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My next-door neighbor dropped his voice when he answered my question about the For Sale sign at the other end of the row where we both have houses. Who was selling, I wondered, and what exactly was for sale?
In addition to our houses, my neighbor and I each own another building in the row—his a workshop next to his house, and mine, just beyond that, a garage no wider than the garage door. Both were once stables. Beyond my garage are two more garages, and past those, another house, with an attached shed sporting the For Sale sign in its window. That makes seven buildings in a row with shared walls and adjoining roofs. Compared to nearby apartment buildings, these dwellings are old and quaint, stunted and quirky, like seven dwarves in a fairy tale. Across the lane are the outbuildings of a farmstead still in my neighbor’s family. Just beyond, you see the mysterious gaping doorways and windows of an abandoned building project in the middle of a meadow with the far mountain ridge visible. I loved my lane. I loved my fairy-tale surroundings. I wanted no alteration. The For Sale sign might auger unwanted changes.
My neighbor told me of the bad blood between the two co-owners of the house and its associated garage, which they had inherited. They had supposedly arrived at an agreement for a remodel and a division of property, but that understanding had broken down. A complete separation was the solution to their problems, and both the house and the garage were for sale. “Ask José María,” my neighbor said.
To tell this tale of intrigue, I might present a cast of characters in the manner of Agatha Christie, to help orient the reader. My list would include my neighbor Álvaro, to whom I posed my question; my neighbor Alicia, in the big house beyond the row; José María, one of the two owners Álvaro had mentioned; José María’s son Pablo, living in the house at the far end of the row; and the mysterious tall, bearded man in the green overcoat who was the other owner and whose name I never learned. And the buildings themselves.
In the narrow, dead-end lane, no sidewalk or median sets off the brightly painted buildings. The tiled roofs and roof timbers showing under the eaves, the Dutch doors and the wooden benches beside the doors, the flowers in pots and wooden clogs on a doormat—all this gives the lane the look of a mews, those small, narrow, hidden streets of London where you find the old but refurbished stables and carriage houses that once served the big mansions. Such a neighborhood was the setting for an Agatha Christie story, “Murder in the Mews.” In my charming lane, however, despite the bad blood, no real blood was spilled, and the players acted out small roles in a very minor story. I did not talk to José María, or find out who had it in for whom, or call the number on the sign. The sign disappeared. I forgot about it. A year passed.
Then one day I heard more from Alicia, whose house is just past mine, the last one in the lane, and not part of the staunch row. The property in question had been sold and the new owners were planning a renovation on a grand scale. The roof would be raised. Maybe, she suggested, I’d want to raise my garage roof too, at the same time.
That very afternoon, while strolling down my lane, I gazed at my garage roof as if for the first time. In the lane, only my garage and the two buildings next to it that had been sold still had what appeared to be the original roofs. The roof tile on all three structures was the old, irregular, handmade kind that is not yet so uncommon that it fetches a good price, the way old railroad ties, old brick, and old barn siding often do. The eaves over these three fronts were deep and pitched, braced by rough old timbers emerging from the building fronts. No gutters, so a heavy rain ran over the edge of the roof into the lane like a waterfall. A new roof on a heightened building could never suit this lane. I would never agree to be a part of such a change.
But what can you do? The new owners might be doing themselves in, and though I was against it, it was their choice. “Murder!” exclaims a character in “Murder in the Mews,” when what had appeared to be a suicide begins to look like something else. “Yes,” says Hercule Poirot gently. “But if it were murder, there would have been a motive.” In my lane, among my neighbors and our old buildings, no motive and no murder, just progress, a slow suicide. What can you do? Suicide isn’t murder. Progress isn’t a crime. Buildings are not grumbly, goodhearted dwarves. Fairy tales aren’t for real.
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Amanda Holmes reads Rachel Wetzsteon’s “Sakura Park.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon appeared first on The American Scholar.
When textile artist Stephanie Santana became a mother about a decade ago, she started thinking about how to pass along her family history to her son. For several years, she experimented with the concept of textiles as historical records, screenprinting old family photographs onto various fabrics. Then, several years after graduating from a textile design program at the Fashion Institute of New York, Santana began researching her great-aunt Miriam Matthews, who had served as a member of the American Library Association and the California Library Association’s Committee on Intellectual Freedom during the McCarthy era. When Santana learned of her great-aunt’s fight to prevent the establishment of a board of censors at the Los Angeles Public Library system, she delved further into this historical period. This resulted in a series of quilted works that “draw connections to broader themes [of censorship and erasure] that we’re dealing with now,” Santana says. These latest screenprinted quilts are the focus of her solo exhibition Call & Response, currently on view at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn until June 29.
Santana starts each work by deciding its central themes, either by reading bell hooks’s writings or practicing “free association with my grandfather’s photographs or Library of Congress images or my great-aunt’s archives,” she says. Once she has images in mind, she screenprints them onto fabric—usually cotton because of the “softness to it after you wash it”— with a water-based ink. From there, she assembles them into a collage and sews the pieces into a quilt using a machine. (Santana says she has experimented with digital printing, but “screenprinting has more longevity, just in terms that the types of inks that I’m using—I’m intentional about the materials so that [my works] can be archival.”) The finished artwork is at once a document of her family’s history, a testament to Black women as record keepers, and a textile collage rife with symbolism. Santana hopes that her work inspires people to look into their own family histories—and to recognize how that history informs their present day.
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In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the third Sunday in June would henceforth be celebrated as Father’s Day. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at strengthening paternal bonds, as well as a tacit rejection of the policies recommended by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had just left Johnson’s administration in disgrace after his controversial report on Black family life and poverty was leaked. “As we know it,” Scholar contributor Augustine Sedgewick writes in his new book, “Father’s Day is an unintended consequence of the fractious American politics of race, gender, and class.” Sedgewick’s book, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power, is the story of how such politics ensnarled parental care, and of the men who expanded the domain of fathers across generations of crisis and change, from Aristotle and Henry VIII to Freud and Bob Dylan.
Go beyond the episode:
- Augustine Sedgewick’s Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
- The far right’s signature style is less about dad pants and more about fatherhood: read Sedgewick’s essay “Ku Klux Khaki”
- “Thoreau’s Pencils,” Sedgwick explores the abolitionist’s relationship with his family—and his family business’s ties to slavery
- For more on the Moynihan Report and political discourse on parenting, read Melinda Cooper’s Family Values
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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Years from now, perhaps it is the dress you will remember most.
I recall the first time I saw it, at sunrise, on a summer morning in July 2000: it was celestial white, made of cotton and sailcloth, billowing elegantly in the welcome breeze, wrapped around a 30-foot, steel-framed mannequin atop the historic Coal Tower in Charlottesville, Virginia, hard by the railroad tracks. An early riser, I was bringing coffee home that morning when the haunting dress appeared to the east, looming over the surrounding landscape. I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t know that the dress had found its way there in the evening of the day before, or that it had been installed with the help of a crane from Richmond that had to have been the quietest one on earth. One had to navigate some rough terrain, strewn with broken glass and old mattresses and discarded syringes, to discover that the dress was a faceless monument to Sally Hemings.
As it happens, the artist, Todd Murphy, was an extremely close friend of mine, but he hadn’t said one word to me about the installation. I know well how superstitious creative figures can be about discussing their works in progress, but Todd’s love of secrecy (and love of control) went beyond his art. When I first met him, in 1996, his studio was a former auto parts store on Charlottesville’s downtown mall; the black curtains that covered the large storefront made bystanders curious, perhaps even suspicious, about what was going on in there. Todd knew exactly what he was doing. He worshipped at the altar of mystique.
The underpinning of our relationship was a passion for sports, a love for our daughters, an odd belief that coffee at high school football games was so bad it was actually good, and an ongoing conversation about Thomas Jefferson and race in America. In 1997, I published Long Way to Go: Black and White in America, and Todd was one of the few people I knew who never questioned why it took me eight years to complete it. He moved from Charlottesville in 2002, but by 2016 we were, once more, both living in the same place—New York City. He had known for a while of my desire to discuss the dress with him, and when he finally did, he did so reluctantly. But in late January 2020, he was dying, at 57, and he must have sensed I might want to write something, an epilogue of sorts, a quiet farewell.
“I wanted to install it quietly,” he said softly, “without fanfare, wanted people to fall in love with the dress, before they possibly had a chance to hate it.” There had been a big art festival the weekend before, and people had come from all over the world. Hemings’s dress, though, was not officially part of it. It was a coda, a pop-up of sorts, and it was intended to stay up on the Coal Tower for an indeterminate period of time. When I mentioned the dress to some people, they professed not to know what I was referring to, even though, as Todd said wryly, “it was hiding in plain sight,” situated, as it was, between Jefferson’s Monticello and his University of Virginia. Those who did discover it were, like me, puzzled at first. But once they learned that it was meant to be an homage to Hemings, and that she was facing Monticello, it was clear to me that Todd intended the sculpture to be a provocative rebuke to those who had not told the truth, who had failed to unfold the whole story of who she was and why she mattered. A silent, artistic shot across the bow for those unwilling or struggling to believe, let alone accept, what had conclusively come to light nearly two years earlier.
On a late October day in 1998, I had lunch with Dan Jordan, the head of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which oversees Monticello. In many respects, Dan was as powerful as the president of UVA or the head of the university’s board of visitors. We were joined in the Dome Room at Monticello by Angus Cameron, a mentor from when I worked as a book editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Angus had edited the first three volumes of Dumas Malone’s biography of Jefferson, and he assured us that Malone “never ran across a fact about Jefferson that he didn’t like.”
Dan and I laughed, but then he suddenly became serious. Since the news was imminent, he decided to confide in us. The following week, an article in the esteemed scientific journal Nature would assert that DNA from the descendants of both Jefferson and Sally Hemings had confirmed what had long been rumored but vociferously denied: that Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his enslaved mistress, who was roughly 30 years his junior. “Most people around here”—by that Dan meant people in Charlottes-ville and at the university, where Jefferson was considered far more alive than dead—“will not be happy about this.” In fact, he went further, things might never be the same.
I couldn’t resist asking Rob what he thought. I wasn’t trying to spoil his Sunday, but here we were. He was quiet for what seemed like a long time. He stared at me, then stared away into the autumnal distance, in the direction of Monticello, his North Star.I had lived in Charlottesville long enough at that point—I had been a student at UVA in the early ’70s and then returned to teach there in 1986—to know, alas, how true that was, how this revelation would be its own form of tsunami, an unwelcome upheaval of the Old Order. Four days later, on Sunday, November 1, the headline of a front-page story in The New York Times read, “DNA Test Finds Evidence of Jefferson Child by Slave.” The reaction from many Black Americans to the news that Eston Hemings Jefferson was Jefferson’s son was merely confirmation of what they considered “common knowledge.” The reaction from white people was mixed. Some expressed full-on, ostrichlike denial. If a story like this had been published 20 years later, they would have derided it as “fake news.” Others, like the historian Joseph Ellis, who had never believed the rumor, did an about-face. Ellis predicted that the “wider world” would welcome this news, would ironically “hold these truths to be self-evident,” and might even be relieved to be reminded that Jefferson was, in many respects, a contradiction, and he would be seen as flawed, and therefore human. This happened to be the view of Jefferson I was always comfortable with. Not in the role of saint, someone beyond mortality. Those things never prove to be true anyway.
That Sunday, I happened to run into Rob Coles, a fellow I played basketball with twice a week, but more important, he was an actual descendant of Jefferson, his fifth great-grandson. Rob lived in an apartment at the former Monticello Hotel and looked so eerily like Jefferson that he was constantly invited to be him at events around the world. This was how he supported himself, and he had all the requisite finery and wigs of the time to play the role of a Founding Father. Knowing that he would soon be deluged with questions, I couldn’t resist asking Rob what he thought. I wasn’t trying to spoil his Sunday, but here we were. He was quiet for what seemed a long time. He stared at me, then stared away into the autumnal distance, in the direction of Monticello, his North Star.
“This DNA stuff sure is interesting, Jonathan,” he said, almost coyly, before turning the conversation in a different direction. I knew him well enough to know that he was likely to discuss the matter with other Coles family members who lived in town and that, together, they would figure out, along with the people at Monticello and in Charlottesville, how to respond in the days to come.
In the autumn of 1998, as in the summer of 2000, when Todd Murphy’s dress appeared on the Coal Tower, Charlottesville was not accustomed to being part of America’s Zeitgeist, and the city’s residents, for the most part, liked it that way. But in the wake of the white supremacist invasion that occurred there in August 2017, after a 15-year-old Black girl named Zyahna Bryant petitioned to remove Robert E. Lee from his pedestal in a park that bore his name—and after a weekend of violence that left Heather Heyer and two police officers dead and 34 others injured—The New York Times stopped referring to the city as “Charlottesville, Va.” In the many articles that followed, “Charlottesville” or “before Charlottesville” or “Battle of Charlottesville” would suffice. The name Charlottesville became its own flashpoint, and in no time, it became a social-media meme, a strange form of levity as a way of coping.
I knew that the almost surreal events of that weekend would not sit well with Charlottesville’s citizens, that the perfect and perfectly horrible storm that ensued—visited on them by “outsiders,” they would insist over and again—would infuriate them and leave emotional scars that might take years to heal. One of those people, who was convinced healing would never come, felt that “the rivers of hate run too deep here.” I had known her a long time, but I had not known this: she was a descendant of Lee’s, and her family was prepared to do whatever was necessary to defend the Lost Cause. I knew of one young woman, a friend of my daughter’s, who wandered the streets barefoot for hours afterward in a daze, not comprehending how such violence could have taken place in her Garden of Eden. I spoke with another who had returned from a summer of leading tours at concentration camps and was afraid to hang her mezuzah on the door of her room on the prestigious Lawn at UVA. And then there was this inescapable fact: two of the prime instigators of the violence were graduates of the university. As it happens, both the city and the university had been given fair warning that trouble was coming and were offered assistance, but they exhibited the same sort of denial that greeted the DNA results, the notion that even if bad things happen elsewhere, they won’t happen here. In the months afterward, how James Fields had managed to drive his muscle car down the street and kill Heather Heyer and injure all those people was the subject of abundant finger pointing. When I came back to town a year later, I had the distinct sense that the studied casualness of Charlottesville was gone, that, as Truman Capote wrote in In Cold Blood, people “viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.”
Charlottesville was a place that had, beneath its surface of implacable cool, worked long and hard and diligently to polish and curate its image. (After all, you don’t get recognized as one of the happiest places in the country, as it was in a 2014 study, without good reason.) The lifeblood of that image is a fierce and unnerving desire not to offend, and a tendency toward being both polite and indirect. To the outside world, Charlottesville emphatically prided itself on being progressive to the bone (though the county of which it is a part is much different politically, and one sees very few African Americans in the restaurants along West Main). When the city was singled out for being such a happy place, the news circulated quickly; there was a palpable air of self-congratulation, of smugness, wherever you went.
The elusive element, though, one that many people will go miles out of their way to avoid, is that the essence of a place—any place really—lies in the gray areas, those uncomfortable pockets where nuance and smudged grace notes and barely noticed gestures reside. Finding your way to those places, those places from which illumination can come, requires hard work. It requires having knowledge and context and a deep sense of history—or at least a genuine determination to acquire those things—and it demands a commitment to tell the truth. Which comes in part from a willingness to reflect and be introspective, to brood and ruminate, to take stock. When Jim Ryan became president of UVA in 2018 (returning to the place where he had once taught and motivated by what had happened the year before), he spoke in his welcome address of how important it was to keep striving to find a way to match aspirations with realities, how important it was that a place with more than its share of secret societies be committed to being far more honest—about everything—than it had been until then. In saying that, he was acknowledging the university’s own complicated history and that of its creator, and he offered an apology to those who—unlike him, he stressed—had been attacked because of race or religion.
In the years since the DNA news, Monticello slowly began to change its story: from saying that Jefferson “might have” fathered children with Sally Hemings, to acknowledging that he had, to then recognizing six children in all. Monticello began to offer a separate “slave tour,” though only one-fifth of the visitors each year actually go on it. Hemings family members began to be invited to Monticello. As for Todd Murphy’s mannequin, the reason it was headless was that no definitive likeness has ever existed of Sally Hemings. As for the dress, vandals (and the weather) repeatedly came for it, and Todd replaced it once or twice before deciding, partly out of pique, that the bare structure itself was even more effective in terms of what Hemings was perhaps trying to say: I am still here. Don’t even think of dishonoring me. Eventually, “progress” would have its way, with the Coal Tower deemed to be an eyesore: it would need to be cleaned up so that townhouses could be built around it. Not long after Todd died, the structure was taken down and moved to Ix Art Park, something Todd’s widow, Liane, learned after the fact. She pushed back—she knew he would not have wanted this—and it now resides, safe and protected from whoever might wish to do it harm, at an undisclosed spot south of town.
In the end, James Baldwin was right: “History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.”
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misspelled the name of Jefferson’s son.
The post Hiding in Plain Sight appeared first on The American Scholar.
It was early evening, and only one of my intermediate adult students had turned up for class. We were both tired. He suppressed a yawn, and then I found myself doing the same. We had just completed the first half of an exercise on pronunciation. The student, who was sitting directly in front of my desk, all of two paces from me, shifted in his seat. “This is boring,” he said.
I was surprised and looked up sharply.
The student was looking at his book, and I realized that he had not meant the words for me so much as a private commentary, almost as if he were describing the situation to himself. “We don’t have to do it,” I said.
“No, no, no!” he blurted out. He was now the startled one. “I didn’t mean it like that!”
I repeated that we were not obliged to do the exercise, and after some more apologies and protestations from him, we went on to a different one.
The student is 31 years old, a metalworker who hopes to get into a teaching course so that he can one day work as a welding instructor rather than as a welder. Demonstrating a basic level of English is a requirement for enrolling in the course.
For the next several weeks, I skipped over the pronunciation exercises in the lessons. But one day I decided it was time to work again on pronunciation. This time the student protested before we began. “Is this important?” he asked.
“I think it is.”
There ensued a conversation in which he pushed for learning the rudiments—new grammatical structures and new vocabulary—rather than wasting time on polishing pronunciation. Pronunciation matters, I insisted, and he came back with the observation that he knew more or less how to say the words he was learning.
“Okay,” I said, then turned to write island on the board. “How do you say that?” I asked him.
“IS-land,” he answered.
I turned to one of the other students—all three were present that day—and asked, “Is that right?”
She shook her head no and then proceeded to pronounce the word correctly.
“What about this one?” I asked the metalworker, writing answer on the board.
He got that one wrong too, as he did building and cousin.
“But you can understand me?”
Yes, I told him, I could, but having to slow even infinitesimally made me lose faith in his ability to speak. I listened differently. I listened cautiously, almost suspiciously.
He looked dubious, so I reminded him that he had laughed at my Spanish accent one day. He grinned sheepishly.
My faulty Spanish pronunciation and my terrible English spelling—those are the elephants in my classroom. The spelling elephant had once seemed so big that it squeezed me into a corner, but it had shrunk, I found, because I talked openly about it. I even called it by name when it popped out unexpectedly. The other, bigger elephant, my accent and other difficulties with Spanish, was the creature I wanted to keep hidden. Sometimes, however, it lumbered out, showing its ugly, wrinkled hide and small, worried eyes. What mortification then! That day with my student, I did not need to show the elephant; I needed only to speak of it. “This very morning,” I began, and proceeded to tell him about my experience going to the grocery store and asking for an item, whereupon, simply because I spoke with an accent, the attendant had stared at me blankly. I’d repeated my question, exact same words, and then the attendant decided to listen, and she understood what I said. “But people will often assume they don’t understand you and not even try,” I told the students that day. “Just because of your pronunciation.”
I took a breath and went on. “You think being understood is all that matters. But I can tell you that the ease of communication counts for a lot.”
No one said anything.
“If you are making the effort to learn the language, why wouldn’t you make the effort to learn it well?”
He frowned, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. We continued with the lesson. IS-land? I thought. AN-swer? How often had I corrected him? It appeared to be a stroke of luck that he hadn’t always paid attention in class. But he hadn’t paid attention because he hadn’t cared. Had I finally made him care? I wondered if I’d have to call out my big elephant. Poor old elephant, wrinkly skin, worried eyes. Yes, laugh, I would tell my student. Your elephant and mine, quite a pair.
The post A Pair of Elephants appeared first on The American Scholar.
Our prompt this week was to write a poem based on an error, mistake, or slip of the tongue. Nearly as impressive as the poems that came in were the editing suggestions our NLP players made, which were unfailingly cordial and constructive. It was even more difficult than usual to select among the entries.
Let’s start with poems based on typographical errors and the like. Josie Cannella’s “Prayer Against Autocorrect” begins:
Hale Merry, full of grease,
How does your garbage grow?
Wind sill or bells and cuckold’s hell
and petty maidens all in arrow
Paul Michelsen’s self-described “Tie Pose” capitalizes on mondegreens: “I always thought Jimi Hendrix / was such a ladies’ man / ‘til I heard him ‘scuze himself / to kiss this guy.” In “The Pledge,” Millicent Caliban recollects the columnist Art Buchwald’s first efforts to memorize the pledge of allegiance—“I led the pigeons to the flag”— and takes off from there to imagine the pigeons’ puzzled response to the “space marked out in red, white and blue / that did not yield any crumbs.”
Baruch November, a first-time contributor, came up with “Out of nowhere, a Shidduch,” beginning with Polonius’s famous line, twisted:
Neither a borrower nor a bungler be.
In love, the latter I’ve always been—Having lived an eternity
alone for a Jewish man.I posted online for a new
apartment in Crown Heights.
Out of nowhere, a shidduchWas offered with a woman
whose sole descriptor was a love
for stray dogs.
That is just how
these days are— hounds visitThe soft rooms of women
while I busy myself bumblingPlans for a date that’ll
only end with meTurning on the darkness
of my empty bedroom.
It must have delighted Baruch to read that Josie Cannella loved the dog imagery and the last stanza, and was moved to look “shidduch” up in the dictionary—that is, to Google it. Learning that it meant “the offer of an arranged marriage” enhanced her pleasure in the poem.
My favorite of Millicent Caliban’s two poems is “The Poet’s Lament,” which appropriates Andrew Marvell’s majestic tetrameter and a few lines from “To His Coy Mistress” and applies them to the life of an office worker:
Had I but words enough and time,
I might write verse of love sublime.
But at my back I always hear
My supervisor hovering near.
I fear he will inspect my screen
Expecting images obscene.
So must I type this deadly dreck
From nine to five with stiffest neck.
I hate my job with all my heart,
But somehow I must do my part
To pay the bills and make the rent.
My famished soul is ne’er content
Greg Chaimov airs his fascination, which I share, with the way “sacred” becomes “scared” if we transpose two letters. “On Reading Scared as Sacred” was inspired by a line from Yannis Ritsos:
Alone with the moths on the ill-lit porch, he glances up
from Ritsos’s Monochords to track the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse. He’s startled his sense
of the verse as sacrament has led him to assume
a meaning the poet hadn’t pursued.Assume. Ad plus sumere, for “to take,”
related to consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, casts a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes
and the tattered wings that glide
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.
Emily fearlessly edited the poem:
Alone with moths on the ill-lit porch,
he reads and tracks the lunar eclipse.
On his tongue, a phoneme flips—as bryd to bird
and hros to horse. Assume, relatedto consume, like the shadow
that devours the moon, a pale rose glow
across the sliver that escapes,
like the word he’s chasing in his mind.The impulse to condense is always worthwhile, though we would lose, in this case, “verse as sacrament.” Whether you prefer Emily’s revised version or not, I applaud the effort NLP players are making to critique, edit, and respond to one another’s poems without an inkling of rancor.
Christine Rhein wowed us all, I think, with “Voice Recognition.”
Global warming—turned global warning on my phone,
as I dictate notes about my friend—his cozy home
on the shore of eerie—the lake making its weigh up
his see wall, splashing past it—residence / resonance
in peril. And of course, climate scientists—science dissed,
their data obvious to sum / oblivious to others. How to
school / cool the planet—the question of the our, of mine
over matter, of dollars and sense—profits, pipelines,
the booms day / doomsday clock—so much time, wasted.
Oh, feudal world. Oh, futile trust in words. Monstrous
storms. Towns on fire. Paradise—a pair of dice.
Christine’s wordplay—in which “paradise” is the obverse of “a pair of dice”—won plaudits. Michael C. Rush singled out “The question of the our.” Charise Hoge picked “Oh, feudal world.” The ending wowed both Emily, our critic of the week, and Byron.
