed in 1996 that two thirds
habit political and cultural universes by the potential of China’s immense reform era, Deng reminded the Chi- of Chinese screen time would hence-
that have little in common, they are and still-unexploited film audience. nese in 1979 that even as they might forth be reserved for domestic films
similar in one important respect: both “Out of nowhere appeared a market borrow practical things from abroad, and there would also be special holi-
have expended vast amounts of energy, with 1.4 billion potential customers,” they were still bound by Four Cardinal day blackout periods when American
time, and capital confecting imaginary writes Erich Schwartzel in Red Carpet: Principles: uphold the socialist path, films could not be shown. On top of
universes. The Chinese Communist Hollywood, China, and the Global Bat- the people’s democratic dictatorship, that, theaters were required to con-
Party (CCP ) has long proselytized for tle for Cultural Supremacy. “Accessing the leadership of the CCP , and Mao Ze- tribute 5 percent of their revenue to
sundry versions of its Maoist/Marxist/ that resource would require bowing to dong Thought and Marxism–Leninism. a new state-run fund set up to pro-
Leninist revolution through state- censorship demands and navigating And lest any latter-day comrades be- mote domestic film production. Then
sponsored propaganda campaigns that political land mines to build a theme come tempted to dismiss Mao’s dicta in 1999 Beijing established the China
have even airbrushed large chunks of park or secure Chinese financing.” But as ancient history, seventy-two years Film Group Corporation, extending
its unsavory past from the historical since China needed technical knowhow after the Yan’an Forum Xi reminded the state’s control across all sectors
record. Hollywood has engaged in its and Hollywood wanted more viewers, them that cultural workers should of the film industry.
own escapist mythmaking by produc- a match was tempting. A crucial inflection point in this
ing films filled with fantasy and back- The idea of China selectively bor- make patriotism into the main uncertain Sino-US rapprochement
ing them with promotional campaigns rowing from the West harkened back melody of literature and art cre- arrived when a number of Holly-
irrigated by galaxies of movie stars to a Qing Dynasty formula for mod- ation, guide the people to establish wood movies about Tibet, a sensitive
and inexhaustible reserves of PR and ernization that called for “using things and uphold correct views of his- subject for Beijing, went into pro-
advertising. Both have wantonly em- Western for matters of practice, but tory, views of the nation, views of duction in the 1990s. Seven Years in
ployed wishful thinking, mendacity, using things Chinese for matters of the country and views of culture, Tibet (1997), directed by Jean-Jacques
and deception to create alternate re- essence.” The conceit was to borrow, and strengthen their fortitude and Annaud for Sony, told the story of a
alities that have managed to distract but only in utilitarian ways that shored resolve to be Chinese. Nazi Austrian mountaineer played by
their respective mass audiences from up rather than undermined China’s ex- Brad Pitt who became the Dalai La-
the actual circumstances in which they isting system and values. Of course, at ma’s tutor in Lhasa during World War
have been living.
Despite the fact that these engines
that time China’s “essence” was tradi-
tional Confucian culture, whereas now H ow two such incongruent societ-
ies tried to come together, espe-
II. Kundun (1997), directed by Martin
Scorsese for Disney, traced the Dalai
JAS ON L EE / RE UT ERS / RE DU X

of fiction are otherwise so dissimilar, it is a confection known as “socialism cially in matters of film, is the subject Lama’s early years in Lhasa during the
when China began “reforming and with Chinese characteristics for the of Red Carpet and Ying Zhu’s Holly- late 1930s and the 1940s. Red Corner
opening up” in the 1980s under Deng new Xi Jinping era.” wood in China: Behind the Scenes of the (1997), directed by John Avnet for MGM ,
Xiaoping, the CCP started sniffing Ultimately the contradictions in- World’s Largest Movie Market. In 1994, was about an American businessman
around Hollywood, because its cul- herent in two such different politi- as this unlikely courtship started, Bei- (played by Richard Gere, a prominent
tural overlords wanted to see if they cal universes were not overcome in jing allowed only ten foreign films to supporter of the Dalai Lama) who is
could get some of Hollywood’s seduc- the CCP ’s attempt at borrowing. The be screened in China each year. But as accused of murder in China. Chinese
tive storytelling magic to rub off on US is an outspoken capitalist democ- Chinese audiences became enthralled cultural watchdogs immediately at-
their turgid propaganda efforts to “tell racy. China remains a putative socialist with American movies, CCP officials, tacked these films for idealizing “feu-

42 The New York Review

dal society” in traditional Tibet and troversial China-related topics being ers had turned into a nightmare.” And By 2020 the number of screens in
for “demonizing China.” stripped from US films, but US pro- things had only come under tighter China had shot up to 69,787, an in-
Officials were not only anxious about ducers started trying to figure out control after Xi Jinping became Chi- crease of 9,708 since 2018. It was
the popularity of these American films how they could also work positive bits na’s top leader in 2013, as a raft of “too big to ignore and too lucrative
and about how they might influence about China into them. “With Chinese hypernationalistic, anti-American to anger,” comments Schwartzel. In
the Chinese people. “If Chinese citi- box-office riches in mind,” Schwart- films like Wolf Warrior (2015) and Wolf 2018 Xi had shifted oversight respon-
zens view most movies as two-hour zel writes, producers “began stuffing Warrior 2 (2017) came out. The films’ sibilities of China’s film industry from
diversions, Chinese censors view characters, scenes, and products they soldier-hero, Leng Feng, was a John the State Administration of Press,
them as two-hour threats,” observes thought would appeal to Chinese au- Wayne–like superpatriot whom the Publication, Radio, Film, and Televi-
Schwartzel. “Might China use its huge diences into their films.” CCP saw as an antidote to all the US sion to the party’s powerful Ministry
domestic box office as a cudgel to bend For example, in Disney’s Iron Man 3 superheroes it viewed as filled with of Propaganda. His tenacious mix of
Hollywood to its will, and become ‘The (2013), starring Robert Downey Jr., a anti-China cold war ideology and ar- control, censorship, protectionism,
Great Dictator’ of the global cinematic segment was added so that the pop- rogance. Steeped in “jingoism cloaked state intervention, and xenophobia
universe?” asks Zhu. “Can the Chinese ular Chinese actress Fan Bingbing as Chinese patriotism,” Zhu tells us, had helped Chinese films fare better
government manage Hollywood? Or could be spliced in for a cameo ap- these Wolf Warrior productions were when up against American competi-
can Hollywood manage China?” pearance. Then another scene was “high-concept, high-tech, and big- tors and did shift the balance.
added featuring Downey surrounded budget films that were at once pro- “Now that US hegemony is being
by a claque of adoring Chinese school- pagandistic and crowd-pleasing.” The challenged by an ascendant China, the

A s China gained wealth and power

and started seeking ways to re-
claim its own domestic market and
children. In 2016 Disney executives
obligingly removed a Tibetan monk,
“the Ancient One,” from the script for
party called them “leitmotif” movies
whose propagandistic function was
“opposed to the money worship, he-
power dynamic has changed,” Zhu ex-
plains. “What’s at stake is more than
competition between the old hegemon
to influence content about China that Doctor Strange and replaced him with donism, and excessive individualism and the emerging hegemon; it is about
the US was sending around the world, Tilda Swinton as a Celtic woman. And glorified by Hollywood imports.” whose version of the future will win
many were surprised at how effectively in 2019 Paramount, the producer of Top Wolf Warrior 2 made $854 million the world’s approval.” The goal is “to
it began managing Hollywood. Schwart- Gun: Maverick (initially funded in part and became the highest-grossing film reset the global narrative about China.”
zel observes that no other country had by the Chinese tech and entertainment in Chinese history. Out of the fifteen And what Beijing’s leaders wanted the
the economic leverage “to change not company Tencent), preemptively re- films that earned over $144 million world to know was that in their narra-
only the movies shown within its bor- moved Taiwanese and Japanese flags in China in 2019, ten were now made tive, Western democracy was not the
ders, but the ones made outside them.” from Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket to domestically. In 2020, according to only kind of democracy, never mind
US studios unexpectedly found them- avoid objections from Beijing. Bloomberg, the share of foreign film that China’s version was the demo-
selves subject to increasing pressure “Chinese officials did not even have receipts in China had slipped to 16 per- cratic dictatorship of the proletariat
and forced to make more and more to weigh in,” Schwartzel writes. “Hol- cent from 36 percent the year before. and its version of the film industry
concessions. MGM only managed to lywood had so fully absorbed Beijing’s “While China had started the decade prevented Chinese from honestly prob-
regain favor in Beijing by sanitizing political preferences.” Such Hollywood leaning on the American film indus- ing their own history. “If film helps a
all elements relating to China in new pandering became known as “getting try for revenue and education,” writes nation process its past,” Schwartzel
productions. For instance, Red Dawn soy sauced.” But “while Hollywood stu- Schwartzel, “the country would end it by reminds us, “China has left massive
(2012), which originally featured Chi- dios were stripping their movies of not needing US entertainment at all.” portions of its history unexamined.”
nese soldiers invading an American Chinese villains, Chinese filmmakers After China initiated its “going out”
town, was digitally altered to make the were not extending the same courtesy.” strategy in the late 1990s, entrepre-
troops come from North Korea.
“Hollywood’s ready accommodation
neurs began stepping up foreign
mergers and acquisitions. As Chinese B ecause the CCP has engaged in a
“habitual and ruthless suppres-
would set a pattern for future Sino-
Hollywood negotiation,” writes Zhu.
When Disney was banned in China be-
W ith Hollywood obsequiously come
to heel, in 2012 CCP gatekeep-
ers expanded the number of foreign
billionaires fanned out around the
world buying assets during the early
2000s, Wang Jianlin, a shopping mall
sion of any alternative narratives,” Zhu
writes, “so far, most of the developed
world has shunned the Chinese ver-
cause of Kundun, the company had just films allowed into China from twenty and theater tycoon and the founder of sion.” And as Xi approached his ele-
been seeking approval for an enormous to thirty-four. But they were still not the Wanda Group, became one of the vation to general secretary of the CCP
theme park in Shanghai, which led Dis- about to let foreign movies dominate most energetic. In an epic buying spree apparently for life at the twentieth
ney CEO Michael Eisner to apologize their screens. If US studios were going he hoovered up a Picasso painting for national congress this past October,
to Chinese premier Zhu Rongji. It was to keep profits rolling in from this lu- China’s dedication to suppressing al-
“a stupid mistake” to release the film, crative, high-growth market—by 2020 ternative narratives reached a new
he pusillanimously recanted. “This film it had become the world’s largest—they apogee. Even as it was unexpectedly
was a form of insult to our friends.” needed a new game plan. Their answer rocked by demonstrations against Xi’s
Later Robert Iger, Eisner’s successor, was coproductions with Chinese stu- “zero Covid” policies, it continued to
even declared that his “biggest learn- dios. But while these gave Hollywood develop and expand its film industry
ing” in China was: “caution is imper- access to new streams of capital and and, Schwartzel tells us, even to “turn
ative, meaning to take a position that theaters, they also made it more vulner- American-made Hollywood movies into
could harm our company in some form able than ever to Chinese pressure and endorsements for itself.”
would be a big mistake.” Several months manipulation. As US studios sought to It may have been a quote credited
later China lifted its ban on Disney. “If appease Beijing, the results were often to Stalin—“If I could control the me-
throwing a company’s creative mission films so bollixed up by political non- dium of the American motion picture,
under the bus was the price of regaining sense that they were unwatchable. I would need nothing else to convert
access to the Chinese market, Eisner A prime example was The Great Wall the entire world to Communism”—
was willing to pay it,” writes Schwartzel. (2016) by the vaunted Chinese direc- that motivated Beijing to approach
Eisner was hardly alone in his servil- tor Zhang Yimou, a coproduction be- Hollywood in the first place. But as
ity. Annaud, who had been an admirer tween the China Film Group and the Xi’s techno-autocratic rule expands,
of the Dalai Lama, restored himself to Hollywood studios Legendary Enter- the contradictions have become so an-
CCP favor by making a classic Maoist- tainment and Universal Pictures. It tagonistic that even Hollywood’s will-
style “self-criticism.” “Due to the lack starred Matt Damon as a mercenary ingness to submit has not guaranteed
of thorough understanding of Chinese who somehow reaches China via the smooth sailing.
history and culture, I could not predict Silk Road and teams up with A-list Of course, this is not the first time
the adverse effects of [Seven Years in Chinese actress Jing Tian to help repel $28 million, the soccer team Atlético an autocratic state has bent Hollywood
Tibet],” he intoned. “I regret it.” Then an army of aliens trying to breach the Madrid for $54 million, and the Iron- to its purposes. In The Collaboration:
he offered a bonus genuflection by ac- Great Wall. The film was a costly East– man competitions for $650 million; Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (2013), Ben
knowledging that Tibet was “part of West train wreck that was both pain- made an investment of $2.6 billion in Urwand recounts Nazi Germany’s suc-
Chinese territory.” Reborn as a full- ful to watch and had a disappointing AMC Theatres (making Wanda the larg- cessful efforts in the 1930s when, even
fledged panda hugger, Annaud was in- box office return. In Zootopia (2016), est cinema operator in the world); and though most Hollywood studios were
vited to the Shanghai International an animated coproduction that called acquired a majority share in Legendary headed by Jews, Hitler’s consul gen-
Film Festival, where he accommodat- for a Walter Cronkite–like news an- Entertainment for $3.5 billion. Many eral in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling,
ingly wondered, “What would we think chor, different animals were sutured of these deals masked the fact that received regular courtesy screenings
in France if the Chinese were inter- in to play the part in four different moguls like Wang, who became China’s before the release of films, and when
fering with Corsica? Or what would versions designed to placate national richest man for a while, also wanted to he objected to a scene, it was often cut.
Americans think if Chinese were in- sentiments: a moose for American au- get large chunks of cash out of China, In 1936 Louis B. Mayer even canceled
terfering with Puerto Rico?” diences, a koala for Australians, a corgi and this was one way to do it. But his an MGM project to adapt Sinclair Lew-
As China’s clout grew, “parts of mov- for Brits, and a panda in black suit and new economic power also helped give is’s novel about a fascist takeover of
ies started to disappear,” Schwartzel red tie for Chinese. Beijing the chutzpah to move from sim- America, It Can’t Happen Here, for film.
wryly notes. “China was going to be Soon, says Schwartzel, this new “co- ply censoring films bound for China Red Carpet and Hollywood in
the top market, and its box office be- production strategy that was supposed to influencing films for distribution China sketch out a frightening pat-
came blackmail.” Not only were con- to mint money for Hollywood produc- elsewhere around the world. tern in US–China trade relations. As

April 6, 2023 43
Schwartzel observes, “Hollywood’s ex- Yet despite the multiplication of which system will most inform With the most recent eruption of
perience has served as a precursor for such fears and all the learned trea- the way leaders govern, states demonstrations, increasing animosity
numerous American industries trying tises that have been written about surveil, consumers spend, and toward China abroad, and decoupling
to balance doing business in China with failed joint ventures, too many foreign citizens converse. Hollywood, from China becoming the global market-
placating Chinese officials.” Roseate leaders, both governmental and corpo- once America’s most persuasive place’s new leitmotif, perhaps foreign
promises of “win-win” collaborations rate, only learn by failing themselves. evangelist, remains beholden to businesses in other economic sectors
all too often prove to be wishful think- When Hollywood arrived in China, the another country. will learn from these two fine books on
ing. (There is a joke circulating among common wisdom was that the glamour, the film industry that these days, one
expat businessmen in China that “win- glitz, and mythic power of Tinseltown Zhu puts the wager for foreign com- must learn how to factor political risk
win” really means China wins twice.) would ultimately win the day. But as panies even more starkly: into every due diligence effort. And with
While some foreign ventures in both these books show, it was Holly- the invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Xi’s
China have succeeded, as soon as wood that was transformed, not Bei- A decade ago, the term “courtship” declaration of a “friendship without lim-
success creates economic market jing. Schwartzel concludes that instead could have been used to describe its,” and Beijing’s saber-rattling in the
dependence, they usually get pres- of Hollywood bringing “liberalization the fitful relationship that, how- Taiwan Straits and elsewhere, the po-
sured to toe Beijing’s ideological line in storytelling” to China, Beijing ever tentative and antagonistic litical risks of doing business with this
both at home and abroad. According generated “a risk-averse landscape at times, had brought two willing unpredictable “people’s republic” have
to Schwartzel, “China’s omnipotence where certain topics pertaining to partners to the negotiating table risen dramatically. It is telling that in
on-screen reflects the country’s in- China cannot be broached.” He further in their common pursuit of pros- response to Beijing’s belligerence this
creasing ubiquity in business,” and warns: perity and happiness. past December, even the US Depart-
“that ubiquity has also exported a ment of Defense joined the Hollywood/
worldwide fear of crossing China.” As Whether China’s entertainment But now a much stronger Chinese Beijing quadrille by adding a provision
a result, foreigners have started to be industry ultimately prevails in film industry wants to be not just “a to the National Defense Authorization
“worried not only about losing their its greater ambition of selling competitor” but one that, Zhu writes, Act—passed by both houses of Con-

.
business but also about graver conse- its country and its values to the “smashes and conquers, all at the be- gress and signed by President Biden—
quences: being called in for question- world will be determined in this hest of the Party. Prosperity no lon- making it illegal for US studios to edit
ing, getting thrown out of the country, next century. That quest will also ger brings harmony when one partner their films to appease party censors
disappearing.” serve as a global referendum on starts to strong-arm the other.” and gain access to Chinese markets.

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

Alejandro Chacoff

Too Much of Life: ing scenes and characters of the city.

The Complete Crônicas Unlike the flaneur, though, the cronista
by Clarice Lispector, translated from is no loner; he (almost always a he)
the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa feeds on companionship and cliques.
and Robin Patterson. His paths through the city contain lon-
New Directions, 742 pp., $29.95 (paper) ger pit stops at bars and restaurants;
he is more idler than wanderer.
The cronista hunts big game with a An aura of thwarted promise hovers
pocketknife. A brief description of over even the most celebrated practi-
the old neighborhood soccer team tioners of the form. Not because they
suggests the unrelenting passage of failed to achieve worldly success, but
time; a glimpse of a stranger’s arm because to be a cronista is to celebrate
during a turbulent flight leads to a re- what is minor, to show a certain indif-
flection on life and death. “There’s a ference toward literary greatness. It
right way to start a crônica by using was Rubem Braga who came closest
a triviality,” Machado de Assis, one of to elevating the crônica to canonical
the first great writers to champion the status. Having worked from the 1930s
form, wrote in 1877. through the 1970s, he is now probably
the writer most associated with the
One says: how hot it is! How un- form, and the main representative of
waveringly hot! One says this while its last great generation. Braga and
shaking the tips of a handkerchief, his group of friends contributed to
snorting like a bull, or simply ag- Rio’s bohemian landscape as much
itating one’s overcoat. Then one as the bossa nova musicians, writing
slips from the heat to atmospheric about one another and creating a my-
occurrences, drawing a few spec- thology around themselves that made
ulations about the sun and the them seem elegiac from the outset,
moon, others about yellow fever, as if they knew that their way of ex-
sending a sigh to Petrópolis, and pressing themselves would one day
la glace est rompue; the crônica be outgrown.
has begun.

As with almost everything he wrote,

there’s a subtle irony in Machado’s sug-
gestion that an easy step-by-step will
Clarice Lispector; illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion

The ratio of failure to success is decades.* There are writers working

A lthough she often appears in an-
thologies of the genre, Clarice
Lispector occupies a peculiar position
lead to the desired outcome. Shorter high, but when it works it is indelible. today who define themselves as cro- in the history of cronismo. She was a
and more elliptical than an essay, the It is a form that is at once high-risk— nistas, but in the age of furious tweets latecomer, writing her first crônicas
Brazilian crônica is in fact a madden- because hard to master—and compla- and bloated newsletters, such a subtle in the last decade of her life, but her
ingly elusive genre. The difficulty lies cent, perfect for the talent wasters, form seems unlikely to regain ground. presence in the daily papers gave her
not so much in identifying the form’s the boozers and sinecure seekers who Much like the flaneur drifting around the readership that had long eluded
attachment to the mundane (simple can’t always endure enough solitude to Paris, the cronista is often thought of her as a writer of fiction. The critical
prose, wry personal anecdotes, an eye write novels. The genre’s birth, or at as both a product and an observer of and commercial success of her first
for the odd detail or fleeting charac- least its first wave of popularity, can Rio’s chaotic growth—a nocturnal, dip- novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943),
ter), but in the specific magic dust that be traced to the expansion of Brazil- somaniac figure who sketches the fleet- published when she was only twenty-
transforms minor observations into ian cities, particularly Rio de Janeiro, three, had been followed by a string
prose that’s brimming with pathos. and the local press in the nineteenth *One notable exception is Antonio Prata, of commercially disappointing novels,
The underground passage from triv- century. Once a stylish reprieve from whose crônicas for the newspaper Folha earning her a reputation as an author
iality to transcendence is hard to lo- the urgent news articles it accompa- de S. Paulo not only maintain the artistic who was “hermetic” (an adjective she
cate, yet you know a true crônica when nied, the crônica has seen a severe principles that first animated the genre but hated) and hard to sell. Braga and his
you read one. decline in influence over the past also are popular among readers. friends, fierce admirers of her fiction,

44 The New York Review

used their influence to promote her the sweetness,” her sister orders. “And out at the countryside. The dreams after divorcing her husband, the dip-
journalistic career, recommending her then you can chew for the rest of your of the goats wafted in from the lomat Maury Gurgel Valente, Lispec-
fiction in 1958 to Senhor, an influen- life. Unless you lose it, that is, and I’ve fields on the breeze. At the other tor had a brief and intense affair with
tial little magazine where she would already lost quite a few.” As the gum table on the balcony sat a solitary Paulo Mendes Campos, a well-known
become a regular contributor. But it becomes rubbery and gray and taste- faun. We stared into our drinks and cronista from Braga’s group who was
was her hiring by the Rio daily Jornal less, Clarice starts to feel panicked; dreamed static dreams inside the married at the time. And it was Braga
do Brasil in 1967, a few years after she eventually she spits it onto the sandy glass. “What did you say?” “I didn’t and Fernando Sabino who published
wrote the book that is now considered ground at the school gates, pretending say anything.” The Passion According to G.H., through
her masterpiece, The Passion Accord- she has lost it. “I felt shamed by her their own small publishing house.
ing to G. H. (1964), that brought her to kindness, ashamed that I had lied,” she It’s heady to picture my grandfather But these close relationships belie
the attention of a wider public. She says. “But relieved too. No longer bur- back in vast, isolated Mato Grosso in Lispector’s separateness. The most
held the job until 1973, four years be- dened down by the weight of eternity.” the late 1960s, nursing his ulcer and glaring difference, of course, was her
fore her premature death from cancer. In Lispector’s most fully achieved stirring his ground guarana leaves gender. Along with Cecília Meireles
It was the press that put Lispector on crônicas, the trivial doesn’t so much while opening his paper and finding and Rachel de Queiroz, Lispector is
a first-name basis with the Brazilian segue into the transcendent as become this sort of writing. But readers were among the very few women associated
public, like a soccer player, musician, inextricable from it. A piece of gum probably not that fazed. Lispector’s with a male-dominated genre. The
or politician. “Thanks to the Jornal do contains the whole space–time contin- enigmatic style was certainly unique, ideal occupations for cronismo—booz-
Brasil I’m becoming popular. I get sent uum; a mercury droplet represents the ing and idling, mostly—demand gar-
roses,” she wrote in a column in 1967. elusive nature of all material things. gantuan amounts of time, something
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crôni- This is the same sense of rapture one that pretty much only men had in the
cas, translated by Margaret Jull Costa hears from her hypersensitive fictional heyday of the form. Though the income
and Robin Patterson, is mostly made narrators, to whom no ordinary thing she received as a diplomat’s wife (first
up of her pieces for the daily, though fails to carry some extraordinary ema- in Naples, later in Washington) gave
a sprinkling of writings for other pub- nation—an encounter with a cockroach her a certain amount of freedom to
lications is also included. The second evokes the vision of a terrible, bound- write, Lispector longed for home. Her
half of the title is misleading. Only less, amoral universe, the liquid oozing second, third, and fourth novels were
a few pieces in this collection would out of it a damning nectar containing all written abroad with difficulty, be-
fit even the loosest definition of a the whole secret of human existence. tween attending diplomatic functions
crônica—they vary widely and include, and taking care of her two boys, and
among other miscellany, reflections the cold reception of publishers back
on writing; miniprofiles of friends,
artists, and artist friends; cryptic di-
alogues; replies to fan mail; a spiky
O ften, though, Lispector just seems
to fret about her new day job. “I
know that what I write here cannot
in Brazil depressed her.
Reeling from her divorce, she re-
turned to Rio in 1959 with her sons
riposte to a rumor about the author’s really be called a crônica or a column or and hardly seemed to have the appetite
divorce; and one indignant letter, in even an article,” she writes on March 9, to take part in a literary scene built
the Moses Herzog vein, to the minis- 1968. That same year, she asks, “Is the on barhopping. Moser’s descriptions
ter of education. Also, unclassifiable crônica a story? Is it a conversation? Is of this period give Lispector the air
sentences and paragraphs. Few writers it the summation of a state of mind?” of a Ferrante character: the female
have ever taken the expression “This is Dwelling on one’s desire, ability, artist only half-belonging, unraveling
an open space” quite so literally. Costa or lack thereof to master the form— even while being the center of intel-
and Patterson’s translation does a fine metacronismo, say—is not unusual. lectual admiration, calling friends
job of capturing Lispector’s syntax and But there is something wildly incon- up in the middle of the night, tak-
rhythms, a task that isn’t so straight- gruous about Lispector as cronista— ing sleeping pills and chain-smoking
forward considering the sheer variety it’s as if J. M. Coetzee had been invited but part of the whole point of crônicas (hence the fire), using heavier makeup
of forms her pieces take. to write weekly op-eds for the Times, is their unapologetic lack of utilitarian to shock herself into a new persona,
Tucked away in these nearly 750 or Cormac McCarthy hired as a regular value, their beautiful pointlessness. consumed by her domestic life while
pages, like rare flowers among or- book critic. Where the form privileges They are a kind of anti-news. her male counterparts drink, self-
dinary grasses, are more purposeful levity, suppleness, storytelling, and a The journalist Flávio Pinheiro— mythologize, and launch new literary
attempts at writing what one might certain sense of humor, her writing who did not cross paths with Lispec- ventures. Mendes Campos, after their
call pure crônicas, some of which are is often abstract, weary, and wary of tor at the Jornal do Brasil but worked affair, went back to his English wife
perfectly rendered, and a handful of language’s limits, impatient not merely there in the late 1970s and then again and children; Gurgel Valente sent her
which have the unmistakable touch with narrative but with events in gen- in the 1980s and 1990s as the editor of $500 every month, but financial anxi-
of the author. These are the ones that eral, always seeking a fast track to the famed CadernoB supplement that ety became an issue.
most often appear in anthologies, and metaphysical experience. “As a reader, she used to write for—recently told
upon which Lispector’s reputation as I prefer the attractive type of book, me that the cronista’s role back then
a cronista rests.
“When I was very young,” she writes
on June 6, 1970, in “Fear of Eternity,”
because it’s less tiring, less demand-
ing, requires little real engagement,”
she wrote on February 14, 1970. “But
was to “enhance the paper’s vocabu-
lary.” According to him, cronistas rarely
ever went into the office, and were a
J ornal do Brasil was not Lispector’s
first experience in journalism. In
1940, a few years before publishing her
“I’d still never tried chewing gum, and as a writer, I want to dispense with group apart, largely exempt from the first novel, she convinced a govern-
it wasn’t much talked about even in Re- everything I can possibly dispense daily routine. ment official and censor to give her
cife. I had no idea what it was.” This is with: that is what makes the experi- In a preface to the Brazilian edition a job as a reporter and editor for the
a typical setup for a crônica: a personal ence worthwhile.” of The Complete Crônicas, released by Agência Nacional, a press agency con-
memory or perception—Machado’s Her primordial world of animals, the publishing house Rocco in 2019, the trolled by the Department of Press and
triviality—clearing only the faintest rocks, plants, and anthropomorphic writer and journalist Marina Colasanti, Propaganda of the Estado Novo, a dic-
path to a theme hinted at in the title. rooms doesn’t really jibe with the sec- then the young employee who was put tatorial regime installed by then presi-
Her sister warns her not to lose the ular, street-smart world of odd charac- in charge of dealing with Lispector’s dent Getúlio Vargas. Shortly afterward
never-ending candy (“It lasts a whole ters and sly observations, the gossipy pieces, recalls seeing her only a hand- she worked at the daily A Noite, also
lifetime”), alarming little Clarice: tone one finds in writers like Braga. ful of times, right after she began as under Vargas’s watch.
Often, in her weekly pieces, she slips a contributor. After that, her pieces In 1952 Braga gave her a women’s ad-
I picked up that small pink pastille into a novelistic voice that, one sus- would usually come via emissary, in big vice column at Comício, an anti-Vargas
representing the elixir of eternal pects, reflects the kind of thing she’d brown envelopes, written in a difficult weekly he was running at the time.
pleasure. I examined it, scarcely rather be doing. A column published scrawl—the result of a home fire that Lispector gave cosmetics and rela-
able to believe in that miracle. I, on October 10, 1970, begins: almost killed her in 1966, leaving her tionship advice under the pseudonym
who, like other children, would writing hand severely damaged. Very Tereza Quadros, occasionally smug-
sometimes take a still intact It was very dry that spring, and little editing went on: “I fixed one typo gling in material that subtly ques-
piece of candy out of my mouth the radio crackled, picking up or another, not more than that,” Co- tioned female stereotypes. After her
in order to suck it later on and so static, our clothes bristled with lasanti writes. divorce she worked as a ghostwriter
make it last longer. And there I static electricity, our hair clung for the model and actress Ilka Soares
was with that seemingly innocent to the comb as if magnetized: and was again hired as an advice col-
pink thing, making possible the
impossible world I had only just
become aware of.
it was a hard spring. And very
empty. Wherever you happened
to be, you set off into the dis-
I n one sense Lispector was a part of
Braga’s gang. According to Benjamin
Moser, the author of Why This World:
umnist by the newspaper Correio da
Manhã, this time using an anglicized
pseudonym, Helen Palmer. Part of her
tance: never had there been so A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009), job was to lure unwitting readers to-
Lispector here nails the form’s par- many paths. We spoke little; our it was Otto Lara Resende, another cro- ward the benefits of Pond’s face cream,
adoxical mixture of accessibility and bodies heavy with sleep, our eyes nista, who in 1960 first suggested to which was never explicitly mentioned
high artistic ambition by conjoining a wide and blank. On the balcony, the then editor of Jornal do Brasil, Al- in the pieces.
childhood memory with the unbearable along with the fish in the aquar- berto Dines, that he hire Lispector as None of these early writings are
weight of eternity. “Suck it and enjoy ium, we drank a cool drink, gazing a regular writer. In 1962, a few years included in Too Much of Life, but

