Michael Ignatieff on

Pankaj Mishra

April 6, 2017 / Volume LXIV, Number 

Michael Tomasky:
How Trump
Does It
Nathaniel Rich
on Paul Auster
+++ +
The + +
++
OSCAR +
+
+
MESS +
by Geoffrey OBrien
+ +
Linda Greenhouse:
How Women Got the
Chance
Cathleen Schine
on Elif Batuman
Contents
4 Michael Ignatieff Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
6 Paula Bohince Poem
THE SPEECH
8 Julian Lucas Morning, Paramin by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig OF ANGELS
12 Michael Tomasky Trump: The Scramble
14 Nathaniel Rich 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
16 Geoffrey OBrien La La Land a film written and directed by Damien Chazelle
18 Christopher Benfey Mans Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War
by Philip F. Gura
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings
Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through Americas Most Radical Idea by Erik Reece
Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table by Ellen Wayland-Smith
We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America
by Kate Daloz
21 Linda Greenhouse Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation
by Nancy Weiss Malkiel
23 Norman Rush Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
25 Julian Barnes The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century
French Novels by Anka Muhlstein, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
28 Vivian Gornick Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins
31 Charles Simic The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner LANGUAGE
33 Cathleen Schine The Idiot by Elif Batuman OF THE SPIRIT
35 Robert Alter The Orange Peel and Other Satires by S.Y. Agnon,
translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey Saks A n I n t ro d uc t i o n t o
The Bridal Canopy by S.Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by I. M. Lask Cl a s s i c a l Mus i c
A Guest for the Night by S.Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by Misha Louvish
To This Day by S.Y. Agnon, translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin Ja n S w a f f ord
A Book That Was Lost: Thirty-Five Stories by S.Y. Agnon,
translated from the Hebrew by Amiel Gurt and others A perfect, lean compendium
Two Tales: Betrothed and Edo and Enam S.Y. Agnon, from a scintillating writer who
translated from the Hebrew by Walter Lever
and six other books by S.Y. Agnon knows profoundly where music
37 Timothy Noah The CEO Who Went Too Far comes from, and the geniuses
39 Fintan OToole Irelands Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth by Mark Williams whove made it best in the
42 Letters from Edward Jay Epstein, Charlie Savage, Steven Weinberg, and Edward Ball Western tradition. Composer
and biographer on the grand
CONTRIBUTORS scale, Jan Swafford has given
ROBERT ALTER is the Class of 1937 Emeritus Professor TIMOTHY NOAH is the Labor Policy Editor for Politico us the last music book well
of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University and the author of The Great Divergence: Americas Growing
of California at Berkeley. His books include Pen of Iron: Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. ever need. CHRIS LYDON,
American Prose and the King James Bible and a translation GEOFFREY OBRIEN is Editor in Chief of the Library host of Radio Open Source
of the Hebrew Bible. of America. He is the author of The Phantom Empire and
JULIAN BARNESs most recent books are Keeping an Eye Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002
Open: Essays on Art and The Noise of Time, a novel. 2012, among other books. In Language of the Spirit, Jan
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of Eng- FINTAN OTOOLE is a columnist with The Irish Times Swafford achieves something
lish at Mount Holyoke. He is the author of Red Brick, Black and the Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Let- very difficult: he captures
Mountain, White Clay. ters at Princeton. His book on George Bernard Shaw, Judg-
PAULA BOHINCEs most recent book of poems is Swal- ing Shaw, will be published in the fall. the spirit of music in words.
lows and Waves. NATHANIEL RICH is the author of Odds Against Tomor- His series of short sketches of
VIVIAN GORNICK is at work on a book of rereadings, row and The Mayors Tongue. composers and their works ring
which will be published next year.
NORMAN RUSHs most recent novel is Subtle Bodies. true, and, more importantly,
LINDA GREENHOUSE is Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in
Law at Yale Law School. She writes an opinion column on CATHLEEN SCHINEs latest novel, They May Not Mean send you running to listen to
the Supreme Court and law for The New York Times. Her To, But They Do, will be published in paperback this June.
new book, Just a Journalist, will be published in the fall.
the music for yourself.
CHARLES SIMIC has been Poet Laureate of the United
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is President of Central European States. His new book, Scribbled in the Dark, a volume of po- EMANUEL AX, pianist
University in Budapest. His books include Isaiah Berlin: A etry, will be published in June.
Life and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. MICHAEL TOMASKY is a Special Correspondent for The Reading Jans Swaffords
JULIAN LUCAS is an Associate Editor at Cabinet. Daily Beast and the Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
Language of the Spirit is
like taking a road trip
Editor: Robert B. Silvers Founding Co-editor: Barbara Epstein (19282006)
Senior Editors: Michael Shae, Hugh Eakin, Eve Bowen, Jana Prikryl Publisher: Rea S. Hederman through the land of classical
Contributing Editor: Ann Kjellberg Associate Publisher: Catherine Tice
Assistant Editors: Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Madeleine Schwartz Business Manager: Raymond Shapiro music with your wickedly
Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen
Andrew Katzenstein, Max Nelson, and Liza Batkin, Editorial Assistants; Nick Binnette, Editorial Intern; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Borden Elniff, Katie Jefferis,
smart but charmingly self-
and John Thorp, Type Production; Janet Noble, Cover Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Michael King,
Technical Director; Meagan Schneider, Advertising Associate, Classifieds and Special Listings; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice Fellegara, deprecating best friend. . . .
Director of Marketing and Planning; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Director of Electronic Publishing; Angela Hederman, Special
Projects; Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager/List Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Margarette Devlin, Comptroller; Pearl Williams and Erin Schwartz, Assistant Music to Swafford is not a
Comptrollers; Teddy Wright, Receptionist; Microfilm and Microcard Services: NAPC, 300 North Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.
NYRDaily Hugh Eakin, Editor; Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Assistant Editor; Madeleine Schwartz and Lucy McKeon, NYR Gallery Editors. dry, intellectual exercise, but
rather an emotional experience
POWER AND FANTASY touching on the full range
Gideon Rachman: Trumps China Mess Walter Pincus: The Chaos of Immigration
Masha Gessen: Our Russian Nightmares Christopher de Bellaigue: The Sultan of Turkey of feeling of which humans
nybooks.com/daily
Plus: Jenny Uglow on art and autocracy, Christopher Benfey on a visionary printmaker, and more are capable. ELIZABETH
LUNDAY, author of Secret Lives
On the cover: Pankaj Mishra (Dominique Nabokov); Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, accepting the Oscar for Best Picture with the films cast and crew
(Patrick T. Fallon/The New York Times/Redux); students graduating from Radcliffe College, June 1962 (Patricia Hollander Gross/Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe of Great Composers
Institute, Harvard University); Elif Batuman (Korhan Karaoysal). The drawings on the cover and on pages 12 and 14 are by Pancho. The illustrations on pages 13 and
42 are by James Ferguson. The drawings on pages 36 and 40 are by David Levine.
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
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3

Which Way Are We Going?
Age of Anger:
A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
406 pp.,$27.00
Michael Ignatieff
In Pankaj Mishras portrait of our age,
most people are angry: the white work-
ing class of the American rust belt be-
trayed by the metropolitan elites, the
young high school and college gradu-
ates clinging to part-time jobs in Eu-
rope, and the terrorists who lived in the
Paris banlieues. All of these different
manifestations of rage, Mishra argues,
have a common source: resentment at
a modernity that promises equal-
ity and freedom and delivers only the
dog- eat- dog brutality and competition
of neoliberal capitalism. It was Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Mishra argues, who
diagnosed in the 1750s the resentment
that has defined but also corroded the
modern age ever since:
An existential resentment of
other peoples being, caused by
an intense mix of envy and sense
of humiliation and powerless-
ness, ressentiment, as it lingers
and deepens, poisons civil soci-
ety and undermines political lib-
erty, and is presently making for
a global turn to authoritarianism
and toxic forms of chauvinism.
If this is the hypothesisand
Mishras new book, Age of Anger, is
widely discussed and much praised for
his analysiswhat are we to make of
it? Its not obvious that patriotic coal
miners and steelworkers from Tennes-
see or Ohio share any resentments in
common with jihadis. Young Euro-
peans looking for jobs are unlikely to
feel much kinship with the fanatics who
shot up the Bataclan in Paris. Indeed,
its not even clear that many of their
fellow banlieusards share the jihadis
quarrel with modernity. Few have
joined their civil war.
Theres a lot of anger in this age of
ours, but not all anger is the same and
not all anger has equal justification. To
describe terrorism as an act of anger,
for example, may seem to imply that it
has a justifying cause. In lumping to-
gether the anger of workers left high
and dry by plant shutdowns, young
people unable to find a secure job, and
jihadi killers, Mishra fails to distin-
guish an anger that results in indiscrim-
inate slaughter and has no justification
whatever.
Mishra doesnt bother with such dis-
tinctions, it seems, because he sympa-
thizes with the anger of jihadists and
believes it has some justification. At
one point, for example, he says of the
ISIS terrorists that they have aimed at
exterminating a world of soul-killing
mediocrity, cowardice, opportunism
and immoral deal-making. Never, so
far as I know, has a free and freedom-
loving intellectual handed a gang of
killers such a lofty worldview. Mishra
would not justify terrorist actshe
would recoil at the very ideayet in
seeing its perpetrators as holy warriors
against modernity he justifies their
arguments.
Yet what exactly is this moder-
nity? Mishra means the unprec-
4 The New York Review
edented political, economic and social
disorder that accompanied the rise of
the industrial capitalist economy. The
dislocating convulsion that the West
experienced between 1750 and 1850, he
argues, is now sweeping through Asia,
Africa, and the Middle East with the
same destabilizing effects. Just as the
dislocations of industrial capitalism
triggered revolts, uprisings, and terror-
ism in the West, he argues, the same
dislocations are engendering aveng-
ing rage in the East. This militant
secession from a civilization premised
on gradual progress under liberal-
democrat trusteesa civilization felt
as outrageously false and enfeebling
now rages far beyond Europe.
Pankaj Mishra, London, November 2014
This version of modernity is relent-
lessly dystopian. The history of mod-
ernization, according to Mishra, is
largely one of carnage and bedlam
rather than peaceful convergence.
This is Max Webers iron cage of
modernity, the industrial capitalist
machine that led, Mishra writes, to
world wars, totalitarian regimes and
genocide.
Lets consider the work that this tiny
word led is obliged to perform in
Mishras analysis. The chain of causa-
tion that produced world wars, totali-
tarian regimes, and genocide in the
twentieth century has occupied histori-
ans for generations, and they have con-
cluded that these terrible occurrences
deserve careful analysis and were not
inevitable. Industrial capitalism led
to war, totalitarianism, and genocide
only if you leave leadership, contin-
gency, folly, and failure out of the story,
in other words if you leave out politics.
To say that modernity led to world
wars, totalitarian regimes, and geno-
cide, without showing the clear con-
nection to actual history, is to rely on
invective.
Modernity does include imperialism,
exploitation of man by man, oppression
of women, racism, colonial conquest,
and war. It also includesa random
selectionthe formal abolition of slav-
ery and the slave trade, the invention of
sulphonomides and penicillin, the de-
velopment of treatments for cancer, the
near elimination of polio, universal de-
clines in the incidence of tuberculosis,
sharp falls in child mortality, the right
to vote for women, staggering advances
in physics, chemistry, and biology, and he does not engage with the contradic-
the ordinary, inadequate, decencies of tion he puts forward.
the welfare state. Modernity also in- His critique draws heavily on Jean-
cludes human rights, self-determination, Jacques Rousseaus Discourse on In-
and decolonization. Imperialism, pace equality of 1755. Mishra argues that if
Marx, is a contingent rather than neces- we return to Rousseaus indictment of
sary feature of capitalism. Youd never early capitalist alienation and resent-
know, from Mishras denunciations of ment, we can better understand con-
colonialism, that the last European em- temporary discontents. Rousseaus
pire, the Portuguese, collapsed in 1974; prescient criticism of a political and
the last empire of them allthe Soviet economic system based on envious
Uniondisappeared in 1991. comparison, individual self-seeking
Progress of this sort lets no one off and the multiplication of artificial
the hook: inequality, injustice, and en- needs . . . helps us to understand . . .
vironmental despoliation all remain, why a cleric like Ayatollah Khomeini
but to ignore what modernity has made rose out of obscurity to lead a popular
possible for a large part of humanity revolution in Iran. Using Rousseau
gives the violent nihilists of our time to understand Khomeini is bizarrely
a victory they do not deserve. Mishra unhelpful. Any actual explanation of
carries the attack on modernity so far Khomeinis rise might want to include
as to attempt to deny clear if modest the fall of Mohammed Mossadegh, the
interference of the CIA, the cruelty and
Harry Borden/Contour by Getty Images
violence of the Shah, the Shia revival,
and Khomeinis political skill in exile.
In other words, it is Iranian politics and
Western governments arrogant and
incompetent interventions, not Rous-
seauian ressentiment, that explain the
Iranian revolution.
More broadly, modernity as a con-
cept has no capacity to explain ressen-
timent, anger, and violence. It can be
forced to deliver explanations only if
you ignore all of its positive impulses
and if you ignore, as Mishra does, such
drivers of history as politics, contin-
gency, and folly.
Mishra makes much of the fact that
the anger toward the West in the Mid-
dle East and South Asia today replays
the anger of Russians and other East-
ern Europeans lagging behind the in-
dustrializing West in the nineteenth
gains for the worlds poorest people. century. But he misses what contem-
Millions of Chinese and Indians, he porary Russian revolutionaries, like
writes, will never enjoy in their life- Alexander Herzen, saw with such pain-
time the condition of a civilized urban ful clarity: that Russian resentment lay
existence. Age of Anger never bothers not with modernity itselfrailways,
to engage with clear evidence to the telegraphs, banks, and capitalismbut
contrary. Hundreds of millions of Indi- with the fact that it was imposed from
ans, Chinese, and Africans have been above by an absolutist regime intent on
lifted out of absolute poverty in the last blocking other aspects of modernity
two generations. Mishra could have the moral check on power, the instinc-
argued about the absence of human tive recognition of the rights of man, of
rights in countries such as these, but the rights of thought, of truth.
he is not drawn to engage in detail with Mishra thinks that liberalism has be-
them. trayed the values that Herzen praised so
Since modernity is actually a multi- poignantly because it has become a po-
faceted accumulation of dark and light, litical apologia for capitalist progress.
progress and retrogression, Mishras On the contrary, the wisest liberals of
analysis quickly becomes tangled in its the cold war era, Karl Popper and Isa-
own contradictions. In one part of the iah Berlin, always warned against link-
book, modernity is castigated for its ing liberalism to historical narratives
creative destruction. Here he draws on of progress, capitalist or otherwise.
traditional conservative nostalgia about In their view, it was Marxs attempt
capitalisms impact on custom, tradi- to ground his revolutionary politics in
tion, and rural order. In other places, a science of history that, more than
his indictment is from the left, directed any other factor, led communism to
against capitalisms creation of new in- become an intellectual tyranny every-
equalities. In still other places, it is no where it was tried. It was Berlin, after
longer capitalisms creative destruction all, who loved to quote Herzens great
that is at fault. Rather it is economic remark to the effect that history has no
stagnation that is to blame: In an eco- libretto.
nomically stagnant world that offers a So it is always a good idea to resist
dream of individual empowerment to triumphalist narratives of history, for
all but no realizable dreams of political example, the conceit that the end of
change, the lure of nihilism can only the Soviet Empire would usher in an
grow. He begins one sentence credit- age of liberal capitalist democracy ev-
ing modernity with overturning en- erywhere. It is always important to
trenched prejudices against women, question the alibis that narratives of
only to conclude the same sentence progress offer for the dark side of capi-
observing that the overthrow of these talism. But it serves no useful intellec-
prejudices is one major source of male tual purpose to substitute dystopian
rage and hysteria today. Which side, narratives that are equally distorting.
one might ask, is Mishra on? He seems Mishra inveighs against clash of civi-
to want to have it both ways. Here too lization theoristspresumably Samuel
 MAX ERNST
B I G B R OT HE R : T E ACH ING S TAFF FOR A S CH OOL OF MURDERERS

OPENS MARCH 30, 2017

PAU L K A S M I N G A L L E RY
5 1 5 W E S T 2 7 T H S T R E E T, N E W Y O R K

Big Brother, Paris, 1967, bronze, 60 x 37 x 39 inches, 152.4 x 94 x 99 cm. Inscribed and dated max ernst 5/8 and Susse Fondeur Paris 2016.
Photo: Christian Baraja. Max Ernst artwork 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

April 6, 2017 5
 Huntingtonand other unnamed in-
tellectual robots who keep recycling
such oppositions as backward Islam
WINDHAM CAMPBELL PRIZES versus the progressive West, Rational
Enlightenment versus medieval unrea-
CELEBR ATING FI VE YEA RS E S T. 2013 son, open society versus its enemies.
In place of these false oppositions,
however, he substitutes the dubious
clich that capitalist modernization
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University everywhere is a story of invasions,
congratulates the recipients of the 2017 unequal treaties, assassinations, coups,
Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes corruption, and ruthless manipulation
and interference, in which the domi-
FICTION nant West is invariably the aggressor
and the East is invariably the virtuous
Andr Alexis but hapless victim.
Erna Brodber
NONFICTION
Mishras analysis concludes with
a call for transformative thinking,
Maya Jasanoff suggesting that the root of the popu-
list anger of the age lies in modernity
Ashleigh Young itself and the resentment it ignites. The
result is that his argument effectively
DRAMA precludes any possibility of a political
response. If modernity is the problem,
Marina Carr what is the cure? We are modernity
and we have been so since Rousseau.
Ike Holter Modernity endures because it emanci-
pates as well as crushes, frees as well as
POETRY imprisons. Above all, it is not a malign
fate that can only be endured. Moder-
Ali Cobby Eckermann nity is a reality shaped by human will,
Carolyn Forch capitalist, anticapitalist, liberal, con-
servative, socialist, all pulling in differ-
ent directions to produce the vast and
Recipients are awarded $165,000 to fragmented reality in which we have to
support their writing. Prizes will be conferred live.
at a ceremony and literary festival at What is missing in Mishras vision
Yale University on September 13, 2017.
is any account of the influence of po-
litical will in changing the course of
WINDHAMCAMPBELL .ORG
modernity in the years ahead. He is
right when he says that we are cur-
rently living through an extraordinary
if largely imperceptible destruction of
faith in the futurethe fundamental
optimism that makes reality seem pur-
poseful and goal-oriented. But you
cannot reconstruct faith in the future if
you give no credit to what political faith
has actually achieved in the past. You
would not know, reading Age of Anger,
that democratic struggles for the right
to strike, the right to vote, and the right
to equality for countless excluded, de-
spised, and marginalized peoples have
enlarged the circle of political inclusion
for millions of citizens.
A writer of Mishras passion and
erudition might actually have engaged
with what needs to be done, here and
now, to make modernity fulfill its so
often betrayed emancipatory promise.
He calls for transformative think-
ing, but offers us only passionate fa-
talism and angry resignation. He does
not consider what could be done: get-
ting money under control in politics,
defending the rule of law from preda-
tory cliques, fighting for the rights of
migrants and refugees, finding decent
jobs for those left behind by economic
change, reestablishing the norm that
everyone, especially corporations and
the super-rich, pay their fair share of
taxes, getting nations together to slow
the pace of climate change. The list is
long and accomplishing any of it de-
pends on faith in the capacity of men
and women to work together to secure
their objectives.
It hardly needs to be said that his-
tory does not appear to be on the side
of liberal and progressive ideals. We
are in the full gale of a conservative
counterrevolution that could last for
some time and reshape modernity in a
reactionary direction. If this is the situ-
ation, Mishras analysis may be taken
to imply that the best we can hope for
is to be acute but futile observers, while
the worst would be to give up political
activity altogether. What is agonizing
about our current situation is not that it
is hopeless but that it could have been
different. It is the contingency, the
sheer avoidability of the current situa-
tion, that should rekindle faith that it
can be changed in the future.
Weve had an unforgettable lesson
in the importance of political agency
and the dire consequences of failures
of political leadership. Had politi-
cal leadership in the Remain camp in
Britain or the Democratic Party in the
United States mobilized constituencies
in time and got out their vote, we would
not be ruled by people with such a de-
termination to move us in the opposite
direction. In both cases, a different
outcome was only narrowly defeated.
Mishras analysis, which removes po-
litical agency from the story of mo-
dernity, makes it impossible to grasp
that our present situation could have
turned out very differently. We need to
remember this if we are to recover the
faith in ourselves that we need in order
to shape the future in the direction of
progressive ideals.

ZOO, JARDIN DES PLANTES

Bee at the roses center, Im participating
in a fad that in a century will seem
arcane, barbaric, a small crumpled photograph
in a drawer or cloud might contain me,
nearly out of frame, in the hands of
some ancestor, wholl see my dress
as incredible costume, like kangaroo or zebra,
the ship-bedraggled dodo, understood
too late. What can a narwhal suspended in
nothing say? Or the whales skeleton,
its lost cumulus body, erased by the welcome
ease of peach glac on the le de la Cit?

Paula Bohince

6 The New York Review

 Changing the Conversations that Change the World
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From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life Biography and Portraits of the City
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Morning, Paramin
by Derek Walcott and Peter Doig.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
108 pp., $35.00
The solitary artist on the snowy ridge of
Peter Doigs Figure in Mountain Land-
scape (19971998) couldnt be farther
from the Caribbean. Back turned, he
looks over his easel toward a smatter-
ing of evergreens on a mauve hillside. It
is winter, but there is hardly any white
on the canvas, and the distant lime-
Southern Sublime
Julian Lucas
ing Walcott through the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts, watching from
behind his wheelchair as he evaluated
each painting, inaugurating the series
of exchanges that would become Morn-
ing, Paramin.
T he collaborators are in many ways
fellow travelers, sharing an obstinate
attachment to outmoded mediums
(gurative painting, formal poetry) and
to themes you might call,
tion to the Antilles, juxtaposing Doigs
arrival as a Caribbean painter with the
passing of Walcotts friends (S. H. is
the late Seamus Heaney) and the grad-
ual vanishing of the island he knew in
childhood. The verses are an apostro-
phe to the distant bather in Doigs J. M.
at Paragon (2004), who appears wad-
ing in the shallows under a cloudless
orange sky. The title of Doigs painting
alludes to a bay in Trinidad, but Wal-
cott imagines the view from his home
and here, the synecdoche for a history
of encroachment that briey impli-
cates Doig. But whatever grounds this
suspicionan older artists misgivings
about a younger one, a natives about
an islander by adoptionfalls away as
the poem unfolds. Walcott admits Doig
to that aristocracy of perception that,
for him, determines who belongs. My
land is utterly yours.
Whether it is ours is another question.
Morning, Paramin has a beauty that
almost excludes its read-

Peter Doig/PinchukArtCentre Collection

green mountains suggest the arrival of
spring. The painter, a ame in the wil-
derness, seems almost to smolder, cov-
ered in jagged pink patches as though
pictured by a thermographic camera.
Derek Walcotts poem on the facing
page begins with serene indifference
to climate or continent, describing the
painter as the poets houseguest. A stu-
dio is mentioned; shortly thereafter, a
pool. Discrepancies accumulate and
we begin to wonder where, between
text and image, we have disembarked.
But the poems nal lines excuse this
sleight of land, invoking the painters
peripatetic biography and the decep-
tive license of his art:
Drawing is a sort of duplicity,
he joins them, the pouis and
gommiers avalanche,
after the crisp, fierce snows
ferocity
has left her tattered fabric on a
branch,
as foam or snowfall whiten from
one brush
the double climate that he keeps
inside
the landscapes that astound him
with their ambush.
Two crafts converge in Morning,
Paramin, an entrancing collection that
couples fty- one of Doigs paintings
with answering verses from Walcott.
Each pair is a meditation on privacy
and possession, transience and belong-
ing, youth, mortality, inheritanceand
how all of these disclose themselves
in landscape. Snowbound Canadian
houses mingle with costumed carnival
apparitions; the windows of a Vienna
picture shop repeat themselves in the
gaps of a sea wall; a lion haunts the
barred entrance of a yellow prison. But
the book centers on Trinidad, an island
both artists have called home. Doig,
who was born in Edinburgh and grew
up in Canada, spent his early childhood
in Port of Spain and resettled nearby in
2002. Walcott built his career there;
in 1959 (the year of his collaborators
birth) he founded the Trinidad Theater
Workshop.
Doig couldnt have asked for a more
daunting appraiser than the eighty-
seven-year- old Nobel laureate. No one
has scrutinized the Caribbean with
more devotion, sensitivity, and pro-
tectiveness than Walcott, a St. Lucian
poet, playwright, and painter who has
made its landscape the touchstone of
his art. He ew to Montreal in 2014 for
Doigs exhibition No Foreign Lands,
urged by the French editor Harry Jan-
covici, who after reading Walcott on
Caribbean painting proposed a joint
project. It began with the artist steer-
depending on your gen-
erosity, either conserva-
tive or timeless: natural
beauty, the saintly quali-
ties of ordinary people,
and the elusiveness of
home. Both have divided
their lives between Can-
ada, the United King-
dom, and the Caribbean;
climate in their works is
a force that can estrange
worlds or, through meta-
phor, bind them. Wan-
dering, solitary gures
are another common
xation. In The Hitch-
Hiker (19891990) a red
truck crosses a twilit Ca-
nadian meadow, while in
100 Years Ago (Carrera)
(2001) a distant island
looms behind a haggard
rowers craft: The canoe
is a hyphen between cen-
turies,/between genera-
tions, between trees.
(And between careers.
In 2007 Doigs White
Canoe broke the re-
cord for most expensive
painting sold by a living
European artist; Wal-
cotts epic Omeros, pub-
lished two years before
his Nobel Prize, opens:
This is how, one sun-
rise, we cut down them
canoes.) Between Doigs drifters and
the castaways of Walcotts Caribbean
emerges a sense of serendipitous, even
providential encounter.
The stunning result is less a dialogue
than a shared dream, Doigs paintings
a pilgrimage along which Walcott lights
votive candles for all that he has loved.
The unreal atmosphere resembles Italo
Calvinos Invisible Cities, Marco Polo
narrating the oneiric empire of Kublai
Khan. Walcott drifts between ekphra-
sis and personal reection, often work-
ing in near sonnets that, like those of
Midsummer (1984), demarcate a sea-
son in his life. It is old age, palpable in a
disencumbered style (My disenchant-
ment with all adjectives/is deepening, a
certain sign of age), and discovering
its footprints across a landscape where
two lives, and two Caribbeans, blend.
The poems are suffused with twi-
light, but the dominant register is cel-
ebration, delight in the fresh eyes of a
painter whom Walcott addresses much
as Shakespeare does the young man of
the sonnets: with an injunction to pre-
serve beauty in the world, to produce
and reproduce, perhaps even to inherit.
Dedication to S. H., the collec-
tions rst poem, is a bittersweet invita-
Peter Doig: J. M. at Paragon, 2004
in St. Lucia. Addressing the solitary
gure as Peter Doig, he proffers the
painters own landscape with a patri-
archs reluctance:
A crest, and then a slope of barren
acres,
a forest on its flank, the wide
sea- swell;
from my wide balcony you can
watch the breakers
bursting in sheets of spray across
the hotel.
Youre welcome to it, Peter Doig:
Pigeon Island,
that once had an avenue of
casuarinas;
everything that offers my land
to be utterly yours. . . .1
The welcome is tinged with wariness.
Just before Walcott addresses Doig,
the scenery is interrupted by a bathetic
hotel: the Sandals Grande St. Lucia,
a resort near the ruined British forti-
cations on the Pigeon Island peninsula
1
The passage echoes and reverses the
usurpation of a colonial masters veran-
dah that begins Walcotts Another Life
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973).
ers, the aggressive inti-
macy of correspondence.
Bypassing any question
of audience, it is a com-
munion between artists,
its sacrament the land-
scape as shared secret:
Theyre yours: those
scenes I knew in my
green years
with a young mans joy
at Choc, at
Blanchisseuse.
Walcott has Derek
spent a lifetime learning
how to see the Carib-
bean. The archipelagos
history is for him a tale
of perspectives in paral-
lax: of the eyes that have
beheld the islands, and
those with which the is-
lands have beheld the
world. The story begins
with the willful blind-
ness of colonialism, a
misapprehension of the
people and the natural
environment. In his 1992
Nobel lecture, the poet
decried that consoling
pity . . . [in] tinted engrav-
ings of Antillean forests,
with their proper palm
trees, ferns, and water-
fallsthe prelude to an aesthetic in-
dictment charged with moral force: A
century looked at a landscape furious
with vegetation in the wrong light and
with the wrong eye.
Across his work Walcott has sought
a rectication of vision, a way of con-
tending with those who, inverting the
crime of Lots wife, sin by refusing
to look. The tourist with postcards
printed on the insides of his eyelids, the
Afrocentrist whose motherland mirage
rejects the Creole culture around him,
the Naipauline exile who measures his
home by the tape of another world
all are heretics in Walcotts universe,
which is governed by values similar to
those enumerated in St. Lucias motto:
The land, the people, the light. An-
other Life (1973), Walcotts rst long
poem and the story of his birth as an
artist, remembers the exuberance with
which the poet and his friend Grego-
rias (the painter Dunstan St. Omer)
devoted themselves to the St. Lucian
landscape, swearing that we would
never leave the island/until we had put
down, in paint, in words/. . . every ne-
glected, self-pitying inlet.
This geography in art was also an
assumption of prerogative, Walcotts

8 The New York Review

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Friday, April 14 at 9 p.m. on