The origin of “Singeing from the Roof,” a late entry from Anna Ojascastro Guzon, was “a rare tornado that touched down in the city rather than the usual outskirts. ‘Do they have a roof?’ has been common conversation.”
Somehow, she still stands without a cane
and rolls her own tobacco leaves.
She still laughs at adult jokes and
believes in the existence of God.
She expects her late husband and
lost children to be there when
she meets Him. When asked if she’ll smoke
still, after she passes into eternity
she flipped her cigar, placing the lit end
in her mouth, and chuckled.
“Like this,” she said
with embers singing from the roof.
It was fascinating to learn from Anna that “The practice of smoking cigars backward is not uncommon among Filipino women, and my own grandmother enjoyed the habit.”
Randall Brett’s “XOXO” provoked more editorial commentary and suggestions than any other submission, prompting the author to revise the poem diligently after Emily, Josie, Byron, and Angela Ball all weighed in. I refer readers to the comments field for the full back-and-forth.
I wish I had room to quote more than the first line (“Deliver us from eagles’) of Elizabeth Solsburg’s “Lord’s prayer” and to give sufficient praise to Charise Hoge for her charming poem, “the little things, mon amour.” Michael C. Rush has a fine title (“All Poetry Is Non Sequitur”) with such admirable lines as this: “Ask the fauxpasparazzi and other followers of the Sacred Ineptitude.” It’s always grand when a poet on the order of the redoubtable Denise Duhamel favors us with a poem.
My own effort arose from watching baseball games with the sound off, subtitles distorting what the play-by-play broadcasters said:
Yankees vs. Dodgers (Closed-Caption)
Swing and a mess.
The outfield is playing at normal death.
For next time, I suggest that we consider the “reasons for living” that the protagonist, Isaac Davis, enumerates in Woody Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan. Davis’s reasons include Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, Mozart’s Jupiter symphony (second movement), Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues,” and Cézanne’s apples and pears. What reasons do you have?
Your poem can take the form of a list, or an annotated list. No more than 10 reasons, and keep in mind the negative defense of living given by Dorothy Parker in her poem “Resumé.” It might put you in a creative mood to listen to John Coltrane play the great Rodgers and Hammerstein hit “My Favorite Things”—or to listen to Julie Andrews sing it. Deadline: Friday, June 20, noon (any time zone).
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Amanda Holmes reads W. S. Merwin’s “The Last One.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Last One” by W. S. Merwin appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by John Seabrook; W. W. Norton, 368 pp., $31.99
A father’s legacy can take many forms: an honorable example, a talent for affection, a thousand neckties. Jack Seabrook, once the nation’s lord of frozen food, guarded his heart with razor wire but doted on a sublime, cross-indexed wardrobe of silk and superfine—130 bespoke suits, 500 handmade shirts, and precisely the right grey top hats for driving Eva Gabor, plus picnic basket, in a glossy coach-and-four.
After Jack died in 2009, no one wanted the clothes—not costume institutes, not consignment shops. His third child, New Yorker staff writer John Seabrook, didn’t want them either. What he did want, though, Jack took to his grave: the truth about the family’s produce business, built and erased in just three generations. Jack did bequeath him a cache of journals and documents, plus a family safe that refused to open. (“It was not until after he was gone—and my therapist pointed out that the very last thing this careful, meticulous man would ever do is lose a combination to a safe—that I understood why it was hidden behind a sliding bookcase and a false wall, and what was inside.”)
Seabrook, at 34, wrote a New Yorker feature on his formidable grandfather, Charles Franklin (C. F.”) Seabrook, a short, mean genius known as the Henry Ford of agriculture. Thanks to 50,000 fertile acres of carbonate marl near Delaware Bay, New Jersey, C. F. was “the principal dreamer, main promoter, political fixer, master builder and autocratic ruler of this industrial farming empire,” and innovations such as overhead irrigation, boil-in-bag technology, and proto-TV dinners changed the way Americans ate. Seabrook asparagus could go from field to quick-freeze in under two hours. “The greatest vegetable factory on earth,” crowed Life, in 1955.
C. F. was fortunate in his trio of sons: the engineer, the marketer, and Jack the financial whiz. He sent two of them to Princeton, studied the tribal customs of British aristocrats, and “set about creating a South Jersey peerage of his own … a sort of feudal kingdom ruled by Seabrooks, to be passed down by the law of primogeniture” for half a millennium. His grandson thought its saga could make a book, given a year or two. It took him nearly 30. In between, he pursued the higher journalism, married a loving woman of sense, became a parent, adopted a daughter from Haiti—and kept probing ancestral wars of inheritance, despite a bumper crop of Keep Out signs. “Don’t write about your family,” warned his mother, a former star reporter, as his father stayed gracefully elusive—a danger signal, since he was no overbearing Tom Buchanan, but “sleeker and stealthier, and much cleverer. He entered through a side door, and you wouldn’t hear him coming.”
Then Seabrook (“young and righteous”) discovered reportage in The Nation on a violent 1934 farmworkers’ strike over wage cuts and bad housing—probably the most significant event in company history. He’d never heard of it. Eyewitnesses, including ACLU observers, agreed that “the Seabrooks and their henchmen crushed the strike using fire hoses, tear gas, mass arrests, an imported gangster named Red Sanders, armed vigilantes, and the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which spread terror by burning crosses in front of Black workers’ homes.” One beloved uncle torched a striker’s house with a woman and small children inside; another drove over protesters (including his loyal landscaper) with a truck. “Were you there then?” Seabrook asked his father, who replied, ”Of course I was there”—17 years old, armed with a pistol, clubbing strikers in the groin.
Who were these people he’d loved and trusted and thought he knew? A labyrinth of alternate histories, unreliable narrators, and generational cover-ups makes The Spinach King a first-rate misery memoir and a harrowing study in history told from above and below. Japanese-American internees who worked at Seabrook in the ’40s remembered C. F. with respect, even fondness: he’d defended them to locals, and even provided a Buddhist temple. Yet archival research strongly suggested that the jolly modern farm was a Potemkin village, with semi-captive labor from around the globe, and the piratical C. F. (perhaps due to the effects of stroke) “an addict, a predator, and a paterfamilias who seemed to hate his own flesh and blood.”
Jack took over for his unstable parent as Seabrook’s CEO in 1954, a succession beset by secrets and demons, private and commercial. But after baroque betrayals on all sides, C. F. abruptly sold the company to outsiders in 1959 “and left a smoking crater just over the horizon of my paternal heritage,” an Edenic loss that left the adult Seabrook flailing and mourning until a brother’s crisp advice—“Lay off the vitriol, and the bourbon”—saved both his marriage and his book.
The Spinach King is a rueful, sure-footed portrait of three generations in pawn to a farm boy’s dream. Seabrook’s confiding prose and thorough sourcing deliver a genuine capitalist tragedy: Lear among the pea pods. “Over time, the real family and the branded one blurred,” he realizes. “Intimate personal relations got mixed up with public-facing togetherness. Instead of family values shaping the brand, marketing values came to shape the family.” You can’t beat the material, from his parents’ shipboard meet-cute on the way to Grace Kelly’s royal wedding to death curses and fistfights, nouveau-riche spending jags, coaching with Prince Philip, and enough family pathology to justify a new DSM listing: Seabrook Syndrome.
Compassion, if not complete understanding, duly arrives, though the testosterone tempests of the C-suite often drown out input from Prufrocks and consorts and heirs, notably the brother and sister whom “I didn’t ask … to participate in the book, in order to allow them plausible deniability. They have processed some of these events differently, as siblings do,” which may be something of an understatement.
Divide and conquer was the Spinach King’s maxim, and his short-lived subjugations prove, yet again, how hard it is to be rich and stay human. His grandson’s reconstructions form a riveting tour of a forgotten battlefield led by an exiled prince still neck-deep in ghosts. And brooding over truant Swiss bank accounts, of course. As one does.
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In September of 2022, the stormy remains of a giant typhoon struck 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline. Waves more than 50 feet tall and winds around 90 miles per hour beat up 40 low-lying communities, ravaging beaches, ripping up roads, and ruining houses. The storm caused fires and power outages, spoiling fish and game that had been cleaned and frozen to last until the following spring. Many people had to skip meals. Some ran through their emergency rations or depended on others for something to eat.
Alaska has only about 740,000 people yet constitutes one-sixth of America’s land: it’s the largest, most sparsely populated state in the nation, and most of it is rural, with only a small fraction of its communities connected by roads. Providing disaster relief to coastal regions such as those affected by the storm can be difficult. As Nikole Nelson, then executive director of the Alaska Legal Services Corporation, said recently, “It’s not an exaggeration to say people were starving”—above all, children and elders.
The federal government’s main program to combat hunger is SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Though supervised by the feds, the program is run by each state, and states often make mistakes about disbursement of those funds by wrongfully denying, suspending, or terminating benefits for households in need. In fiscal year 2019, for example, Alaska’s rate of making such mistakes was 39 percent—above the national average of 34 percent. During FY 2023 (which began on October 1, 2022), the state’s rate jumped to 87 percent—the worst in the country, at almost twice the national average. In the wake of the typhoon, hardships intensified.
With nowhere else to turn, many Alaskans sought legal help. Alaska Legal Services is the only organization of its kind in the state serving, for free, people who are poor or struggling economically, like most in those communities. In the best of times, it can handle only a fraction of the requests it receives for legal aid. In the fall of 2022, the organization was overwhelmed by pleas from people who could not get food through SNAP. Alaska Legal Services employed 28 lawyers, but most of the people who stepped in to help were not lawyers.
In 2019, with approval from the state supreme court, Alaska Legal Services began a program for community justice workers. They aren’t members of the bar and sometimes don’t have a college degree, yet they are trained and certified to help solve civil justice problems by providing legal advice, advocacy, and other kinds of services. The unauthorized practice of law—law work performed by anyone not a lawyer—is a crime in most states and usually a felony. In Alaska, as long as people don’t hold themselves out as lawyers when they aren’t and don’t charge for their services, they can do a lot that would be prohibited in most states. They can even represent clients in court.
Alaska Legal Services enlisted volunteers to help address the state’s SNAP backlog in the teeth of the crisis. About 60 community justice workers were trained, and 50 of them jumped in. They usually got SNAP benefits approved for their clients within 10 days.
The agency’s Joy Anderson and Sarah Carver reported that in 2022, Alaska Legal Services resolved 125 SNAP cases dealing with denials of benefits; in 2023, when a third of the organization’s cases were about SNAP benefits, it resolved 25 times more: 3,093 cases. Justice workers closed almost 500 of those, negotiating with state agents, requesting hearings, and representing clients. They recovered $1.43 million in benefits.
Nikole Nelson had learned about the need for justice workers at a 2016 conference in Washington, D.C., where Rebecca Sandefur, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave a talk about the American crisis in access to civil justice. Nelson had been a lawyer in Anchorage for Alaska Legal Services since 1998, when she was 26, and became the agency’s executive director in 2010. She was interested in Sandefur’s ideas but hadn’t met her. Before the talk, Nelson said, she “was totally fangirling.” Afterward, her thinking about legal services work had been transformed.
People who are poor or struggling for money and economic stability, Sandefur emphasized, and who lack help in addressing legal problems, often suffer shattering consequences. They lose “their homes, their jobs, custody of their children, or access to insurance, benefits, or pensions.” They default on financial obligations and forfeit legal rights. They encounter problems with their health and aren’t properly nourished. They face other deficits and defeats—such as getting hammered by a natural disaster—that are exceedingly difficult to recover from.
Sandefur reported that at any moment, “as many as half of American households”—considerably more than 100 million Americans—were experiencing at least one significant civil justice problem, “many involving basic human needs.” Sandefur now estimates that Americans face at least 150 million new civil justice problems each year, based on a survey by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System and the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law. The most common problems are related to consumer debt, health care, housing, and financial assistance.
Problems can arise from unpaid government benefits associated with SNAP and unemployment. From unsafe rental housing, unfair civil fines, overdue wages, and hounding from debt collectors. From the need to obtain a restraining order against an abuser or the need for elder care or the need to obtain legal guardianship of an aging or ill relative or a young one without a parent. And from many other distresses. The crisis is vast. It is persistent. And it is growing every year.
Raising the cap solves only part of the access crisis. Most people with an urgent need don’t realize they can seek recourse in the law, so they don’t even try.The Legal Services Corporation, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress since 1974, is the country’s major financial supporter of legal services. The corporation provides an average of one-third of the funding for 130 organizations, including Alaska Legal Services. But the corporation has often been embattled, accused of being anticapitalist, socialistic, or too progressive. It has regularly failed to get from Congress the money it seeks.
Its appropriation for FY 2024 was $560 million. In March, Congress extended the current level of funding through September. Because of inflation, the purchasing power of the corporation’s funding is now worth only about two-thirds of what it was 30 years ago. Add in the growth of the U.S. population since then, and the corporation’s funding per individual is now worth only half as much.
The corporation helps keep the access crisis from being an outright catastrophe, but that is a dismal standard. Of the roughly 1.3 million lawyers in the United States, only around 10,000—about three-fourths of one percent—are full-time legal services lawyers. The American Bar Association says they are among the country’s lowest-paid lawyers.
About 50 million people were eligible for help from the corporation in 2022—about one-sixth of the U.S. Those who sought aid received an inadequate amount or none at all for 92 percent of their “significant civil legal needs,” the National Opinion Research Center reported. Only eight percent of those needs were adequately addressed. That colossal rate of failure greatly understates the problem.
Scores of millions of others can’t afford to pay a lawyer but earn more than the eligibility cap set by Congress for free legal services, which is strikingly low, at 125 percent of federal poverty levels. In 2022, except in Alaska and Hawaii (where the numbers averaged 20 percent higher), individuals in the United States making more than $16,988 a year or families of four making more than $34,688 were not eligible. Some legal services organizations don’t take federal funding because the 125 percent cap leaves out far too many people: they set their own cap at 400 percent of federal poverty levels. In 2022, the higher cap covered 58 percent of the American population, about 193.3 million people.
And raising the cap solves only part of the access crisis. Most people with an urgent need don’t realize they can seek recourse in the law, so they don’t even try. “Among poor Americans,” Sandefur said in that 2016 speech in Washington, “one of the most common responses to civil justice problems is to do nothing at all.” Many are so inured to their exposure to emergencies that, in her words, they accept their adversity as “part of God’s plan.” Sandefur has studied that perplexing reality more than anyone else. When she first published her finding in 2012, no one else in the field was thinking the way she was. To her, the “left behind”—poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans who need help in getting access to legal services—include many millions of people who don’t seek assistance.
Sandefur’s D.C. presentation motivated Nelson: “I was, like, ‘Exactly—that is exactly what I’ve been experiencing my entire career as a legal aid lawyer.’ It was the first time that I heard somebody articulate what I had been seeing in the field for a very long time.”
For Nelson, an upsetting part of her work was having to ration justice: saying no to people who needed help. She said, “Nobody goes into legal aid because they want to turn people away.” Listening to Sandefur, Nelson thought to herself, “Oh, we will never get on top of this problem by just adding more lawyers to the mix and additional funding for civil legal aid.”
Nelson asked Sandefur to help Alaska Legal Services develop the justice worker program and persuade the Alaska Supreme Court to allow justice workers to give clients legal advice and represent them in court. The supreme court granted that request at the end of 2022—soon after the remnants of the typhoon hit the state. “I don’t think that would’ve happened without her,” Nelson said about Sandefur, “without her ideas and without her support as a counselor, but also as a champion.” What she has done in Alaska, she is doing in many other places—work that has made her, during the past decade, the most influential thinker and doer in the effort to improve access to civil justice in America.
Rebecca Sandefur was born in 1970 in Norman, Oklahoma. Her parents, both 19 at the time, had married the year before. “We used to joke that we all grew up together,” she said. She is plainspoken and introduces herself as Becky. Her good-humored irony sheathes the sharpness of her thoughts and the decisiveness of her sense of right and wrong. Her friendly voice and midwestern directness reinforce her neighborliness—her kindness and generosity, her empathy, her concern that you get her meaning. Those qualities also veil her resolve.
While attending the University of Oklahoma, her father worked as a night manager at an Arby’s. Her mother worked as a secretary at the university’s law school. When Sandefur was four, the family moved to California, where her father got his PhD in sociology at Stanford. Her younger brother, Conner, was two when the family moved back to Norman, where her father became a professor at the university. When Sandefur was 13, it was on to Madison, where her father accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin, eventually rising from professor to dean of its College of Letters and Science.
Through his mother, her father is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in south-central Oklahoma. Sandefur and her brother extend the line as descendants of Native Americans forced to move from ancestral lands in the American Southeast to Indian Territory. Her grandmother was on the Chickasaw Council of Elders, which provides advice to the tribe about how to sustain its language, preserve its culture, and repatriate remains of its citizens buried elsewhere.
Sandefur’s grandmother dropped out of high school. When she was about 40, she earned her GED. She then went to a community college to qualify as an elementary school teacher, with financial support from the tribe. That allowed her to “have a very different kind of life: access to things like retirement benefits and health insurance and that kind of good stuff,” Sandefur said. The tribe also paid for her father to go to college: “The lives of generations in our family have been different because of those small investments in those two people.”
In Madison, starting in ninth grade, Sandefur needed about a year and a half to catch up with other students in reading and writing. “Many of the people I went to school with, in Wisconsin, were either the children of college professors or of state professional employees,” she said, “which was very different from Norman, Oklahoma.” High school was a watershed; it was where she learned to “read and write and think like an adult.” She became a National Merit Scholar, earning enough credits to finish in three years.
For two years, she went to Agnes Scott College, a liberal arts school near Atlanta, then returned to Madison to finish her B.A. at the University of Wisconsin, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She knew by then that she wanted to be a scholar.
She mulled over the idea of going to grad school in English, because she loved the epic poem Beowulf, about the warrior who defeats the monster Grendel. She thought it might be fun to spend a career contemplating that kind of text. Her undergraduate work with the sociologist Robert M. Hauser, however, drew her to studying America’s social problems. After graduating, she worked as a Kelly temp for a year and a half, typing documents while figuring out her path. Ultimately, she chose to get her PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. She “wanted to be able to work on problems that mattered,” problems she could “take action on.”
Her first major work as a sociologist was on the American legal profession, and it framed her understanding of the access crisis.
She cowrote a groundbreaking book that exposed the growing pains of the bar during the late 20th century and the strains it endured when business and finance experienced a surge in globalization. Published in 2005, Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar examined the Chicago bar as representative of the American bar as a whole.
The book told how a “largely undifferentiated mass” of solo legal practitioners morphed in the 20th century: many lawyers still worked alone, but others began practicing in groups. Some firms had tens of lawyers, others (toward the end of the century) employed hundreds, and the largest (eventually) had a thousand or more. She explained why lawyers’ specialties dictated their status—“the prestige with which other lawyers rated different areas of law,” as she put it. Whether their clients were large corporations, unemployed workers, or something in between, the type of client determined how much—or little—prestige, power, and money lawyers amassed.
Beginning in the 1970s, the work of the American bar also changed immensely. Throughout the United States, lawyers in private practice spent a larger share of their time on work for corporations and a smaller share on work for individuals. As dollar values of corporate mergers and deals of other kinds skyrocketed, so did the size, profits, and worldwide influence of American law firms serving big business and major finance. Much greater money, power, and prestige flowed to lawyers for large corporations and finance firms than to lawyers representing individuals with personal problems.
In Chicago, as happened in other major American cities from 1975 to 1995, the number of lawyers almost doubled. In the 1970s alone, the number of lawyers nationwide grew by 76 percent, the fastest rate in any decade from 1900 until today. Barriers to entry into the legal profession lowered: women and people of color made up larger shares of bar membership than ever before. Inside the bar, however, high barriers remained. The profession’s rungs amounted to well-defined classes, with lawyers in those divisions, according to Urban Lawyers, inhabiting “separate social worlds.”
Whether their clients were large corporations or unemployed workers, the type of client
determined how much—or little—prestige, power, and money lawyers amassed.Sandefur and her coauthors realized that the lofty status enjoyed by lawyers for the rich and influential had a devastating, largely unrecognized consequence. The least prestigious work that lawyers did, by the values that had come to predominate in the profession, was to help individuals and families without much money deal with their personal problems—troubles that emerge “at the intersection of civil law and everyday adversity,” as Sandefur put it. Most lawyers spurned the work, deterred by its low pay and low status. A tiny fraction got done compared with what there was to do. What lawyers didn’t do to help address economic and social inequality contributed to the worsening of the problem.
Sandefur had started as one of dozens of research assistants on the book and vaulted to academic prominence as a coauthor with three senior male colleagues. Having written her dissertation on the social organization of legal careers, she became an assistant professor at Stanford and planned to continue writing about the labor market for lawyers from the perspective of theory-oriented sociology. That was her pathway to tenure.
But the implications of the findings published in Urban Lawyers came to obsess Sandefur. “The closer you come to doing anything useful for any concrete human being, you often get paid less,” she said recently, “but you definitely get less respect within your own profession.” It wasn’t just that lawyers’ criteria for success meant that many people lacked representation and floundered. Lawyers’ prohibition against anyone practicing law without having passed the bar kept almost everyone who was not a lawyer from helping people deal with justice-related adversity. Those realities locked masses of people outside the law’s protection.
Sandefur concluded that “Equal Justice Under Law,” chiseled on the façade of the U.S. Supreme Court and, in Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s words, “the most inspiring ideal of our society,” was unattainable in the American legal systems, plural. John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann, influential sociologists and coauthors with Sandefur and Robert L. Nelson of Urban Lawyers, wrote in a previous book that the United States had two legal professions: “two systems of justice, separate and unequal.”
Sandefur wanted to come up with solutions to that problem. She recognized that her scholarship would be deemed unorthodox and reduce the odds of her getting tenure at Stanford. She didn’t get tenure—and, she allowed, she “was very cranky for about a year and a half.” But she carried on with her quest.
Her project is to change the country’s way of addressing a central aspect of American inequality, which has grown considerably in the past generation: from a legal problem, unsolvable without lawyers, to a justice problem, sometimes solvable best by lawyers because of their expertise when it’s essential—but much more often, without them.
Sandefur’s first scholarly article, written when she was a grad student in 1998, was about the idea of social capital. She was the lead author, cowriting with Edward O. Laumann. It’s a work of orthodox sociology—a way of thinking about a big concept. Social capital is a set of hard-to-quantify features of social relations, like norms and networks, which lead to persuasion, cooperation, and connectedness among individuals and groups.
An influential article published a decade earlier had addressed social capital as a quality, like trust, that an individual or group either has or does not. Instead, Sandefur and Laumann presented social capital as a resource that can be exchanged, like money, and can decrease or increase in value. They concentrated on how it functions: sometimes it’s a liability, which undermines trust; usually it’s a benefit, which adds to trust, providing information or building influence.
Sandefur’s work in the field of civil justice access is an example of how social capital functions as a positive force. She has written or cowritten about 80 or so sociology articles, law review articles, committee reports, and other publications—not counting podcasts she has done, media reports she has featured in, and major speeches she has given. Each item is a coordinate on an imaginary map of her campaign: how she has developed, employed, and built her social capital, and why others have added theirs to hers.
The concept of the justice worker caught Sandefur’s attention at a 2006 academic conference in Ireland. She learned about people sometimes called McKenzie Friends, who aren’t lawyers but provide “reasonable assistance” in legal matters; the precedent was established in a 1970 British court ruling in the divorce case of McKenzie v. McKenzie. Many of these McKenzie Friends work in family law, in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and Canada—countries where rules governing the practice of law allow people who aren’t lawyers to do what, in most American states, only lawyers can.
In 2010, Sandefur moved from Stanford to the Chicago-based American Bar Foundation, the national bar’s independent research arm, for which she started the Access to Justice Research Initiative. The next year, she joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she got tenure in 2013. In 2018, she received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for “promoting a new, evidence-based approach” to expanding access to justice.
Now 54, Sandefur is a professor at Arizona State University, a position she has held since 2019. She remains part of the American Bar Foundation, where she launched and directs the Access to Justice Scholars Program, nurturing a growing cohort of thinkers while continuing to build a wide network of people who are working on the problem.
She has also played a major role in convincing prominent bar leaders that the legal profession “can no longer maintain a monopoly over work that it has long failed to perform,” as David F. Levi and coauthors wrote in a 2019 article called “Reclaiming the Role of Lawyers as Community Connectors.” Levi, dean emeritus at Duke Law School and a former federal judge, is president of the American Law Institute, a century-old nonpartisan research organization of the bar’s elite.