April 6, 2023 45
Lispector’s former selves often reap- and the ruins of a modernist project— tion around the corner, where you get heroine’s occasionally banal questions
pear in her Jornal do Brasil columns. hers is the most self-sufficient island. radar, television, shortwave.” The com- with warm candor. “Given the influ-
In a piece dated April 24, 1971, she de- This aloofness infused her fiction pliment sheds light on her unusual po- ence you have with the general public,
scribes the pleasure she finds trans- with a peculiar originality. More sur- sition as cronista—why seek a glimpse couldn’t you raise your level a little?”
lating an Encyclopedia for Women: prising than her astonishing debut at of transcendence when most of the Lispector asks, probably without sens-
age twenty-three was the speed with time you’re in a full-blown trance? If ing her own snobbery. “I would lose
Every woman should have one (it which she discarded gifts other writ- Complete Crônicas is a misnomer, the my influence then,” Magadan replies.
isn’t ready yet), since it covers cul- ers would kill for, moving quickly from other half of the collection’s title, Too Yet these shortcomings never grate.
ture (the section I’ve been doing up a modernist style to more mystical Much of Life, is apt. The impression Perhaps we are as starstruck as her
till now, and I just hope they’ll also writing. Shifting among the points of Lispector gives is not that she is un- star interviewees. Or more likely it’s
give me the section on makeup) as view of three characters, Near to the interested in the quotidian, but rather that her attempt to navigate the dis-
well as things that are strictly fem- Wild Heart is an embarrassment of overwhelmed by it, sensorially over- comfort of weekly exposition actually
inine like makeup, lifestyle, handi- riches, hinting at the inventive syn- charged by the smallest occurrences, produces a pure and mundane portrait,
crafts (I’ve embroidered numerous tax she later became known for while needing only the tiniest slice of exis- and complicates her immaculate liter-
tablecloths, but only in flat stitch also representing acute psychologi- tence to feed her fiction. ary image. In her column of Septem-
or satin stitch—I don’t know how cal portrayals and a deft use of stream ber 18, 1971, she relays a rumor that
to do complicated stitches), etc. of consciousness. Whereas the more disturbs her:

Then she says, “For women, our turn

has finally come: we are considered
realist work of the great modernists
is usually deemed more “accessible,”
in Lispector’s case the early modern-
A n ambivalence toward “chasing
after money, work, love, pleasures,
taxis and buses” can be a disadvantage
Someone told me that Rubem
Braga said I am only good in books,
important enough to be given an ist novel plays the role of the “easier” for reporting. Lispector’s profiles of and that I don’t write a good col-
encyclopedia.” book. (She was baffled by compari- artists are laudatory, showing not the umn. Is that true, Rubem? Rubem, I
Lispector often shows this kind of sons to Joyce, Woolf, and Proust; she slightest inclination to find fissures do what I can. You do it better, but
sardonic awareness about the terrible claimed she hadn’t read any of them in their public image. Her book and you shouldn’t require others to do
deal women get. But she also seems before writing her first novel.) art reviews read like press releases. the same. I write columns humbly,
to be a pragmatist at heart, preferring In hindsight, it is not hard to under- (Among these is a plug for Braga and Rubem. I don’t have any preten-
to navigate the world as it is rather stand why critics were initially flum- Sabino’s second publishing house.) Her sions. But I receive letters from
than confront it too forcefully. (That moxed: the trajectory from almost fully interviews are whimsical but without readers and they like my columns.
the aforementioned ironic comment formed modernist to sui generis mys- the suggestive depth of her fiction. She And I like to receive those letters.
ends the column rather than starting tic isn’t a usual one. By the time of The asks Pablo Neruda, who is “extremely
it sums up this attitude.) Politically, Passion According to G. H.—the reli- nice,” questions like “What is anxiety?” I like to receive those letters: there is
she declares herself a leftist. “I would gious allusion isn’t ironic—Lispector and “Who is God?” as well as “Where something thrilling in this unguarded
like to see a socialist government in was tuned into the unseen, her narra- would you like to live if you didn’t live tone, which is heard often in the collec-
Brazil,” she writes on December 30, tors all seemingly overcome by a too- in Chile?” and “What, in your opin- tion. To one reader, whose letter mixes
1967. But other discussions about pol- long stare into the Aleph. For those ion, makes a pretty woman?” When she “aggression with flattery,” she says:
itics in the columns are sparse and who don’t get her half the time (I count asks him to write a poem on the spot, “You’re quite right to want me, like
generic. Whether this is because of myself among them), Near to the Wild he demurs. “What is love, Zagallo?” Chekhov, to write amusing things. . . .
or despite the fact that in 1968 the Heart remains the work to be cher- she asks, apparently in all seriousness, Don’t worry, Francisco, my moment to
military government clamped down ished, more tethered and in touch with of the manager of Brazil’s 1970 World say amusing things will come, I really
on civil liberties, leading to the most down-to-earth anxieties, like whether Cup soccer team. am full of highs and lows.” To another,
repressive period of the regime, is a to get married, have a kid, and so on. Sometimes she is saved by her sub- who speculates on her divorce:
question that is hard to answer. “You pick up a thousand waves I jects, who indulge her in a way they
can’t catch,” Braga wrote to her in probably wouldn’t someone less fa- I reckon you’re the wife of a dip-
1957, referring to her novels. “I feel mous. Glória Magadan, a Cuban-born lomat. You adopt an air of false

W riting a column under her own

name was not something Lispec-
tor undertook lightly at Jornal do Bra-
like a cheap radio, only getting the sta- writer of soap operas, answers her pity. . . . Madam, please keep your
pity to yourself, I don’t need it. And
if you want to know the truth, some-
sil. In a column dated June 5, 1971, she thing you weren’t expecting, here it
writes, “One day I phoned Rubem is: when I separated from my hus-
Braga, the creator of the crônica,” re- band, he waited for me to come back
minding us yet again of his stature. to him for more than seven years.
Worrying that her pieces were becom-
ing “excessively personal,” she asks for When a “rather disheveled young
An Airplane or a Helicopter
his advice. “It’s impossible not to be woman” shows up at her house unin-
personal in a crônica,” he tells her. She vited, paper in hand, and mentions
writes, “But I don’t want to tell anyone an argument arose that she knows Lispector is an in-
about my life: my life is rich in experi- what is that loud buzzing in the sky somniac because she can see her light
ences and vivid emotions, but I don’t as if from an old abandoned on every night—also saying that she
ever want to publish an autobiography.” garden behind the house witnessed “the fire”—she is invited
There is a paradox in Lispector’s on the market square in. The woman cooks an octopus for
fiction: despite her use of the first —an airplane or a helicopter? her. Lispector’s editor is not thrilled
person, her narrators often betray lit- —a helicopter! about this sort of engagement with
tle background. What comes across —no, an airplane! readers—he eventually asks her to
is a sense of self-effacement, or of —no, a helicopter! stop dealing so much with fan mail.
self-scattering, self-dispersion—the —yes, an airplane! This raw sincerity and artlessness is
narrator is so sensitive to the mood, —yes, a helicopter! one of the most appealing aspects of
atmosphere, and objects surrounding Too Much of Life. Even more so than in
her, pulling her in different directions and then her fiction, in her crônicas and other
and down rabbit holes of abstract re- so that there would be no two ways about it columns Lispector uses the “I” with-
flection, that the traits usually associ- a helicopter peeked in through the window out the self-conscious, manipulative
ated with a stable character or persona and decided the argument care often employed by more autobi-
(psychological details, biographical ographical writers (Philip Roth, say),
facts) seem beside the point. now one can peacefully and the impression given is one of
To this can be added a certain free- go walk in the park vulnerability. “Fear of Eternity” and
dom from the distraction of careerism. and tell the starlings others deserve their place among the
Lispector was not immune to criticism, apart masterful examples of the crônica,
but no other Brazilian novelist of the from the thrushes but it is remarkable how infrequently
twentieth century—no other Brazil- Lispector tried to write these perfect
ian novelist ever, perhaps—seemed —Oleh Kotsarev set pieces. Maybe the personal charm
more unselfconscious about what was (translated from the Ukrainian and autobiographical self-presentation
going on elsewhere, or more aloof from by Tatiana Retivov) demanded by the crônica—and even
what other people were interested in, by a regular column—was a little too
utterly free from the usual inferiority much for someone whose fiction always
complexes that weigh on artists from a showed a deep hesitation regarding

.
huge, peripheral country that worries the idea of a unified, confident self.
about being irrelevant. In the archipel- The self remains fragmented, incon-
ago of postwar Brazilian fiction—pre- sistent, rather comfortable with its
cariously united by a common language contradictions.

46 The New York Review

 Drowned Worlds
Phillip Lopate

Nineteen Reservoirs: purposes. But in 1950 the director of

On Their Creation and the Promise laboratories for the Bureau of Water
of Water for New York City Supply, Benjamin Nesin, said that such
by Lucy Sante, with a plan was “‘hazardous and unreliable,’
photographs by Tim Davis. adding, ‘The Hudson River is virtually
The Experiment, 197 pp., $24.95 a reservoir of infection.’” Whether this
was true is beside the point, since the
We are living, as we know, through a water would have been filtered to avoid
global water crisis. Climate change has infection, but a more subtle argument
brought droughts to large areas and against using Hudson River water was
floods to others; water scarcity has that it never tasted as fine as New York
led to the privatization of this pre- City’s tap water issuing from the lakes,
cious commodity in some countries, and so that superb taste was fortu-
and with it an increased economic bur- itously preserved.
den on the poor; factory runoff and In spite of the occasional curious
aging lead pipes contaminate drink- detail, there is little to differentiate
ing water; regions and nations fight the various chapters from one another.
over the allocation of river rights, as Sante plods dutifully through the sta-
do agricultural and urban interests. tistics of each construction job—so
Given the complexity of land use and many feet of concrete, types of bed-
water politics, it seems almost a mira- rock, numbers of workers—and men-
cle that residents of New York City can tions the high points (“eighteen miles
rely on a dependable stream of clean, long, this would be the longest contin-
good-tasting water in their daily lives. uous tunnel in the world”), but she has
This water comes from a network of little feeling for the romance of engi-
upstate artificial lakes whose devel- neering. In an apologetic, self-mocking
opment over the past 180-odd years aside, she even expresses boredom and
Lucy Sante charts in her new book, skepticism about the effect of these
Nineteen Reservoirs. quoted statistics:
Lest one expect a paean to American
ingenuity, the author’s attitude toward The grandeur of the project—and
this achievement is not exactly cele- those that would follow it—was in-
bratory—it’s rather elegiac, in fact. variably expressed in figures. That
“The reservoir system has been a great was the poetic language of enter-
success,” she acknowledges, and “con- prise in the twentieth century.
tinue[s] collectively to supply the city Nothing else conveyed so well the
with more than 1.1 billion gallons of immensity of every new undertak-
fresh water every day.” But that suc- ing and its dwarfing of whatever
cess has come at a price. “From an had preceded it, and it could be
upstate perspective,” Sante writes, appreciated by the average piker
with a fourth-grade education.
the reservoir system represents at Nowadays numbers have become
best an imposition and at worst an Lucy Sante; illustration by John Brooks so large they usually dissolve into
imperial pillage of the landscape. abstraction.
Twenty-six villages and countless great reservoirs”—Ashokan, Schoha- Nineteen Reservoirs she has once again
farms, orchards, quarries, and the rie, Rondout, Neversink, Pepacton, and dived deep into the archives, ferreting In fact, there is an air of abstraction
like were bought for a fraction of Cannonsville—to the river’s west.* out intriguing nuggets and vignettes about this slender book, which may
their value, demolished, and then Most historical accounts of New York from the newspapers and court filings issue from its being strangely unpeo-
submerged, some of them within focus on the hoopla surrounding the of the day, as well as an illuminating pled. Especially compared with Low
living memory, leaving broken arrival of Croton water in 1842, but trove of illustrations. We learn, for in- Life, so filled with juicy portraits of
hearts and fractured communities. Sante says little about this response, stance, of the often unavailing efforts con artists, corrupt politicians, mas-
The system has further affected concentrating instead on what she to reduce water waste by installing uni- ter thieves, and scoundrels, the prose
a political polarization between sees as the pattern for all versal metering—a practice first pro- here is less dramatic and energetic.
upstate and down, city and coun- posed in the 1860s and later resisted There are no heroic visionaries like the
try, that was already well underway water-utility projects to come: re- by landlords, who feared that their ten- Brooklyn Bridge’s Washington Roe-
before the first shovel of soil was calcitrant landowners, aggrieved ants would maliciously overuse water bling or the Suez Canal’s Ferdinand
removed, and which appears as a landowners feeling cheated by in order to drive up their bills. de Lesseps. No one is seen to be in
microcosm of the urban/rural po- their remuneration (some land Progressives also fought meters, charge; rather, the projects are put on
larity that continues to unbalance was bought for $160 an acre and seeing them as a tax on the poor. Re- the planning board and accomplished
the nation as a whole. some for $565 an acre), labor dis- form mayor William Jay Gaynor used in the course of time, almost like an in-
putes, ethnically based disputes the slogan “Water must be as free as exorable, impersonal tsunami washing
Her “purpose,” she continues, “is not to among workers, outbreaks of dis- air” in 1912, and decades later, in 1965, over the countryside. The only human
condemn the reservoir system.” With- ease, fatal blasting accidents, and Mayor Robert Wagner was still insist- voices we hear at length are occasional
out it, the city innumerable delays. ing that free and unlimited water was quotes from the rural victims whose
“a part of the social philosophy of the way of life is being swept away, such
might have faded into insignifi- people of the city” and “a mark of our as the unidentified woman who told a
cance over the course of the twen-
tieth century, not only squelching
its vast financial powers but abort-
S ante is a zealous researcher, as is
amply demonstrated by her first
book, Low Life (1991), that marvelous
social advance.” The problem was that
New Yorkers seemed to be fairly prof-
ligate in their use of water, consuming
reporter, “When they wipe out a whole
community—your friends, neighbors,
stores, merchants—there’s no amount
ing its function as shelter for mil- compendium of vice and chicanery in nearly four times as many gallons per of money that can replace it.” But even
lions of people displaced from nineteenth-century New York City. In day per capita as Londoners. they are not fully individualized.
elsewhere. The vast expansion of the city’s pop-
*A pity that Sante does not devote more ulation at the turn of the twentieth
What she intends is more balanced: “I
would simply like to give an account
of the human costs, an overview of the
space to Water Tunnels 1, 2, and 3, which
connect the city to its upstate water sup-
ply. The first two were completed in 1917
century necessitated a comparable in-
crease in the number of reservoirs—or
so the logic of the times went, though
I t is perhaps inevitable that Sante’s
efforts to reimagine the way of life
that once obtained in these small,
trade-offs, a summary of unintended and 1936; the third, begun in 1970 and still rural homeowners in the path of dem- effaced villages would be undernour-
consequences.” under construction, is the city’s largest olition argued that the city should in- ished, given the scarcity of the archives
The book proceeds chronologi- infrastructure project in our time, and it stead use water more frugally, or even left behind. Indeed, the image record
cally through the construction of the gobbles up huge amounts of the municipal desalinate water from the Hudson she found in local newspapers and
main reservoirs: first the Croton sys- budget. But strictly speaking, these tunnels River, as many smaller municipali- construction companies’ files seems
tem east of the Hudson, then the “six are not reservoirs. ties were already doing for drinking to be a lot more robust than any

April 6, 2023 47
verbal accounts that survived. Sante tion suffered from ‘backwardness’ with tury, prompted in part by the place between two allegiances: Belgium and
has located a prodigious vein of apt regard to population increase.” And she where I was living, the Lower East the US, the ruined, forgotten past and
reproductions and salted them into the notes how violent those seizures could Side of New York City, where every the modern present. Then there is the
pages of the book. There are panoramic be. In Gilboa, she writes, residents hundred-year-old tenement shell, question of gender, about which Sante
views of mountain valleys before the with its scalloped cornice and or- wrote so movingly in an essay for Van-
flood, postcards, tunnel interiors, put up fierce if ineffectual resis- nately detailed window frames ity Fair after she started transitioning:
pipelines, cranes, bridges, engravings, tance, relying on the fact that ornamenting vacancy and rot,
maps, placards, main streets, grocery city employees could not legally appeared on my retina accompa- I once described myself as a crea-
stores, dams, waterfalls, group por- enter their houses to turn them nied by a grimly ironic caption: ture made entirely of doubt, much
traits of workers at company picnics, out. When people refused to THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . I of it self-doubt, but as soon as I
sandhog teams, surveyors, ground- move, however, workers tore off was haunted by those ruins. made up my mind to come out, last
breaking ceremonies, pumping sta- their roofs. Even then some hung February, I ceased doubting. That
tions, cemeteries—mostly in black and on, in empty houses, having pru- Out of that fascination and research is to say, I experienced regular
white. Added to these historic images dently removed their furniture. came Low Life, a book that resisted bouts of dysphoria, which in this
is a set of handsome color photographs Mary Brooks stood firm until she New York City’s “bulldozing of what context means intense recurring
by Tim Davis, commissioned for the had to leave for a minute to confer has faded to make way for the next periods of self-doubt, self-hatred,
book, which display craggy landscapes with a neighbor, whereupon work- thing, the thing after that, the future.” and despair, which happen irreg-
and recreational campsites and town ers set her house on fire. She was interested in the city’s ghosts: ularly for varying lengths of time,
meetings, among other contemporary “New York’s ghosts are the unresting typically (for me, by now) about
scenes. souls of the poor, the marginal, the dis- two or three days a week. Yet
The book’s one dominant character, possessed, the depraved, the defective, paradoxically I had never before
you might say, is New York City, a vil- the recalcitrant.” Having resurrected experienced such wholehearted
lainous, shadowy presence pulling the those ghosts to her satisfaction, Sante conviction. Even in the throes of
strings, its attitude toward the upstate went on to explore the Belgian dead: those bouts I felt an unaccount-
locals summarized by the author as able bedrock of certainty.
“imperious, exploitative, cold.” In the I already had a history, intriguingly
preface to Low Life, Sante said her buried. It might even be an inter- In Nineteen Reservoirs, the pri-
book was “an expression of love and esting one. Eventually I came to mary tension is between her identi-
hate, as is appropriate for a work about the conclusion that if I did nothing ties as a city dweller and a country
New York.” In Nineteen Reservoirs, one else, I at least needed to uncover person. Sante has seemingly chan-
can no longer detect any love for the it. Maybe some of what I thought neled her three-fourths peasant self
city—or hate, for that matter—only I had lost was merely hidden. in identifying with the disenchanted
a kind of weary reproach. viewpoint of her Catskills neighbors.
What drew Sante, such a brilliant, Digging into her mother’s ancestry She sympathizes with their frustra-
cosmopolitan cultural critic, to write of poor farmers, Sante came to a con- tion at the limits imposed on them
this particular study? Granted, the clusion: “I am three-quarters peasant.” in their own domain—no boating or
subject is important and has never Here we may glimpse the source of swimming in these artificial lakes—
been given fair treatment, but what her identification with the rural folk without acknowledging the valid rea-
do New York’s water projects actually who lost their land to the city slickers. sons for trying to keep the reservoirs
signify for her—why does she care so Though in The Factory of Facts she pollution-free.
much about these reservoirs? It is not admits that at first “it’s much harder I must admit that, as a lifelong res-
until halfway through the text that we to insert my imagination into that ident and celebrant of New York City,
get our first partial answer, with the world of fields and forests” than into I feel guiltlessly happy enjoying the
introduction of that first-person fig- Surveyors on Bonticou Crag planning the streets of New York, she goes on plentiful, tasty water provided by the
ure, the author: the route of the Catskill Aqueduct, to say that Belgium isn’t so far away: state’s reservoir system. I am proba-
High Falls, New York, 1906 bly one of those people Sante speaks
In the 1990s, I lived not far from I can just drive three hours to the of with such disdain:
the Pepacton Reservoir, the exis- But Sante also admits that some western foothills of the Catskills
tence of which I barely knew be- of these villages might have disap- and there I can see the Ardennes, New York City continues to take
fore I got there, despite having peared even without reservoirs being if I take the trouble to place a stee- its drinking water from those ar-
spent the previous twenty-five constructed: their economy was fre- ple every few feet along the hori- tificial lakes in mountain valleys,
years as its beneficiary in New quently tied to timber, which, once de- zon. To further the verisimilitude, I so inviting on a hot day in a re-
York City. Within a month or so pleted, gave way to farming, but the go on: I triple the population, dis- gion with no real lakes, albeit as
of taking up residence in Dela- soil was too stony and the topography pense with isolated farms and put taboo for swimming or boating as
ware County, I was struck by the too variegated to be well suited for ag- villages in their stead, reduce each if they were meant for the gods
local attitude toward the reservoir. ricultural use. So the larger underlying herd of livestock by two-thirds or alone. The ghosts of the drowned
Its construction was spoken of as subject, typical of this author, has less more but multiply the number of villages continue to haunt the
if it were a disaster—a volcanic to do with the intrusion of a quasi- herds, remove most of the decid- popular imagination via roadside
eruption, say—that might have military bully than with the way the uous trees—nearly eliminated by markers and twice-told tales. . . .
occurred decades previously but more or less effaced past continues to invading Germans—and replace Farms continue to fail, and farm-
whose consequences resonated haunt the oblivious march of progress. ers continue to die, and land and
into the present day. . . . “I’ve always been a sucker for tales houses continue to be bought by
For the past twenty years, I’ve of lost civilizations, pockets in time, city people who wouldn’t know
been living close to the Ashokan suppressed documents,” Sante admits their sheep-dip from their cream
Reservoir, where the upheaval of in her beautifully written memoir The separator. New York, like other cit-
construction occurred more than Factory of Facts (1998). ies, is filled with people who have
a century ago. Immediate passions no idea where their water comes
may have died out with the genera- from and are only occasionally

“E
NE W YORK CI TY DE PART MEN T OF EN VI RONME N TAL PR OTE CTION

tion that experienced the building very human being,” she writes made aware that it is a precious
of Ashokan, but the city is still re- elsewhere in that book, “is an and very finite resource that will
garded as an occupying power— archeological site.” Born in 1954 in Ver- become scarce again one day—
like the United States military in viers, Belgium, Sante, who came out as them with conifers, add various perhaps quite soon. By then there
Japan, say—that profits from the trans in 2021, sets out in The Factory single-lane roads and unpave many will be no untapped mountain val-
region while offering little in re- of Facts to uncover her family’s roots of the ones existing, turn wooden leys to draw from.
turn and definitely not keeping in the old country and the unsettling houses to stone and convert trail-
the best interests of the locality discontinuities in their identities while ers into either shacks or pre-fab Perhaps I should start to worry more.
in mind. restlessly migrating between Belgium units depending on which histor- As Sante points out, every time the res-
and the United States. Is she European ical era I’m aiming for. But I don’t ervoirs have dipped below acceptable
Sante tries to imagine what vil- or American? “I went from being the have to alter the hills, which are levels, as recently as last year, a hue
lage life was like—the dairy farms, little Belgian boy, polite and diffident old and low, and the valleys steep, and cry rises up to do something about
the churches, the scenic views draw- and possessed of a charming accent, and the rain and fog plentiful. conserving water; then the rains come
ing tourists—before these hamlets to a loutish American adolescent.” But and people forget about the threat. The
were flooded. She cites with outrage the past kept drawing her back. Living reservoir system has held its ground,
an 1886 paper by one R. D. A. Parrott, as a bohemian, Beat-inspired writer
W hat I find most intriguing, in for the time being, and there are no

.
“The Water Supply for New York City,” in the 1980s, searching for ways to link this predictions for when it might collapse.
which argued that it was all right to new book with Sante’s oeuvre, is that But Sante has performed a valuable
seize the land by eminent domain be- I developed a consuming inter- she has found a way to elaborate on service in raising hard questions about
cause “the Catskill territory in ques- est in the turn of the last cen- her major theme, her genuine conflict its mixed legacy.