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April 6, 2017 9
 identification of his own artistic matu-
rity with St. Lucias independence from
the British Empire. Consecrating his
homeland in paint and verse, the poet
located himself at the beginning of a
Caribbean tradition. He counted as
peers and forebears all those painters
who, regardless of origin, got the light
right: Winslow Homer, Paul Gauguin,
the Trinidadian watercolorist Jackie
Hinkson, and the Impressionist painter
Camille Pissarro, subject of Walcotts
long poem Tiepolos Hound (2000).
A biography in verse, the book traces
Pissarros gifted eye and transforma-
tive influence (he taught both Czanne
and Gauguin) to his childhood in St.
Thomas.
It is also a lament that Pissarro rarely
painted his birthplace. (Walcotts own
paintings, most of them watercolors of
Trinidad and St. Lucia, are reproduced
alongside Pissarros story in mute re-
proach.) Near the poems end, Walcott
addresses a moving plaint to the prodi-
gal of Charlotte Amalie, who aban-
doned the West Indies for Paris and
Pontoise, and deprived his homeland
of a genius. His judgment is unsparing:
You could have been our pioneer.
P eter Doig, a renowned landscape
artist in a time without many, became
famous long before he settled in Trini-
dad. When he won the Walker Art Gal-
lerys John Moores Prize in 1993, it was
for one of a portfolio of snow paintings:
richly colored yet melancholy works
that draw on postcards, photographs,
and advertisements to refract the scen-
ery of his Canadian youth. He spent
most of his childhood around Quebec
and in Toronto, but left at nineteen for
London, where he studied painting at
St. Martins and the Chelsea School of
Art.
At the time his work gained atten-
tion, the city was dominated by the
Young British Artists. Conceptual
pieces and large installations were
prominent, while painting, especially
figurative work, seemed exhausted. But
Doig wanted to make homely paint-
ingsof houses and train stations,
fallow fields and frozen ponds, explo-
rations of weather and light that used
thickly layered surfaces, complex re-
flections, and the imperfections of his
source materials. (What appear to be
snowflakes in many of his paintings are
incidental paint-splotches, reproduced
from the source photographs upon
which they dripped.) He succeeded de-
spite this supposedly archaic practice:
Frieze featured his work in 1992; two
years later, he was nominated for the
Turner Prize, Britains most important
award for contemporary art.
Doig relocated to Trinidad in 2002,
establishing a studio in the Laventille
quarter of Port of Spain. Soon after
moving he began Moruga (2002
2008), a morose riff on Columbuss
landfall that exchanges the heroic light
of discovery for cataclysmic gloom.2
The scenea swordsman aboard a
boat with a cross- emblazoned sailis
based on a newspaper photograph of
2005 Discovery Day festivities in
2 scape and stays there, he is no longer
The Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin
has a painting in a similar mood: The
Crucifixion of the New World (2002).
Three ships with a crew of living skel-
etons cross the ocean behind a bloody
crucifix, its stigmata the hands and
tongue of doomed indigenous deities.
10
Morugawhere Columbus, Walcott
notes, never set foot. (Everything has
been thoroughly rehearsed, he writes.
Doig paints it for what it is: a fable.)
A reproduction of an inaccurate reen-
actment of an illegitimate annexation,
the painting is an example of the lay-
ered, interrupted sequences of refer-
ence that connect Doigs paintings to
realityand perhaps a wry reflection
on his own resettlement.
He was criticized in the art world as
an outsider to his adopted home, a white
tourist sampling a poor, brown country.
In an admiring review of Doigs 2015
show at Denmarks Louisiana Museum
of Modern Art in these pages, Hilton
Als ventriloquized these naysayers as
seekers after an authentic misery
that the painters work refused:
Peter Doig: Lapeyrouse Wall, 2004
Was he not indulging the privilege
of the colonialist when he painted
Trinidad, a third-world country,
with the lushness of an observer
who was . . . more interested in ex-
oticism than the truth?. . . Was
Doig not cheating the viewer of the
misery of that other world?3
But Trinidad is not quite other to
Doig, who in the fifteen years since set-
tling there has raised children, worked
with a show for incarcerated artists on
Carrera, and cofounded the popular
Port of Spain screening series Studio-
FilmClub. (For each film Doig paints
a poster, and three of them are repro-
duced in Morning, Paramin. Walcott
contrasts the less cosmopolitan Port of
Spain movie theaters he remembers,
all Hollywood films and no air condi-
tioning.) Doig also spent five years of
his childhood in Trinidad. His father,
who worked for a shipping company
and painted in his spare time, brought
the family to Port of Spain a year after
his birth. The house was full of work
by local artistsCarlyle Chan, Willi
Chen, Sibyil Attackand even after
the Doigs went on to Canada, the only
paintings on their walls were from
Trinidad. As Walcott writes, If [a trav-
eler] returns to what he loved in a land-
a traveler but in stasis and concentra-
tion, the lover of that particular part of
earth, a native.
3 at, then swept aside), its possessive
Peter Doig: The Transformer, The
New York Review, June 25, 2015.
W hat does it mean to possess a land-
scape? Youre welcome to it, Peter
Doigand yet everything in Morning,
Paramin suggests that ownership, even
certainty of reference, is provisional.
Privacy is conveyed by all of the paint-
ings, from the web of frosty branches
that conceals the anatomy of The Ar-
chitects Home in the Ravine (1991) to
the colorful ice marring the reflection
of the lodge in Pond Life (1993). But
the painters reticence has particular
poignancy for the Caribbean, so be-
sieged by sun-washed simulacra that it
is almost inextricable from visions of
paradise or picturesque poverty.
Doigs art refers to a more private
world, equal parts enchanted and quo-
tidian, cobbled together from pickup
cricket games, idling motorboats, aban-
Peter Doig
doned bottles of beer, and chance
transients recast as tutelary guardians
while, contra the postcards, night falls.
In a suite of nocturnal portraits, Wal-
cott animates the drunk reveler of Stag
(20022005), the carnival masker in
Man Dressed as Bat (Night) (2008),
and the startled poacher, caught by an
electric flash, of Pelican Man (2003).
The high point of the sequence is a
paean to Antillean evening:
Night with its diadems and
coronets seen
as contradictions of Hellenic
sense,
because she is our islands fairy
queen
blood- lipped and candle- eyed, la
diablesse,
of bats and werewolves, loup
garous, douennes.
Slipping into a shadowed French
Creole for a litany of folkloric ter-
rors, these verses accompany the blue,
horned figure who emerges from the
bush in Doigs painting Untitled (Para-
min) (2004). A traditional blue djab
(devil) from Trinidads carnival, the
phantom glows in lapis lazuli outline
against the dark fronds of the forest,
naked but for a pair of khaki shorts.
He stands as though on the threshold
of a closed territory, a boundary re-
inforced by the poems assertion of a
distinct tradition (Hellenic antiquity
and Spensers Faerie Queen gestured
language, and the flickering Creole of
The New York Review
its incantatory end. Not for everyone
this kingdom of night, contradicting
sense.
What sunlit, tropical views do ap-
pear in Morning, Paramin are always
screened out or at a distance, only
ironically offered up. The browsing
connoisseur in Metropolitain (House
of Pictures) (2004), lifted from Honor
Daumiers The Print Collector (1857
1863), loiters with his hands in his
pockets before a crowded gallery wall.
From behind, a hilly, verdant landscape
bleeds into view, overtaking the grid of
empty frames. But the collector seems
to miss the larger picture, fixated on a
single colorless drawing of palm trees
that appears before his eyes:
It is the distance of the heart
from what it cannot own, an old,
old tune
hummed by the critic with his
scarf and patches.
Paramin is a village high in Trinidads
Northern Range known for its parang
bands, herb gardens, and the lofty
view of the Caribbean from its name-
sake hill. It is a place Derek Walcott
shares not only with Peter Doig, but
also Morning, Paramins other major
presence, the late Margaret Maillard.
The poets second wife and mother
of his two daughters, Maillard died
in 2014. Walcott first met Doig at her
funeral reception (the painter knew
her through his children), a gathering
in Port of Spain recollected by In the
Heart of Old San Juan. The city is
transfigured by elegy: Margaret was
gone but all the streets were hers, . . ./
April 6, 2017
all these are her monuments, not paint
or verse.
Griefs itinerary turns Doigs land-
scapes into a cartography of mourning.
The man who walks beside the cem-
etery in Lapeyrouse Wall (2004) be-
comes an echo of the poets loss (The
parasol, Id say, belongs to his dead
wife). While most of Doigs paintings
have an almost confrontational flat-
ness, Lapeyrouse Wall recedes toward
a vanishing point in which Walcott
sees both infinity and patience,/the
qualities that are praised in a Protes-
tant hymn. In the poem Lapeyrouse
Umbrella, which faces a detail of the
scene in Lapeyrouse Wall, mourning
turns to morning as a place lost with
one intimacy is reborn in the dawning
of another: What she has forgotten
you learn every day, Peter.
The Trinidad Walcott shared with
Margaret is transubstantiated, redrawn
from Doigs vantage. Paramin, in the
hilly country north of Port of Spain,
where the artist lives, serves as the me-
diator for this act of communion. Wal-
cott visited him there in 2015, and the
poem he wrote about itperhaps the
collections most beautifulis both
epitaph and ascension, a remembrance
and anticipation of shared life:
She loved to say it and I loved to
hear it,
Paramin, it had the scent of
cocoa in it,
the criss- crossing trunks of leafy
gommiers straight
out of Czanne and Sisley, the
road rose then fell fast
into the lush valley where my
daughters live.
The name said by itself could
make us laugh
as if some deep, deep secret was
hidden there.
I see it through crossing tree
trunks framed with love
and she is gone but the hill is still
there
and when I join her it will be
Paramin
for both of us and the children,
the mountain air
and music with no hint of what
the name could mean,
rocking gently by itself,
Paramin, Paramin.
Paramin and its echo seem a pass-
word to the hereafter, a spellbinding
name exchanged in a moment that ex-
cludes us. A conversation between sol-
itudesbereavement, deathit draws
a veil of private meaning over a be-
loved place. The most moving por-
traits in Walcotts poetry are of such
solitary communions in landscape,
not only the mourners encounter with
loss but the artists or the craftsmans
with tradition. This finds its highest
expression in the lonely, sometimes
ecstatic concentration of labora
fisherman at sea, a widowed seam-
stress at her Singer, or Peter Doig as
he appears in Portrait (Under Water)
(2007), eyes closed, head an island
breaking the surface, turbaned by cur-
rents in a composition that vaguely
recalls Van Goghs Self- Portrait with
Bandaged Ear (1889). (Beauty with-
out speech/is what great painting is,
writes Walcott in The Tanker.) His
reply to Portrait, Abstraction, con-
vokes an assembly of silent painters
and the music of their solitude:
We imagine that we can hear what
certain painters
heard as they worked: Pollock the
cacophony of traffic,
OKeefe the engines of certain
lilies, Bearden
cornets muffled in velvet, Peter
Doig the
brooding, breeding silence of deep
bush. . . .
Addressed less to an audience than
to posterity and tradition, this concept
of art as higher conversation has a cer-
tain conservatism. Some would even
say arrogance, as though the poet
whose works are so often homages
or comments to other artistswere
determined to speak over our heads.
But this aspiration is inextricable from
humility, an ambition born of astonish-
ment at the slow-burning signals/of
the great that Walcott defends in his
1976 poem Volcano:
At least it requires awe,
which has been lost to our time;
so many people have seen
everything,
so many people can predict,
so many people refuse to enter the
silence
of victory, the indolence
that burns at the core. . . .
Silence, indolence, and awe are not
characteristic of the art of our time.
But they are values in which Derek
Walcott, who so powerfully embodies
them in these poems for Peter Doig,
has never lost faith.
11
 Trump: The Scramble
Weekly, daily, indeed sometimes
hourly, we have trouble believing what
we see coming out of the Trump White
House. It can be difficult to turn our
gaze from the stupefying parade of
announcements and events and tweets
and leaksand leaks, and leaksthat
show us a White House at once wholly
undisciplined while trying to impose an
ideological discipline upon the nations
capital that finds no modern precedent
in either party.
One can select a day almost at ran-
dom and quickly work up a list of four
or five developments that defy belief.
Lets take Friday, February 24, which
began with the president speaking at
the Conservative Political Action Con-
ference (CPAC) meeting in the Wash-
ington suburbs, where he repeated and
intensified his earlier charge that the
news media are the enemy of the peo-
ple (even as he avowed, naturally, that
nobody loves the First Amendment
more than he). A little later that day,
The New York Times, CNN, the Los
Angeles Times, Politico, The Huffing-
ton Post, and Buzzfeed were blocked
by White House aides from attending
a briefing with Press Secretary Sean
Spicer. The three major networks were
invited, as were right-wing outlets like
Breitbart News.
Those two events would have been
quite enough, but then, late in the day,
a pair of potentially explosive news
stories broke, one from the Associated
Press describing a draft report by ana-
lysts at the Department of Homeland
Security arguing that nationals from
the seven nations included in Trumps
January 27 travel ban did not in fact
constitute a threat to national secu-
rity, and another from The Washington
Post about potentially improper efforts
by the White House to counter Russia-
related stories. This second story was
particularly powerful, in that it showed
the White House trying to enlist mem-
bers of Congress and the intelligence
communitywhich Trump has so
regularly impugnedto deny reports
tying the White House to the Krem-
lin. Both were part of the ceaseless
flow of news leaked by insiders trying
to advance or block particular schemes
brewing in this or that faction of the
administration.
Somewhere in thereMarch 1, to be
precisethere was one day of normal-
ity, the day after the presidents address
to a joint session of Congress, when he
refrained from ad-libbing about the
failing New York Times or what have
you and managed, for a solid hour, to
resemble a typical president. Then, the
next night, The Washington Post broke
the story that Attorney General Jeff
Sessions had perhaps perjured him-
self at his confirmation hearing under
questioning from Minnesota Senator
Al Frankenwho has emerged, by the
way, as a serious and important opposi-
tion leaderand the carnival was back
in town.
It is spectacle such as we have never
seen, but attention must be trained not
solely on the White House. Just a few
short weeks into this administration,
and already it seems clear that the most
12
Michael Tomasky
Donald Trump
important question historians might
be asking twenty, fifty, seventy years
from now will be not about Trump but
about the Republican Partyhow the
Republicans could have permitted this.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen-
ate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
and all the rest of them surely know
that Trump isnt fit to be president.
They surely understand the danger of
giving him the enormous war-making
authority a president has. They have it
in their power to block things like Mus-
lim bans, which to a person they have
at one point or another declared to be
un-American.
Yet they have obliged Trump since
the campaigncriticizing him here and
there, when it didnt really matter, but
when it mattered talking as McConnell
did in the following cringe-inducing ex-
change with Martha Raddatz of ABCs
This Week. This interview took place in
late January, at a crucial moment when
the country was awaiting the Ninth Cir-
cuits decision on the travel ban, when
green card holders were barred from
entry, and when the nation was desper-
ately in need of leaders to denounce
the obviously unconstitutional execu-
tive order:
Raddatz: Do you support Presi-
dent Trumps temporary immigra-
tion ban from these predominantly
Muslim countries?
McConnell: Well, I think its a
good idea to tighten the vetting
process. But I also think its impor-
tant to remember that some of our
best sources in the war against rad-
ical Islamic terrorism are Muslims,
both in this country and overseas.
And we have had some difficulty
in the past getting interpreters, as
you suggested in the earlier seg-
ment, who are helpful to us treated
properly. So we need to be careful
as we do this. Improving vetting,
something . . .
Raddatz: And yet right now theyre
being detained soso do you sup-
port this or do you not support
this?
McConnell: Its hopefully going
to be decided in the courts as to
whether or not this has gone too
far. I dont want to criticize them
for improving vetting. I think we
need to be careful. We dont have
religious tests in this country.
Raddatz: In the past, youve called
the Muslim ban completely and to-
tally inconsistent with American
values. While the President says
this is not an outright Muslim ban,
even if this is temporary, how is
this order consistent with Ameri-
can values?
McConnell: Well, if theyre look-
ing to tighten the vetting process,
I mean who would be against that?
But I am opposed to a religious
test. The courts are going to deter-
mine whether this is too broad.
McConnell did no more there than
leave himself the wiggle room neces-
sary to be able to say later that he put a
little daylight between himself and the
president. With the occasional excep-
tions of John McCain and a small num-
ber of others, its been this wayor far
worseamong Republicans for a very
long time.
McConnell is one thing. He has no
policy commitments, beyond his hope
that all campaign finance regulation
might someday be wiped off the books.
He just wants the power of his majority,
and if its Trump who happens to be the
facilitator and guarantor of that power,
fine by him.
Ryan is another matter, indeed the
opposite: he has many policy commit-
ments. You might think that would
give him reason to take stands against
Trump, but in fact it is precisely his
policy commitments that keep him
tethered to Trump. Ryan wants to dis-
mantle the welfare state. So the devils
bargain he has made, and this is true
of many congressional Republicans, is
that they will support Trump, let him
deport Muslims and crack down on
undocumented Latinos, let him depart
from party orthodoxy on trade, let him
pursue risky and maybe even sinister
policies with Vladimir Putin, turn a
collective blind eye to the manifold
ways in which he dishonors the office,
as long as the president signs whatever
legislation they bring to his desk that
rips the bricks out of the wall of the lib-
eral state. They will hope in the mean-
time that he doesnt start World War
III or hand state secrets to the Russian
FSB.
T hat assault on the liberal state,
though, didnt get off to a very happy
start. Everyone, I think, was surprised
by the vigor with which the public
rose to the defense of the Afford-
able Care Acthadnt the press told
us that the act was reviled?at those
mid-February town hall meetings that
senators and congressmen held. Or
failed to holda number of representa-
tives and senators announced meetings
and then, fearing that what theyd seen
happen to their colleagues would fall
on their heads, simply didnt show up. I
have a Facebook friend from my home
state of West Virginia who kept post-
ing about trying to see her Republican
senator, Shelley Moore Capito, and her
GOP representative, David McKinley.
Capito refused an invitation to attend a
town hall meeting in Buckhannon, West
Virginia, where citizens posed their
questions to an empty chair. McKinley
didnt show up during his posted office
hours, my friend wrote, and at length
citizens were allowed to come intwo
at a timeto meet with a staffer.
At the events that were held, what
was notable was that the angry people
were by and large white, and firmly
middle-American, and a lot of them
probably Republican. Chris Peter-
son is the sixty-two-year-old Iowa pig
farmer who gained much press cover-
age by saying to GOP Senator Charles
Grassley:
And with all due respect, sir,
youre the man that talked about
the death panels. Were going to
create one great big death panel
in this country [because of the
fact] that people cant afford to get
insurance.
And Arkansan Kati McFarland de-
scribed to her Republican senator, Tom
Cotton, her familys Republican, mili-
tary, and NRA roots before telling him:
The New York Review
 Without the coverage for preexist-
ing conditions, I will die. That is
not hyperbole. I will die. Without
the protections against lifetime
coverage caps, I will die. Without
the Obamacare exchange health
care plan that I have elected to
continue after my Cobra that is
going to kick in after I turn twenty-
six this coming Sunday, I will die.
After all these years, the Republicans
finally released an Obamacare replace-
ment bill on March 6. The American
Health Care Act is an awkward hybrid
of Obamacare and longtime conserva-
tive talking points against Obamacare.
It would preserve Obamacares prin-
ciple that people cant be denied cover-
age because of preexisting conditions,
but it would also take away by 2020 the
Medicaid subsidies that have helped
cover millions. The proposal was im-
mediately attacked by both Democrats
and the most conservative Repub-
licans, who denounced it as too similar
to Obamacare. Changes to satisfy them
will likely make the bill a harder sell in
the Senate.
Recall that last year, before and after
the election, Trump and numerous
Republicans vowed that Obamacare
would be repealed within days of their
assumption of power. If they cant even
manage that, which was supposed to be
the easy lift, its hard to see how they
move on to Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security.
Ryans designs on Medicare, turning
it into a program under which govern-
ment would cease to be the single payer
of coverage and instead seniors would
get subsidies to buy private plans, are
long-standing. The GOP goal on Medic-
aidwhich these days supports not just
the poor but many middle-class people
with, for example, nursing-home sub-
sidiesis simply to vastly reduce the
amount of money the federal govern-
ment sends to the states. On Social
Security, a plan was unveiled last De-
cember by Sam Johnson, the congress-
man who chairs the House Ways and
Means Committees subcommittee on
Social Security, that would eliminate
a tax that high-income benefit recipi-
ents currently pay and would in turn
cut benefits for most other recipients.*
Efforts to move on these fronts will re-
quire investments of political capital
by the Republican leaders that neither
they nor the already faltering president
arguably have.
Tax reform is another priority of the
Republican leaders. On taxes, Trump
seems to care most about lowering the
corporate tax rate, currently 35 per-
cent. Congressional Republicans will
be for that but they will also want to
push lower personal income tax rates,
the better to starve the government of
funds in order to slash domestic spend-
ing, always their top goal. The trick
there will be whether they can pass off
whatever they come up with as rev-
enue neutral, that is, not increasing
the deficit. They said that back in the
2000s, when George W. Bush was pres-
ident, but those tax cuts helped explode
the deficit. Independent analysts have
found that one recent GOP tax plan
could add as much as $2.4 trillion to the
deficit over ten years.
*See Michael Hiltzik, The GOP Un-
veils a Permanent Save for Social
Securitywith Massive Benefit Cuts,
Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2016.
April 6, 2017
The House Republicans have put
forward whats called a border-
adjustment tax that would give tax
breaks to US exporters and remove
such breaks for importers. The idea is
to encourage companies to make prod-
ucts in the United States, but its success
would very much depend on the dollar
rising dramatically in value. Its a huge
risk, and corporate America is quite
divided on the question, which means
that the lobbying would be intensive
(and expensive), which means delay.
If congressional Republicans like
Ryan find that Trump is not especially
helpful in enabling them to fulfill their
long-held dreams of undoing all these
liberal entitlements and slashing taxes
again on the one percentwhich can-
didate Trump swore to his followers he
would have no part ofthis romance
Steve Bannon
might well be brief. Early on, during
the confirmation fightsthe week that
McConnell chose to display his loyalty
to the White House by ordering Dem-
ocratic Senator Elizabeth Warren to
stop reading a statement from Coretta
Scott King during the debate on Jeff
Sessionss nomination as attorney gen-
eralI ran into a Democratic senator
in the Capitol. Yes, theyre unified now,
he told me: Right now, theyre afraid
of Trump, and more to the point afraid
of Trumps voters. But give it a little
time. Cracks will show. All we need
is three of them to join us. (There are
forty-eight Democrats in the Senate, so
three Republicans voting with a uni-
fied Democratic bloc would make for a
majority.) As he spoke to me, I thought
he was being optimistic. But the anti-
anti-Obamacare protests and Trumps
approval number of around 40 percent,
abysmal for a president this early in his
term, suggest maybe not.
T here is, though, one subject on which
history suggests the Republicans will
maintain absolute solidarity, and that is
the question of political attacks against
Trump. This includes big matters and
the smaller symbolic ones that per-
colate out of any White House every
week. Indeed, one truth that the first
few weeks of the Trump presidency
have driven home to me more than any
other is what an enormous influence
this Republican-conservative solidar-
ity has on the very way our political
discourse is shaped.
Take as an example of a big matter
the botched raid against al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) on Jan-
uary 29 in Yemen. In the first twenty-
four hours, the White House managed
to spin it as a success, as it took out
fourteen suspected AQAP operatives.
But it also killed two dozen civilians,
including nine children. And it resulted
in the death of one American Navy
SEAL team member. Withering post-
operation reports appeared in The New
York Times, Reuters, and elsewhere;
on background, military officials criti-
cized the raid and even Trump himself.
The next week, Yemen withdrew per-
mission for further US-led anti-terror
strikes.
After a month of mostly silence
and shirking responsibility, Trump
defended the raid in his joint-session
speech. He introduced from the gallery
Carryn Weigand Owens, the widow
of William Ryan Owens, the Navy swallow.)
SEAL killed in the attack. What ap-
peared to be her heavenward prayers to
her husband made for effective televi-
sionmost TV commentators gushed,
even as a number of military people
observed on Twitter that they found
the moment grotesquely manipulative.
In any case, many questions about the
raid remain unansweredand with
Republicans running Congress, they
will remain so. Whereas we can be cer-
tain that if President Hillary Clinton
had ordered exactly the same raid with
exactly the same results, House Repub-
licans would have started issuing sub-
poenas in mid-February.
Its that way on smaller matters, too.
You may recall that the Trump White
House took some criticism for failing
to mention Jews in its official Holocaust
Remembrance Day statement. But now
imagine that the Obama White House
had done that. It would have been a
major three-day story, and the odor of
it would have lingered around Obama
forevertwo years later, news reports
would have included sentences like
Prime Minister Netanyahu, still smart-
ing from that Holocaust Day slight . . .
Democrats and the liberal media
simply do not have the power to shape
the terms of discourse in the same way
that the congeries of talk-radio hosts,
websites, blogs, and social media out-
lets of the right do. They dont even at-
tempt to. Hardly a day goes by without
the Trump White House doing some-
thing that makes me wonder about an
imagine if Obama had . . . scenario.
Republicans couldnt even rouse
themselves to get very upset when
Trump issued those infamous tweets
over the first weekend in March about
Obama wiretapping him. Trump not
only besmirched Obama in those
tweets; he also clearly implied that
Americas law enforcement and intel-
ligence agencies carried out illegal ac-
tivities under the alleged orders of the
outgoing president. But most of the Re-
publicans criticisms were of the gentle
I know of no such evidence variety.
This instinct on the right might be
put to the test, of course, on the ques-
tion of Russian interference in the
election. This will not go away. After
Sessions was forced to recuse himself
from any Russia-related investigations,
calls began to grow for the appointment
of a special prosecutor. That would be
something Trump would have to agree
to, as Bill Clinton did in 1994 with re-
spect to the Whitewater business. Its
hard to imagine him doing that, just as
its hard to imagine Republicans show-
ing any interest in getting to the bottom
of the matter. But a month ago, it was
hard to imagine Sessions recusing him-
self. These things happen turn by turn.
Republicans and conservatives over
the years have excused mountains of
hypocrisy in their own leaders. Defi-
cits mattered, until Ronald Reagan ran
them up and suddenly they didnt. Cut-
ting spending mattered, until George
W. Bush increased spending and sud-
denly that was okay (until Bush be-
came unpopular). Saddam Hussein
was the comparative good guy in the
1980s, then he became Hitler. The Re-
publicans have changed positions on
many things, and found ways to jus-
tify those changes when it was expe-
dient to do so. (Democrats have done
this too, but at least their penchant for
less starkly moralistic rhetoric makes
their swerves in policy a little easier to
But how the Republicans will find a
way to defend a Republican president
who may well owe his election in part
to the Russian Federation, of all politi-
cal forces, will be an interesting thing
to watch. Questions about the extent
of possible contacts with Russians dur-
ing the campaign by disgraced former
National Security Adviser Mike Flynn,
Trump aide Carter Page, and former
campaign manager Paul Manafort are
rife, and they have all been denied
enough now by Sean Spicer and by the
president himself that if hard evidence
exists to the contrary and any of these
committees is energetic enough to turn
it up, the White House will be in deep
crisis.
T he Democrats, for their part, are
looking already toward the House of
Representatives in the 2018 elections.
You will hear insiders repeat one data
point in particular: that Hillary Clinton
beat Donald Trump in twenty-three
House districts that are currently held
by Republicans. Most of these districts
are upscale suburbs and exurbs in Cali-
fornia, Colorado, Texas, Florida, Penn-
sylvania, and elsewhere.
In the meantime, on February 25, the
same day the party chose Tom Perez as
its new chairman, Democratic candi-
date Stephanie Hansen clobbered her
Republican opponent in a special elec-
tion for a state senate seat in a swing
district in Delaware. The win gave
the party control of the states upper
chamber and it offered some evidence
of whats possible when Democrats
just show up for the fight. On April
18, a special election will be held in
the Georgia congressional district of
Tom Price, who is the new secretary of
health and human services. The race is
surprisingly competitive, and the pre-
sumptive Democrat, Jon Ossoff, ap-
pears to be well financed. These early
special elections are often said to augur
more than they really do, but a win in
Georgia would surely buck up Demo-
cratic spirits.
In the near term, the confirmation
hearings for Supreme Court nominee
Neil Gorsuch, set to begin on March 20,
will unite Trump and the congressional
Republicans. That much is predictable.
But so, too, is the daily unpredictabil-
ity of life under Trumpwhat hell say,
what he might tweet, what Steve Ban-
non will decide to do to undermine
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (or vice
versa), what a federal judge might rule
on immigration, what an intelligence
source might leak on Russia, and more.
There are encouraging signs of disunity
everywhere.
March 9, 2017
13