For Sandefur, the new American vocation of justice workers is in the public service tradition of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the New Frontier’s Peace Corps, the Great Society’s Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Clinton administration’s AmeriCorps—but with important differences. Instead of being top down and government run, the vocation operates from the bottom up. The authority to certify workers as well as train them rests with the states, so the model has the potential to be sustainable even if it doesn’t attract major federal support. Instead of working for short stints, workers have the option of doing so for a long period. Instead of traveling to help in places they don’t know and where they aren’t known, workers can serve people where they live.
The model addresses the two nubs of the access crisis: restriction, with “only some kinds of justice problems” getting “lawful resolution,” as Sandefur put it; and inequity, with wealthy and white people “consistently more likely to get access than other people, like poor people and racial minorities.” Sandefur defines the vocation loosely to allow for a variety of approaches: justice workers paid by legal services groups; law students gaining practical experience; retirees participating in an “encore project”; employees of nonprofits dealing with health, housing, and other core social needs; and social workers, nurses, public health workers, librarians, teachers, clergy members, and others whose justice-work training expands the skills they bring to their day jobs.
Trust is essential to the mission. In this era of profound American polarization, when people contest what is true as vehemently as what is just, the default mindset seems to be mistrust—of government, institutions in general, the other. The trust that social workers, nurses, and others have earned in their communities serves as a powerful counterforce that can help expand the vocation of justice workers. Think of a building made with service panels and wiring that can handle a much higher load of electricity than is needed when the building opens, in anticipation of greater need in the future.
Sandefur doesn’t call the vocation a profession, to avoid the stigma she associates with use of that term. As she and a colleague wrote, the legal profession often functions as “a monolithic, money-seeking, and monopolistic guild that fails to meet even the basic justice needs of everyday Americans.” The justice worker, meanwhile, is concerned with helping people attain decent, secure, stable, and safe lives. “You work a case under the supervision of an attorney,” she said. “They make sure you know what you’re doing, and then you’re out into the world doing your justice work.”
In March 2024, Lauren Custer, a 36-year-old mother of four and foster mother of one in Fairbanks (population 30,000), joined Alaska Legal Services as a justice worker. She had been a paralegal for 11 years, supporting lawyers, helping victims of domestic and sexual assault and human trafficking get protective orders and meet other needs. The idea of managing her own caseload as a justice worker appealed to her, “to set my own daily expectations—it’s on me and I’m the case handler.”
Of her average of 45 cases, at least 35 involve helping people get public benefits: SNAP, Medicaid (including prenatal care), and housing assistance. She checks in with about half her clients each workday, by email or phone, or sometimes in person at a soup kitchen. She lets them know how their cases are progressing, or that she hasn’t forgotten them. She described her job as “bridging that gap to justice that most people in the populace that we serve have a very hard time doing.”
Sara Freeman, 24, joined Alaska Legal Services as a justice worker in April 2024. She had come to Alaska from Georgia after college as an AmeriCorps member with the Alaska Public Defender Agency, helping clients behind bars access medical treatment and other social services. For a year, she worked near Anchorage, the state’s capital and major city (population 286,000). As her AmeriCorps year ended, the agency offered her a similar job as a paralegal in Nome (population 3,700), 540 miles to the northwest. “Nome looked really cool, so I took it,” she said, “and fell in love with it.”
Part of her job was referring clients with civil needs to Alaska Legal Services, and over two years, she got to know the agency well enough to apply for a job there. “Nome is always suffering from a lack of attorneys,” she said, and “being a lay advocate fills that gap a little bit.” Most of her cases involve SNAP benefits and other forms of public assistance. Her job, she said, is “making justice more accessible” in the most basic way—for people otherwise isolated by weather and wilderness.
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed longstanding weaknesses in American civil society, with both justice systems stretched to their limits. Courts moved from physical courtrooms to online platforms, hearing only emergency cases and allowing massive backlogs to pile up. Legal services offices were overwhelmed.
Their cases dealt with problems such as layoffs and denials of unemployment claims; evictions and other housing and landlord-tenant disputes; price gouging and harassing debt collection; abuses of all kinds (of children, domestic partners, and the elderly); immigration miseries stemming from government-imposed delays on visas; a lack of safe shelters for homeless people; increased racial discrimination; and the need for guardianships of those severely ill with Covid and for advanced health directives. The explosion of civil legal problems upended the lives of countless people—but it stirred innovation.
Among the many groups that had invited Sandefur to speak in the few years before the pandemic—including Congress and the World Bank—none was more important than the Conference of Chief Justices: it’s made up of the top judicial officers of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and some American territories. In 2018, she presented her case to the chiefs in a talk titled “The True Legal Needs of the Public.”
In 2020, the conference adopted a resolution (“Urging Consideration of Regulatory Innovations Regarding the Delivery of Legal Services”) that included “the authorization and regulation of new categories of legal service providers.” The conference urged the gatekeepers—the courts led by members of the conference—to open the gates.
Echoing Sandefur’s findings over the previous decade and a half was a series of whereas clauses. One stated, “WHEREAS, traditional solutions to reducing the access to justice gap, such as increased funding for civil legal aid, more pro bono work, or court assistance programs have had some success, but are not likely to resolve the gap, which is only increasing in severity,” it was time for the addition of people such as justice workers.
Beginning that year, a cluster of states began to remove barriers to justice workers through exceptions in their unauthorized-practice-of-law rules. The Arizona Supreme Court authorized domestic violence legal advocates to provide some legal advice about protective orders and family law—following the justice worker model. In 2021, the Utah Supreme Court, through an experiment of the court and the state bar, authorized Holy Cross Ministries to train its community health workers as medical debt legal advocates, or justice workers, and provide legal advice about dealing with debt—including to undocumented people, who, by law, are prohibited from receiving counsel from legal services lawyers. In 2022, the Delaware Supreme Court adopted a rule authorizing the qualified tenant advocate program, a version of the justice worker model, and in 2023, the state legislature passed a law creating a right to representation in eviction proceedings and requiring that any tenant household earning under 200 percent of the federal poverty line must be represented by a lawyer or a qualified tenant advocate.
Also in 2022, the Alaska Supreme Court endorsed the state’s community justice workers program by adopting the broadest waiver of restrictions to date in any state. It allows justice workers to provide help to clients in court proceedings and widens the scope of problems that justice workers are able to address. As Alaska’s communities identify other needs and as workers demonstrate proficiency in dealing with them, the program can expand quickly.
Justice workers now help Alaskans draft wills, defend themselves against harassing debt collection and small claims lawsuits, obtain protective orders against people who commit domestic violence, and secure unemployment benefits and funds for food. They can also help tribal members benefit from the Indian Child Welfare Act.
As of this April, 190 justice workers were working in 41 Alaskan communities. About a third were Alaska Natives—Aleuts, Northern Eskimos (Inupiat), Southern Eskimos (Yuit), Interior Indians (Athabascans), and Southeast Coastal Indians (Tlingit and Haida). About one quarter were employed or recommended by a tribe (or a tribal nonprofit). About a fifth worked in health care or social services. Another fifth were law students.
In 2023, the Arizona and Utah supreme courts authorized in their respective states the extension of their justice worker models to housing-stability legal advocates. Also that year, Sandefur and Matthew Burnett, who were working together at the American Bar Foundation’s Access to Justice Research Initiative, cofounded Frontline Justice, a nonprofit that describes itself as “a bipartisan national project to democratize access to justice.” It launched with $2 million in philanthropic support. The allusion to battle—frontline—is a reminder of the life-defining stakes for many with civil justice problems.
Frontline Justice’s advisory board includes conservative and liberal leaders, with members in the fields of business, labor, law, medicine, public health, and religion, and some who work with immigrants and people with disabilities. In an era when partisan collaboration has broken down, the organization’s work is an example of cooperation and civic innovation. Sandefur is a cochair of the organization, with John Bridgeland and Cecilia Muñoz, former directors of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively.
Frontline Justice launched with $2 million in philanthropic support. The allusion to battle—frontline—is a reminder of the life-defining stakes for many with civil justice problems. When Frontline Justice was looking for a CEO, Nikole Nelson (executive director of Alaska Legal Services) applied. “I said, ‘Look, if there’s somebody better to do this, please take them. But there’s nobody who believes in this more than I do.’ ” She emphasized that “the justice worker model has the potential to scale in ways that nothing else had that I saw in 25 years in legal aid.” From a strong field of candidates, she got the job. As Sandefur said of Nelson: “She has this wonderful expression: ‘You have to move at the speed of trust.’ ”
Nelson leads a virtual organization from Anchorage, with colleagues in Brooklyn, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and other parts of the country. Throughout 2024, she traveled in the Lower Forty-Eight to build Frontline Justice, “socialize the justice-worker concept, and try to move forward the kinds of regulations or rules that exist in Alaska and Arizona and Utah that will clear space for justice workers to get a foothold and help address the justice gap.”
Two of the most important moves happened in Texas, where the state supreme court issued a draft rule allowing for versions of justice worker programs. Approval is expected this year. The state’s Access to Justice Foundation announced Moonshot Grants totaling $13.4 million over three years to six nonprofits that will “help launch a Community Justice Workers (CJW) Program to expand access to legal services for low-income Texans using trained lay advocates to provide limited-scope civil legal services.”
Sandefur helped develop the grants and the program. The foundation gave her a $1.6 million contract to study the Texas Moonshot Grants in a new Justice Worker Lab at Arizona State University.
As Nelson wrote in an email, “Texas is not an outlier state like some may consider Alaska to be. It has a huge population and a mix of urban and rural communities.” Buy-in from the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Access to Justice Foundation was “a next level indication that the movement has legs beyond rural communities.”
In July 2024, at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Closing the Justice Gap,” Ronald S. Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation, endorsed the justice worker model. He said that the corporation is investing in it as “a promising innovation that has already shown tangible success.”
As of May, eight states have authorized some version of justice workers. The Texas plan was pending, and at least 20 other states, as well as the District of Columbia, were considering some version of the program. California’s proposal would allow the state’s more than 100 legal services organizations “to deploy Community Justice Workers.”
Sandefur regards the crisis in civil justice access as a failure of democracy—one that goes back to the shaping of the modern American legal profession about a century ago. The supremacy of market forces in determining how lawyers operate and the lack of prestige for lawyers who tend to people who aren’t rich make for a tenacious bias against providing equal access to civil justice. The profession became a large contributor to the inequality that, by dozens of measures, has gotten worse in the past half-century—despite the country’s overall prosperity. The legal historian Robert W. Gordon wrote, “In no profession is the gulf greater between ideals and practices than it is for lawyers.”
But the Constitution made the United States a rule-of-law country to “establish Justice” and “promote the general Welfare,” among other objectives. To accomplish those objectives, the Constitution establishes American law as a primary and indispensable public good. “We the People of the United States,” the preamble begins, with the first three words calligraphed in much larger letters for emphasis. American law’s principal task is to make government, including the law itself, work fairly on behalf of the people. “Justice workers enable people to use their law,” Sandefur explained. “Their relationship to government and law is changed through the experience of working on their own justice issues.”
She observed that the “law is a big public thing. In our country, for whatever reason, we have this very strange system where, if you want to use your own big public thing, you usually have to hire a private expert to navigate what’s already yours.” Lawyers control the practice of law, so their values play a commanding role in determining what is important in law and who can solve problems involving law, even though the law belongs to the public, not to lawyers.
“Law in a democracy is supposed to be a fundamentally, universally accessible thing,” she said. “When it’s not, it isn’t just that people face unfair and unnecessary suffering that increases inequality. Democracy doesn’t work if people can’t participate in the ordering of their own lives. Substantial groups of people can’t do that.”
The existence of separate and unequal legal systems makes it impossible for a vast number of people to engage with law and legal institutions as citizens. They live outside the law’s protection. That deepens their sense of powerlessness, as does their social and economic vulnerability. “That’s just not democracy,” Sandefur said. The government, founded and extolled as a system of laws—of, by, and for the people—has, for a large share of them, not provided civil justice. The potential of justice workers is to help do that for tens of millions, even a hundred million, more Americans.
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Who would say no to an extra year of life, especially if you could choose when to take it? Not at the end, please, when you might be too old or tired to enjoy it. You wouldn’t want it at the beginning either. We love babies for their potential, but no one wants to be one again. You’d probably ask for it to come in the middle, when extra time is likely to be rich and nourishing, like fresh-baked bread, spongy and soft. Yet in those rich, busy years of midlife, what need have you for more? You’d be like a person who has consumed an entire loaf of bread, and then tries to stuff more in. Why be greedy when you are well fed? Picture a snake that has swallowed a rabbit. How funny you would look, your life bulging in the middle, the rhythm of your days sluggish as you digest all you have taken in. No—the extra days must come where we need them, at the end, a dry morsel, but worth having.
If, on the other hand, you had to give up a day or two, or even a month? It would hardly matter if you lost them in the middle. With plenty on your plate, you could afford to sacrifice a little. My father savored a beer at lunch. He was a logical, thoughtful person, not given to impulse. If I sat down with a cold beer on a hot day, I might suck down a quarter of it in the first gulp. Not my father. He would calculate how long the beer must last—through the meal, for example—and space his sips accordingly. Ask for a taste of his beer at the start when he could still adjust and he’d push the glass toward you. Ask in the middle of the meal when the glass is down by half, and he’d still share. But when it came to the dregs, he was quite possessive. He’d explain he had the remaining amount portioned so it lasted to the end. Then, probably, he’d grudgingly allow you a taste. With his time, however, he was never reserved. Yes, take some that’s left, he’d have said. He’d have risen from his chair no matter how it hurt him to move. He’d have done so to study the matter and give advice or to collect the tools and fix the problem for you.
I wonder if he calculated, as he approached the end of his life, how much was left of it. He seemed to know the end was coming. After his glasses disappeared in the commotion of a fall in a parking lot, he protested the purchase of another pair of expensive progressive lenses. And he was right—the glasses arrived, but he got the use of them for no more than a handful of days. If I could choose for him, I would splice any extra time onto the end of his life. Keep him going. Just a little longer. It’s too late for that, obviously, though sometimes he returns in my dreams, neither the young, confident, capable father I knew nor the old, bent father I also knew, but the man sitting at the table on the back porch, where everything is in place. He wasn’t picky, but he was particular. The cheese board, the baguette, the proper knife, the right mustard, the leftovers to be eaten up, the plain flatware he preferred, the seat he liked. And his freezer-chilled beer and favorite glass. “Ah!” I can hear him say in quiet satisfaction. He is ready to savor it all in regulated sequence and to the fullest. If you want something, go ahead, ask already.
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Amanda Holmes reads Nizar Qabbani’s “In the Summer,” translated from the Arabic by Bassam Franghieh and Clementina Brown. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “In the Summer” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the fall of 1989, my senior year, I bought a handgun in the lobby of my high school library. It was a cheap .25 caliber, small enough to fit in my front pocket. The guy who sold it to me, a fellow student, said it was unregistered. He said it was something I didn’t want to get caught with.
For several years, I kept the gun in the glove box of my truck. Each morning, before I drove to school, I would check to make sure it was there. Each afternoon, driving home, I would suddenly recall it, like a harbored secret. It mostly stayed in my truck. I took it out occasionally to aim it. As far as I can remember, I never fired it.
I’m still not sure why I bought it. A few months before, in August, I had joined the National Guard—as soon as I finished high school, I would ship off to basic training. I owned a shotgun at the time, and a deer rifle. Where I lived in rural Arkansas, lots of kids owned guns. They drove to school with deer rifles on the gun racks of their trucks. Others had shotguns or crossbows. A few kids occasionally brought their guns inside, and years later, after everything that has happened, I think of the guns we carried and wonder if we were scared and thought we needed protection. If we felt there was some undisclosed and ill-defined danger coming, some shootout we always needed to be prepared for, even at that age.
This was, of course, a time of war.
The Berlin Wall was coming down, ending a war older than we were, but already another one was coming. Sometime during basic training, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Our drill sergeants told us we were going to war.
Instead, I went home. I started college during the long buildup to the Gulf War. My roommate—also a National Guard member—and I watched CNN every night, usually while drinking heavily. By this time, the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions had been mobilized. The aircraft carriers Eisenhower and Independence had slipped through the Suez Canal on their way to the Persian Gulf. Every day more soldiers arrived in the Gulf. Every day more National Guard units were alerted.
One weekend a month, I went to Guard drill. On the rifle range, we fired our M16s at pop-up targets so far downrange that I could hardly see them. In October, we did field training exercises, radioing for fake air strikes while the enemy—the other half of our battalion—moved toward us. Always there was talk of the war, men with more rank than me wondering whether we would be called.
When we needed to forget about what was happening, my roommate and I read. He liked old pulp novels: The Punisher, The Executioner, The Destroyer. Bullets were always flying in these books. People dying and getting decapitated. Cops killed and innocent bystanders (sometimes) saved.
He also liked Stephen King, and during the fall of 1990, as the buildup of forces continued in the Gulf, I started a collection of King’s short stories titled Skeleton Crew. In the first story, some secret government project opens up another dimension, and horrifying creatures come through, hidden in a thick mist. Other stories had a spell-casting grandmother, a man stranded on a deserted island who eats parts of himself to stay alive, a toy monkey whose cymbals cause catastrophe every time they clash.
The story “Cain Rose Up” is set in a college dorm. The main character, Curt Garrish, has just finished a difficult final exam. He heads back to his room and, after talking to a few students, takes out his hunting rifle, which is hidden in his closet. He loads it, then stands at the window looking out.
I read this story in November, at the start of deer season in Arkansas. The days had grown short, and the streetlights came on in the afternoon. My stepfather’s National Guard unit had been mobilized, and I was afraid mine would be next. I was drunk a lot of the time and hungover when I wasn’t. I still had that handgun in the glove compartment of my truck. Some days, walking down the halls of the dorm, I could see other students cleaning their guns in preparation for a weekend hunt, the smell of solvent sharp in the hallway. We weren’t supposed to have guns there, but like Curt Garrish in the story, we simply smuggled them inside, late at night, while everyone was asleep.
As Garrish makes his way toward his dorm room and the rifle, the language of the story foreshadows death—Garrish says he has taken a “last” test. He thinks a fellow student might be better off dead. Reading his description of Rollins as “the asinine floor-counselor who had sent Jimmy Brody up to visit the Dean of Men for a drinking offense,” I laughed, since my asinine floor counselor had sent me to the dean of students for a drinking offense earlier in the semester. But after Rollins leaves, Garrish imagines him dead in a ditch.
It’s a very short story. Simple, direct sentences, but King captures that end-of-semester feel. The fears and frustrations. The silence of a formerly loud dormitory, the sense of emptiness. There isn’t much interior dialogue, and what we do have is about dying. When Garrish begins to fire his rifle, he is thinking about eating the world before it eats him, a phrase he repeats throughout the story.
I read “Cain Rose Up” a dozen times through November and December. As the leaves left the trees and the weather turned cold. As the reports of rifles sounded in the blue hills ringing our small college town. As the dorms began to empty and the students went home for Christmas.
In those days, I did not know about Charles Whitman, the gunman who killed 17 people in Austin, Texas, in 1966. “Cain Rose Up” was first published in 1968, two years after the Austin shooting. For weeks beforehand, Whitman had been complaining about irrational thoughts. Overwhelming violent impulses. During his autopsy, doctors found a pecan-size tumor in his brain.
The scariest part of the Stephen King story is that there’s no stated reason for why Curt Garrish opens fire. We expect there to be a reason. A manifesto. Some sort of mental illness. Reading the story today, we cannot understand how a seemingly healthy young man does such a thing, despite the number of times we’ve seen it happen.
The war started in January, and we watched it from the beginning, just as we had followed the buildup. CNN’s 24-hour coverage showed oil fires burning, men in gas masks, Apache helicopters. Wolf Blitzer told us about the Iraqi Republican Guard. For days we watched as coalition aircraft carpet-bombed the desert. We would see crosshairs on the screen, and a moment later a factory would blow up, and let me tell you now, there’s only so much destruction you can handle before wanting to destroy something yourself. Usually yourself.
At the time, I was reading Rage, a novel by King in which Charlie Decker, shortly after being expelled for beating his chemistry teacher with a pipe wrench, walks into his high school and shoots his algebra teacher. He then takes the class hostage for four hours. While mornings were filled with gunfire in the hills and evenings with news from the Gulf, I read about how Charlie’s classmates slowly come over to his side. About how they begin—all but one—to understand how he could have become so lost. When Ted, the only student who doesn’t understand Charlie’s actions, tries to escape, the other students stop him. Rage ends with Charlie getting shot by the police chief. There is more to the story—Charlie becomes a sort of hero, and Ted, who has become the antagonist, ends up in an institution—but for me, it always ended in the classroom. The story is set in the classroom. All the hurt happens in the classroom. Charlie is broken and scared in the same way Curt from “Cain Rose Up” is broken and scared, both of them looking for some way to alleviate all the things inside them that made them want to hurt others, and themselves.
It was late, but I could still see a few people crossing campus. I remember thinking that from so far away, you wouldn’t even be able to see their faces when the first shots were fired.By March, the war was over, and so was my college career, at least for the time being. I spent the last two months of the academic year not going to class at all. I turned on CNN in the morning and got the latest news, then read through the afternoon, mostly Rage, because the fake world of the book was better than the real world of bombs and bullets.
At the end of the semester, when the dorm was almost empty, I read “Cain Rose Up” again. Soon I would have to drive home and tell my mother I had flunked out of college, not because I wasn’t smart enough but because there was something wrong with me.
It was evening. The parking lot was almost empty as well, and the long halls of the dorm were silent as the sound of socked feet on the tile floor. I stood in the window, looking out at the university. It was late, nearly everyone gone, but I could still see a few people crossing campus. I remember thinking that from so far away, you wouldn’t even be able to see their faces when the first shots were fired.
Imagine now the summer of 1991. There are parades everywhere in America, flags waving, people crying, soldiers who just want to get home forced to march in the midsummer heat. George H. W. Bush has never been more popular.
The most-played song on college radio stations is Jesus Jones’s “Right Here, Right Now,” a song that says we’re watching the world wake up from history, but history is always around us. The Cold War has been blown away and the Gulf War won. The Soviet Union, that big pink blob on all our high school maps, has been broken into 15 different-colored countries.
In July, the remains of 11 men and boys are found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment, and the world gets scarier, the way it did in the ’70s when we first learned about serial killers. In Russia, there’s a coup attempt. In October, the deadliest mass shooting in American history takes place when George Hennard shoots 23 people in a cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, before killing himself. In November, postal worker Thomas McIlvane goes on a shooting rampage in Royal Oak, Michigan, and we get the lovely new phrase going postal. After each shooting, we go out to our cars to see if our handguns are still there. Some nights, we bring them inside, “just in case,” we tell ourselves, but don’t say what it is in case of.
In November, we elect a new president, but just days after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, a shooting at CIA headquarters in Langley causes the country to ask whether anywhere is safe from gun violence.
Add to all this a tanking economy, high unemployment, and a record deficit. The flag-waving after the war has tailed off, and some of us are beginning to understand how empty everything is. At the end of all the rhetoric, we have spent billions of dollars and killed thousands of people. We have left a country in ruins. We’ve left many veterans in ruins.
That the Gulf War followed the Cold War so closely made it seem like we’d always be at war, and the number of shootings on the nightly news told us there’d always be guns.
It was into this atmosphere that the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy” came into our lives. Eddie Vedder based the lyrics on the story of Jeremy Delle, a 15-year-old sophomore who killed himself in front of his high school English class in Richardson, Texas, on January 8, 1991. Vedder could relate to the Jeremy Delle story because a kid he knew in junior high “kind of freaked out and brought a gun into class one day” and shot a fish tank at the school.
In the song, which came out in August 1992, the eponymous Jeremy is picked on at school. The lyrics recount Jeremy’s difficult home life, that “the boy was something Mommy wouldn’t wear,” and it is because of being picked on and this difficult home life that he walks into his classroom and kills himself in front of the other students. The chorus, in Vedder’s deep voice, repeats again and again that Jeremy spoke in class today, even though we, the audience, know that Jeremy actually went silent. The video, which begins by setting the scene—“3:30 in the afternoon,” “64 degrees and cloudy”—depicts Jeremy at home, drawing pictures, and ends with still shots: the class recoiled in horror. Bright spots of blood on their white clothing.
For context, you have to remember what was happening in America when “Jeremy” came out. The particular feeling of angst and anxiety. The creeping commitment to guns. The fact that people were now walking into restaurants and opening fire. Going postal. That school shootings were appearing elsewhere in our pop culture. That already some of us were beginning to cart guns around in an attempt to alleviate some unknown, unnamed fear.