48 The New York Review

 An Exceptional Witness
Ingrid D. Rowland

One Hundred Saturdays: tinely slipped outside the old city walls
Stella Levi and the Search to go swimming in the sea with the
for a Lost World Italian men who shared her athleticism
by Michael Frank, with and her sense of adventure. From the
illustrations by Maira Kalman. age of fourteen she kept a packed suit-
Avid Reader, 227 pp., $28.00 case by the door, ready for the moment
when she could finally fly away to an
One evening in 2015, the writer Mi- Italian university; instead, at twenty-
chael Frank rushed in late to a lecture one, she was shipped off to Auschwitz.
at the Casa Italiana, the home of New Rhodes, the easternmost of the Greek
York University’s Department of Ital- islands, was conquered by Mycenaean
ian Studies in Greenwich Village. As he Greeks in the Bronze Age, but its po-
plopped into the sole remaining seat sition at a strategic point in the Med-
around a long table, the elegant older iterranean forever fostered a unique,
woman next to him asked, in a thick cosmopolitan culture. Today the build-
Italian accent, “Where are you com- ings of the principal city, also named
ing from that you’re in such a hurry?” Rhodes, still reflect the presence of
A French lesson, he replied. She fol- the Knights Hospitallers of St. John,
lowed with two more questions: “Might who set up a new headquarters there
I ask why you are studying French?” in 1310 after their expulsion from Jeru-
and then, “Are you interested in know- salem. Catholic corsairs from a host of
ing how French served me in my life?” European nations, they stayed for two
(Evidently the Casa Italiana observed centuries, until Süleyman the Magnifi-
a properly Italian sense of timing for cent ejected them in 1522 and annexed
starting its lectures.) Frank told her Rhodes to the Ottoman Empire.
he was studying French to reacquaint Jewish merchants were active in
himself with a language he’d learned Rhodes from the Hellenistic period,
in school but had since buried under but the community’s composition
layers of Italian. Stella Levi had a changed significantly in 1492, when
more complicated story to tell. Know- Ferdinand and Isabella, Their Most
ing French, she revealed, had not only Catholic Majesties of Spain, expelled
served her but saved her: their entire Jewish population with
the help of Grand Inquisitor Tomás
“When I arrived in Auschwitz,” she de Torquemada. Tens of thousands of
said, “they didn’t know what to do Spanish-speaking Sephardim, with their
with us. Jews who don’t speak Yid- distinctive liturgy, law, and customs,
dish? What kind of Jews are those? scattered from Antwerp to Alexandria,
Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephar- many of them scholars, doctors, and
dic Italian Jews from the island of rabbis—an entire professional class.
Rhodes, I tried to explain, with no Unfortunately for the Jews of Rhodes,
success. They asked us if we spoke the Knights of St. John, with whom they
German. No. Polish? No. French? had lived side by side for centuries,
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘French I speak . . .’” decided to adopt Spain’s anti-Semitic
policies, and in 1502 Grand Master
The program that drew them both Cardinal Pierre d’Aubusson decreed
to the Casa Italiana that evening was that Jewish Rhodians must convert to
a discussion of museums, memory, and Christianity or be expelled from the is-
the atrocities committed under what land. The community was decimated.
Italians call nazifascismo, that infer- Stella Levi (front row center) with members of her family and friends outside the Juderia, Twenty years later Süleyman seized
nal partnership between Benito Mus- Rhodes, late 1920s; illustration by Maira Kalman Rhodes from the knights (who even-
solini’s puppet Republic of Salò and tually moved to Malta) and settled 150
the German occupation of Italy be- Frank’s harrowing youth in the com- their comfortable shoes with a slow Jewish families from Salonika inside
tween 1943 and 1945. Frank, born after pany of another older woman, his flam- sway of their hips to make the imag- the city walls of the capital. Ensconced
World War II, came to the lecture out boyant, overbearing aunt Hankie (née inary fabric of their flared skirts swirl in their own quarter, the Juderia (tell-
of interest. Levi, born in 1923 on the Harriet), a Hollywood screenwriter around them. Deep down, they still car- ingly, a Spanish word), free from re-
island of Rhodes, came as a witness who embodied the Frank family’s ried themselves like Marlene Dietrich strictions on the kinds of trades they
to the Nazis’ last deportation of Jews nightmare version of Auntie Mame— in Morocco. could pursue, free to worship according
from Greece. Those deportees from stylish, imperious, dictatorial, and ulti- to their own Sephardic traditions, the
the eastern reaches of the Mediter- mately unbearable. In his memoir The Rhodian Jews, or Rhodeslis, lived and
ranean also took the longest road to
the death camps deep in the forests of
Poland, and for Frank, “When I arrived
Mighty Franks (2017), he recreated not
only Aunt Hankie’s predatory pursuit
of “larky” experience with her favor-
S tella Levi’s memories also float and
swoop like those gowns. What she
bore inside her (and continues to bear:
prospered among Orthodox Greeks,
Catholics (who returned in the eigh-
teenth century), and Turkish Muslims
in Auschwitz” provided an unforget- ite nephew (an honor that came at a she will turn one hundred on May 5) for nearly four and a half centuries.
table prelude to that evening’s event. grueling price), but also the palmy at- was not simply the traditions of an By the early twentieth century their
The brief conversation impressed mosphere of Los Angeles in the era old country—really a vibrant mixture population had reached almost 4,500.
Levi as well. At the age of ninety-two, when stars still clung to the last shreds of old countries—but also the excite- In 1912 the crumbling Ottoman Em-
she had decided recently to record her of true cinematic glamour. ment of her rebellion against those pire ceded Rhodes to Italy, and the
memories of life in Rhodes, and through That world is as long gone as Levi’s traditions, her embrace of modern island’s prevailing—and notably tol-
a mutual friend, also present at the lec- Jewish Rhodes, but both still lie latent life, of dresses with the same swirling erant—Turkish culture began to give
ture, she eventually asked Frank to give in a cloud of living memories—mem- skirts the Hollywood ladies remem- way to the twin pressures of modern
her few pages of recollection a profes- ories of both mind and body. Some bered, of the stylish cork sandals she Europe and Italian Fascism. Stella’s
sional’s once-over. Instead he became, twenty years ago, at an exhibition of wore to Auschwitz and kept wearing father, Yehuda Levi, “in his clothes . . .
in effect, Stella’s scribe. A Hundred Sat- dresses from the 1930s and 1940s at the until they broke apart. Stella’s panache language, and general sensibility, was
urdays distills his six years of visits to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I proclaimed her utter rejection of her in many ways essentially Turkish.”
her New York apartment, as he, an ex- saw old Hollywood come to life when grandmothers’ heavy alla turka robes He still wore a djellaba at home and
ceptional listener, drew out a wealth of the elderly women who entered the and the embroidered caps that never a fez to work with his Turkish busi-
stories from “a woman I would come to gallery, all dressed in what they would left their heads. ness partner, at least until his Italian-
MAI RA KALM AN

think of as a Scheherazade, a witness, have called slacks once upon a time, Inexorably, progress was coming for educated children begged him to put
a conjurer, a time traveler who would began, unconsciously, instinctively, to the Rhodian Jews almost as quickly as it away. He had married, by arrange-
invite me to travel with her.” move as they once had moved inside the Nazis. Levi’s grandmother Mazal- ment, Miriam Notrica, the daughter of
In many ways, Stella Levi seems to their own versions of those expertly tov Halfon had barely left the Jewish a prominent local banking family. The
have furnished the ideal antidote to tailored dresses, stepping smartly in quarter in her entire life; Stella rou- names of their seven children reveal

April 6, 2023 49
a plethora of languages and cultural herself of the enserradura, an extreme July, declared an armistice with the after the cattle cars with her neigh-
influences: Morris (Moshe), Selma, Fe- treatment her grandmother practiced Allies, but much of the country, and all bors reached their destination in Po-
licie, Sara, Victor, Renée, Stella. Stella on emotionally troubled adolescent of its conquered territory in the Bal- land. In a little more than a year, then,
spoke Judeo-Spanish at home, Italian girls in the neighborhood: for a week, kans and Greece—including Rhodes— the Nazis extirpated Jewish life in
in school, learned French from her enclosed in a silent room (her family passed directly to Mussolini’s former Greece, destroying communities that
sisters, who had attended the French and neighbors would be encouraged ally Adolf Hitler. Stella’s Italian friends had lasted for centuries in the case
school in Rhodes, and picked up Turk- to move out of their houses if neces- Renzo Rossi and Luigi Noferini fled of Salonika, millennia in the cases of
ish and Greek from her friends and sary), the girl rested, eating nothing the island, Noferini to serve with the Athens and Rhodes.
neighbors. She learned English in New but a thin broth. Creating an island partisans in Tuscany, Rossi, as a Jew, Why did the Germans bother to
York when she arrived in the late 1940s. of peace within the bustling, crowded simply to survive. Gennaro Tescione, send the Jews of Rhodes all the way to
Juderia might have soothed the anx- as an officer in the Italian army, shot Auschwitz? Stella wondered but never
iety of some Rhodian girls, but Stella himself rather than obey a summons found an answer. Initially, packing peo-

T he culture of Rhodes may have

been as vibrantly international
as ever around the turn of the twen-
disdained the idea; she would rather
strike out on her own, with a good book
or a swim in the sea.
to report to Germany. The Levi fami-
ly’s savings, like those of their Jewish
neighbors, began to run out.
ple off to the East had been a way to
hide the evidence of the Final Solution,
but by August 1944, when the Rhodeslis
tieth century, but economic conditions Mussolini marched on Rome the year On July 23, 1944, the SS rounded up came to Auschwitz, the secret was out:
became increasingly difficult in the before Stella’s birth, and thus the only the remaining Rhodian Jews, more in July the Soviet army had discovered
Jewish quarter as the Ottoman Em- Italy she knew was Fascist Italy. She re- than 1,700 of them, and put them on and liberated the Majdanek extermina-
pire tottered and fell after World War I. garded Italy, whose language she spoke a boat to Piraeus.* During that miser- tion camp. As Nazi power eroded and
Young men had already begun to em- and to which she felt a profound con- able eight-day journey the ship made then collapsed, Stella was transferred
igrate in the late nineteenth century, nection, as glamorous and modern. Until a single stop, at the island of Leros, from camp to camp in an increasingly
to the United States, Buenos Aires, 1936 the colonial grip on Rhodes was to join another vessel full of Jews col- desperate effort to conceal the system
Rhodesia, and the Belgian Congo. Both relatively benign: the Italians brought lected from the island of Kos and to from the advancing Allies. Auschwitz
of Stella’s brothers would eventually running water and electricity to the pick up provisions (for the crew only), fell in January, but Stella, perpetually
leave: Morris for Los Angeles and Vic- Juderia; paved roads; opened schools, a along with the single Jew residing on on the march from Poland to Bavaria,
tor for the Congo. Yehuda Levi had al- theater, and a cinema; and brought in Leros. Twenty-three passengers died en found freedom only on April 6, 1945.
ways made a good, if not lavish, living modern medicine. They tore down the route, mostly the old people crammed Rather than returning to Rhodes, where
selling wood and coal and operating the old souk and peppered the ancient city into the bilge without sanitary facilities, the properties of the Juderia had all
customs scale at the port of Rhodes with incongruous Fascist-style build- food, or water. In all, it took three and been confiscated and its social fab-
with a Turkish partner, but he was cer- ings. They introduced taxis, buses, a half weeks for the Jews of Rhodes to ric destroyed, she asked to be sent to
tainly not prosperous enough to move and motorcars, encouraged sports, reach Auschwitz-Birkenau: first they Italy. In Florence, she was reunited with
his family into the new Italian-built drained swamps. The local governor, spent three days massed in the SS tran- her former clandestine teacher, Luigi
houses outside the city walls, where the Mario Lago, even convinced Mussolini sit camp of Haidari west of Athens, and Noferini, and no doubt broke his heart
Notricas and the other wealthy Jewish to found a rabbinical school. then endless days packed into cattle when she moved on to New York, Los
bankers now chose to live. cars headed north. Amazingly, Stella and Angeles, and back to New York again.
As a result, Stella grew up among her sister demanded—and received— To the last of the one hundred Sat-
the close-packed courtyards and per-
petually open doors of the old Jude-
ria, surrounded by wafting smells of
A ll that changed in December 1936,
when Lago was replaced by Ce-
sare De Vecchi, Count of Val Cismon,
permission to step out of their car and
wash their hair at a pump during a stop
at a Czech railway station.
urdays we spend with her, Stella keeps
the Holocaust in a separate mental
compartment, a Pandora’s box she
pastry and pasta, swathed in a dense Mussolini’s minister of education, who The men who finally opened the knows better than to open all the way.
tapestry of song, embroidery, conver- had specifically requested his new ap- doors at Auschwitz station on Au- The trauma she allows herself to feel
sation, ritual, and family. Here Yehuda pointment as “governor of the Italian gust 16 were Greek Jews from Salo- fully is, instead, the humiliation of the
could cross the street every day to pray Possession of the Aegean Isles” after nika. As they unloaded the Rhodians’ Italian Racial Laws, which sapped her
in the synagogue and Miriam could a visit to Rhodes earlier that year. At suitcases, they quickly whispered in self-confidence as a teenager and en-
make a daily round of visits to family first, De Vecchi’s presence only seemed Judeo-Spanish to hand babies over to capsulated the greater horror to come.
and friends. Free to wander the Ju- to create a change in the atmosphere; the old people. They dared not explain The experience of the camps she rele-
deria, sleeping at her cousins’ house the Juderia’s life a la turka seemed that young women holding infants gates to another Stella: the conniving,
or at home, Stella spent her Rhodian more precarious, less in touch with went straight to the gas chambers, but thieving survivor who bartered pota-
childhood lovingly nurtured and itch- the times, as the drive toward mod- healthy young women had a chance of toes and pieces of bread with male in-
ing to escape. Decades later, her pro- ernization began to show its ruthless survival as forced laborers. These fel- mates through a hole in the wall that
digious memory still registered the side. But the passage of Mussolini’s low Judeo-Spanish Greeks had already separated the men’s latrines from the
textures and colors of her early life anti-Semitic Racial Laws in 1938 fell survived for months; they were among women’s, and who stepped out of the
with uncanny precision, but perhaps on the Juderia like the blow of an axe. more than 40,000 people—nineteen cattle car to Auschwitz to wash her
she always sensed that those seem- Yehuda lost his job; Stella and her sis- trainloads—deported from Salonika to hair at a water pump along the way.
ingly solid traditions were as fluid as ters were banned from school. Auschwitz between March and August What ultimately pushed that Stella
the turquoise Aegean. At some point A local Italian, Luigi Noferini, set up 1943. By December 1945 fewer than toward life, however, was the stubborn
in their conversations, Frank realizes a clandestine school for Stella and five 2,000 Jews lived in Salonika, once a physical effort of her sister Renée, who
that Stella never once saw her nuclear Jewish boys. She was fifteen, he was community of 50,000. shoved her forward, shivering with
family all together at the same time. almost thirty, but the urgent condi- fever, for three days as they marched
Life in the Juderia was literally mag- tions forged an urgent friendship. And from a nameless satellite camp of
ical, still haunted by spirits in the first
decades of the twentieth century. Every
so often the rabbi would spread word
one evening when she was seventeen,
“they were sitting alone side by side
at his desk. They had finished lessons
O f the 1,700-plus Rhodian Jews who
made the journey to the death
camp with Stella, 1,200 were gassed
Dachau to another camp at Allach, and
thence to liberation. Had she stayed
behind in the infirmary, she would have
through his sexton, the shamash, that for the day. Stella closed her book, and immediately, including her parents, been taken to Dachau and gassed. In
an evil force, so fearsome to name that Noferini put his hand on hers. Just and only 151 lived to see the liberation the end, every survivor, Stella insists,
it was evasively called “the sweetness” that, no more.” Through Noferini she of Auschwitz in late January 1945. Of depends on nothing but luck.
(la dulce), was about to enter the com- met another Italian, Gennaro Tescione, the fifty people left behind in Rhodes, It seems fitting that One Hundred
munity’s water supply. Women filled a Neapolitan lawyer in his late twen- forty-three found protection from the Saturdays should be an illustrated
up bottles and bowls with water and ties stationed in Rhodes as an army courageous Turkish consul, Selahattin book, for Stella Levi’s tales are pro-
covered them, and for several hours, lieutenant; if Noferini stimulated her Ülkümen, who arranged for them to foundly rooted in sensory experi-
perhaps half a day, no one washed or intellect, Tescione struck something in get Turkish citizenship and emigrate ence—of spaces urban and domestic,
turned on the tap until the danger her soul. Stella met a third Italian, the to Turkey. (Ülkümen also saved Jews open and closed, of salt water, honey-
had passed. Traditionally, no one ever Jewish businessman Renzo Rossi, on in Kos and is honored at Yad Vashem soaked pastries, silk nightgowns, hud-
set the table with knives or bathed at the beach one day with a group of her as Righteous Among the Nations.) But dles of children, snatches of melody
home; instead, once a week, before friends from the Juderia, and his villa all these survivors had emigrated to and rousing choruses, the erotic thrill
Shabbat, families went to the ham- became a refuge from the dread that Turkey by 1945. An ancient woman of skin on skin. Maira Kalman’s paint-
mam. Asthma was cured by inhaling suffused the community. Yet she recog- of ninety who had somehow slipped ings—based on surviving photographs
marijuana fumes or drinking it in a nized that the Racial Laws also bound through the cracks lost her mind and of the Levi family, Stella, Noferini, and
tisane. Sliced potatoes applied to the her more closely to her Jewish friends wandered her deserted neighborhood Tescione—infuse those black-and-
head cured migraine. “Don’t say, ‘My and to their remarkable heritage. until she died of starvation shortly white images with Mediterranean
God,’ Michael,” Stella protested one af- By 1939 wealthy, well-connected color to create a singularly attractive
ternoon as she described some of her Rhodian Jews were leaving the is- *Frank gives the dates as Levi remem- book, a tribute not only to an excep-
family’s traditional remedies. “There land, for Tangier, Congo, Argentina, bers them. The United States Holocaust tional time and place, but also to the
was a logic to these cures. They had the United States, but the residents Memorial Museum reports the date of the exceptional person charged with the

.
been handed down through the gener- of the Juderia, clinging together, ad- deportation as July 20, 1944. The number task of commemorating it, a witness
ations. And, what’s more, they worked.” opted a kind of collective denial. On of deportees varies in different accounts, whose independence, integrity, and
All the same, she never quite be- September 8, 1943, Italy’s Grand Coun- but Frank, in a personal communication, zest for life would have been irresist-
lieved in la dulce, nor did she ever avail cil, which had deposed Mussolini in suggests a figure of over 1,700. ible at any time, in any place.

50 The New York Review

 Becoming Enid Coleslaw
Ed Park

The Complete Eightball: Burden’s Flaming Carrot, the precise

Issues 1–18 body horror of Charles Burns’s Hard-
by Daniel Clowes. Boiled Defective Stories, and the mid-
Fantagraphics, 528 pp., $49.99 (paper) western rue suffusing Harvey Pekar’s
American Splendor. (Lloyd Llewellyn,
swinging star of “The Laffin’ Spittin’
1. Man,” first appeared in a teaser in-
cluded in an issue of the Hernandez
The comic book really is a perfect brothers’ Love and Rockets.) But in
consumer item. It’s portable, flexi- the spirit of that titular sphere, Eight-
ble, cheap enough to be disposable, ball defied categories, ricocheting like
durable enough to last several life- mad from the start. Or is it that, when
times with proper archival care, shaken, it foretold some of the comic
lightweight, colorful and simple medium’s possible futures? 
(no packaging or shrink-wrap re- From 1989 to 1997, Fantagraphics
quired). Think in terms of the entire published the first eighteen issues,
package, the structural cohesion of which have now been collected in one
every component (from page num- bullet-stopping volume as The Complete
bers to indicia, etc.) Eightball.1 The tentpoles are two seri-
—“To the Young Cartoonist,” als that proved Clowes could do pretty
Modern Cartoonist (1997) much anything: the labyrinthine, Lynch-
ian Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
In 1989 a two-dollar comic book called and—beginning immediately after—
Eightball debuted with the aggres- the indelible female friendship saga
sive subtitle “An Orgy of Spite, Ven- Ghost World, both of which have been
geance, Hopelessness, Despair and issued as separate volumes (and, in the
Sexual Perversion.” True to the let- latter case, developed into a much-loved
ter, the five vices suffuse its thirty-two film). But it’s a richer experience to read
black-and-white pages. In the surreal them in situ, interrupted by everything
opener, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in else. Clowes was driven to perfection-
Iron,” our hero gets blindsided by a ism, as well as to fill pages—deadline
creepy bondage movie, soul-kissed by as mother of invention.2
a filthy drunk, and arrested by sadistic Thus we find unhinged screeds (a
cops; he periodically flashes back to Clowesian proxy lists personae non
the troubled face of some lost love or gratae in “I Hate You Deeply,” includ-
phantom. Then there is “Devil Doll?,” ing “People who don’t capitalize their
a takeoff on those tracts drawn by the name,” while “The Future” forecasts
evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick that that “everybody who ever recorded
proselytizers still leave on subway anything will at some point be called
seats—a campy-cruel three-pager in a genius by somebody”—see today’s
which heavy metal, PCP , and D&D lure oversaturated podcast market for
a woman to a life of sin. (After getting proof), instantly fizzling franchises
a pentagram tattooed on her brow, she (“Hippypants and Peace Bear”), and
cackles, “I think it looks #@* radical!”) wry urban daydreams (“Marooned on
Next comes a sleazy fable of adultery a Desert Island with the People on the
and novelty gags (“The Laffin’ Spittin’ Subway”). There are slightly facile mus-
Man”), dressed to kill in angular mid- ings on art-making (“Grist for the Mill”),
century fashions and punctuated with as well as emotionally plangent stories
the airborne sweat droplets known in that say more in a dozen pages than
the comics trade as plewds. The clos- most graphic novels can at ten times
ing feature is “Young Dan Pussey,” a A page from Daniel Clowes’s ‘Ghost World,’ which appeared in Eightball #17, August 1996 the length. Of this last group, “Immor-
warts-and-all take on a superhero tal, Invisible,” “Like a Weed, Joe,” and
comics mill—a meta-maneuver sug- lauded the literary potential of comics, comics for Cracked. (Unlike misfit pen- “Blue Italian Shit” are luminous mem-
gesting firsthand experience. “Get a but its word-drunk selection has lit- ciller Dan Pussey, he never served time ory plays that, despite centering on dif-
move on, boys! Breakfast is ready!” tle in common with such monumental at a superhero outfit.) For the inaugu- ferent characters, read like episodes in
cries the taskmaster to his underpaid works. It felt like the future, arrived ral issue, he signed his pieces Daniel a single sentimental education.
team, bunked in the Infinity Comics at through the past. The shading ef- Clowes, D. G. C., and Dan Clowes. Future Impressive later works like “Cari-
compound. “Pages are waiting to be fects were done cleanly in Zip-A-Tone issues ran bylines from Dan’l Clowes, cature” and “Gynecology” distill the
pencilled, written and inked!” (a soon-to-be-discontinued adhesive D. Gillespie Clowes, “Tubby” Clowes, earlier misanthropy into compul-
Varying in tone and ambition, each sheet), and the peculiar lettering could Young Dan Clowes, and more: an indus- sively readable noir-tinged narratives.
of the comics in Eightball’s first issue look plucked from an earlier era, its trious crew of misanthropic ink studs They have the meandering magic of a
fixates on verbal zing and graphic fussiness forcing readers to come and true artistes, all easily summoned
textures. Faces tend to be grotesque, closer, slow down. At two bucks, the with a glance in the mirror. (“I’ve al- 1
Five more issues appeared from 1998 to
and the dialogue is often stylishly comic was a bargain, dense and delir- ways felt that I had all these different,
2004. These later numbers concentrated
rancid (“Yeah, stop fucking around, ious. Maybe too dense. In one story, the very unrelated parts of my personality,
on single, long-form narratives (David Bor-
Douche . . . I don’t want our sales to be hard-boiled narrator breaks the fourth and I wanted to be able to do stories
ing, Ice Haven, and The Death Ray, all later
affected by this unreadable shit!”), but wall to grumble about space limits as he with each of these different parts of
published as graphic novels) and are not
the comics’ sheer beauty and mystery contemplates his dire straits: “A good my personality in the same book,” he
included in this volume.
can also knock you out. The opening question that deserves an answer—un- later said.) Covers and an occasional
panel of the first story is a close-up of fortunately I only have 6 pages in this feature were printed in color, for him 2
The Complete Eightball includes a dozen
a stunning, raven-haired woman, with issue so you’re gonna have to take my an almost masochistic feat involving pages of illuminating notes and source im-
earrings that (on the third or thirteenth word for it.” Mylar film, blue-lining, and the cutting ages. Of Eightball #6 (June 1991), Clowes re-
DAN IE L CL OW ES / FAN TAGR APH ICS

read) turn out to be Thalia and Mel- of transparent Pantone sheets. By issue calls that the printing was so abysmal that
pomene, the classical masks of comedy 10, Clowes had divorced, remarried, and he “threw the entire box of comp copies out
and tragedy. Her face is so hypnotic,
you miss what’s hiding in plain sight. 
Eightball was published not long
T he joke is that he has no one to
blame but himself. Everything in
Eightball was done by the artist Daniel
relocated to Berkeley. The cover price
was fifty cents more.
Other adventurous comics found
the window onto Division Street about two
minutes after cutting it open. Later, after
being told by the printer (now out of busi-
after Art Spiegelman’s groundbreak- Clowes. He was twenty-eight and liv- their way to store racks in the late ness: HA !) that we couldn’t reprint until
ing memoir Maus (1986) and Alan Moore ing in his native Chicago, after a stint 1980s and early 1990s, and you could these copies were sold, I went out in the
and Dave Gibbons’s caped-crusader de- in New York, where he studied at the detect in Eightball a tinge of the night- middle of the night and salvaged a few of
construction Watchmen (1987), when Pratt Institute—later lampooned in mare logic of Chester Brown’s Yummy the copies that hadn’t yet been pissed on
the mainstream American press briefly “Art School Confidential”—and drew Fur, the pop-culture mockery of Bob by hoboes.”

April 6, 2023 51
Cheever story like “The Country Hus- His facility with multiple modes might noisseur, Clowes conjures a shadow Damme) and the name of the auteur:
band” or “The Day the Pig Fell into suggest the absence of a singular style world of grim diners and collectible Dr. Wilde. According to a restroom sage,
the Well”: populated with curious (in the same interview, he prioritizes tchotchkes, moronic ad copy (“Hey! who dispenses advice—legal, derma-
characters who enter and exit with- doing “all different kinds of drawing”), I Need a Liquor Store”) and periodi- tological, and otherwise—from atop a
out fanfare, told in a voice bursting but even in their variety, his panels are cals like The Octagon (newspaper) and toilet seat, the company responsible for
with regret yet also ecstatic with the always recognizably Clowesian—and Luv Canal (girlie mag, named after that unsettling film, Interesting Produc-
sheer talent expended in the telling. miles away from bland.  the infamous toxic dump site). Cryp- tions, is located in Blackjack County.
The busy, fevered covers—everyone Glove is a startlingly original comic tic storefronts do slow business at odd Which is where things really get weird.
looks deranged—practically shout for a that nevertheless trails numerous in- addresses: you can find Yahweh’s Mis- Able-bodied, with a healthy head of
browser’s attention, in contrast to the fluences, from the title (nicked from take at 1977 Hair Street. Call it gentle hair, Clay is nonetheless so staggered
subtler ones gracing later Clowes books Russ Meyer’s ferociously great 1965 film magic realism, a playful twist on the by this celluloid version of his ex—is
like Wilson (2010) and Patience (2016). Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) on down: everyday that prepares the reader for it really her?—that for the rest of the
Even the letters sections (“The Bulg- a Manson-like cult, Lovecraftian fish- more profound breaches of reality.  saga, he’s depicted with bags under
ing Mailsack”), prank-call contests, and folk, a ubiquitous logo that recalls the Clay Loudermilk is less of an inno- his eyes, desperate for a solid night’s
ads for mugs and T-shirts feel crucial, post horn in The Crying of Lot 49, not cent than Jeffrey Beaumont, Kyle Mac- sleep. Some scenes, seen once, can’t
providing a glimpse of the hustle and to mention an important locale (Hour- Lachlan’s Blue Velvet character; the be unseen. This goes for the reader,
flow of audience engagement in the glass Lake) that also figures in Lolita. story starts with him visiting a porn too. For all its visual wit and honed
pre-Internet era.3 The Complete Eight- banter, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
ball comes with no overarching table unfolds as a series of dangerous vi-
of contents for its five-hundred-plus sions, designed to make us reel. It’s apt
pages, making individual pieces hard that Glove’s first chapter delivers not
to hunt down. (I developed an elabo- just forbidden sights, but monstrous
rate system using shredded Post-its.) means of seeing. One of Clay’s friends,
The absence compels you to read the ludicrously, appears with the tails of
whole thing in sequence, to regard it “Asiatic sea crustaceans” flailing from
as a polyphonic magnum opus tilting his sockets, to treat some ocular mal-
at the monoculture, born under Bush I ady; he explains that his doctor had
and stretching into Clinton’s second his eyeballs removed, and the crea-
term. It’s a madcap portrait of the art- tures were “there to eat out the bac-
ist as generational talent, recycling and teria.” Later Clay sits handcuffed in
refining his themes, as well as a time the back of a police cruiser when the
capsule bearing the moods and mores cops stop a mute, possibly somnam-
of an American decade now so distant bulant woman who has three vertical
it might as well be the age of Atlantis.  eye slits in her face. One figure sees
nothing; the other, too much. 