4321
by Paul Auster.
Henry Holt, 866 pp., $32.50
Recent history has done a nice job of
preparing readers for a novel about
alternative realities. There were signs
as early as November 2015, when a
Caltech cosmologist discovered evi-
dence of a parallel universe impinging
on our own, that we had passed into
a paranormal realmthat, while we
were amusing ourselves in the dining
car, an impish railway signal operator
had pulled a switch and the locomo-
tive had veered off the straight track,
diverging into increasingly fantastical
territories. Subtler, more benign in-
dications included the Chicago Cubs
winning the World Series, the unprec-
edented reversal of stratospheric wind
patterns, and hundreds of sightings of
menacing clowns luring children into
the woods. But the election as president
of a menacing clown, abetted by white
supremacists and Russian espionage,
confirmed that we had entered a real-
ity that has already outpaced the most
brazen conceits of speculative fiction
a reality of rather slipshod design, the
kind of world you might expect to have
been thought up by a teenager with
only the most sophomoric understand-
ing of dramatic irony, the perils of cli-
ch, and the importance of narrative
plausibility.
None of the four braided alterna-
tive realities in Paul Austers 4 3 2 1
is nearly as hamfisted as our own. If
anything the novel is distinguished by
the surprisingly muted exploitation of
its high- concept premise. An unpre-
pared reader may not even grasp the
nature of the premise for at least the
first fifty pages, which unfold like a
traditional bildungsroman, tracing the
ancestry, birth, and early childhood of
the principal character, Archibald Fer-
guson, born on March 3, 1947, at Beth
Israel, a second-generation Ameri-
can Jew whose father and uncles run
a furniture and appliance store called
3 Brothers Home World. All but the
most attentive readersthose who
might notice, in the third chapter, that
Montclair, New Jersey, has mysteri-
ously morphed into Millburn, New
Jersey, that the fathers blue DeSoto
has become a bottle-green Plymouth,
or that Aunt Mildred suddenly lives in
Chicago instead of Berkeleymay not
get the picture for another dozen pages
or more.
Eventually, however, it becomes
clear that Ferguson is not one boy but
four, each living in a slightly different
reality. In his various incarnations Fer-
gusons character is remarkably con-
sistent. He is devoted to his mother,
dreams of becoming a writer, is a fine
baseball player, reveres women (and
also, in one of the plots, men), and has
irreproachable, if fairly conventional,
taste in literature and film. But the cir-
cumstances in which he finds himself
varyslightly. Unlike most novelists
who experiment with the premise of
parallel universes (recent examples
would include Lionel Shrivers The
Post-Birthday World, Kate Atkinsons
Life After Life, Laura Barnetts The
Versions of Us), Fergusons lives do
not fork at a decisive moment. They
14
Mixed-Up Kids
Nathaniel Rich
Paul Auster
diverge gradually, four stalks sprouting
from a common bulb.
Auster loyalists will be unsurprised
to discover that the closest thing to a
formative disjunctive event in the lives
of Archie Ferguson involves his re-
lationship to his father, Stanley. The
formative disjunctive event in Austers
own life was the early, unexpected
death of Samuel Auster, which not
only became the subject of his first
book, The Invention of Solitude, but is
refracted to varying degrees through
his fifteen novels and four works of
memoir.
In 4 3 2 1 the filial relationship is tied
to the fate of 3 Brothers Home World.
In the first narrative, which reads in
this aspect like a wish-fulfillment sce-
nario, one of Stanleys brothers bur-
glarizes the furniture store, sending
the family on a trajectory of financial
struggle that nevertheless binds them
closer together. In the second, the store
burns down; with the insurance money,
Stanley opens a tennis center, a time-
consuming enterprise that widens a
gulf between father and son. The third
Stanley Ferguson dies in the fire, and
the fourth buys out his deadbeat broth-
ers, leading the business to thrive and
the family to disintegrate.
Later Archie quits baseball because
of a freak injury, or a friends death; he
falls in love with Amy Schneiderman,
who is either a family friend, his cousin,
or his stepsister; he attends Columbia,
or Princeton, or skips college alto-
gether and moves to Paris; he finds a
father figure in a professor, or a stepfa-
ther; he becomes a film critic and mem-
oirist, a journalist and translator, or a
novelist; he dies in a freak accident, or
he lives. But because the divergences
between the narratives do not alter
Fergusons essential character, and at
times even lack basic plot significance
(unless youre from Essex County, it
makes no difference whether the Fer-
gusons live in West Orange or South
Orange), they often seem beside the
point. They are also difficult to track,
for the alternating structure means that
roughly a hundred pages pass between
the cessation of one thread and its re-
sumption. The only sane responsethe
only possible responseis to submit to sentences but in a mania for catalog-
the torrent of narrative and not bother
trying to recall whether one happens to
be situated in the reality in which Amy
Schneiderman attends the University
of Wisconsin or the one in which shes
at Brandeis.
Submission is also the only sensible
response to 4 3 2 1s prose, which de-
parts from that of Austers previous
books. Auster has never been a showy
stylist, favoring flat, declarative sen-
tences that belie the eeriness of his
storytelling. The spellbinding quality
of his writing derives from the unusual
mixture of narrative influences from
which he drawsAmerican hardboiled
fiction, French existentialism, and what
for better or worse is known as magical
realism, combined with a vulnerable
confessional immediacy. But in 4 3 2 1
he has taken up a new, expansive style,
dominated by paragraph-length sen-
tences that crash over the reader like
waves, dousing us continually with new
information, the sentences expanding
to summarize an event instead of paus-
ing to inhabit it, often extending into
the future or the past. This approach
favors breadth over depth, as in this
sentence, to take an example at random
from the novel, about Rose Fergusons
photography business:
The fortunes of Roseland Photo
were also sinking, not as quickly
as those of Stanleys TV & Radio,
perhaps, but Fergusons mother
knew the days of studio photog-
raphy were nearly done, and for
some time she had been reducing
the number of hours she kept the
studio open, from five ten-hour
days in 1953 to five eight-hour days
in 1956 to four eight-hour days in
1959 to four six-hour days in 1961
to three six-hour days in 1962 to
three four-hour days in 1963, de-
voting more and more of her ener-
gies to photo work for Imhoff at
the Montclair Times, where she
had been put on salary as the pa-
pers chief photographer, but then
her book of Garden State notables
was published in February 1965 . . .
We have not yet reached the midpoint
of the sentence.
One either succumbs to this type of
prose or doesnt, just as some people
are susceptible to hypnosis while oth-
ers, confronted with a dangling amulet,
simply laugh. 4 3 2 1 is a novel you can
lose yourself in. It does not make heavy
demands, except perhaps on your time,
though a sympathetic reader will glide
through it. Auster is a conscientious
host, never penalizing his reader for
losing track of references or minor
details, careful to avoid disorientation
as he moves between narratives. The
transitions are especially artful, creat-
ing the illusion that the narrative is ever
advancing forward in time, even when
four consecutive chapters all but repeat
the same time frame in different reali-
ties. It is easy, reading 4 3 2 1, to lose
track of time.
T his, in fact, is the point. The passage
of time is one of the novels central sub-
jects, reflected not only in the sweeping
ing markers of time and place. Auster
pays scrupulous attention to histori-
cal events, marking the milestones in
newsreel prose, but he rarely dwells on
them:
On March seventh, two hundred
Alabama state troopers attacked
525 civil rights demonstrators
in Selma as they were prepar-
ing to cross the Edmund Pettus
Bridge. . . . The next morning, US
Marines landed in Vietnam. . . .
President Johnson federalized the
state National Guard. . . .
The New York Review
An exception is the sit-ins on the cam-
pus of Columbia University, led by the
Students for a Democratic Society,
of which Amy is a member (in two of
the narratives). Ferguson the journal-
ist covers the event for the Columbia
Spectator, though he is agnostic about
the politics. He mostly stood behind
the group and believed in its cause,
writes Auster, but a noble cause de-
manded noble behavior from its advo-
cates. He disapproves of name- calling.
Amy breaks up with him, in one of the
narratives, because he does not commit
himself to the movement.
Ferguson does commit himself to
literature and film and art. We know
this because Auster presents us with
scrupulous lists of the books Ferguson
reads, the movies he watches, the mu-
seums he visits, even a five-paragraph
roll call of the authors appearing on
the syllabi of his freshman courses
at Columbia. Dostoevsky, Thoreau,
Heinrich von Kleist, and John Cage
help to develop Fergusons conception
of the world and are granted short ap-
preciations; when he defends Kleists
prose style, in conversation with a lit-
erary mentor, he appears to be defend-
ing Austers own style in 4 3 2 1. He
tells and tells but doesnt show much,
says Ferguson of Kleist, which every-
one says is the wrong way to go about
it, but I like the way his stories charge
forward. Its all very intricate, but at the
same time it feels as if youre reading a
fairy tale.
But most of the proper names scroll
down the page like closing credits,
only occasionally accompanied by a
jot of weightless praise. Carole Lom-
bards films are splendid comedies,
Isaac Babel is Fergusons number
one short-story writer in the world,
and he calls James Baldwin the best
American writer, a surprising opinion
for a person of his political disengage-
ment, and undermined by the fact that
Baldwin, no sooner mentioned, van-
ishes from the narrative. The ideas of
the dozens, if not hundreds, of other
writers and filmmakers and artists
mentioned are not explored or tested,
so one can only guess at the reason for
their inclusion. It would seem that the
torrent is the point, the unrestrained
deluge of trivia that echoes the deluge
of the prose style and, above all, the
deluge of storytelling. The approach is
nothing like Baldwin or Babel, and it
is the opposite of Cage; it is more like
Scheherazade.
I n its sheer expansiveness 4 3 2 1,
which is more than twice the length of
any book that Auster has published, is
unlike anything he has written. Yet it
is also commodious enough to encom-
pass everything else he has written.
Several times Auster writes playfully
of the book of life (Ferguson some-
times wondered if he hadnt pulled a
fast one on the author of The Book of
Terrestrial Life) and 4 3 2 1 is close
to a Book of Auster, studded with al-
lusions to previous novels. Besides the
father-and-son relationships, there
are various other familiar Austerities:
the infatuations with New York City,
Parisian culture, and old films; the
stories within stories; the search for
patterns in chaos; the recurring image
of a disoriented man locked in a dark
chamber; the bifurcation (or in this
case tetrafurcation) of the self, often
expressed through alter egos, many of
April 6, 2017
whom share the lineaments of Austers
biography.
Previous Auster-like avatars Dan-
iel Quinn (New York Trilogy), Peter
Aaron (Leviathan), David Zimmer
(The Book of Illusions), Jim Freeman
(Invisible), and Adam Walker (In-
visible) make cameo appearances in
4 3 2 1 as Columbia classmates of Ar-
chie Ferguson, along with Zimmers
friend Marco Fogg (Moon Palace), all
of them beginning writers who seemed
to have the stuff to go on and become
real poets and novelists one day. Fer-
guson translates the same French poets
that Auster has translated, visits land-
marks prominent in previous novels
(the Moon Palace Chinese restaurant,
the West End bar), and writes a book,
The Scarlet Notebook, that resembles
Austers story collection The Red Note-
Minor League baseball players in a championship game, 2014;
photograph by Tabitha Soren from her book Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream,
to be published by Aperture in April
book. With The Scarlet Notebook, Fer-
guson hopes to write
a book about a book, a book that
one could read and also write in,
a book that one could enter as if it
were a three- dimensional physical
space, a book that was the world
and yet of the mind, a conundrum,
a fraught landscape filled with
beauties and dangers, and little
by little a story would begin to de-
velop inside it that would thrust the
fictitious author, F., into a confron-
tation with the darkest elements of
himself. A dream book.
This is a good description of most of
Austers books.
4 3 2 1 is not nearly the most self-
referential of Austers novels; Travels in
the Scriptorium (2006), a locked-room
mystery in which the room is Austers
own mind, is almost entirely populated
by characters from earlier novels, a
claustrophobic exercise in performance
art. But 4 3 2 1 is broad enough to allow
him to discuss the principles of his own
writing, and to defend them. Auster
has been disserved throughout his ca-
reer by comparisons to contemporaries
like Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and
Don DeLillo, writers to whom he bears
only a superficial resemblance. Closer
analogues are Haruki Murakami and
Stephen King, novelists who share
his interest in genre conventions and
their subversion, metafictional loopi-
ness, doppelgangers and evil twins, and
the construction of dramatic tension
through the extreme juxtaposition of the
banal with the deranged.
In one of the early chapters of 4 3 2 1,
a six-year- old Ferguson falls from an
oak tree in his backyard and breaks his
leg. The event stirs within him an onto-
logical crisis. He acknowledges that it
was stupid to have tried to climb onto
a branch he couldnt quite reach, but
he points out that he had been led to
that fateful decision by a series of ran-
dom events out of his control. Had any
of them occurred in a slightly different
manner, his leg wouldnt be in a cast.
Such an interesting thought, it strikes
Ferguson, to imagine how things
could be different for him even though
he was the same. Soon after Ferguson
considers this idea, which is not only
Tabitha Soren
the premise of 4 3 2 1 but the basis of
many of Austers novels, he begins for
the first time to write.
A different Ferguson, the budding
novelist, explores the same idea in
a short story called Right, Left, or
Straight Ahead? A character named
Lazlo Flute, on a walk through the
country, comes to an intersection. In
three successive chapters he takes a dif-
ferent path. After a couple of misadven-
tures, Flute concludes that he should
spend more time with other people and
stop taking so many solitary walks. His
problems dont arise from choosing one
path or another but come from within.
E lsewhere Ferguson expresses his
ambition to write fiction that com-
bines the strange with the familiar,
that would make room not only for
the visible world of sentient beings and
inanimate things but also for the vast
and mysterious unseen forces that were
hidden within the seen. 4 3 2 1 is best
when Auster does just thatwhen the
ground beneath the readers feet is
spongy, unstable. The novel sputters
when it lingers over what Ferguson calls
the things you already knew, a cat-
egory that includes not only the mile-
stone historical events but the familiar
coming- of-age plots and the reassuring
opinions about politics and artthe
screenings of Fellini and Godard at the
Thalia, the visits to the Met, the Frick,
the Museum of Modern Art . . .
But in the novels final chapters,
as the plots spin out of orbit, the odd
occurrences multiply and the ground
shifts again. The reader suspects that
the stories of all four Fergusons can-
not simply meander on in perpetuity,
and they dont. Auster at last gives
up his game, though the revelation of
his metafictional gimmick is not espe-
cially shocking; by this point the reader
has had nearly nine hundred pages to
prepare. In the end Auster reaches
the same conclusion as Lazlo Flute:
One road, he writes, was no better
or worse than any other road. But he
adds a crucial elaboration:
The torment of being alive in a
single body was that at any given
moment you had to be on one road
only, even though you could have
been on another, traveling toward
an altogether different place.
This explains the rationale behind
4 3 2 1s conceit, but it might just as
easily apply to Austers entire body of
work. He began his career by wonder-
ing what might have happened had his
relationship with his father been differ-
ent; what other roads might a stronger
paternal bond have set him on? He has
since imagined other paths for him-
selfas a private detective, a fireman
turned amateur gambler, a St. Louis or-
phan born in 1915, a mongrel dog with
a human consciousness, and various
New York writers much like him, who
are visited by mysterious strangers.
If every person, like Ferguson, has
several selves inside him, even many
selves, a strong self and a weak self, a
thoughtful self and an impulsive self,
a generous self and a selfish self, then
self-knowledge lies in the promiscu-
ous inhabitation of multiple identi-
ties. Among these many paths for the
self are those not takenthe shadow
people that we imagine we could be,
if only we had a little more courage, or
strength, or wisdom. The world as it
was, as Auster puts it, could never be
more than a fraction of the world, for
the real also consisted of what could
have happened but didnt. Whether
one finds his fiction exhilarating or
maddening depends on whether one
accepts this mystical view of human
experience. Reality, to Auster, is itself
an interlocking chain of alternative
realities.
Austers approach stands in opposi-
tion to the conventions of most serious
contemporary fiction, which attempts
to plunge deeper and deeper into the
soul of a character, revealing the con-
tradictions, usually irresolvable, that
lie within. Auster instead travels out-
side of his characters, into parallel
universes populated by shadow people
and doppelgangers who, by choice or
chance, find themselves thrust into
worlds that could have happened but
didnt. One might not want to visit
those worlds, might consider them a
frivolous distraction, but for willing
travelers there is no more congenial
guide to this marshy terrain. Though
4 3 2 1 is not the most successful exam-
ple of Austers projectit is too heavily
weighted with the familiar, too stingy
with the strangeit offers the clearest
explication of his sensibility. Alterna-
tive realities have their uses, and for
more than escapist fantasy. It takes a
strong imagination to see the world as
it isnt. It takes an even stronger imagi-
nation to see the world as it is.
15
 Lets Face the Music and Dance
La La Land
a film written and directed
by Damien Chazelle
The day I went to see Damien Chazelles
La La Land I was blissfully uninformed
of anything about the film except for the
fact that it was a musical and that some
early viewers had been well pleased by
it. My mood was dark for reasons both
personal and publicthe day itself
gloomily overcastand the mere word
musical was enough motivation to
walk in, with the hope of a few hours
of mood-altering respite. Musicals
had always offered as their minimum
promise a small healing dose of unreal
pleasurean absorbing short-term res-
idencybut that was quite enough.
This one had the desired effect. I
hadnt expected Swing Time or The
Gangs All Here or Its Always Fair
Weather, and so had no occasion to be
disappointed. But after two hours of
following the essentially simple trajec-
tory of aspiring actress Mia (Emma
Stone) and aspiring jazz club proprietor
Sebastian (Ryan Gosling)watching
them meet cute (during a traffic jam
on a Los Angeles freeway), go through
the necessary succession of spats and
misunderstandings until they reach
the transcendent moment of dancing
among the stars projected on the ceil-
ing of the Griffith Park planetarium,
and then move on, less buoyantly, to-
ward their destined endsI left the
theater, if not enchanted or swept
away then at the very least diverted
and perked up. I had been irrationally
touched near the beginning by a shot of
Stone standing alone on a hilly street
in Los Angeles at night, and in the last
reel very much pleased by a neat trick
of a resolution that avoided resolving
anything; pleased as well, it must be
said, by the recurring aftertaste of the
pleasures of older films.
There didnt seem to be anything
wrong with savoring the way movie love
seeps into movies. It almost amounts
to a conquest of time, the way earlier
decades find a way to be born again. If
Jean-Pierre Melville could spend half
a lifetime obsessively reworking The
Asphalt Jungle, why shouldnt Damien
Chazelle feel free to recombine his im-
pressions of An American in Paris or
The Young Girls of Rochefort? La La
Land was in any case a fresh concoc-
tion, not an adaptation or retread, and
the songs by Chazelle and his musical
collaborator Justin Hurwitz were newly
minted, in a mode hovering somewhere
between pop song and show tune.
Only afterward did I pick up on the
storm of attacks and counterattacks
swirling around La La Land follow-
ing its unexpectedly wide success, even
before it tied with All About Eve and
Titanic for a record number (fourteen)
of Oscar nominations. The movie had
apparently become an object of pas-
sionate contention on multiple fronts.
Sometimes it was criticized for being
an inadequate musical, sometimes, it
seemed, for being a musical at alla
musical in the classic frivolous sense
at a moment that called for engagement
with more serious issues than the ro-
16
Geoffrey OBrien
mantic problems and career ambitions
of a couple of young Angelenos. A
Facebook protest singled out Goslings
Sebastian as the quintessential mans-
plainer for his insistence that Stones
Mia, as a prerequisite to any deeper
involvement, pay respectful attention
to his lectures on pure jazz. That this
was once again a white guy laying down
the laws of jazz appreciation, and that
what he meant by pure jazz seemed
vaguely defined, and that the film as a
whole paid only the most token atten-
tion to LAs extraordinary ethnic diver-
sity added further layers of polemic.
Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, accepting the Oscar for Best Picture with the
films cast and crew, after La La Land was incorrectly announced as the winner,
Los Angeles, February 2017
If that werent enough, neither Gos-
ling nor Stone was much of a singer or
dancer, so Chazelles desire to evoke
the splendors of the Astaire-Kelly-
Charisse era was foredoomed; and
the songs inevitably werent exactly in
the Gershwin and Kern league; and the
story didnt in the end do much more
than ratify the rather limited and ma-
terialistic concerns of two shallow pro-
tagonists. The New Yorkers Richard
Brody, in a jeremiad of a review, wrote
of Chazelle having slathered the movie
with his coercive version of charm.
The New York Times foregrounded the
arguments by pitting members of its art
staff against each other in a roundup of
dueling opinions. The debate took on
comic dimensions. A YouTube posting
offered a trailer of La La Land as di-
rected, unsettlingly, by David Lynch.
Saturday Night Live capped the con-
troversyif this can really be called a
controversy rather than a desperate at-
tempt to focus on anything other than
prevailing political chaoswith a quite
hilarious skit in which Aziz Ansari was
arrested and brutally interrogated for
not loving La La Land enough.
In following various social media
threads on the subject, I was repeat-
edly struck by the earnest attempts
to explicate La La Lands message.
I had rarely thought of musicals as
message pictures, except for the BUY
WAR BONDS slogan tacked on to any
number of 1940s releases. If anything
they functioned as advertisements
for ultimate gratified desire, symbol-
ized by song, dance, communal high
spirits, and optical dazzlement. They
belonged, insistently and without apol- over. A few minutes more and were
ogy, to a domain of pleasure, and once into the epilogue. Mias songwhich
in a long while of ecstasy, while still in the film represents a go-for-broke
leaving room for a not unpleasing un- improvisation on which the possibility
dercurrent of melancholy. To quarrel of her career will stand or fallhas the
over the precise value of a particular effect of an emotional plea, an attempt
musical might seem like arguing about to lay bare real vulnerability. For those
the value of a day at Jones Beach or a dreamers she salutes a little madness
round of pinball at an amusement ar- is key: the word is more than a little
cadeboth of them, as it happens, ac- jarring. Is it a kind of madness that we
tivities that have provided serviceable have been experiencing, or even the
backdrops for movie musicals. If you wilder reaches of fantasy? The trem-
dont like it there is no particular rea- bling of her voice signals a temptation
son to force yourself; if you do, you will to shatter the very constraints that give
require no justification to indulge. You the film its identity, to break down any
distinction between the disillusioned
Patrick T. Fallon/The New York Times/Redux
contemporary world in which La La
Land is set and the stylized parallel do-
main in which it fitfully unfolds.
In 1964 Jacques Demya crucial
inspiration for Chazelleattempted
such a fusion in his first collaboration
with Michel Legrand, The Umbrellas
of Cherbourg, and succeeded so well
that by the films halfway point a viewer
may forget that every line of dialogue
is sung, and that the naturalistic set-
tings in which Demys film ostensibly
takes place are as dreamlike in their
color schemes as Oz: all has become
equally real and equally unreal, with
no sense of going back and forth be-
tween realms. La La Land takes up
the challenge with its opening number,
which begins with an empty sky and a
cacophony of sounds that turns out to
be the background noise of an LA free-
way in full gridlock, with car radios all
blaring their own distinct soundtracks.
A moment later and the drivers
begin to emerge, staging a bravura hy-
can of course find messages of one sort peractive ensemble number (Another
or another scattered everywhere, in Day of Sun), complete with conga
Follow the Fleet (Lets face the music drummers and skateboarders, done
and dance), Good News (The best seemingly in a single take. The point is
things in life are free), or The Band unmistakably made that this is indeed
Wagons unassailable summing-up: a musical, a musical that in these first
Thats entertainment! moments would seem to be a celebra-
If a message must be found, for La tion of exuberant urban energy assert-
La Land it is signposted in Mias plain- ing itself against all odds. But it is a
tive and ultimately triumphant audition collectivity of mutual strangers, and we
song: Heres to the ones who dream/ are to see nothing further of that kind.
Foolish as they may seem/Heres to the Crowds there will be, but they will not
hearts that ache/Heres to the mess we be joined in song. From this point the
make. It is certainly an old enough film will focus exclusively on the two
message. In Gold Diggers of 1933, Dick people who are about to meet: Mia,
Powells dream was to break away from who is rehearsing for an audition in her
his inherited wealth and prove himself car, and Sebastian, who as the traffic
as a Broadway tunesmith; in Moon starts moving pulls out impatiently in
Over Miami, Betty Grables dream front of her, the startled Mia giving him
was to meet a millionaire at a resort the finger as he roars by.
hotel; in Viva Las Vegas, Elvis Presleys Chazelle and Hurwitz have laid down
dream was to get enough money to buy a cadence that will be varied and elabo-
a new engine for his racing car. Such rated in what follows, in a series of set
dreams may not be enough to get you pieces that track first Mia and then Se-
through life but they are enough to get bastian after they exit the freeway: she
you to the end of the picture. This time working unhappily as a barista on the
around the old formula is reconfig- old Warner Bros. lot, undergoing hu-
ured, pointing to the mess we make miliation at a failed audition, and being
as a signal that we have entered a more lured by her roommates to a lavish party
jagged era when the all-around satisfy- where she is miserable; and he alone at
ing wrap-up that worked out for Betty his piano trying to master a passage by
Grable at the candy- colored backlot Thelonious Monk, then going off to the
Flamingo Hotel can no longer be man- cocktail lounge gig where he is ordered
aged or even daydreamed. to play nothing but Christmas carols
and is likewise miserable. The moves
that follow work variations on generic
B y the time this pivotal moment ar- standbys. They meet again; he is rude
rives, this last call for establishing that to her again; winter turns to spring;
the film has really been about some- they meet again at a poolside party
thing more than the stylish resurrection where she finds him playing keyboard
of an old genre, La La Land is almost for a threadbare 1980s pop tribute band
The New York Review
and takes the opportunity to repay his
earlier rudeness with her own mockery;
they find themselves at last on a hillside
at dusk looking down at the city and
ease their way into their first awkward
romantic duet.
The rhythm of these scenes is more
or less impeccable, jabbed along by a
constant injection of new backgrounds
(the huge film poster blow-ups deco-
rating Mias apartment), new color
schemes (the primary- colored party
dresses of her and her roommates),
shifts of scale and perspective, splashes
and fireworks. That Gosling and Stone
do not dazzle either as singers or danc-
ers seems designed to give the pro-
ceedings a note of sinceritythey are
almost as tentative as you or Iwhile
the virtuosity of editing and camera-
work take up the slack. This after all
is what musicals must do to qualify at
all: set in motion a machinery of linked
cadences in which you are made to feel
complicit, so that by the time it is done
you have the illusion of having danced
in some parallel world. Its always a
parallel world no matter how many real
things and places are crammed into it.
The freeway becomes a sound stage,
just as the Brooklyn Navy Yard did in
On the Town, in the primal fresh air
moment of the postwar musical.
Chazelle comes to La La Land after
two earlier movies that in very different
ways foreshadow it. His first film, Guy
and Madeline on a Park Bench (2010),
was also a musical, of a New Waveish,
cinma vrit sort, filmed in 16mm and
black and white while Chazelle was
still a film student at Harvard, and tak-
ing an elliptical approach to its wisp
of a love-triangle plot. The musical
numbers, technically less ambitious,
reinvent with their rough charm the
shock of someone bursting unexpect-
edly into song, and with the trumpeter
Jason Palmer as Guy the film is more
persuasively imbued with jazz than
Chazelles current offering.
The script for La La Land was in
fact written right after Guy and Mad-
eline, but could not find financing until
the success of Chazelles next feature,
Whiplash (2014), a skillful demonstra-
tion of skills that in many ways is as
disagreeable as its successor is agree-
able. The boot camp methods of an
obsessive jazz teacher harsh enough
to drive a student musician to suicide
are depictedindeed, mirroredwith
a relentlessness that almost succeeds
in making the very idea of music un-
appealing. Its rhythmsurged on by
relentless up-tempo drum solosare
expertly sustained but the curious effect
is of a kind of deliberate anti-musical.
Goslings Sebastian carries over
some of Whiplashs queasiness, with
his permanent bad mood and his self-
righteous disquisitions on jazz shunted
aside only with difficulty to make room
for the central love story. The love story
is really all the story there is, as Cha-
zelle has carefully eschewed subplots
and serious complications and left wide
deliberate gaps in backstory. Neither
Sebastian nor Mia seems to have any
close friends (her roommates recede
from view after the early scenes), and
there are no competing love interests to
provide standard obstacles and jealous
misunderstandings. At the outset Mia
is given a boyfriend, an ambitious cor-
porate type, but she seems completely
indifferent to him and after she walks
April 6, 2017
out of an insufferable dinner where
there is knowing talk of an Indonesia
jungle eco-resort, he is not heard from
again. Likewise we are given only the
vaguest hint that some earlier incident
may have brought on Sebastians con-
stant simmering resentment.
Its all down to the two protagonists,
and the only drama is whether they
can let down their guard long enough
to make a musical of it rather than a
dispiriting study in self-protective mis-
trust. Emma Stone has a definite edge
since her failed audition scenes, brief
though they are, provide the films only
real comedy, and seeing her carrying
on in such chipper fashion in the face
of the utter indifference of casting di-
rectors does create a bond of sympathy.
Ryan Gosling by contrast succeeds
perfectly in delineating a character
John Legend, Emma Stone, and Ryan Gosling in La La Land
whom perhaps only Mia could love. It
isnt altogether clear whether the jazz
club episode in which he lectures her
on the origins of jazz (born in a little
flophouse in New Orleans), while
talking over the music as he complains
about people who talk over the music,
is meant as a parodic allusion to earlier
Hollywood birth- of-the-blues riffs in
pictures like Syncopation and Young
Man with a Horn.
Nor is it clear whether were being
encouraged to share this malcontents
evident distaste for the pretty good
jazz-funk ensemble for which hes
hired by his old acquaintance Keith
(John Legend), a band whose success
earns him good money and gives him
a taste of commercial success. Legend
certainly gets the better of their repar-
tee when he tells Gosling: How can
you be a revolutionary if youre such a
traditionalist?
Of course it doesnt matter at all if
Sebastian is the great pianistic talent
hes cracked up to be, any more than it
matters if Mias one-woman play, whose
catastrophic opening nearly sinks her
career, is really so good that a top Hol-
lywood agent would immediately want
to audition her for a starring movie role.
Classic musicals often contrive to make
us identify with people we would not
want to know if they were not charac-
ters in a musical: people who when they
are not singing and dancing may be
found whining, sulking, or indulging in
bouts of insecure self-aggrandizement,
nursing petty anxieties and lashing out
in silly and abrasive lovers quarrels. It
is only the fact of being characters in
a musical that rescues their lives from
treadmill emptiness.
T he springtime of Mia and Sebastians
love blossoms about halfway through
the picture, as they leave an evening
screening of Rebel Without a Cause
Mia is under Sebastians tutelage in
cinema as well as musicand go off to
the observatory in Griffith Park where
back in 1955 James Dean had listened
to a lecture on the end of the solar sys-
tem. Magically they find themselves
inside, dancing around a pendulum
display, and then, under the same dome
where Rebels apocalyptic forecast had
been described, they whirl away among
the galaxies, liberated from gravity and
perhaps from their own personalities.
There follows a montage of summer
happinessWatts Towers, the Angels
Flight funicularthat comes across as
a series of picture postcards.
With autumn the film inches away
Dale Robinette/Lionsgate
from these images of romantic bliss as
Sebastian and Mia get down to the nuts
and bolts of their respective dreams
and the mood becomes less Gene Kelly
and Debbie Reynolds in Singin in the
Rain and more Robert De Niro and
Liza Minnelli in Martin Scorseses
New York, New York. Dancing on the
ceiling gives way to the glumness of ev-
eryday wear and tear. The tensions ex-
plode in an obligatory central squabble
designed to put both leads in as unat-
tractive a light as possible, so that when
Mia finally storms out in the aftermath
of what was supposed to be a romantic
one-night reunion in the middle of Se-
bastians tour there is a positive sense
of relief that we no long have to be a
party to their mutual recriminations.
The musical has hit the ground, and the
notion of a parallel world is thoroughly
washed away in scenes that seriously
contemplate the possibility that all
of this will come to nothing, and that
we will be left finally only with a por-
trait of two lonely careerists, with the
emphasis on lonely. There seems to be
nothing like a sustaining community in
the offing for either of them, certainly
none of the professional camaraderie
found in Singin in the Rain and The
Band Wagon.
That give-and-take compensated for
the pressures and disappointments that
went with a careerin musicals, tradi-
tionally understood as a career in show
business. (It was movie musicals in
particular that always most effectively
promoted the belief that a successful
show business career was the summa-
tion of earthly bliss.) The faith in such
a family of fellow troupers was indis-
pensable to psychic survival in a cold
world of exploitative producers and
unsympathetic casting agents. The soli-
tariness of Mia and Sebastian reflects
the loss of such a faith. Where are the
wisecracking showgirls and philosophi-
cal stagehands and veteran session men
who would once have helped ease their
pain? They have only each other, such
as they are.
Which brings us again to Mias song
and her moment of supreme doubt. One
more failure and she will be annihi-
lated. She will be one with the show biz
dreamers evoked in the old Burt Bacha-
rachHal David song Do You Know
the Way to San Jose? (LA is a great
big freeway/Put a hundred down and
buy a car/In a week, maybe two, theyll
make you a star), the ones who ended
up parking cars and pumping gas.
But this acknowledgment of unfor-
giving reality, of the likelihood that
her dream will come to nothing, swiv-
els neatly into the triumph of fantasy.
The dream was real after all: Mia gets
the part, becomes the star of a major
film project, and in the twinkling of
an eye it is five years later and she is
an international celebrity like the one
she waited on at the beginning of the
movie, in the same coffee shop that
she now strides into as a fawned- on
customer. She has a husband, a beau-
tiful child, and then, that very night,
she walks with her husband into a jazz
club and sees Sebastian at the mike.
His dream has triumphed too. A happy
ending, a double happy ending, but the
wrong one. They get to have the career
but not the love, and we are allowed to
imagine that their success may be the
final disaster.
That is not however the true end-
ing. Chazelle has a better one, a movie
within a movie that returns us to the
parallel world of musicalsthe world
in which everything happened dif-
ferently, the lovers never quarreled
and were never parted, their careers
bloomed together, not apart, in Paris of
course, and they delight in home mov-
ies of the child they never hadsealing
it all up securely in the dream of which
it was always part. The domain of full-
blown unreality that the film has all
along wanted to inhabit is finally put on
screen. By finding his way to this, Cha-
zelle puts his last internal rhyme firmly
in place, and makes La La Land some-
thing it would not otherwise have been.
It seems like enough for one movie.
In a scene even more ephemeral than
Mias final reverie of an alternate fu-
ture, La La Landwhich had already
picked up six Oscars, with Emma
Stone, Damien Chazelle, and Justin
Hurwitz among the recipientswas
announced as winner for Best Picture.
Moments later, just after one of the
films producers had declared that re-
pression is the enemy of civilization,
it emerged that due to a slip-up with
the envelope (a goof thoroughly in line
with classic musical plotting) the win-
ner was Moonlight after all.
The disorganized spectacle, as La
La Land producers Jordan Horowitz
and Marc Platt struggled to persuade
everybody that this was not a joke, and
emotions in both camps were rapidly
readjusted in full view of the televi-
sion audience, made for some real
theatrical excitement after a long eve-
ning that until then had run purringly
and unastonishingly. Political decla-
rations that in earlier years had been
17
unscheduled disruptions here were a
carefully calibrated part of the pro-
gram. This included the commercial
breaks, which provided a slickly pro-
duced array of advertisements for love,
understanding, and tolerance, with the
productions main sponsor Cadillac as-
Building the American Dream
Mans Better Angels:
Romantic Reformers and
the Coming of the Civil War
by Philip F. Gura.
Belknap Press/
Harvard University Press,
315 pp., $29.95
Paradise Now:
The Story of
American Utopianism
by Chris Jennings.
Random House, 488 pp., $28.00
Utopia Drive:
A Road Trip Through
Americas Most Radical Idea
by Erik Reece.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
346 pp., $28.00
Oneida:
From Free Love Utopia
to the Well-Set Table
by Ellen Wayland-Smith.
Picador, 310 pp., $27.00
We Are as Gods:
Back to the Land in the 1970s
on the Quest for a New America
by Kate Daloz.
PublicAffairs, 355 pp., $26.99
1.
On a sunny August afternoon in 1851,
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman
Melville, after a picnic in the Berk-
shires and a leisurely smoke under the
trees, decided, seemingly on impulse,
to visit the Hancock Shaker Village, on
the outskirts of Pittsfield, Massachu-
setts. For Melville, who lived nearby, it
was a chance to share the company of
the older American writer he most ad-
mired, and to whom he would dedicate
Moby-Dick, published later that fall.
For Hawthorne, however, it was
something of a research trip. Model, or
utopian, communities like those es-
tablished by the Shakers were to be the
subject of his next novel, The Blithe-
dale Romance. During the summer, as
preparation, he had immersed himself
in the horribly tedious volumes of
the French visionary Charles Fourier,
whose odd fusion of pragmatic and
surreal ideas for harnessing human de-
sires to create social harmony had had
a surprising vogue in the United States.
The day before the picnic, Hawthorne
had written in his notebook, Fourier
states that, in the progress of the world,
the ocean is to lose its saltness, and ac-
quire the taste of a peculiarly flavored
lemonade.
During the 1830s, Hawthorne had
published two stories inspired by the
18
suming the unexpected role of a font
of humanitarian values. The New York
Times ran an advertisementthe most
effective of the spotsfor truth itself.
Whatever uneasiness lay outside the
hall, a surface of buoyant solidarity was
generally maintained.
Christopher Benfey
An engraving of New Harmony, Indiana, the utopian community
founded by Robert Owen in 1825 and dissolved in 1827
Shakers; in a letter to his sister in 1831,
he had even broached (perhaps in jest)
the possibility of joining the sect. His
description of the community at Han-
cock begins on a positive note, as he ad-
mires the central brick dwelling house,
with its floors and walls of polished
wood, and plaster as smooth as marble,
and everything so neat that it was a
pain and constraint to look at it. But
as their guide, an old man wearing a
gray, broad-brimmed hat who was one
of the elders of the village, leads them
to the bedrooms, segregated by sex,
Hawthornes mood abruptly darkens,
as he notes the lack of privacy in the
two-to-a-bed alcoves and the rudimen-
tary sanitary arrangements. The fact
shows, he notes disdainfully, that all
their miserable pretense of cleanliness
and neatness is the thinnest superficial-
ity; and that the Shakers are and must
needs be a filthy set.
Hawthornes intemperate outburst
suggests how unfit for such a rigidly
designed community he himself would
be. And yet, in 1841, fastidious Haw-
thorne made the unlikely decision to
join the utopian community at Brook
Farm, outside of Boston, loosely mod-
eled by its founder, a former minister
named George Ripley, on precisely
those Fourierist ideas that he had lam-
basted in his journals. Ripleys cousin
Ralph Waldo Emerson had politely
demurred to join what he referred to,
in private, as a perpetual picnic, a
French Revolution in small, an Age of
Reason in a pattypan. Henry David
Thoreau wrote with kindred scorn, I
The last-reel confusion provided
as perfect a chance-generated reso-
lution as possible. The long-shot
Moonlight, a favorite for many, was
the beneficiary of a rare miraculous
reversalmirroring, but this time
with a happy ending, the sort of last-
think I had rather keep bachelors hall
in hell than go to board in heaven, and
established his own utopian commu-
nity of one, on July 4, 1845, on a patch
of Emersons land on Walden Pond.
What might have inspired a man of
Hawthornes temperamentantisocial,
politically reactionary, and suspicious
of reform of any kindto join a com-
munity dedicated, in Ripleys words,
to a more natural union between in-
tellectual and manual labor and the
substitution of a system of brotherly
cooperation for one of selfish competi-
tion? Several new books (all written
before the election of Donald Trump)
examine aspects of the many utopian
communities founded in the United
States during the first half of the nine-
teenth century, as well as the larger
question of their extraordinary appeal
to earlier Americans and their possible
relevance today.
2.
Utopian: the word has a strange
sound at the troubled start of 2017.
During the disheartening primary cam-
paign of 2016, utopian came to mean
hopelessly unrealistic, even delusional.
Let me tell you something, Bernie
Sanders tweeted in April, as his pros-
pects were dimming, there is nothing
weve said in this campaign that is pie-
in-the-sky or utopian. Nothing. As
for his primary opponent, the good
news is that she is not a utopian, the
conservative columnist Ross Douthat
ditch overturning so recently disap-
pointed in the political spherewhile
La La Lands split-second moment of
illusory triumph rhymed nicely with
those bubbly evanescent ecstasies
toward which musicals have always
aspired.
wrote in The New York Times,
Granger
as Clintons presumed victory
in the election approached; she
isor has become, across a
long and grinding careertem-
peramentally pragmatic, self-
consciously hardheaded.
Meanwhile, commentators in-
creasingly reached for utopias
dark twin, dystopia, to de-
scribe Donald Trumps dire view
of America. According to James
Poniewozik, writing in The New
York Times, Trump, in his July
acceptance speech at the Re-
publican National Convention,
characterized the United States
as a dystopian hellscape and
himself as the only leader ca-
pable of saving it from murder,
terrorism, financial ruin and
an uncontrolled wave of im-
migrants. Trumps speech re-
portedly caused the number of
inquiries about the words dysto-
pia and dystopian to increase
by 2,000 percent online, momen-
tarily crashing the Merriam-
Webster website; meanwhile,
dystopian novels like 1984 and It Cant
Happen Here have returned, ominously,
to the best-seller lists.
And yet the word utopia has al-
ways been double-edged. Coined by
Thomas More, five hundred years
ago, to mean nowhere (hence its
nineteenth- century literary spinoffs
Erewhon and News from Nowhere),
utopia has an ambiguous u (or ou,
meaning not) that can also be read as
the Greek eu, meaning goodhence
a good place. Moreover, alternative
visions of a better society, including
Mores, have historically includedas
a key part of their justificationa grim
assessment of the dark present. If in
the background of every utopia there
is an anti-utopia, Frank and Fritzie
Manuel wrote in their influential 1979
book, Utopian Thought in the Western
World, one might say conversely that
in the background of many a dystopia
there is a secret utopia.
T he subject of American planned
communities sprawls in all directions,
and a major challenge for the books
under review is to narrow the scope,
in space and time, of an otherwise un-
manageable topic. For Philip Gura,
a professor of American literature at
the University of North Carolina, such
model communities are best seen as
part of a larger, specifically American
movement of reform from roughly 1837
to the Civil War. What precipitated
such experiments in what the reformer
Thomas Wentworth Higginson called
The New York Review
practical radicalismvegetarianism
and temperance, prison reform and free
love, abolition and womens rights
was, in Guras view, the devastating fi-
nancial panic of 1837, which followed
a bad harvest the previous year and in-
creasing foreign debt.
Banking crises would recur with dis-
heartening regularity, in 1857, 1873, and
1893; what distinguished the collapse of
1837 was that it was totally unforeseen.
Until the spring of 1837, Gura writes,
most Americans uncritically believed
that limitless economic expansion was
assuredindeed, was the nations di-
vine destiny. The ensuing wreckage
was all the more shocking:
Many manufacturers closed their
factories and peremptorily dis-
missed their mill hands. Those
who still could find work saw
wages plummet, sometimes in half.
Prices of staple goods and hous-
ing increased, often to prohibitive
levels, creating a population of
literally hundreds of thousands of
homeless in the nations cities. Dis-
ease and abject poverty abounded.
Trade was stagnant. Bankruptcies
were everywhere, with property
sacrificed at auction at a fraction
of its cost.
The land stinks with suicide, Em-
erson wrote in the aftermath. Young
men have no hope. He concluded that
society has played out its last stake; it
is checkmated.
It is amid these grim historical cir-
cumstances that Gura invites us to see
an experiment in community like Brook
Farm, founded by a minister, George
Ripley, appalled by the poverty and des-
peration of disenfranchised workers in
his Boston parish. For a man like Haw-












thorne, engaged to be married and fac-
less projects of social reform, Em-
erson reported to Thomas Carlyle in
1840. Not a reading man but has a
draft of a new community in his waist-
coat pocket. At least a hundred such
planned communities were founded in
the United States during the nineteenth
century, according to Chris Jennings in
Paradise Now. Unlike Guras primarily
economic explanation, Jennings attri-
butes the rise of utopian communities
to the confluence of two streams of
thought in the wide-open wilderness
of the New World. One of these was
the Judeo-Christian belief that after a
thousand years a New Jerusalem would
reign on earth. The other was the sec-
ular Enlightenment faith, inherited
from eighteenth-century thinkers like
Voltaire and Locke, that every social
problem had a solution discoverable by
science.
Efforts to construct the perfect
society in miniature and then lead by
example differed in superficial ways,
depending on the background and re-
ligious leanings of their founders, and
the challenges of location or climate.
But they had a surprising degree of
overlap in their basic premises: that
society should be based on coopera-
tion rather than competition; that the
nuclear family should be subsumed
into the larger community; that prop-
erty should be held in common; that
women should not be subordinate to
men; that work of even the most me-
nial kind must be accorded a certain
dignity. They also shared a dominant
mood, a sense of disappointment, even
anger, with the world as they found it.
Utopianism may be a species of opti-
mism, Jennings notes, but it is always
born of discontent.
Jennings selects five communal-
ist movements that flourished during
the busy golden age of American uto-
post-Bauhaus society. Shaker crafts
reflect a platonic impulse to unite the
messy, imperfect material world with
a numinous sphere of eternal forms,
Jennings writes. Charles Dickens,
touring a Shaker village in 1842, was
less impressed: We walked into a grim
room where several grim hats were
hanging on grim pegs, and the time was
told grimly by a grim clock.
It was also in industrial Manchester
that Robert Owen worked out his own
progressive views for more humane
ways to run a factory, including the
eight-hour day and child care, ideas
that he first put into practice, with great
success, in Manchester before deciding
to try something on a larger scale in the
United States. It was also in Manches-
ter that Friedrich Engels, an admirer of
Owen, developed his ideas of a socialist
revolution, part of the larger narrative
for Wilsons study, which culminates in
the planned society of Leninist Russia.
T he utopian leaders monitored one
anothers progress and shortcomings.
John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the
Oneida community in upstate New
Yorkthe most remarkable utopian
experiment in American history, in
Jenningss viewconceived of his own
experiment as rising, phoenix-like,
from the ashes of Brook Farms de-
mise. Look at the Dates, he wrote.
Brook Farm deceased in October
1847. The Oneida Community com-
menced in November 1847. Even
before he became a student at Yale,
Noyes had caught the millennial fever,
and determined, from his own reading
of the Bible, that human perfection was


available here and now. The mistake
of the Brook Farmers, in his view, was
that they left God out of their tale and
they came to nothing.
The Shakers, too, had made a mis-
take, in Noyess opinion. They were
right to break up the nuclear family,
along with what he dismissively called
the special love of marriage, but
naive to think that abstinence was the
means to accomplish it. Noyes pro-
posed, instead, that all adults in his
community embrace what he called
complex marriagei.e., multiple
sexual partnersalong with a surpris-
ingly effective method of birth control
based on males stopping short of ejacu-
lation. Noyes himself occupied the
top of this pyramid, as Jennings puts
it. For years, he considered it his duty
to sexually initiate many of the young
women in the community.
Most of the utopian communities
of the nineteenth century, including
Oneida and Brook Farm, were agri-
cultural. The Garden of Eden seemed
to represent an unfallen world before
the ravages of industrialization. When
Oneidas fruit trees couldnt support
the community, however, Noyes de-
cided to mass-produce the innovative
animal traps that one of his young
members had been selling to local
Iroquois trappers. Ellen Wayland-
Smith, in her well-researched account
of Oneida, gives a detailed account of
the process by which, as Jennings wryly
puts it, the mostly vegetarian Perfec-
tionists made their living from mam-
malian carnage. Later, when much of
the Northeast had been purged of bea-
vers and bears, partly because of the in-
genious Newhouse trap, Oneida turned











ing an uncertain future as a professional pianism: the Shakers; the Welshman WUKPIUEKGPVKEKPXGUVKICVKQPVQPFOGVJQFU
writer, buying shares in Brook Farm, Robert Owenss short-lived New Har- 