The economy was slowly starting to pick back up, and our new president was a young dude who blew the saxophone and didn’t sound like a cranky old man yelling at traffic. In the wake of the war, America embraced optimism. A new wind and all that. The end of the old Soviet Union and now this little hiccup in the Middle East had been handled and everyone in America was ready to go back to being exceptional.
Except me, and people like me. And there were a lot of us back then. We came from small towns but wanted to go somewhere big. We felt stifled and confined and wanted to walk in the larger world, but seeing the larger world—the wars and the shootings and how all anyone could talk about was the economy—made us think that the wider world wasn’t worth it. That, like the narrator in “Jeremy,” we might spend our lives trying to forget this, trying to erase this.
In the video, Jeremy is the only moving thing. Everything else is a still shot, from his parents sitting at the dinner table while Jeremy rages around them, to the descriptions of Jeremy that appear as words written on a chalkboard: problem, peer, harmless, bored. Alongside the words are biblical allusions: “the serpent was subtil,” from Genesis 3:1; “the unclean spirit entered,” from Mark 5:13; and Genesis 3:6, referencing the concept of original sin.
As the video progresses, Jeremy becomes more agitated. Isolated. Alone. He raises his arms in a V, but he’s standing before a wall of flames. Strobe lighting gives him a dark, surreal look, as if we can’t possibly imagine what he is going through, or what he is about to do. Some nights, watching MTV at three or four in the morning after drinking all night, I would see the “Jeremy” video superimposing itself over the day’s events, as if it embodied everything the early ’90s were about.
It was a weird time. While Blind Melon was urging us to keep our cheeks dry today, Ugly Kid Joe was telling us how much he hated everything about us. REM was reminding us that everybody hurts sometimes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were shooting up under the bridge. Guns N’ Roses sang of walking in the cold November rain while Alice in Chains fell down in a hole and Nirvana told us to nevermind, that with the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Kurt Loder and Kennedy told us the news of the day and then switched to videos, and we saw “Jeremy” again and again. Soundgarden was singing about Spoonman, and Snoop Dogg was drinking gin and juice, anything to forget for a few hours. Tool was trying to stay sober. Metallica told us nothing else matters.
The world was down in a hole. My National Guard unit was never deployed, but on many nights, I imagined it had been. I imagined the war. The constant shooting. How I would feel coming home. I had gone back to college but spent most of my time watching MTV. We were hearing inklings about email and the internet, but where I lived, no one owned a computer. War broke out in Bosnia as Socialist Yugoslavia fell, further breaking up our classroom maps. In November 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Act, mandating federal background checks on those purchasing firearms; barely a week later, six people were murdered and 19 injured when a man named Colin Ferguson opened fire on a Long Island Railroad train. Interspersed as it was between music videos, the news seemed part of the same surreal world the videos came from.
MTV played the “Jeremy” video constantly. Every time it came on, I listened for clues in the lyrics to why Jeremy kills himself. Why so many other people were killing themselves as well, including veterans who had served in the Gulf War. When people were walking into schools to shoot themselves or other people or both, the media asked, “What if this feeling wasn’t here before and was instead started by the music?” instead of realizing that the opposite is true, and it always has been.
On MTV at 11 p.m., Beavis and Butt-Head came on. It was a show about two kids who do little except watch music videos, the same thing I was doing. They have no drive except to listen to music and “score” with “chicks,” which was something else I was doing. On the weekends, my roommate and I invited our friends over and got drunk and listened to loud music, and it occurs to me now how often we need some noise to shut out the silence of our own hearts. I’ve often wondered why my younger self was so uninterested in the world, but more likely I was learning, at that tender age, how to dissociate from it when it becomes overwhelming. Oh well, whatever, nevermind.
We liked the depravity of alternative music. The mainstream music of the ’80s had been as big and loud as the hair bands that played it, celebrating the world of sex and drugs, but alternative music of the new decade was about private suffering—Jeremy’s Daddy not giving attention to the fact that Mommy didn’t care. Or how, with the lights out, we can be anonymous, moving through college parties, drinking and listening to loud music.
Because it’s so easy to sit and watch. Let the world slip by. See the images on the screen and scream along with the words, nevermind what they mean. We were already afraid. A few years before, we had watched the Satanic Panic sweep the nation, along with a fear of Dungeons & Dragons and serial killers, but it seemed we had not yet learned anything about fear and how it gets inside us. How the 24-hour cycle gives us no respite from the news. Turn to any channel any time of day for breaking news, and now with the internet and social media, we have instant access to stories from around the world, all the killings and kidnappings, all the bullets and bombs.
After “Jeremy,” Pearl Jam stepped away from making music videos. “Ten years from now,” bassist Jeff Ament said, “I don’t want people to remember our songs as videos.”
Ament was saying he wanted people to remember the music. But he might have been saying something else—that he didn’t want the video to be remembered because of what it was.
But many people get the video wrong. There is a widespread belief, because of the way the last scene is edited, that Jeremy has killed his classmates, that the blood covering them in the last still is theirs. Maybe this interpretation gained ground in America because that’s what we have come to expect—that we will, someday, be killed by a gun.
Charlie, the main character in Stephen King’s Rage, comes from a broken home, just as Jeremy does. His father is violent and abusive. One night, Charlie hears him talk about cutting Charlie’s mother’s nose off. In another scene, Charlie’s classmates discuss how difficult school is. How much pressure is on them. The class slowly comes around to Charlie’s side, realizing the world outside the windows is as banged up and broken as it is in here. How no one out there understands.
None of us do. Not what makes a kid walk into a school and kill himself, not what makes him walk into a school and kill others. Not what he is thinking. Not his hopes or dreams, though we do have some idea of the forces that made him this way. In Rage, Charlie doesn’t know why he is doing what he is doing, although he knows he will regret his actions later. But he cannot stop them, any more than the rest of us can stop the world from sliding toward constant violence.
Or at least we don’t seem able to. Since Rage was published in 1977, several copycat incidents have occurred.
In 1988, Jeffrey Lyne Cox held 60 classmates at gunpoint at San Gabriel High School in California before being disarmed by other students. He had read Rage multiple times.
In 1989, 17-year-old Dustin Pierce took a classroom of 10 students and a teacher hostage at gunpoint in Jackson County High School in McKee, Kentucky, while reportedly trying to re-create the plot of Rage.
On September 11, 1991, Ryan R. Harris walked into a math class at Stevens High School in Rapid City, South Dakota. He pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and ordered the teacher to leave. The teacher complied, and Harris held the rest of the class hostage for the next four hours. Harris had been inspired by Rage.
On January 18, 1993, Scott Pennington, a student at East Carter High School in Grayson, Kentucky, used a .38-caliber revolver to fatally shoot his English teacher, Deanna McDavid, in the head. He then shot and killed the school’s head custodian, Marvin Hicks, and held his classmates hostage for 20 minutes before releasing them. Just before the shooting, he had written an essay on Rage.
On December 1, 1997, at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, 14-year-old Michael Carneal brought five guns to school and opened fire on a group of students standing in a prayer circle. Three were killed and five injured. Police would later discover a copy of Rage in Carneal’s locker.
Because of these copycat killings, Stephen King allowed Rage to go out of print. Shortly after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, King published a 25-page essay titled “Guns,” in which he explained his reasoning for pulling the novel:
It took more than one slim novel to cause [the shooters] to do what they did. These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse. … My book did not break [them] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.
Before Jeffrey Lyne Cox was born, his parents’ marriage had come apart. His father demanded he be perfect; his mother lashed out in anger. In 1987, he spent two weeks in a Los Angeles psychiatric ward after displaying suicidal tendencies. Five months later, he took his high school classmates hostage.
Dustin Pierce took his teacher and classmates hostage in Kentucky because he wanted to see his estranged father, whom he hadn’t seen since he was four.
Scott Pennington was upset at his teacher for giving him a C. Pennington was also upset that his family had recently moved. His father was disabled and out of work—the family lived in poverty. Pennington said he wanted to kill two people, any two people, to become eligible for the death penalty.
Michael Carneal told reporters that he could not explain his crimes, but he did say that contributing factors included a mistaken belief that his parents did not love him, taunting from classmates, and false assertions that he was gay.
Prosecutors argued that Loukaitis had carefully planned the shooting, getting ideas from “Jeremy,” mistakenly believing that Jeremy had killed his classmates.In 1996, at Frontier Junior High School in Moses Lake, Washington, Barry Dale Loukaitis opened fire, killing two classmates and a teacher. A copy of Stephen King’s Rage was found on his nightstand. He also came from a troubled home. In the year prior to the shooting, his parents separated, after his mother discovered that her husband was having an affair. She filed for divorce in January 1996. After the divorce, she became increasingly distant and began speaking of suicide. She would frequently imply that her son would have to kill himself as well.
Psychologists hired by the defense believed that Loukaitis had either depression or bipolar disorder when he committed his crime. But prosecutors Donna Wise and John Knodell argued that Loukaitis had carefully planned the shooting, getting ideas from the Pearl Jam song “Jeremy,” mistakenly believing, because of the way the video was edited, that Jeremy had killed his classmates, not himself. Wise and Knodell also contended that he had gotten ideas from Rage.
I wonder if all of those young men thought the world would always be this way. If they thought there was no way out.
After killing three people and wounding five others, Michael Carneal dropped his rifle. He placed his pistol on the ground and surrendered to the school principal, saying, “Kill me, please. I can’t believe I did that.”
Ryan Harris told his classmates he wasn’t going to kill them.
Dustin Pierce just wanted to see his father.
Here are some things I think about: Why Ryan Harris didn’t kill anyone. Why Barry Loukaitis did. Why they walked into those classrooms in the first place. What combination of abuse and alchemy caused them to be the way they were.
Here are some other things I think about:
In 1980, my parents divorced.
Through all of the ’80s, I saw my father only a handful of times.
In 1989, I bought a handgun.
In 1990, I read “Cain Rose Up.” In 1991, I read Rage.
In 1991, we watched the war like it was a movie. The bombs and bullets. The missiles and machine guns. The praising of our military might, as if all it takes to be better than someone is to possess more firepower.
Starting in 1992, I watched the “Jeremy” video at least 30,000 times. Or some number almost astronomical in meaning, like the number of people who die from gun violence every year, or the number of times our politicians have offered thoughts and prayers in response.
Here are even more things I think about: standing in the window of my dorm and looking down. Feeling small and afraid. Of the war. Of the world. Of how to make my way in it.
I think of the student in my writing class who wrote an essay about his school getting shot up. How he knew the kid who did it. How they all walked around afterward as if some fundamental thread of being had come unraveled.
I think of the grad school friend who survived the shooting at a San Antonio parade in 1979 when a gunman opened fire from an RV. She hid behind a dumpster. She was seven.
I think of the 1981 bomb threat at my elementary school, how the teachers tried to keep us occupied while policemen searched the buildings.
I think of how some men turn to books for an escape when the world outside the windows gets to be too much.
How some men turn to music.
How some men turn to guns.
How many people struggle with their mental health.
How most discussions of guns in America focus solely on men, even though more than 6,500 women in this country die each year from gun violence.
How many men harbor secrets so dark, they must seem like the end of the world.
How there is so much ugliness in the world that it ruins us, breaks us, hardens us to the point where we have to make the world even uglier.
I wonder if it’s really less dangerous with the lights out. Maybe Kurt Cobain meant that in the dark of a concert, in the throes of music we share—through videos, CDs, the pop-culture pantheon of the time—we were one, heads banging in unison at all the unfairness in the world. A lot of us were angry. Sad. Suicidal. Looking to music to show us some way in the world. But the music reflected everything we already felt. Already the bright future we foresaw had been tarnished by war. By the weaponry of man and the madness of men. Already we had seen the future and found it forlorn, lacking in both empathy and understanding. Where we’d work too many hours for too little pay. How we’d come home unhappy and take it out on those around us because the world makes us miserable pricks who project our fears onto others, so worried about keeping our families safe that we fail them, again and again.
I think of the student who wrote an essay about his school getting shot up. How they all walked around afterward as if some fundamental thread of being had come unraveled.Or maybe Cobain just meant that we can’t be targeted in the dark. That with the lights out, it’s harder to shoot us all. The truth is, we’re all scared. We’re all scarred and broken, and it isn’t from the stories we’ve read or music we’ve heard, but from what we see on the nightly news. Art imitates life, which makes me wonder what kind of lives we lead, and why anyone would want to imitate them.
I lost the handgun long ago. I don’t even remember where, or why.
When I still had the gun, however, I would bring it in the house every so often to clean it. To imagine myself firing it. Some days, I took it to school with me. But then I would go into the military and learn so much about guns, I would want to abandon them forever. I would read Rage and wonder why, with so much beauty in the world, men choose to do such ugly things. I would watch the “Jeremy” video and wonder, again, what makes the world this way. I see the way Jeremy smiles at the end, as he tosses his teacher an apple. As he turns to face the classroom.
I no longer see only the video, however. Instead, I see a kid like Charlie Decker. Like Barry Loukaitis. Michael Carneal. The Columbine shooters, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter. I see my ex-wife’s kindergarten classroom, I see the classrooms my daughters attended over the years, I see the college classrooms I’ve spent two decades in, I see the hundreds and hundreds of students who’ve sat before me. None of us can move, trapped as we are in our national nightmare. We have turned toward the door, where a small boy stands isolated and alone, hurting in a hundred different ways. He raises his right hand. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Sixty-four degrees and cloudy. Our faces frozen in horror, as if we’ll relive this moment, again and again and again.
The post Jeremy Spoke in Class Today appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker by Zachary Leader; Belknap Press, 464 pp., $35
Does biography illuminate the work of an artist? James Joyce slyly poked at this age-old question in his 1922 novel Ulysses. In one of the book’s many meandering scenes, Stephen Dedalus and a group of literary associates banter at the National Library of Ireland. Stephen spins out his theory that various characters in Hamlet stand in for Shakespeare himself. Yet Joyce gives the episode’s best line to another character who regards interest in writers and their lives as an unseemly distraction: “Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.”
Ulysses is immortal as well: brilliant, infuriating, hilarious, unfathomable—an unrivaled colossus of modern literature. Who could write such a novel? An English professor at Northwestern University named Richard Ellmann undertook to find out and in 1959 published James Joyce, which one critic hailed as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” But who was Ellmann? And what is the story behind James Joyce, the rare biography that, like Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson or Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, breaks free of its subject and attains the status of literature?
Only a master biographer could hope to answer such questions. Zachary Leader fits the bill, and Ellmann’s Joyce takes readers on a dazzling intellectual tour. The book is not Leader’s greatest accomplishment: his two-volume life of Saul Bellow and his celebrated biography of Kingsley Amis take up more weight on the metaphorical shelf. Nevertheless, Ellmann’s Joyce is a singular achievement worthy of notice, both in its exploration of character and as a defense of the biographer’s art.
Ellmann first considered writing about Joyce while working on his doctoral thesis after wartime service in Europe. While visiting Ireland, he asked William Butler Yeats’s widow whether Joyce had really insulted her husband when they first met by telling him, “You are too old.” Joyce at the time was 20, and the great poet nearly twice his age. Both men had denied the remark, but Mrs. Yeats showed Ellmann an unpublished essay in which her husband had committed it to print. “As all mild men must [be], I was delighted by this arrogance,” Ellmann would recall. The encounter reveals his knack for getting people to talk, as well as the thrill of discovering a primary source.
Ellmann eyed rival scholars and angled to secure exclusive access to papers and documents. A flatterer, he cultivated sources with ingratiating notes and gifts.Blessed by Northwestern to undertake the Joyce book, Ellmann set off in 1953 to chase leads through Dublin, Paris, Trieste, and Zurich. Joyce had died a dozen years earlier, but Ellmann spoke with everyone he could find who had known the writer. One observer of Ellmann at work said he made it his practice with interviewees “never to contradict, scarcely ever to interrupt. He let them talk; he showed himself grateful for what they told him; now and then with a quiet question he would elicit some particular point of information, and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!”
Yet Ellmann’s obliging manner concealed ambition, competitiveness, and occasional sharp dealing. He eyed rival Joyce scholars and angled to secure exclusive access to papers and documents. A talented flatterer, he cultivated sources with ingratiating notes and gifts. On one occasion, he charmed an old friend of Joyce’s out of his prickly reticence by publishing a favorable review of the man’s book. Ellmann’s diplomacy paid off most spectacularly with the discovery of more than 100 letters between Joyce and his brother Stanislaus. Yet another widow was involved; the letters lay gathering dust in a cellar. “I had tumbled into King Tut’s tomb,” Ellmann later wrote.
Biographers often make the mistake of saying too much rather than too little. Yet Leader, who has written an admirably brisk book, might have elaborated on why these particular letters were such a bonanza. As James Joyce reveals, James and Stanislaus had an edgy relationship full of codependency, resentment, and blunt talk. Ellmann quotes a 1924 letter from Stanislaus, written when Ulysses had become a sensation. Instead of adding to the hosannas, Stanislaus lamented the obscure turn in his brother’s prose, noting that it seemed “written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s leg” and asking pointedly, “Why are you still intelligible and sincere in verse?” Then again, perhaps one of the pleasures of Ellmann’s Joyce is sending readers back to James Joyce to discover such passages for themselves.
If so, fair game. James Joyce overflows with riches, including, Leader wryly notes, vigorous writing at the ends of chapters: “sites of drama and suspense.” Not long after receiving his brother’s letter, an ailing Joyce pressed on with his final book, Finnegans Wake, earning this stirring peroration from Ellmann:
So, in spite of pain and sporadic blindness, Joyce moved irresistibly ahead with the grandest of all his conceptions. No ophthalmologists could seriously impede him. Through blear eyes he guessed at what he had written on paper, and with obstinate passion filled the margins and the space between lines with fresh thoughts. His genius was a trap from which he did not desire to extricate himself.
Such flourishes excited general readers but put off certain academic critics. As Leader explains, James Joyce has its share of detractors—for its narrative structure, glancing engagement with Irish politics, conflation of Joyce and Stephen Dedalus, and what one scholar called its “rather mediocre” stabs at literary criticism. Yet the book proved a sensation on its release, earning broad publicity for Oxford University Press and winning the National Book Award.
Ellmann’s Joyce is not limited to the story of a single volume. Leader’s Ellmann is a man in full: a midwesterner, a Jew, a teacher, and a loyal son whose loving father wrote him long, almost comically interfering letters. Most haunting is Leader’s sensitive exploration of the sacrifices Ellmann’s wife, the scholar Mary Ellmann, made for her husband’s career. “I cannot bear it. I feel myself being destroyed,” she wrote in one devastating note about domestic tedium. On the eve of the family’s move to England in 1969—she did not want to go—Mary suffered an aneurysm that left her in a wheelchair. In presenting Ellmann’s story, Leader does not scold or editorialize; instead he recounts a life in prose that is authoritative, compelling, and true.
James Joyce demystified a towering artist for many an intimidated reader. Joyce, we learn, loved his family, scorned Ireland, fought censorship, lived in poverty, feared cuckoldry, suffered poor health, and sang beautifully. Though his novels and stories stand on their own, his biography is by no means irrelevant. It shows how life becomes art. Nothing in the world could be more interesting. Leader transposes that same fascinating process onto Ellmann: scholar, literary detective, and writer. Between Joyce’s books, Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, and now Leader’s work on Ellmann, readers have a unique nesting doll of literary treasures. The only question is, what to read first?
The post A Portrait of the Scholar appeared first on The American Scholar.
The mood on campus this spring was grim. At Sarah Lawrence College—where I teach classical languages, literature, and history to undergraduates—many students appeared anxious, lonely, and depressed. Tuned in to social media and alarmed by contemporary political turmoil, they complained of insomnia and an inability to concentrate. Some seemed incapacitated by life’s ordinary, inevitable pains—a failed romantic relationship, the loss of a beloved pet, an arduous homework assignment. Some expressed hatred toward themselves and their own bodies. Sad and angry, many despaired of their future and that of the world. Inequities and atrocities both domestic and foreign can evoke an admirable commitment to social justice, but many undergraduates these days do not know how to work toward it. Feeling powerless, frustrated, and angry, they mistake vengeance for justice and venting for virtue. Adversity has left many students feeling helpless. They lack the tools to cope.
The American College Health Association reports that in 2023, 76 percent of college students “experienced moderate to serious psychological distress” and that 99 percent of students facing academic challenges say that pressures in the classroom “affect their mental health.” These are tumultuous times, and adolescence and young adulthood are difficult, stressful life stages. But in the nearly four decades that I have spent teaching, I have never seen anything approaching the current mental health crisis among young people.
We are experiencing a perfect storm. The pandemic cost students valuable in-person learning time and actual (nonvirtual) human contact. A few years later, digital engagement still dominates, as students click tirelessly through images, outsourcing their autonomy and agency to social media. Trained by these platforms to “like” or “dislike,” many young people have become accustomed to viewing Good and Evil as a simple binary. The reality of moral complexity leaves them feeling infuriated and distressed. Education should develop knowledge and understanding—essential coping skills—but elementary and high school instruction has failed to prepare students adequately in these areas, and those of us in higher education struggle to remedy the problem.
College and university administrators have come to see their role as striving to comfort customers rather than to educate young people to confront life’s challenges. Assessing four-year colleges, public and private, U.S. News & World Report detailed increases in funding for “academic support, student services and institutional support” between 2010 and 2021 and decreases in funding for instruction. The role of the humanities in higher education has diminished. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported a 24 percent drop in bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities in 2022 as compared with 2012. Prioritizing monetary returns for themselves and their “customers,” administrators hire more administrators, fund STEM programs, and gut humanities programs while scrambling to provide ever more professionals to address the mental health crisis.
As a classicist, I find this situation both tragic and ironic. We are systematically depriving students of the tools developed over centuries for coping with conflict, catastrophe, and existential angst. And then we are surprised at the uptick in anxiety and despair. Of course, young people are anxious and depressed. Human existence is difficult. And tragic. We all suffer. We all die. Political, economic, and environmental disasters threaten. Always. These facts would be incapacitating—if not for the humanities.
Many of today’s undergraduates, as it happens, have little access to the humanities. Though urged relentlessly to focus on their mental health, many students lack the ability to focus at all. They might find respite from anxiety and despair by reading books, but most have not read many and would prefer not to. Intellectual challenges prompt anxiety, even fear. Tasked with reading a lengthy, densely packed work of literature or writing an essay assessing their own reaction to it, many students would, well, rather not. Since sustained, focused reading does not form part of their experience, many undergraduates find literature intimidating, sometimes impenetrable.
In part a consequence of longstanding trends in elementary education, functional illiteracy remains prevalent, even at “elite” colleges and universities like Sarah Lawrence. For several decades, too many elementary schools have taught reading via ineffective and recently discredited approaches. In 2019, journalist Emily Hanford reported on the “three-cueing system,” vigorously promulgated for more than 40 years by Lucy Calkins at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, a respected training program for aspiring educators. First introduced in 1967, this system eventually gained currency in as many as a quarter of American elementary schools. According to Hanford, elementary school teachers decided that “teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.” Instead, readers were encouraged to draw on “semantic/meaning cues” (asking themselves, “Does it make sense?”), “syntactic/sentence structure cues” (asking themselves, “Does it sound right?”), and “graphic/visual cues (letters)” (asking themselves, “Does it look right?”).
Teachers instructed students to identify the first few letters of a word and then guess the rest, or to try to guess at the meanings of words by looking at the pictures. Good readers, however, do not guess. They look at every letter. They just do it quickly. Unable to “sound out” every letter phonetically, failing even to look at all the letters, a student will have difficulty distinguishing expect from expert, irreplaceable from irredeemable. By guessing at the meanings of words, a reader never gets that jolt of satisfaction and pleasure, that “aha!” moment that comes from sounding out a difficult word, putting the letters together, deriving meaning from a sentence.
By 2000, cognitive scientists understood that the three-cueing system contradicted the research on reading. Hanford cites David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland, who explains that the system does not merely cultivate in students the habits of poor readers, it impedes their ability to read at all. And yet, the cueing system pedagogy remained fashionable among educators long after cognitive scientists recognized its folly. Still taught during the pandemic, the system adversely affected not only the current generation of undergraduates but also the next.