2.
[Comics] are in a sense the ultimate
domain of the artist who seeks to
T he overall effect is startling. It looks
exactly the way the world should look.
At its most potent, Glove can feel like
wield absolute control over his im- it alters, even negates, seeing. During
agery. Novels are the work of one these moments of high anxiety and
individual but they require visual maximal weirdness, style is obliter-
collaboration on the part of the ated or irrelevant. The images attack
reader. Film is by its nature a col- too quickly for style to be processed, like
laborative endeavor. . . . Comics offer medicinal sea worms that dive straight
the creator a chance to control the through the eyeholes and into the brain. 
specifics of his own world in both Like Clay, we want to see more, even
abstract and literal terms. if it ruins us. His dark desire for the
—“So, Why Comics?,” truth—the imperative to cherchez la
Modern Cartoonist femme—brings him into the fold of
conspiracy theorists, who see in a gro-
“To me, my art looks perfect when I cery chain’s primitive logo the sigil
do it,” Clowes told The Comics Journal of some vast secret network, and into
in the summer of 1992. a death cult prepping for the Great
Cleansing, an apocalyptic revolution
I mean, it’s really what I see in my that involves the assassination of the
head. To me it looks almost like a advice columnist Ann Landers.5 Clay
diagram or like a coloring book or strays into the clutches of a seduc-
something. It really looks very. . . I tress or three as he hunts for clues. All
don’t want to say bland, but it just the while, he shows decency to those
looks very perfect. It looks exactly he encounters, no matter how strange
the way the world should look. And they look: a lovelorn waitress who is
I don’t see a style at all. I see it as part fish, a genetically engineered pet
being each face is the way a face with no orifices, a crawling man who
really looks. . . . People tell me they helps him out with directions. As in
can recognize my style, and I don’t Faster, Pussycat!, violence erupts on a
understand what they’re talking A page from Daniel Clowes’s ‘Art School Confidential,’ which appeared in Eightball #7, hair trigger; but unlike the exhilarat-
about. I don’t see my style. November 1991 ing drubbings doled out by the Ama-
zonian Varla (Tura Satana), the ones
The interview was published shortly As in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet theater, after all, and we piece together delivered by a testosterone-injecting
after Eightball #9, containing the pen- (1986), a young man descends into a that he’s divorced. What he sees on- brute named Geat kill the soul.
ultimate chapter of Like a Velvet Glove twilight zone behind an explicitly all- screen is not what he came for: a bi- Clay lodges across the street from
Cast in Iron; the serial would reach American façade.4 A bric-a-brac con- zarre S&M movie, entitled Like a Velvet his quarry: Interesting Productions,
its shattering finish two months later. Glove Cast in Iron, with a mustached the secretive entity behind the taw-
Clowes’s confession-cum-manifesto, 4
It should be said that Clowes’s Eightball man in diapers and a dominatrix who dry film. Through binoculars, he spies
as he nears the end of his landmark characters are almost entirely white, and looks alarmingly like his ex-wife. (We a small, pipe-smoking girl at a desk,
work, is a mix of modesty and bravado, the gaze (with the significant exception don’t grasp this till later; we don’t even perpetually writing. (Going through her
DAN IE L CL OW ES / FAN TAGR APH ICS

the tone half-kingly, half-savantish. of Ghost World) is unabashedly male—not learn Clay’s last name till episode 3.) trash, he later discovers she’s simply
unusual for the time, but more glaring The masks of Melpomene and Thalia drawing the same picture of a horse
3
Correspondents include fellow cartoon- thirty years on. Clowes is aware of the un- pop up on the end credits, bracketing
ists like Peter Bagge, whose Hate had its comfortable embrace of nostalgia. In the the list of pseudonymous actors (Abel 5
In one of Glove’s rare off-key asides, the
heyday in the 1990s, comedian Margaret provocatively titled “Gynecology,” late in Caine, Brock Thunder, Madam Van revolutionaries take over the White House,
Cho, a member of Yo La Tengo, Spike Lee’s The Complete Eightball, the artist Epps fee- where they get annoyed by a freshly di-
brother, and a Seattle woman who, after in- bly excuses his bias for the iconography of chise Cook’s in the 2001 film Ghost World vorced, foulmouthed Bill Clinton. Clowes
quiring about the pronunciation of Clowes’s yesteryear, including problematic images, (for which Clowes cowrote the screenplay) drew the panels in July 1992, months be-
surname, adds, “Did I mention that you are by saying, “I just like the innocence of those is revealed to have originally had a racist fore the election, and almost chose to de-
a white male and I hate you?” old drawings.” And the fried-chicken fran- name, later fixed by changing one letter. pict Ross Perot in the Oval Office instead.

52 The New York Review

head, over and over.) When he gets in- critical of bad music, retro diners, and Enid buys at Adam’s II, an adult store Ghost World is what Clowes will be re-
side, his fate is sealed. raw ambition. I was going to call them that she begs her friend Josh to take membered for.
Once he enters the building, movie sassy, but on the story’s first page, her to. That mask, divorced from its Stuck in the pages of the final
titles are tacked to a corkboard, with Enid rips into Sassy, the magazine intended use, looks like part of a su- issue in The Complete Eightball is
keys to corresponding screening rooms. du jour for their demographic: “These perhero costume: the sordid has be- a stapled, fourteen-page pamphlet
Clay takes three keys. The first film is stupid girls think they’re so hip, but come adorable. Google “Ghost World,” called Modern Cartoonist. Easily de-
a bug-eyed rant (delivered, in fact, by they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck-up and one of the first images you’ll see tachable, it’s a literal book within a
Dr. Wilde, the director); the second, prep-school bitches who think they’re is Thora Birch as Enid in the 2001 film book, with publication attributed to
a perverse silent movie in which two ‘cutting edge’ because they know who version, winsome in a bat-eared mask. a fictitious Catholic group devoted to
babies are made up to look like bride ‘Sonic Youth’ is!” To which Becky re- Edward Gorey devised suitably the comic art form. On the cover, an
and groom. He walks out of both. With plies, “You’re a stuck-up prep-school Victorian-sounding pseudonyms for eyeshaded artist draws a goofy face
grim fairy-tale logic, the third selection bitch!” his morbidly wry stories from the on the page before him, while outside
is the worst thing he could ever see. Clowes initially didn’t think “Ghost letters of his own name (Ogdred the window, a mushroom cloud looms
Later, in one of the most devastating World” would be more than a one-shot, Weary, Regera Dowdy, et al.). Vladi- beyond a ruined cityscape. In a tidy,
reveals in comics, it turns out that— but the voices must have been irresist- mir Nabokov inserted Vivian Dark- minuscule hand, Clowes—the anon-
spoiler alert—all of Interesting Pro- ible. (He cites the charming if casually bloom into some of his books for an ymous author of the pamphlet—first
ductions’ plots, from insipid to sadistic racist 1964 movie The World of Henry enigmatic, anagrammatic cameo. For assesses the current (1997) situation,
to literally murderous, come directly Orient, which follows two teenage girls Ghost World, Daniel Clowes, a serial deeming that there are at best “20–25
from the pipe-chomping girl’s mind, as in Manhattan who are obsessed with employer of pen names, rearranged [comic] creators producing work of an
transcribed by a slavering Dr. Wilde. a concert pianist, as an influence on himself, lending his most enduring extraordinarily high value,” followed
By the end, Clay is molded into a new his duo’s insular dynamic.) By their and endearing heroine his letters. By by “25 or 30 with noble aspirations,”
shape, his fate in line with his name. second appearance, it’s clear that Enid the end of the book, Enid Coleslaw’s and around 2,950 others who are be-
and Becky are trying to navigate the destiny is unclear, but she’s equipped neath contempt—“teenage million-
uneasy life stage between school and with all the wisdom and love her cre- aires who draw to create fodder for
3. whatever lies beyond—and the newly ator has to offer.7 ‘development deals’ and those in wait-
forming obstacles between them—by ing to be same.” He praises the power
Think of the comic panel (or page or directing their insecurities outward, of the form (“Comics have an inher-
story) as a living mechanism with, mocking their peers and especially the 4. ent energy to them . . . a near-electric
for example, the text representing adults around them. charge”), and inveighs against sloppy
the brain (the internal; ideas, reli- They roll their eyes at do-gooder par- As we enter, voiceless and impo- work, skewering artists who opt for a
gion) and the pictures representing ents and long-haired waiters, Satanists tent, a digital age of “instant ac- more “iconic” style (mocked as “The
the body (the external: biology, etc.), and psychics and stand-up comics, cess” (or constant excess), the fragile Adventures of a Featureless Blob”).
brought to life by the almost tan- “guitar-plunkin’ morons” and the “pa- chemistry of this, our hand-held, Just as the cultural change wrought
gible spark created by the perfect thetic fucking loser[s]” who resort to non-automatic pictorial narrative by the Internet becomes easier to
juxtaposition of panels in sequence. personal ads. (“I remember when I first device and its inherently sublime see, he makes a stand against the
—“To the Young Cartoonist,” started reading these, I thought ‘DWF ’ nuances . . . appears to be in grave “democratization” promised by new
Modern Cartoonist stood for ‘dwarf,’” Enid says. “I could danger. Reading a comic book as technology, looking down his nose at
never figure out why so many dwarves God intended is a simple pleasure the “structural shift . . . in the reader’s
The snippets of letters that ran in were placing ads.”) Enid sneers that and as such, our precious pictorial favor, giving him an exaggerated role
Eightball #11, responding to the end Becky’s foppish former beau seems pamphlet, like vaudeville and the in the give-and-take between artist
of Glove’s run, read as though writ- to have taken fashion cues from “a magic lantern, is just the sort of and audience.”
ten in a state of shock. “Exactly what gay tennis player from the Twenties.” thing that gets crushed in the gears It’s fitting that The Complete Eight-
was that all about??” wonders one Browsing a free alt weekly sporting of progress. ball, which contained a parody of Jack
reader, while another says it “left me the headline “In Bed with the GOP : A —“The Future and Beyond,” Chick’s fire-and-brimstone pamphlets
with the same feeling I got when I fin- Lobbyist Comes Clean,” Enid moans: Modern Cartoonist in issue #1, should end with a tract
ished 100 Years of Solitude—life can “People who are super-serious about by Clowes himself in the final num-
be so great, and yet fucked.” Clowes politics all the time give me the total In May 2001, two months before Terry ber. Clowes has reminisced about buy-
later joked that #11 was “one of the creeps! It’s like my dad. . . . I mean who Zwigoff’s film Ghost World hit theaters, ing and consuming, in one evening,
most incoherent issues,” and some of the fuck cares?!” The Comics Journal ran a long inter- about sixty of Chick’s tracts, telling
it feels pro forma, as if he were de- view with Clowes, whom it had simi- The Guardian it was “maybe the most
pleted after the labors of Glove. There’s larly featured in 1992. This time, he devastating comics-reading experience
the interior monologue of someone
bored at a party; an Irish folktale “il-
lustrated by D. Gillespie Clowes”; “Why
I n earlier Eightball stories, when an
embittered Clowes stand-in goes
on a tear, you can feel like the hair’s
got to do the cover. Rather than a sin-
gle illustration of the kind he’s done
on occasion since for The New Yorker,
I’ve ever had.” “I’d never been abso-
lutely convinced by a comic book be-
fore in my life,” he told The Imp, Daniel
I Hate Christians” (about what you’d been singed off your head, even if his Clowes turned it into a mini graphic Raeburn’s sporadic but important
expect); and “The Happy Fisherman,” bile matches your own. (“I wanted to memoir. In panel 1, he’s invited to be comics-crit magazine, in 1997,
who is nude from the waist down, his be kinda mean ’cause I’m really sick the subject of an interview. (“Why did
privates cloaked by an open-mouthed of these people dominating my life,” I agree to that?” he wonders in panel but I was sure that he was right
fish. Actual Hollywood interest in Like Clowes once said.) By having the 3. “I hate The Comics Journal.”) Later, and that I’d been crazy all along. . . .
a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron inspired a caustic observations come from two Clowes reads the results with dismay; To read that many in a row, this
satiric riff, “Velvet Glove,” but it’s a young women whose lives are in flux, yet by the last panel, he’s somehow overwhelming tidal wave of Chris-
dud, alternating scenes of a superhero- and forcing these opinions to rub up agreed to do the cover illustration. tianity coming at you—it’s an
inflected revamp of Glove with ones of against social reality, the story achieves “What’s wrong with me?” he says at his amazing experience. Here was
Clowes getting pressured to, e.g., cast a devastating poignancy while still dis- drawing board, composing the comic this comic dealing with life and
Jim Belushi as Geat. playing Clowes’s gift for spite. Unfold- we’ve just read. death. The absolute most impor-
But then, on page 25, there is “Ghost ing in eight parts, Ghost World is the In the interview, Clowes recalls the tant thing. I mean, he was pulling
World.” The story stands out immedi- spiritual opposite of Like a Velvet Glove arduous process of using Rubylith out all the stops, there was no soft-
ately, its pages shaded in a delicate Cast in Iron. Though haunted by his sheets to get the distinctive color ef- pedaling, he was just ramming it
blue to evoke the soft glow a TV casts past, Clay Loudermilk remains some- fects for Ghost World. It was a bespoke down your throat. Never before had
into a room at night, numbing but also thing of a cipher; living in the present, technique he learned at Pratt, and so I been affected like that by comics.
holy. Best friends Enid Coleslaw (dark in a world more closely conforming to comically cumbersome that he muses,
bob, glasses) and Becky Doppelmeyer our own, Enid and Becky are both more “I might as well have spent four years I find Chick’s work repulsive. But it’s
(blond) are recent high school grad- normal and deeply rooted. learning how to fix a cotton gin.” The easy to see why Clowes found those
uates trying to figure out their next The title came from some graffiti grumbling in both cases is tongue in cheap tracts (eight cents a pop at a
move, and the pleasure is in their fresh Clowes passed daily near his home in cheek, because the labors he undertook Christian bookstore) so potent. Here
faces and how they find diversion— Chicago; after he moved to Califor- worked. The Comics Journal cover—a was someone who used the medium
even fascination—living in nowheres- nia, the phrase floated to mind as he Möbius comic strip—is a witty mas- to its utmost, harnessing the power of
ville.6 Enid and Becky are witheringly began writing the story, and it mem- ter class in the art form’s seductive words and pictures, to his own furious
orably captures that sense of being charm and narrative flexibility, and ends. (Chick died in 2016.) Clowes’s re-
6
The suburban milieu is geographically out of step with what’s around you. It’s ligion is comics itself, and every word
vague—“a combination of Chicago and as though, having plunged his talent 7
The affection is mutual, to a point. In chap- in Modern Cartoonist—and each panel
Los Angeles . . . with decaying Midwestern deep into Glove’s heart of darkness, ter 3, Becky teases Enid: “Name one guy in The Complete Eightball—is a tes-
brick buildings and palm trees in the back- Clowes immediately turned it in the who lives up to your standards.” “Some- tament to his godlike prowess. As he
ground,” per Clowes. Aimee Mann’s song opposite direction. A subtle but im- body like David Clowes,” Enid says dream- told The Comics Journal in 1992: “I was

.
“Ghost World” (2000), inspired by the comic portant mirroring takes place between ily. “He’s like this famous cartoonist.” To trying to almost create something for
but released before the movie, suggests the S&M mask in the first chapter of which Becky replies: “Yick! I hate cartoons!” myself that I wish existed, or to cre-
the South: “If I don’t find a job/It’s down Glove, which unzips to reveal Clay’s (Later Enid sees Clowes at a signing and ate for the world something I wish
to Dad and Myrtle Beach.” ex-wife, and the black headgear that recoils in disgust.) existed.”

April 6, 2023 53
 Longing for Reconciliation
Susan Neiman

far less connected than today, that

knowledge served to cross-pollinate
separate traditions of thought, making
him an invaluable consultant, editor
of book series, and organizer of con-
ferences and salons. Yet what, Muller
asks, justifies a six-hundred-page bi-
ography of a charismatic man who in
the end left little but unforgettable
impressions? There were four small
books: one a doctoral dissertation of
questionable originality, the others
short essays or lectures transcribed
after his death. However interesting
they are, they are more fragments than
full works, and they would hardly be
memorable without the impressions.
One answer to the puzzle is found
in the names of those who were im-
pressed. Between Zurich, New York,
Cambridge, Berlin, Paris, and Jeru-
salem in the years between 1947 and
1987, this multilingual man met most
of the Western intelligentsia. Theo-
dor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Hannah
Arendt, Daniel Bell, Hans Blumenberg,
Pierre Bourdieu, Stanley Cavell, Paul
Celan, Noam Chomsky, Emil Cioran,
Jacob Taubes and Margherita von Brentano, Berlin, circa 1972 Jacques Derrida, Paul Feyerabend, Na-
than Glazer, Jürgen Habermas, Eric
Hobsbawm, Alexandre Kojève, Her-
Professor of Apocalypse: was sweet Jewish melancholy in a man planation of how this thinker bridged bert Marcuse, Paul Ricoeur, Gershom
The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes whom a series of mental and physical the gap between Thomas Aquinas and Scholem, Carl Schmitt, Susan Sontag,
by Jerry Z. Muller. illnesses had left looking older than Duns Scotus. In Professor of Apocalypse and a host of lesser luminaries make
Princeton University Press, his fifty-nine years and considerably Jerry Z. Muller records four different appearances in Muller’s biography.
637 pp., $39.95 more harmless than the rumors that groups of colleagues as the ostensible Taubes carried on long correspon-
preceded him. “Demonic” was a word source of the story, often cited as proof dences with most, bitter fights with
Charisma, like pornography, is easier often used. of the accusation that Taubes was a some, love affairs with others. Muller
to recognize than define. Max Weber’s Some months later, ten minutes into charlatan whose mastery of texts and writes that Professor of Apocalypse is
attempt borders on tautology: his Nietzsche lectures at the Freie knowledge of their authors was less as much a portrait of an age as a man.
Universität Berlin, I got it. It wasn’t than he claimed. There’s no question The book would have been truer had
A certain quality of an individual his erudition or rhetorical brilliance, that he often played fast and loose it been a better portrait of the age. For
personality by virtue of which he though he could shine in six languages. with the truth. Yet to the extent that all his erudition, Muller, a professor
is set apart from ordinary men and Taubes asked questions no one else he was a charlatan, the story reveals emeritus of intellectual history at the
treated as endowed with super- dared. He loved Nietzsche profoundly, what sort: How gifted must one be to Catholic University of America, misses
natural, superhuman, or at least yet he could stand in a Berlin audito- expostulate spontaneously on what vital facts about postwar Germany,
specifically exceptional powers or rium, quote Heinrich Himmler, read would have been the views of a phi- where Taubes spent most of the last
qualities. the most anti-Semitic passages of losopher who formed a link between twenty-six years of his life. Some may
Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, and ask Thomist and Scotist thought? seem trivial outside academia: German
Later social scientists did no better, what they had to do with the gas cham- professors leave much of their work
though enterprises selling lessons in bers. In between he told the best Jew- to their Assistenten, who have little in
business leadership still attempt to
break down charisma into parts that
can be acquired. It’s not a matter of
ish jokes I ever heard. Did he answer
the questions he’d raised? Not in any
form I remember. But his riffs on them
T aubes, who was born in Vienna in
1923 and died in Berlin in 1987,
came from a long line of Jewish schol-
common with American assistant pro-
fessors except the absence of tenure.
Even today some scholarly texts pub-
intelligence (though intelligence helps) were deep in a way that made the use ars and had an extraordinary edu- lished under professors’ names have
or competence (which often doesn’t). of the word “deep” seem superficial, cation in both religious and secular been written by their assistants. Ger-
It’s essentially erotic, but need not courageous in a way that revealed the studies. His mother was an activist in man seminars are conducted through
involve sex. Its mystery led the early timidity of most thinking. the socialist Zionist youth group Ha- student presentations on which the
Greeks, who first named it, to view it It was a combination that could poel Hazair, and his father was a rabbi presiding professor simply comments.
as a gift of the gods: something that make a young philosopher dizzy. I was who left Vienna for Zurich in 1936. This By not mentioning those facts while
might be conferred but cannot be cul- old enough to be grateful that Taubes saved his immediate family, though meticulously documenting which as-
tivated. Attempts to describe it inevi- was not the first charismatic teacher many relatives were murdered during sistant took over which of Taubes’s
tably fall back on metaphors of light: I’d had, so I could enjoy the experience the Holocaust. Taubes completed his tasks, Muller leaves the impression
charismatic people are dazzling, or without being overwhelmed by it. And Ph.D. in philosophy at twenty-three that he was lazy, crazy, or unscrupu-
sparkling, or fiery. since Berlin in the 1980s was not ex- with a dissertation on Occidental lous. Instead he was merely taking part
Those who knew the philosopher and actly overflowing with Jewish intellec- eschatology and was ordained as a in an educational system that Ameri-
rabbi Jacob Taubes agree on one thing: tuals, Taubes enjoyed the company of rabbi at twenty-four. There were no can academics rightly find shocking.
he had it. Virtually every other claim someone who got his jokes, and most professional prospects in Switzerland Those of us who knew Taubes, as well
about him provokes disagreement. Yet of his allusions. It helped sustain the for a stateless Jewish intellectual, so as those who only knew tales about
his charisma wasn’t apparent when I vision of a rebirth of German Jewish in 1947 he went to New York, which, him, have eagerly awaited Muller’s
E THAN AN D TANI A TAUBES COLLE CT ION

met him in 1983 in the home of his life that he never abandoned. apart from a few years in Jerusalem, book, which was twenty years in the
wife, the philosopher Margherita von Whether in the classroom or his was his base until he settled in Ber- making. So many questions remained
Brentano, whose interests in Kant, favorite Berlin haunt, the Paris Bar, lin in 1966. He studied at the Jewish unanswered. After inviting him to Jeru-
the Enlightenment, and critical the- Taubes could talk as well about Talmud Theological Seminary and taught at salem as a cherished student, Scholem
ory were close to my own.1 What I saw as he could about Nietzsche, as well Harvard and Princeton before becom- called him evil and sent him back to
about the Frankfurt School as the Gos- ing a professor at Columbia in 1956. New York, but four different versions of
1
I was coeditor of her Nachlass, Marghe- pels, as well about the latest French Praised from his earliest years as the story were in circulation. Which one
rita von Brentano: Das Politische und das literary theory as Kafka or Kabbalah. a wunderkind in two distinct realms was correct? And why was a man who
Persönliche (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010). For He could talk so well about anything, of thought, Taubes prided himself on called himself an arch-Jew (Erzjude)
conversation and comments I am grateful in fact, that two suspicious colleagues knowing everything, and particularly drawn to the company of Nazi intellec-
to Ethan Taubes, and look forward to his once invented a fictitious medieval everyone, worth knowing. In an age tuals? Was that part of the antinomian-
book on his father. philosopher to goad him into an ex- when international intellectuals were ism that led him to disdain Reform and

54 The New York Review

Conservative Judaism, while breaking conditions of knowledge. I’ve argued are still concerned with the questions least his pardon, for his decision to
most of the 613 commandments of ha- elsewhere against those views, but those events pose to us?” After quot- live in Germany with Brentano.
lakah? Was he flirting with Christianity Kant’s work did lead to the separa- ing this letter Muller puzzlingly asks,
or struggling with it? Even to those of tion of philosophical and theological “Was this an explanation or a ratio-
us inclined to forgive a great deal, it
was clear that Taubes lied, broke hearts,
betrayed. He damaged and fascinated,
questions.
By the time Nietzsche’s struggle
with religion led him to pronounce
nalization?” A rationalization for what?
Taubes had a permanent job and a
place in the cultural life of New York
B orn in 1922, Brentano was the
brilliant and beautiful scion of
a distinguished German family that
often at the same time. Muller’s book that God was dead, the split between City, but Anglo-American philosophy included writers, philosophers, and
is subtitled “The Many Lives of Jacob the two fields was so complete that was barely conscious of the questions diplomats. She was baptized by the
Taubes,” and there were hopes that twentieth-century histories of philos- that moved him. A distinguished Ox- future Pope Pius XII; her father was
it might weave the many lives into ophy simply ignored the wealth of reli- bridge philosopher recently told me ambassador to the Vatican. But at a
one—or at least answer some of the gious ferment spilling from the pages that German intellectuals’ acceptance time when most West Germans, who
questions he left behind. of earlier thinkers. Even those who of fascism posed no more philosophical viewed themselves as victims of the
Instead Muller provides a compen- didn’t subscribe to positivism upheld problems than a man who thought he war, simply wanted to forget it, Bren-
dium of answers, drawn from prodi- W.V. Quine’s principle of charity, which was a teapot: “Both were simply mad.” tano was a committed antifascist. (It
gious archival research and over a suggested we should tactfully ignore Neither this nor the dismissal of is odd, to say the least, that Muller
hundred interviews. He doesn’t seek ideas that no longer made sense to Nazi intellectuals as swinish could describes that commitment as “cen-
to weigh them; whether Taubes was us, the way we turn a blind eye to the satisfy Taubes. He thought the Ho- tral to her self-image,” as if it were a
an intellectual charlatan or a brilliant quaint musings of an aging great-aunt. locaust raised anew the question of matter of narcissism.)
thinker is for the reader to judge. It’s For Taubes, however, the answer to the Gnosticism, the idea that the world Brentano wrote a dissertation on Ar-
a strategy that aims at objectivity, but problem of fascism and the Holocaust is the product of a perpetual bat- istotle under Heidegger’s supervision,
absent a point of view, with no guid- lies in religion, and it took him all the tle between good and evil forces. As but university jobs for women were
ing theme or thread, we are left with a way back to the Gospels. He saw Nazi the seventeenth-century philosopher virtually unknown, so she spent years
bunch of stories about a complicated attempts to ground anti-Semitism in Pierre Bayle had argued, it’s the hy- working at Southwest Radio. Then as
man. The reader who hoped for open racist pseudoscience as trivial; far pothesis that makes most sense. Surely now, German radio stations were often
windows on Taubes’s lives lays down more important was the anti-Judaism it saved the appearances better than staffed by Ph.D.s who created serious
the heavy volume feeling faintly like of early Christianity. Taubes wasn’t the Judeo-Christian idea of a Creator programming about politics and cul-
a peeping Tom. the only philosopher on the Continent who was fundamentally benevolent ture. Among other things, Brentano
who rejected the split between reli- and intended us to be so. Yet however wrote and produced the first German
gion, philosophy, and politics, but he Gnosticism seemed to resonate with radio programs about the Holocaust.