 

with its plans to open an extensive dairy
establishment and a day school, seemed
a reasonable investment. When Brook

mony in southern Indiana; the Fou- NKHGQHCTVKHCEVUHQTIGPGTCVKQPU[GVVQEQOGq
rierist phalanxes, including Brook 



Farm; the doomed Icarians and their 







Farm proved to be no more resilient
than other businesses and could not
compete with the more settled farms
in its neighborhood, Hawthorne de-
manded the return of his investment.
Gura is perhaps too hard on Haw-
thorne in emphasizing his pragmatic in-
terest in Brook Farm. Miles Coverdale,
Hawthornes surrogate in The Blithe-
dale Romance, refers to his months at
Blithedale as the most romantic epi-
sode of his life, observing ruefully, I
rejoice that I could once think better
of the worlds improvability than it de-
served. It was the marked individual-
ity of so many of the Brook Farmers,
faced with the rigid social and work
arrangements of Ripleys community,
that, in Hawthornes view, spelled the
experiments doom. Isaiah Berlin, in
discussing the decline of utopian ideas,
was fond of quoting Kants dictum:
Out of the crooked timber of human-
ity no straight thing was ever made.
Hawthorne adopted a strikingly similar
wording in his assessment of Blithe-
dale: Persons of marked individual-
itycrooked sticks, as some of us might
be calledare not exactly the easiest to
bind up into a faggotor neat bundle.
3.
Brook Farm was not an isolated case.
We are all a little wild with number-
April 6, 2017
techno-communist paradise based
on a six-hundred-page novel by their
French founder; and the surprisingly
long-lived Oneida community. In
stressing the migration of radical so-
cial ideas from Europe to the United
States, Jennings is indebted to a tower-
ing precursor, Edmund Wilsons To the
Finland Station.
Wilson was struck by how much of
the freshest thinking about new models
for society came from British Manches-
ter, at the rise of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, with its cotton mills and hideously
inadequate living and working condi-
tions for its downtrodden laborers. It
was here that the illiterate Ann Lee
abused by her husband, suffering ter-
ribly in childbirth, and finding refuge
among a loosely knit group of renegade
Quakersbegan to develop her con-
cept of a celibate, spotlessly clean so-
ciety devoted to the Second Coming, in
which she herself would function as a
sort of female counterpart of Christ.
Lees mania for cleanness pervaded
the Shaker communities established
after her flight to New York in 1774.
With their now-familiar ladder-
backs, Shaker chairs were designed
so that they could be hung on the walls
while the floors were swept; ornament
of any kind provided nooks and cran-
nies where dirt and contagion might he Edith ODonnell Institute of Art History
thrive, hence the spare construction he University of Texas at Dallas www.utdallas.edu/arthistory 214-883-2475
that has become so admired in our own,
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20
to the silver-plate cutlery for which it is
best known.
Oneida was the rare utopian commu-
nity to survive the Civil War, and even
it renounced its experiment in free love
in 1879, resolved its complex marriages
into conventional pairings, and turned
its communitarian flatware production
into a capitalist joint-stock company.
Jennings ventures the upbeat conclu-
sion that such communities were partly
the victim of their own successes in
consciousness-raising: The decline of
American communal utopianism was
less about the defeat of one idea than
it was about the triumph of another,
the embrace of such civic schemes as
free public libraries, universal educa-
tion, and care for the poor. For Gura,
the Civil War, in addressing the ca-
lamitous institution of slavery at the
heart of American capitalism, taught
Americans that their social problems
were of such a scale that they could
not be addressed by the example of a
few divinely inspired reformers, and
required pragmatism and compromise
instead.
4.
And yet, the utopian impulse to cre-
ate a more perfect society apart from
its corrupt surroundings did not van-
ish with the Civil War, as Erik Reece
makes clear in Utopia Drive, his engag-
ing road trip through Americas most
radical idea. Oneida and Owens New
Harmony are on Reeces itinerary; so is
Walden Pond, and the Shaker commu-
nity at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, near
Reeces home. Im not a social sci-
entist, Reece confesses disarmingly;
Im a guy with a truck, a gas card,
and a few boxes of old books shifting
around in the cab. But Reece also ex-
plores more recent attempts to live in
an alternative, utopian way.
It was only in the back-to-the-land
movement of the late 1960s and the
early 1970s that one encounters any-
thing like a mushrooming of utopian
communities to match the 1840s. Ac-
cording to Kate Daloz, who grew up on
a commune in northern Vermont and
has written a history of the phenom-
enon, the 1970s remain the only mo-
ment in the nations history when more
people moved to rural areas than into
the cities, briefly reversing two hundred
years of steady urbanization. The rea-
sons are well known:
In the shadow of the Vietnam War
and amidst widespread social up-
heaval, this ever-present American
urge to reinvent ourselves in the
wilderness spiked into its largest,
most influential and most radi-
cal manifestation ever. That de-
cade, as many as a million young
Americans uprooted themselves,
almost en masse, abandoning their
urban and suburban backgrounds
in favor of a life in the countryside.
Jennings is dismissive of this second
wave of utopian ferment, arguing that
the aspirations of the hippie commu-
Subscribe to
nards were categorically different from
those of their utopian forebears, and
that while
the communalists of the sixties
and seventies tried (and often suc-
ceeded) to build strongholds of
cooperation, pleasure, and con-
sciousness amid the mercantile bus-
tle of American life, they seldom
described their communities as le-
vers of millenarian transformation.
This seems both overstated and mean-
spirited. Surely the dwellers on com-
munes around 1970 were hoping to be
levers of social (if not millenarian)
transformation.
An 1879 caricature of the critics of Oneida, the utopian community in central New York
founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 and dissolved in 1881
One of Reeces best chapters is set at
Twin Oaks, in Louisa, Virginia, a back-
to-the-land experiment founded in
1967, which he calls one of the coun-
trys most stable sustainable communi-
ties. The residents of Twin Oaks hold
land, labor, and income in common,
advocate nonviolence and ecological
sustainability, and make decisions in
a direct, consensual manner. They live
lightly on the land, sharing the work
a required forty-two hours a weekof
farming and maintaining buildings and
property. As at Oneida, subsistence
agriculturesupplemented by dump-
stered beef from the wasteful main-
stream society they proudly shunis
insufficient to support the community,
and Twin Oaks has developed a flour-
ishing trade in hammocks and tofu.
At Twin Oaks, interestingly, Reece
finds evidence of some of the same
conflictsmarriage versus looser af-
filiations, for examplethat bedev-
iled utopian communities of the past.
Echoing Hawthornes Coverdale, he
identifies the nub of the whole utopia
problem: What do you do when some-
one elses idea of paradise conflicts
The New York Review of Books
on the Web: www.nybooks.com
with your own? One young woman
tells Reece that when she first came
to Twin Oaks, she was ecstatic to be
living around such cool people and in
such a cool place, but she soon came
to realize that a lot of my friends here
are just as depressed as my friends back
in graduate school.
Across the long history of Ameri-
can utopian yearnings, experiments in
communal living like Twin Oaks seem
to have had their primary appeal for
young peoplenot the very young, but
those who have had their first bruis-
ing encounter with things as they are.
Such dreamers have, in Hawthornes
words, gone through such an experi-
ence as to disgust them with ordinary
Granger
pursuits, but . . .were not yet so old, nor
had suffered so deeply, as to lose their
faith in the better time to come.
Today, as is becoming increasingly
clear, we have another generation ap-
palled by what it sees, in the failure of
its leaders to address the threat of cli-
mate change or the grotesque income
disparity of our wildcat economy. Inter-
est in the utopian communities of the
past, from young writers like Jennings
and Reece, may be a signal of social
experiments yet to come in Trumps
America and after. To say that these
communities no longer exist, Reece
writes of the communes of the 1840s,
is not the same thing as saying that
they failed. The angel of history may
yet salvage their blueprints from the
detritus of the past. Because, after all,
we still need these ideas so badly. In
his assessment of the contemporary
relevance of utopian visionaries, Jen-
nings is more elliptical but no less in-
sistent: Their disregard for the world
as it is guaranteed that they didnt
survive long. Our disregard for the
world as it might be could prove just as
grave.
The New York Review
 How Smart Women Got the Chance
Keep the Damned Women Out:
The Struggle for Coeducation
by Nancy Weiss Malkiel.
Princeton University Press,
646 pp., $35.00
In encounters with undergraduates at
Yale, where I teach, it occasionally comes
up in conversation that until 1969,
when 284 women were admitted to the
class of 1973, Yale College was for men
only. The response I get, from young
women and men alike, is one of incredu-
lity. We had no idea, they tell me.
And indeed, why would
they? Yale, along with the other
Ivy League universities, ad-
mits roughly equal numbers of
men and women today. At these
schools, women run the student
newspapers, play varsity sports,
compete on equal footing for the
most prestigious postgraduate fel-
lowships. Women are serving or
have served as presidents of more
than half the Ivies. Besides, 1969
is long ago on the time horizon of
a college undergraduate. I gradu-
ated from the college then known
as Radcliffe in 1968. Anyone who
might have referred then to an
episode of Radcliffe or Harvard
history from an equivalently long
time beforethat is to say, from
1920would have seemed a faint
voice from an irrelevant antiquity.
Nancy Weiss Malkiels Keep
the Damned Women Out, a
painstakingly detailed account
of how coeducation came to
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,
is an invaluable antidote to the
amnesia that has come to envelop the
subject. More than that, it is an impor-
tant work of cultural history. It seems
a truism to observe that so profound
a change could not have occurred in a
vacuum, and Malkiel takes full account
of the social and political revolutions
that were convulsing the country in the
1960s. But she digs deeper to show how,
as the decade neared its end, the lead-
ers of Yale and Princeton realized that
the mission these institutions had long
assigned themselves of producing the
nations leaders would soon be unsus-
tainable in the absence of coeducation.
An emeritus professor of history at
Princeton, where she served as dean
of the college for twenty-four years,
Malkiel writes with an insiders knowl-
edge of her own institution and from a
historians meticulous reconstruction
of what happened at the others, using
official archives, oral histories, and her
own interviews of the participants. Her
account dovetails with Jerome Kara-
bels important 2005 book, The Cho-
sen: The Hidden History of Admission
and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton.
But while Karabels hidden his-
tory dwells on the contortions these
schools went through in order to main-
tain themselves as preserves for white
Anglo- Saxon Protestants before that
goal became untenable, Malkiels story
of coeducation played out largely in the
public eye. And no wonder: it was so-
cially acceptable to have a public con-
versation about excluding women long
after the inventive strategies these uni-
versities used to keep Jews out could
April 6, 2017
Linda Greenhouse
no longer be discussed openly. (For an
enlightening account of that subject,
see Dan A. Orens 1985 book, Joining
the Club: A History of Jews and Yale.)
Up until the year before the first cohort
of female undergraduates arrived at
Yale, the freshman handbook included
this passage, as it had for years: Treat
Yale as you would a good woman; take
advantage of her many gifts, nourish
yourself with the fruit of her wisdom,
curse her if you will, but congratulate
yourself in your possession of her.
Students graduating from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1962
It would be uplifting to be able to
recount that an epiphany had struck
Presidents Kingman Brewster of Yale
and Robert Goheen of Princeton in the
late 1960s, revealing to them that the
leadership class they were dedicated
to producingreplicating, really
might actually include women. But as
Malkiel shows, these universities and
their leaders were responding not to
womens interests, but to their own.
Yale and Princeton were beginning to
lose the applicants they most wanted,
young men of the greatest academic
and nonacademic talents, who in grow-
ing numbers were turning down offers
of admission in order to attend such
coeducational colleges as the Univer-
sity of Chicago, which began admit-
ting women shortly after its founding
in 1892. In the spring of 1968, 132 men
whom Princeton had admitted to the
class of 1972 said no thanks and went
to Harvard. In early 1967, Brewster,
then in the midst of courting Vassar
College to relocate to New Haven, told
more than one thousand Yale alumni
that our concern is not so much what
Yale can do for women but what can
women do for Yale. At about the same
time, Goheen explained to a Princeton
alumnus that without coeducation,
Princeton would inevitably become a
second-rate institution.
In a somewhat different category,
Harvard plays a vital onstage and
offstage part in Malkiels account.
Harvard had long assumed responsibil-
ity for educating the female students
admitted by and housed at Radcliffe
College, founded in 1879 as the Har-
vard Annex. Classroom instruction
had been coeducational since the late
1940s. The arrangement between the
separately endowed institutions was an
awkward one, with the ratio of male to
female students fixed at 4:1. Numerous
Harvard opportunities including, bi-
zarrely, access to the undergraduate li-
brary, were kept off-limits to Radcliffe
women. But with all its odd features,
the arrangement did offer Harvard
men the experience of coeducation
and made Harvard a magnet for grow-
ing numbers of the applicants Yale and
Princeton wanted.
Harvard began to award degrees to
Radcliffe graduates in 1963 and finally
merged with Radcliffe in 1999, with
Radcliffe becoming an institute for ad-
vanced study and retaining a few of the
colleges prized assets, most notably
the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger
Library on the History of Women in
America. That denouement is outside
the period Malkiels book deals with,
and she mentions it, and the delicate ne-
gotiations that preceded it, only in pass-
ing. But she finds much of interest in the
excruciating minuet that the two insti-
tutions engaged in during the more than
thirty years that led to that moment.
Both President Nathan Pusey of
Harvard and President Mary Ingraham
Polly Bunting of Radcliffe would
have happily agreed on a merger by
the late 1960s, with Bunting persuaded
that it was the only path to full equality
for female undergraduates. But Rad-
cliffes board and alumnae leadership
were afraid that Harvard would simply
swallow Radcliffe and its proud legacy
without a trace. One board member
recounted: We went around the table stem the tide, writing to the head of
giving our impressions of how we felt
about it and I, somehow, pulled myself
up and thought to myself: Who am I
to be sitting here at the demise of Rad-
cliffe College? So Puseys and Bun- why we feel we should necessarily con-
tings successors were left to approach
the goal obliquely. Every intermediate
step was complicated, even merging
the two schools admissions offices; it
turned out that the highest-paid em-
ployee in the Radcliffe office had the
same salary as the lowest-paid person
on the Harvard side.
O ne way or another, men and women
would keep going to classes together at
Harvard, as they had for decades, even
without being able to study side by side
in the library until 1967. The heart of
Malkiels story takes place at Yale and
Princeton. (She also touches on the
rocky arrival of coeducation at Dart-
mouth. The books title comes from a
letter sent by a Dartmouth alum-
Patricia Hollander Gross/Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
nus to the board of trustees while
coeducation was being debated:
For Gods sake, for Dartmouths
sake and for everyones sake, keep
the damned women out.) Unlike
Harvard and Radcliffe, Princeton
and Yale didnt have thirty years
to ponder the question. Both
Presidents Goheen and Brewster
regarded the matter as urgent,
with the time for finding a path-
way to coeducation to be mea-
sured in months, not years.
In the fall of 1967, Goheen and
his provost (and eventual succes-
sor), William G. Bowen, set up
a faculty committee to study the
question. Part of the committees
mission was to interview Princeton
faculty members who had experi-
ence with coeducation. As Mal-
kiel describes the questions they
considered, what comes through
is ignorance laced with panic:
What difference did having
men and women in the class-
room make in terms of class
participation? Was there any va-
lidity to the oft-repeated asser-
tion that bright girls play dumb
in classes with men? Did coeduca-
tion increase the level of mens par-
ticipation so that they would avoid
appearing dumb in front of the
women? Was a greater variety of
approaches and viewpoints voiced
in coeducational classes? How did
the presence of students of both
sexes affect student preparation,
instructor preparation, and the
quality of teaching? Were men re-
luctant to enroll in, or attracted to,
classes with substantial numbers
of women? And what of womens
inclinations with respect to classes
with substantial numbers of men?
Were women more demanding
than men of time in office hours?
In other words, was life as we know
it about to change, and for the worse?
Some important members of the
Princeton administration thought
so. Arthur J. Horton, the universitys
director of development and a 1942
graduate, did everything he could to
the faculty committee: Im not against
females, not against the idea of higher
education for them, not against their
role in the country. I just dont see
cern ourselves with educating a few of
them at what he called the very real
risk of spoiling the esprit that made
Princeton Princeton.
Other obstacles came in the form of
alumni and current studentsyoung
21
men who, after all, had made the ex-
plicit and increasingly countercultural
choice to attend a single-sex college.
Samuel A. Alito Jr., a member of the
class of 1972, would later join an orga-
nization called Concerned Alumni of
Princeton and would use this affiliation
as a conservative credential when he
applied for a job in the Reagan Justice
Department in 1985. Malkiel doesnt
mention this, but she does discuss the
organization at some length, describing
its viewpoint as:
Everything about the new Prince-
ton was troubling: not only co-
education and the admission of
significant members of black stu-
dents but also the increasing em-
phasis on drawing students from
more modest socioeconomic back-
grounds and from public schools,
the downplaying of the admission
of alumni sons, campus protests
over the Vietnam War, the retreat
from ROTC, and a philosophical
imbalance that tilted toward left-
ists and liberal-radical[s] among
the faculty.
Challenged during his 2006 Su-
preme Court confirmation hearing by
Democratic senators who read aloud
inflammatory passages from the orga-
nizations magazine, Alito testified that
he didnt remember having joined.
Princeton invited female high school
seniors to apply for admission to the
class of 1973. But as applications
poured in by the hundreds during the
spring of 1969, when admissions deci-
sions would have to be made, the out-
come of the boards deliberations on
Matt Magee
5XQH, 2011
Oil on panel, 48 x 24 inches
hirambutler.com
22
coeducation remained so uncertain
that the admissions office prepared two
sets of letters: one, to thank applicants
for their interest but tell them that the
admission of women had not yet been
authorized, and the other, accepting or
rejecting applicants in the usual man-
ner. Finally, in mid-April, the board
voted overwhelmingly to go ahead with
coeducation, encouraged by the knowl-
edge that Yale had already decided to
do the same thing. (Malkiel also looks
across the Atlantic at the admission of
women to formerly all-male colleges at
the Universities of Oxford and Cam-
bridge. The process there went more
smoothly because of institutional dif-
ferences that spared individual colleges
from having to deal with boards and
alumni on the question.)
In later chapters, Malkiel makes it
clear that a seat in the classroom was
just the beginning for these young
pioneers who had ventured into an
alien landscape. Yale had two ten-
ured women on its faculty. Princeton
had given tenure to its first woman a
year earlier (informing her of the suc-
cessful tenure vote with a letter that
began Dear Sir). A female student
who asked the head of Yales history
department about offering a course in
womens history was told, That would
be like teaching the history of dogs. A
Princeton English professor responded
to a female student who wanted to write
a paper on women writers: Im inter-
ested in auto mechanics, but I dont try
to bring that into the curriculum.
But these women were tough, and
proved themselves soon enough. In
Princetons first coeducational class of
1973, women were 18 percent of the
class but 32 percent of those elected
to Phi Beta Kappa, and the captain of
the womens tennis team was deemed
Princetons Best Athlete on the
cover of the alumni magazine.
If that were the end of the story, we
could all breathe a sigh of relief and
turn the page. But there is much more
to say. The admission of women to the
Ivy League had serious consequences
for the single-sex colleges that had pre-
viously attracted many of the brightest
women. Malkiel looks closely at the im-
pact on Smith and Wellesley, which have
survived as womens colleges, and on
Vassar, which might once have struck a
deal with Yale and in the end turned to
coeducation as a survival strategy. Its
also clear all these years later that there
is still a good deal to learn about cre-
ating a classroom and campus environ-
ment in which young women can thrive.
The questions the Princeton faculty
committee confronted in 1968 have yet
to be fully answered.
In a sobering epilogue, Malkiel ob-
serves that coeducation has not re-
solved longstanding complexities in the
relations between men and women.
Sexual harassment and assault on cam-
pus are rather recent arrivals to the
news columns, but they are not new
phenomena. The roots of this behavior
are deep. Early in the coeducation ex-
perience at Dartmouth,
Men sitting on the roof of Mas-
sachusetts Hall shouted numbers
from one to ten as women students
walked bywith the numbers
meant as ratings of the womens at-
tractiveness. The same happened
in the dining hall, where men held
up signs bearing numerical rat-
ings as if you had just completed
a dive. One woman reflected,
No matter how cool you were,
no matter how self-possessed you
were as a woman and mind you a
lot of us were 18 at the time it was
devastating.
Fast forward two generations, and we
have Harvards discovery last fall that
members of its mens cross- country and
soccer teams had for years been issu-
ing crude and sexualized rankings of
many women. The university canceled
the soccer season and put the cross-
country team on probation. Similar
behavior came to light at other univer-
sities. Harvard has also wrestled with
the problem of sexual assault on the
premises of the private all-male clubs
that exist without official university
recognition while continuing to have
an outsized part in undergraduate so-
cial life.
Incidents like these provide a foot-
note, at once poignant and maddening,
to a comment a Yale undergraduate
made to the Yale Daily News in 1968,
explaining why he favored coeduca-
tion. At an all-male college, this young
man said,
You get entangled in a weekend-
to-weekend existence, and you
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become a product of it. You lose
sight of the simple fact that girls
are people, just like you and me.
Instead they become things to play
with on allotted days. Things.
That was an accurate description of the
problem, surely, but it also expressed a
naive belief in coeducation as the cure.
All too often on all too many cam-
puses, it appears, women are still seen
as they were back then: as things.
With some 6,900 accredited postsec-
ondary educational institutions in the
country, one might question Malkiels
focusand Karabels before heron a
tiny handful of elite institutions. Surely
the contemporaneous integration of
women into the flagship state univer-
sities in North Carolina and Virginia
has symbolic as well as practical signifi-
cance, to speak nothing of the arrival
of women as cadets and midshipmen
at the service academies a few years
later. True enough. But Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton are not only leaders in
American higher education; they have
the power to set priorities and define
the purposes of education. Even if their
motivation was largely self-interested
a bow to the inevitable, a reflection of
a changing world rather than a desire
to effect changetheir admission of
women told the world that at least as a
formal matter, women belonged. The
recent sexual assault scandalsalong
with the continuing severe underrepre-
sentation of women among university
teachersshow us how much work still
needs to be done.
Coeducation, Malkiel observes, ac-
companied, but did not cause, more
profound social transformations in
these colleges and universities. Re-
ferring to increased diversity along ra-
cial and ethnic lines, she adds: Elite
education became less aristocratic and
more democratic/meritocraticagain,
in parallel with, but not as a result of,
coeducation. Keeping their doors
closed to women was simply unsustain-
able for institutions at risk of becoming
anachronisms.
As I finished reading Keep the
Damned Women Out, I thought back
to my own graduation from Radcliffe
in 1968. Our small commencement cer-
emonythere were only three hundred
women in the classwas held in the
Radcliffe yard, a few blocks from the
thousands gathered in Harvard Yard
for the university commencement.
Our graduation speaker was Walter E.
Washington, the mayor of Washington,
D.C., great-grandson of a slave and the
father of a classmate who was one of the
handful of African-American students.
The Harvard mens graduation
speaker was the Shah of Iran. In pomp
and ceremony, we were far outshone.
Some of us, the white armbands on our
robes signifying opposition to the war
in Vietnam, even felt a little cheated.
The Harvard ceremony up the street
was unfolding on a world stage. Ours
seemed by contrast small bore, domes-
tic if you will. But it now occurs to me
to ask of these two long-ago events:
Which represented the past, and which
the future?
The New York Review