It should surprise no one, then, that many of today’s undergraduates have yet to discover the benefits of losing themselves—and finding themselves—in books. Stumbling over words such as inscrutable or insubstantial makes the process of reading effortful, unsatisfying, and unpleasant. Reading aloud passages of text in seminars or pieces of their own writing in individual meetings with me, students sometimes reverse the meaning of a sentence by mistaking now for not. Even students not victimized by the cueing system, those able to identify words phonetically, often have limited vocabularies, dislike reading, and struggle to assemble meaning from a text. Elementary and high school education may include short excerpts of larger works, but many young people have not experienced the pleasures and rewards of reading literary works in their entirety.
I vividly remember the joy I felt in first grade when working independently through a series of storybooks of escalating phonetic complexity. Each new word was a triumph of my emerging decoding skills, each sentence an adventure. Every story offered an exciting journey in space and time. I fell instantly in love with books. Years later as a teacher, I used to ask students what they read for fun. About a decade ago, coincident with the rise of smartphones and social media, students began to respond to the question with blank stares. Now I ask instead what they do for fun. The answer, more often than not? Video games.
Baffled and dissatisfied readers make unproductive, frustrated writers and thinkers. Many students find the process of developing their own thoughts in writing both arduous and ineffective. Unfamiliar with examples of good writing, students lack the tools to critique and improve their own. Many native speakers of English write as if English were a foreign language only partially acquired. Poor writing prevents students from developing their initial, unreflective reactions (or unfounded projections or prejudices) into cogent, evidence-based analyses. An impoverished vocabulary and awkward, muddled phrasing diminish a student’s ability to articulate and communicate insights and experiences. Misunderstanding, confusion, frustration, and unhappiness result. It is no wonder that undergraduates are anxious and depressed.
Direct engagement with the humanities, though undeniably not a panacea for serious mental illness, could nevertheless help students cope. Encouraged to read and reread books and to reread and revise their own writing, undergraduates can begin to develop knowledge and discover the joy of engaging in a productive conversation with themselves. I urge my students not to use AI in preparing their essays. What would be the point? The humanities can help us navigate life’s vicissitudes: hope, despair, joy, grief, love, hate, success, failure. Reading books develops intellectual and emotional understanding and a capacity for nuanced, compassionate moral judgment. Use of AI undermines the process. I tell my students, “AI cannot tell you what you think about the works we will read this semester. If you outsource your thinking to AI, you will deprive yourself of the benefit of encountering these works.” It is a hard sell. But not an impossible one. Direct encounters with literature develop students’ ability to confront life’s challenges. Rather than setting a daunting text aside—or projecting their preconceptions and prejudices onto it—they come to discover the delights of allowing a work of literature to transport and inform.
The human capacity for language makes us uniquely suited to transcend the terrors of mortal existence. The Chorus of Aeschylus’s great tragedy Agamemnon (458 BCE) advises that people can and must learn from experience. Pathei mathos, Aeschylus’s Chorus intones: “learning comes from experience.” The humanities provide something even better: the opportunity to learn from other people’s experience. Literature, history, philosophy, and art carry us beyond ourselves and our own limited experience and timespan, empowering us to assess and benefit from the achievements, suffering ( pathos means both “experience” and “suffering”), and errors of people—real and fictional—throughout the ages. I offer here examples from my own area of specialization, ancient Greek and Roman literature, but the arts of every culture offer vital models and countermodels.
A defense against existential despair, the Iliad and the Odyssey extol the human condition, commending mortals’ capacity not only for self-restraint, affection, and love but also for morality and empathy.Homer’s epics (c. eighth century BCE), for example, offer comfort by revealing that our anguish is not unique, that perfect human happiness is a fantasy. Toward the end of the Iliad, Achilles explains that the great god Zeus has two urns from which he distributes fates to human beings. One urn contains good fates, the other bad. To some people, Zeus distributes fates drawn from both urns. To others, Zeus distributes fates drawn from only the urn containing bad fates. Over the course of the epic, Achilles has come to understand that every human life entails a mixture of good and bad fortune—or all bad. No human being completely escapes trouble and suffering. Odysseus, protagonist of the Odyssey, exemplifies these vicissitudes of fate, enduring numerous extreme reversals of fortune. A benevolent, well-regarded king, Odysseus subsequently becomes a conquering warrior, a shipwrecked sailor nearly drowned at sea, then a destitute wanderer and starving beggar, a violent avenger, and a king once again. Despite encountering extreme hardship and adversity, Odysseus never gives up, never loses sight of his goals.
Exposing perfect, uninterrupted human happiness as a fantasy, the Homeric epics ease existential angst by reminding us that mortality is our superpower, the source of self-restraint and human connection. Impervious to suffering and death, the immortal Zeus need not—cannot—exercise self-restraint. A superstar sexual athlete, Zeus can bully, rape, and ravage at will without suffering any consequences. By contrast, mortal rapacity proves self-destructive. By raping Helen, the beautiful queen of Sparta, the mortal prince Paris causes a catastrophic war devastating to Trojans and Greeks alike. Not only life-sustaining self-restraint but also reciprocal affection and devotion elevate human over divine existence, as the loveless marriage of Zeus and Hera contrasts with the affectionate marriage of the Trojan prince Hector and his wife, Andromache. Unlike Zeus, Hector can nobly sacrifice himself in a (tragically futile) effort to save his wife, child, and community. Unlike the goddess Hera, chafing ineffectually at Zeus’s repeated affronts to her dignity, Andromache can fear for Hector’s safety and mourn his death. The enduring fidelity of Penelope, long-suffering wife of Odysseus, enables the long-absent king’s successful homecoming and resumption of political authority. Homer emphasizes not the shortcomings of mortal existence but the benefits, our distinctive access to self-control and our singular ability to foster loving human connections—both vital to mortals’ well-being and inaccessible to Homer’s immortal gods.
A defense against existential despair, the Iliad and the Odyssey extol the human condition, commending mortals’ capacity not only for self-restraint, affection, and love but also for morality and empathy. Homer’s immortal gods, incapable of self-restraint or love, also have no need for or access to either morality or empathy. But human survival and success depend on both. In Homer’s epics, violations of moral obligations such as oaths and xenia—“guest-friendship,” the mutual obligations governing relationships between guests and hosts—have predictably adverse consequences. Paris’s theft of Helen from his host’s home catalyzes the Trojan War. The Trojans’ subsequent violation of an oath perpetuates the conflict. Conversely, honoring moral responsibilities promotes human survival. One implausible but memorable anecdote in the Iliad describes a confrontation between the Greek warrior Diomedes and the Trojan warrior Glaucus. Before engaging in battle, the two enemies learn each other’s names and genealogy, discover that they have inherited the “guest-friend” relationship from their grandfathers—one of whom once hosted the other—and opt to honor that moral obligation. Instead of fighting, these two warriors exchange armor and walk away uninjured. An admirable model for all human conflict resolution, two violent, hostile adversaries exchange words, discover a connection, and choose to honor a moral obligation. Like morality, empathy also proves vital for human well-being. In the Iliad, grieving over the death of his dearest companion, Patroclus, Achilles slays his friend’s killer and many other men. He continues to ravage his enemy’s corpse. None of this brings Achilles any solace. Only the recognition that human grief is universal—that his own father will soon suffer over his son’s death, just as his enemy’s father suffers now—eases Achilles’s distress, enabling him to return his enemy’s corpse and resume his own life.
An antidote to gloom and hopelessness, Homer’s epics also expose the fallacy of assuming that might equals right in the realm of human beings. Gods live forever, and Zeus rules eternally by force and intimidation, but human existence is finite, every human choice therefore time-limited and consequential. In the Iliad, King Agamemnon epitomizes the foolishness of any mortal who believes he can exercise the consequence-free, absolute, perpetual authority of the gods. Lacking self-restraint and foresight, Agamemnon harms himself and his own warriors by recklessly appropriating another man’s sex slave, previously awarded by the soldiers as a prize for military valor. This irresponsible abuse of autocratic power alienates the Greeks’ best warrior, his absence resulting in the deaths of many Greeks in battle. In the Odyssey, the suitors’ rapacious abuse of the family and possessions of the absent Odysseus harms the suitors themselves, precipitating their destruction by the indignant king on his return. Eviscerating the “might equals right” doctrine, the Iliad and the Odyssey offer the comforting assurance that bullies and thugs cannot prevail forever.
In their celebration of the uniquely human capacities for self-restraint, love, morality, and empathy, Homer’s epics also empower us against hopelessness by inspiring a taste for adventure and achievement. Immortality, for Homer’s mortal characters, consists not in some imagined afterlife but in achieving things so great that future generations will recall them in perpetuity. The Iliad depicts human life as finite and death as the end. The Odyssey portrays the afterlife as a nonlife, the antithesis of being, devoid of all earthly pleasures. Mortals in both epics strive to accomplish great things in order to earn kleos, the glory achieved by gaining eternal remembrance in poetic song. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus turns down an offer of immortal life with the beautiful goddess Calypso in favor of a human life of adventure and the joys and responsibilities of family and community. Remaining in a fantastical land—Calypso’s island or the fairy-tale paradise of Scheria, site of his initial landfall after shipwreck and days floundering at sea—Odysseus would earn no kleos. No one would ever hear of his exploits. He would disappear from the human world, forever anonymous. If Odysseus stayed in paradise, abandoning his personal and political responsibilities, his family and community would continue to suffer the depredations of the suitors currently ravaging his home in pursuit of his wife and royal authority. Prioritizing the hardships and rewards of real life over eternal existence in a fantasy paradise, Odysseus inspires us to resist the deadly seductions of “virtual reality.” His example reminds us that time spent in imaginary spaces—whether mythical lands or video games or the fabrications of social media—deprives us of opportunities for real-life relationships, pleasures, responsibilities, and accomplishments.
A taste for adventure and achievement fosters in turn an appreciation for the survival skills of courage, ingenuity, and—most crucially—moral discernment. Without hesitation or a backward glance, Odysseus bravely departs from Calypso’s island on an intricate raft of his own devising. In doing so, he faces an uncertain future with fortitude, cunning, and even glee. Cleverness repeatedly preserves his life and enables him to recover his home, family, and political authority. Despite his bravery and resourcefulness, Odysseus nevertheless provides a cautionary warning as well as an inspiration. He delights in his own courage, cunning, resilience, and talent for lies and wordplay, but his words and actions cultivate our moral judgment and our skepticism. Odysseus is a self-proclaimed liar, and he harms a great many innocent people in the course of his adventures. Unprovoked, he attacks and plunders. He gratuitously prolongs the suffering of his family and loyal servants longing for his return. He spins tall tales of his own adventures. His implausible accounts of fantastical supernatural encounters help to fortify us against the deceptions of any unreliable narrator. He offers, for example, a lengthy description of a visit to the Underworld and conversations with the spirits of the dead. Can we accept this story as true? Only by denying the reality of our own lived experience. As an unreliable narrator and a morally complex role model, Odysseus also exemplifies the perils of reckless greed and curiosity without forethought: his incautious, uninvited intrusion into the cave of the Cyclops costs him the lives of several companions and nearly his own.
Literature can alleviate despair by inviting us to develop coping skills and empowering us to survive and thrive. The Iliad and the Odyssey commend self-restraint, supportive and loving relationships, empathy, moral responsibility, endurance, ingenuity, resilience in the face of adversity, moral discernment. Other ancient Greek and Roman works offer a similarly therapeutic alternative to despondency, cultivating insights and skills necessary for human well-being.
Writing in the 440s–430s BCE, the Greek prose writer Herodotus, for example, introduced the distinction between myth and history. Ancient tales of the Trojan War (and even earlier events) had circulated for hundreds, probably thousands, of years as stories of the Greeks’ distant past—until, centuries after Homer, Herodotus pointed out that these stories occurred too long ago for verification. Herodotus chose to describe instead another great—but more recent—conflict, the Persian Wars (490s–479 BCE), for which some eyewitness accounts and even pieces of material evidence were still available. A legendary or fantastical story can have no evidentiary corroboration and needs none. Historical truth requires verifiability and verification. Herodotus himself does not always adhere to his own precept, but by introducing the distinction between history and myth, he fortifies the 21st-century reader against evidence-free deceptions and falsehoods generating fear, anger, and hatred. Both fact and fiction can be entertaining and educational, but the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy remains crucial for maintaining good mental health—and necessary for resisting tyrannical efforts to obliterate the distinction.
Many other ancient works cultivate coping skills. Although Greek tragedies of the fifth century BCE often include divine characters, the plays guide our focus to the aspects of life within our control. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides expose the consequences of destructive and constructive human choices. Their plays encourage deliberate, farsighted decision making. They caution against rage, cruelty, overconfidence, and a lack of self-control. They cultivate instead critical self-reflection, honesty, generosity, compassion. Catullus, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and other ancient Roman writers similarly invite healthy exploration of human identity, hierarchies of power and privilege, optimal and suboptimal ways of navigating life and relationships. The Roman poet Horace advises us to be cautious in favorable times and hopeful in hostile ones.
I offer the example of my own students as anecdotal evidence of the benefits of the humanities. The study of ancient Greek and Latin languages and literature helps to remedy the illiteracy emanating from undiscerning digital engagement and the cueing system by fostering mental concentration and sharpening logical reasoning skills. At Sarah Lawrence, my first-year Latin students spend nine months (two semesters) learning to identify and interpret every letter of every word—while simultaneously gaining practice in logical deduction. Unlike English, Latin conveys meaning not primarily through word order but through word inflection—changes to the spelling of words to indicate their grammatical role in the sentence. In English, Kate gave a book to Ellie means one thing, whereas Ellie gave a book to Kate means quite another, and the meaning depends solely on word order. Latin, by contrast, encodes grammatical relationships in the final letters of each word. Word inflections follow a vast variety of set patterns for noun and adjective declensions and for verb conjugations. These patterns, called paradigms, require diligent memorization as well as dedicated practice until students can recognize individual word formations in context. Since most significant spelling changes occur in the final few letters of each word, “decoding” a Latin sentence requires identifying all letters, especially the final ones. Even more challenging, many word endings yield more than one interpretation. Drawing on other clues in a sentence, readers must use deductive reasoning to exclude all but the one meaning applicable in any particular instance. (Sometimes ambiguity remains, especially in Latin poetry, and this, too, can be illuminating.)
Countering the adverse effects of social media, digital scrolling, and the cueing system, the process of decoding Latin combines the gratification of puzzle solving with the joys of discovery. Over the course of two semesters, my Latin students experience the intellectual and emotional rewards of sustained, focused concentration. They begin to read as everyone should: not assuming that the text mirrors and affirms their expectations but instead allowing for the possibility of gaining unexpected insights. The Latin word for “literature” is litterae, literally “letters.” Acquiring access to litterae, my students attain access to literature.
In class at least, students enrolled in my Beginning Latin course this past year seemed not anxious and despairing but deeply focused and engaged in the process of acquiring an ancient language. They appeared to relish the arduous challenges of identifying, interpreting, and internalizing Latin vocabulary, word inflections, grammatical structures, and idioms. They took pleasure in decoding a Latin sentence and “encoding” an English one into Latin. They marveled at the ways that English and Latin do and do not align. One day, I arrived to class a few minutes early and found my students all present, already hard at work deciphering a Latin sentence, one student at the blackboard, chalk in hand, the others offering suggestions.
Even at this early stage in their comprehension of Latin, these students could access ancient wisdom. Authentic Latin aphorisms offer inspiration and motivation. Cicero provides a bracing reminder of the power of effort, maintaining, >Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit. That is, “Constant/persistent application/practice devoted to one thing often gains mastery over [literally, “conquers”] both talent and skill.” Cicero’s words encourage students to take ownership of their accomplishments, knowing that they are not responsible for inborn attributes of talent and skill but that they can control their time and efforts. Their accelerating grasp of Latin, a product of hard work, both confirmed Cicero’s statement and yielded immediate and ongoing gratification. Ovid’s Saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas, “Often the harsh thorn creates soft roses,” heartens with the realization that difficulties, even pains, accompany life’s most beautiful and worthwhile things. My students discovered that knowledge is power and, as Seneca explains, Timendi causa est nescire: “The cause of fearing is not knowing.” The ancients generously share their understanding of the supreme value of literature, for Seneca insists, Otium sine litteris mors est et hominis vivi sepultra: “Leisure without literature is death and a tomb for a live human being.” Ovid celebrates the ability of literature to transcend the limits of mortal existence, maintaining that carmina morte carent—“songs/poems lack death.” That we can still read Ovid and other ancient writers today validates this ancient Roman poet’s confidence in the enduring survival and value of literary works.
The study of Latin—like all of the humanities—takes students out of themselves and also returns them to themselves. Literature offers students something to think about other than their own immediate concerns. At the same time, ancient literature helps students recognize that their own struggles are not unique but part of the human experience. Decoding excerpts of authentic Latin poetry and prose, students gain confidence and insight. At the end of the semester, my Beginning Latin students tackled, in the original, Vergil’s magnificent Aeneid (first century BCE). Exquisite and delightful as poetry, this epic depicting Rome’s beginnings also offers a valuable education in moral complexity, as it simultaneously celebrates and condemns Roman imperial conquest.
The students in my literature-in-translation seminar similarly seemed to be having fun reading and interpreting ancient Greek tragedy. Fun reading tragedy? It sounds counterintuitive, but Athenian tragedies of the fifth century BCE reward focused interpretive examination and discussion. Like the process of reading Latin, the effort to read tragedies, even in English translation, demands intense concentration and judicious moral evaluation. Students must interpret unfamiliar phrases and look up unfamiliar words. They encounter themes both foreign and familiar. Assessing morally ambiguous characters who confront dire predicaments—some of their own making, some not—students develop and engage in the practice of nuanced moral reasoning. They begin to connect these ancient stories to their own experience. Euripides’s Trojan Women (415 BCE), for example, depicting the aftermath of the fall of Troy from the perspective of the city’s survivors—newly enslaved, formerly royal women of the city—vividly dramatizes the catastrophic reversal of fortune occasioned by war. The play evokes not merely sympathy for these destitute women but also admiration for their ability to use the only power remaining to them, the power of speech. With their words, the women express their understanding and emotions, comfort one another, and demonstrate that misfortune has not altered their noble natures. Exalting articulate human speech for its power to preserve character and enable human beings to support one another and endure the unendurable, this powerful dramatization of human suffering and strength both inspires and emboldens.
With warfare and territorial aggression a perpetual fixture of human life, now as then, this play also offers a reassuring depiction of the self-destructive consequences of victors’ unrestrained ruthlessness and rapacity. Produced on the eve of the Athenians’ catastrophic Sicilian Expedition (415–413 BCE), the Trojan Women cautions against overconfidence, reckless opportunism, and abuses of power. In the play, the Greeks fail to restrain themselves in victory, violating temples of the gods, killing and raping suppliants at the altars, sacrificing a Trojan princess at the tomb of a Greek warrior, hurling Hector’s son, a toddler, from the battlements of Troy. As Euripides’s contemporary audience well knew, the brutal victors soon suffered for their sacrilege; the gods destroyed many Greek ships returning home from Troy. Many men did not survive the journey. Others returned years later, after many difficulties, encountering troubles in their homes, as Homer’s Odyssey describes.
The uplifting final words of Euripides’s dark play emphasize both the extraordinary fortitude of the Trojan women and the inevitable, calamitous consequences of rapacity. The elderly Hecuba, the former queen of Troy now destined to be the slave of Odysseus, heads bravely toward her fate, a model for the other captives, encouraging herself with these words: “Trembling limbs, carry my footstep. Go forward, wretched one, toward the enslaved day of your life.” And the Chorus of enslaved women accompanying her intones stoically, “Alas for the wretched city! Nevertheless, carry your foot forward toward the oar blades of the Greeks.” With these last words, the Chorus ominously references the Greek ships—most of which, as everyone knows, will never make it home.
The students in my literature seminar likewise found sustenance in Euripides’s Heracles (c. 417–414 BCE), a similarly inspiring tragedy commending human friendship and the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit. Produced, like the Trojan Women, during the dark days of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a widespread, brutal conflict pitting Athens and its subject citizen-communities and allies against a Spartan-led Peloponnesian League of citizen-communities, the Heracles reverses the traditional story of the protagonist’s exploits. Instead of completing his labors as expiation for slaughtering his wife and children in a moment of madness, as in the traditional account, Euripides’s Heracles has made a deal with Eurystheus, king of Mycenae. If Heracles rids the world of the monsters threatening civilization, Eurystheus will allow him and his family to return home to Mycenae. Defenseless in Heracles’s absence, his mortal father, wife, and children huddle for safety at the altar of Zeus. The new tyrant of Thebes threatens to kill them all, their only hope being Heracles’s return. In a horrifying reversal, Heracles, the great monster slayer and civilizer, returns from his labors in triumph—and is driven mad at the command of the goddess Hera. Instead of protecting the members of his family as they had hoped and prayed, Heracles, in his divinely sent madness, slaughters them all. Awakening to the horror of his own actions, Heracles determines to kill himself. The intervention of Theseus, king of Athens and one-time beneficiary of Heracles’s extraordinary talents, persuades the devastated man to endure and go on living. Willing to share in Heracles’s dreadful suffering, Theseus offers his supportive physical presence and the sanctuary of his home and city.
“Alas for the wretched city! Nevertheless, carry your foot forward toward the oar blades of the Greeks.” With these last words, the Chorus ominously references the Greek ships—most of which will never make it home.A testament to the sustaining power of human friendship, the Heracles also revises the traditional definition of human excellence. Long famous for his brute strength and physical endurance, Euripides’s Heracles transforms before our eyes into a new model of human excellence, a human being able to inspire and accept devoted friendship and possessing the courage to persevere, even in the face of the unbearable.
My students found respite, solace, and inspiration in these stories of long ago. Striving to discover themselves and their place in the world, disappointed by the feckless actions of modern leaders, dismayed by vicious political polarization and nefarious falsehoods fomenting hatred and fear, they derived comfort and encouragement from reading these ancient tales that recall us to our shared humanity. I offer this random sampling of examples as not exhaustive but representative—tantalizing evidence of the wealth of human wisdom and experience available in the literature, philosophy, historiography, and arts of all times and places.
The humanities remind us that in daunting times, despair is not an option. Enabled to lose ourselves and find ourselves in the arts and experiences of others, we develop ingenuity and resilience. Productive investigation replaces fruitless worrying. Knowledge offers not only power but also pleasure. Understanding, discovering, figuring things out—in books and in our own lives—feels great. Human life is challenging, scary, depressing, sometimes traumatic. Young people know that something—much—is wrong, as it always is. Access to the humanities can restore to them the tools to cope.
The post The Art of Coping appeared first on The American Scholar.
It’s the summer after graduation, and Munir and his friends G, Ernesto, and Álex leave Madrid for an idyllic summer picking grapes in the French countryside—because, as Munir writes in the sixth edict of his “decalogue of decalogues about experience as literary capital”: “What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something to say about it. So try living a little first. Not just in books or in bars, but out there, in real life. Wait until you’ve been scarred by the world, until it has left its mark.” But the scars end up a little deeper than Munir anticipated. There’s no grape harvest—thanks to climate change—and the four friends end up working alongside the “etcetera of Europe” at a series of nightmarish factory farms where they do everything from injecting monstrous chickens with mysterious vaccines to artificially inseminating genetically modified corn. At least, that’s the premise of Munir Hachemi’s 2018 novel, Living Things, published earlier this year in an English translation by Julia Sanches. But how much of this tale is really fiction? And what’s the point of fiction in an inhumane world anyway? Hachemi joins us in the studio to talk about storytelling, machismo, and going vegan.
Go beyond the episode:
- Living Things by Munir Hachemi
- Some of Hachemi’s inspirations include Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia, Tomás Downey, María Sonia Cristoff, Pablo Katchadjian, Emiliano Monge, and, of course, Borges
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The post Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming appeared first on The American Scholar.
On a visit to Seattle early in 2001, I happened to see an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent at the Seattle Art Museum. The artist had made brief appearances in two biographies I had written—one, of Alice James, the younger sister of William and Henry James; the other, of the financier and art collector J. Pierpont Morgan. My publisher had reproduced part of a Sargent painting, The Breakfast Table, on a paperback edition of Alice James. All these figures—Sargent, Morgan, the Jameses—were Americans who lived transatlantic lives between the 1850s and early 1900s, and their worlds occasionally intersected. Sargent and Henry James were neighbors in London and good friends; the artist’s painting of the writer is a masterpiece. Having published his novel The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James wrote a few years later, “There is no greater work of art than a great portrait—a truth to be constantly taken to heart by a painter holding in his hand the weapon that Mr. Sargent wields.”