O ne question the book raises often:

Why did Taubes fail to write more?
This betrays an ignorance of twentieth-
suggested that theological concepts
were prior to any others.
Though Taubes scorned disciplinary
the facts, Taubes was understandably
torn. For one who came so close to the
Holocaust, a world without redemption
She was then appointed assistant pro-
fessor at the new Freie Universität Ber-
lin, where she held the first seminars
century philosophy, which keelhauled as well as other sorts of boundaries, he from the cycle of good and evil was there on anti-Semitism. Decades later
itself over whether it was possible to expressed at an early age the wish to intolerable. And if redemption had a she would be a major figure in the cre-
write philosophy at all. That question be a theologian. Did he ever develop a meaning, people like Schmitt, and even ation of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.
was equally anguished, though differ- theology? He had at least two, which Hitler, must be redeemable. At a time when Germany’s con-
ently posed, on both sides of the Atlan- led many to wonder if his religious pre- The longing for redemption led to sciousness of the Holocaust is so cen-
tic. If the problem that fired endless occupations were merely the detritus Taubes’s fascination with Paul, the tral to its identity that it may be in
discussions in Harvard’s philosophy of an Orthodox upbringing he could apostle to the Gentiles who never quite danger of oversaturation, it’s hard to
department was How is philosophy not overcome, his struggles with re- rejected Judaism. At a time when most recall how radical Brentano’s commit-
possible after Wittgenstein?, the prob- ligious questions mere performance. Jews were delighted that Pope John ments were. Back then intellectuals
lem driving thinkers in Frankfurt and It might sometimes look that way. He XXIII had tried to cleanse the Catholic were as inclined as everyone else to
Berlin was How is philosophy possible could hijack a B’rit milah (circumcision Church of anti-Semitism, Taubes was accept the consensus of the Adenauer
after Auschwitz? ceremony) by appearing unannounced arguing that anti-Semitism was insep- era: all that—the Holocaust was sel-
In 1969 Cavell wrote that “the figure at the head of an Orthodox minyan and arable from Christianity. According to dom named—was awful, but war is al-
of Socrates now haunts contemporary driving out the liberal rabbi in order Pauline theology, Jews’ refusal to ac- ways awful. Those responsible for it
philosophical practice and conscience,” to underscore the importance of ha- cept Jesus as the Messiah meant they were dead or punished at Nuremberg;
a nod to influential Anglo-American lakic ritual. Weeks later, in the same had abandoned their role as the chosen those remaining had been cogs in big
philosophers who wrote next to noth- city, he could invite guests to a dinner people, which passed to the Christians, wheels that couldn’t be escaped with-
ing. Even Wittgenstein published only party featuring a large lobster. (“I’m setting up a conflict that poisoned two out losing one’s life. Misled by a hand-
a dissertation he subsequently repu- an Orthodox sinner,” he would say with millennia. “If we had accepted him, he ful of bad apples, the German people
diated; his later work consists of a se- a grin.) The antinomianism thus im- would have been the Messiah,” Taubes had no idea of what was going on in
ries of notes, most of them unanswered plied has a history, not only in the said on his deathbed.2 their name in the East.
questions, that students compiled after practices of the seventeenth-century He spent his life torn between the Forgive and forget was the order of
his death. Perhaps, Cavell was suggest- followers of the messianic Shabbatai desire to heal the split between Ju- the day. Brentano refused to follow
ing, philosophers have no better model Zevi but in the Apostle Paul, who ar- daism and Christianity, particularly it. In 1967, when she and Taubes de-
than Socrates’ gadfly, stinging others gued that since the spirit was what between Germans and Jews, and his cided to wed after turbulent years of
out of complacence without offering a mattered, Gentiles need not obey the doubts about the possibility of doing common-law marriage, he took her to
solution to the dilemmas we pose. Rich- law. It could be a genuine philosophical so. Muller records Taubes’s early ex- Zurich to meet his family. After Shab-
ard Rorty went further and declared position as well as a cynical rationaliza- pression of the dilemma as a “gash bat services at the synagogue and
that philosophy had reached a dead end. tion for self-indulgence. With Taubes, in his own soul” but fails to see its lunch at the family table, Rabbi Zwi
In America and England, such de- everything was overdetermined. centrality to his most important re- Taubes searched for a conversational
bates burned inside philosophy de- lationships. Muller describes in detail connection to his daughter-in-law to
partments. In Germany, they were Scholem’s rejection of Taubes in 1951, be, so he complimented Adenauer.
discussed by politicians and regu-
larly filled radio programs and the
pages of Der Spiegel and other major
I n 1945 Hannah Arendt wrote that
“the problem of evil will be the
fundamental question of postwar
as well as Taubes’s lifelong attempt
to return to his mentor’s good graces.
But there was no chance of reconcil-
Brentano would have none of it; she
called the longtime chancellor a hyp-
ocrite whose right-hand man was a
media. Philosophers like Adorno and intellectual life in Europe.” She was iation once Taubes, after an excruci- prominent Nazi, like most members of
Horkheimer in Frankfurt and Bren- wrong. Apart from a handful of Ger- ating period of hesitation, accepted a the civil service, school system, police,
tano in Berlin believed philosophy man philosophers—all Jewish ex- professorship in Jewish studies and and courts. Taubes once told me she
must answer the question that his- cept Brentano—philosophy ignored hermeneutics at the Freie Universität. was the only German he completely
torians of the day ignored: How was the questions the twentieth century Scholem had staked his life on the idea trusted.
fascism possible? had raised again. Non-Jewish philos- that the fabled German-Jewish sym- Muller, however, misreads their re-
It was a question that drove Taubes ophers, who had kept their chairs by biosis had been a fraud: Jewish love lationship, which Taubes’s son Ethan
as much as any other, but he took a keeping their heads down during the for German culture was unrequited. calls the axis of his father’s later life.
longer view: two world wars may have Third Reich, were hardly inclined to Taubes staked his life on proving the While acknowledging that they shared
underlined the crisis in thinking, but discuss such questions. In the English- opposite: history could be undone, an “interest in philosophy and an in-
its roots went back centuries. Many, speaking world, John Rawls once told Hitler would not have the last word. terest in Marxism,” he focuses on their
like Rorty, saw its origins in the man me that the Holocaust “just is the His repeated attempts to get Scholem differences in a stupendously banal
whom Moses Mendelssohn had called moral problem of the twentieth cen- to reconsider their relationship were list, from the fact that “she had a
“the all-destroying Kant.” In 1781 Im- tury” but avowed that he understood surely fueled in part by the hope of fashion sense that Jacob lacked” to
manuel Kant showed that many tra- it too poorly to tackle it. receiving the master’s blessing, or at the fact that she smoked cigarettes
ditional philosophical questions were “The events of 1933 are of too bloody while he smoked pipes. Taubes’s com-
unanswerable. No longer able to as- seriousness to be filed away,” Taubes 2
See his The Political Theology of Paul, mitment to Brentano was the commit-
certain the nature of God or freedom, wrote to a friend in 1958 of his inde- translated by Dana Hollander (Stanford ment of a Jew determined to reconcile
philosophy could henceforth concern cision about going to Germany. “But University Press, 2004); reviewed in these with decent Germans, as well as of
itself only with understanding the where nowadays are there those who pages by Mark Lilla, October 23, 2008. an inconstant man who admired her

April 6, 2023 55
incontestable integrity. For Taubes, neither Jacob nor Susan was inclined earlier on the eastern front? Across the what most of the Federal Republic was
to be sure, the commitment was com- to devote themselves to parenthood, Iron Curtain, by contrast, authoritar- thinking. Taubes, who wanted more
patible with any number of affairs, the children were sent to a series of ian East Germany was led by genuine than anything to understand how his
which had also destabilized his first boarding schools until Susan’s suicide antifascists who had spent the war in beloved German culture had turned
marriage. Yet his relationship with in 1969, when Brentano and Taubes concentration camps or exile. Unlike him into a mortal enemy, could not
Brentano was a key to his character, brought them to Berlin. their neighbors to the west, they were help but gravitate to him. Brentano,
and despite repeated strife as well as The main reason for Muller’s antipa- genuinely concerned with eliminating however, found Schmitt and his ilk so
a divorce, they usually lived in adjoin- thy toward Brentano becomes clear in former Nazis from positions of power.4 despicable that she was appalled by
ing apartments until the day he died. his discussion of the political conflicts You need not be a Stalinist to see her husband’s willingness to visit him.
Is Muller’s inability to understand of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the dilemma Muller misses. Taubes The West German upheaval that
Taubes’s second marriage the result Taubes and Brentano were the lead- and Brentano were hardly unaware began in the 1960s had violent and
of ordinary sexism? The chapter intro- ing figures in the Berlin turmoil that of the repressions in the East that unhinged moments, including the
ducing relationships Taubes formed in spilled out of the university and into led their friend the socialist philos- terrorist acts committed by the Red
Berlin grants the men full names and the political realm. Both supported opher Ernst Bloch to leave a chair in Army Faction in the 1970s. Taubes
thumbnail sketches of their accom- leftist positions, while trying to curb Leipzig for tiny Tübingen. They sup- and Brentano condemned what was
plishments, while the segment enti- those students inclined to reject any ported Agnes Heller financially when called revolutionary violence, propos-
tled “Character and Creed: Taubes and book that was written in the past and she could no longer teach in Budapest, ing instead the American civil rights
His Women” merely refers to “Marghe- any idea that had no immediate polit- as well as other Eastern European in- movement’s sit-ins as models of politi-
rita,” as in the first female philoso- ical consequences. In a moment rem- tellectuals subject to suppression. Yet cal action. Yet they understood the rage
phy professor at the Freie Universität, iniscent of our own, many students they were also aware of the fascist of the generation they were teaching.
or “Ingeborg,” as in Bachmann, who demanded a politically pure leftist uni- currents that seethed beneath West That rage was produced by the reve-
after studying philosophy became a versity, which right-wing politicians German life, even—or especially—at lation that their parents and teachers
major figure in Austrian letters. Muller used as an excuse to block left-wing the universities. Public expressions of and every other source of authority had
writes that Taubes combined a “relent- appointments altogether. Taubes and anti-Semitism had grown rarer, but been—at the very least—complicit in
less erotic pursuit of women” with a Brentano worked to convince students anticommunism, the other pillar of crimes that were swept under carpets
“satisfaction in mentoring them, and to study positions with which they dis- Nazi ideology, was never abandoned.5 for decades. It has been argued that
energetic attention to their profes- agreed, and they fought to appoint the the repression of Nazi crimes was nec-
sional promotion,” which “may seem occasional socialist professor. They essary to establish a democratic order
in the new Federal Republic.6 Coun-
in tension or irreconcilable.” However,
he concludes, to understand Taubes
“one must embrace his contradictions.”
rarely succeeded at either, but their
efforts took up the better part of a
decade—one reason why neither pro-
T aubes’s fascination with Schmitt,
whom he visited and challenged, has
caused much speculation. Why would
terfactuals are notoriously immune to
refutation, but even if that repression
But this particular contradiction ex- duced much writing at the time. the philosopher-rabbi engage with a contributed to stability in the long run,
ists only for those who think erotic Muller depicts Brentano as the steely thinker who refused to repudiate the it’s easy to appreciate the fury of the
attractions to be nothing more than Stalinist she never was and tries to Nazis even after the war? Schmitt, generation that bore the brunt of it.
a matter of body parts. separate her positions from those of whom the Allies sentenced to prison, Taubes and Brentano tried to navigate
While Taubes’s pursuit of seduc- Taubes. Anyone who ever saw them to- wrote that “what the Nazis did was that fury, mentoring many of the stu-
tion certainly caused harm, not least gether could see a life full of intense but beastly; what happened to me and thou- dent leaders while attempting to keep
to both his marriages, for him it was often fruitful intellectual disagreement, sands of honest Germans is devilish.” fanaticism at bay.
never a matter of conquering fresh whether about Heidegger or the latest Yet the more one understands of Muller misses all of this, presumably
flesh. He sought communion, body developments in the Berlin Senate. postwar Germany in the years before because he subscribes to the view that
and soul. It’s less accurate to say he Brentano was an Enlightenment Taubes’s death, the less mysterious his fascism and communism are variants
crossed boundaries than to say he had thinker, while Taubes was drawn to fascination becomes. Even Heidegger of the same disorder, opposed to the
no boundaries at all. This was clear in ideas the Enlightenment sought to opted for silence, saving his more out- conservative version of the liberalism
situations that weren’t erotic; anyone leave behind. Yet they shared an un- rageous musings for the privacy of his he prefers. After reunification, Bren-
he took to was immediately treated as derstanding of postwar Germany that Black Notebooks. (In 1947 he wrote that tano dismissed such equivalences in an
part of the family, to whom nothing eludes Muller. Both saw that the ap- the Allies’ refusal to allow him to teach oft-quoted remark: “The Third Reich
need be explained. That sort of behav- peal of fascism went deeper than any was “worse than any crime commit- left behind mountains of corpses. East
ior was weird but harmless. At other proffered allegiance to democratic val- ted by the Nazis.”) Schmitt said aloud Germany left behind mountains of
times he could turn paranoid and lash ues. West Germany was in deep denial files.” Muller, of course, has a right to
out at someone he had just favored. It’s about its Nazi past. Adenauer’s rep- 4 any political position he chooses. But
See chapter 3 of my Learning from the Ger-
impossible to tell how much of this was arations and democratic assurances he can hardly understand Taubes, who
mans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar,
due to mental illness. Taubes under- masked contempt for the Allies’ brief he concludes “was a man of the left,”
Straus and Giroux, 2019).
went various forms of treatment for a attempts at denazification. West Ger- without a deeper understanding of the
bipolar disorder that never vanished. mans viewed those as victor’s justice, 5
See, for example, Willi Winkler, Das braune conflicts that drove him. Muller’s con-
But the pain caused by the weight of and when the cold war began in ear- Netz: Wie die Bundesrepublik von früheren tempt for the left, most recently ex-
history was at least as real. nest, the Americans abandoned the Nazis zum Erfolg geführt wurde (The Brown pressed in a Foreign Affairs piece titled
efforts entirely. After all, who could bet- Network: How the Federal Republic Was “The Neosocialist Delusion,” reveals an
ter oppose the Communists than the Led to Success by Former Nazis; Hamburg: unwillingness to engage or understand

S exism alone cannot explain Muller’s

disdain for Brentano, since his
discussion of Taubes’s first wife and
Nazis who had fought them a few years Rowohlt, 2019). it. The ridicule expressed there perme-
ates his discussion of the political con-
flicts that enmeshed Taubes in the last
mother of his children, Susan Taubes, is two decades of his life. Taubes, who
more respectful. He claims that no other could even take seriously the views of
woman was as important to Taubes, but those who murdered his own relatives,
not two years into their marriage their would not have been amused.
paths were so different that they were The Garden Between Days What of the question of German-
living on separate continents. Though Jewish reconciliation that shaped so
Taubes had followed his family’s urg- after John Singer Sargent much of his life? When I published
ings to marry a young woman from a Learning from the Germans in 2019, I
good Jewish family, Susan’s aversion The lilies above the girls in white look like girls in white, was more sanguine than I am today.
to Judaism in any form was so strong dancing. The girls hang paper lanterns in the garden, careful Germany is no longer filled with re-
that she refused to allow any sign of it with the candles inside. They watch the small flames flicker, kept safe pressed apologists for Nazism, but three
in their home or to give their children, from the drifting wind by white and red paper. years of hysterical philo-Semitism and
Ethan and Tania, the rudiments of a The sky is cooling; the gnats and flies have grown still a foreign policy somewhere to the right
Jewish education. Muller sketches her among the flowers. The girls lower their faces toward the lanterns. of AIPAC have taken on McCarthyite
intellectual development—she wrote a Nothing else moves, although the dancing lilies pretend to. tones and shown the limits of historical
doctoral dissertation on Simone Weil, as In the fading sunlight, every color appears bluish, reckoning. In the name of remember-
well as a later surrealistic novel about like a universal shadow, but the pink roses ing the Holocaust, Jews and Israelis in
their divorce3—through the deteriora- are stubborn. The pink roses stay pink Germany have been attacked as anti-

.
tion of their marriage, which was virtu- even in the dark. Semitic for criticizing Israeli policies.
ally over a decade after it began. Since Jacob Taubes would have appreciated
—Zuyi Zhao the irony; I wish we could meet at the
3
Divorcing (1969; New York Review Books, Paris Bar to talk about it.
2020); reviewed in these pages by Les-
6
lie Jamison, May 13, 2021. Her previously See, for example, Christoper Browning’s re-
unpublished novel, Lament for Julia, will view in these pages of Harald Jähner, After-
be published by New York Review Books math: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich,
in June. 1945–1955 (Knopf, 2022), December 22, 2022.

56 The New York Review

 The Master of Toska
Gary Saul Morson

Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: ever conveyed longing and loneliness

The Emergence of so well.
a Literary Genius: 1886–1887 In Chekhov’s longest story, “The
by Bob Blaisdell. Steppe,” about a journey across Russia’s
Pegasus, 444 pp., $29.95 endless, almost desolate plain, nature
itself appears to suffer from toska: “The
What makes Chekhov stories so won- sky, which seems deep and transcen-
derful? When did the humorous anec- dent in the steppes, where there are no
dotes he wrote for money become great woods or high hills, seemed now endless,
art? And at what point did Chekhov petrified with dreariness.” The travelers
appreciate his talent? Bob Blaisdell’s discern in the distance a solitary poplar
new book, Chekhov Becomes Chekhov, planted “God only knows why”:
focuses on the years when it became
evident, first to others and then to Was that lovely creature happy?
Chekhov himself, that a literary ge- Sultry heat in summer, in winter
nius had emerged. frost and snowstorms, terrible
How straightforward Chekhov sto- nights in autumn when nothing is
ries seem, and yet how strangely mov- to be seen but darkness and noth-
ing. Like the soul as he understood ing is to be heard but the sense-
it, they appear simple but are pro- less angry howling of the wind, and
foundly mysterious. In her splendid worst of all, alone, alone for the
book Reading Chekhov (2001), Janet whole of life.
Malcolm stresses how, for him, each
person’s soul harbors a secret acces- A peculiar beauty dwells in such sad-
sible to no one else. She quotes the ness, when
passage in his best-known story, “The
Lady with the Dog,” in which the hero, you are conscious of yearning and
Gurov, pondering the secret love affair grief, as though the steppe knew
that constitutes his real life, imagines she was solitary, knew that her
that one person never understands an- wealth and her inspiration were
other because it is always what cannot wasted for the world, not glorified
be seen that truly matters. Everyone, in song, not wanted by anyone; and
he reflects, has through the joyful clamour one
hears her mournful, hopeless call
his real, most interesting life for singers, singers!
under the cover of secrecy. . . . All
personal life rested on secrecy, and Chekhov’s story is that longed-for
possibly it was partly on that ac- song.
count that civilized man was so
nervously anxious that personal
privacy should be respected.

Explaining to one correspondent

C hekhov’s life and art, Malcolm
writes, were “a kind of exercise
in withholding.” Even with the Soviet
that he had “autobiographophobia,” censor’s prudish cuts restored, his let-
Chekhov did everything to conceal his ters fail to disclose “anything essential
deepest self. When in his voluminous about him. . . . Chekhov’s privacy is safe
letters he must speak of himself, Che- from the biographer’s attempts upon
khov either offers trivia or conveys se- Anton Chekhov; illustration by Leanne Shapton it.” Malcolm exaggerates, of course, and
rious information as if he were joking. the best biographies offer hints to Che-
He was deliberately hard to pin down. He had imagined that he could atively dull plays”—but in fact they are khov’s inner life, revealed in part by
When a journal editor, V. A. Tikhonov, have been telling the story of the rich in drama lying just beneath the the very ways he tried to conceal it.
requested his biography, Chekhov re- kiss till next morning. surface. “Let the things that happen Malcolm’s opposite, Blaisdell—a pro-
cited a list of obvious facts in a jok- on stage be just as complex and yet fessor of English at CUNY —confidently
ing tone: No one understands, and the hero vows just as simple as they are in life,” Che- reveals what he supposes the author
“never to confide again.” khov explained. “For instance, people concealed. To do so, he weaves from
In 1890 I made a trip to Sakhalin More often than not, people cannot are having a meal at table, just having stories, letters, and recollections a
across Siberia. . . . In 1891 I toured or do not listen. In The Cherry Orchard, a meal, but at the same time . . . their narrative of Chekhov’s life in 1886 and
Europe, where I drank splendid Dunyasha cannot wait to tell Anya, who lives are being smashed up.” 1887, when he emerged as a great writer
wine and ate oysters. In 1892 I has just returned from abroad, that In one of Chekhov’s early stories, a and became, to his own amazement,
strolled with V. A. Tikhonov at she has received a proposal: grieving cabman tries to tell his fares celebrated. It is not so much Chekhov’s
[the writer Shcheglov’s] name-day about his son’s death, but no one pays evolution as an artist that concerns
party. . . . I have been translated Dunyasha: I’ve waited so long for attention. At last, he confides in his Blaisdell as the recognition, by Che-
into all languages with the excep- you, my joy, my precious . . . I horse: khov himself and others, that his works
tion of the foreign ones. . . . I am a must tell you at once, I can’t are indeed masterpieces.
bachelor. I would like a pension. wait another minute . . . “Now, suppose you had a little Blaisdell conveys how busy these
Anya (listlessly): What now? colt . . . and all at once that same years were. The main support of his
Dunyasha: The clerk, Yepikhodov, little colt went and died. . . . You’d parents and siblings, Chekhov, a young

E ven when Chekhov characters wish

to reveal their deepest secret,
they usually find it cannot be put into
proposed to me just after Easter.
Anya: You always talk about the
same thing. . . . (Straightening her
be sorry, wouldn’t you? . . .” The
little mare munches, listens, and
breathes on her master’s hands.
doctor, managed to produce 112 short
stories, articles, and pieces of humor
writing in 1886 and another 66 in 1887.
words. The hero of “The Kiss” tries to hair) I’ve lost all my hairpins. . . . Iona is carried away and tells her He also wrote long letters, some of
tell his fellow officers about the chance Dunyasha: I really don’t know what all about it. which are themselves literary gems
event that changed his life but cannot to think. He loves me—he loves appearing in anthologies of Russian
convey what made it so transformative: me so! The title of this story is usually trans- writing.
Anya (looking through the door into lated as “Misery” or “Anguish” be- One letter Che khov received in
He began describing very minutely her room, tenderly): My room, my cause the Russian title, “Toska,” has March 1886 changed his view of him-
the incident of the kiss, and a mo- windows. . . . I am home! no English equivalent. It suggests—as self. The veteran writer Dmitry Gri-
ment later relapsed into silence. . . . well as sorrow, dreariness, and loneli- gorovich offered his unsolicited
In the course of that moment he Chekhov’s plays are filled with non- ness—a sense of longing. Made into a opinion that Chekhov was a major
had told everything, and it sur- conversations like this and so at first verb, it means to miss someone. Toska literary talent and urged him to take
prised him dreadfully to find how glance seem entirely undramatic— may, indeed, be the defining emotion his work more seriously. Chekhov, Gri-
short a time it took him to tell it. Blaisdell even refers to “those compar- of Chekhov’s stories. Perhaps no one gorovich asserted, should not write