Known and Strange Things:
Essays
by Teju Cole.
Random House, 393 pp., $17.00 (paper)
Teju Cole is a kind of realm. He has
written three bookstwo exceptional
novels and the volume of essays to be
considered hereas well as many un-
collected essays, interviews, newspa-
per columns, and a vast online oeuvre
made up of skeins of tweets on fixed
themes, faits divers, e-mail arguments,
captioned Instagrams, mixed media ex-
ercises, and rants. At the moment he is
credited with more than 13,000 tweets,
263,000 Twitter followers, 1,035 pho-
tos, and around 22,000 fans who offi-
cially like his Facebook page. Even in a
time when many writers are enlarging
their literary footprints by means of the
Internet, he is a prodigy.
There is a strong interconnected-
ness between the different parts of his
work. Coles personal story, sometimes
given straight, sometimes fictionalized,
pervades. The bicultural Teju Cole was
born in the US in 1975, raised in Nige-
ria until his seventeenth year, brought
back to America where he first studied
art and attended medical school, and
then went abroad to study African art
history; he later studied Northern Ren-
aissance art at Columbia. His initial
novels brought him a storm of prizes
and attention. He is currently a writer
in residence at Bard College and the
photography critic for The New York
Times Magazine and is himself an ex-
hibiting photographer. Cole has said in
an interview that the essays on photog-
raphy in this collection, which also col-
lects many of his writings on literature,
travel, politics, and art, are the most
important of his writings.
Cole is very conscious of the differ-
ence between what one might think
of as books aimed at a presumed pos-
terity and his online works, aimed at
a real-time and frequently interactive
fandom. He discusses this subject in a
conversation with the novelist Alek-
sandar Hemon in the first group of
essays in Known and Strange Things.
For sure, he says,
some of the smartest and most
interesting literary minds of our
generation and the generations to
come will work in areas that are
not books as we currently think
of them. . . . But I think some of
these people will also write books.
Coles essays are brilliantly writ-
tensharp, intelligentand yield a
pleasurable sweetness. His prose, in
its variations, is impeccably where he
wants it to be. His erudition is put to
work humbly. But in encountering
these essays, perhaps the most impor-
tant quality to grasp is Coles deep
sense of the seriousness of life, which is
sustained in different registers through-
out. Rotating through his composi-
tions, and sometimes shouldering aside
their announced subjects, is an array of
thematic problems routinely confound-
ing to the educated secular leftcentric
urban readerships of today. Here are
two examples among the many that
Cole discusses. One: In a world that
is post-credal, post-religion, and post-
April 6, 2017
A Burning Collection
Norman Rush
Teju Cole on the outskirts of Ramallah during the Palestine Festival of Literature,
June 2014
socialism, in what should humanism be
grounded? Two: When liberal empires
engage in overseas criminality, what
are the responsibilities of that empires
domestic beneficiariesthe lucky, the
talented, the wealthy?
1.
The Literary Sublime
The balance favors epiphany.
Teju Cole
From A Conversation with Aleksan-
dar Hemon:
AH: Where do you stand in rela-
tion to transcendence? Do you
pursue it? Must we pursue it?
TC: As for faith: I dont believe in
the Christian god, or the Muslim
one, or the Jewish one. Im senti-
mentally attached to some of the
Yoruba and Greek gods . . . though
I dont ask them for favors.
What do I believe in? Imagina-
tion, gardens, science, poetry, love,
and a variety of nonviolent conso-
lations. I suspect that in aggregate
all this isnt enough, but its where
I am for now.
The pieces in Section I, Reading
Things, introduce a selection of the
works of some of the creators of Coles
personal literary sublime. He says,
of Andr Acimans discriminations
among the varieties of lavender, found
in his book of essays, Alibis, something
that might apply equally to his own
work: The pleasure of reading him re-
sides in the pleasure of his company.
He praises Acimans thoroughness,
calling Alibis an extended aria on the
sense of smell. In Ivan Vladislavis
novel Double Negative, Cole finds an
artist who successfully brings the detail
of photographic high art to life in his
narrative.
Cole gets to the heart of Derek Wal-
cotts poetry: Epiphany became Wal-
cotts favorite mode, his instinct, even
as he struggled to satisfy each poems
competing demands of originality and
necessity. He reveres the art of W.G.
Sebald, and not only the novelistic
Rob Stothard
works. He provides a concentrated en-
comium for Sebalds lesser-known ex-
cursions into poetry. In an emotional,
but not maudlin, essay he describes
a visit to Sebalds grave. His atten-
tions to poetry here conclude with an
acute, tender, and comradely tribute to
the somber Tomas Transtrmer: In a
Transtrmer poem, you inhabit space
differently; a body becomes a thing, a
mind floats, things have lives, and even
non-things, even concepts, are alive.
The essay Black Body is a tour de
force, an appreciation of James Bald-
win in his prophetic modes, which
touches on what Cole calls Baldwins
question of filiation, that is, his con-
flicted relationship to classic works
from the canon of the oppressing cul-
ture. Cole wrestles with his own variant
of this perennial trouble. On the sub-
ject of difficult-to-mix feelings, Cole
is clear-sighted. He meets with V. S.
Naipaul:
This benevolent rheumy-eyed old
soul: so fond of the word nigger,
so aggressive in his lack of sym-
pathy toward Africa, so brutal in
his treatment of women. He knew
nothing about that. He knew only
that he needed . . . help walking
across the grand marble-floored
foyer toward the private elevator.
The tale of this encounter coexists with
another essay wholeheartedly endors-
ing Naipauls great A House for Mr.
Biswas as a lasting work of imagina-
tive sympathy.
For their artfulness, intelligence,
and candor, Coles essays on writing
all have something fresh. The next-to-
the-last piece in the Reading Things
section is a compressed presentation
(in the spirit, as Cole acknowledges,
of Flauberts Dictionary of Received
Ideas) of the bromides and clichs that
corrupt literary and political discourse
and block the powers of written art.
For example: SCANDAL . If govern-
mental, express suprise that people are
surprised. If sexual, declare it a distrac-
tion, but seek out the details.
T he group of essays called Seeing
Things pursues instances of sublime
experience apart from literature. The
first of them, Unnamed Lake, is a
composite creationpart personal
essay; part reflection on twentieth-
century history; part criticism about
music and philosophyexamining the
repressed horror that floats over a mag-
nificent performance of Beethovens
Ninth Symphony. Cole is listening to
a recording of a particularly brilliant
realization of the work in 1942 by Wil-
helm Furtwngler:
The adagio is clear and tender,
played slower than usual. . . . No
one who heard it could have failed
to be moved to human kindness.
Could they? (In addition to Hitler,
both Himmler and Goebbels are
in the audience.) . . .
The previous week, on March 17,
a Nazi camp had begun operation
in Belzec, southeastern Poland.
After this comes a miscellany of
appreciations of the Kenyan sculp-
tor Wangechi Mutu, the filmmaker
Michael Haneke for his film Amour,
a Royal Shakespeare Company per-
formance of Julius Caesar by a black
cast, the music of the Australian com-
poser Peter Sculthorpe. Cole has his
eye on instances of art whose power to
move may not have been appreciated.
He writes about a picture of a young
woman in a freedom march by Roy
DeCarava,
one of the most intriguing and po-
etic of American photographers.
The power of this picture is in the
loveliness of its dark areas. His
work was, in fact, an exploration of
just how much could be seen in the
shadowed parts of a photograph.
The essays on photography do triple
duty. Overall, they argue for elevating
photography to a level equal to that of
the other graphic and plastic arts. They
give prominence to master photog-
raphers such as DeCarava. And they
refine the measures used to make dis-
criminations regarding quality among
specimens of photographic art. Cole
is convincing here, but certain parts
of the discussiondiscriminations
of opacity in DeCaravas work, for
examplestruck me as rather more
metaphysical than is usual for him. A
much fuller complement of representa-
tive plates would have been helpful; the
works of Zanele Muholi, Thomas De-
mand, Sergei Ilnitsky, Malick Sidib,
Seydou Keita, and Glenna Gordon will
have a different luster when they are
encountered in future.
2.
Being There:
Travel, and Then Politics
Robert Owen, the great patriarch of
socialism, was asked what we would do
once Utopia was established. His reply
was: We shall travel. For Cole, travel
itself can yield a kind of second-order
sublime. Strictly concerning the anat-
omy of travel, Cole has much to say:
When you do visit Zrich or
Cape Town or Bangkok, they are
23
 very much alike: the amusement
parks have striking similarities,
the cafs all play the same Bra-
zilian music, the malls are inter-
changeable, kids on the school
buses resemble one another,
and the interiors of middle- class
homes conform to the same
parameters.
This doesnt mean the world is
uninteresting. It only means that
the world is more uniform than
most photo essays acknowledge. . . .
I like Italo Calvinos idea of con-
tinuous cities, as described in
the novel Invisible Cities. He sug-
gests that there is actually just one
big, continuous city that does not
begin or end: Only the name of
the airport changes. What is then
interesting is to find, in that conti-
nuity, the less obvious differences
of texture: the signs, the markings,
the assemblages, the things hiding
in plain sight in each cityscape or
landscape.
So travel requires discipline and self-
awareness and an awareness of travels
limitations, like Heimweh and Fern-
weh. Heimweh is the German word for
homesickness. It can of course strike at
any time and screw up an experience.
Fernweh is a longing to be away from
home, a desire to be in faraway places.
Fernweh is similar to wanderlust but,
like heimweh, has a sickish, melancholy
tinge. It too can strike at any time. To
illustrate Fernweh, he quotes Elizabeth
Bishop:
Should we have stayed at home
and thought of here?
...
What childishness is it that while
theres a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined
to rush
to see the sun the other way
around?
Something deeper than travel con-
nects these essays in the third section
of Coles book, called Being There.
If its fair to see Cole as engaged in
a complicated process of assembling
his own brand of aesthetic human-
ism (for want of a better term), then
his small histories can be perceived
as testing events for his evolving
ethos.
Take A Readers War, which is
an essay sandwiched between pieces
about travel but is not about travel
as such. It is one of two essays built
around Coles consideration of Barack
Obama. Heres the thought sequence in
A Readers War. One:
Thanks to literature, to the con-
sciousness it shapes, the desires
and longings it inspires . . . civiliza-
tion is now less cruel than when
storytellers began to humanize
life with their fables. This de-
fense, made by Mario Vargas
Llosa when he received the Nobel
Prize in Literature . . . , could have
come from any other writer. It is,
in fact, . . . a clich. But clichs, so
the clich goes, originate in truth.
Vargas Llosa reiterated the point:
Without fictions, we would be less
aware of the importance of free-
dom for life to be livable, the hell it
turns into when it is trampled un-
derfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or
a religion.
24
Two:
There was a feeling during the
years of George W. Bushs presi-
dency that his gracelessness as
well as his appetite for war were
linked to his impatience with com-
plexity. . . . His successor couldnt
have been more different. Barack
Obama is an elegant and literate
man with a cosmopolitan sense of
the world. He is widely read in phi-
losophy, literature, and history . . .
and he has shown time and again
a surprising interest in contem-
porary fiction. . . . It thrilled me,
when he was elected, to think of
the presidents nightstand looking
Teju Cole: Zrich, 2014; from Blind Spot, a collection of Coles photographs and texts,
to be published by Random House in June, with a foreword by Siri Hustvedt.
It will be on view in the exhibition Teju Cole: Blind Spot and Black Paper,
at the Steven Kasher Gallery, New York City, June 15August 11, 2017.
rather similar to mine. . . . We had,
once again, a reader in chief.
Three:
The United States is now at war in
all but name in Pakistan, Soma-
lia, and Yemen. In pursuit of Al
Qaeda, their allies, and a number
of barely related militias, the presi-
dent and his national security team
now make extraordinarily fre-
quent use of assassinations. . . . The
White House, CIA, and the Joint
Special Operations Command
have so far killed large numbers
of people. . . . The precise number
is unknown, but estimates range
from several hundred to over three
thousand. . . . Many of the dead are
women and children. Among the
men, it is impossible to say how
many are terrorists, how many are
militants, and how many are sim-
ply, to use the administrations ob-
scene designation, young men of
military age. . . .There is also the
testimony of the survivors of drone
attacks: heartbreaking stories of
mistaken identity. . . . The plain
fact is that our leaders have been
killing at will.
How on earth did this happen to
the reader in chief? What became
of literatures vaunted power to in-
spire empathy?
Four:
I know language is unreliable . . .
but the law seems to be getting us
nowhere. And so I take helpless
refuge in literature again, rewrit-
ing the opening lines of seven well- Finally, and not to be missed, there
known books: is The White Savior Industrial Com-
plex, a revised version of a 2012 essay
Mrs Dalloway said she would in which Cole reflects on the furious
buy the flowers herself. Pity. and now notorious polemic he deliv-
A signature strike leveled the ered in a string of tweets earlier that
florists. year (setting off much comment across
the media):
Call me Ishmael. I was a young
man of military age. I was im- 1. From Sachs to Kristof to Invis-
molated at my wedding. My ible Children to TED, the fastest
parents are inconsolable. growth industry in the US is the
White Savior Industrial Complex.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan
came from the stairhead bear- 2. The white savior supports bru-
ing a bowl of lather. A bomb tal policies in the morning, founds
whistled in. Blood on the charities in the afternoon, and re-
walls. Fire from heaven. ceives awards in the evening.
Teju Cole/Steven Kasher Gallery
3. The banality of evil transmutes
into the banality of sentimentality.
The world is nothing but a problem
to be solved by enthusiasm.
4. This world exists simply to sat-
isfy the needsincluding, impor-
tantly, the sentimental needsof
white people and Oprah.
5. The White Savior Industrial
Complex is not about justice. It is
about having a big emotional expe-
rience that validates privilege.
6. Feverish worry over that awful
African warlord. But close to 1.5
million Iraqis died from an Ameri-
can war of choice. Worry about
that.
7. I deeply respect American sen-
timentality, the way one respects a
wounded hippo. You must keep an
eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
I am an invisible man. My The occasion for Coles polemic was
name is unknown. My loves the documentary Kony 2012, a video
are a mystery. But an un- that he felt neglected the contributions
manned aerial vehicle . . . has of the white West to the creation of the
come for me from an unknown conditions enabling the appearance of
location. the macabre Lords Resistance Army.
(Concerning Coles first and sixth
Someone must have slandered points, it should be noted that Nicho-
Josef K., for one morning, las Kristof was an early critic of the
without having done anything war in Iraq, and that in 2002 Jeffrey
truly wrong, he was killed by a Sachs cautioned against pursuing war
Predator drone. [in Iraq] where diplomatic means . . .
might suffice.) I read the manifesto
Okonkwo was well known as a kind of berserk attempt by Cole
throughout the nine villages to get at the Gordian knot of his feel-
and even beyond. His torso ings about Western altruism and West-
was found, not his head. ern death and destruction. His readers
may, I think, find the same knot, some-
Mother died today. The pro- where. This bracing provocation is now
gram saves American lives. permanently part of the discourse on
Western development and charitable
Understandably, this conceit of Teju aid. Elsewhere, Cole is at work on
Coles has become famous. other current social causespardon
for Snowden, reform of the immigra-
tion process, the still-missing Chibok
Cole is an accomplished observer of girls.
himself as a political animal. Indepen- Known and Strange Things ends
dent Nigeria has gravely disappointed with Coles account, in a coda essay,
him. His travel writing about the land of a frightening visit to his doctor in
he grew up in combines travelogue, response to a totally unexpected at-
accounts of homecoming, and disgust tack of papillophlebitis, also referred
at the present state of Nigerian pub- to as big blind spot syndrome. It is
lic life. (He is at work on a nonfiction an idiopathic disease that comes and
study of modern Nigeria.) Coles third goes and that brings episodes of partial
world may be beautiful in places, but it blindness. His vision is clear at present.
is sad. Interestingly, what hope exists My own deep hope is that this does not
seems to arise primarily from unpre- happen again. I am sentimental about
dictable incarnations of the art im- Teju Cole and think of him as an emis-
pulsea privately funded jazz school sary for our best selves. He is sampling
in Nigeria; a Nigerian woman, solitary himself for our benefit, hoping for en-
and out of place, carrying a copy of a lightenment, and seeking to provide
novel by Michael Ondaatje under her pleasure to us through his art. May his
arm. realm expand.
The New York Review
 A Marvelous Moment for
French Writers and Artists
The Pen and the Brush:
How Passion for Art Shaped
Nineteenth-Century French Novels
by Anka Muhlstein,
translated from the French
by Adriana Hunter.
Other Press, 228 pp., $18.95
You see her from a distance, at the end
of a long enfilade of rooms. As you ap-
proach, you notice that she is already
turned toward you. She is in her forti-
fied underwear: a light blue bodice,
white slip, light blue stockings; in her
raised right hand, a powder puff like a
vast carnation. To the left, over a chair,
is the blue dress she will soon put on.
To the right, though you might not at
first observe him, is an impatient, mus-
tachioed figure in evening dress, his top
hat stillor alreadyon his head. But
once again, you are aware that she has
eyes only for you.
She is Manets Nana, in the Ham-
burg Kunsthalle, benefiting from a re-
cent rehang that makes her even more
of a cynosure. Nana is the courtesan
protagonist of Zolas 1880 novel of the
same name, and you might reason-
ably assume that Manets painting is,
apart from anything else, one of the
great book illustrations. But it is more
interesting than this. Nana first ap-
peared as a minor character in Zolas
LAssommoir (1877). Manet spotted
her there, and painted his portrait of
her. When Zola saw it, he realized that,
yes indeed, she was worth a novel in her
own right. So, far from Manet illustrat-
ing Zola, what actually happened was
that Zola was illustrating Manet.
The close friendship, interaction, and
parallelism between writers and artists
in nineteenth- century France are the
subject of Anka Muhlsteins The Pen
and the Brush. Balzac put more paint-
ers into his novels than he did writ-
ers, constantly name- checking artists
and using them as visual shorthand
(old men looked like Rembrandts, in-
nocent girls like Raphaels). Zola, as a
young novelist, lived much more among
painters than writers, and told Degas
that when he needed to describe laun-
dresses he had simply copied from the
artists pictures. Victor Hugo was a fine
Gothicky-Romantic artist in his own
right, and an innovative one too, mix-
ing onto his palette everything from
coffee grounds, blackberry juice, and
caramelized onion to spit and soot, not
to mention what his biographer Gra-
ham Robb tactfully terms even less
respectable materials.
Flauberts favorite living painter (also
that of Huysmanss Des Esseintes) was
Gustave Moreau, and his Salammb
is like a massive, bejeweled, wall-
threatening Salon exhibitthis being
both the novels strength and its weak-
ness. Baudelaire, Zola, Goncourt, Mau-
passant, and Huysmans were excellent
art critics (Monet thought Huysmans
the best of all). The subject is enor-
mous, and might threaten to go off in
every direction. What about photog-
raphy? And book illustration? And
sculpture? What about poets and pic-
tures, both real and imaginary? Anka
April 6, 2017
Julian Barnes
douard Manet: Nana, 1877
Muhlstein wisely limits herself to prose
writers, and to five who speak to her
most clearly: Balzac, Zola, Huysmans,
Maupassant, anda slight chrono-
logical cheatProust. The result is a
personal, compact, intense book that
provokes both much warm nodding
and occasional friendly disagreement.
O f all the arts, writers most envy
music, for being both abstract and im-
mediate, and also in no need of transla-
tion. But painting might come a close
second, for the way that the expres-
sion and the means of expression are
coterminouswhereas novelists are
stuck with the one- damn-thing-after-
another need for word and sentence
and paragraph and background and
psychological buildup in order to heft-
ily construct that climactic scene. On
the other hand, it is much easier for
writers (and composers, for that mat-
ter) to work in subtle, or not-so-subtle,
homages to other art forms than it is for
painters. Thus Zola gives a friendly nod
to Manet in his novel Thrse Raquin,
where a murdered girl in the morgue is
described as resembling a languishing
courtesan offering up her breasts to
us, while the black line around her neck
(evidence of strangulation) recalls the
black ribbon around the neck of Olym-
pia; just to confirm the homage, Zola
Kunsthalle Hamburg
also includes that rather sinister black
cat from the painting.
Zolas public support for Manet and
the Impressionists was loud and vigor-
ous, and came at just the right time.
(Sometimes there seems to be a logical
assembly of rallying forces, at others it
is a matter of fortune. When Tom Stop-
pard spoke at Kenneth Tynans funeral,
he addressed the critics children on
behalf of his own generation of play-
wrights: Your father, he told them,
was part of the luck we had.) Manet
certainly expressed hisequally pub-
licgratitude to Zola, painting a cel-
ebrated portrait of the novelist at his
desk: pinned on the wall behind is a
print of Olympia, and clearly visible on
the desk is Zolas pamphlet in praise
of the painter. Zola was a forceful,
detailed, and brightly colored critic,
though he didnt exactly deal in the
quiet hint; art was there to describe
and to change societyboth his and its
functions were combative. If the aes-
thetic argument shaded into the politi-
cal, so much the better.
And Zola could be just as keen on
having things both ways as his oppo-
nents were. In 1869, when Manets The
Execution of Emperor Maximilian was
about to be translated into mass-media
form as a lithograph, the authorities
banned it. The reasons were clear: the
event was a key moment of geopolitical
humiliation for Napoleon IIIs regime,
in which France had abandoned its
Mexican puppet to his fate. Zola, in an
unsigned article in La Tribune, piously
claimed (as had Manet) that the pic-
ture was totally nonpolitical, with the
subject treated from a purely artistic
point of view. When this didnt work,
four days later he was pointing out the
opposite: the cruel irony of Manets
picture, which could be read as France
shooting Maximilian (see illustration
on page 26).
So there was allusion, name-
checking, and boosterism, either dis-
creetly worked into fiction or overtly
shouted from newspapers. Balzacs
treatment of painters, as Muhlstein
points out, is much more admiring
than his treatment of his fellow writers.
Whereas Daniel dArthez, the most sig-
nificant writer he invented, is a cold,
gray, virtuous character . . . all his paint-
ers are jolly, attractive, unpredictable,
and often practical jokers. This hardly
applies, however, to the Balzacian
painter who made the most impact on
real-life artists: Frenhofer, the protago-
nist of The Unknown Masterpiece.
This twenty-page text sets the ficti-
tious Frenhofer (elderly, so inevitably
like a Rembrandt) against the estab-
lished, middle-aged Pourbuscourt
painter to Henri IVand the aspiring
young Poussin. Frenhofer, sole pupil
of Mabuse, is the driven genius with
impossibly high standards to whom
the others defer; for ten years he has
been secretly working on a portrait
that expresses all he has learned about
art. Poussin gulls him into showing it,
whereupon the supposed masterpiece
is revealedat least to Poussins and
Pourbuss eyesas haphazardly ac-
cumulated colors contained by a multi-
tude of peculiar lines, creating a wall of
paint. Either Frenhofers conception
of art is so lofty that it is untranslat-
able into pigment; or, perhaps, what he
has produced is so far ahead of its time
that it can be appreciated only centu-
ries later. In a rage (with himself, or the
others?), he destroys all his paintings,
and dies that night.
As a short story, it is somehow both
rickety and overdense; as a narrative
about the nature of art, it has a grasp-
ing intensity, which gave it the longest
afterlife of any art fiction of the cen-
tury. In his translation Anthony Ru-
dolf enumerates the recognition from,
and even influence over, Czanne, Pi-
casso, Giacometti, and de Kooning.
(The story was also a great favorite of
Karl Marx.) Picasso illustrated a livre
dartiste with choices that suggest, ac-
cording to Rudolf, that he might not
have read the text very carefully.
T he link between writers and art-
ists in nineteenth- century France was
strong and largely cordial. But some
writers went furtheror imagined, or
claimed, they did. Balzac described
himself as a literary painter. Muhl-
stein calls Zola a writer-painter.
Maupassant hymns the superiority of
painting over fiction (though he was
25
mainly talking about color). Proust is
in Muhlsteins eyes occasionally a kind
of Cubist. Muhlstein charts the sudden
irruption of the visual arts into the lives
of nonelite Parisians: first, by the open-
ing of the Louvre as a Central Museum
of Arts in 1793; later, by the arrival of
vast booty from Napoleons conquests
(and the tenacious holding on to it
after the empire fell). It was not just
the thrilling, democratic availability
of great art that excited writers; it was
also that painters were making it new
as much, if not more so, than writers.
So writers now looked at how paint-
ers looked. Though Muhlsteins claim
that the visual novel dates from this
period suggests too much. When was
the noveland before it, poetrynot
visual?
You could say, perhaps, that writers
look, whereas painters see. Muhlstein
tells of Proust telling of Ruskin tell-
ing of Turner: how the English painter
once did a drawing of some ships sil-
houetted against a bright sky and
showed it to a naval officer. The sailor
indignantly pointed out that the ships
portholes were missing; the painter
demonstrated that, given the light, they
were in fact invisible; the officer replied
that this might very well be the case,
but he knew that the portholes were
there. Writers look as hard as they can,
but they may well falsely remember a
porthole that is missing from the real-
ity in front of them. Whereas painters
have it both ways: they might Turner-
ishly omit the portholes, or choose to
put them in, because they can also see
what the rest of us cant.
Perhaps the social closeness of
French writers to painters in the
nineteenth century made some of
them think of themselves more self-
consciously as writer-painters. Some of
Muhlsteins examples are very striking.
So, Zola, in Une page damour (1877),
gives five different descriptions of the
same view of Paris, varying by time
of day and season: the link to Monets
(future) sequence-painting seems in-
escapable. (And he uses the same ploy
in LOeuvre.) Then there is his pictur-
ish fascination with mirrors; and the
way he justifies architectural anachro-
nism in a Parisian cityscape because
he needs the as-yet-unbuilt Opra
and the as-yet-unbuilt church of Saint-
Augustin to give visual structure to his
description.
But when, for instance, Muhlstein
notes parallels in Zola between the
representation of landscape and a
characters state of mind, this is not
something new to literature: this is
the Wordsworthian egotistical sub-
limeor, to take a more local ex-
ample, the pantheistic trance of Emma
Bovary after she has been seduced by
Rodolphe in the forest. Contact with
painters doubtless suggested new an-
gles of looking and tweaks of lighting.
But the books subtitleHow Passion that Balzac perhaps imagined Dela-
for Art Shaped Nineteenth- Century
French Novelsis overreaching. The
fact remains that we dont read Mau-
passant for the colors, or Zola for the
lighting. We read Zola for the psycho-
logical truth, the social observation,
and the tragic working-out of determin-
ism. Further, the world of Zolathat
Homer of the sewers, as the duchess
so jauntily puts it in la Rechercheis
essentially one of darkness; the world of
Impressionism essentially one of light.
While many of Frances nineteenth-
century painters, from Delacroix to
26
Monet to Czanne, were very well read,
and some of them drew inspiration from
literature, not many of themwith the
exception of Odilon Redon (Writing
is the greatest art)directly envied
the form. As for what they made of
their literary friends and supporters
work, there is often more nuance and
less full-heartedness in their response
than you might expect. Indeed, some,
like Van Gogh, writing in 1883, were
very unnuanced: Zola has this in com-
mon with Balzac, that he knows little
about painting. . . . Balzacs painters
are enormously tedious, very boring.
Balzac and Delacroix, who met around
18291830, initially had much admira-
tion for each another; Balzac dedicated
La Fille aux yeux dor to the painter,
and over the years Delacroix copied
into his journal twenty pages worth of
douard Manet: The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 18681869
quotes from Balzac, from thirteen dif-
ferent novels.
But a cooling- off happened around
1842, and thereafter Delacroixs opin-
ion of the novelist became harsher. By
1854, four years after Balzacs death,
the painter was fulminating into his
journal against the panegyrical pref-
ace to Le Provincial Paris, which
boasted of Balzacs colossal reputa-
tion and compared him to Molire.
(Delacroix seems not to have known
that The Editor was almost certainly
Balzac himself.) And the next day, the
painter went into detail: works like Eu-
gnie Grandet hadnt stood the test of
time, he wrote, because of the incur-
able imperfection of Balzacs talent.
No sense of balance, of structure, of
proportion.
You sense that Balzac was usually
the wooer, Delacroix the wooed. Also
croix to be an artist other than he was.
(When a flatterer congratulated him
on being the Victor Hugo of paint-
ing, Delacroix chilled him with the re-
sponse, You are mistaken, Monsieur,
I am a purely classical artist.) It was
Balzac, rather than the supposedly Ro-
mantic Delacroix, who was the more
constant dreamer. He imagined giving
his lover Mme Ha ska Delacroixs Les
Femmes dAlgerif only he could have
afforded it. One of his saddest dreams
took place in 1838 when, already on the
run from creditors, he decided to build
a country house called Les Jardies with
a view over the woods of Versailles.
His colossal initial plans were quickly
scaled back to a skinny three-storey
chalet, but within it, Balzac carried
on dreaming, with everything from
electric bells to a fireplace of Carrara
marble. And the decor? That too Bal-
zac had planned. As Robb explains in
his richly observed biography:
The walls were bare except for Bal-
zacs charcoal graffiti, which be-
came a permanent feature: Here
an Aubusson tapestry. Here
some doors in the Trianon style.
Here a ceiling painted by Eugne
Delacroix. Here a mosaic par-
quet made of all the rare woods
from the Islands. There was also a
charcoal Raphal facing a charcoal
Kunsthalle Mannheim
Titian and a charcoal Rembrandt,
none of which ever turned into
the real thing: all signifiers and no
signifieds.
Whether Delacroix knew he was
down to do a ceiling for the novelist is
doubtful.
As for Zola, his support for Manet
and the Impressionists was much more
public, and more publicity- conscious,
and the painters were properly grate-
ful. But their response to his LOeuvre
(1885), the centurys most famous novel
about art, was complicated. Its pro-
tagonist, Claude Lantierthe brother
of Nanahas a succs de scandale at
the Salon des Refuss, and founds a
plein-air school, but ends up sacrificing
fortune, wife, and child for his art. It
was loosely assumed for some time that
Lantier was based on Czanne (though
Lantier, like Zola, is a naturalist);
further, that the books publication
had caused a breach between the two
old friends. This theory was based on
the last-known letter from Czanne to
Zola, which reads in full:
Mon cher mile, Ive just received
LOeuvre, which you were kind
enough to send me. I thank the au-
thor of the Rougon-Macquart for
this kind token of remembrance,
and ask him to allow me to wish
him well, thinking of years gone
by. Ever yours, with the feeling of
time passing, Paul Cezanne
As Alex Danchev wisely comments in
his 2013 edition of the letters:
Czannes words have been
combed for any hint of telltale
emotionoffence, anger, antago-
nism, rancour, shock, sorrow, bit-
terness, or merely coolnessas if
the letter might contain the key to
the rift. This exercise in runecraft
has yielded remarkably little, ex-
cept for wildly varying assessments
of these few lines, and a tendency
to read back into them the knowl-
edge of what came later.
Indeed, its not even clear from
the letter whether Czanne had even
started reading the novel when he ac-
knowledged its arrival, let alone taken
any offense. And as it turned out, this
wasnt the painters last letter to the
writer: Muhlstein points out that a later
one has very recently turned up. Even
so, it wouldnt be fanciful to scent some
ambiguity or polite withholding in C-
zannes words: the more so because
such ambiguity was perfectly expressed
by Monet, in his letter to Zola. Here is
a fuller version than the one Muhlstein
gives:
How kind of you to send me
LOeuvre. Thank you very much.
I always find it a great pleasure
to read your books and this inter-
ested me all the more since it raises
questions to do with art for which
we have struggled for so many
years. I have just finished read-
ing it and I have to confess that it
left me perplexed and somewhat
anxious.
You took great care to avoid any
resemblance between us and your
characters; all the same I am very
much afraid that our enemies in
the Press and among the general
public will bandy about the name
of Manet, or at least our names,
and equate them with failure,
which Im sure was not your inten-
tion. Forgive me for mentioning
it. I dont intend it as a criticism; I
read LOeuvre with a great deal of
pleasure, and every page recalled
some fond memory. You must
know, moreover, what a fan I am of
yours and how much I admire you.
My battle has been a long one, and
my worry is that, just as we reach
our goal, this book will be used by
our enemies to deal us a final blow.
Forgive me for rambling on, re-
member me to Madame Zola and
thank you again.
This is fascinating, for many reasons:
the gentleness of the reproach; the
similar mention of the fond memory
evoked by the book, rather than praise
for its representation of art and art-
ists; the assumption that the public will
identify Lantier with Manet (rather
than Czanne); and perhaps, above
all, the sense of vulnerability border-
ing on paranoia about the damage the
novel might do to the cause of Impres-
sionism, which had already been going
strong for fifteen years. The fear that
a final blow might be dealt to the
movementand worse, by a friend and
ally, rather than a traditional enemy
is revelatory.
The New York Review
 When Monet writes of failure
being associated with the names of the
Impressionists, he is also using it in a
narrower sense. Lantier exemplifies
what Muhlstein calls a destructive per-
fectionismnot unlike Balzacs Fren-
hofer (though Zola furiously denied
any Balzacian influence). Zolas friend
Paul Alexis, in advance of the writing
of LOeuvre, noted that the novelist
was planning to explore the appalling
psychology of artistic impotence. Zola
himself, writing about the hysteria of
modern life, noted:
Artists are no longer big, power-
ful men, sane of mind and strong
of limb, like the Veroneses and
the Titians. The cerebral machine
has gone off the rails. Nerves have
gained the upper hand, and weak,
wearied hands now try to create
only the minds hallucinations.
Lantier, always a slasher of his own
canvasses (like Manet, like Czanne),
is a creator with too much ambition,
one who, as Zola put it, fails to deliver
his own genius, and as a result goes
mad and kills himself; not a single pic-
ture of his survives.
Pissarro didnt think Zolas book
would do much harm to the Impres-
sionists, even if it was just not a great
novel, thats all; but you can under-
stand Monets anxiety. If this was
how their great advocate presented his
idea of the modern painteras crazy,
destructive, and self- destructivewhat
might Joseph Publique think? The
truth was that most of the Impres-
sionists worked hard and constantly,
destroying only what they considered
unworthy, and were far from crazy (the
malleable myth of Van Gogh had yet
to be constructed). The further truth
remained that in describing artistic
pathology, Zolas actual model was nei-
ther Manet nor Czanne, but himself.
As he put it in his preparatory notes for
the novel, In a word, I will describe my
own private experience of creativity,
the constant agonizing labor pains; but
I will expand the subject with tragedy.
A nd thenjamais deux sans trois
along came Maupassant to compound
the fiction writers well-intentioned
sinning. Maupassant was also an ex-
cellent art critic, sympathetic to and
appreciated by the Impressionists.
In 1889, three years after LOeuvre,
he published Fort comme la mort, his
most underappreciated novel. Its cen-
tral figure, Olivier Bertin, is a mod-
ern, fashionable society portraitista
conservative Impressionist in Muhl-
steins wordswho sounds more than a
little like Jacques-mile Blanche avant
la lettre. He is taken into the household
of the Comte de Guilleroy; he paints
the comtesses portrait and, perhaps in-
evitablythis being a French novel
becomes her lover; the affair lasts ten
years, and his portrait of her has pride
of place in the house. What could be
more suave, more fashionable, more
Parisian? Except that the comtesse has
a daughter, who grows up to resemble
her mother (and therefore the portrait),
and as the mother (unlike her portrait)
ages, the painter finds himself becom-
ing obsessed by the daughter.
Muhlstein mentions a recent theory
that Maupassants source was a liter-
ary one: the rumor that Turgenev, for a
long time in a contented mnage trois
April 6, 2017
with Pauline Viardot and her husband,
had fallen disastrously in love with
Mme Viardots daughter. Certainly,
the novel had a literary consequence of
some magnitude: Ford Madox Fords
The Good Soldier (1915). Looking
back some years later, Ford wrote that
I had in those days an ambition that
was to do for the English novel what
in Fort comme la Mort Maupassant
had done for the French. He took
from Maupassant the idea of violently
transgressive passion; also the flaying
difference between the easy love of
youth and the desperate love of age.
As Bertin puts it, trying to understand
if not lessen his pain, Its the fault of
our hearts for not growing old. Faced
with an impossible emotionaland
socialdilemma, the painter throws
himself beneath the wheels of a bus.
And so another sympathetic novelists
painter dies in torment: you might ex-
pect the Impressionists to get up a peti-
tion against such repeated libels.
Frenhofer, Lantier, Bertin . . . At least
Prousts Elstir doesnt go mad and kill
himself. Prousts (and Swanns) way of
looking at pictures avoided addressing
the work head- on, instead preferring to
comment on which painted characters
reminded them of which real people
they knew in society. Indirection is all.
There is a change of gear in this final
section of Muhlsteins book. Proust
himself was more interested in classical
than contemporary painting (though he
approved of some Impressionists). El-
stirwho is first introduced as a young
prankster, then vanishes from the nar-
rative for six hundred pages, emerging
later as a major artistis barely seen
at work. Also, he is confected from
many painters, and thus, as Muhlstein
says, represents the artist rather than
an artistthough he has many sly
groundings in reality. Mme de Guer- new books from
manteswhile at the same time mak-
ing a sign to the servants to give Marcel UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE
some more mousseline sauce for his as-
paragusremembers that Wait now, I
do believe that Zola has actually written
an essay on Elstir. (And the asparagus
is another hint: Elstir, just like Manet,
painted a bunch of them.)
However, it is not one of Elstirs
Hirato Renkichi
pictures that everyone thinks of in tr. Sho Sugita
connection with la Recherche, but
rather Vermeers View of Delft, the
most beautiful painting in the world,
according to Proust, with its famous
little section of yellow wall. I confess
that the first time I saw this painting I
thought it not even the best Vermeer
in the show, and then failed for a while
to guess which bit of wall I was meant Mnica de la Torre
to be looking at. The most likely patch
of pigment turned out to be a roof; but
confusingly, although the roof was yel-
low, the thin sliver of actual vertical
wall beneath it was more of an orange
color (which all somehow confirmed
what I had already suspected, that I
shall never make a paid-up Proustian).
The dying writer, faced with the pic- Alan Felsenthal
ture, comments, This was how I should
have written. . . . My last books are too
spare, I should have applied several lay-
ers of color, made my sentences precious
in themselves, like this little section of
wall. Would this have been a good
idea? That question (since the writer
is fictional) remains unanswerable. But
Alejandra Pizarnik
Bergottes words act as a gentle under- tr. Yvette Siegert
lining of what Muhlsteins book often
implies: that writers, of all artists, are
the most anxious, and the most envious, uglyducklingpresse.org
about other forms of art.
27

Whatever Happened to
Interracial Love?
by Kathleen Collins, with a foreword
by Elizabeth Alexander.
Ecco, 175 pp., $15.99 (paper)
A master of the short story that is all
voice, Grace Paley was famous for
having come down against the fiction
of plot and character development be-
cause, as she once said, Everyone, real
or invented, deserves the open destiny
of life. In Paleys stories the narrating
voiceurban, ethnic, rooted in lived
experienceis most often speaking
directly to the consequences of that
open destiny, which, once pursued,
never fails to take its toll. In one story
the narrator runs into her ex-husband
whom she cheerfully addresses as
Hello, my life, but then has an ex-
change with him that reminds her that
he had had a habit throughout the
twenty-seven years of making a narrow
remark which, like a plumbers snake,
could work its way through the ear
down the throat, halfway to my heart.
He would then disappear, leaving me
choking with equipment.
The voice that speaks those sen-
tences becomes the story being told. Its
every inflection deepens and enriches
the Paley persona that incarnates the
wisdom of Paley the writer: namely,
that women and men remain longing,
passive creatures most of their lives,
always being acted upon, only rarely
acting themselves. At its most distilled,
this wisdom achieves the lucidity of the
poet, or even that of the visual artist.
Ive often thought of Paleys sentences
as the equivalent of color in a Rothko
painting. In Rothko, color is the paint-
ing; in Paley voice is the story.
Kathleen Collins, an American writer
who died in 1988 at the age of forty-six,
leaving behind a trunkful of unpub-
lished manuscriptsstories, plays, a
journal, an unfinished novelwas a
natural at this kind of writing. Now,
nearly thirty years after her death, six-
teen of the stories found in that trunk
have been published as a collection
called Whatever Happened to Inter-
racial Love? In all of them we hear a
voiceblack, urban, unmistakably
rooted in lived experiencespeaking
not only to let us know what it felt like
to be living inside that complex iden-
tity, but to make large, imaginative use
of it, the way Paley used her New York
Jewishness to explore the astonishment
of human existence.
Collins was born in 1942 in Jersey
City, New Jersey, into a middle- class
black familyher father was a state
legislatoras conscious of class as it
was of race. She was educated at Skid-
more College where she majored in phi-
losophy and religion. In 1961 she joined
a summer project to help build a youth
center in a village in the Congo, and the
following year went south with SNCC to
help register black voters. However, she
proved not an activist. In 1963 she went
to Paris where she received an MA in
French literature and cinema studies at
the Sorbonne; when she came back to
New York it was to join the faculty at
City College of New York as a teacher
of film history and screenwriting.
28
The Love We Dont Know
Vivian Gornick
Very soon she began making films of
her own, as well as writing plays and sto-
ries. A number of these plays were pro-
duced to a fair amount of acclaim, and
the most distinctive of her films, Losing
Ground (1982), was only just this past
year restored and reissued. Somewhere
in the middle of all this she married,
had two children, and by the mid-1970s
had endured a painful divorce that be-
came the inspiration for some of her
most evocative pieces of prose. A week
after her second marriage in 1987 she
was diagnosed with breast cancer and
within a year she was dead. None of
her stories was published in her lifetime.
Kathleen Collins, upstate New York, circa 1983
The writer upon whom Collins
consciously modeled herself was the
playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who
wanted to use her blackness to make
the women and men in her audience
feel as trapped as did her various char-
acters in the existential free fall of
ordinary everyday despairpoverty,
loneliness, ill healthcompounded by
the despair of having been born into
the wrong sex or race or class.
Whatever Happened to Interracial
Love? is, deliberately I presume, so
arranged that it is not until the fourth
story that the reader realizes the writer
is both black and a woman. This ar-
rangementmade, no doubt, by a
clever editorreflects a developing per-
spective that not only binds the pieces
together into a book, it tells us how to
read the book. Sometimes the narrat-
ing voice is that of a woman, sometimes
a man; sometimes it speaks in the first
person, sometimes in the third. And
quite often it adopts the convention of
poetic repetition. No matter: at all times
it is distinguished by a similarity of tone
and temperamentcalm, measured,
above all unsurprisedand an unwav-
ering interest in looking as long and as
hard as it can at what is, and what is not.
Taken all in all, this voice develops into
a persona that is striking for the sheer
richness of its human presence.
The opening stories are two sets of
monologues on the exquisite pain of
failed love, the first being given by an
unidentified film director ostensibly in-
structing a cameraman (or woman) on
how to light a movie being made about
a breakup; the second is shared by a
husband and wife, each reporting sepa-
rately on their long estrangement. Here
are the directors words in abbreviated
form:
Okay, its a sixth-floor walk-up,
three rooms in the front, bath-
tub in the kitchen, roaches on the
walls. . . . Okay, lets light it for
night. I want a spot on that big
double bed that takes up most of
the room . . . Good. Now lets have
a nice soft gel on the young man
composing his poems or reading
at his worktable. And another soft
Sam Waymon
And that was just the first time he left
one for the young woman stand-
ing by the stove killing roaches. . . .
Now backlight the young woman
as she lifts that enamel counter
covering the bathtub and put a lit-
tle light on him undressing her and
a nice soft arc on the two of them
nude in the doorway. Nice touch.
Now dim the light. . . No, take it
way down. She looks too anxious
and sad. Keep it down. He looks
too restless and angry. Down some
more. . . . Shes just waiting at the
window. No, on second thought,
kill it, he wont come in before
morning. . . . Now find a nice low
level while theyre lying without
speaking. No, kill it, theres too
much silence and pain.
Now fog it slightly when he comes
back . . . and keep it dim while they
sit on the bed. Now, how about a
nice blue gel when he tells her its
over. Good. Now go for a little fog
while she tries not to cry. Good.
Now take it up on him a little while
he watches her coldly, then up on
her when she asks him to stay. Nice.
Now down a bit while it settles be-
tween them and keep it down while
he watches her, just watches her,
then fade him to black and leave her
in the shadow while she looks for
the feelings that lit up the room.
Here are the husband and wife:
HUSBAND
. . . Its a long improvisation, my
life. . . . I was never a pleasure to
have around. . . . Im moody, damn
it, and restless . . . and life has so
many tuneless days . . . I cant apol-
ogize for loving you so little. . . . I
love everything too little, except
the journey, the way the wheels
turn . . .you accommodated your-
self instantly to all my whims . . .
fancying them into significant es-
capades of the soul . . .while . . . I
wont apologize for loving you so
little . . . no woman living has ever
been part of my dreams . . . life has
so many tuneless days.
WIFE
. . .The first time my husband left
me, I took a small cabin in the
woods. . . . I was going to stay the
whole summer. I stayed three
days. . . . I came back home. . . it
was very hot and lonely . . . I took
to crossing the Brooklyn Bridge
in the evenings at the time the sun
was setting. . . . I took to the read-
ing of memoirs . . . it was one of my
finer moments when I discovered
that no human life escapes the trib-
ulation of solitude. . . . the summer
grew hotter and lonelier . . . I began
to feel I was drying out inside . . . it
encouraged me to consider a little
light fucking . . . he turned out to be
tall, fervently sincere behind thick
bifocals . . . and with a penis about
the size of a pea . . . I took it as an
omen that I was not designed for
light fucking . . . .Winter came . . . I
rode the subway to Coney Island.
The cold, lonely stretch of beach,
the abandoned amusement park. . .
her.
In the third story the word negro
appears for the first time, and then al-
most casually:
I had an uncle who cried him-
self to sleep. Yes, its quite a true
story and it ended badly. That is to
say, one night he cried himself to
death. He was close to forty. . . . He
was quite handsome. Negro. But a
real double for Marlon Brando. . . .
It is difficult to separate this story
from the slight props of race nec-
essary to bolster it up. I have said
he was Negro. . . . In the middle of
the night he woke me up, shook
me awake with his violent crying
and sobbing. . . . How he could cry!
Give in to his crying, allow it full
possession of his being as if life
were a vast well of tears and one
must cry to be at the center of
it! . . . It was surely perverse, surely
bound to the color of his skin. . . .
He utterly honored his sorrow,
gave in to it with such deep and
boundless weeping that it seemed
as I stood there that he was the
bravest man I had ever known.
The slight props of race, indeed.
When it comes to women and men
together, Collins is often at her most
playful, making the hunger for sexual
experience seem as comical as, at other
times, it is painful. In one story a college
student riffs on the beautiful black activ-
ist whom she has settled on as the appro-
priate person to rid her of her virginity.
Something, it turns out, easier said than
done. Charlie Jones is light-skinned,
The New York Review
 How Jesus Became God
Taught by Professor Bart D. Ehrman
TIME O THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH
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off 3. Humans as Gods in the Greco-Roman World

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L
R BY A P R
5. Ancient Jews Who Were Gods
6. The Life and Teachings of Jesus
7. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
8. The Death of JesusHistorical Certainties
9. Jesuss DeathWhat Historians Cant Know
10. The ResurrectionWhat
Historians Cant Know
11. What History Reveals about the Resurrection
12. The Disciples Visions of Jesus
13. Jesuss ExaltationEarliest Christian Views
14. The Backward Movement of Christology
15. Pauls ViewChrists Elevated Divinity
16. Johns ViewThe Word Made Human
17. Was Christ Human? The Docetic View
18. The Divided Christ of the Separationists
19. Christs Dual NatureProto-Orthodoxy
20. The Birth of the Trinity
21. The Arian Controversy
22. The Conversion of Constantine
23. The Council of Nicea
24. Once Jesus Became God

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April 6, 2017 29
 green-eyed, and a freedom rider. Our
narrator knows, she just knows, that he
is the right person to initiate her. But
then, to her amazement, Charlie seems
IN MEMORIAM unable to get the job done. Push, the
narrator tells him, push hard. Hes got
to be the right person, hes just got to be.
Push, Charlie Jones, push. Yes, maam,
says Charlie. But at last:
Kenneth J. Charlie Jones.
Yes, maam . . .
It wont go in . . .
getting along for a while. Inside the
melting pot. Inside the melting pot.
The last line of the story is: Its 1963.
Whatever happened to interracial
love?
Only rarely again in this book will
the narrating point of view sound as
young as it does in this story; and never
again will it sound accommodating.
The measured voice now complicates
itselftheres iron in itas more and
more it begins to record the slights and
humiliations and knife thrusts that
Only once do you know that
kind of man, they say. Only once.
But she would know them all her
life. One after the other they would
turn out to be that kind of man.
No surprises here. Shocks perhaps, but
not surprises.
The narrator in this story is giving
us a view of an inner reality that she
and the daredevil are equally intimate
with. Its as if they had both grown up
confined by the accident of skin color

Arrow No, maam . . .