Finding the wielder of that weapon in Seattle was a welcome surprise. The exhibition was called “John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the Wertheimer Family.” Who were the Wertheimers? According to introductory text on the wall, the father of the family, Asher, was a London art dealer of German Jewish descent who had commissioned portraits of himself and his wife in 1897 to honor their 25th wedding anniversary. Artist and patron became friends, and over the following decade, Sargent—at the height of his career—painted the couple’s 10 children as well, individually and in groups. He portrayed several of the Wertheimer women twice.
All 12 portraits were on view in Seattle, along with photographs, a Wertheimer genealogy, and other Sargent paintings and drawings. One photograph showed Sargent and two of the Wertheimers paused on a lawn during a game of croquet. Apparently, the artist had open invitations to Asher’s London townhouse and his country retreat in Berkshire.
Within a few minutes, I was entirely captivated—by the paintings, a sense of the stories they might tell, and a great many questions.
What had drawn Sargent to this family? How had they met? I associated him with portraits of British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins, not with Jews. Did he have other Jewish patrons and friends?
Why was the painting of the eldest Wertheimer son, Edward, unfinished?
What became of the elegantly dressed second son, Alfred, looking like an Edwardian aesthete with one hand on a stack of books? Why were there glass flasks on a wall beside him?
A lovely pencil sketch of the eldest daughter, Ena (Helena), was inscribed, “Jan. 25, ’10, to Ena, philoprocree, John S. Sargent.” Philoprocree? The caption on a nearby photograph identified her as Ena Wertheimer Mathias. Many of the exhibition items were credited to the collection of a Mrs. David Mathias. Which meant there were living descendants. Where?
Some of the paintings seemed to allude to works by earlier masters. Was Sargent playing with the history of portraiture in this series for a knowledgeable art dealer–patron?
Additional exhibition text explained that Asher’s father, Samson, had emigrated in the 1830s from Bavaria to England, where he founded the family art-dealing business. Several generations earlier, one ancestor had been court factor, also called court Jew, to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I in Vienna. What was a “court Jew”?
Were Sargent and Asher drawn together in part by shared outsider status in Victorian and Edwardian England, despite their professional successes? One, the leading portrait painter of the era—an American expatriate, lifelong bachelor, connoisseur of music and dance—was a cosmopolitan nomad. The other, a renowned expert on art with a lofty clientele and a luxurious lifestyle, lived in a society that regarded Jews as ineradicably “other” and art dealing, no matter how illustrious, as mere “trade.”
In these portraits and photographs, the Wertheimers’ faces looked distinctively Jewish and, to me, familiar. Some of my own ancestors had left southern Germany for America at about the time Samson Wertheimer had moved to England.
I bought the exhibition catalog at the Seattle Art Museum that day in 2001, wanting to know more about all of these people. And after I returned home to New York, I continued to think about Sargent and the Wertheimers.
Several years later, I wrote to the leading authority on Sargent, Richard Ormond, who is, among other things, the artist’s great-nephew and the coauthor, with Elaine Kilmurray, of the superb nine-volume Sargent catalogue raisonné. I asked him whether he thought it might be possible to write a book about Sargent and the Wertheimers. He replied that the story seemed fascinating but would probably be difficult to tell, since few Wertheimer letters or documents apparently survive.
Then, in the early spring of 2012, I found an email address for one of Asher’s great-grandsons, Julian Mathias. We corresponded and spoke by phone; in October 2012, I went to see him in England. He recounted many stories about the family, put me in touch with a number of his relatives, and gave me three thick files of letters and documents to copy.
Next, on a perfect October English day of alternating rain and sun, I visited Julian’s aunt Kay Mathias at her house in the rural county of Kent. She was the American-born widow of Ena Wertheimer Mathias’s youngest son and, at 90, the oldest surviving member of the family. She owned many of the objects I had seen in the Seattle exhibition and others as well, including a Louis Quinze–style armchair in which Asher Wertheimer’s wife, Flora, had posed for one of her two Sargent portraits.
Kay and I spent the day talking—her memory was very sharp—and looking through photographs, letters, and a handwritten Wertheimer genealogy book. She readily identified people in the photographs, told me new stories, added details to those I’d been gathering. She had owned Sargent’s pencil sketch of Ena, as well as several watercolors the artist had given to various Wertheimers, but she and her children had sold them. First, though, she had had them all photographed; the photos were on the walls in her house.
Another Wertheimer descendant, Yolanda Chetwynd, provided more information, including a lengthy unpublished memoir by her grandmother, Ena’s eldest daughter. It was beginning to seem as though there might be enough material for a book.
I learned that Oxford’s Bodleian Library held about 200 of his letters. I quickly discovered that deciphering Sargent’s handwriting was somewhat like learning a new language: nearly impossible at first, easier as you go along.Learning about Sargent was somewhat easier than learning about the Wertheimers. There were outstanding critical studies, exhibition catalogs, hundreds of paintings, and thousands of letters. In 1927, two years after Sargent died, his friend Evan Charteris published a brief biography. Charteris had the immense advantage of firsthand knowledge of his subject as well as access to the artist’s sisters and their papers, and he was able to quote extensively from Sargent’s early letters to childhood friends. But Sargent—reserved, elusive, deeply private—neither kept diaries nor saved his correspondence. His letters were widely dispersed among the recipients’ descendants and in libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.
Early on, I learned that Oxford’s Bodleian Library held about 200 of his letters to his good friend Lady Elizabeth Lewis. I ordered digital scans and quickly discovered that deciphering Sargent’s handwriting was somewhat like learning a new language: nearly impossible at first, easier as you go along. As I made slow headway, I found Sargent’s voice immensely appealing. In one note, he described all the people “I have forgotten I was to paint this spring” as a “meteor shower.” In another, he sounded not unlike Oscar Wilde: “What a tiresome thing a perfectly clear symbol would be.” And he mock-complained to Lady Lewis, as he worked on Asher’s large commission between 1897 and 1908, of being in a state of “chronic Wertheimerism.”
On another trip to England, I went to see 10 of the Wertheimer portraits in a Tate Gallery storage facility. The Tate has owned nine of the paintings since the 1920s and acquired the 10th in 1996; it has stored them off-site for most of that time.
I had made an appointment to see the paintings, and on the scheduled day, I traveled by underground, bus, and foot to a heavily guarded compound behind a gatehouse. After passing through checkpoints and a series of locked doors, I arrived at several large rooms in which people were examining paintings, moving them, preparing them for loans.
Ten is the maximum number of pictures one is allowed to request, and I had asked for 10. The woman assigned to help me, Sarah, was eight months pregnant; this was her last day of work before maternity leave. The paintings were stored vertically in huge racks that pulled out of their units on fixed tracks. To study them, I had to bend my head to the side or climb a scaffolding ladder. It was thrilling to see the portraits again, now that I was planning to write about them.
The figure in Asher Wertheimer had much more life than I remembered from Seattle, and more color: several reds in the face and hands, green-brown eyes, tones of white and yellow in the forehead. Holding his coat open in an expansive gesture, the art dealer looks self-possessed and astute.
In another of the portraits, Ena wears a long black cloak and plumed hat. Light from above falls on the hat’s white ostrich feathers, on lace ruffles at Ena’s neck and wrist, on her face turned back over one shoulder, laughing. Velvety grays define the shapes and folds of her cloak.
After examining the paintings for three hours, I asked Sarah how much time had been allotted for my visit. “Thirty minutes,” she said.
In his 1985 book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes describes the biographical process as a “haunting … an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present. … [It is] a continuous living dialogue between [subject and author] as they move over the same historical ground.”
Holmes followed in the physical footsteps of some of his subjects. He took the walking trip, accompanied by a donkey, that Robert Louis Stevenson had taken with his donkey in the Cévennes mountains in 1878. He stayed in the Italian towns Percy Bysshe Shelley had lived in for the last months of his life. “I mark my beginning as a professional biographer,” Holmes writes, “from the day when my bank bounced a cheque because it was inadvertently dated 1772.” In trespassing on the lives of Sargent and the Wertheimers, I’ve inadvertently dated my own checks and correspondence 1898, or 1923.
The book I came to write, Family Romance, is a group portrait of Sargent, the Wertheimers, and their social worlds. It includes sketches of the main characters’ colleagues and friends, among them Monet, Picasso, Diaghilev, Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Ottoline Morrell, Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, and numerous Rothschilds and Sassoons.
Their footsteps traced paths from Habsburg courts in early-18th-century Vienna to 20th-century Fascist Italy. They took me to Austria, Germany, Italy, Boston, Chicago, and frequently back to England. To collections of Sargent paintings on both sides of the Atlantic. To histories of Jews in Europe and Britain. To Asher Wertheimer’s London houses, altered but still there, and along his daily walk to his galleries in New Bond Street, spaces now occupied by luxury clothing shops. To Sargent’s light-filled house in Chelsea. To grand estates in Buckinghamshire that had belonged to Ferdinand and Alfred de Rothschild. To a great many libraries and archives. And, again and again, to see Kay Mathias in Kent.
The adventure of “haunting” and being haunted by these figures also took me deep into the 19th-century art world and the political and economic turmoil that radically altered people’s lives over the course of that century. A decline in “old” aristocratic wealth and privilege, along with a rise in “new” (often American, sometimes Jewish) fortunes, reordered the transatlantic social landscape and created dynamic international markets for art. The Wertheimers were major players in that drama. Sargent brilliantly portrayed it.
This essay is adapted from Jean Strouse’s forthcoming book, Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November.
The post The Patron Subjects appeared first on The American Scholar.
One chilly evening in September, stepping outside into the lane at dusk for a breath of fresh air, I encountered a cozy trio: a little blond boy on his trike who lived around the corner, the boy’s grandfather, and my neighbor, a man about my age, in his early 60s. The boy, Martín, was pedaling in circles and naming wild animals that he’d learned in school that day, and my neighbor was quizzing him on the animals’ English names. When I greeted them, my neighbor told Martín, “Ask Clellan! Clellan knows!” León, Martín said, and I said, lion. Jabalina, he said, and I answered, boar. My neighbor and the grandfather played along, either asking Martín to affirm my answer or repeat it, or both. Soon enough, Martín grew tired despite our enthusiasm and pedaled off toward home, his grandfather following closely.
That left me with my neighbor. We exchanged the usual comments about how bright the boy was, how energetic. How much children learn, and how fast. English already in kindergarten! Soon our talk turned to the weather, and I mentioned that I’d called a bricklayer about fixing my fireplace. The workman had already come to have a look and seemed very nice, I said. I’d gotten his name and number from another neighbor.
“I don’t know him. Is he young?”
“Well,” I said. “Not young like 30, but maybe young like 40.”
We both laughed. My neighbor said that his nephew was already nearing 50. He shook his head. Was he remembering a time when his nephew was a young man while he himself was a slightly older young man, with a young son of his own? My neighbor’s son is halfway through his 20s, just like my younger son. My older son is closer to 30 than to 20. I shook my head too. The young are not so young anymore. The young are catching up.
After saying goodnight and going back inside, I recalled a fall afternoon 20 years earlier when my boyfriend at the time, about 40 years old then, and his daughter, about four, were over at my place with my two sons and me. We were all down in the field below my house, picking apples for the donkey I owned. My boyfriend showed the children how to hold an apple in their palm, not between their fingers. “Like this,” he said, extending an apple in his opened hand to the donkey.
My sons already knew to keep their fingers out of the way when feeding the donkey, but my boyfriend’s daughter was new to this. She watched wide-eyed as the donkey, with quivering velvety lips, took the apple into its mouth. “Do you want to try?” asked her father. She took a tentative step closer and put her hand out, an apple balanced on her palm. The donkey lowered its head and lifted the apple away, and she yanked her hand back. She turned to look up at her dad, holding her hand up, fingers spread, as if a miracle had occurred. Her smile was radiant. “I want to be a vet,” she said, “just like you.”
“You can be anything you want,” he answered.
Over the years, I heard him tell her the same thing on several occasions. His manner was always calm, his voice matter-of-fact, not like the voice of someone with a wonderful secret to share, but of someone simply pointing out the facts of a situation. A calendar to show the days left before an event, a clock to show the hours remaining, a forecast to tell you the weather to expect, a closet full of clothes to outfit you as anything you wanted to be. “You see?” he seemed to be saying. “Look. Every possibility. Right here. Anything you want.” He didn’t also say, “Clear skies as far as you can see,” but he meant something like that too. You want your child to see open horizons, not barriers and obstacles.
But even squinting, my boyfriend’s daughter might not have been able to read the time, or understand how fast it was passing. She might have tried on costumes that didn’t fit. Maybe no piece of clothing would. It was a vet she’d said she wanted to be, like her dad, but over the years she showed no particular aptitude for science and no particular interest in animals. She was a mediocre student. Not every possibility is open to everyone, and the good that a parent desires for a child is not necessarily within reach, no matter how often the parent repeats the phrase that you can do or be whatever you want, or that imagination is the only limitation. Limitations can block one at every turn.
One of the biggest limitations is the storm of fears and doubts swirling within a person. Often a well-wisher will dismiss those fears with the phrase, “It’s all in your head.” Some people might turn a blizzard into a flurry by insisting the weather is nothing to worry about, but just as likely in my experience is the persistence of the private storm. You can argue all you want—and you might be right—that if people so wanted, they could lower their head and push obstinately through to better weather. But if a person doesn’t want to badly enough? Not wanting to do something badly enough, not having drive, is a tremendous problem. Wanting to is like a rope strung between the house and the barn for those blizzards that wipe everything off the horizon. If you venture out without that safety line, it could mean your death. Indeed, without drive, you may never step out into the weather of the world at all. Because you know you will stumble and fall and lose your way if you do, and if you survive, it will only be to come crawling back to the house, the livestock left to die, and you an utter failure. My boyfriend’s daughter didn’t suffer this trouble, but others do. For them, success in the face of the storm feels as improbable as flying.
My boyfriend’s daughter did not choose to study veterinary medicine, and in fact, she did not seem to want to study at all. The relationship between father and daughter soured, and he no longer told her she could be anything she wanted; he said if she wanted to mop floors for a living, that was her business.
I could hear my neighbor still busy at his house—the old family homestead—putting things in order before going home to his own apartment. I glanced at the clock. What did it tell me? My neighbor’s wife would be arriving home. Martín would be having his super. My phone would soon chime to remind me to go to bed. Stare at the clock all I want, and the hands do not seem to move. It’s not too late, the hands say. There’s still time. Time doesn’t exist: it’s all in my head.
The post All in Your Head appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads W. B. Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “A Prayer for My Daughter” by W. B. Yeats appeared first on The American Scholar.
My cousin Manya, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, passed away on June 10, 2024, a day before the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, and two months before what would have been her 100th birthday. I hadn’t even known of her existence until 2004, when Manya wrote me a letter care of The New York Times. She had read an article I’d published there about the emergency quintuple bypass surgery that had saved my life.
“This is a long shot,” Manya’s letter began, “but I can lose nothing, maybe gain a lot.” She wrote that she had spent three years in Auschwitz, had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen, had lost her mother and father and eight siblings (four sisters, four brothers) to the camps, and had come to America in 1947. When she was a young girl, at the time of her father’s sister Sarah’s wedding, she heard her grandfather speak of a sister in the United States who had married a man with an unusual name—Neugeboren —and she “had always wanted to search into this matter, since there is not a soul left on my father’s side of the family.” She had never forgotten the name, she wrote. She added that her “grandfather’s name was Mendel Gerlich, and he came from Rimanov.” Would I please respond, “regardless of whether there is a connection or not.”
My grandmother’s family name was Gerlich, and she and my grandfather came from Rimanov, a shtetl in what is now Poland, near the present Ukraine border and not far from Kyiv. I telephoned Manya, and we talked for a long time. Manya lived in Ellenville, New York, a town in the Catskills about two hours north of New York City, where she had made her home for more than 50 years. Her husband, Herman Eisner, also a survivor of the death camps, had been the rabbi at Congregation Ezrath Israel, an orthodox synagogue in Ellenville, from 1949 until his retirement in 1988. He had died in 1995. By chance, Manya said, she was coming to New York City the next day to see an opthalmologist who was treating her for macular degeneration.
We met in the doctor’s waiting room. “Neugeboren?” she asked when she emerged from the doctor’s office and saw me. We embraced, after which she asked me to return to the doctor’s office with her so he could meet me—she had told him the story of how she’d found me, just as, in the days, weeks, and years to come, she would tell the story to others. Then we went to a coffee shop. The evening before, after I talked with Manya and telephoned my children and several cousins to tell them about her, I’d gone through folders that contained information about the Neugeborens and Gerlichs, and I’d brought some of the information with me—a page from my “baby book” in which my mother had written my grandmother’s name (“Bela née Gerlich Neugeboren”); a page from the 1910 U.S. Census that listed the names of my grandparents and their children, and provided data about them.
Both Neugeboren and Gerlich are rare names. Any Neugeboren I’ve ever met has come from Rimanov or a village near Rimanov, and for Manya the same was true of the name Gerlich. In the coffee shop, we talked, and we laughed, and we sat there astonished—“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” Manya kept saying as we tried to comprehend our story’s obvious and wonderful conclusion: her grandfather and my great aunt had been brother and sister.
“Then we are cousins!” Manya said, and after I told her that she had lots of cousins now, she talked of the family she’d lost and, holding my hand, recited the names of her mother and father, and of each of her eight brothers and sisters.
My father, like Manya, was one of nine children, and I had grown up with 22 first cousins on his side of the family (and with more than a dozen cousins on my mother’s side). A month or so after Manya and I met, I held a gathering in my Upper West Side apartment to which I invited as many Neugeboren cousins as I could locate, and on that afternoon, Manya kept saying what she would say each time she told the story of how we met: “It’s a miracle! After all the years … it’s a miracle …”
Manya and I got together whenever she came to New York for a medical appointment, and we talked by phone regularly. When she and her friend Sherry Solomon came to see a play about the Holocaust, the three of us went together, and Manya and Sherry stayed over in my apartment. The play was based on a book by Primo Levi—Manya had called me as soon as she heard about it on NPR—and we talked about Levi, whom we both admired, as a writer and a man, much more so than Elie Wiesel, a writer Manya considered “too much the showman” to be trusted.
On another visit, when I had lunch with Manya and her granddaughters, Rachel and Ilana, I presented her with an advance copy of a new book of mine: News From The New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile, a collection of short stories whose dedication page read, “For my cousin Manya Gerlich Eisner.”
I visited Manya several times in Ellenville, in the house located across the street from Congregation Ezrath Israel. The synagogue was situated on a small knoll the town had named Rabbi Herman and Manya Eisner Square. In earlier years, Ellenville had been a vibrant town with a substantial Jewish population—home to The Nevele, one of the largest borscht-circuit hotels, and a hotel some of my aunts, uncles, and cousins had stayed in while on vacation. By the time I first visited Ellenville in 2005, however, the hotel had fallen on hard times (it closed in 2009), many of the town’s stores had closed, and most of the young Jewish families had moved away.
Manya’s friendship with Sherry Solomon had spanned more than 60 years. “I don’t believe in soulmates,” Manya’s granddaughter Rachel wrote me, “and yet that is exactly what they were: they spoke every single day … walked together and supported one another through all that life is.” Sherry had been a high school English teacher, a college instructor, a secondary school principal, and had earned two doctorates, and when, one afternoon Manya accompanied Sherry to the nearby State University of New York at New Paltz, where Sherry was registering for several classes, Sherry urged Manya to register for a course. When she arrived in the United States, Manya spoke no English and had only an eighth-grade education, but she signed up for a course that day, and subsequently took one or two courses a semester until, in 1979, she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree, with honors.
When Sherry’s health began to decline, she moved to Florida with her husband, and after he died, she moved to California, where she lived with family, and then, her memory failing, in a nursing home. In 2009, not long after Sherry left Ellenville, Manya asked if I could visit her for a weekend and help her go through documents, correspondence, paintings, and photos because she’d decided it was time to leave Ellenville. Sherry was gone, the synagogue often did not have a minyan on the Sabbath, and her eyesight was failing in a way that made ordinary chores increasingly difficult.
Manya loved to read, and the good news, she reported—Manya was forever finding good news in situations that made others despair—was that she had discovered books on tape. She had recently finished listening to Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was now about to listen to the third of six short novels by Anton Chekhov. We talked about our great love for these two writers: James, who’d been born in New York City but had spent much of his early life in upstate New York, not far from Ellenville, and Chekhov, who’d been born in Taganrog, Russia, but who’d spent some of the happiest years of his short life in Odessa, where my mother’s family had come from. We talked, too, about a recently published novel of mine, 1940, which was, in part, about Hitler’s childhood doctor, Eduard Bloch, a Jewish man who had been able to emigrate from Linz, Austria, to the United States—due to Hitler’s intervention.
While we went through items Manya had gathered, including photos of her and her husband with Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, and other notable politicians, Manya talked about how much she missed Sherry, about the vanishing of Ellenville’s Jewish community, and about her plans to relocate, probably to New Jersey, where relatives on her mother’s side of the family lived.
In 2010, Manya moved into a three-room apartment at The Lakewood Courtyard, an Orthodox Jewish assisted-living facility in Lakewood, New Jersey, where Rachel and I would visit with her until shortly before her 99th birthday. Then, unable to care for herself, Manya moved into a Lakewood nursing home, The Leisure Chateau.
In Ellenville, New York City, and Lakewood—on walks, in her homes, and on the phone—Manya and I talked endlessly and easily. She always asked first about my children and grandchildren, and when I’d report that they were all well, she’d always say a quick “Thank God” before asking for details. She talked with me about her only child, Moshe, who was living in Florida, and was, like my son Eli, an artist and illustrator. She talked about Moshe’s family—his wife and their three children—and about her two granddaughters and her hope that each of them would meet and marry “a nice young Jewish man.” And she talked about her childhood in Czechoslovakia, and about her years in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Bergen-Belsen.
In one of the courses Manya took at SUNY–New Paltz, a man gave a lecture on the Holocaust in which he talked about Holocaust deniers, at which point, Manya told me, she stood up and said, “I was there and I will talk about my experience whenever you need me.” And so she began talking about her time in the camps to schoolchildren, and also to interviewers from the USC Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. When she talked with me about her years in the camps, she did so with the same almost defiant directness that she did in the more formal interviews. And because she said that her story, like all stories about the Holocaust, should be told as often as possible, when I returned home from my first visit with her in Ellenville, I did what I would do in subsequent visits, and made notes about our conversations.
Manya was born in Svidnicka, a village located on the northern border of Czechoslovakia, about 130 miles southwest of Krakow, Poland, in what is now Slovakia. Svidnicka was, Manya said, “a little hamlet that had only a one-room schoolhouse,” and when she was six years old, her parents sent her to live with her grandparents—the Gerlichs—in a larger town, Bardejov, so that she could get a better education. Bardejov, its population 40 percent Jewish, according to Manya, was about 100 miles southwest of Krakow, and was, Manya said, “a lovely historic town” that had “a nearby spa, a beautiful town square, a museum, a handsome Gothic church.” Bardejov was surrounded by a moat so that “the town could close the drawbridges when its enemies attacked.” Manya spent her childhood there, going home to Svidnicka only for holidays and summer vacations. And in Bardejov she received what she said was “unusual for a young Jewish woman in that part of the world at that time”: a good Jewish education. This happened at Bais Yaakov, one of a group of schools that had recently been developed in Poland expressly for the education of Jewish girls and young women.
On my first visit to Ellenville, I’d brought Manya a copy of my novel The Stolen Jew, set partly in 19th-century Russia, which had at its heart the dread cantonist gzeyrah: the edict that required Jewish town councils to select young Jewish boys for 25 years of service in the Tsar’s army, a period of service so long, it usually meant the boys would never return. Sometimes, when the son of a wealthy family was selected, it would have a poor Jewish boy kidnapped and sent off his place. And when Manya and I went through family photos in 2009, she gave me one she’d found of a group of young Jewish women from Bais Yaakov who, when she was 14 or 15 years old—some 40 years before I wrote The Stolen Jew—put on a play about the cantonist gzeyrah. In that performance, Manya had played the role of “the stolen Jew”—the young Jewish boy who was kidnapped to take the place of a boy from a wealthy family.
Manya’s father, Moses Gerlich, was from Bardejov, but her mother, Rachel Spira, was born in Svidnicka, and when her parents married, Manya explained, her mother “was given the family business, and this was so to speak, her dowry, and my father went to live in Svidnicka and run the family grocery store.”
Manya completed school in Bardejov in 1938, and then returned to Svidnicka and lived with her parents for a year or two. “I really can’t remember how long exactly,” she told an interviewer from the Holocaust Museum, “but at that time, most of the girls learned to sew because sewing was very important. There were no readymade things in those days, so everybody had to learn to sew in order to make things for themselves. It was only practical.