April 6, 2023 57
so hurriedly and instead make each If an engagement actually existed, “serious step”? Dunya Efros, how- we often get a new viewpoint or learn
story the work of genius it could be. “why did Chekhov only talk about ever, seems to have had enough for an important fact allowing us to see
“I am convinced . . .you will be guilty [it] to Bilibin?” Maria, though Dun- now of his waffling. events forming a second story, much
of a great moral sin if you do not live ya’s close friend, claimed she never deeper than the first. If one misses
up to these hopes,” he enthused. “All even heard of any such engagement Blaisdell gives us no evidence for her the turn, one does not discern what
that is needed is esteem for the tal- until decades later. “If Efros took the supposed impatience. makes a good story a great one.
ent which so rarely falls to one’s lot.” proposal seriously and told anybody Blaisdell loves any prurient hint. Consider “Enemies,” which opens
Blaisdell for some reason finds about it, no one accounted for her ever When Chekhov, teasing Bilibin for just after the district doctor Kirilov’s
this letter insufferably condescend- having done so,” Blaisdell observes. his “softness,” mentions rough love- six-year-old son has died of diphtheria.
ing. “Hmph!” he snorts. “Grigorovich Little wonder the biographer Ronald making, Blaisdell asks whether we Russian doctors at this time had little
sounds like another one of Chekhov’s Hingley concluded that there was no can suppose that Chekhov and Efros prestige, and Kirilov is evidently poor
comic windbags.” Chekhov’s reaction engagement. “had gone at it in a rough manner? We and unattractive. Chekhov describes
was quite different: “Your letter . . . can wish Chekhov was as enlightened grief as no one else could. The wealthy
struck me like a flash of lightning. I al- as we are in 2022 and that he would Abogin arrives to summon the doc-
most burst into tears, and now I feel it
has left a deep trace in my soul!” Then
he added that a letter from a writer
B laisdell suggests another
possibility:
watch his language and behavior.” Has
Blaisdell forgotten that the engage-
ment may not have existed, or that, if
tor to his dying wife’s bedside. Kiri-
lov can barely grasp what Abogin is
saying and, unconscious of what he
so well known “is better than any di- I, on the other hand, think that it did, it remained at most something is doing, leaves the room to observe
ploma.” Chekhov, the man of brevity there was an engagement, but between joke and reality? his dead son and grief-stricken wife
and understatement, went on and on in that it started out as a joke. That is, When in Nice an editor asked Che- (though Abogin mistakenly assumes he
this awed tone. He was clearly deeply at the conclusion of his wild name khov to write a story based on his is getting his things for the journey):
moved. Admitting the justice of Gri- day party, Chekhov proposed and travel impressions, Chekhov declined,
gorovich’s criticisms, Chekhov closed Efros accepted . . . as a joke. And saying that “I am able to write only That repellent horror which is
by asking for his photograph. From they played along at this together from memory, I never write directly thought of when we speak of death
this point on, Chekhov really did begin until they didn’t know themselves from observed life”—but Blaisdell was absent from the room. In the
to devote greater care to his fiction. whether it was a joke or not. usually insists on a close, direct con- numbness of everything, in the
Blaisdell admires the classic 1962 nection between stories and the im- mother’s attitude, in the indif-
biography by Ernest Simmons, who This seems possible. Of course, other mediate circumstances in which they ference on the doctor’s face there
offers no theories or interpretations. possibilities also come to mind: for were written. “Anton Chekhov’s biog- was something that attracted and
Instead, he quotes generously, with an example, that the joke was between raphy in 1886–1887 is captured almost touched the heart, that subtle,
eye to what is most interesting, from completely in the writing that he was almost elusive beauty of human
letters, memoirs, and stories, so read- doing,” Blaisdell’s book begins. “Read- sorrow which men will not for a
ers can form their own impressions. ing the stories, we are as close as we long time learn to understand and
Like Simmons, Blaisdell cites at length can be to being in his company.” The describe.
the most famous letters and, month by 178 pieces Chekhov wrote in these
month, quotes from Chekhov’s best- years, read “in conjunction with the That “elusive beauty” is Chekhov’s
known stories. Unlike Simmons, Blais- personal letters to and from him . . . trademark. Who else would describe
dell offers many interpretations. And become a diary of the psychological the face of a deeply grieving person
unlike Chekhov, who always advised and emotional states of this conspic- as expressing “indifference”? Kiri-
concealing one’s subjectivity, Blais- uously reserved man.” By this method, lov’s pain surpasses sobbing and can
dell displays his own personality all Blaisdell claims to get behind Che- be handled only by numbing and dis-
too frequently. But readers can usually khov’s curtain of reserve. tancing himself from reality. As Kirilov
overlook such displays and immerse Blaisdell allows that Chekhov some- goes from room to room,
themselves in the delicious texts he times concealed connections between
strings together. his life and stories by switching gen- he raised his right foot higher
The book’s flyleaf and introduction ders or altering circumstances, but he than was necessary, and felt for
promise to follow Chekhov’s becoming confidently pierces such concealments. the doorposts with his hands, and
“engaged and unengaged” with Evdo- Of course, everything in writers’ work as he did so there was an air of
kiya (Dunya) Efros, a Jewish friend of must have some basis in their expe- perplexity about his whole figure
Chekhov’s sister Maria, but, as Blais- rience, but why must the connection as though he were in somebody
dell knows, it is far from clear any be direct or immediate? If Blaisdell else’s house, or were drunk for
engagement existed. In the midst of phrased his guesses as simply intrigu- the first time.
a long letter he wrote to his friend ing possibilities, they would be more,
Bilibin, who was himself engaged, not less, persuasive, because as it is So abstracted is he that when he re-
Chekhov drops in passing, “Last night, they provoke a skeptical response. He turns, he can hardly recall why Abogin
bringing a young lady home, I made Chekhov and Bilibin rather than Che- reads Chekhov’s story “Mire,” with its is there. At last he explains that his son
her a proposal. I went out of the fry- khov and Efros. Perhaps Chekhov had seductive Jewish heroine, Susanna, as has died and he cannot leave his wife.
ing pan and into the fire . . . Bless my a short infatuation with Efros that he an expression of resentment toward Using the flowery, educated language
marriage.” In another letter to Bilibin knew wouldn’t be reciprocated, or was his Jewish fiancée. He resolved his he is used to, Abogin appeals to the
he wrote: joking about her having no suitors, or “marriage problem,” Blaisdell observes, doctor’s conscience, sense of duty, and
was mocking his own inability to make “the way, perhaps, a fourteen-year-old legal obligation to go care for his own
Thank your fiancée for remember- commitments in love. boy would, by blaming and ridiculing wife. Kirilov is especially annoyed by
ing me and tell her that my wed- The problem is that Blaisdell re- an innocent person who had just been Abogin’s invoking “the love of human-
ding will most likely—alas and peatedly refers to the engagement minding her own business.” So strong ity,” an ideal common among wealthy
alack! The censor has cut out the as a simple fact, and then interprets was the need to ridicule Efros that, and well-educated people but foreign
rest. . . . My one and only is Jew- stories accordingly. “In the winter of although “no one who knew him ever to the doctor, who experiences it as the
ish. . . . She has a terrible temper. 1886,” he declares in the book’s intro- accused him of being anti-Semitic,” he less fortunate often experience the un-
There is no doubt whatsoever that duction, Chekhov indulged in anti-Semitism by creat- intentionally condescending language
I will divorce her a year or two after ing this unappealing Jewish character. of their “betters”: “‘Humanity—that
the wedding. became engaged and unengaged “Chekhov has confusing or confused cuts both ways,’ Kirilov said irritably.”
to be married. . . . When he was in motives,” Blaisdell concludes. “One is Finally he agrees to go.
Four weeks later Chekhov wrote to the midst of his frustrating and to describe a literary type, a newfan- When they arrive at Abogin’s house,
Bilibin, “With my fiancée, I broke anxious engagement, young cou- gled Circe, another is falling under the two men observe each other.
off completely. That is, she broke off ples in his stories are continually the spell of Dunya Efros. Our author’s The doctor was “stooped, . . . untidily
with me. But I still didn’t even buy a making their rancorous way into misogynistic and anti-Semitic vision dressed and not good-looking.” His
revolver.” or out of their relationships. results in Susanna.” It is a comment appearance and “uncouth manners”
As Blaisdell notes, when Chekhov that says little about Chekhov while suggest “years of poverty, of ill for-
had news, Commenting on “A Serious Step,” again displaying how “enlightened . . . tune, of weariness with life and with
about a father’s reaction to his daugh- we are in 2022.” men.” Abogin’s appearance could not
he passed it along matter- of- ter’s engagement, Blaisdell presumes differ more. A tall, sturdy man with
factly to his brother Alexander or that Chekhov was pondering his own. “large, soft features,” Abogin “was
[his publisher and friend] Ley-
kin, but . . . neither confidant was
aware of this engagement. Alex-
He reconstructs Chekhov’s thoughts
about being engaged: S o apparently simple are Chekhov’s
stories in Blaisdell’s account that
it is hard to identify what makes them
elegantly dressed in the very latest
fashion . . . and there was a shade of
refined almost feminine elegance”
ander was never one to hold back, It seems that every time Chekhov masterpieces. Like poems, they sug- in his gestures. In Abogin’s luxuri-
and his letters contain no query- contemplated marriage this year, gest much more than is stated directly. ous drawing room, the doctor “scru-
ing about Chekhov’s relationship he found reasons not to proceed. Chekhov loved to give stories an un- tinized his [own] hands, which were
with Efros. But why not go ahead and take that expected turn. Just before they end, burnt with carbolic,” and notices

58 The New York Review

 

 





 









 




 
 
  


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60 The New York Review

 

  




 
 


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 “the violoncello case,” testifying to see how Chekhov has prepared for this sheer vitality. He is therefore puzzled
“A lyrical, meticulous inquiry Abogin’s cultural superiority. ending, but it surprises nonetheless. A that, on Christmas morning, Likharev
into the alchemy of memory.” great story has become still greater. and Ilovaisky listen with pleasure to a
crowd singing a popular ditty:
—Kirkus Reviews
I t turns out that Abogin’s wife has
only faked illness so she could run
off with her lover. Abogin despairs at D evoting fifteen pages to “Ene-
mies,” Blaisdell focuses, as we
Hi, you Little Russian lad,
Bring your sharp knife,
the loss. Interestingly, he is also in- have come to expect, on the possible We will kill the Jew, we will kill
sulted at the way his wife has left him. resemblance between doctor Kirilov him,
“If she did not love me,” he asks, “why and Chekhov, another doctor who was The son of tribulation . . .
did she not say so openly, honestly, es- also “often run down and exhausted,”
pecially as she knows my views on the suffering from minor and serious com- Why did Chekhov include these terri-
subject?” What views? As any reader plaints, and, perhaps, moved by “some- ble verses? Of course, Russian peas-
would have known, it had long been a one’s shaky voice” to go when he had ants were anti- Semitic, Blaisdell
commonplace among intellectuals that resolved not to. And “the anger, the allows, but their song might easily
when a wife fell in love with another fury, the disgusting hatred the ene- have been omitted, especially because
man, a proper, enlightened husband mies fling at each other—had Chekhov the story happened to appear in the
would bless their union. By leaving se- felt or only witnessed it?” Blaisdell “right-wing anti-Semitic newspaper”
cretly, Abogin’s wife has demonstrated grasps that the heroes of “Enemies” of Chekhov’s friend Suvorin.
doubt of his enlightenment. could have appreciated each other’s Again, Blaisdell misses the turn. The
The doctor flies into a rage at this sorrow, but he misses the significance fact that these verses are appalling is
display of upper-class values: of Abogin’s high-minded appeals and the whole point. Likharev enjoys them,
does not detect the insult he senses in “looking feelingly at the singers and
Go on squeezing money out of how his wife has left him. The second tapping his feet in time,” because of
the poor in your gentlemanly way. story about the origin of convictions his populist sympathies. However
Il rombo is an Italian term for the sub- Make a display of humane ideas, utterly escapes him, and so the ending appealing and inspiring, ideology, to
terranean rumble before an earth- play (the doctor looked sideways disappoints him: “Chekhov had multi- which the Russian intelligentsia was
quake. In May and September 1976, at the violoncello case) play the ple opportunities to revise this story. so susceptible, can lead to horror. In
two severe earthquakes ripped through bassoon and the trombone, grow He did not. He tacked on the moral 1881 the populist People’s Will assas-
the Friuli region in northeastern Italy, as fat as capons, but don’t dare to and left it there, forever.” sinated Tsar Alexander II, and Russia
causing extensive damage. About a insult personal dignity! Something similar happens with witnessed murderous pogroms, per-
thousand people died under the rub- Blaisdell’s discussion of “On the Road,” haps provoked by the fact that a Jewish
ble, tens of thousands were left without At first amazed, Abogin responds in in which a man, Likharev, and a woman, woman had played a prominent part
shelter, and many ended up leaving kind, and the two hurl “undeserved Ilovaisky, are trapped in an inn during in the plot. The People’s Will cynically
their homes forever. insults” at each other: a Christmas Eve storm. Likharev re- decided to exploit anti-Jewish senti-
counts his life of total commitment to ment to unleash popular rebellion. Two
The highly original novel Rombo is I believe that never in their lives, one ideology after another, a life he decades later it was the government
a record of this disaster and its af- even in delirium, had they uttered describes as typically Russian. “This that inspired pogroms, but in the early
termath, as told by seven men and so much that was unjust, cruel, and faculty is present in Russians in its 1880s it was populist revolutionaries.
women who were children at the time: absurd. The egoism of the unhappy highest degree,” he comments. On August 30, 1881, the Executive
Anselmo, Mara, Olga, Gigi, Silvia, Lina, was conspicuous in both. The un- Committee of the People’s Will issued
and Toni. They speak of portents that happy are egoistic, spiteful, un- Russian life presents us with an a manifesto, written in Ukrainian and
preceded the earthquakes and of the just, cruel, and less capable of uninterrupted succession of con- addressed to “good people and all hon-
complete disorder that followed, the understanding each other than victions and aspirations, and if you est folk in the Ukraine.” It began:
obliteration of all that was familiar. fools. Unhappiness does not bring care to know, it has not yet the
Their memories, like the earth, are people together but draws them faintest notion of lack of faith or It is from the Jews that the
subject to rifts and abysses. apart, and even where one would scepticism. If a Russian [intellec- Ukrainian folk suffer most of all.
“It reads cinematically; the cuts fancy people should be united tual] does not believe in God, it Who has gobbled up all the lands
are determined and stylistic. . . . by the similarity of their sorrow, means he believes in something and forests? Who runs every tav-
The book excels when it manages far more injustice and cruelty is else. ern? Jews! . . . Whatever you do,
to balance the grand geology of its generated than in comparatively wherever you turn, you run into
subject matter on the tiny gestures of placid surroundings. Likharev has never experienced ei- the Jew. It is he who bosses and
daily life. . . . Rombo is staggering. ther disillusionment or skepticism cheats you, he who drinks the
There is something epic about it.” Waste is one of Che khov’s great because whenever he abandoned one peasant’s blood.
—Magnus Rena, Review 31 themes, and what is wasted here is belief system, he immediately adopted
the opportunity for empathy. As if to another. At first fanatically devoted As Chekhov writes the story, readers,
“Kinsky expertly animates the demonstrate what Abogin and Kirilov to “science,” Likharev abandoned it like the heroine, first sense the attrac-
natural world around her while miss, he makes us empathize with each tiveness of Likharev and his enthusi-
removing her human hand. . . . If character’s failure of empathy. asms. But the story turns and, without
trauma is the inability to redescribe, The story might have ended here, explicitly saying so, exposes the hor-
Rombo offers a powerful antidote but a surprise is in store. On the jour- ror that Likharev’s charismatic ideal-
in language and the infinite ney back, “the doctor thought not of ism may entail. I am not sure whether
possibilities of description.” his wife, nor of his [son] Andrey,” but Blaisdell’s ignorance of Russian cul-
—Matthew Janney, Financial Times of privileged people like Abogin. With ture—his academic training was in
thoughts “unjust and inhumanly cruel,” English literature and he learned to
“A chorus of seven villagers narrate Kirilov read Russian in middle age—accounts
the novel from a vantage point close for his missing this turn, or whether, as
to the present day. . . . Kinsky is also condemned Abogin and his wife in “Enemies,” it is his lack of interest
a poet, and she has a poet’s ear for and . . . all who lived in rosy, sub- in ideological movements.
rhythm and precision, elegantly dued light among sweet perfumes, Yet in the end these shortcomings
rendered in Caroline Schmidt’s and all the way home he despised do not matter that much. Blaisdell may
translation. The author has a great them till his head ached. And a miss the turn in Chekhov’s stories, but
gift for describing landscape.” firm conviction concerning those he captures the turn in Chekhov’s life.
—Charlie Lee, Harper’s Magazine people took shape in his mind. The real story Blaisdell tells is Che-
khov’s gradual realization that his tales
ROMBO The story turns out to be about not are not just funny anecdotes that pay
A NOVEL just the failure of empathy but also the the bills but great literature. As he ex-
Esther Kinsky way political “conviction,” in this case for nihilism and then for populism: plained to Grigorovich, “I have hun-
Translated from the German by based on class hatred, arises. The last “I loved the Russian people with poi- dreds of friends in Moscow, and among
Caroline Schmidt sentence is the most horrible: “Time . . . gnant intensity; I loved their God and them a dozen or two writers, but I can-
will pass, but that conviction, unjust believed in Him.” not recall a single one who reads me or
Paperback • $16.95
and unworthy of the human heart, will Likharev’s enthusiasm is infectious, considers me an artist.” He could not
On sale March 14th
not pass, but will remain in the doctor’s especially to women, and as the story alter his rushed writing immediately,
mind to the grave.” That is, the class draws to a close Ilovaisky is ready to he admitted to Grigorovich, but bit by

.
hatred he now indulges will prove more follow him anywhere, but he does not bit he did so. Blaisdell’s entertaining
long-lasting, and sink deeper into his ask her to. The succession of ideologies book traces this change in Chekhov’s
Available from booksellers or nyrb.com soul, than even his grief over the loss of does not interest Blaisdell, who focuses self-perception and allows us to trace
his son. As we reread the story, we can on Ilovaisky’s attraction to the hero’s the emergence of a literary genius.

62 The New York Review

 A Regional Reign of Terror
Eric Foner

By Hands Now Known: Being in the wrong place at the

Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners wrong time could be dangerous. In
by Margaret A. Burnham. 1950, much like Trayvon Martin six
Norton, 328 pp., $30.00 decades later, Robert Sands, a fifteen-
year-old Black youth, was shot and fa-
A little over twenty years ago, the tally wounded as he walked through
New-York Historical Society mounted a segregated Birmingham neighbor-
“Without Sanctuary,” a remarkable ex- hood, where he was employed by a
hibition of photographs of lynchings white family. Sands’s presence had led
in the American South. The images of a white woman to express alarm to her
mobs torturing and murdering Black husband. Within minutes he shot the
citizens, some widely circulated as sou- teenager in the back. The local prose-
venir postcards, revealed a depravity cutor refused to assemble a grand jury
that had long been shrouded by histor- to consider criminal charges.
ical amnesia. Since then, the roughly
3,500 lynchings that took place be-
tween 1880 and the 1950s have received
ample public attention, including at
the National Museum of African Amer-
N ew Orleans was another city with
police officers known for brutal-
ity, including the chief detective, John
ican History and Culture in Washing- Grosch, and his brother William, also
ton, D.C., and the National Memorial a detective. In 1940 William Grosch
for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, and another officer drove to Detroit to
Alabama, which opened in 2018. Thanks take custody of Wilbert Smith, a Black
to a recent outpouring of scholarship, man who had fled New Orleans several
novels, and films, most Americans are years earlier after being charged with
also aware that violence was essen- shooting a policeman during a traffic
tial to the functioning of slavery. Less Howard University students protesting outside the Attorney General’s Conference on stop and had been living in Detroit
widely remembered, however, is the Crime held at Memorial Continental Hall, Washington, D.C., December 13, 1934. The until apprehended by that city’s po-
quotidian brutality that claimed many four-day conference failed to include lynching in its program. lice. Almost as soon as the three men
hundreds of Black lives between the reached New Orleans, the detectives
end of slavery and the civil rights rev- Often the perpetrators were the very a prowler. In Westfield, a town near fatally shot Smith. The two officers
olution. The horrors of Black life in the officials sworn to uphold the law—po- Birmingham, a female white clerk at a went on to beat his former wife and
Jim Crow South have not really entered lice officers and sheriffs. Almost all the local store, claiming that a Black cus- ordered her to leave the city. In this
the country’s historical consciousness. murderers escaped punishment. Com- tomer, William Daniel, had insulted instance a grand jury was summoned,
Jim Crow, a shorthand for the more plicity extended well beyond the actual her, called the police. When an officer but it declined to issue indictments.
than six-decade-long southern racial killers. Prosecutors were reluctant to arrived he almost immediately shot The stationing of large numbers of
order that followed Reconstruction, is seek indictments; all-white trial ju- and killed the alleged offender, even Black soldiers, many from the North, at
usually equated with segregation, but ries refused to convict; the FBI , De- though, as Burnham laconically re- segregated World War II army bases ad-
it was far more than that. A compre- partment of Justice, and army, in the marks, Daniel had not committed a jacent to southern cities led inexorably
hensive system of white supremacy, it case of soldiers killed on American soil, crime: “Even in Alabama, there was no to conflict as servicemen began to push
also included the disenfranchisement almost never took action; and the Su- law against ‘insulting a white woman.’” back against segregation. Willie Lee
of Black voters (thus stripping them preme Court eviscerated the constitu- One reason for the excessive vio- Davis, a twenty-five-year-old corporal
of political power), a labor market that tional amendments and laws Congress lence in what Blacks called “Bad Bir- from Georgia, was murdered by a local
relegated African Americans to the had enacted during Reconstruction mingham” was that the region’s coal police chief in 1943 while on furlough
lowest-paying jobs, and a code of be- that empowered federal authorities to and steel companies had their own after a verbal dispute. Davis, who was
havior in which Blacks were required punish those who deprived Blacks of private police forces that worked in dressed in his army uniform, evidently
to demonstrate deference in all their constitutional rights. The diligent re- tandem with municipal authorities to angered his killer by objecting to being
interactions with whites. search of Burnham and her students in weaken the United Mine Workers. In searched by him, saying, “I’m not your
In the Jim Crow South, for a Black local records, the Black press, NAACP 1948 the Reverend C.T. Butler, pas- man. I’m Uncle Sam’s man [now].” Uncle
person to step outside norms of behavior files, and interviews with descendants tor of a local Baptist church, father Sam’s assistant attorney general, Tom
established by whites could be a death makes those who perished more than of thirteen children, and an important Clark, filed a criminal charge, but the
sentence. Violence could erupt at any victims, bringing to light their family figure in the union, was shot and killed case never went to trial.
time, for any reason, or for no reason relations, jobs, and educations, and the by Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Burnham reports that at least
at all. The “mundane, largely hidden vi- details of the encounters that ended Company police. In a familiar pattern, twenty-eight active duty Black soldiers
olence” that loomed over Black life is with their deaths. the white press sought to undermine were murdered between 1941 and 1946
the subject of Margaret A. Burnham’s Burnham’s account focuses on par- Butler’s reputation, publicizing police for refusing to submit silently to Jim
new book, By Hands Now Known: Jim ticularly dangerous locations, such as claims that he had been “molesting” Crow. Hundreds more suffered gunshot
Crow’s Legal Executioners, a work by Birmingham, where the laws prohibit- a fifteen-year-old white girl. Fearing wounds or imprisonment. As Thurgood
turns shocking, moving, and thought- ing homicide, she writes, “simply did additional killings, nearly the entire Marshall complained in 1944 to the De-
provoking. It merits the attention of not apply” to the police. Long before Butler family fled to Michigan. partment of Justice, “There have been
anyone interested in the historical roots the 1963 confrontation between “Bull” While statistics can reveal the scope numerous killings of Negro soldiers by
of the civil rights movement of the 1960s Connor’s dogs and fire hoses and young of racist terror, it is the individual civilians and police,” but he was “not
and, more recently, Black Lives Matter. civil rights demonstrators that marked stories uncovered by Burnham and aware of a single instance of prose-
the high point of the mass civil rights her students that make for the most cution.” These experiences, Burnham
movement, shootings of Blacks and the powerful reading. Some truly boggle writes, “never made it into the sagas

O ver the course of a long career, bombing of their homes were shock- the mind. In 1941 John Jackson, a Bir- about the ‘Greatest Generation.’”
AFRO AME RICAN N EWS PA PE RS / GAD O/ GE TTY IM AGE S

Burnham has been a pioneering ingly commonplace. Fifty bombings mingham steelworker, was waiting with Years before Rosa Parks refused to
civil rights attorney and legal scholar. took place in the city between 1947 and other African Americans to gain access surrender her seat to a white passen-
In 1977 she became the first Black 1965, mostly directed against Black to a movie theater through the “Negro ger in Montgomery, southern buses
woman appointed to a judgeship in families who breached the color line by entrance.” Police ordered them to clear had become flash points. Many com-
Massachusetts. Today she directs the seeking to move into white neighbor- a path for passersby. Evidently Jackson munities authorized drivers to carry
Civil Rights and Restorative Justice hoods. In 1948 alone, according to the did not hear the directive and laughed weapons, a recipe for homicide. In
Project at the Northeastern Univer- Birmingham World, a Black newspaper, at something said by his female com- 1944 a driver ordered the Black sol-
sity School of Law, which chronicles sixteen African American men died at panion. “What are you laughing at, dier Booker Spicely to give up his
the history of racist southern homi- the hands of law enforcement officers. boy?” a policeman yelled. Jackson re- seat when a group of whites entered
cides between 1930 and 1970 and seeks The strange alchemy of the city’s plied, “Can’t I laugh?” With that, he the bus, traveling between Durham
to rescue the victims, many of whose criminal justice system transformed was thrown into a patrol car, shot, and and Camp Butner in North Carolina.
stories have never been told, from his- minor infractions into capital crimes. beaten by an officer. He died on the Spicely left the bus after remarking,
torical oblivion. The project’s detective One individual murdered by the police way to the station house. (In this case, “I thought I was fighting this war for
work has uncovered over one thousand while incarcerated had been arrested unusually for Birmingham, the culprit democracy.” As he stepped into the
such murders. Approximately thirty for having too much to drink, another was dismissed from the police force, street the driver shot him twice, then
are discussed in detail in this book. because the police were searching for though not otherwise charged.) drove away, leaving the soldier bleeding

April 6, 2023 63
from his wounds. Refused treatment under the purview of the states, not refuge and where Blacks, unlike in more realistic. But it is the Finch of
by a whites-only hospital, Spicely was the nation. the South, enjoyed the right to vote. To Kill a Mockingbird who remains in
admitted to a “Negro” bed at another, The Court’s limited interpretation Despite the enactment in 1934 of the the minds of readers and of admirers
where he died. The War Department of the constitutional changes brought Fugitive Felon Act, which Burnham of the celebrated film version starring
launched an intelligence operation about during Reconstruction contin- calls a “latter-day Fugitive Slave Act,” Gregory Peck.
to learn local Blacks’ response to ued well into the twentieth century. northern governors like Frank Mur- The idea of the white savior, it
the murder, especially if “agitators” In a ruling in a 1945 murder case, the phy of Michigan could not ignore the seems, has an enduring appeal. Yet
were encouraging them to “miscon- Court declared that murder and as- demands of Black voters, and battles one of Burnham’s central arguments
duct themselves.” Tried on a charge of sault, even when motivated by the over extradition kept the southern is that resistance to the systemic mis-
manslaughter, the driver was acquitted. desire to violate the victim’s consti- legal system in the national spotlight. carriage of justice in the South arose
In 1946 in Bessemer, a center of tutional rights, must be prosecuted Scores of such cases, Burnham writes, primarily from Black communities.
coal mining and steel production near under state, not federal, laws. The case required northern authorities to make Memory itself—the efforts of rela-
Birmingham, Timothy Hood, a Black involved a sheriff, Claude Screws, and a judgment about southern justice. In tives, friends, and neighbors of the
veteran, adjusted the “color board”— two deputies who shot and killed a many instances they concluded that victims to keep alive their names and
the physical marker separating Black Black man on a courthouse lawn in the fugitives would be lynched if ex- stories—can be a form of resistance.
and white sections of a bus—to cre- Baker County, Georgia. Screws was tradited to the South. Protests against misconduct by police,
ate more seats for Black passengers. prosecuted and convicted in federal bus companies, and others, she shows,
When the driver ordered him to move court, but the Supreme Court over- long preceded the 1960s civil rights
it back, Hood replied, “Do it yourself.”
A fight broke out and the driver fired
five shots, wounding Hood. Shortly
turned the verdict. Even though Geor-
gia authorities refused to take action
against the killers, the hands of the
T he rule of law—a legal system
based on principles that apply
equally to all persons (including the
revolution. She devotes special atten-
tion to the legal work of the NAACP .
That organization, often dismissed as
afterward the local chief of police, a federal government were tied. police)—is a hallmark of civilized so- hopelessly conservative, emerges here
member of the Ku Klux Klan, arrested For good measure, three justices— cieties. A perversion of the rule of law as courageous activists risking their
Hood and shot him inside the police Owen Roberts, Felix Frankfurter, in the Jim Crow South—the conviction lives to seek justice for Black victims
car, killing him instantly. A coroner’s and Robert Jackson—reflecting the of an innocent Black man charged with of Jim Crow violence. What Hoover
inquest ruled the incident justifiable prevailing historical orthodoxy, de- raping a white woman—is the center- called the NAACP ’s “aggressiveness”
homicide. clared in a separate opinion that Re- piece of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mock- alarmed him. Some local NAACP lead-
Gender did not shield Black women construction legislation authorizing ingbird (which a 2021 survey of 200,000 ers paid with their lives. Elbert Wil-
from brutality. The first case outlined federal protection of Blacks’ rights readers of The New York Times named liams, for example, was murdered in
in the book involved Ollie Hunter, de- was motivated by a “vengeful spirit” the best book published in the last 125 Tennessee in 1940 after the NAACP an-
scribed by the writer of a letter to the on the part of northerners after the years). Lee’s hero is the white lawyer nounced a plan to encourage Blacks to
NAACP as an “elderly Negro woman” Civil War. For members of the Su- Atticus Finch, who understands that vote in that year’s election. (The FBI
shopping in a general store in Don- preme Court to view expanding the racism makes it impossible for south- investigated, but its inquiry focused
alsonville, Georgia. The white store- rights of Blacks as a form of punish- ern courts to dispense justice fairly. on determining whether local Blacks
keeper ordered her to put down an ment to whites did not bode well for a He associates racial bigotry with the were influenced by communism, not
item she was examining. When Hunter broader understanding of the federal “cruel poverty and ignorance” of the on identifying Williams’s assailants.)
left the store, he followed. He physi- government’s power to protect Black accusers, a rural white family. Lee’s In her final pages, Burnham raises
cally assaulted her on the street, kill- citizens. Overall, Burnham writes, the implication is that change will come to the fraught question of reparations
ing her. federal courts “rendered nearly tooth- the South through the actions of well- for the families of victims of Jim Crow
Black young people were also among less the Reconstruction-era statutes meaning better-off whites like Finch. savagery. “An apology must be made,”
the victims. Willie Baxter Carlisle, an that specifically targeted racist terror.” There is no room in this narrative for she writes, but more than an apology is
eighteen-year-old in eastern Alabama, As for Screws, in 1958 he was elected Black activism. needed. She calls for a “material rem-
tried, with some friends, to sneak into to the Georgia Senate. In reality, as Burnham amply demon- edy” for victims, some of them still liv-
a dance party for local high school- Along with Supreme Court rulings, strates, respectable whites—public ing, forced to flee the South lest they
ers. Two policemen removed them a combination of other circumstances officials; newspaper reporters who too become targets, often leaving be-
and then discovered that someone helps explain why so many persons deemed the murder of a Black per- hind farms, shops, and other hard-won
had let air out of a patrol car’s tires. guilty of heinous crimes walked away son, as she puts it, “too trivial to re- economic assets.
The next night the officers took the scot-free. These include the exclusion port”; and businessmen who profited It is unclear how best to describe
teenagers to jail and beat them with a of virtually all Black southerners from from the availability of cheap Black the United States in the Jim Crow
walking stick and rubber hose. Carlisle jury service, the FBI ’s reluctance to in- labor—all helped to maintain the Jim era, when a quasi-fascist polity was
died a few hours later. This took place vestigate these crimes, and the power Crow system. Judges, from local courts embedded within a putative democ-
in 1950, by which time white accep- of the Jim Crow South in the Dem- all the way to the Supreme Court, vi- racy. Some scholars, drawing on the
tance of extreme police brutality had ocratic Party, which made it impos- olated their oaths to uphold the Con- example of South Africa in the time of
begun to wane. Acquitted of murder sible to enact federal antilynching stitution, while members of Congress apartheid, use the term “Herrenvolk
in a local court, the officers were in- legislation. refused to enact laws against lynching. democracy” to describe a situation in
dicted on federal charges and served In addition, Burnham writes, fed- The incidents detailed in By Hands which parts of the population enjoy
a few months in prison. According to eralism “fortified and insulated local Now Known were not the work of prej- full democratic rights while others are
Burnham, no death certificate was regimes of racial terror.” To be sure, udiced poor whites. Nor were they ran- entirely excluded. The political philos-
issued for Carlisle, and his grave re- federalism can be a double-edged dom occurrences or the actions of a opher Jean L. Cohen calls these sys-
mains unmarked. sword. Before the Civil War, southern- few bad apples—entire communities tems “hybrid regimes,” while pointing
ers employed the doctrine of states’ were to blame for the perversion of out that the undemocratic enclave can
rights as a shield for slavery only to see the criminal justice system. In 1947, exercise a significant degree of power