Not even with your green
eyes . . .
continually push the born outsider to
the limits of endurance.
In Only Once, a short, incantatory
to a narrowness of experience that re-
sembles living under house arrest. They
both know every inch of their restricted
No, maam . . . tale, a woman remembers an affair territory by heart; and if content to
And your extra-light skin . . .

Lorna Simpson
No, maam . . .. . .
1921-2017 And your freedom riding . . .
No, maam . . .. . .
I guess youre not the right
person. . . .

It is in the title story that we get the

No individual has done more
to change how we think about
economics and about
society beyond economics
during the past six decades.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, from preface to
Creating a Learning Society,
Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series
WILLIAM MB
BERGER PRIZE
for
BRITISH ART
HISTORY
2017
The William MB Berger Prize is
awarded annually to a book or
exhibition catalogue that has made
an outstanding contribution to the
history of British art during the
preceding twelve-month period
(1 January31 December).
The prize of 5000, established
in 2001, is administered by
The British Art Journal in
association with the
Berger Collection Educational
Trust of Denver, Colorado.
Full details with nomination
procedure for the 2017 prize
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Subscribe online to
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Three issues
annually
$100
clearest exposition of the life and times
within which the guiding sensibility be-
hind these stories is to be found. Here,
the time is 1963, the place an Upper
West Side apartment shared by two
young women, one negro, as Col-
lins has it, the other white. Both are
just out of college, both deep into civil
rights, and both determinedly in love
with young men of the opposite race:
the white woman with a black poet who
seems never to leave the apartment,
the black with a white freedom rider
who keeps getting his jaw broken in
Mississippi.
The narrating point of view, deliv-
ered in the third person, is that of the
black roommate who is struggling to
understand what she is living through,
even as she sympathizes with the feel-
ings of her dangerously disappointed
parents, members of the black bour-
geoisie who are watching everything
theyve worked for disintegrate before
their eyes: Their sons [and daughters]
will go to jail for freedom (which in their
parents minds is no different from going
to jail for armed robbery, heroin addic-
tion, or pimping, and other assorted
ethnic hustles). Nonetheless, the young
woman is writing to her father,
Daddy you must see that I must Lorna Simpson: Ebony 6, 2010
lead my own life even if you dont
understand it and all this talk with an irresistible daredevil. He had keep their heads down and remain
about color all the time Im not to execute a faultless jump, she tells well within its bounds, never seeking to
the same anymore and I have to be us. The man is forever prancing about break out into the world beyond, they
what I am Ive lived with all kinds on the top of the Brooklyn Bridge or could perhaps get by as anonymous sur-
of people . . . and now Im trying to preparing to jump off a rock the size vivors of the raw deal into which they
live with some white people and of a boulder or leap across the third have been born. The woman, conceiv-
some negro people and find out rail, always calling out to the narrator, ably, is willing to do so; the man is not.
who I am and I have to do it and . . . Think I can make it? And grinning. He is compelled to risk self-destruction
rather than forget that promise of an
But then, life being what it is, even Like he could open and close life. open destiny that imagined others seem
in the year of race- creed- color blind- With his laughing eyes. Poised. to share. And she? What is she com-
ness, as she sits writing this letter the And his golden body. Poised. pelled to do? Stand witness.
doorbell rings, and there on the thresh- She didnt want to watch. Not What we have here, in Collinss six-
old stands her lover, the freedom rider this time. Nor any of the other teen stories, is sensibility in service
who had wanted desperately to marry times. . . . of a state of mind whose authenticity
her, crying. He had something to say: Only once do you know that none, I think, can challenge. Written
He had just come from his parents kind of man, they say. Only once. in the 1970s and 1980s, when African-
house. He knew now that he could not American writing was ablaze with
marry her. He knew now that he would Then one day, rage and righteousness, they might
never go back south. It was over. . . . He have seemed too nuanced to make an
understood now that he could never He didnt clear the rail. Or maybe impression. Coming to us as they do
be the Negro he had wanted to be for he did. Maybe it was later. He mis- now, when we are living once more
her. Never. Ever. And then he was timed a dive from a high cliff. Or through a period of flaring racism that
gone. The young woman closes the maybe he didnt. Maybe it was has brought talented protest writing to
door thinking she must get another even later than that. He shot him- a new level, they strike a note on the
apartment, one where she will be able self in the head. Thought the gun one hand oddly original, on the other
to think and see clearly, about how in- was empty. Or maybe he knew it painfully familiar. Either way it drags
tegration came into style. And people wasnt. at the heart.

30 The New York Review


The Hatred of Poetry
by Ben Lerner.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
86 pp., $12.00 (paper)
Dont let the boy just loaf about;
If he writes verses, kick him out.
Martial (c. 40c. 103)
Poetry has been around forever. It pre-
dates literacy and perhaps even the
gods, who, some say, were invented
by poets. There are so many types of
poems, ranging from the epic to the
tiny haiku, that it took The Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
1,554 pages to list and describe them
all. Though it has mutated over the cen-
turies, with the lyric poem becoming in
more recent times the favored mode
of expression, it can still be defined
as language that sounds better and
means more.1 The miracle of poetry
is that a three-thousand-year-old poem
can still speak to us today. If there had
been no continuity of some kind, po-
etry and poets would have been extinct
long ago.
That this little-understood and often
marginalized human activity has given
the world some of the greatest works of
literature, many of which have outlived
the civilizations and the languages in
which they were originally composed,
is beyond dispute. Poetry is indeed
something divine, Shelley wrote.
Hearing an outburst like that, one is li-
able to conclude that the monkeys who
came down from the trees cannot live
without poetry, but a cooler head re-
minds us, Bread is necessary; poetry
isnt necessary in the way cake isnt
necessary. Cake marks important oc-
casions. Still, Molly Peacock goes on
to say, Can you imagine living in a city
without a bakery? Without cake?2
Of course, poets and poetry have had
enemies. Plato famously condemned
poets propensity to pass off their fan-
tasies as truth and banished them from
his ideal Republic. That poets are not
right in the head is a common belief.
Who in their right mind would choose a
lifetime of poverty and ridicule? Poets
were accused of perverting morality
and corrupting the young, of being
blasphemous, unpatriotic, and dirty. It
took extraordinary malice and deter-
mination over the centuries to destroy
nearly every copy of every extant poem
by Sappho. Even the enlightened eigh-
teenth century of Hobbes and Locke
with their elevation of reason as the
primary source of authority and legiti-
macy denounced poetry, since a ratio-
nal mind finds it intolerable to be in the
company of imagination. Metaphor,
the very soul of poetry, was demoted to
a superfluous stylistic ornament.
The Romantic movement restored
poetry and imagination, but now poets
came to be viewed as either harmless
eccentrics or crazed revolutionaries
1
Charles Wright in Quote Poet Un-
quote: Contemporary Quotations on
Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis
ODriscoll (Copper Canyon, 2008),
p. 6.
2
Joyce Wadler, Having Her Cake and
Eating Her Couplets, Too, The New
York Times, April 20, 2000.
April 6, 2017
Must Lerner Connect?
Charles Simic
determined to overturn the existing
order. In more recent times, neither the
political right nor the political left has
been a defender of poetry. Degenerate
literature, the Nazis called much of it;
bourgeois individualism was the Soviet
name for it. The goal of every collec-
tivist project in history being to wrestle
away the self from the individual, its no
wonder that the most innocuous poems
became the subject of police inquiry
and suppression.
In his polemical essay Against
Poets, the Polish novelist and play-
wright Witold Gombrowicz made a
claim that no one really gives a damn
Ben Lerner, Sanibel Island, Florida, December 2016
about poetry despite pretending that
they do. When poetry appears mixed
with other, more prosaic elements such
as Shakespeares drama and the prose
of Pascal and Dostoevsky, or simply as
the impression of an ordinary sunset,
one trembles as other mortals do. How-
ever, the pharmaceutical extract called
pure poetry is a deadly bore. Sugar
is good for sweetening coffee, Gom-
browicz says, but not for eating by the
spoonful. The excess of anything wea-
ries, and so does the excess of poetic
language, as well as the sentiment and
piety that go with it.
What Gombrowicz is objecting to,
many readers would agree with. Poetry
is both the most natural and the most
unnatural of arts. Theres undeniably
something contrived about a sonnet
or an epic, but to claim that all poems
possess this same artificial quality is an
astonishingly stupid thing to say, espe-
cially coming from a writer justly ven-
erated for his intellect.
Ben Lerner is an extraordinarily
fine writer, the author of three much-
admired collections of poetry and two
marvelous novels. In his new book, The
Hatred of Poetry, which grew out of an
article published by Harpers and from
the speculations on poetry of the poet-
hero Adam Gordon in Lerners first
novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, he
explores the subject further. He sets the
stage by quoting Marianne Moores fa-
mous poem Poetry, in its shortened particularly astringent, Lerner says,
1967 three-line version, and giving an
account of how the poem had been
given to him by the Topeka High li-
brarian after he asked her for the short-
est poem in the school library, so that
he could memorize it and recite it to his
ninth-grade English class as his teacher
had assigned them to do:
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a
perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it, after all, a place for the
genuine.
That opening phrase, Lerner says,
keeps coming back to him every time
Ariana Mangual
he attends a poetry reading or when he
teaches a class. What kind of art as-
sumes, he asks himself, the dislike
of its audience and what kind of artist
aligns herself with that dislike, even
encourages it? An art hated from with-
out and within, he answers, though he
doesnt experience it as a contradiction
because poetry and hatred for poetry
are inextricable for him.
He quotes Allen Grossmans essay
on Caedmon, the first English poet
whose name we know, an illiterate
cowherd who learned the art of song in
a dream and awoke as a poet. But the
poem he sang upon waking, the legend
goes, was not as good as the poem he
sang in his dream. Poetry thus arises
from the desire to get beyond the finite
and the historicalthe human world of
violence and differenceand to reach
the transcendent or divine. . . . Thus
the poet is a tragic figure, because a
poem is always a record of failure.
Lerner agrees with Grossman
that actual poems are structurally
foredoomed by a bitter logic that
cannot be overcome by any level
of virtuosity, [that] only a ruthless
reading that allows us to measure
the gap between the actual and
the virtual will enable us to expe-
rience, if not a genuine poemno
such thinga place for the genu-
ine, whatever that might mean.
The bitterness of poetic logic is
ticular thing to be imperfect, we must
because we were taught at an early
age that we are all poets simply by vir-
tue of being human. Undoubtedly,
his teacher in Topeka had been read-
ing Emerson and Whitman, but Lerner
further alleges that this belief is one
of the underlying reasons why poetry
is so often met with contempt rather
than mere indifference and why it is
periodically denounced as opposed to
simply dismissed. Most people, accord-
ing to him, carry at least a weak sense
of a correlation between poetry and
human possibility that cannot be real-
ized in poems. The poet, by his very
claim to being a maker of poems, is
therefore both an embarrassment and
an accusation. I never heard anything
that makes me believe this to be true.
If poetry is of no interest to people, its
because they were frightened off it in
school and have not bothered to read
any since, not because poets failed
their ideal of poetry.
Neither do I buy Shelleys lament
that the most glorious poetry that
has ever been communicated to the
world is probably a feeble shadow of
the original conception of the poet,
which Lerner brings up in support of
his theory of the impossibility of po-
etry. Of course, theres some truth to
it. In Leaving the Atocha Station, his
young poet agonizes about the incom-
mensurability of language and experi-
ence. Its no news that words fail to
do justice to what we see or feel; that
we find ourselves struck dumb by too
much beauty or horror. What Lerner
regards as a tragic flaw of poetry is a
given, the way not being able to make
a roosters crow heard in a painting is.
While a feeling of impotence paralyzes
anyone who becomes fixated on lan-
guage and starts thinking about find-
ing the right word not as an aesthetic
problem, but as a theological one, its a
false quandary. Lerner fails to mention
the part that poetic images, metaphors,
and symbols play in circumventing the
limitations of language.
Poems come out of wonder, not out
of knowing, Lucille Clifton once said.
When we sit down to write, we know
we dont have a guarantee, framed
and hung over our heads and signed
by every philosopher from Plato to
Derrida, that what we are about to do
will bear fruit and lead to the truth; we
face a risk and a gamble every poet ei-
ther knowingly or unknowingly takes.
American poetry is a kind of do-it-
yourself metaphysics. If we have a tra-
dition in poetryand we doit goes
back to the Transcendentalists and
their empirical approach to experience,
the idea that you eschew abstractions
and begin with something concrete,
what William Carlos Williams called
no ideas but in things. After that, you
are on your own.
In order to demonstrate that even
when we read a bad poem we experi-
ence its radical failure by measuring it
against an ideal poem, Lerner takes a
close look at The Tay Bridge Disas-
ter by the nineteenth-century Scot-
tish poet William Topaz McGonagall,
widely acclaimed as the worst poet in
history, and employs Platos so-called
argument from imperfection, which
says that in order to perceive a par-
have in mind some ideal of perfection;
and we must come to the foregone
31
conclusion that it is much harder to
agree on what constitutes a successful
poem than it is to agree that were in
the presence of an appalling one. Not
just McGonagall, but John Keats and
Emily Dickinson, according to Lerner,
make a place for the genuine by pro-
ducing a negative image of the ideal
Poem we cannot write in time.
Marianne Moore would have lost her
patience with this kind of argument.
She knew what she meant by the genu-
ine and what a poem is and so would
have Lerner and his readers had he
quoted the longer version of Poetry
that she tinkered with from 1919 to
1967 and not only republished from
book to book, but allowed to be widely
anthologized, instead of basing his own
book on her final condensed version of
the poem, which both her readers and
fellow poets regarded as a big mistake.
The version quoted by Lerner shrugs
off poetry, and we nod yes because, of
course, we think we know what she is
talking about, but as it turns out, we
dont. Does she have a particular kind
of poetry in mind, or is she condemn-
ing all poetry? Without seeing the lon-
ger version, a reader has no idea. Heres
the whole poem that she appended in
the notes to the 1967 Complete Poems
with the heading Original Version:
POETRY
I, too, dislike it: there are things
that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a
perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the
genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can
rise
if it must, these things are
important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can
be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so
derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for
all of us, that we do not
admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or
in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild
horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic
twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician
nor is it valid
to discriminate against
business documents and
school-books; all these phenom-
ena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into
prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can
be
literalists of
the imaginationabove
insolence and triviality and
can present
32
for inspection, imaginary gardens
with real toads in them, shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you
demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested
in poetry.
Moore is pleased to encounter men-
tion of real things in poems, not be-
cause a higher meaning can be imputed
to them, but because they recall the de-
light we experience every time we no-
tice something we failed
to notice before, making
such moments in our lives,
and the lessons that can be
drawn from them, useful.
Though she doesnt define
genuine, we know what
she means and recognize
it when we encounter it
in a poem. It has noth-
ing to do with honesty, of
course, but with the way
the poet engages with
the world. In the case of
Moore it would be her ex-
traordinary curiosity and
openness to experience,
her readiness to include
even business documents
and school books among
the raw materials of a
poem. Asking poets to be
literalists of the imagina-
tion means taking liter-
ally what one imagines,
which poets have always
done, as a peek at Greek
myths and Dickinsons
poems will immediately
confirm. Imaginary gar-
dens with real toads in
them is her definition of
what a poem is, a fenced
enclosure in which a bit
of reality sits like an ugly
creature or like Satan in
Miltons Paradise Lost, as some critics
have suggested.
L erner describes the objections that
avant-garde movements had to po-
etry. The Italian Futurists, who like
the Dadaists were geniuses when it
came to scandalizing the cultivated,
shouted from the rooftops that life
is a lie and poems the flowers of that
lie, while movements on the political
left seethed at the failure of poetry to
move the masses to action. As Lerner
points out, even those denouncing con-
temporary poetry in this country act
as though at some unspecified point
in the past it was widely popular and
appreciated, failing to mention that
the poems that at one time appeared
in every newspaper from coast to coast
and that were presumably read by mil-
lions were so uniformly awful that we
thankfully never had to lay our eyes on
them again.
Lerner quotes George Packer in a
New Yorker blog post asking whether
it is too late to convince president- elect
Obama not to have a poem written and
read at the inauguration:
For many decades American po-
etry has been a private activity,
written by few people and read by
few people, lacking the language,
rhythm, emotion, and thought that
could move large numbers of peo-
ple in large public settings.
Packer seems to be as uninformed
about the United States as he can be
about the Middle East and the rest
of the world. Poetry readings, with
crowds sometimes numbering into
hundreds, have been a staple of col-
leges and universities for the last fifty
years, with those taking place in New
York City listed in the magazine he
works for. Those attending them do so
eagerly and clearly enjoy themselves,
because they keep coming back. They
hear a great variety of poets and even
Marianne Moore with a cockatoo at the Bronx Zoo, 1954
purchase their books afterward. To be
unacquainted with something so com-
monplace and still pontificate on a sub-
ject one knows nothing about is what
all those who disparage poetry sound
like.
A far more substantial objection
Lerner cites comes from Mark Ed-
mundson, a professor of English at the
University of Virginia, in his piece on
the decline of American verse in Harp-
ers. Edmundson contends that con-
temporary poets, while talented, have
ceased to be politically ambitious. . . .
They dont slake a readers thirst for
meanings that pass beyond the expe-
rience of the individual poet and light
up the world we hold in common. In
other words, they have become too
self-absorbed to notice other people.
Edmundson has a point, of course. The
misery of the homeless in this country
and the horrendous lives of our work-
ing poor, to give just two examples,
are rarely, if ever, noticed. The prob-
lem is that one can make that sort of
complaint about the poets in any his-
torical period and in every country of
the world. Poetry is neither politics
nor philosophy, Wallace Stevens said.
Poetry is a poetry, and ones objective
as a poet is to achieve poetry.3 I agree
3
In Louis Untermeyers Departure
from Dandyism, Saturday Review,
December 19, 1942.
wholeheartedly, and yet some aware-
ness now and then of the suffering that
goes on in the world wont hurt a poem.
Lerners book describes his con-
flicted feelings about poetry. It is both
a defense of poetry and a defense of
those who hate it. He regards this con-
tradiction as the dialectic of a vocation
no less essential for being impossible. I
dont think this feeling is as universal
among poets as he believes. What his
book lacks is a broader survey of what
our poets have thought about poetry.
Leaving out the views of every one of
our major figures, starting with Em-
erson and going on to the Modernists
and the generations that
Esther Bubley/Pix Inc. /The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
followed, makes Ameri-
can poetry look like a
parochial affair involving
a handful of people and
just a few ideas. If he had
broadened his range and
engaged with some of the
writings of Pound, Ste-
vens, Williams, Creeley,
OHara, Levertov, Dun-
can, and others who chal-
lenge his view of poetry,
he would have had a fuller
discussion of the subject
and a better book.
As for the hatred of po-
etry, heres what I think.
In the late 1960s, I par-
ticipated in the Poets in
the Schools program in
New York City. It involved
going to different high
schools, visiting one or
more classes per day, and
being paid as little as fifty
dollars. Since I was always
broke, I went. Id get there
at the appointed time, find
the principals office where
someone would escort
me through noisy hall-
ways to some classroom
where equal pandemo-
nium reigned and where I
would be introduced to a
teacher who would then quiet down the
students by shouting: We have a poet
with us today! It was news received
with incredulity, with kids asking each
other and the teacher if they heard it
right. Once I got a chance to say some-
thing, I asked the class if they liked po-
etry, a question that made many shake
their heads, some pretend to gag, and
one or two even spit in disgust.
Since that was the answer I had
learned to expect, I asked them next
if they ever wrote love letters. Their
embarrassed silence told me that of
course they did. Now that I had their
full attention, I asked them whether
they would like to hear a love poem.
They said nothing, so Id read them
poems by E. E. Cummings, Dickinson,
Millay, and a few others, asking after
each one whether they wanted to hear
more. And they did. After I was done
with love, I read them poems on other
subjects and they not only paid atten-
tion, but started making perceptive
remarks.
After class, a few would linger to ask
me where they could find some poem
I had read. This I found to be the case
with college students too. If one asks
them if they like poetry, they say no,
but once they hear a poem they like,
their interest is aroused, leading in se-
vere cases to paternal panic and inner
torments such as Ben Lerner describes
in his book.
The New York Review

The Idiot
by Elif Batuman.
Penguin, 423 pp., $27.00
Elif Batuman has generously bestowed
her wit and intelligence and insight on
journalism, and now, even more gen-
erously, on fiction. The Possessed, her
2010 collection of essays subtitled Ad-
ventures with Russian Books and the
People Who Read Them, is unforget-
table, perhaps because it is so unpre-
dictable. Part memoir, part literary
criticism, part travelogue, the essays
echo pleasantly in The Idiot, her first
novel.
Batuman thanks Dostoevsky in her
acknowledgments, saying, When it
came to titles, and not just titles, what
writer could ever touch the hem of your
lofty garment? I have not read Dos-
toevskys The Idiot since I took it off
the school library shelf thinking it was
a comic novel. Finally, fifty years later,
I am right. Batumans novel is roaringly
funny. It is also intellectually subtle,
surprising, and enlightening. It is a
book fueled by deadpan wonder.
The Idiot opens on a freshman stu-
dents first day at Harvard, and perhaps
you have just sighed and thought, Oh
that again, oh them again, perhaps Ill
just reread Lucky Jim. By all means,
reread Lucky Jim if you are so inclined.
(I was disappointed when I went back
to it, but you may be luckier.) But be-
fore you do, read this book, revel in this
book, an academic novel that is not only
about the absurdity of higher learning
but is also about the love of learning.
Batuman has written a romantic com-
edy about the romance of language, a
metacomic novel of ideas, and an ad-
venture in grammar. The Idiot is an
epic tale of words and the people who
love them and live by them.
Batumans novel begins in 1995,
when e-mail is still something of a
novelty:
I didnt know what email was
until I got to college. I had heard
of email, and knew that in some
sense I would have it. Youll be
so fancy, said my mothers sister,
who had married a computer sci-
entist, sending your e, mails. She
emphasized the e and paused be-
fore mail.
Those are the first lines of the book,
and they set up so much so quietly, so
amusinglythe narrator, Selin, is not
one of those kids in the avant-garde of
popular culture, she is studious and shy,
she is embedded in an extended family
that feels free to comment on her life,
and her aunt speaks with a foreign in-
tonation, which Selin finds interesting
and whimsical enough to point out, and
simultaneously dismisses as annoying.
As for e, mails, they become increas-
ingly important, one of a number of
manifestations of language that Batu-
man employs in The Idiot. E-mails will
indeed make Selin feel fancy; they will
make her miserable as well, as she em-
barks on a campus e-mail epistolary
romance that is eloquent, emotionally
awkward, and suitably pretentious.
Selin grew up as an only child in New
Jersey with her Turkish mother, a rela-
tionship that is both deep and relaxed.
April 6, 2017
The Wisdom of the Yard
Cathleen Schine
Elif Batuman, Ko University, Istanbul, May 2011
Her parents are divorced and her fa-
ther, about whom we hear very little,
lives in Maryland. She is smart and
hard-working enough to get into Har-
vard, and to recognize Harvards limits
and her own. She has never heard of
Fellini, but her high school beach read-
ing was Camuss The Plague. At one
point, feeling acutely inadequate in a
way any of us who has ever been eigh-
teen will recognize, Selin thinks of all
the places she has never been and all
the things she has never done:
All I had ever done was visit my
parents all the timefirst one par-
ent and then the other, with no
sign of it ever stopping. Worse yet,
I knew I had no one to blame but
myself. If my mother told me not
to do something, I didnt do it. Ev- and the prop, Chaplin and the globe
eryones mother told them not to
do things, but I was the only one
who listened.
For Selin, trying to accomplish
things is the point of coffee. One
of Batumans many literary gifts is her
ability, and inclination, to create small,
comic bursts of insight into Selins tem-
perament through observations like
that, particularly about the banalities
of student life, even, for example, the
anxious drudgery of placement tests:
There was a quantitative reason-
ing test full of melancholy word
problemsThe graph models the
hypothetical mass in grams of a
broiler chicken up to eighty weeks
of age.
Or an interview to get into a freshman
seminar when Selin has a horrible cold,
the professor droning on about the
differences between creative and aca-
demic writing. Selin sits before him
nodding energetically and trying to
determine whether any of the rect-
Korhan Karaoysal
angles in my peripheral vision was
a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they
were all books. . . . I was thinking
about the structural equivalences
between a tissue box and a book:
both consisted of slips of white
paper in a cardboard case; yet
and this was ironicthere was very
little functional equivalence, espe-
cially if the book wasnt yours.
T he comic genius of Selin as a char-
acter is that she sees absurdity and cre-
ates absurdity by how she sees. She is a
perfect comic creation, and a touching
one, too: there is no malice in her. This
is an unusual satirical novel in that way.
Language is the medium and language
is the comedian, language is the star
he balances, the hungry fellow and the
shoe he dines on.
Batuman has the comedians gift
for understatement, a flawless sense of
comic timing, and an eye for imagery
that is always curious and never ob-
trusive. When Selin puts her coins in
a Coke machine, a can tumbled out
like a body falling down the stairs.
When spring finally comes to snowy
Cambridge, gray dull snowbanks
began melting to reveal all kinds of
half-frozen garbage. The air smelled
of dirt. You were always tripping over
dead birds. On a table in a Chinese
restaurant stand bottles of soy sauce
like tiny women. The comedy lurking
in language and in life informs every
aspect of Batumans novel, form and
subject alike. Humor is not everything
Batuman writes about, but it is every-
where in what she writes.
Batuman cherishes language, the
sounds and sense and nonsense. When
Selin rides the subway into Cam-
bridge, she finds herself reorganizing
the names of the Boston transit sta-
tions into an evocative, almost lyrical
sequence:
Eliot, Holyoke, Copley Square,
Symphony, Wollaston, Hoosac
Pier,
Marblehead, Maverick, Fenway
Park,
Haymarket, Mattapan, Codman
Yard,
Wonderland, Providence, Beacon
Hill,
Watertown, Reservoir, Mystic
Mall.
There is beauty in the world, and
there are words, too. Selin is searching
for a connection between them, for the
relationship between language and the
world. Her first stop on her quest is
Linguistics 101. In class, she is excited
to hear that language is hardwired
into the braininfinite, regenerative,
never the same twice, that the high-
est law, higher than Holy Scripture, was
the intuition of a native speaker. It
makes sense to her:
Whenever my mother and I were
talking about a book and I thought
of something she hadnt thought of,
she would look at me and say admir-
ingly, You really speak English.
This lovely aside, both earnest and
ironic, full of affection and insight into
Selins mother, a quick and elegant
glimpse into their relationship filtered
through a lens of language theory, is
the kind of thing Batuman does so well.
Her subject is often absurdity, her prose
always restrained. Restrained, yet gen-
erous to both her characters and her
readers. She sends Selin from theory to
theoryphilosophical, linguistic, liter-
ary, artistic, mathematicalall of them
somehow evoking the complexities of
language. Selin exists in language.
One of the first things Selin learns
in Linguistics 101 is all the ways that
Noam Chomsky is right and B. F. Skin-
ner is wrong. Language is simply a bio-
logical faculty, grammar a universal
instinct, which means that no one can
be bad at it,
not even toddlers or black people.
Thats what the book said: you
might think that toddlers and
black people had no grammar, but
if you analyzed their utterances,
they were actually following gram-
matical rules. . . .
The class learns about the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, which said that
the language you spoke affected how
you processed reality. We learned that
it was wrong. And not just wrong,
but vile and essentially racist. Selin,
however, is the girl who sees things in
books her Turkish mother doesnt see.
In my heart, she confesses, I knew
that Whorf was right. Different lan-
guages forced you to think about dif-
ferent things.
O ne of my favorite parts of The Idiot
involves a Turkish verb tense. Batu-
man finds in this tense not so much a
Whorfian worldview as a novelists
world. Family relationships, hierarchy,
resentment, rivalry, fear, motherly af-
fectionmuch is revealed about Selin
in Batumans discussion of a point of
33
Turkish grammar. In Turkish, Batuman
explains, there is a suffix that can be at-
tached to verbs that changes the mean-
ing of the tense. If you add the suffix -mi
to a verb, it means you did not yourself
see or experience what you are relating.
The suffix is a way of indicating in-
direct knowledge or hearsay, as if you
added it seems or I heard or ap-
parently to whatever you are saying.
Selin experiences it as an accusatory
or tattletale tense. When you heard
-mi , you knew that you had been in-
voked in your absencenot just you
but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack
of generosity. She associates it primar-
ily with a cousin. You complained-mi
to your mother, the cousin would say.
Or The dog scared-mi you. When-
ever Selin hears -mi , she feels caught
out. The dog did scare her. She did com-
plain to her mother. The -mi tense
was one of the things I complained to
my mother about.
She later writes a research paper on
-mi and begins to feel something like
affection for it and its nuanced facility.
She learns that it is called the eviden-
tiary or inferential tense and that it is
often used in speaking to children, as in
What seems to have happened to the
doll? The suffix, three simple letters,
allowed the speaker to assume the won-
der and ignorance that children live in.
Batumans attention to a Turkish suf-
fix is not an aimless diversion, although
it is diverting. Aside from their sheer
grammar-groupie pleasure, these pas-
sages simultaneously demonstrate and
describe what Batuman is doing. She
has, first of all, created a character who
herself lives in wonder and ignorance.
In addition, the evidentiary -mi has
a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was
automatically funny, she writesan
uncanny description of her own style.
Selins discomfort with and pleasure
in the -mi tense also helps us to un-
derstand the romance on which she is
about to embark. It begins in her Rus-
sian class. The class is reading a primer,
Nina in Siberia, each chapter unfolding it. The slipper is one of her hideous
with only the grammar theyve learned
by that point, eccentric wooden ex-
amples of which Batuman generously
shares throughout the novel. In an early
chapter, the absence of grammatical
possibilitiesno dative case, no verbs of
motionis tellingly appealing to Selin:
The story had a stilted feel, and yet
while you were reading you felt to-
tally inside its world, a world where
reality mirrored the grammar
constraints, and what Slavic 101
couldnt name didnt exist. There
was no went or sent, no inten-
tion or causalityjust unexplained
appearances and disappearances.
Poor Nina goes to Siberia to find her
boyfriend, Ivan, a student of physics
who sneaks off to the collective rein-
deer research farm, Siberian Spark, in
Novosibirsk, leaving only a mysterious
farewell letter. As The Idiot proceeds,
Nina in Siberia becomes a more and
more random, bizarre mirror of Selins
own relationship with a senior in her
Russian class who is also named Ivan.
Her wistful gratitude to the textbooks
grammatical restraints prepares us, if
not her, for the confused, passive deter-
mination of her first love.
The romance begins when Selin, who
is called Sonya in Russian class for rea-
sons having to do with declension, has a
chance after-class encounter with Ivan,
a mathematician from Hungary. It is
a classic romantic meetinggirl drops
glove, boy picks up glove, gives glove
backtransformed into charming Batu-
man farce: Sonya! It was Ivan, extend-
ing a floppy blue slipper. You dropped
blue rubber ball was so small, so fast
new ski gloves. She and Ivan are often
paired up in class for conversations
in Russian based on their readings in
Nina in Siberia, a tale that is not going
so well for Nina. Ivan the Hungarian
mathematics student, playing the part
of Ivan the Russian physics student who
ran off to Novosibirsk, has something
he must tell Nina, played by Selin:
Well, he said. He looked at the
floor and then looked at me. Lines
appeared on his forehead. I have
a wife, he said. And its not you.
I knew it wasnt realI knew She joins a group of students who are
it was just a story. But my stom-
ach sank, my breath caught in my
throat, a wave of nausea rose in my
chest.
Spurned by a fictional character, Selin
has fallen in love.
C hecking her e-mail one day and find-
ing only a request to chip in two dollars
for someones birthday cake, Selin im-
pulsively writes an e-mail to Ivan. Her
letter is a play on the fictitious Ivans
letter to Nina. When Ivan receives it,
she writes, she will be in Siberia. She
is quitting school because questions of
articulatory phonetics no longer inter-
est her:
too, you know. You dont have to
wait for me to call.
Okay, I said sadly: so he wasnt
going to call me.
And college life goes on. Selins best
friend Svetlana teaches her to play
squash, to which her response is, The
and crazy. To think this world was too
deterministic for some people! There
is a series of disastrous attempts by
Selin to teach English as a second lan-
guage. She runs along the river and eats
in the dining hall and wins a prize for a
story she wrote. Through it all, there is
the mystery of Ivan, of what he wants,
what she wants, what either of them is
willing to say or do.
For the summer, Selin plans to go to
Paris with Svetlana and then join her
mother in Turkey. At Ivans sugges-
tion, she adds a detour to her journey.
to be implanted in Hungarian villages
in order to spread American culture.
He is staying in Budapest, and the
implication is that she will see him on
weekends, though by the time Selin
leaves for Paris, she has stopped an-
swering his e-mails. Selin believes that
language, like math, is a self-sufficient
system, but it is clearly insufficient for
a girl in love. Especially with someone
who already has a girlfriend.
Selin in Paris is not too different
from Selin in Cambridgefunny, in-
nocent, world-weary. What she sees is
new, but in some ways everything she
sees every day is new to Selin. Svetlana
and her family, extremely rich Serbs,
some of whom live in Paris, are an aw-
fully entertaining crew:

PEPLUM
Blutch
Translated from the French
and with an introduction
by Edward Gauvin
Peplum may be Blutchs masterpiece: a grand, strange
dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a
gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful
woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still
be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name
and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way
toward Romeseeking power, or maybe just survival,
as the world unravels.
Famous in his native France and nearly unknown here,
the cartoonist who goes by Blutch (real name: Christian
Hincker) has a magnificently expressive line, so bold
and ragged that it often looks as if hes snapped his
brush in half and is mashing its splintered end into the
drawing board.
Douglas Wolk, The New York Times Book Review
EVENTS WITH BLUTCH
Saturday, April 1st, 2pm
MoCCA Arts Festival
I will live and work in Novosibirsk
on the collective farm Siberian
Spark. I know that you will under-
stand me and that it will be better
this way. I will never forget you.
Yours,
Selin (Sonya)
And so, cloaked in the flat intona-
tions of a nonsensical Russian primer,
an epistolary flirtation begins. Ivan
writes back a day later to tell her that
he had a dream she would cheat on him
with his future girlfriends ex-boyfriend
and can she please tell him the plot of a
Russian soap opera they are supposed
to have been watching all semester. He
does, in fact, have a girlfriend, but the
correspondence continues. Ivan begins
writing letters about fate and freedom.
He seemed really worried about the
The boy who convinced you to go
to Hungary, he must be very hand-
some, Svetlanas aunt Bojana
told me. You can find an excel-
lent coffee in Budapest. I see that
you are looking at my tea tray. Do
you like it? Its quite a good tray. I
will make it a gift to you. But not
nowonly when you get married.
In the Louvre, Svetlana finds herself
strongly identifying with a tiny medi-
eval Madonna confronting a silver
whale, apparently indoors, but Selin
identifies with none of the women in
the paintings. When she finally does
find something in a painting she identi-
fies with, it is a sideboard.
And then theres Hungary. Ivan has
given her a phrasebook, Just Enough
Hungarian:






Ink48 Hotel, 653 11th Avenue at 48th Street possibility that we might not have free



 

 In conversation with David Mazzucchelli will. Lucretius and quantum theory The toilet is blocked. The gas is
Wednesday, April 5th, 7pm came into it. Selin finds the idea that leaking. The boiler is not work-
Blutchs art is truly exquisite, Albertine free will might indeed have limits to be ing. I have a toothache. I have bro-
rendering battles, orgies 972 Fifth Avenue at 79th Street a relief. Ivan, though, writes, I am on ken my dentures. I have lost (my
and conversations in dense, In conversation with Richard McGuire and the boundary of being a scientist, and contact lenses, a filling, my bag,
inky lines akin to Mattotti, but so far the only scientific explanation for my car keys, my car, everything).
Dan Piepenbring
completely his own and com-
Thursday, April 6th, 6pm free will is that it is an illusion. I dont Someone has stolen (my car, my
pletely haunting . . . . The book
requires rereading to grasp Maison Franaise at Columbia University like that. passport, my money, my tickets,
the scope of storytelling and 515 W 116th Street, Buell Hall, 2nd Floor As the year progresses, the intensely my wallet, everything). . . . Dont
linework, which is effortless Masters of the Graphic Novel: Blutch and Burns desultory relationship continues with hang up. Theres a delay. Im sorry
enough to make the greatest In conversation with Charles Burns and e-mail and the occasional awkward, Im late. I dont understand you. I
American cartoonists jealous. Franoise Mouly though rather sweet, meeting. Selin is think this is wrong. No, not that.
Publishers Weekly
Events are co-sponsored by NYR Comics and Europe Comics.
so tuned in to every shade of meaning Thats enough, thank you. I wont
when they meet that she misinterprets take it, thank you. Please stop.
what Ivan says with startling precision:
New York Review Comics will be at Table F 202 Selin does not encounter the many ca-
in the exhibit hall of the MoCCA Arts Festival,
See you later, I said. lamities anticipated by Just Enough
April 1st and 2nd, 11am 6pm,
Metropolitan West, 639 W 46th Street. Yeah, eventually, he said. Hungarian during her stay, but emo-


 



Stop by and have a look at our new books. You notice were not very good at tional misadventure does await her
Available in bookstores, call Tickets to the MoCCA Arts Festival are $5 per day. getting in touch. there. Luckily, she is very young, and
(646) 215-2500, or visit www.nyrb.com Well get better, I said. ahead of her lies a lifetime of words and
He frowned. You can call me, all the worlds they bring with them.