“I began to earn some money from my sewing, but in 1940, or maybe a little bit before, some of the Jewish businesses were taken away, and my father lost his business and it was given to a gentile man, and so life became very difficult because we were a large family. Then in 1941, I began to hear about Polish Jews smuggling through the border to escape what was happening in Poland, and they came to our town and told us these terrible stories, which were very hard to believe were real. But some people were farsighted enough to believe, and they made provisions and some of them did emigrate, especially those who could afford it. But some rich ones remained, and they also wound up in the death camps.”
Manya recalled in particular a young man who escaped from Poland and brought news, via an uncle of his still in Poland, that people were being taken to labor camps, where they were tortured and where many of them died. Somehow, however, people kept believing that what was happening in Poland would not reach Svidnicka. “Mostly people felt helpless and didn’t know how to deal with what we heard about but could not see,” Manya said. “But of course I was 16 years old then, so I could not feel it as intensely as an adult would, because when you are young, you don’t have the understanding and the maturity.”
In the spring of 1942, Manya heard that Jewish girls in Bardejov were to be rounded up. “I remember that I wanted to go home to be with my family,” Manya told me, “but my parents sent me a note saying, ‘Please do not come home, because they will take you immediately—you stay where you are.’” (Many years later, after the war, when Manya had returned to Svidnicka because she needed some legal papers, one of the peasants told her that when her parents were being taken away, her father looked at the townspeople and said, “Whatever you see is happening to us will happen to you.”)
With one of her cousins and several other girls, Manya hid in various places. The Germans searched from house to house, and when she was hiding in her grandparents’ attic, they somehow did not open a particular door, though she recalled hearing them searching downstairs.
After the first roundup and transport of Jews in April 1942, there was a brief reprieve, but then Jews were told that they were going to be “resettled,” and shortly before Shavuoth, a holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, placards were posted around town: all Jews were to pack their things and be ready for deportation.
Three of Manya’s cousins—one girl, two boys—decided to go into the woods to hide, and Manya went with them. They took blankets, some clothing and food, and created a shelter for themselves between trees from branches. “One day a peasant came around, and we gave him money,” Manya said, “and I told him to see a friend of mine whose father was a dentist—he had what was called an ‘exception’ that made him legal because he was necessary for the welfare of the town—and I sent a note to my friend, and she wrote back that my grandparents were deported—the railroad went through Bardejov, where they concentrated all the people they were taking away—and this man kept coming and was menacing to us and kept asking for money.”
Manya and her cousins stayed in the woods for about three weeks, and the man continued to visit them to ask for money, and when their money ran out, they feared the man would report them, so one evening they left the woods and returned to her grandparents’ home, which had been sealed on the outside. They crawled in through windows, and lived there for a short while, going out in search of food only at night. “Then one evening,” Manya said, “the police came into the house, and they took us all to the local prison, and in the morning, we were taken to a central point. And from there we were taken to Auschwitz. This was in June 1942, and I was in the camps till October 1944. And my parents and grandparents, and my eight brothers and sisters, they all went to Treblinka, and I never saw them again.”
In the waiting room at her doctor’s office, and at the family reunion in my apartment, Manya met, talked with, and embraced relatives from her father’s side of the family for the first time in more than 60 years. After we made a blessing over wine and toasted Manya, we recited the traditional shehechayanu prayer, thanking God for having kept us alive, for having sustained us and allowed us to reach this moment in time. When, very gently, I’d first asked Manya how this moment had come to be, she laughed lightly—bitterly?—and said that she asked herself the same question every day of her life.
Although some of the girls with whom Manya had gone to school were already in Auschwitz when she arrived, she hardly recognized them. “Everybody was transformed because of the haircuts, and also because by that point, they were already emaciated,” Manya explained, “And also you were in shock, and had no time to think. You just had to act on all the orders that were constantly being given to you, and everything that had been yours was taken away.”
Manya spent her first months in Auschwitz digging up hills and making them level, and in the beginning, she said, “this was fine because you still had your health and energy. But you had to march a long way to reach the places where you worked, and soon everything started to catch up with you. Your feet became irritated, and when the shoes went, you wore wooden shoes or whatever you found, and infections developed, and there was very little food, and slowly, slowly it affected your health. Then, after maybe four or five weeks, they moved us to Birkenau, which wasn’t too far from Auschwitz and was also known as Auschwitz Two, and I think it had once been a prisoner of war camp, and we were put into bunks, not beds, and Auschwitz seemed like a country club compared to Birkenau, because in Auschwitz you had running water in each block, so when you came home you could wash yourself and also you had water to drink.
“But in Birkenau, typhus immediately broke out with full force and everyone became sick. I did not—my good fortune again—and then happened what saved my life. People grouped together—you found your own kind, so to speak—and I stayed with some Slovakian girls, and one day someone told us they were looking for a group to form a Kommando. Each group, whatever they did, they were a Kommando, and this Kommando was called a Leichen-Kommando—Leichen is a corpse in German—and they wanted to form this Leichen-Kommando to pick up the corpses that were lying everywhere and bring them to one area. And they said that if we did this job we’d have enough to eat, and would not have to march, and not have to stand for hours in Zählappell—roll call—and by the time you were counted, you were half dead from standing, which when winter came was a terrible thing, and they said we could sleep longer, and I said to a friend, ‘A corpse at least can’t hurt us,’ and so 18 of us, maybe 20, said ‘Okay.’”
Most girls in the Leichen-Kommando, like Manya, had never seen a corpse before Auschwitz. “At the beginning, it was very terrible, but after a while you just did it automatically,” Manya said. “We had stretchers, and every time we found a corpse lying around we picked it up and carried it on a stretcher. You did not think, and you became very callous. You just did what you had to do, and your main objective was to have some comforts, and not to be too tired or hungry or cold. Unfortunately, it was a very busy job because people were falling like flies—they were dying in such masses, it couldn’t be handled by the selection, where they weeded out everybody who, if there was nothing left to get out of them, were removed.”
As more and more of the camp’s inmates died and were removed, the camp seemed “almost empty,” Manya said, and one day, “our Kapo told us they had to make our Kommando smaller because there weren’t so many corpses, and I was one of those who lost a job. And the irony of it was I was crying because—can you believe it?— I lost my job picking up corpses! And it was maybe October or November by then, and getting very cold and rainy and muddy, and I had to start getting up at three in the morning to stand Zählappell, and march out for work. And I became sick also. I caught typhus, but I kept working every day, and I was about to fall apart, but one day they told me to hurry quickly because, in the morning, they were planning to organize a new Kommando. I couldn’t sleep all night, and worried about how I would get to the place, which was at the other end of the camp, and the mud was very deep and sticky, and the camp was full of ditches for the water to run off, and if you fell into a ditch, nobody had the strength to pull you out, so that was the end of you. But I got there somehow, and the Kapo was the same one who was in charge of the corpses, and she recognized me, and she picked this one and that one, and then she said ‘Und du,’—and you—I was picked for the new job, which was called EssKommando, which means ‘food commando,’ and 20 or 25 of us had wagons and brought food from the kitchen to the sick blocks.”
But one day, stricken with an acute case of diarrhea, which everyone suffered from constantly, Manya left her wagon and went to the bathroom, and when she returned the wagon was standing in the middle of the road by itself, with no people near it. She hurried back to her block, where an inmate told her to hide herself quickly because they had just made a selection in which everyone who’d been pushing wagons was taken into the selection.
When the interviewer from the Holocaust Museum asked what Manya thought it was that had enabled her survival—whether it was luck, chance, faith—Manya replied that it was God, and added, “God, yes, but everybody gives it a different name. There were chains of circumstance that let you survive, and there was no rhyme or reason. First it was one job, then it was the other job. It was my going away from home at the right time, being in the right place at the right time—or not being there—and I looked more sick than any of the girls who were selected because I had just finished with typhoid, and I was all skin and bones, and I do not even have a memory of the time in the EssKommando.”
But then another Kommando was created called the SchmutzKommando, and that was actually “a fun job,” Manya said. “We were six girls, and we went around with a pail and a stick to pick up paper around the block to make it look like a country club,” she laughed. “It was very easy—no strain and with all the advantages: no Zählappell, no roll call, more food, and you were with your friends, but that’s when I became very sick—so weak, I could not walk. And there was a doctor from Czechoslovakia named Emma who some of the girls got to examine me, and she said I had pleurisy and pneumonia, and I could not work. But my friends covered for me, and one girl, who came from my town—I think this was in the spring of ’43—she brought me some food—even some olives and halva because she worked in the Rotäappchen—the Little Red Riding Hood, we called it—where all the food was brought, and they could smuggle things into the camp, and gradually, from rest and a little more food, I recuperated.”
After that, Manya was given a job cutting the hair of new arrivals to the camp, and when large numbers of Hungarians started arriving—this was in 1944—she was transported to Brezinka, where she continued to cut hair and also to work in the disinfecting center. “And we did not believe they would send us someplace,” she said to an interviewer, “because we were as close to the crematoria as from here to that hall there, and I did not believe they would let us live. But then one day they put us on a bus, and took us away. And we did not believe we were going to see the sun again.”
In other interviews with the Holocaust Museum and the Shoah Foundation, and in our conversations, Manya sketched in the story of what happened to her after she left Auschwitz. They took her first to a camp in Hindenberg, a small town surrounded by ammunition factories where an SS man named Tauber was in charge, and when he looked at the number tattooed on Manya’s arm, she recalled him saying, “Ihr selt doch von den Alten”—“You are from the old ones, from the early ones.“ And he gave her and the other “early ones” jobs inside, like Stubendienst (room service), which were easier, and Manya stayed in that camp through November, December, and January.
When the Russian army began to advance toward Hindenberg, the Germans gave her and the other inmates all the food they could carry, and started them on a march that, in the dead of a very cold winter, lasted two days, after which point they put her and the other inmates on a train, in boxcars, where they lived for “a day or two, or a week or more”—Manya had no idea of time by then—and when the train stopped, they let the inmates out of the boxcars, fed them, and then put them back into the boxcars, where they stayed until the train reached Bergen-Belsen.
“That was the last stop,” Manya said. “They concentrated as many people there as possible because as the Russian front was moving west, they kept moving the people east. And they could not take care of so many people, and food was getting scarcer and scarcer. And the last few days, they said they we are going to feed everybody poisoned soup in order to finish everyone off. But whether they were too late to do it, or they did not have the time, whatever the reason was, the English came in on April the 15th, and we were liberated.”
Near the end of her testimony for the Holocaust Museum, an interviewer asked Manya if she had any bitterness.
“Bitterness is a mild term,” Manya said. She then told the interviewer what she told me. “I was able to renew my life, thank God,” she said, “and the most important thing is that we preserved our humanity—all the girls I was with, we were just as human at the end as when we went in—perhaps more human because we became more sensitive.”
I asked if she could elaborate on what she meant, and on some of what she felt so many years later. “What we knew was how easy it is to become dehumanized,” she replied. “I thought about this many times, and I think the important thing is to nurture your humanity because it’s very brittle, and it can disappear very easily under very little provocation. Certainly we had enough provocation to become dehumanized, and that is the thing I feel most proud of from our experience, because brutality brutalizes, and we certainly did not become brutal. That’s the last thing we became. We became more sensitive—more understanding—because we learned what a human being is capable of.”
A moment or two later, and taking my hand in hers the way she had the first time we met, she smiled: “And also,” she said, “sometimes, like you and me, something happens, and it’s a miracle …”
To which I responded, as I had the first time, with an old rabbinic saying: that a person who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.
The post My Cousin Manya appeared first on The American Scholar.
Manolín, a small brown ram belonging to a man who owns a parcel of land with some outbuildings along the train tracks in the river bottoms, was my excuse for stopping when I walked by the farmstead and saw the man and his wife sitting in lounge chairs in their yard, facing the gate. It was mid-July, and I was walking my dogs. I’d come this way for a view of the crazy partying already underway at five p.m. at the big field on the outskirts of my town—the site of the Carmín, a local fiesta to which thousands of people, mainly young adults, flock from all over Asturias. Why do they come? It’s summer, time to party.
I called out a hello, and the man’s wife recognized me immediately, probably because of my dogs, a black Lab and a German shepherd. First the man’s wife and then, a little more slowly, the man came out through the gate to greet us. The dogs were on their leashes and standing obediently at my side, as they had not been three months earlier, when they had passed this way.
On that occasion, after the dogs had escaped from the field where they normally stay, they had presumably passed by this farmstead with its three guard dogs and yard full of geese, but had gone no farther than the next field where Manolín was housed. Had they squirmed in under the fence? Had they jumped it? Had someone let them in, believing they were shut out of their own yard? That is the explanation the owner, Rafa, favored. However it happened, they got in. Then they got to work on poor Manolín.
On arriving at noon that day to check on the ram, Rafa had found the creature prostrate but still alive. Lying in the shade nearby were my two dogs, both of them spent from their exertions.
“It’s not their fault,” he said over the phone after getting my number off one of the dogs’ tags. The dogs had been missing about six hours. “They’re good dogs,” he assured me, and he told me so again when I went to retrieve them. Rafa recounted that he’d had no trouble going right up to the Labrador, who had wagged his tail. For my part, looking around the field, I was aghast at the quantity of wool strewn about. Just one sheep? The tufts appeared to be from a flock. Then we went to see Manolín, safe now in a shed. Rafa told me the thick wool had saved the ram: if the attack had occurred two months later, after shearing time, the scene would have likely been different. Less wool, more blood. Rafa’s wife appeared without introducing herself and frowned at me. I apologized profusely, both for myself and my dogs. Rafa broke in to tell me again that it wasn’t the dogs’ fault, and I accepted the implication without a murmur of protest.
My insurance company paid the vet bills, and I stayed on good terms with Rafa. I moved the dogs from their big yard to my patio. I kept an eye out for Manolín, and whenever I spotted him in his field, I would stop to pet him, as I told Rafa and his wife that July evening. The lane began to fill up as we chatted, and my companions both cast derisive glances at the young people spilling out of the field 100 yards away. Some were just arriving while others who had been drinking for an hour or two came down the lane towards us in search of a bush. “Badly organized,” was Rafa’s pronouncement, mentioning that too few portable toilets had been set up. “Those girls don’t care about showing their bottoms,” he said. “But older people? What are they supposed to do?”
I looked where he was looking, and sure enough two girls with their underpants down and their skirts hiked were squatting beside the road. People were coming and going, not giving them a glance. Not even a surreptitious one. All along the lane people were milling. Young men were unzipping without a trace of embarrassment, and other young women were brazenly squatting in full view beside the lane. Rafa and his wife had seen the same thing every summer for years and were not a bit surprised, but I was astonished. Fifteen feet away, one young man prepared to urinate against the fence just as Rafa looked around and saw him.
“Don’t piss on the gate,” Rafa hollered, and the surprised fellow stopped in mid action. He looked confused. Then understanding dawned. “Oh, you’re the owner,” he said.
“That’s right. Pee all you want into the hedge on the other side,” Rafa answered, and the guy moved across the lane to finish his business against a tree.
Rafa explained that they’d set up the chairs not to view the fun but to protect their property because within a few hours the people in the lane would be drunk. “This is the worst night of the year,” Rafa said.
“Does it go on all night?” I asked.
“Until they all move into town to continue carousing,” said the wife.
The next morning at seven a.m., when I took the dogs for their walk, I saw the evidence: broken bottles all through the streets of the town center, plastic glasses strewn and trampled, clothing left on gates and benches, paper and food littering the sidewalks, some blood splotches here and there, pink and tan puddles of vomit, and one display window knocked out of a business, done not to loot the interior, it seemed, but for the joy of destruction. Amid the trash and debris of the festivities, several partiers still stumbled along. In a doorway two people embraced. Street cleaners were working with brooms and hoses. A few patrons sat at tables in a café. “No dog will resist a sheep,” Rafa had said, able to forgive my dogs, and it appeared that no happy carouser will resist another drink. Just as Rafa had sympathized with my dogs resting in the shade after their attack, I sympathized with a young man seated on a bench at a bus stop. He was asleep, hands hanging between his knees and chin on his chest. On the ground between his feet lay his phone. It seemed likely he’d either step on it or eventually walk away from it. “Hello,” I said. No response. “Hello?”
The fellow didn’t move. I put my hand on his shoulder. Still no response. So I shook him gently. Slowly, slowly his eyes opened, but he didn’t look up. “Your phone,” I said. He was staring down at it. Slowly, slowly, he bent forward to pick it up. “Too much fun last night?” I said, and he slowly raised his eyes. He smiled sweetly and nodded. “Too much.” Then he was asleep again, doing what comes naturally.
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Amanda Holmes reads C. K. Williams’s “The Gaffe.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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When Bony Ramirez moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic 10 years ago, he hoped to study art in college. Doing so while financially supporting his mother and younger brother, however, would have been impossible. Instead, Ramirez started a job as a construction worker, and he spent his day off each week creating colored-pencil drawings of figures inspired by European Mannerist paintings. Eventually, he began posting pictures of his work to social media—and, to his surprise, amassed a large following, especially during the pandemic. Ramirez now works full-time as an artist, combining traditional materials like acrylic paints, oil pastels, and colored pencils with ones evoking life in the Caribbean, such as floral-patterned wallpaper and seashells. He mounts the finished products on wood panels, and these mixed media pieces explore life, past and present, in the Dominican Republic through surrealism and mysticism.
- Allegory of Liberation, 2024, acrylic, soft oil pastel, color pencil, wallpaper; Bristol paper on wood panel 48 x 48 inches. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Greer.)
- The Epiphytes, 2024, acrylic, soft oil pastel, color pencil, wallpaper; Bristol paper on wood panel. 80 x 80 inches. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Greer.)
- Installation shot of “Bony Ramirez: Cattleya,” 2024, at the Newark Museum of Art. (Photo courtesy of Richard Goodbody.)
Ramirez’s solo exhibition “Cattleya,” named for a genus of orchid native to the Caribbean, is now on display at the Newark Museum of Art, the first museum in the United States that Ramirez ever visited—“a full circle moment,” he says. Inspired by Martin Johnson Heade’s 1880 painting Cattleya Orchid with Two Hummingbirds in the museum’s collection, Ramirez’s exhibition explores the idea of orchids as “beautiful parasites.” While the flowers are treasured for their purple and white blooms, they also attach themselves to trees, leaching nutrients from their hosts. “I related that to the idea of colonial occupation—or how sometimes when people visit other countries, they don’t acknowledge the place that they’re in,” Ramirez explains. He hopes his works encourage viewers to understand the full diaspora of the Caribbean. “Caribbean contemporary art hasn’t had much of a place in art history yet,” he says. “I try to make sure that all elements of Caribbean life and culture are incorporated so that if you’re from there, you feel included, too.”
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The Letters of Seamus Heaney selected and edited by Christopher Reid; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 848 pp., $45
One St. Patrick’s Day in the early 1980s, I met Seamus Heaney for lunch at the Faculty Club at Harvard, where we were both teaching. The Boston area is one of the most proudly Irish places in America, and everybody was wearing green for the day. Everybody except Seamus Heaney, that is. Heaney was Irish to the core, but he had no patience for superficial symbolism. The challenge he faced was how to represent the essence of Irish culture to the world while brushing off the green-beer sentimentality we get a taste of every 17th of March.
Heaney would not have chosen to be a spokesman for Ireland, but he found himself thrust into that position by his fame. His newly published letters—800 pages of them, ably edited by Christopher Reid—are a study in how he tried to define himself while repeatedly contending with external pressures and a world that wanted to define him on its own terms. “You don’t have to make noises against the establishment if your name is Seamus,” he writes in an early letter discussing his politics, “it’s just taken for granted.” Heaney was not simply an Irish Catholic; he sprang from the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, where the literary establishment greeted his work—and the emergence of a native Catholic, republican, rural voice—with hostility.
Michael Foley, co-editor of the Honest Ulsterman magazine, characterized Heaney’s verse as “everything that poetry should not be, a rejection of the urban world for pastoral nostalgia, a cautious upholding of all the Irish pieties (especially the Holy Trinity of nation, church and family).” Heaney’s wife, Marie, affectionately kidded him for being “the laureate of the root vegetable.” And having settled in the Republic of Ireland, he faced resentment from poets there who felt too much attention was being given to this interloper and to other Northern Irish writers such as the poet Derek Mahon and the playwright Brian Friel. After Bloody Sunday in 1972, when British soldiers shot 27 unarmed civilians during demonstrations in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry, Heaney became outspoken about the Troubles. His poem “The Other Side,” published the same year as Bloody Sunday, projects amicable coexistence between an Irish farming family and a Protestant neighbor. Heaney once told me that the poem was modeled after Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”
Self-assurance did not come naturally. When he published his first verses in the literary journal at Queen’s University, Belfast, he chose the pseudonym Incertus, Latin for “unsure of himself.” In one early letter, he jokingly calls himself a “cautious wee papist.” Yet on a deeper level, he had complete self-confidence, fortified by what he called “the Joycean/Yeatsian tradition in this country of regarding the word itself as somehow magical; turning the act of writing into an act of consecration where the bread and wine of daily life is consecrated into the host of language, the holy wafer of art.”
I lived in Ireland for a number of years and saw Heaney fairly often. One evening after a long, convivial, and boozy gathering at his home on Strand Road in Dublin, it was determined that someone had better give me a lift back to Trinity College, where I was teaching at the time. When Heaney came around with the car, it turned out to be a Mercedes sedan. I thought nothing of it, but Heaney sounded a little apologetic about the extravagance of the vehicle. In my experience, Irish people never like to be seen as putting on airs—it’s like in the American South, where “Don’t get above your raisin’ ” is a byword. His tongue-in-cheek explanation invoked a fellow poet: “Miłosz bought one, so I reckoned it was all right.”
Modesty and caution, a strict sense of obligation and a wariness about how he was seen by others—these were essential parts of who Heaney, the son of an Irish farming family, remained throughout his life. This fidelity to the values of the plain people of Ireland is something that sets him apart from the nation’s other Nobel laureate in poetry, William Butler Yeats, a visionary whose work is informed by a sense of grandeur and nobility. No poem of Heaney’s illustrates his down-to-earth values better than “The Haw Lantern,” in which he imagines the red berry of the hawthorn as “a small light for small people, / wanting no more from them but that they keep / the wick of self-respect from dying out, / not having to blind them with illumination.” These homely virtues endear him to Irish readers, who know him as one of their own. At Harvard, Heaney lived at Adams House, one of the residential halls. He would sometimes eat in the dining hall among the staff, kitchen workers, and janitors, many of them Irish American or recent immigrants from the old country. He enjoyed the familiarity of people whose ways and accents he would have been familiar with. No doubt he was homesick. The story goes that many of them knew him simply as Seamus, thought he was a fellow worker, having no idea they were in the company of a famous poet.
It was a delight to go to the pub with Seamus, to share a meal, to smoke a cigar with him. So it’s a shame that so few of the letters offer glimpses of the man himself.And yet, he also led the life of a literary celebrity. After his bibliographer, Rand Brandes, criticized his lifestyle, albeit mildly, Heaney responded: “Surely you, of all people, know from the inside that what appears as ‘stardom’ and ‘globetrotting’ is often simply the result of a decent sense of obligation.” But the strain was tremendous. In 2000, he wrote to his friend Dennis O’Driscoll: “Maybe it can be survived, but I’m not sure. The lookalike who goes to the platforms and the camera-calls has been robbed of much of himself.” He writes in another letter of a childhood spot on the Moyola River as “one of the few places where I am not haunted or hounded by the ‘mask’ of S.H.”
His sense of duty was a burden as much as a virtue. In a 1985 letter written from Adams House, he reports to a close friend, the painter Barrie Cooke,
In the last two days I have written thirty-two letters—none of them a real letter, of course, but all of them a weight that was lying on my mind even as the accursed envelopes lay week by week on my desk. The trouble is, I have about thirty-two more to write: I could ignore them but if I do the sense of worthlessness and hauntedness grows in me.
He had a large network of friends all over the world, and it was always a great event during the holiday season to see the Heaney Christmas card show up in the mail. Christopher Reid comments,
The sending of cards constituted a significant part of the Heaney family’s Christmas ritual. Catherine Heaney recalls that every December her father ‘approached the task with the rigour and planning of a small military operation.’ The cards themselves carried poems, often newly written, or lines from his poems, and might be illustrated by a member of the family.