M ost of the acts of violence related

in By Hands Now Known were
committed by law enforcement offi-
northern states enact laws to prevent
the return to the South of fugitives
from bondage. Federalism certainly
just as the United States was embark-
ing on the cold war, J. Edgar Hoover
told President Truman’s Committee
at the national level and can accus-
tom the larger system to authoritar-
ian practices.*
cials or by persons, such as bus driv- protected the Jim Crow system from on Civil Rights that an “iron curtain” On the other hand, as the civil
ers, performing public functions. This national interference. Today, how- in the American South made it impos- rights revolution demonstrated, when
is significant because beginning in the ever, now that the Supreme Court has sible for the FBI to conduct adequate a repressive local system comes into
late nineteenth century the Supreme overturned protection of reproductive investigations, since white residents conflict with the interests of the
Court embraced the legal concept of rights via the US Constitution, legis- at all levels of society refused to pro- nation-state, as eventually happened
“state action,” according to which the latures and courts in “blue” states are vide information (not that Hoover had during the cold war, it becomes vulner-
federal government’s ability to pros- relying on federalism to uphold a wom- any real interest in investigating these able to a mass challenge from below.
ecute violations of Blacks’ constitu- an’s right to terminate a pregnancy. crimes). None of this, of course, is how Ameri-
tional rights was limited to crimes Indeed, in a surprising twist, Burn- As Burnham makes clear, the events cans are accustomed to thinking about
committed by public officials, not by ham begins By Hands Now Known she chronicles must be understood as our constitutional system—widely
private individuals. Police officers and with a chapter about northern gov- expressions of “systemic” racism (a seen as an example of enlightened
sheriffs were certainly state actors, ernors who refused requests from their concept whose mention can today cost statesmanship, a model for the rest
and the federal government could have southern counterparts for the extra- a teacher in some states his or her job of the world. By Hands Now Known

.
taken legal action against them but dition of Blacks who managed to es- for discussing “divisive topics” in the is one of those rare books that forces
almost never did. The justices also ad- cape the clutches of the southern legal classroom). Not long ago, admirers of us to consider in new ways the nature
opted a rigid understanding of states’ system. These cases underscore the Lee’s novel were shocked when Go Set of our politics and society and the en-
rights and federalism, ruling as early importance of the fact that while Jim a Watchman, which she had written be- during legacy of our troubled past.
as 1873 in the Slaughter-House Cases Crow could not have existed without fore Mockingbird, was finally published.
that despite the Fourteenth Amend- national complicity, it was a regional It depicted Finch not as a heroic man *Jean L. Cohen, “Rethinking Hybrid Re-
ment, which barred states from deny- system. The Great Migration from the of principle but as an outspoken rac- gimes: The American Case,” to be published
ing to any person the equal protection South to the North during and after ist who could not accept the idea of in Constellations: An International Journal
of the laws, most of the constitutional World War I created large new com- Blacks challenging Jim Crow. Of the of Critical and Democratic Theory, Vol. 30,
rights enjoyed by Americans remained munities where fugitives could find two portrayals of the character, this is No. 3 (September 2023).

64 The New York Review

 Avoidance Issues
Karan Mahajan

The Last White Man morning Anders, a white man, woke

by Mohsin Hamid. up to find he had turned a deep and
Riverhead, 180 pp., $26.00 undeniable brown.” From there, Hamid
traces Anders’s inner and outer trans-
Of the South Asian authors of his formation as the affliction spreads
generation, none has staked a bolder through the town.
claim to being a “world writer” than In Exit West, the device of the tele-
the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid. portation doors allows Hamid to col-
Starting with his second novel, The lapse several migrations into a single
Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), his year by bypassing the realities of po-
books have unhesitatingly tackled liced borders and interminable asylum
think-tank-worthy international sub- waiting periods. In The Last White Man
jects such as September 11, economic he has similarly hit upon an irresistible
growth, and the migrant crisis, using way to dramatize a white society’s fear
his home country as a backdrop rather of its growing dark-skinned popula-
than a subject in itself. In Hamid’s tion. At first Anders, a gym instructor
work you rarely find direct references in his twenties or thirties, looks into
to Pakistani landmarks or historical his smartphone’s camera and his mir-
events; Islam’s inner controversies ror and wants “to kill the colored man
are elided. who confronted him here in his home,
This is generally not a problem, to extinguish the life animating this
because Hamid is a tireless renova- other’s body, to leave nothing standing
tor of the Anglophone South Asian but himself, as he was before.” Then,
novel. Eschewing the genre’s tradi- as he slowly comes to terms with what
tional forms—the family drama, the has happened to him, he feels like the
historical saga, the political doorstop- “victim of a crime.”
per—he has favored sleek, formally Out in the world, wearing a cap low
inventive works and has said that he over his face, he realizes he is no lon-
is “attracted to the idea of a book you ger seen as completely human—the
can read in one sitting.” And he has grocery clerk won’t respond to his
shown that one way of dealing with a “mumbled thanks and goodbye,” and
large Western readership—which, for a white woman honks and curses at
a postcolonial writer, can open you up him when he idles at a green light. “If
to accusations of pandering to the West there had only been some way for her
and selling out your own country—is to know he was white, or for him to
to make the address to the West a know it,” he thinks. Many astute ob-
charged, volatile part of the narrative. servations about the experience of
The superb, bravely wrathful The being dark-skinned in a white town
Reluctant Fundamentalist, is a mono- follow—the feeling of not knowing
logue delivered by a well-educated, “where his sense of threat was com-
courtly, and rather insistent Pakistani Mohsin Hamid; illustration by Ciara Quilty-Harper ing from,” of being “recast as a sup-
man named Changez to an American porting character” at his workplace.
in Lahore. The Pakistani wants to ex-
plain to this unnamed American, and
to himself, why he felt compelled to
concerned with using [his] novels to
question how the novel works” and
more interested in “how a story can
H amid’s latest novel, The Last
White Man, continues this trend
of taking a seemingly intractable prob-
But the novel begins to falter as the
disease affects more of the population
and no one seems to ask why this is
abandon the US after the September become as powerful as it needs to be lem—in this case, race relations—and happening.
11 attacks and why, at the height of his to do the things that it needs to do.” portraying it as a strange blessing In Exit West, too, the magical black
social and financial success in the West, From this came the moving Exit rather than a curse. Like Exit West, doors appear without reason. They sim-
a part of him desired “to see America West (2017), which features two lovers it features magic-realist elements. ply exist and are indifferent to their
harmed.” As the monologue continues, fleeing their Pakistan-like country as But it is Hamid’s first novel not cen- users’ origins. In short inset sections,
we wonder: Is Changez making veiled it is gradually swallowed by civil war. tered around Pakistan (or its unnamed Hamid gives us glimpses of individuals
threats against the American? Is the Teleported across the globe by a series equivalent), and it illustrates the prob- in Europe, Asia, South America, and
American, who may or may not have of secret magic doors that resemble lems that occur when a novelist whole- Africa traipsing through the doors—to
a gun strapped under his armpit, a CIA giant iPhones or the black monoliths heartedly embraces his identity as a escape hardship or find love or satisfy
agent? The novel doesn’t answer these of 2001: A Space Odyssey, they end up “world writer.” their curiosity. In The Last White Man,
questions; it lets the reader’s own bi- in refugee encampments in Mykonos, The Nobel Prize–winning British however, the racial epidemic works in
ases—against bearded, America-baiting London, and finally Marin County, Cal- novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has said that one direction—toward brownness—
Muslims in particular—fill in the gaps. ifornia, where they make a home in a as his fame grew, he began to think and appears localized. The doors in
Hamid’s third novel, How to Get utopian multiracial society built on more about “how to write novels for an Exit West are unquestioned, but that’s
Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), con- the ashes of whatever once counted international audience and . . . to come partly because the book’s main char-
tinues this experiment of address. De- as Western civilization. up with universal themes”: acters, Nadia and Saeed, are in such a
livered as a second-person discourse to “The apocalypse appeared to have precarious situation in their bombed-
the reader, the book subverts the get- arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic,” After you have . . . sat in a hotel out hometown that they have no time
rich-quick self-help genre by plunging Hamid writes, sounding a surprisingly room in Norway talking about to study or debate the physics of tele-
“you” into the insalubrious life of a optimistic note, your work—you come home and portation. By contrast, the characters
poor boy raised in the slums and the you start to go back to work. . . . in The Last White Man live in a stable,
many moral compromises you have to which is to say that while the And you can’t help every now and first-world society (albeit one in indus-
make during your ascent from DVD de- changes were jarring they were again remembering these Norwe- trial decline, with an opioid epidemic),
livery boy to seller of expired food to not the end, and life went on, and gians and you stop and you think: where they have time to examine their
drinking-water entrepreneur. To get people found things to do and ways “I can’t write that, because the affliction and consult doctors.
filthy rich in Asia, you (and particularly to be and people to be with, and Norwegians wouldn’t understand.” But Anders and the other charac-
you, the Westerner who might have na- plausible desirable futures began ters do none of this. Instead, after
ively bought the hype about the Asian to emerge, unimaginable previ- Perhaps Hamid too has become con- the initial panic, Anders makes peace
economic miracle) need to get filthy— ously, but not unimaginable now, cerned about the Norwegians, because with his metamorphosis, as does his
morally, physically, psychologically. and the result was something not The Last White Man is set in an un- lover, Oona, who eventually jokes that
After the success of these novels, unlike relief. named city in a largely white, unnamed, “it suited him” and even, with a kind
some of Hamid’s postcolonial anger probably Northern European country. of out-of-body pleasure, enjoys “her
about the Western gaze seemed to cool. The book’s most radical message might Still, the book is quick to make up for grind with a dark-skinned stranger.”
Having moved back to Pakistan after be that there is a way out of the cri- its lack of Pakistani characters by Does she worry about becoming dark
years in the US and UK and become sis. Hamid refuses to grant the bour- turning its white people brown. herself? It isn’t always clear. Anders
the father of two children, Hamid said geois reader the solace of doomsday This is a very literal process. Here’s and Oona are presented as middle-of-
in an interview that he was now “less thinking. the first sentence of the novel: “One the-road liberals, the sort who, after

April 6, 2023 65
 their complexions change, will realize though participating in a scandalous central characters not in detention
“North by Northwest isn’t about what guiltily that they’ve never talked to the town-wide masquerade,” and soon the but in a safe encampment in Marin,
happens to Cary Grant, it’s about one brown man who works with them. last white man—Anders’s father, by which “sounds like a festival” with
what happens to his suit. The suit The state doesn’t get involved di- sheer coincidence—has died of nat- “music and voices and a motorcycle
has the adventures, a gorgeous rectly with their condition either. ural causes. “Sometimes it felt like and the wind.” But Exit West also re-
New York suit threading its way Compare this to the chaotic, pitiless the town was a town in mourning, and lied, at times, on a fairytale-like belief
through America. The suit, Cary quarantining of victims of a contagious the country a country in mourning,” in the goodness of humans. In one piv-
inside it, strides with confidence blindness disorder in José Saramago’s otal scene, as racial tension builds in
into the Plaza Hotel. Nothing bad Blindness—a clear inspiration for the migrant-choked London, the nativist
happens to it until one of the greasy conceit of Hamid’s book and for his gangs that have been threatening vi-
henchmen grasps Cary by the long, whispery sentences. In Blind- olence suddenly step “back from the
shoulder. We’re already in love with ness, the probing of doctors and the brink”:
this suit and it feels like a real panic of the state apparatus are al-
violation.” —From the title essay ways undercutting the magic; and we Perhaps they had decided they
too feel the terror of the diseased. In did not have it in them to do what
The Last White Man, the government, would have needed to be done, to
like Oona and Anders, accepts magic corral and bloody and where nec-
with a shrug. essary slaughter the migrants, and
had determined that some other
way would have to be found. Per-

M eanwhile—surprising in the work

of a novelist who has written
mainly about brown people—the ex-
haps they had grasped that the
doors could not be closed, and new
doors would continue to open, and
isting dark-skinned residents of the they had understood that the de-
city are ignored. We don’t see their nial of coexistence would have re-
reaction to suddenly having colored quired one party to cease to exist,
brethren who are culturally white and and the extinguishing party too
dressed in the fancier clothes of the would have been transformed in
middle and upper-middle classes; nor the process, and too many na-
do we learn if they fear being blamed tive parents would not after have
for this epidemic. At one point Anders been able to look their children in
“wonder[s] if people who had been born the eye, to speak with head held
dark could tell the difference, could tell Hamid writes in the wise-elder voice high of what their generation had
who had always been this way and who of the novel, “and this suited Anders, done. . . .
had become dark only recently,” but the and suited Oona, coinciding as it did And so, irrespective of the rea-
Todd McEwen grew up in Southern Cal- novel never takes this thought further. with their own feelings, but at other son, decency on this occasion won
ifornia. As the son of regular people, More puzzlingly, Hamid makes little times it felt like the opposite, that out.
he had no in with Hollywood, a mere of the disjuncture between race and something new was being born, and
thirteen miles away, try as he might. culture, presenting race as a totalizing strangely enough this suited them too.” But, of course, the reason matters—
physical fact. But one imagines that it is the central question of our age:
In his new book of essays, a love letter
a white person who becomes brown What will extinguish this anger erupt-
to old Hollywood, he writes about Casa-
blanca, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
The 39 Steps, White Christmas, North
might cling harder to his whiteness,
shout his allegiance to his nation from
the rooftops, explain to everyone that
W hat is Hamid up to with this
flimsy parable, the weakest book
in his formidable oeuvre? The decision
ing between tribes and races and na-
tions? In The Last White Man, Hamid
sidesteps the problem of interracial
by Northwest, and many more films.
the transformation is merely skin-deep to set the novel in a majority-white conflict by letting everyone quickly
(as Anders does fleetingly at the start country is not, in itself, problematic. turn brown, so that racial differences
of the novel). The question of whether But in doing so, he has unwittingly cease to exist. In one sense, he is try-
turning brown gives the formerly white replicated a reflex of certain white ing to present a compressed portrait of
characters any access to nonwhite cul- writers: conflating whiteness with how societies change—yours is a white
tures is similarly ignored, as are the everywhereness, with a lack of spec- country one decade, a brown one the
nonwhite cultures themselves. Even ificity, an unquestioning sense of the next, and the important thing is not to
such questions as what the transfor- centrality of whiteness. In writing a rage against the new but to thought-
mation actually looks like—whether novel about race, Hamid has produced fully mourn who you were, to recog-
it is a pigmentation swap-out or full- his first deracinated book. nize, as Oona does, that “whiteness . . .
Cary Grant in North by Northwest,
MGM/Cinema Retro Archive
scale alteration of bone structure and He has also gone too far in elimi- could no longer be seen but was still a
voice—are glossed over; we are only nating all traces of Pakistani culture.
“Todd McEwen’s new book-—a told vaguely that Anders is “no longer How much fun he might have had if
memoir about his love of film—is a recognizably himself, beyond being the the white characters in The Last White
quirky, chewy gallimaufry contains a same rough size and shape. Even the Man found themselves metamorphos-
small jewel, a little masterpiece of expression in his eyes was different.” ing into Pakistanis, or if they had to
a chapter, ‘Cary Grant’s Suit’. . . If I Instead, the novel focuses on a pre- investigate which type of brown per-
were compiling a new Oxford Book dictable tale of increasing paranoia son they’d become! This, after all, is
of Essays I’d include ‘Cary Grant’s among the remaining whites, the the complaint of monoracial cultures
Suit’ alongside Samuel Johnson, (largely offstage) formation of mili- that decry immigration and demand
William Hazlitt, and Joan Didion. It’s tias that target dark-skinned people, assimilation: Why should we have to
digressive, surprising, delightful.” and the Covid-like isolation this ne- learn about your way of life? But this
-—Ian Sansom, The Telegraph (UK) cessitates for Anders and, by associ- novel, ostensibly about the clash of
“A hilarious and morose invocation ation, Oona. The two of them spend cultures and races, refuses to confront
of a lost world. Anyone who has ever more time with their aging parents, its white readers with other cultures.
been movie-mad will relish this irre- think about mortality, get together The “world novel” in this way creates
pressibly digressive, surprise-filled, and smoke joints—and that’s about a world that is simpler than the world:
exquisitely written memoir (sort of). it. Nothing much more happens. an unintentional children’s book.
I certainly did.” —Phillip Lopate Hamid has so thinly imagined the Or not so unintentional. In an inter-
inner worlds of these whites, their own view shortly after the publication of
cultural life—reducing it to physical Exit West, Hamid argued that it was
CARY GRANT’S SUIT activities like yoga and gym-going— crucial to deploy novels to counter a
Nine Movies That Made Me that we don’t get a sense of what fashionable pessimism that he now be-
The Wreck I Am Today they lose or of what becoming dark- lieved was “a deeply conservative and
Todd McEwen skinned really means to them, apart reactionary position,” one that tended
Linen bound hardcover with a from a new face in the mirror and an “to lead towards deference, towards
red ribbon marker • $21.95 estrangement from the comforts of the strong and powerful, towards pow- part of them.” But to reach this con-
whiteness. erlessness and a kind of surrender.” clusion without first dramatizing the
New York Review Books By the end, everyone in the town— “Putting forth an optimistic vision intermediate stage of anger is to avoid
represents selected Notting
even the hard- core racists—has like that,” he added, “makes that vi- the issue altogether. It is to write The
Hill Editions titles in the US

.
and Canada turned brown, and a fragile peace sion, in some small way, more likely Reluctant Fundamentalist without the
is established. Once the shock has to come true.” reluctance or the fundamentalism. It
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com faded, people start posting pictures Exit West did put forward a bold new is to flee, using literature, into a world
of themselves on social media “as vision, depositing its asylum-seeking of consoling make-believe.

66 The New York Review

 Auden’s Dialectic
Nick Laird

Poems cret Agent,” as Auden later titled the

by W. H. Auden, poem, demands to be read as both lit-
edited by Edward Mendelson. eral and figurative: there’s a metaphor
Princeton University Press, being extended here. Although Mus-
2 volumes, 1,913 pp., $120.00 solini had closed the alpine passes into
France and Italy in 1927, providing a
The two volumes of Poems by W. H. ready political interpretation for the
Auden (edited by Edward Mendel- contemporaneous reader, the isolation
son, his tireless literary executor) con- the poem explores is romantic, and
tain all the poems that he published, the “new district” seems the world of
submitted for publication, or sent to sexuality.
friends for “posthumous” publication Written the same year, 1928, that the
from 1927 until his death in 1973, along OED records the first use of “pass” in
with Mendelson’s scrupulous textual the sense of an amorous advance, the
notes. The books run, in total, to almost poem counsels the self on the impor-
two thousand pages and come seven tance of sexual continence or restraint
years after the sixth and final volume or subterfuge. In his notes Mendelson
of Prose, which gathered the essays, re- explains that “Greenhearth is a variant
views, and autobiography.1 Mendelson of Greenhurth, a mine in Teesdale, near
edited all of them—publishing the first Alston,” and Auden’s decision to use the
volume of Auden’s prose (1926–1938) variant is not accidental. The hearth,
back in 1997—and wrote the definitive the locus of the household, is a fine
and fulsome critical biographies Early site for a dam, meaning also a female
Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). parent, and easy power, meaning also
Mendelson has been studying, ex- heterosexual normality—but “they”
plicating, and collating Auden’s work will not allow it. Trouble is coming.
for more than fifty years, since Auden The last line is taken, as many have
asked him, around 1970, when Men- pointed out, from the Old English poem
delson was a young teacher at Yale, to “Wulf and Eadwacer,” the monologue of
help organize his uncollected essays a captive woman to her outlawed lover.
into what became Forewords and Af- It reads, “þaet mon eaþe tosliteð þaett
terwords (1973). Mendelson, recalling naefre gesomnad waes” (One can easily
the selection process to another biog- split what was never united). This allu-
rapher of Auden’s, Richard Davenport- sion casts Auden’s whole poem as one
Hines, said the poet of frustrated love—but what exactly is
parted? Lovers or the poet’s own body
asked me why I didn’t include his and soul, which were never joined? Is
essay on Romeo and Juliet, and the poem referring to the impossibil-
I simply shook my head no, as a ity of fully inhabiting his own desires,
slightly nervous way of saying I of matching the inward and the out-
didn’t think it equaled the rest. ward—the public and private faces he
At this, he beamed at me, and I W. H. Auden; illustration by Andrea Ventura wrote about so much?
realized he was delighted that
I didn’t think everything he wrote but it’s hard now not to see much of it For weeks up in the desert. Woken
was worthy to be engraved in gold.

Still, whatever Mendelson thought

simply as a consequence of the neces-
sary sexual coding, its power derived
from what could not be said. “Here am
by water
Running away in the dark, he
often had
A stonishingly fluent, Auden could
write poems of immense power
that take their subject matter head-on.
then, he has now given us every- I, here are you:/But what does it mean? Reproached the night for a When it came to love poems, more cir-
thing, or almost everything. (A final What are we going to do?” (It’s worth companion cumspection was needed, but using
volume, Personal Writings: Selected remembering that homosexuality was Dreamed of already. They would the second-person pronoun licensed
Letters, Journals, and Poems Written subject to criminal sanctions in Brit- shoot, of course, a direct approach of sorts: “Lay your
for Friends, is forthcoming.) It’s been ain until 1967, when Auden was sixty.2) Parting easily who were never sleeping head, my love.” Though he
an astonishing act of literary scholar- Take the fifteenth poem (they are joined. later became famous for lines that
ship and personal dedication on Men- numbered rather than titled) of the have the feel of diagnostic epigrams
delson’s part, and readers the world thirty in his first collection: “Who would get it?” indeed. The poem (“We must love one another or die”) or
over should be thankful for it. tells us itself that the “new district” generalizing maxims (“About suffer-
Control of the passes was, he saw, has a “key,” a code, a way of being read. ing they were never wrong,/The Old
the key The texture is not without precedent Masters”), the early poems are neces-

I n the twentieth century those in-

terested in poetry had to come
to terms with the big beasts of the
To this new district, but who
would get it?
He, the trained spy, had walked
in English literature—the heavy al-
literation (line 10, for example, has
“weeks,” “woken,” “water”) harks
sarily oblique, and this vital hedging
and coding gives rise to a new style.
“Audenesque” came to mean minatory,
initials: W. B., T. S., and the upstart, into the trap back to Anglo-Saxon verse—though knowing, allusive, densely enigmatic.
W. H.—and it’s no exaggeration to say For a bogus guide, seduced with the tone feels entirely new. There is Behind that approach lies also a very
that the publication of Auden’s Poems the old tricks. a straightforward-enough reading: a English irony, a refusal to stand en-
in October 1930 by Faber and Faber, “trained spy” has been betrayed by tirely foursquare behind the thing
his first commercially published collec- At Greenhearth was a fine site for a “bogus guide” and is now in enemy being said, a tone that allows some
tion, changed poetry in English. Here, a dam territory. He’s been abandoned by his play within it. And play, for Auden, cre-
from a twenty-three-year-old, was a And easy power, had they pushed handlers and seems sure he will be ated a space where he could exist in
new tone in the language, a different the rail shot. But ambiguities multiply sugges- his complexities.
way of saying, pushing back against Some stations nearer. They tively. There is an oddness, a dream Auden’s dialectic—the puckish, un-
expectations of rhythm and syntax and ignored his wires. logic to the lines: water runs away in ruly youth versus the adult diagnosti-
referent. The poems were strange, rich, The bridges were unbuilt and the dark, the desert seems to bring cian—was there from the start, and
authoritative. trouble coming. us to a landscape more psychologi- finds embodiment in “Paid on Both
Certain tropes percolate through the cal than actual. Its symbolism seems Sides,” which opens Poems. “Paid on
early poetry—stratagems, machina- The street music seemed gracious allegorical. Both Sides” is an odd saga of two
tions, espionage—and have been read now to one Auden thought that modern po- feuding families, set in the North of
as symptoms of adolescent rebellion, etry, which he defined as “poetry of England, and has much of the tele-
or the resistance of youthful leftism 2
He is always described, and self-described, the last fifteen centuries,” “means and graphed, stylized action of, as he called
against the bourgeois establishment, as homosexual, though for several years in cannot help meaning more than and it, a charade. It’s tonally all over the
the 1940s he had a sexual relationship with something different from what it ex- place, teetering now toward farce,
1
See Fintan O’Toole’s review in these pages, a woman, Rhoda Jaffe, and brief affairs with presses, so that the reader is required now tragedy, but the following scene
October 22, 2015. women at other times in his life. to play a creative role,” and “The Se- is worth quoting at length since it