34 The New York Review

 The Great Genius of Jewish Literature
S.Y. Agnon (18881970), who was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Litera-
ture in 1966, is the one modern master
among writers of Hebrew fiction. Jef-
frey Saks has undertaken a heroic task
in assembling the Agnon Library, using
existing translations, which generally
have been revised, and commissioning
English versions of previously untrans-
lated books. It is not quite a complete
works because some books could not
be included for reasons of copyright
or on other grounds. The most unfor-
tunate omission is Agnons modernist
masterpiece, Only Yesterday (1945), a
wrenching and richly inventive novel
about a naive young Zionists failed at-
tempt to take root in the land, which
unfolds in Jaffa and Jerusalem in the
early years of the twentieth century.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (his original
family name was Czaczkes) was born
in Buczacz, a town of about 15,000,
over half of whom were Jews, that at
one time belonged to Poland, was part
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from
the late eighteenth century until the end
of World War I, and is now in western
Ukraine. In an Orthodox home, under
the supervision of his learned father,
he was given a thorough education in
the classic Jewish texts, from the Bible
with its medieval Hebrew exegetes to
the Talmud, and he would draw on this
background extensively throughout
his career. But his family also engaged
a German tutor for him, and he read
Goethe, Schiller, and other German
writers with his mother. The adolescent
Agnon was drawn to Zionism, a move-
ment then less than ten years old, and
in 1908, when he was nineteen, he im-
migrated to Palestine.
Like most of the young Zionists of
that era, he proceeded to abandon the
religious practice of his childhood. The
Hebrew stories he began to publish in
Palestine quickly attracted attention,
the first being Agunot (Abandoned
Women), a story of unhappy lovers
written as if it were a folktale, from
which he took his rather somber new
name.
In 1913, for reasons that remain ob-
scure, he moved to Germany. Whether
or not he intended a long stay, he was
caught there by World War I, and he
did not return to Palestine until 1924,
married and with two children. He
settled permanently in Jerusalem and
returned to Orthodox observance. He
appears to have used his German years
to immerse himself in European culture
while continuing to write Hebrew fic-
tion. He also did some teaching at Franz
Rosenzweigs Frankfurt Lehrhaus, col-
laborated with Martin Buber in collect-
ing Hasidic tales, and began a lifelong
friendship with Gershom Scholem, the
great historian of Jewish mysticism.
Agnon is in some respects an anoma-
lous modernist. Early on, he had an
affinity for European gothic writers,
and gothic motifs such as the Dance of
Death, ghostly brides, and revenants
occur in many of his stories. He might,
one conjectures, have been drawn to
Thomas Manns recurrent theme of the
conflict between eros and the calling of
the artist and to Manns use of narra-
April 6, 2017
Robert Alter
S. Y. Agnon, 1908
THE TOBY PRESS S.Y. AGNON LIBRARY
EDITED BY JEFFREY SAKS
The Orange Peel
and Other Satires
translated from the Hebrew
by Jeffrey Saks.
177 pp., $16.95 (paper)
The Bridal Canopy
translated from the Hebrew
by I. M. Lask.
444 pp., $19.95 (paper)
A Guest for the Night
translated from the Hebrew
by Misha Louvish.
531 pp., $16.95
To This Day
translated from the Hebrew
by Hillel Halkin.
186 pp., $24.95; $14.95 (paper)
A Book That Was Lost:
Thirty-Five Stories
translated from the Hebrew
by Amiel Gurt and others.
600 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Two Tales:
Betrothed and Edo and Enam
translated from the Hebrew
by Walter Lever.
171 pp., $16.95 (paper)
tive leitmotifs. The dreamlike surreal-
ist stories Agnon began to write in the
1930s are in some ways reminiscent of
Kafka, though in one interview he ve-
hemently denied any connection, say-
ing that he had only one or two books
by Kafka on his shelves and that the
main thing for him as a writer was what
the Holy One inspired in his heart.
With characteristic slyness, he added
that his wife, on the other hand, owned
Kafkas collected works.
In a 1916 letter to Salman Schocken,
the department store magnate and,
later, publisher who became his pa-
tron, he expressed his profound admi-
ration for Flaubert, whom he would
have read in German translation. This
was a writer, he said, who mortified
himself in the tent of art, pointedly
Agnon House
substituting art for Torah in a well-
known rabbinic idiom. Flaubert was his
model for the painstaking devotion to
the writers craftAgnon assiduously
revised much of his work, and in the
years immediately after World War I
he transformed some of the effusive
stories of his first decade of writing into
beautifully disciplined prose. I suspect
that he also learned from Flaubert the
narrative technique of free indirect
discourse, in which a character speaks
through the voice of the narrator, which
he frequently used as an instrument of
psychological characterization.
Despite all this, Agnon often wrote
as a traditional teller of Hebrew tales
for whom the corpus of European liter-
ature was remote. In one of his stories
he refers to Homer, the master [rav] of
the poets of the Gentiles, using pay-
tan as the word for poet, a term that
usually designates a composer of litur-
gical verse. The stylistic pretense here
is that Homer belongs to an unfamil-
iar realm, though in Agnons haunting
novella Betrothed he has an important
part in the protagonists fateful pas-
sion for the sea and the Mediterranean
A Simple Story world of origins. Scholem, in an inter-
translated from the Hebrew view on Israeli television a few years
by Hillel Halkin. after Agnons death, was asked by
259 pp., $16.95 (paper) the critic Dan Miron what he made of
Agnons Orthodoxy. Scholem shrewdly
responded that for Agnon art was the
Two Scholars Who Were crucial consideration and that he was
in Our Town and Other Novellas
religious because it served his purposes
translated from the Hebrew as an artist.
by Paul Pinchas Bashan and others.
His religious identity is clearly insep-
288 pp., $16.95 (paper) arable from the unique path he chose as
a Hebrew stylist, and that in turn poses
From Foe to Friend a constant challenge for translating his
and Other Stories work. My language, he writes, is a
with illustrations by Shay Charka. simple language, the language of all the
48 pp., $19.95 generations that preceded and of all
the generations to come. His Hebrew
Shira is essentially the Hebrew of the early
translated from the Hebrew rabbis, which means the Hebrew of the
by Zeva Shapiro. Mishnah and the Midrash compiled
811 pp., $19.95 early in the Common Era, with at some
moments a trace of Yiddish inflections
In Mr. Lublins Store and occasional limited concessions to
translated from the Hebrew the modern language. His hyperbolic
by Glenda Abramson. invocation of the language of all the
281 pp., $24.95 generations reflects his classicizing
bent: for him, rabbinic Hebrew is as liv-
A City in Its Fullness ing and subtly expressive a vehicle as it
edited by Alan Mintz was eighteen hundred years ago, and by
and Jeffrey Saks. using it he means his works to be simi-
617 pp., $29.95 larly long-lasting.
It is scarcely the language of the
most recent generation of Hebrew
35
speakers. When I taught a graduate
seminar on Agnons novellas at Berke-
ley a few years ago, several of the stu-
dents were young Israelis with whom
I had to spend some time in class ex-
plaining rabbinic terms and idioms and
identifying the allusions to biblical and
later texts. Agnons Hebrew, of course,
is wonderfully apt for all the stories and
novellas that use the device of a tradi-
tional teller of taleswho often proves
to be ironic or subversive beneath the
mask of tradition. In the novels and
stories that deal with people in modern
settings, the prose often has the effect
of generating pervasive ironies because
of the cultivated discrepancy between
the Late Antique coloration of the He-
brew and the world of the characters,
often characterized by secular values,
the ambiguities of sexual freedom, and
the ravages of modern war.
In view of the distinctive charm and
force and the literary echoes of this
writing, I sometimes have suspected
that Agnon may be one of those writ-
ers, like Pushkin, who are absolutely
brilliant in the original and dont come
across very well in translation. But this
could not be altogether true. Walter
Benjamin, reading Agnon in the Ger-
man translations of his early work in
the 1920s, was convinced that he was
a great writer. Edmund Wilson, the
fi rst American critic to draw attention
to him, came to the same conclusion in
an essay for The New Yorker in the late
1950s.
The many translators Jeffrey Saks
has gathered for his series by and
large respond creditably to the chal-
lenge, though there is, understand-
ably, some unevenness. Even a single
ill- considered word-choice can throw
a translation out of kilter. In one story,
when a ragged stranger appears at a
synagogue in Buczacz, we realize be-
fore long that he must be the Elijah of
Jewish folklore. Again and again in this
English version, he is called the va-
grant, but the Hebrew heilekh means
no such thing. A heilekh is a wayfarer, a
traveler on foot, with none of the nega-
tive connotations of vagrancy, which
would scarcely suit the harbinger of
the messiah. Elsewhere, translations
are at points marred by errors in Eng-
lish idiom or grammar (even like for
as, or who for whom.) This is brilliantly rendered by Agnon. In the
unfortunate because Agnons Hebrew
is meticulously correct and exhibits
perfect pitch in the rabbinic idiomatic
usage it has adopted. These are, how-
ever, no more than small flaws.
The anomaly of Agnon as a modern-
ist is manifested in the two quite dif-
ferent aspects of his fiction. Many of
the novels and stories with a modern
setting have a mastery of form that
shows Agnon as a peer of Mann, Her-
mann Broch, and modernists such as
Faulkner and Joyce whom he may or
may not have read. (When I visited him
as a student at his home in 1960, there
was a copy on his desk of A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, just then
translated into Hebrew.) But there are
also works, including one important
novel, A Guest for a Night (1941), that
seem loosely associative, anecdotal, ep-
isodic. In texts written by some writers
of the Jewish Diaspora, the critic Ben-
jamin Harshav writes,
each detailed observation is
treated for its autonomous value.
36
Every detail is taken out of its nar-
rative chain and observed close up;
it does not lose the readers inter-
est, for it belongs to one total uni-
verse, which endows each detail
with rich meaning and depth.
Harshav links this kind of discourse
with traditional methods of Talmud
study as they have been folklorized
in Yiddish-speaking culture, and he
fi nds its aftermath in the writings of
Freud, Kafka, Saul Bellow, and others.
In some cases, Agnon uses such
episodic discourse to good artistic ef-
fect, as in A Guest for the Night, which
doesnt have much of a plot but never-
theless creates a powerful portrayal of
the devastation wreaked by World War
I on the narrators hometown, to which
he has come from Jerusalem for an ex-
tended stay and where he finds a world
of maimed bodies and people with the
bleakest prospect for any collective
future. He calls the town, here and
elsewhere, Szybusz, an obvious sub-
stitute for Buczacz, which sounds like
a Polish name but in Hebrew means
breakdown or distortion. In other
instances, the cultivation of Jewish dis-
course seems a little self-indulgent and
can be annoying to the reader, as in his
posthumously published novel, In Mr.
Lublins Store, set in Leipzig during
World War I.
Much of his longer fiction, however,
follows the patterns of the European
art novel, as do his exquisitely wrought
novellasAnd the Crooked Shall Be
Made Straight (admired by Walter
Benjamin), Hill of Sand, In the Prime
of Her Life, Betrothed, and Edo and
Enam. The most striking example of
Agnon as a European writer is the
novel A Simple Story (1935), set in Szy-
busz at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Like many of Agnons sto-
ries and novels, it is a tale of doomed
love. Hirshl, the passive protagonist, is
hopelessly in love with his poor cousin
Bluma Nachtnight flower in both stories are from time to time punctu-
German and Yiddishwho has come
to work as a servant in his parents
house. As prosperous bourgeois shop-
keepers, however, the parents arrange
a marriage for him with the daughter of
an affluent farmer. After the wedding,
Hirshls obsession with Bluma contin-
ues to grow and his mind deteriorates
until he has a psychotic breakdown,
ship and to the scrupulous observance
end, he returns to sanity and reconciles
with the wife his parents have chosen
for him, but it is a reconciliation suf-
fused with bitter irony, for it entails
succumbing to their world of coin-
counting, social conventionality, and
complacent materialism.
A Simple Story is the most Flauber-
tian of Agnons novels, and in keeping
with its French model, it is the most
perfectly constructed. He often draws
on Flauberts technique of free indi-
rect discourse to represent Hirshls
consciousness and his habitual fail-
ure to recognize the real nature of his
own desires. Also Flaubertian is the
reiteration of motifsroosters, geese,
cigarettes, coins, and much elsethat
have their own fraught presence and
help pull the novel tightly together.
And Agnon surely would have sympa-
thized with Flauberts animus against
the bourgeoisie. All the bourgeois fig-
ures in the novel are Jews, but they are
also preeminently European, and this
is a thoroughly European novel. Writ-
ten between the two world wars, it feels
rather like a nineteenth-century Euro-
pean novel. By this time, Agnon had
already begun writing experimental
fiction, but his major modernist novels
and novellas still lay ahead.
R eaders who make their way through
Jeffrey Sakss series will see that Agnon
is often deeply immersed in the ances-
tral world of piety. He sincerely loved
the sacred books that were its founda-
tion, and he shows genuine reverence
for his forebears devotion to God and
Torah. Nevertheless, the pious impulse
in his writing is not always what meets
the eye, and it is well to keep in mind
Scholems observation that the religios-
S. Y. Agnon
place, but he is not in the least fright-
ity ultimately served Agnons aims as
an artist.
A case in point is the large cycle of
stories A City in Its Fullness, edited by
Agnons daughter after his death. The
stories, some folkloric, many realistic,
all take place in a Buczacz of centuries
past. Agnon wrote them relatively late
in life, brooding over the fate of his
hometown, where almost the entire
Jewish population was slaughtered on
a single day by the Nazis. Though the
cause he is, after all, an observant Jew,
ated by angry denunciations of the kill-
ers, one must agree with the American
scholar Alan Mintz that for Agnon the
truest response to the Holocaust is to
create literarily the fullness of Jewish
life before that dark shadow was cast.
Several of the early stories in the cycle
are virtually hagiographic, celebrating
prodigies of devotion to Torah scholar-
he tries to parrot the Hebrew, man-
of all the minute details of rabbinic law.
As the book progresses, however,
we begin to encounter shocking tales
of vindictiveness, greed, gluttony, and
the heartless exploitation of the help-
less poor. Even a story that ostensibly
extols an extreme act of piety, about
a man who dies of hunger in the for-
est, though he has food, because he
refuses to eat in the absence of water
for the ritual washing of hands, makes
piety look like craziness. A City in Its
Fullness, at fi rst glance a loving com-
memoration of the ancestors whose
descendants were murdered, turns out
to have a subversive undercurrent, as in
much of Agnon. As an artist he was too
deeply committed to an unblinking vi-
sion of things as they are to sustain an
aura of reverence.
In the Forest and in the Town, a
story fi rst published in 1938 and not
yet included in the Agnon Library (it
should be translated in one of the two
remaining volumes), offers an instruc-
tive clue to Agnons larger enterprise.
The fi rst-person narrator, an adoles-
cent, has abandoned his Talmud studies
to go wandering every day in the for-
est outside his town, presumably Buc-
zacz. He takes with him a copy of the
Hebrew Bible but informs us that he is
reading the Prophets and the Writings,
possible sources of poems and stories,
and not the Torah, the compendium of
laws and the primary point of depar-
ture for the Talmud. He is the artist as
a young man.
There is an obvious antithesis be-
tween the town, where people con-
stantly worry about making a living,
and the forest, which is represented as
both edenic and wild. (The use of op-
posites is also suggested in the Hebrew
words for forest and town, which
are anagrams of each other.) In this
forest, however, there lurks an escaped
multiple murderer called Franciszek.
That the killer bears the same name as
the gentle saint who spoke to the birds
is one of several reversals of received
notions in the story.
The narrators parents are, of course,
alarmed that their son should insist on
continuing his visits to a dangerous
ened by the prospect of encountering
the murderer, which as readers we sense
will occur. First, however, he meets an
enigmatic old man who decides to tell
himtheir conversation would have
to be in Polishwhat happens in the
initial chapters of Genesis, concluding
with Abel rose up and killed Cain. Of
course, Cain could have killed Abel,
but he who must die, dies. The narra-
tor makes no comment on this startling
switch of killer and victim, though it
will be recalled at the end of the story.
When the narrator fi nally comes
upon Franciszek, the two speak ami-
cably, and the escaped murderer offers
the young man a swig of schnapps from
the flask fastened to his belt. The nar-
rator accepts, but before he drinks, be-
he pronounces in Hebrew the requisite
blessing, which ends with the words
for everything comes about through
His word. Franciszek asks him to
translate and then has him repeat the
words in Hebrew, shehakol nihyeh bid-
varo. He ponders what the young man
has told him the words mean, repeat-
edly muttering, Maybe its so. Then
aging only a mangled version of the
fi rst wordtchokl. The narrator goes
home, careful to reveal nothing of his
meeting in the forest.
After a time, Franciszek is captured
and subsequently led out for a public
execution with much of the towns pop-
ulation present. The townspeople show
mixed feelings toward the condemned
man, some wanting to see him killed,
others fi nding themselves strangely
sympathetic toward him. But since
mans imagination, the narrator stra-
tegically remarks, cannot match the
attribute of cruelty he possesses, they
accepted despite themselves the ver-
dict of the judges. The narrator ends
up standing close to the gallows, and
as the noose is about to tighten around
Franciszeks neck, he is heard to utter
a single word, tchokl. The other by-
standers are perplexed, but the narra-
tor thinks he understands: when the
killer fi rst heard the declaration for
all comes about through His word,
he wondered whether it was true; now,
at the moment of death, he accepts his
The New York Review
fate, affirming that even the cycle of vi-
olent crime and inexorable punishment
is part of a divine plan.
The story turns conventional ideas
upside down. The serial killer is a kind
of rude philosopher; everyone, as the
narrator observes elsewhere in the
story, has the potential to be a killer;
Abel was fated to murder Cain, though
it could have been the other way around.
In the forest, the narrator, manifestly
Agnons surrogate, performs a ritual
gesture prescribed by religious law in
The CEO Who Went Too Far
On February 16, President Donald
Trump defended his troubled admin-
istration, then all of twenty-seven days
old, in a news conference. I turn on
the TV, open the newspapers, and I see
stories of chaos, Trump said. Chaos!
Yet it is the exact opposite. This admin-
istration is running like a fine-tuned
machine.
In truth, the Trump administration in
its infancy is creating enough blunders,
scandals, and controversies to strain
the resources even of large news orga-
nizations like The New York Times and
The Washington Post. The disruptions
come on with the suddenness of a sum-
mer cloudburst. Even as reporters rush
to cover one storm, five others materi-
alize. It isnt easy to keep up.
The purpose of Trumps press con-
ference was to distract attention from
the withdrawal the day before, on the
eve of his confirmation hearing, of his
nominee for labor secretary, Andy
Puzder, by nominating in great haste
a substitute, R. Alexander Acosta, the
dean of Florida International Univer-
sity law school and a former member
of the National Labor Relations Board.
Puzders was the first Trump Cabinet
nomination to fail, and Trump is not
one to dwell on (or even acknowledge)
setbacks. By design or happy accident
(with Trump its often hard to tell)
Acosta was a much more confirmable
choicea conservative like Puzder,
but far less doctrinaire and person-
ally abrasive. He also would be, if
confirmed, the first Latino member of
Trumps cabinet.
Defeat or withdrawal of one or two
nominees isnt unusual at the start
of any administration, but Puzders
withdrawal was striking when you re-
membered that Trump enjoyed three
enormous advantages: a Republican
majority in the Senate, with fifty-two
votes; a Senate rule, passed when Dem-
ocrats controlled the chamber, disal-
lowing filibusters against all nominees
except those for the Supreme Court;
and very rigorous party discipline
among Senate Republicans. Despite
these, Trump lacked a majority to con-
firm Puzder. It was the new presidents
first legislative defeat, and likely will
be his only defeat in assembling his
Cabinet.
The people Trump invites into high
levels of government fall into two
categories: provocateurs and estab-
lishmentarians. White House Chief
Strategist Steve Bannon and Senior
Policy Adviser Stephen Miller are pro-
April 6, 2017
reciting the blessing, but it is the killer
rather than the young Jew who thinks
hard about the meaning of the words.
In the wild beyond the town, a secret
pact is sealed between the future artist
and the criminal.
That, I would contend, is the under-
lying paradox of Agnons multifaceted
project as a writer. He often presented
himself to his readers and to the public
eye as a modern avatar of Jewish tra-
dition, writing in the very Hebrew in
which it had been fashioned, expressing
Timothy Noah
Andrew Puzder, Donald Trumps original choice for labor secretary,
leaving a meeting with President-Elect Trump at Trump International Golf Club,
Bedminster Township, New Jersey, November 2016
vocateurs. Because many of these pro-
vocateurs have ties to the nativist and
white-nationalist alt right, Trump
has tended to place them in White
House jobs that dont require Senate
confirmation. The establishmentarians
are Trump recruits judged respect-
able by the Republican establishment
(and usually chosen for that reason).
In the White House, Vice President
Mike Pence and Chief of Staff Reince
Priebus are establishmentarians, but
most of them have positions in Trumps
Cabinet.
These establishmentarians either
have experience in government or a
history of generous financial contribu-
tions to the Republican Party. Before
his nomination, Puzder gave about
$300,000 during the 2016 cycle to the
Republican National Committee, the
Republican Party of California, where
he lived until last year, and the Re-
publican senatorial and congressional
committees. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell reportedly surprised
his colleagues by describing Puzder
as better prepared than any nominee
for labor secretary in historyeven
though Elaine Chao, McConnells wife,
had held the job previously. (Chao is
now Trumps secretary of transporta-
tion.) McConnell prized Puzders ex-
perience as CEO of CKE Restaurants,
which owns the Carls Jr. and Hardees
burger chains, because Puzder had
been subject to Labor Department reg-
ulations that McConnell and Puzder
both found meddlesome.
reverence for its sages and saints. But he
also had a sense that there was a kin-
ship between the artist and the outlaw.
Agnon certainly cherished the knowl-
edge that could be attained from sacred
texts, and also, as an autodidact and the
friend of modern scholars, he evinced
some admiration for secular scholar-
ship as an instrument of knowledge.
Yet he conceived artas becomes
clear in Shira, his posthumously pub-
lished novel about eros and art, art and
diseaseto be the vehicle of a more
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Puzder was an establishmentarian in
good standing. But he was also, tem-
peramentally, a bit of a provocateur.
In fast food, you sort of compete for
the best of the worst, Puzder said in a
speech in 2011not the kindest way to
describe your workforce. At CKE , Puz-
der approved raunchy TV ads in which
women in tiny bikinis approached
slow-motion sexual climax as they sank
their teeth into Carls Jr. burgers. When
womens groups complained, CKE an-
swered, in a press release, We believe
in putting hot models in our com-
mercials, because ugly ones dont sell
burgers.
If put to a vote today in Congress, the
principal law that the Labor Depart-
ment exists to enforcethe 1938 Fair
Labor Standards Act, which created
a minimum wage and the forty-hour
workweekwould never overcome
Republican opposition. (Even some
congressional Democrats might vote
against it.) But the FLSAs govern-
ing principle that a fair days work
deserves a fair days pay continues
to have support among the broader
public. The Republicans strategy has
therefore been not to attack the FLSA
directly, but rather to enforce it lightly
and work quietly to make it less bur-
densome to businesses. (That will
likely be Acostas approach. While
serving with the National Labor Re-
lations Board, Acosta often, though
not always, sided with employers such
profound, more perilous and painful
order of knowledge than could be at-
tained through any institution of learn-
ing, pious or secular. Endorsed by a
community, whether in a yeshiva or a
research library, such learning could
lead one only so far. It is, finally, in his
view, the artist who is prepared to take
the dangerous last step into the forest
where ultimate contradictions must be
confronted, where he must put himself
beyond the pale of received values, like
his secret brother, the outlaw.
as Walmart in cases involving labor
grievances.)
Puzders opposition to FLSA regu-
lations wasnt quiet. If government
could transform unskilled entry-level
positions into middle-income jobs,
he wrote about the minimum wage
in 2014, the Soviet Union would be
todays dominant world economy.
Puzder opposed a hike in the hourly
minimum even to $10.10, up from the
current $7.25; most Democrats support
an increase to $12 or $15.1
McConnell thought Puzders experi-
ence running a fast-food company was
an asset, but to many others it looked
like a significant liability. Under Presi-
dent Obama, the Labor Departments
Wage and Hour Division targeted res-
taurants as one of fifteen low wage,
high violation industries rife with
wage theftthat is, failure to pay
minimum wage or overtime. Even
among these fifteen rogue industries,
restaurantsmainly fast-food res-
taurantswere one of the worst, with
nearly $40 million in back wages recov-
ered in 2016.
Among twenty fast-food companies
that Bloomberg BNA surveyed in Sep-
tember, CKE Restaurants had compar-
atively few FLSA violations. But few
meant that 60 percent of Labor De-
partment investigations of restaurants
owned directly by CKE or by franchi-
sees ended with citations. A separate
calculation by two researchers at the
Century Foundation similarly found
that since Puzder became CEO in 2000,
over half of the inspections by the Oc-
cupational Safety and Health Admin-
istration of CKE- owned or -franchised
restaurants found they had health and
safety violations.
T hen there was Puzders housekeeper
problem. On February 6, Ryan Grim
reported in The Huffington Post that
Puzder had, about five years earlier,
discovered that a cleaning woman he
and his wife had employed for sev-
eral years was an undocumented im-
migrant. Hed fired her and offered to
help her get legal status (she declined),
but he didnt get around to paying state
1
Candidate Trump initially opposed
any increase, prompting organized
labor and others to dispute his eco-
nomic populism. Eventually Trump
settled on $10, though he seems in no
rush to introduce legislation on the
matter.
37

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and federal employment taxes for her
until after his nomination.
Similar problems concerning domes-
tic help previously derailed the nomi-
nations of Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood
for attorney general during the Clinton
administration and the nomination of
Linda Chavez for labor secretary dur-
ing the administration of George W.
Bush. But the view in the transition,
an unidentified Trump official assured
The Huffington Posts Grim, was that
disqualifying a candidate based on the
household help was very much the old
model. The new model was to sigh re-
gretfully and confirm. Wilbur Rosss
firing of an undocumented house-
keeper after he was nominated to lead
Trumps Commerce Department did
not impede his Senate confirmation,
and the Senate confirmed White House
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney after
he admitted to not paying $15,000 in
employment taxes on a nanny.
Yet on February 15, when Puzder
abruptly lost a crucial half- dozen Re-
publican votes, the decisive cause, we
were asked to believe, was Puzders
cleaning lady. The Washington Post
explained, It was Puzders hiring of
an undocumented worker for domestic
workas well as his support for more
liberalized immigration policiesthat
pushed several Senate Republicans
away. Puzder, as chairman of a corpo-
ration heavily dependent on low-wage
immigrant labor, did support a path to
citizenship for undocumented workers,
as Trump does not. But if that were the
Puzder told The Riverfront Times that
there was no physical abuse at any
point in time. Both Puzder and Fier-
stein acknowledged that police were
called to the house.
The documents cited in the River-
front Times article were sealed the day
after Puzders nomination. But Mari-
anne LeVine, a reporter at Politico,
retrieved from the St. Louis County
court some documents from a separate
filing in 1988 that Puzder appeared to
have overlooked. (The couple divorced
in 1987.) These included a petition in
which Fierstein alleged that in the 1986
episode Puzder assaulted and bat-
tered her, leaving her with two rup-
tured discs and two bulging discs.
All of the muscles, bones, liga-
ments and soft tissue of the face,
chest, back, shoulders, and neck
were violently wrenched, strained,
swollen, contused and otherwise
injured.
Puzder again denied assaulting Fier-
stein. The court denied her request for
$350,000 in damages on the grounds
that the divorce agreement signed the
year before had settled all her previous
claims against Puzder.
F iersteins first retraction of the as-
sault claims, LeVine discovered,
turned out to be a condition of a 1990
child- custody agreement with Puzder.
Fiersteins subsequent insistence that
its request that she turn over all epi-
sodes on domestic violence that shed
aired between 1985 and 1990. (There
turned out to be twenty.) The com-
mittee was able to identify Fierstein
because only one episode featured a
woman named Ann in wig and sun-
glasses. But Winfrey made it a condi-
tion of providing the tapes that only
senatorsnot even committee staff-
erscould review the episode.
Word got out only three days before
Puzders hearing was to take place
that HELP Committee senators were
reviewing the video. The March 1990
date of the episode (High Class Bat-
tered Women) quickly leaked, and
LeVine learned that another guest on
the show was Charlotte Fedders, a well-
known victim of domestic violence
whose husband, John, had abruptly lost
his job as enforcement chief in Presi-
dent Ronald Reagans Securities and
Exchange Commission after The Wall
Street Journal reported he was a wife-
beater. 3 Charlotte Fedders had kept a
VHS tape of the episode and quickly
agreed to share it. On the program,
Fierstein said that when she went pub-
lic with her charges of abuse Puzder
said to her, I will see you in the gutter.
This will never be over. You will pay
for this. It was, of course, impossible
to know whether Fierstein was lying.
But she did not seem, on the tape, to
be obviously mendacious or unhinged.
Politico posted its story, with video
snippets and a transcript of Fiersteins
comments, at 1:00 AM on February










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problem, why would Trump nominate,
the very next day, a substitute whose
views on immigration were even more
liberal? And why would Puzders house-
keeper problem suddenly loom so large
when Rosss and Mulvaneysand Puz-
ders, just one day earlierhad not?
T he actual cause for Puzders loss of
support was a matter few felt like dis-
cussing: allegations made three decades
ago by his first wife, Lisa Fierstein
her abuse claims against him had been
a mere ruse to leverage a better divorce
settlement wasnt easy to square with
the fact that she had first filed them
before the couple even separated. Nor
was it a good fit with LeVines discov-
ery that, eight months before the child-
custody agreement, Fierstein repeated
her accusations disguised in sunglasses
and a wig and using the pseudonym
Ann on an episode of The Oprah Win-
frey Show. If Fierstein didnt identify
herself on Oprah, how could her accusa-
15.4 By lunchtime CNN was report-
ing that there were four to twelve firm
Republican no votes (the day before
there had been only Republican un-
decideds) and that Senate GOP lead-
ers were advising the White House to
pull the nomination. Within a couple of
hours, Puzder withdrew.
Twelve days later, the conservative
talk radio host Hugh Hewitt invited
Puzder on his show to commiserate
about his defeat. Puzder said he was
the victim of a fake news tsunami.