April 6, 2023 67
shows—in his first public outing as Being an inveterate schematizer,3 off Englishness and become Ameri- influences. (Fittingly, perhaps, con-
a writer—elements of Auden out in Auden cannot resist a further catego- can.4 Play can be flippant, but it can sidering the extensive criticism and
the open, in competition and dialogue rization when it comes to Berlin, who have the seriousness and gravity of the poetry he wrote looking to Shake-
with each other: takes his two classes of thinkers from nursery rhyme, of the psychoanalytical speare, his first poem was published
Archilochus. Auden, in response, goes or metaphorical truth—the truth of in the school magazine under the
[Enter DOCTOR and his BOY ] to Lewis Carroll: all men, he insists, the archetype, say—and it allows one typo “W. H. Arden.”) He went up to
may be divided into Alices and Ma- to cleanly interact with the experience Christ Church, Oxford, in 1925, where
B. Tickle your arse with a feather, bels. (Mabel is one of Alice’s friends, of symbols, of relations, of exploration he studied natural science, then PPE
sir. who “knows such a very little.”) Auden’s of the other, of the forbidden, without (politics, philosophy, economics), and
D. What’s that? elaboration is slightly nonsensical—he falling foul of moral or common law. It finally English, under the medieval
B. Particularly nasty weather, sir. decides that a Mabel is an “intellectual is also, of course, a resistance to tyr- scholar Nevill Coghill, graduating with
D. Yes, it is. Tell me, is my hair with weak nerves and a timid heart, anny, to the strict imposition of order, a third-class degree but a university-
tidy? One must always be care- who is so appalled at discovering that whether that be the po-faced doctor wide reputation for his brilliance
ful with a new client. life is not sweetly and softly pretty or the stern housemaster or the fas- and for his poetry. As an undergrad-
B. It’s full of lice, sir. cist dictator. uate he read and imitated Eliot, Ger-
D. What’s that? Auden is the brilliant trickster, trude Stein, Edith Sitwell, and Laura
B. It’s full of lice, sir. the naughty boy with a stink bomb Riding.
D. What’s that? and a devastating verse about the After Oxford, Auden went to Ber-
B. It’s looking nice, sir. . . . Latin master. The tone can be tire- lin with Isherwood for nearly a year
X. Are you the doctor? some—“plague the earth/with bril- and embarked on many sexual affairs,
D. I am. liant sillies like Hegel/or clever nasties mainly with male prostitutes. Eliot
X. What can you cure? like Hobbes”—and his lighter verse published Auden’s Poems in 1930, and
D. Tennis elbow, Graves’ Disease, can stray a bit too far toward showing while teaching at Larchfield Academy,
Derbyshire neck and House- off. Some of the epigrams or shorts Auden wrote The Orators: An English
maid’s knees. seem to anticipate the awfulness of Study, which deals with the country’s
X. Is that all you can cure? Instagram poetry—“Nothing can be social and political landscape after
D. No, I have discovered the ori- loved too much,/but all things can be World War I and with his homosexu-
gin of life. Fourteen months I loved/in the wrong way”—and I could ality. A state-of-the-nation census, an
hesitated before I concluded do without much of the marginalia and elaborate diagnosis of “this country of
this diagnosis. I received the clerihews: “Martin Buber/Never says ours where nobody is well,” it’s wild
morning star for this. My head ‘Thou’ to a tuber:/Despite his creed,/ in its techniques, combining, among
will be left at death for clever He did not feel the need.” other things, a prize-day speech at a
medical analysis. The laugh But Auden introduced, or tried to, school, a “Letter to a Wound,” an air-
will be gone and the microbe a certain kind of irony into American man’s journal with accompanying di-
in command. poetry, even as America was teaching agrams, genetic and psychoanalytical
X. Well, let’s see what you can do. him the revelations of a more puritan, theory, a sestina, an airman’s alphabet,
that he takes a grotesquely tough, more direct way of being, or of report- Pindaric odes . . . In the foreword to its
 D O C TOR
takes circular saws, grotesquely ‘realist’ attitude,” and he ing being. (In The Sea and the Mirror, reprint in 1966, Auden wrote:
bicycle pumps, etc., from his bag. puts Donne, Schopenhauer, Joyce, and his long poem-as-commentary on The
He farts as he does so. Wagner in the Mabel column—but it’s Tempest, he has Prospero ask, “Can I As a rule, when I re-read some-
typical of Auden to steer the argument learn to suffer/Without saying some- thing I wrote when I was younger,
B. You need a pill, sir to childhood. thing ironic or funny/On suffering?”) I can think myself back into the
D. What’s that. He thought that “to grow up does not As he told a Time interviewer in 1947: frame of mind in which I wrote it.
B. You’ll need your skill, sir. O sir mean to outgrow either childhood or The Orators, though, defeats me.
you’re hurting. adolescence but to make use of them People don’t understand that it’s My name on the title-page seems
in an adult way. But for the child in possible to believe in a thing and a pseudonym for someone else,
BOY
is kicked out.
us, we should be incapable of intellec- ridicule it at the same time. . . . It’s someone talented but near the
tual curiosity.” The “intricate play of hard for them, too, to see that a border of sanity.
The schoolboy humor attempts to sub- the mind” allowed Auden to entertain, person’s statement of belief is no
vert and deflate the adult dignity and as it were, notions, and he was intel- proof of belief, any more than a From 1932 to 1935 Auden taught at
certainty and self-congratulation (“I lectually promiscuous, always open to love poem is proof that one is in Downs School in the Malvern Hills,
have discovered the origin of life”); new modes, new thoughts. Eliot’s well- love. enjoying the teaching and gossipy
the unresolved tension between these known observation of Henry James, company of his colleagues and their
two aspects of Auden’s character was that he had a mind so fine no idea charges. (“The aim is training char-
to play out in his work for the rest of
his life.
could violate it, might be reversed in
Auden’s situation. He was interested
in everything—in psychology, Chris-
W ystan Hugh Auden was born
in York in 1907, the youngest
of three boys. (His brothers became
acter and poise,/With special coach-
ing for the backward boys.”) In 1934
he took a motoring holiday in Cen-
tianity, opera, Thucydides, Diaghilev, a farmer and a geologist.) When he tral Europe with two of his former

I n his review of Isaiah Berlin’s The

Hedgehog and the Fox, Auden quotes
Berlin’s famous thesis: hedgehogs “re-
Tolstoy, Shakespeare; or, to take some
examples from his poem “Spain 1937,”
“the enlarging of consciousness by diet
was a year old, his father, George
Auden, became the school medical of-
ficer for Birmingham, and the family
pupils at Downs, one of whom was
Michael Yates, with whom he was in-
fatuated. In 1935 Auden temporarily
late everything to a single central vi- and breathing,” “the diffusion/Of the moved there. Dr. Auden served in the left teaching to join the GPO Film Unit,
sion,” while the foxes “pursue many counting-frame and the cromlech,” “the Royal Army Medical Corps in Gallip- writing the “verse commentary” for
ends, often unrelated and even contra- photographing of ravens,” “the divina- oli, Egypt, and France during World the documentary Night Mail (1936),
dictory.” Dante, Plato, Hegel, Proust, tion of water,” “the origin of Mankind,” War I. Auden boarded at St. Edmund’s and married Erika Mann, the les-
Nietzsche, and Ibsen are hedgehogs, “the absolute value of Greek,” “the in- prep school in Surrey, where he met bian daughter of Thomas Mann, who
while Herodotus, Aristotle, Molière, stallation of dynamos and turbines,” Christopher Isherwood, who became needed a passport to leave Germany.
Montaigne, Goethe, and Joyce are “theological feuds in the taverns” . . . his lifelong friend, his collaborator, In 1936 he wrote a play, The Ascent of
foxes. Auden goes on: In A Certain World, Auden’s com- and in the late 1920s and 1930s, his F6 , with Isherwood, and he published
monplace book, he reproduces Schil- lover. Between 1920 and 1925 Auden the collection Look, Stranger! (pub-
I find this classification entertain- ler’s lines from On the Aesthetic boarded at Gresham’s School in Holt, lished in the US the following year
ing and illuminating, but I think it Education of Man (1795): “Man only Norfolk, and at the suggestion of a fel- as On This Island), which contains
needs elaboration. Are there not plays when, in the full meaning of the low pupil, Robert Medley, with whom some of his loveliest lyrics (“Out on
artists, for example, who, precisely word, he is a man, and he is only com- he was in love, began to write poetry. the lawn I lie in bed”) and shows signs
because they can perceive no uni- pletely a man when he plays.” Play is Hardy, Edward Thomas, the Anglo- of Auden accepting his sexuality. The
fying hedgehog principle govern- a way of existing in full, of not being Saxon poems were important early military metaphors are reprised, for
ing the flux of experience, are caught or trapped in attitudes or example, in poem XXVI , but it turns
aesthetically all the more hedge- poses, just as Auden could shrug off 4
Auden discovered Freud at thirteen, ac- out the passes do not need to be
hog, imposing in their art the unity communism and try on Freud, or shrug cording to Mendelson’s biography, “when controlled:
they cannot find in life? his father began using the new psychology
3
Mendelson reproduces some of Auden’s in his school medical practice.” All his life That night when joy began
Of course he is talking about himself. explanatory diagrams to Isherwood—for the poet argued with and borrowed from Our narrowest veins to flush
Making sense of his experience, for example, about his ars poetica, The Sea and Freud, becoming, perhaps, the first major We waited for the flash
Auden, involved synthesizing in his the Mirror—though he doesn’t include the poet to use modern ideas about psychology Of morning’s levelled gun.
art the disparate and divided, using extraordinary “comprehensive chart” of an- in his work. According to the Cambridge
formal principles, metric or syllabic titheses Auden constructed while teaching Companion, “From adolescence he would But morning let us pass
or stanzaic. (“Talent,” as Yeats noted, at Swarthmore and writing The Sea and the startle or bully his friends with Freudian And day by day relief
“perceives differences, genius unity.”) Mirror, which can be found in Later Auden. diagnoses.” Outgrew his nervous laugh . . .

68 The New York Review

B y 1937 the thirty-year-old Auden
was regarded as the leading poet
of his generation (and the voice of the
as The Cambridge Companion to W. H.
Auden rather brutally puts it, “an ag-
gressively ‘out’ and promiscuous ho-
ambiguous truths elicited by play, by
the parabolic, are overtaken by a more
public, more life-involved tone, and
However we decide to act,
Decision must accept the fact
That the machine has now
socialist youth) in England, a reputa- mosexual who, though Jewish, had the the received idea is mostly true. It’s destroyed
tion that had spread across the Atlan- stereotypical ‘Aryan’ good looks Auden also thought that Auden’s American The local customs we enjoyed,
tic. That year New Verse dedicated a favoured.” Through turmoil and be- years produced less memorable and Replaced the bonds of blood and
double issue of the magazine solely to trayals and temporary separations, influential poems, although this is nation
celebrating his work, and contained Kallman and Auden were to remain a more arguable proposal. The later By personal confederation. . . .
tributes from elder statesmen like partners for the rest of Auden’s life. books contain more than a few works For the machine has cried aloud
Pound and up-and-comers like Dylan His attraction to the country was of genius: Nones (1951) has “In Praise And publicized among the crowd
Thomas. Thomas’s real feelings were partly about escape from the old cer- of Limestone,” and The Shield of Achil- The secret that was always true
revealed in a letter to James Laughlin, tainties: he told Robert Fitzgerald that les (1955) contains “Bucolics” and the But known once only to the few,
not long after Laughlin’s founding of “America is the place because nation- title poem, which strike me as being Compelling all to the admission,
New Directions, in May 1938: alities don’t mean anything here, there among the most accomplished things Aloneness is man’s real condition,
are only human beings, and that’s how Auden—or anyone—ever wrote. That each must travel forth
Auden is, I think, 31. I am 23. I the future must be.” Auden found new Reviewing The Age of Anxiety (1947), alone . . .
don’t know Auden, but I think he subjects and concerns in the United Auden’s long “baroque eclogue” set in a
sounds bad: the heavy, jocular States—early on he befriended the wartime downtown New York bar with
prefect, the boy bushranger, the
school wag, the 6th form debater,
the homosexual clique-joker. I
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was
influential in his return to Christianity,
which is, according to Auden, “a way,
four characters, Quant, Emble, Ro-
setta, and Malin, who represent Intu-
ition, Sensation, Feeling, and Thought,
A uden witnessed the worst of na-
tionalism and felt it his moral obli-
gation to be alienated from the crowd,
think he sometimes writes with not a state, and a Christian is never respectively, Randall Jarrell wrote: the mob. Did he succeed in uncoupling
great power: “O Love, the inter- something one is, only something one nationalism from poetry? Eliot, in “The
est itself in thoughtless heaven, can pray to become.” Kallman’s Jew- The man who, during the thirties, Social Function of Poetry,” wrote that
Make simpler daily the beating of ishness provided him, however, with was one of the five or six best poets “no art is more stubbornly national
man’s heart.” I can’t agree he’s as access to a different set of references, in the world has gradually turned than poetry,” and Yeats’s entire proj-
bad as [Archibald] MacLeish. He’s and Kallman also got him interested into a rhetoric mill grinding away ect was to create a nation, a unifying
overpraised of course. I’ve added in grand opera. They collaborated on at the bottom of Limbo, into an au- myth for Ireland—from the Celtic twi-
my own little dollop of praise in libretti, including Stravinsky’s The tomaton that keeps making little light poems and Cathleen ni Houlihan
a number of New Verse devoted Rake’s Progress (1951). jokes, little plays on words, little to one of his final poems, “Cuchulain
entirely, with albino portrait and Auden’s move to America prompted rhetorical engines, as compulsively Comforted.” He wanted “an Ireland/
manuscript, to gush and pomp some rancor in the literary world. He and unendingly and uneasily as a The poets have imagined.”
about him. He’s exactly what the was recruited to the Morale Division neurotic washes his hands. Auden’s response to this kind of
English literary public think a of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in thinking can be discerned in his elegy
modern English poet should be. Germany,5 where he interviewed Ger- In general it is true that the diagnosti- for Yeats:
He’s perfectly educated (& expen- man citizens about the war and “got cian took over, and in the later poems
sively) but still delightfully eccen- no answers that we didn’t expect.” He an urbane, benevolent, slightly smug In the nightmare of the dark
tric. . . . He’s just what he should Auden is forever lecturing, warning, or All the dogs of Europe bark,
be: let him rant his old commu- advising his readers. Also, the poems And the living nations wait,
nism, it’s only a young man’s nat- became very long indeed. “New Year Each sequestered in its hate . . .
ural rebelliousness, (& besides, Letter” (1941), “For the Time Being”
it doesn’t convert anybody: the (1944), and The Age of Anxiety might His reply to becoming the poster boy
awarding of conservative prizes to be rated partial successes. “For the for a certain kind of Englishness was
anti-conservatives who are found Time Being” (subtitled “A Christmas to up sticks and move to New York.
to be socially harmless is a fine, Oratorio”) began life as a libretto for (He told his friend Louis MacNeice in
soothing palliative, & a shrewd Benjamin Britten and has good bits— 1940, “An artist ought either to live
gesture. And, incidentally too, the wise men, the narrator—as well as where he has live roots or where he
the rich minority can always calm long, indigestible passages, particu- has no roots at all.”) Nationalism to
down a crier of “Equality for All” larly Saint Simeon’s meditation: Auden was akin to patriotism, which
by giving him individual equality was akin to warmongering, and he
with themselves). By Him is dispelled the darkness shrugged off the necessity of speak-
wherein the fallen will cannot ing for or to a national audience. More
Although Thomas himself was no distinguish between temptation interested in a relation of intimacy,
stranger to inhabiting the carica- and sin, for in Him we become he had no time for grandstanding.6
ture of Poet, readers coming from a fully conscious of Necessity as Mendelson wrote of him in these
working-class, state-educated back- our freedom to be tempted, and pages:
ground might share some of his re- of Freedom as our Necessity to
serve. While we’re at it, reading much have faith . . . A writer who addresses a plural au-
of Auden’s work again, one notices the dience claims to deserve their col-
absence of women in his poems. They returned briefly to London in 1945, and The reader’s ability to finish it might lective attention. He must present
are either abstracted (“By landscape Robert Graves’s attitude seems not depend on their own feelings about himself as the great modernists—
reminded once of his mother’s fig- untypical: “Ha ha about Auden: the Christianity. Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Pound—more
ure”) or cartoonish and misused, like rats return to the unsunk ship.” The Age of Anxiety is virtuosic in or less seriously presented them-
Edith Gee (in the ballad “Miss Gee,” places, full of verbal energy and rhythm selves, as visionary pioneers and
from Another Time), who has a “slight and documentary details (“Near- cultural authorities, artist-heroes
squint” and “no bust at all.” She dies
of cancer and is hung from the ceiling
to be dissected by Oxford students.
S o much has been written about
Auden—and so much was written
by Auden—that it can be difficult to
sighted scholars on canal paths/De-
fined their terms”) but is overextended,
and all four characters sound both a
setting an agenda for their time
and their nation. In contrast, a
writer who addresses an individ-
Auden’s world is a male world, with keep the poems in view. There is the lot like Auden and, thanks to the in- ual reader presents himself as
male actors in it. chaotic love life, the twenty years of sistent Anglo-Saxon alliteration, like someone expert in his métier but
In the 1939 travelogue Journey to a daily amphetamine use, the squalid no one who’s ever lived. (“Muster no in every other way equal with his
War, written with Isherwood, an ac- domesticity, the last, lonelier years, monsters, I’ll meeken my own. . . ./ reader, having no moral authority
count of their visit to wartime China and all the gossip—he made Anne You may wish till you waste, I’ll want or special insight on anything be-
the previous year, Auden described Sexton cry backstage at Poetry Inter- here. . . ./Too blank the blink of these yond his art.
America as “absolutely free” (one might national; in Austria he lent his car to blind heavens.”) The unnaturalness of
quibble and ask for whom, exactly?), Hugerl, a male prostitute, who used it the language begins to grate. Auden can be boring, and he can be
and in January 1939 Auden and Isher- in a bank robbery, during which it got “New Year Letter” (1,707 lines of thrilling, but it nearly always feels like
wood made the move there, arriving by a bullet hole in the hood; when his flat rhyming tetrameter) has many brilliant he is talking to you, an individual sit-
ocean liner in New York Harbor. Ini- on St. Mark’s Place was too filthy he passages, particularly when it harks ting beside him at high table or at a
tially the trip was to be for a year, and used the toilet in the local liquor store; back to Auden’s lost landscape of the bus stop. He doesn’t present himself
they were going to write a travel book Hannah Arendt took him shopping and Pennines, though the liveliest thing as one of the great visionary pioneers
called Address Not Known. Auden ended made him buy a second suit . . . about it might be its notes, written
up staying in New York on and off for The received idea about Auden is in doggerel and free verse and prose 6
When he felt he had to, he took politi-
thirty-three years. Isherwood headed that in the later work the complicated anecdotes. In some ways it’s a tour cal and moral stands effectively and qui-
to Hollywood to write screenplays. de force, attacking ideas of national- etly. See Mendelson, “The Secret Auden,”
In his first year in New York, Auden, 5
He had been rejected by the US Army in ism and using the American polyglot The New York Review, March 20, 2014;
then thirty-two, met the eighteen- August 1942 on medical grounds, because argot, while frequently demonstrating and “Auden and No-Platforming Pound,”
year-old Chester Kallman, who was, of his homosexuality. a clipped English restraint and clarity: nybooks.com, February 27, 2019.

April 6, 2023 69
but as a gossipy equal, albeit one en- it’s always chatty: “Looking up at the presentation as a cultural author- fetches/The images out that hurt and
dowed with a preternatural facility for stars, I know quite well/That, for all ity, and where that path can lead: to connect.” That “rummaging” suggests
language. What may have begun as a they care, I can go to hell”; “A lake Yeats’s nationalism or even Pound’s something decidedly disorderly, some-
way of writing truthfully within the allows an average father, walking fascism. In “The Composer,” Auden’s one scrabbling around in the common
strictures of public life—i.e., writing slowly,/To circumvent it in an after- depiction of the poet’s job shows both life. For Auden, “perfection, of a kind,
to a “you” in order to avoid gendering noon”; “I know a retired dentist who his conviction of poetry’s vital con- was what” the ideologically committed,

.
the love object—became for Auden a only paints mountains.” nective work and his understand- the tyrants, were after. Auden lived in
creed, a tenet. And many poems open Of the great poets of the twenti- ing of how ludicrous and grubby and the real world of retired dentists and
like conversations. The tone might be eth century Auden is the most aware unsystematic the work actually is: average fathers, where we—if we’re
dramatic or funny or confidential, but of the danger of “greatness,” of self- “Rummaging into his living, the poet lucky—live too.

True Crime and Punishment: An Exchange

To the Editors: currently being analyzed. (I’m told it costs six weeks after being released, Edgar that center on claims of wrongful convic-
$30,000 and takes up to six months.) If Smith abducted and attempted to kill a tions.” Lennon places a heavy burden on
I read John J. Lennon’s review of Sarah the murderer in our case is alive and at woman, Jack Unterweger went on to kill the shoulders of Edgar Smith, an anoma-
Weinman’s book Scoundrel [“Peddling large, what has he done with his life? Is nine women. (Other cases have merely lous figure whose supposed literary talent
Darkness,” NYR, March 9, 2023] with great he capable of Lennon’s level of insight? involved perpetrators lying about their garnered attention and advocacy from fa-
interest, being the son of one of the princi- If so, should I care? Lennon didn’t men- crimes, such as Jimmy Lerner, author of mous friends like William F. Buckley, and
pals in the story, the editor Sophie Wilkins. tion survivors. You Got Nothing Coming, who depicted the whose persuasive manipulations caused
He states, at one point, that he suspects Those who profit from peddling dark- skinny, 5'4" man he killed in a drug-induced significant harm to the women and girls
that I must now regret having turned over ness should be ashamed of themselves. rage as a hulking giant of 6'4" who threat- in his orbit, above all Victoria Zielinski,
to the author the letters from Edgar Smith Yet within the stories that include mur- ened his life.) While murderers as a whole the fifteen-year-old girl Smith murdered
to my mother. I certainly cooperated with der we might find ideas that broaden our have a lower recidivism rate—at a mere in 1957, and Lisa Ozbun, the woman he
Sarah Weinman, thinking that it was a story perspectives and apply to everyone. For 41 percent, according to one study from nearly murdered in 1976.
that deserved to be told and feeling that instance, how can Lennon be both a killer Lennon expresses overt dismay that
there was no way I could stop it, but I did and a moral person, as he obviously is? Scoundrel did not properly consider Edgar
not give Sarah any letters. I had given all Perhaps he will describe his journey in Smith’s humanity, especially during his
my mother’s letters to Butler Library at Co- his forthcoming book. I hope he will ac- long incarceration in the last decades of
lumbia University in 2003 after her death; knowledge his victim’s family. Does he his life. But Lennon does not take into ac-
she corresponded with hundreds of peo- know and understand the kind of prison count the many instances in which Smith’s
ple in the literary world and her letters he put them in? humanity was prioritized, championed, and
were a treasure trove. I did not once think My life changed when I joined the or- celebrated, and that the root of his inevi-
about the folder with Smith’s letters. Had ganization Journey of Hope—from Vio- table (and tragic) recidivism was his rage
I looked at them, I almost certainly would lence to Healing. After twenty-five years toward and hatred of women, never ade-
have removed them as an unnecessary em- I learned to talk about what happened. quately dealt with both inside and outside
barrassment to my mother’s memory. She Murder is surprisingly intimate. I learned of prison. Smith’s humanity, in all its ugly
deserves to be remembered for her trans- how to share and how not to share. One of glory, was accurately depicted.
lations and her editorial gifts, not for the my speaking partners was a woman whose The criminal justice system has unques-
folly of the campaign, led by William F. son was on death row. It was easy to be- tionably tilted toward punishment and
Buckley, on Smith’s behalf. come friends because we had so much in retribution, and must be ameliorated to
It is reasonable to ask: Does this old common. I invited my sisters to join the shift the balance toward rehabilitation
story have any interest today, apart from Journey and they did. We met Sister Helen and reintegration into society. A book of
its improbability and shock value? I agree Prejean and made her an honorary Klas- narrative nonfiction, one most concerned
with Lennon that the book is not a serious sen sister. with the machinations of belief, a pattern
examination of the problems of the Amer- In my opinion, offenders need victims of violence against women and girls, and
ican criminal justice system, despite the and vice versa. We’re in this together. whose voices get to matter most, cannot,
author’s hint that it will be. Nor does it aid and should not, solve these problems.
our understanding of male psychopathic Ruth Klassen Andrews
violence toward women, which Weinman Cassopolis, Michigan 2002—than released prisoners in general, Sarah Weinman
implies was her chief motivation. That is thanks at least in part to being much older New York City
a hugely important topic, but the Smith To the Editors: than other prisoners upon the end of their
case provides little illumination. long sentences, literary murderers appear John J. Lennon replies:
I feel that the tale’s interest lies in the It takes a remarkable chutzpah to review a to be an uncommonly dangerous lot.
interactions of the three principals, who book about a man who raped and murdered Understandably from his perspective, When the Edgar Smith saga ended in 1976
were so different in personality and back- a fifteen-year-old, sexually assaulted a ten- Lennon is upset by the idea that this story and he went away for good, Sarah Wein-
ground, and I suggest that two elements year-old, and upon leaving prison went on is being told at all, because of the danger it man and I weren’t yet born. Fast forward
were central to their cooperation. The first to attempt to murder another woman, and poses to people trusting the good faith of to today. We’re both writers in this era of
was their shared intelligence and verbal conclude that the problem is that the man other murderers. But perhaps—just per- mass incarceration, me from the inside
facility, which was certainly a strong bond wasn’t given a fair shake by the author. haps—the stories of those murdered and and her from the outside. In her letter,
between Buckley and my mother, who re- In four thousand words John J. Lennon assaulted also deserve to be told? Weinman is right when she writes about
mained lifelong friends. The second was devotes all of a paragraph to considering my reality—“The criminal justice system
the very fact of their differences: it was the impact on victims. In contrast, sec- James Palmer has unquestionably tilted toward punish-
the equivalent of three exotic animals, tion upon section is devoted to the feelings Deputy Editor ment and retribution”—and she’s also right
each looking at the other two and think- of Smith, and blaming Weinman for not Foreign Policy that her book “cannot, and should not, solve
ing, Wow! I did not know there were such “hearing his own account.” Lennon con- Washington, D.C. these problems.”
interesting creatures yet so easy to talk to! cludes that the depiction of “a talented What she fails to acknowledge is that
I would have been happier with the book and damaged” man as a sociopath in the To the Editors: the book compounds those problems. It
had it been less salacious and explored book is bad because it might cause peo- seems to me like Weinman wrote Scoundrel
those psychological dynamics more. ple to think harshly of murderers such as I appreciated John J. Lennon’s essay. Len- because it was a good story, entertaining.
himself. He speculates that the book will non’s insight, as an incarcerated individ- And that’s fine. But it makes the concern
Adam S. Wilkins cause people to think that “the real injus- ual, into criminal justice matters and the for our punishing criminal justice system
Berlin, Germany tice was that Smith wasn’t executed.” Some prison system is valuable and necessary. sound disingenuous.
readers may think that; others will come He also shares my own long-standing con- If Weinman is going to keep position-
To the Editors: to the reasonable conclusion that Smith cerns about the true crime genre, that it ing herself as the moral umpire of true
not only deserved life in prison, but that too often veers into exploitation and pri- crime, voicing her concerns about the in-
Lennon’s essay caught my attention as I it significantly reduced the harm and suf- oritizes entertainment over the treatment justices in our legal system, then maybe
am a surviving family member of a murder. fering he could cause to others. of systemic issues. she should write about an offender who
Our mother was raped and murdered over There have been three prominent mur- Which is why I was puzzled at his char- doesn’t disgust her. And while I’m con-
fifty years ago when my three sisters and derers who were released after high-profile acterization of Scoundrel as “traditional stantly reckoning with what I did, maybe I
I were teenagers. The crime has remained interventions by the well-meaning lite- true crime that exploits true innocence” myself should write about a victim’s story
unsolved. Now, with new technology, it may rati, whether conservative or liberal. Jack and his conclusion that it “will make people and try to immerse myself in their pain.
be solvable. Hair from the murder kit is Henry Abbott went on to murder a man rethink the subset of true crime stories . . . To be fair, Weinman does this well.

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