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38
tions possibly affect any legal proceed-
der had assaulted her physically in their
home in Clayton, Missouri, an affluent
St. Louis suburb. Fierstein has main-
tained since 1990 that those abuse al-
legations in the 1980s were lies that she
was persuaded to tell by an unscrupu-
lous divorce attorney in order to get a
better divorce settlement.
But a July 1989 story in The River-
front Times, a weekly newspaper in St.
Louis, told a different story.2 Citing
documents filed in St. Louis County
Circuit Court in 1986, The River-
front Times said Fierstein alleged that
Puzder
attacked me, choked me, threw
me to the floor, hit me in the head
pushed his knee into my chest
twisted my arm and dragged me on
the floor, threw me against a wall,
tried to stop my call to 911 and
kicked me in the back.
Puzders version, the paper said, was
that he had merely grabbed her by
the shoulders and pushed her back
to keep her from hurting herself: I
dont know if her foot caught or what
happened, but she went down on her
back and stayed down on the ground.
2
Gianna Jacobson and J. A. Lobbia,
Puzder v. Puzder, The Riverfront
Times, July 26, 1989.
He didnt say what that news was, and
ing? (I should here disclose that I was
LeVines editor on these stories, and
once or twice shared a byline with her.)
After LeVine reported the fact of
Fiersteins Oprah appearance, Fier-
stein explained in a letter to the Sen-
ate Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions Committee, then considering
Puzders nomination, that shed been
invited onto Oprahs program after the
Riverfront Times story appeared. I
was hesitant but encouraged by friends
and became caught up in the notion
of a free trip to Chicago and being a
champion of women and womens is-
sues, she wrote. I regret my decision
to appear on that show. I never told
Andy about it.
The obvious next step, for both the
HELP Committee and the press, was to
locate the 1990 Oprah episode and find
out what shed said. This proved sur-
prisingly difficult. The Oprah Winfrey
Network, which controlled the video
library, put off all press inquiries. (Two
intimates of Winfreys later explained
to me that angry cattlemen had filed
an $11 million libel suit against her in
1996 over something shed said on her
show about hamburgers. Shed won this
screwball lawsuit, but resolved never
again to make available any past episode
deemed even remotely controversial.)
Winfrey was more responsive to the
HELP Committee, agreeing quietly to
Hewitt was too much of a gentleman to
ask.
Since Puzder withdrew, some liberal
Washington policymakers and journal-
ists have expressed regret that he was
brought down by allegations aired in a
messy divorce rather than by his views
about American workers. The implica-
tion is that plausible past allegations of
domestic violence dont warrant seri-
ous consideration in assessing a mans
fitness for public office. It perhaps is
not coincidental that none of those
who have voiced this complaint was a
woman.
March 9, 2017
3
Brooks Jackson, Storm Center: John
Fedders of SEC Is Pummeled by Legal
and Personal Problems, The Wall Street
Journal, February 25, 1985. The article
caused a sensation, prompting Char-
lotte Fedders to publish a 1987 memoir
about the experience titled Shattered
Dreams. A TV adaptation aired on CBS
in May 1990. The theme of all three was
that domestic abuse was not confined to
lower-income familiesthere were rich
men who beat their wives too, and they
were much better able to keep it from
being discovered.
4
Marianne LeVine and Timothy Noah,
Puzders Ex-Wife Told Oprah He
Threatened You Will Pay for This,
Politico, February 15, 2017.
The New York Review
 A World More Glowing
Than We Will Ever Know
Irelands Immortals:
A History of the Gods of Irish Myth
by Mark Williams.
Princeton University Press,
578 pp., $39.50
In 1811, Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres was commissioned to paint
an image for the ceiling of Napoleon
Bonapartes bedroom at the Palazzo
del Quirinale in Rome. The former
papal palace was being prepared for
the French emperors visit to the city
to assume the title King of Rome and
make himself the explicit heir to the
Caesars. But Ingress painting is not,
as might be expected, on a Roman
theme. It shows instead the supposedly
ancient Gaelic bard Ossian, a blind
white-haired figure slumped over his
Celtic harp, dreaming of the figures
who hover above him. Among them
are some of the central figures of Irish
mythology, including the warrior and
hunter Finn mac Cumaill.
Ingres knew that Napoleon was be-
sotted by the poems of Ossian, which
were in fact fabrications woven in the
1760s by the Scottish writer James
Macpherson from traditional materi-
als but passed off as rediscoveries of
the lost works of a third-century-AD
warrior-bard. Napoleon had previously
commissioned for his home at the Ch-
teau de Malmaison an even stranger
painting: Anne-Louis Girodets bi-
zarre Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of
the French Heroes, in which the Gaelic
bard welcomes into the afterlife the
French generals killed in the revolu-
tionary wars.
It is a peculiar thought that in some
parallel universe where Napoleon com-
pleted his dominion over Europe, the
gods and superhumans of pre-Christian
Ireland might have become the official
icons of a French- dominated conti-
nent. Instead, they remained what they
have been for 1,500 years: elusive and
angular figures whose very ambiguity
has made them supremely adaptable.
Paradoxically, these haughty heroes
have proven to be most obedient ser-
vants, lending themselves at different
times to the needs of medieval Irish
poets and Victorian theosophists, of
Napoleonic propaganda and New Age
visions, of W. B. Yeats and J. R. R.
Tolkien.
It is a fascinating history and in
Mark Williamss Irelands Immortals
it has found a magnificent historian.
Williams, an Oxford-based scholar
of Welsh, Irish, and English medieval
literature, is equally at home in the
arcana of Old Irish texts and modern
English-language writing, and it is this
range of erudition that has allowed him
to write the first full overview of the
long twilight of the Irish gods. Irelands
Immortals is not just a history of their
afterlifeit deserves to be seen as it-
self a part of that history.
At the heart of this story is a kind of
tenderness: the reluctance of one cul-
ture to obliterate entirely the one that it
had supplanted. To get some idea of the
original meaning of those figures like
Finn mac Cumaill in Ingress paint-
April 6, 2017
Fintan OToole
Anne-Louis Girodet: Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes, circa 1800
ing, we can turn to a book composed
around 1220 AD but bringing together
many of the older stories of an imag-
ined pre-Christian Ireland. Accalam
na Senrach (The Colloquy of the El-
ders) is a novel-length evocation of the
coming of Christianity to Ireland in
the fifth century and its rapid replace-
ment of the complex belief systems
that Ireland shared with other Celtic
cultures.1 It is also a moving reflection
on memory and forgetting in which we
feel the tension between the need on
the one hand to banish beliefs that are
now heretical and possibly satanic and,
on the other, the desire to honor the an-
cestors who held those beliefs. How, as
Christians, could the unknown authors
of the book even justify writing down
the old pagan stories? Yet how, as Irish
people, could they justify the consign-
ment of the culture of their ancestors
to oblivion?
F inn mac Cumaill, who is at the cen-
ter of this particular cycle of stories,
seems, from a Christian point of view,
quite a dangerous figure. He may origi-
nally have been the god of the all-male
bands of young aristocratic hunter-
warriors, the fan, who roamed Ire-
land. This institution was anathema to
the churchit was nomadic, blasphe-
mously oath-bound, and suspected of
being a reservoir of pagan practices:
the clergy called the fan sons of
death. So it is all the more remarkable
that the authors of the Accalam, most
1
The most accessible version is Ann
Dooley and Harry Roes translation
under the title Tales of the Elders of Ire-
land (Oxford Worlds Classics, 1999).
not being entirely forgotten. He is God
Muse National du Chteau de Malmaison, Rueil
the antiquarian. And Patrick, as Gods
servant, has a power that the great old
warriors, for all their heroic strength,
do not possess: writing.
Pre-Christian Irish culture was al-
most entirely oral and the Accalam is,
among other things, a reflection on the
precariousness of oral cultures and the
wonders of literacy. It is, in the sim-
plest sense, self- consciously literary.
The process it describes is that of the
translation of the spoken into the writ-
ten, and of the oral past into a literary
future. This act of writing, moreover,
has divine sanction. The angels pass on
to Patrick Gods instruction to have
these stories written down on poets
tablets in refined language. God him-
self, it seems, wants the Irish deities to
be transformed into literature.
And in a sense, as Williams shows
with such brilliant persuasiveness, they
are nothing but literature. Irish mythol-
ogy has its own mythologythe idea
that it is a clear window on Western
Europes pagan past, a pristine survival
from the Celtic culture that was broken
by the Romans and gradually driven
to the continents western margins. It
is an enormously attractive ideathe
appeal of the Celtic is that it is wild
produce, sourced in the ancient forests
and on misty crags, not like the farmed
stuff of our classical, rational civiliza-
likely clerics themselves, should choose tion. But Williams demolishes this idea
to preserve some of the lore of these with extraordinary erudition and dev-
suspected pagans for posterity. astating wit. Happily, though, he shows
Thus the ingenious narrative device the Irish gods and heroes to be actually
of the Accalam: the last survivors of more interesting figures, not static rem-
the fan are allowed to tell their tales nants of the deep past but living, infi-
to an unimpeachable audience: Saint nitely adaptable images that continue
Patrick himself, who had been born to feed the artistic imagination.
in Roman Britain and became the fa-
ther of Irish Christianity. Patrick on his
missionary travels in the fifth century When the angels told Patrick that the
is blessing an old fort that was once the old heroes had forgotten two thirds of
house of Finn when the last survivors their stories, they were understating
of the fan appear: His priests . . .were the case. The Irish gods are one per-
seized with fear and horror at the sight cent life and 99 percent afterlife. Of the
of these enormous men, the warriors of actual religious life of pre-Christian
an earlier age, together with their great Ireland, its rituals and cults as well as
dogs. Patrick sprinkles the giant war- its cosmological and theological be-
riors with holy water and the demons liefs, we know very little. Culturally,
fled from them in all directions, into the Irish were part of a broader Celtic
the hills and rock-clefts and off to the world. This is not to say that they were
far reaches of the country. But it is not themselves Celts: they were descended
just the old pagans who are thus spiri- from the first people who settled the is-
tually cleansedso, more importantly, land about 10,000 years ago.
are the stories they will tell. Patrick, in The once-cherished notion of a
his generosity, has chosen to allow cer- Celtic invasion of Ireland around three
tain tales, and the gods and heroes they thousand years ago has long since been
contain, to enter into Irish memory. debunkedthere is not a shred of evi-
What is so moving is the feeling of re- dence for it. But there is little doubt
membrance being pulled out of the fire that Irish culture existed within an At-
of oblivion. The old giants sometimes lantic sphere that encompassed Britain,
introduce their tales with phrases like northern France, and northern Spain.
That story is still clear in my mem- This, though, does not help us very
ory, implying that others are not. much. As the Patrick of the Accalam
Indeed, his two guardian angels tell understood, things that are not written
Patrick that the fan warriors to whom down disappear and the people who ac-
he speaks have already lost fully two tually believed in the old gods did not
thirds of their store of tales because write down their own myths. For con-
their memories are faulty. The angels temporary evidence, we have only the
give him sanction from God himself fragmentary (and often self-serving)
to keep listening to the stories. This, impressions left by a few Greek and
then, is a rather unbiblical God, one Roman writers.
who is gentle enough to grant some of A single paragraph in Julius Caesars
his pagan predecessors the privilege of history of his Gallic wars is pored over
39

A COLLECTION OF WITTY
AND PROVOCATIVE ESSAYS
BY ROGER SCRUTON
CONFESSIONS
OF A HERETIC
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Roger Scruton
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40
again and again because it is the nearest
thing to an account of Celtic religion
and in it Caesar tells us that the chief
god of the Gauls is Mercury, and that
after him come Apollo, Mars, Jupiter,
and Minerva. It is like a contemporary
American going through a gallery of
medieval portraits and telling us that
they look like Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Taylor Swift,
and Donald Trump. We have some idea
of what he is seeing but not much idea
of what he is looking at. In any case, we
simply do not know whether the Irish
gods were precisely the same as those
worshiped by the Gauls.2
It seems clear enough that one of the
Gaulish gods, Lugdus, the most likely
candidate for Caesars Mercury-like
deity, was widely worshiped
in Ireland, though he may W. B. Yeats
have had many local ava-
tars, including the Finn mac
Cumaill who ends up on
Ingress painting for Napo-
leons ceiling and the other
great warrior C Chulainn,
hero of many poems and
plays by Yeats. On the other
hand, the single most impor-
tant aspect of the Irish Oth-
erworld is the notion that its
denizens dwell inside hol-
low hills called sde. These
were often megalithic tu-
muli built as sites of worship
thousands of years before
the emergence of a Celtic
culture in Ireland, but they
were now understood to be
worlds in themselves, much
vaster on the inside than on
the outside.
The people of the sde,
later anglicized as shee and
etiolated into Victorian fair-
ies, were dazzlingly beauti-
ful, wealthy, supernaturally powerful,
and long-lived or even immortal. The
Irish version of Lugdus, called Lug, is
explicitly referred to in early written
sources as from the hollow hills. But
this central aspect of Irish belief is not
found in Gaul, or even in neighboring
Britain. So far as the evidence goes, it
seems to be utterly distinctive to Ire-
land. Irelands pre-Christian belief sys-
tem, then, may well be a mix of Western
European cults adapted to local needs
and entirely indigenous ideas. Given
the highly localized nature of Irish so-
cietyit was a patchwork of petty king-
domsit may well be that practices
and beliefs, and even deities, varied
considerably across the island.
What is certain is that by the early
Middle Ages, when these beliefs are
written down in stories that have been
heavily filtered through Christianity
and literacy, the Irish gods look noth-
ing like the Greco-Roman or Norse
pantheons. The sde are not a Celtic
Olympus or Valhalla inhabited by
relatively stable families of gods with
2
Similarly, the Greek writer Strabo,
who wrote between 20 BC and 29 AD,
records a visit by one Artemidorus to
an unnamed island near Britain where
he witnessed sacrifices being made like
those on the Aegean island of Samo-
thrace to the goddess Demeter. This
island might or might not be Ireland
and it might or might not imply the
existence of a cult of a Demeter-like
mother goddess.
clearly defined attributes. Their inhab-
itants are closer to superstars and su-
permodels than to the classical gods:
as Williams puts it they physically
resemble usor would, were we all
gorgeous, splendidly dressed young
adults in glowing health. These god-
peoples are close enough to mere mor-
tals that they can fall in love with and
marry each otherthough usually with
unhappy consequences. In medieval
Gaelic literature, these exquisite deities
acquired the collective name Tatha
D, the god-peoples, which later mu-
tated into the form now in general use,
Tatha D Danann. 3
By the time of the influential pseudo-
history The Book of Invasions, written
in the eleventh century, the Tatha D
Danann had been reimagined as a race
of people who invaded Ireland in the dis-
tant past and routed the indigenous na-
tives, before themselves being defeated
by the invading Gaels and relegated to
their new kingdoms in the hollow hills.
The strangeness of this story, which has
the Irish Gaels going to war against and
militarily defeating their own gods, is
one expression of the difficulty of plac-
ing the god-peoples within a Christian
worldview. Having rescued them from
oblivion, Irish Christian writers have
to decide who and what they are. The
glory of the old gods, though, is that
they do not provide answers to those
questions. They refuse to be defined,
and thus have to be imagined.
The easy way to think of them, from
a Christian perspective, is as satanic
demons and sorcerers, and some early
Christian writers in Ireland do indeed
think of them in this way. But the desire
to remember them in writing demands
other possibilities. Were they, perhaps,
a race of humans with enhanced capac-
ities? Could they be people who had
somehow escaped the consequences
of the Fall of Adam and Eve? Or were
they actual gods who had died out when
Jesus saved mankind from its sins?
One especially ingenious Irish solution
to these ontological questions was the
suggestion that the Tatha D were in
3 tween the eighth and thirteenth centu-
Notably, the Danann bit was added
because Tatha D could also be trans-
lated as the Christian term people of
Godit was important not to con-
fuse the pagan god-peoples with Gods
people.
fact half-fallen angels who had been
expelled from heaven for being neutral
in the conflict between God and Satan
but, being not quite bad enough for
hell, had been allowed to land in Ire-
land instead. Or, in a particularly dar-
ing variation on this theme, perhaps
they were in fact good angels who had
come to Ireland to help its people be-
fore the arrival of Christianity.
The point about these possibilities is
that they continued to exist simultane-
ously, sometimes within the same story.
The old gods have a hovering, waver-
ing kind of existence. For ordinary
Irish people, they may have retained
a vivid presence in oral tales, but we
dont really know how they thought
about them. For the literate intellec-
tuals on whose anonymous
labors our own knowledge
depends, the old gods cre-
ated a field of ambiguity and
uncertainty that invited lit-
erary exploration of the slip-
periness and insecurity of
human existence itself. In-
deed, the great attraction of
the Irish gods for writers is
what they are not. They are
not sacred. Actual paganism
had almost certainly died
out in Ireland by the early
eighth century when the last
of the druids are lumped in a
law tract with satirists and
inferior poets and farters
and clowns and bandits and
pagans and whores. The
Irish gods have the enor-
mous advantage for writers
of not being off-limits. One
can say anything one likes
about them. As well as being
a field of ambiguity, they are
also a realm of imaginative
freedom.
Many of these old gods probably had
deep roots in pre-Christian Ireland:
among them are the father figure called
the Dagda; Brigit, who is the exemplar
of poetry, medicine, and metalwork;
the aforementioned Lug; the Morrgan,
a goddess of battle who appears as a
crow or raven; the sea god Mannann;
the warrior king Nada of the Silver
Arm; the beautiful young lad engus
(later called Aengus or Angus); and his
mother Band, who was the goddess of
the River Boyne. Their pure forms are
no longer discernible through the fog
of oral memory and the thick layers of
Christian reinterpretation.
But just as many of the original gods
were lost in the transition to Chris-
tianity, anonymous medieval writers
invented hundreds of others and rein-
terpreted some of the old gods in the
light of Christianity, of classical learn-
ing, and of contemporary needs. Brigit,
who is now the most popular goddess
among contemporary neopagans, was
conflated with an early Irish Christian
saint of the same name to such an ex-
tent that it is impossible to tell whether
the attributes of the goddess are back-
projections of the saint or vice versa.
What is especially intriguing, though,
is that in this process of reinvention,
which flourished most fruitfully be-
ries, the Irish poets and prose writers
shifted the gods from the realm of na-
ture to that of culture. They probably
began as spirits of the sun, moon, sea,
and rivers, but in medieval Ireland,
The New York Review
they are transformed into images of
skill, knowledge, and the arts. They
function as prototypes of what Gaelic
society called the es dna, the people
of talent. In one ninth-century text, a
prodigious teenage poet announces his
genealogy, beginning with I am son of
Poetry,/Poetry son of Scrutiny,/Scru-
tiny son of Meditation and working
his way back to Understanding son
of Wisdom,/Wisdom, son of the Three
Gods of Skill. These three gods of
skill are glossed in the text as the three
sons of the goddess Brigit. Here, as in
many other texts, we can see that the
old gods are being used to suggest that
the artist has a genealogy that is at least
the equal of the aristocrats. There is
thus a lovely symbiosis: the old gods
validate the work of the artists and the
artists repay the compliment by giving
the old gods new life in their vivid tales.
Because the writers are free to invent
and because the nature of the gods is so
Dagda gained a mistress, and they
had sex. The mark remains at Bel-
traw Strand where they coupled.
It is not surprising that this part of the
story was entirely excised when Au-
gusta, Lady Gregory, Yeatss great ally
and collaborator, published the most el-
egant revival of the Tatha D tales as
Gods and Fighting Men in 1904. (The
fly into which tan was transformed
became a more decorous butterfly.)
But Gregory was in her own way being
consistent with the traditionthe gods
owed their continued existence to their
adaptability. In the Celtic Revival led
by Yeats and Gregory in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries,
they were repurposed to meet a variety
of demands. For an Anglo-Irish land-
owning class that was gradually being
displaced by the rise of the Catholic
peasantry and middle class, the Tatha
This masterpiece of American autobiography
is the tale of a striving, self-mythologized,
and nearly Melvillean figure crashing toward
his own salvationand more. . . . Nearly
50 years on, its clear that, to paraphrase
Dostoevsky on Gogol, we all come out from
Podhoretzs overcoat. Lee Smith, Tablet
Making It is Podhoretzs blistering account of
fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out
of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and
finally of his induction into the ranks of what he
calls the Family, the small group of left-wing and
largely Jewish critics and writers whose opin-
ions came to dominate and increasingly politi-
cize the American literary scene in the fifties
and sixties.
It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless
and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely ob-
MAKING IT served and in many ways still-pertinent analysis
of the tense and more than a little duplicitous
Norman Podhoretz relationship that exists in America between
Introduction by Terry Teachout intellect and imagination, money, social status,
uncertain, these tales have a remark- D provided a fantasy of a dazzling 






and power.
able variety of tone. On the one hand, elite surviving its own defeat. George



 The Family responded to the book with outrage,
for example, there is the great beauty
and poignancy of the ninth-century
saga The Wooing of tan. Midir, a
member of the Tatha D, falls in love
with the mortal tan. When Midir
takes her home with him, his existing
wife, a sorceress, is not best pleased
and turns tan into a pool of water.
But the heat of the fire in the hearth
turns tan into a purple fly the size
of a mans head and the most beautiful
creature in all the land.
Eventually, after a thousand years,
the fly falls into the cup of another
woman who swallows her and ingests
her into her womba rare instance of
same-sex impregnation. tan, after
her millennium as a fly, is born again
in human form, grows up, and marries.
She is unaware of her previous exis-
tence, but Midir rediscovers her and,
after various adventures, the two of
them disappear through the skylight in
the form of swans.4
On the other hand, the stories can
have an earthy irreverence that was
deeply uncomfortable to later revival-
ists. We might expect the Dagda, who
seems to be the equivalent of Zeus
or Odin, to be approached with awe.
But as he appears in one of the most
important sagas, The Second Battle of
Moytura, written probably in the late
ninth century and telling the story of
a conflict between the Tatha D and
another supernatural race, the Fomori-
ans, the Dagda is naked, with a long
penis. He also engages in one of the
strangest sex scenes in medieval litera-
ture. The Fomorians torture him by
force-feeding him with porridge. He
then encounters the beautiful daughter
of the Fomorian king who taunts him






modesty and charm, the novels profound, unas-
for his impotence and beats him. She
Russell thought the old Irish gods were
avatars of the Hindu deities and imag-
ined that a Celtic theosophy would be-
come the new national religion. These
fantasies transcended their Irish set-
tings, feeding into a Celtic revival in
Scotland, into Californian New Age
hippiedom, into Tolkiens Lord of the
Rings, where the elves are the Tatha
D in thin disguise, and into contempo-
rary beliefs ranging from Wiccan cults
to feminist and Celtic theology.
For Yeats, the Irish gods initially
promised a little more than they de-
livered. He put enormous energy into
trying to conjure them in visions and
magical rituals but they declined to
make satisfactory appearances. They
are, as Yeats came to understand,
purely imaginary beings. He came to
focus on one of them, engus/Aengus,
as the embodiment of the poetic imagi-
nation itself. In the most beautiful re-
vivification of the dead gods, he picked
up on an enigmatic eighth- century
saga, The Dream of engus, in which
the young god languishes after nightly
visions of a beautiful but unattainable
woman. With the great bravado that
only he could muster, Yeats stopped
trying to evoke the god and instead
simply became him. The I of The
Song of Wandering Aengus is both
Yeats himself and the golden young
lad of the Tatha D:
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a
thread. . . .
In a transformation worthy of the old
stories themselves, he catches a fish
and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on
One cant really understand them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he
the state of so-called highbrow remains to this day.
culture today without first coming
to terms with the career of Norman Fifty years after its first publication, this contro-
Podhoretz. Along with Jason and versial and legendary book remains a riveting
Barbara Epstein, Robert Silvers, autobiography, a book that can be painfully
Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and revealing about the complex convictions and
a few others (the children of needs of a complicated man as well as a fas-
Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and cinating and essential document of mid-century
Philip Rahv), Mr. Podhoretz
American cultural life.
reconceived the very idea of what
it means to be an intellectual.
Robert S. Boynton,
The New York Observer
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit www.nyrb.com
A CLASSIC OF GAY LITERATURE,
NOW IN A NEW TRANSLATION
Ernesto is a tender and complex tale of sexual
awakening by one of Italys most admired poets.
Ernesto is a sixteen-year-old boy from an edu-
cated family who lives with his mother in Trieste.
His mother is eager for him to get ahead and has
asked a local businessman to give him some
workplace experience in his warehouse. One
day a workingman makes advances to Ernesto,
who responds with willing curiosity. A month of
trysts ensues before the boy begins to tire of
the relationship, finally escaping it altogether
by engineering his own dismissal. And yet his
experience has changed him, and as Umberto
Sabas unfinished, autobiographical story breaks
off, Ernesto has struck up a new, oddly romantic
attachment to a boy his own age.
This little miracle of a book tackles the weight-
ERNESTO iest themesthe unthinking cruelty of youth,
the shock of adulthood, the humanizing force
Umberto Saba of lovewith the humor and lightness of touch
A new translation by Estelle Gilson that are the surest sign of mastery. For all its
thrusts him waist-deep into the earth,
causing the bloated Dagda to lose con-
trol of his bowels, which apparently re-
stores his sexual potency:
Then the Dagda got out of the hole,
after letting go of the contents of
his belly, and the girl had waited
for that a long time. . . . The girl
jumped on him and whacked him
across the arse, and her curly bush
was revealed. At that point the
4
An accessible retelling of the story
is in Philip Freemans very enjoyable
forthcoming Celtic Mythology: Tales of
Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes (Oxford
University Press, 2017).
April 6, 2017
that turns into a young woman who
then disappears. His pursuit of her will
stretch into infinity while he imagines
how they will together
walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are
done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
When the angels asked Patrick to
have these stories written down on
poets tablets in refined language, they
must have had in mind Yeatss revival
of the old god as a luminous presence
that is always wandering, never quite
captured.



  suming beauty has a force and finally a gran-
deur that come from the source of all great art,
what Saba calls the red hot center of life.
UPCOMING EVENTS Garth Greenwell
Thursday, March 30th, 7:30pm Umberto Sabas secret novel Ernesto re-creates
Warwicks a boys awakening to sexual love with both men
7812 Girard Avenue and women. Its a story so fresh, so alive to
La Jolla, CA nuances of feeling and perception, it defies any
Estelle Gilson in conversation with formulaic understanding of love in Sabas time
Elio Schaechter about her translation or in our own. Estelle Gilsons translation catch-
Thursday, April 6th, 7pm es the intimate rhythms of these discoveries.
Bureau of General Services Rosanna Warren
Queer Division
208 W 13th Street, Room #210
New York, NY
Peter Cameron, Benjamin Taylor, and
Jaime Manrique discuss Ernesto Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit www.nyrb.com
41
LETTERS
THE WORLD OF
EDWARD SNOWDEN
To the Editors:
Thank you for printing my letter and Char-
lie Savages response [The Facts About
Edward Snowden, Letters, NYR, March
9]. In discussing my footnote, he asserts that
the June 10, 2013, article by Te-Ping Chen
makes no mention as to when Snowden
checked in to the Mira. Actually, her article
does state that Snowden checked in to the
Mira on June 1, as I confirmed (www.wsj
.com/articles/SB10001424127887324904004
578537062414488652).
Savage is correct that I was imprecise in
pluralizing reporters in my footnote. Ms.
Chen had a coreporter credited, but as Ms.
Chen told me, she was the one who spoke
to the hotel reservation clerk.
As for the issue he takes with me on the
PRISM program, I use the word acciden-
tal, whereas he uses the word incidental.
For the NSA, incidental is the deliberate,
not accidental, surveillance of people in
contact with a target, as in the example I
give in my letter.
Edward Jay Epstein
New York City
Charlie Savage replies:
Edward Jay Epsteins second letter further
demonstrates why readers should approach
with caution the information he puts for-
ward. First, contrary to his letters implica-
tion, his endnote did not cite the June 10,
2013, Wall Street Journal article, Snowdens
Whereabouts Remain Unclear, to which
he now points. Rather, the endnote cited
the article Snowdens Options for Refuge
Narrow, which the Journal published on-
line on June 30, and which, as I discussed in
my reply to his first letter, indeed says noth-
ing about when Snowden checked in to the
Mira Hotel. Faced with the recognition that
he cited the wrong article, Epstein in this
letter disingenuously tries to paper over his
mistake by mischaracterizing which article
I was discussing rather than by forthrightly
explaining what happened.
Second, I acknowledge that the ninth
paragraph of this June 10 article, of which
I was previously unaware, states (in passing
and without clear sourcing) that Snowden
checked in to the Mira on June 1, in apparent
contrast to Snowdens statements that he had
been staying at the hotel since his arrival in
Hong Kong eleven days earlier. I remain un-
aware of any other place in the public record
except Epsteins work where this June 1 claim
independently appears, ranging from numer-
ous other news articles about Snowdens time
in Hong Kong to a September 2016 report
by the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence, whichseeking to counter
the premiere of Oliver Stones movie
scoured the governments investigative file
for material to portray Snowden as a liar.
Perhaps someday the Miras records
will emerge into public view and we will
have more solid information to evaluate
this question. Either way, my central point
remains unchanged: Epstein treated the
check-in claim as a factual anchor for his in-
sinuations about what Snowden might have
been doing earlier, but at the time he wrote
his book (and still today) the evidence for
foreigners the agency has targeted for
surveillance), and which the government
keeps and treats as fair game for use in
unrelated investigations. Instead, he says
that sentence was about a different type of
unplanned collection that the government
is generally supposed to delete (even if no
ninety-day filtering process exists).
But accidental is not the agencys term
of art for the latter type of unplanned col-
lection, which happens when there is a mis-
take or equipment failure; rather that type is
called inadvertent. Moreover, I point back
to the fact that Epsteins inaccurate claim
about a filtering and purging process imme-
diately followed a sentence about the inci-
dental collection of Americans messages
and, in the context of the paragraph, its func-
tion was to undermine the suggestion that
PRISMs incidental collection of data about
Americans meant that Snowdens exposure
of the system qualified as whistleblowing.
Edward Snowden
Since Epsteins book is littered with in-
accuracies about basic surveillance facts,
the simplest explanation is that he just got
confused here, too. It is surprising that he
appears to prefer people to believe that he
instead knowingly shifted from discussing
the type of unplanned collection that the
government keeps to the type it deletes,
since that would imply that he deliberately
misled his readers using a bait-and-switch.
STEVEN WEINBERG
AND THE PUZZLE OF
QUANTUM MECHANICS
To the Editors:
My article The Trouble with Quantum
Mechanics [NYR, January 19] provoked a
flood of comments. Some were from non-
scientists charmed to learn that physicists
can disagree with one another. Here there
is only room to outline a few comments
from physicists who offered arguments in
favor of interpretations of quantum me-
chanics that would make it unnecessary to
modify the theory. Alas, these interpreta-
tions differ from one another, and none
seems to me to be entirely satisfactory.
(Several letters on this matter received by
The New York Review appear in full follow-
ing the Web version of this letter.)
N. David Mermin of Cornell argued with
characteristic eloquence for what I (but not
he) would call an instrumentalist approach.
In his view, science is directly about the
relation between each persons total expe-
rience and the outside world that includes
that experience. I replied that I hoped for
a physical theory that would allow us to
deduce what happens when people make
measurements from impersonal laws that
abilities appear much as they do in classical
physics. But it is still necessary to bring into
the laws of nature assumptions about these
probabilities that I can only understand as
probabilities of the values found when hu-
mans decide what to measure.
I had an interesting correspondence
with Robert Griffiths of Carnegie Mel-
lon and James Hartle of the University of
CaliforniaSanta Barbara regarding an
approach to quantum mechanics variously
known as decoherent histories or con-
sistent histories, which was introduced in
1984 by Griffiths and further developed by
Hartle and Murray Gell-Mann. The laws
of nature are supposed to attribute prob-
abilities to histories of the world, not just
to the results of single measurements. I
had described this approach in detail in my
textbook Lectures on Quantum Mechanics
but did not cover it in my article, because I
thought it has the same drawbacks that I at-
tributed to all instrumentalist approaches.
The wave functions for these histories in-
volve averaging over most quantities, with
a few held fixed, as if they were being mea-
sured, but histories with different things
held fixed are incompatible, and it is hu-
mans who must choose the particular kind
of history to which to attribute probabili-
ties. Griffiths developed a sort of quantum
logic consistent with his approach, but it
leaves me uncomfortable. Hartle and Gell-
Mann may share some of this discomfort,
for they have moved toward identifying one
true kind of history that does not have to
be selected by people; but they have to at-
tribute weird negative probabilities to his-
tories of this kind. My discomfort remains.
Jeremy Bernstein, a contributor to these
pages, thinks like Mermin that there is no
trouble with quantum mechanics as it stands,
but he supplied an anecdote that runs in the
opposite direction. A visitor to Einsteins of-
fice in Prague noted that the window over-
looked the grounds of an insane asylum. Ein-
stein explained that these were the madmen
who did not think about quantum mechanics.
Steven Weinberg
Austin, Texas
THE TRIAL OF DYLANN ROOF
To the Editors:
In USA v. Dylann Roof [NYR, March
9], I described an incident in the courtroom
during which the defendants mother, Amy
Roof, attending the first day of the trial,
collapsed and was treated by emergency
medical workers. I had placed the episode
during the testimony of a witness, Felicia
Sanders; whereas it actually occurred after
the opening statement of defense lawyer
David Bruck. I have revised the online text
to reflect the correct sequence of events.
Edward Ball
New Haven, Connecticut
CORRECTION
In Eli Zaretskys letter in the March 23,
2017, issue, the second sentence should
have read: However, this is not the case
with Sigmund Freud [Freud: Whats Left
by Frederick Crews, NYR, February 23].
We regret the error.
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NSA filters the trove of e-mails it gathers
via the PRISM system to purge Americans
He agreed, with the understanding that
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In contrast, Thomas Banks of Rutgers in
our correspondence and the draft of a new
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42
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E-mail: listrental@nybooks.com
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meadow, orchards, stream. Charming nearby villages.


 Sleeps 4. Weekly. (212) 772-2030; judith@terrafilms.org;
www.gaurenne.com.
AND



















THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Attn: Order Dept., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300,
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SICILY 5-BED VILLA, pool, near Taormina, stunning sea
MUSEUMS
views, photos www.villaama.net +44 (0) 7952 578523.
A CURRENT L IS T ING
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2018, max. 4 persons, $800 per week, info@andigross.ch.
Galleries & Museums




RENTALS ARTS Listing, please contact
CAMBRIDGE, MA. SUNNY 2-bedroom furnished apart-
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$2,900 month. elizabethbenedictOK@gmail.com.
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FURNITURE WANTED
 WRITERS RETREAT. Cabin 1.5 hours from Holly-
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WE BUY MID-CENTURY FURNITURE
[]JUQ\aW]ZIL www.norasretreats.com (818) 326-9027.
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April 6, 2017 43