The demands on the family’s privacy must have taken an extended toll because Heaney’s wife and children did not allow any family letters to be printed in Reid’s collection; though their decision detracts from the book, it’s hard not to sympathize. Meanwhile, poems about marriage and family are scarce in Heaney’s oeuvre, but they are choice. “A Kite for Michael and Christopher,” written for his two sons, is among my favorites. The emotions it evokes are those that any parent can relate to. He writes about flying a kite his sons have made, “a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff” climbing the sky “far up like a small black lark.” Subtly but surely, it becomes clear he is not talking just about flying a kite. It’s a poem about the legacy he will leave. The last stanza is poignant, fraught with meaning:
Before the kite plunges down into the wood
and this line goes useless
take in your two hands, boys, and feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.
It was a delight to go to the pub with Seamus, to share a meal, to smoke a cigar with him. He was wonderful company. So it’s a shame that so many of the letters reprinted here trace the development of a literary career rather than offering glimpses of the man himself. One turns with pleasure to letters such as the one written to David Hammond, the singer and broadcaster from Belfast: “I did nothing all day yesterday but sit about the McCabes’ flat, doze, go out and drink soft pints of bitter, fart, daydream, eat an Indian meal, fart again and sleep for eight hours again last night. Now the birds are singing in the garden, it’s nine in the morning and it’s all clear.”
Chief among his close poet friends were Michael Longley, Czesław Miłosz, and Ted Hughes. Longley was a compadre from his early days in Belfast. As for Miłosz, in 1987 Heaney wrote the great Polish poet a sort of fan letter, using a metaphor drawn from his childhood on the farm:
The tone and substance of your poetry ploughs a deep furrow in me. During the last eight or nine years, the register of your music as much as the level, wide, unfooled gaze of your vision has been like a sanctuary for me: reliable, confirming but not too comforting.
Hughes was exactly the model Heaney needed when trying to create poetry out of the world he knew, a body of work deeply rooted in country life, straightforward and urgent, striking to the core of existence as he understood it. Just as Hughes’s poetry emerged from his vision of life in the English countryside, Heaney gave an indelible voice to Irish rural traditions. In 1994, Heaney wrote Hughes a long, sympathetic letter in response to the English poet’s marvelous late critical book, Winter Pollen:
More and more when I think of you, I think of the immense complexity of your sorrows and constraints, of the stove-hot labyrinth you’ve been caught in; what one took for granted—the abundance and ecology of your whole work—seemed a marvellous feat of total integration, intelligence, total vocation, sacrifice of the social self to the imagined dimensions of the calling.
When Hughes died of cancer in 1998, Heaney spoke at the funeral service in Westminster Abbey, where Britain’s most eminent writers were assembled, a choir delivering Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium full-out into the abbey’s echoing vastness.
Afterward he wrote to Hughes’s widow, Carol, commenting, “Strange how we were all there, heavy in the big glittering net Ted had woven out of his poetry and personal beauty.” He wished, moreover, that he could have dedicated the translation of Beowulf he was then working on to his departed friend while he was alive to appreciate it—“not only because he fostered me as a poet, but because he was like the minstrel who sings in Heorot Hall, ‘telling with mastery of man’s beginnings, / how the Almighty had made the earth / a gleaming plain, girdled with waters’. And so on. It belongs to him.”
It makes perfect sense for him to cast his admiration for Hughes within the context of the Old English epic. Heaney, Miłosz, and Hughes created their poetry within a living continuum that encompassed the earliest literary traditions, understanding these traditions to be the common property of all. As the ghost of James Joyce reminds him in Heaney’s masterpiece, the Station Island sequence, “The English language / belongs to us.” His friend Derek Walcott wrote Omeros, a Caribbean version of Homer’s epics, just as Joyce had done an Irish take in Ulysses. Like Miłosz, Heaney grappled with the political conflicts of the contemporary world from a perspective deeply aware and respectful of tradition. Station Island, though set within the framework of the Catholic pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, reads like a modern-day reprise of Dante’s Inferno, where the poet, accompanied by an older guide, encounters the spirits of the dead. At the same time, as a part of Heaney’s ongoing story of self-discovery and poetic self-fulfillment, Station Island fits into the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which is subtitled “Growth of a Poet’s Mind.”
Heaney’s last years were clouded by poor health. First a stroke, then heart trouble, finally a fall that proved fatal. But he kept his chin up, stayed strong for those who counted on him, and his sense of humor did not desert him. Reporting on having a pacemaker implanted, he wrote, “The surgeon was in his togs when I was wheeled into the theatre, everybody masked up, me on my back on the gurney, so he asks, as he strops the knife—‘Have you any questions?’ Me: ‘Do you come here often?’ He: ‘Only when I’ve a couple of drinks on me.’ I knew he was the man for the job.”
In our age of digital communications, it’s fitting that this collection of letters ends with a text message. On the day of his death, he texted to his wife in Latin: Noli timere, “Don’t be afraid.” As Reid comments, the message has acquired proverbial status. I’ve seen it painted in large letters on the side of a building in Dublin. In these troubled and troubling times, it’s a good message for all of us.
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Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America by Rebecca L. Davis; W. W. Norton, 480 pp., $35
“You’re writing a history of sex? The whole of it?” Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, was asked several times in recent years. Her response is Fierce Desires, a chronicle of how cultural forces have shaped America’s understanding of sex, sexuality, and gender expression, from 17th-century Jamestown to the Dobbs decision. Those forces have included race, religion, science, the law, language, economics, publishing, the postal system, the growth of cities, immigration, education, social justice movements, disease, war, the military, the internet. Davis gives us chapters on slavery, Native American kinship structures, Mormon and Oneida communities, homosexuality in the Wild West, the rise of sex work and pornography, and Anthony Comstock’s lifelong crusade against porn and contraception. She covers San Francisco’s queer community in the early 20th century, “free love” (the 1960s and mid-1800s editions), the post–World War II Lavender Scare, Black/queer/women’s liberation politics, AIDS, #MeToo, and contemporary polyamory. So yes, the whole of it.
Davis centers each chapter on the story of a single exemplary character. She begins, for example, with the story of Thomasine Hall, a domestic servant in colonial Virginia who was discovered in bed with a female servant in 1629 and about whose gender the General Court in Jamestown could arrive at no determination. Thomasine had also lived and worked as a man named Thomas Hall, and through Hall’s story we learn how social hierarchies of the time permitted “a surprising degree of fluidity,” as long as the hierarchies themselves were not threatened.
Davis similarly elevates several other compelling but little-known figures. People like Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who was born in a World War II Japanese internment camp and went on to become an activist for racial justice and a highly effective HIV/AIDS advocate, before dying of AIDS at age 57. And Mabel Hampton, who left North Carolina in 1920 at age 17 to spend her life in a Black gender-nonconforming community of “lady lovers” in Greenwich Village and Harlem, unabashed and undeterred by an arrest and a prison sentence for “vice.” And Madame Restell (a.k.a. Ann Trow Summers Lohman), who ran a lucrative mail-order business selling contraceptives and abortifacients, and also a lying-in hospital where she delivered babies, all the while being personally hunted by Anthony Comstock.
Davis dismantles the notion that progress toward individual freedom, and acceptance of sex and gender nonconformity, is inevitable—or even the norm.Fierce Desires is animated by a central idea and mission: to explore, over the course of four centuries, “how and why Americans came to believe that sexuality was a singularly significant aspect of their identities.” The notion that, prior to this shift, sexuality was not part of a person’s core sense of self—that behavior around sex and gender pertained only to desire, and not to identity—is fairly mind blowing. It can make other eras seem like other planets, and it makes for compelling reading as we wait to see when certain terms enter common usage—for example, heterosexual (1920s), lesbian (1930s)—as revolutionary categories of personhood.
At the same time, Davis dismantles the notion that progress toward individual freedom, and acceptance of sex and gender nonconformity, is inevitable—or even the norm. Women having sex with women, men having sex with men, and people leading gender-nonconforming lives enjoyed broader acceptance before the 19th century than after, when the government began exerting wider control over sexual behavior. In 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln met a man named Joshua Speed. They shared a bed nightly for years, and Davis tells us that “their intimacy fit easily within their era’s norms.” It is unimaginable that Lincoln, elected president in 1860, could have been elected in 1960.
I was struck by another pattern: the backward direction that each new branch of science seemed to take us, in terms of sexual freedom and basic understanding. We learn that the budding fields of sexology, anthropology, and eugenics were steeped in Christian white supremacy (and sheer quackery) and used “scientific authority” to reinforce racist stereotypes and brand queer desire as “primitive.” The American Medical Association, which began its existence with a decades-long campaign to outlaw abortion, was a menace to women; the American Psychiatric Association didn’t de-pathologize homosexuality until 1973. Not until the release of the Kinsey Reports in the late 1940s and early ’50s did we get a reliable assessment of the natural range of sexual behavior of Americans—and the results shocked just about everyone.
Davis’s assertions are carefully measured, her endnotes voluminous, but her book has some blind spots. Nowhere, for example, does she address BDSM culture. Davis also erroneously subsumes trans people into the gay rights and “LGBT healthcare movement” in the latter decades of the 20th century. (In fact, there was no organized push for trans health care at the time, nor did any rights organization of that era employ the acronym LGBT. The exclusion of transgender people by the gay and lesbian community, a sad and salient part of trans history, is skated over here.) I would also have liked to see a fuller treatment of children in America. There’s coverage of age-of-consent laws, and Davis does well to discuss the politicization of child sexual abuse and the smearing of LGBTQ people as pedophiles. (The overwhelming number of child sexual abuse cases have come from within families, churches, and conservative organizations, such as the Boy Scouts.) But I think the subject of children themselves—how they’ve been targeted, sexualized, and mythologized—warrants its own chapter, one that might include the publication and reception of Lolita and extend to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.
But the scope of Fierce Desires remains remarkable, and Davis’s powers of synthesis are impressive. At the end, when we come to the Dobbs decision, readers have already been shown how the push to ban abortion (invariably accompanied by bans on contraception and sex education) has long been a Trojan horse of Christian conservative social control—“a referendum on the sexual revolution, gay rights, and feminism,” Davis writes, “an ardent critique not only of women’s sexual liberation but of the legitimacy of all sexualities and genders other than a heterosexual, marital, reproductive norm.”
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In western North Carolina, the mountain growing season is short, and autumn is already tossing yellow-and-red confetti against my windshield as I drive the back roads to my friend Amy’s homestead. Curve after curve, I find locust trees that are a few shades lighter than they were last week. Buckeyes also seem well on their way to change. It is now hard to tell the difference between orange leaves falling and monarch butterfly wings rising. The signs of summer and fall, all intertwining.
Amy, a hobbyist flower farmer, has invited me over for a one-on-one garden party. This evening, we’re determined to stake out night-blooming flowers so that we can see them open in real time. To some, this might seem as thrilling as watching grass grow, but we’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.
Our admittedly quirky plan can be traced back to a conversation that happened months ago, when I told Amy that the University of Cambridge had live-streamed the nocturnal blooming of a moonflower—a petal explosion that lasted until daybreak. There are many species called moonflower. The one broadcast from the Cambridge greenhouse was an Amazonian cactus. Once I heard about it, I could not stop wondering what it might be like to watch a flower rise to greet the moon rather than the sun—not via a screen but in person.
Moon gardens are made up of night bloomers and silver-and-white foliage meant to catch moonlight and release perfume. Many species bloom every evening, for as long as the flowering season lasts. These gardens enjoyed a surge of interest during the pandemic, when people were stuck at home in search of nightly entertainment, but they were also popular in Victorian times, when households were beginning to transition from candles and lanterns to electricity. In that era, darkness was not the other; it was endless light that was foreign. Those long-ago moon gardens were a way of exploring human beings’ growing relationship with light. And the more I thought about the Cambridge moonflower, the more I began to wonder: How might modern moon gardens deepen our relationship with disappearing darkness?
The Victorians had a different relationship with nighttime than we do, but the Western world has long had a deep cultural bias against darkness. Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish it as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.
This evening’s flower watch might seem eccentric in the electrified era, but it’s a practice that has occurred throughout history, across cultures. In general, though, if you’re not a gardener or regular night walker with an interest in botany, finding nocturnal bloomers can be difficult. Almost as soon as I heard the term “moon garden,” I started putting out the word to see whether anyone I knew had one. I was particularly romanced by the idea of tropical moonflowers, large ones like Epiphyllum oxypetalum and Ipomoea alba, which resemble the morning glories that once grew feral along the edges of my grandfather’s tarpaper barn in a nearby county. Then one day I heard from Amy, who, it turned out, had sown some night bloomers that were maturing.
Amy is the kind of woman who spins yarn from the wool of her own sheep and grinds wheat berries to bake her own bread. Her home, known as Honeysuckle House, dates to the early 1890s, and she lives, in part, like a historical reenactor, pursuing house projects and activities that align with her home’s earliest days. She mows her yard with an antique scythe, which she stores in the corner of a room known as the parlor. Her garden, meanwhile, is filled with historically accurate plantings. She’d been drawn to the tobacco genus Nicotiana not because these plants bloom at night but because they would have been grown on her Appalachian homestead c. 1900. Still, Amy wasn’t convinced she had anything special to offer after dark—until she spotted her first hawk moth. I’d told her that tobacco species are often frequented by large moths that can be mistaken for hummingbirds, creatures that coevolved with Nicotiana and other night bloomers like primrose, the shape of the moth’s proboscis almost an exact match for their tubular flowers. When she started going into her garden at night to look for hawk moths, one immediately showed up. The encounter, nothing more than a fleeting glimpse, was so moving that she nearly cried.
I get it. For several seasons, I have been making surprising discoveries in the dark, surrounded by animals that rise with the moon—creatures such as owls, salamanders, and glowworms. Is there anything more moving than awaking to wonders that you have been wandering among all your life unaware? Is there anything more hopeful than realizing that you’ve always been surrounded by sublime scenes, even when you were living through days and weeks and months full of despair? Once you’ve brushed against night’s magic, it’s hard not to yearn for more of the shimmering life that seems to reside in all the darkest places.
Amy and I have heard that if you catch Nicotiana at just the right time, it’s like watching a time-lapse video—but in three dimensions. Given the small seasonal window, we’ve made a pact to stake out these flowers for as long as it takes to bear witness.
When I arrive at Amy’s gingerbread-trim Queen Anne, she isn’t basking in the glory of her gardens. She’s gazing into the walnut trees that stand watch over her night bloomers. “Vultures,” she says, without diverting her gaze, which is sharpened by eyeglasses as round and wide as Mason jars.
I see one, then two, then a whole committee of vultures staring down from a crooked branch. “They’ve been here for a while. We’re going to need to go check on the sheep.”
We were set to look for signs of life. Now we’re faced with the very real possibility of finding a carcass. It’s an ill-matched introduction to flower watching.I slide on the borrowed Muck Boots she offers, and we orbit a constellation of outbuildings to reach the pasture. Past a whitewashed chicken coop. Past the clapboard apple house, where fruit was once stored through the winter. Past the springhouse, where drinking water was scooped from a trough prior to indoor plumbing. All the while, at least five vultures are watching us.
I’m trying not to take it as a terrible omen that they are perched directly above Amy’s kitchen garden, where the night-blooming tobacco is growing. We were set to look for signs of life. Now we’re faced with the very real possibility of finding a carcass. It’s an ill-matched introduction to flower watching. At least, that’s what we’re thinking as we climb into her paddock.
She lifts a creaking cattle gate, and we climb the pasture’s highest elevations. During this golden hour, the rolling hills are as resplendent as a crown, with a mountain valley blushing pink underneath. It is the view held all day, every day by her flock of Shetland sheep, bred to thrive in harsh conditions that mirror those of our western Carolina home. When we crest the top hill, woolly heads rise to register our presence before going back to grazing.
“Looks like they’re all okay,” Amy says before turning her eyes skyward, where the vultures have begun circling. They’re so large and the sun is so bright that their bodies cast shadows like art mobiles drawing circles on the hilltop, over and around us. I turn my eyes to the ground, and I watch their shadows slip across pasture grass.
There must be a reason the scavengers are here. But Amy’s worried tone has mellowed. Now that she has counted her sheep among the living, she’s convinced that it isn’t death the vultures are seeking. “It’s cattle birthing season,” she says, nodding toward a line of barbed wire that marks her neighbor’s pasture, full of first-calf heifers. “I’m thinking that the vultures must be here for cattle afterbirth.”
Death isn’t always bloody, but mammalian birth tends to be. The nutrients of those mothers’ placentas, no longer needed by the calves that they supported, can still nourish the community at large. The vultures are likely here to turn the remains of those domestic births into energy that might support their wild offspring.
Vultures are famed symbols of darkness and death. But today, their presence is heralding new life. It’s a stunning realization to have, standing on this mountain with the birds closing in. We came fearing a funeral, and we found a birthday celebration instead, on the very evening that we’ve decided to watch flowers come to life in darkness.
On our way down the mountain, Amy’s sheep bleat a serenade that carries us through beds of cotton-ball hydrangea. When we reach the kitchen garden, we pull chairs across flagstone so that we might sit face to face with the tobacco plants. Above, the vultures keep watch. They are still a bit eerie, but—given our strange realization about them as life-affirming creatures—I’m starting to appreciate their company.
Amy’s garden includes several species of Nicotiana. Some flowers bloom in daylight, others at night. The day bloomers are already in full form. They include woodland tobacco, Nicotiana sylvestris, which is bursting forth with white flowers, sprays of living star showers. Their blooms are hanging so low, it looks as though they’re streaking white light across green stalks.
Amy has laid down planks of weathered wood to help her reach the far end of her beds, where other species are growing along fieldstone bulkheads. Of particular interest is jasmine tobacco, Nicotiana alata, with tight green stalks—the night bloomer we’ve pledged to watch.
As we wait out sunset, Amy decides to introduce me to her population of tobacco hornworms. She puts her hand under a leaf covered in nibble marks to reveal a green marshmallow. “When I saw the moth, I knew that caterpillars were around, and sure enough, I immediately found this guy.”
The creature’s soft body has a sharp red tail that points up like a horn. I lift a leaf to study the caterpillar and get sticky residue on my hands. If tobacco is harvested without gloves, the absorbed nicotine can cause sickness.
Amy directs me to smell the tops of the flowers, then the bottoms. “It’s weird, how different it is,” she says. The petals have a sweet, delectable scent. But the stem smells distinctly of cigarettes. After a few extra sniffs, it takes on the heavy musk of leaf-rolled cigars. It is, for me, a shock to view tobacco as a living plant rather than a packaged product. North Carolina is so closely associated with growing tobacco that once, as a child in the 1980s, I was taken to a cigarette factory on a field trip, where packs of Camel Lights were given out as souvenirs. I was maybe 12. Although burley tobacco is nearly a bygone crop now, I have memories of it growing around Watauga County, where it was harvested and gathered in field bundles that looked, from a distance, like tents. Part of my house, on the banks of the New River, is a reclaimed tobacco barn, salvaged for lumber. Some of our rafters are primitive tobacco drying rods, straight limbs with bark still on them.
When Amy’s tobacco plants first bloomed, she picked some for a bouquet, fascinated by their floral scent. But by the time she got them inside, the perfume was gone and all that was left was that familiar musky smell. To her, as a child, even before the dangers of secondhand smoke were widely known, the smell of cigarettes always seemed offensive, dirty, gross. But growing tobacco has forced her to relearn the odor and create new, more pleasant associations.
I lean in to smell the strangely dual-scented jasmine tobacco blooms, and when I get too close, flyaway strands of my hair stick to the plant, as though it’s attempting to pull me in. Briefly, it succeeds. But I pinch a flower stem and pull away, freeing myself to go sit in my chair.
Taking cues from the insects munching around us, Amy—a host prone to old-fashioned hospitality—slips inside and returns with slices of homemade bread and cups of hot tea sweetened with local honey. Her reappearance inspires the last of the vultures to fly off, leaving us to dine with the warm-faced marigolds.
As it grows darker, Amy notices that a light has been left on inside. She makes a tsk-tsk sound before going to turn it off. “Since I saw my hawk moth, I’ve been making sure to keep things dark,” she says. Now that we’re sitting here, awaiting dusk, she finds it interesting that she’d never really thought about how artificial light might be affecting the plants she spends so much time fretting over. Darkness has, after all, long taken over for her in the evening, safeguarding even diurnal bloomers so that she doesn’t have to water them periodically. Because, at night, the air cools. Moisture lingers.
Amy is always thinking about sunlight, where she should plant things to maximize their growth. She even has an indoor grow light that mimics the sun. But she’d never really considered that pulling down her living room shades or turning off her lights would make any difference for her plants. Though she’d given an occasional thought to shade, until now she’d never much dwelled on the importance of natural night—that is, a night sky with limited light pollution—for flowers’ photosensitive cycles.
Research on the overall effects of light pollution on plants is still sparse, but artificial light has been found to change entire grassland communities, with plants that respond more positively to electric lights pushing out other species. And some plants, particularly trees, leave their pores open for unnaturally long periods under the influence of artificial light, which makes them more sensitive to air pollution and drought. Masking natural night with artificial light can interfere with a tree’s immune system, not unlike how lost sleep lowers human defenses. Some plants stressed by artificial light have been found to over-photosynthesize in attempts to match its unnatural energy, which creates more stress. Under artificial light, plants cannot properly rest. They do not have the time they need to process, like animals denied dreaming.
As we wait, perched on the edge of twilight, Amy tussles with her sheepdog, who is restless without any herding tasks to perform. I cannot sit still, either. I tap my feet, watch for vultures that might rejoin our party. But in time, a strange thing happens—as darkness rises, our attention tightens. We focus on a single blossom. “Can you tell a difference? Are those petals moving? They’re a little less green, right?” The petal undersides are lime green, but Amy assures me that they’re going to reveal new things.
Rising is the smell of luscious floral perfume—the likes of which I’ve never experienced. This blooming tobacco is as clean as evergreen with a spoonful of sugar on its breath.“When they’re open, they’re clearly white, not green at all,” she tells me. I cannot understand what she means. I have only seen what exists, not what is yet to be. Amy knows what they look like in full form, but she has never watched their process of becoming. She has only seen these flowers closed in daylight and open-hand-waving in the evening.
Slowly, then suddenly, one bloom takes the lead in opening. Each petal is relaxing, not stem to sky but center-petal out. “They’re curled like tongues!” Amy exclaims. “I never realized each petal had to unfurl on its own like that.” Before, the flower was so sealed, it was almost a bud. Now, it’s loose enough for me to see that though the bottoms of the petals are green, the tops are stark white.
These flowers are basically turning themselves inside out. And they’re doing it together, like synchronized dancers. One by one, they match the stance of the precocious flowers around them. Each motion fills the air with fragrance. Gone is the smell of cigars in a wood-paneled room. Rising is the smell of luscious floral perfume—the likes of which I’ve never experienced. This blooming tobacco is as clean as evergreen with a spoonful of sugar on its breath.
We fumble and fail to find words to explain the way our bodies are reading the signals these flowers are emitting. I close my eyes, inhale deeply. Just as an earlier encounter with bioluminescent foxfire showed me that I have better night vision than I imagined, I can feel these night bloomers introducing me to my own sense of smell, the importance of which I have, thus far, mostly ignored. Every waft feels like gratitude for this sense I’ve been taking for granted.
A study published in a 2022 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics suggests that we are losing our sense of smell because of genetic changes. Sight, the sense it seems we tend to value most—the sense we think of as being supported by artificial light—has apparently taken the lead in evolutionary progression. No one is entirely sure what’s happening, but various studies about the loss of smell, or anosmia, have shown that air pollution—especially particulates from burning fossil fuels—might be partially to blame. Researchers have identified a nearly twofold risk of developing anosmia in people who live in areas with sustained air pollution. Our collective sense of smell does remain relatively acute in the scheme of things—more acute, some scientists say, than we often give it credit for. Even so, it’s hard to get over the idea that on our evolutionary journey, our species might never again be this sensitive to the nuances of flower language.
The scent of these tobacco flowers is so strong that it chases me around the garden. I ask Amy whether she is experiencing something similar, and she confirms that she, too, can feel the scent growing so thick that it seems it might, at any minute, become visible, hanging in the air around us. Still, we’re not sure whether the flowers are producing more concentrated perfume or we’re just becoming more sensitive to the aroma. Maybe it’s both, a sensory meeting of species.
Many night bloomers have enhanced nonvisual characteristics to attract pollinators like moths and, in some cases, bats. They include fragrance, and the human olfactory system is connected to circadian rhythms that fluctuate in relative alignment with them. According to a 2017 study conducted by Rachel Herz and colleagues at Brown University, human olfactory ability is strongest in the evening around nine p.m. It is around the same time that nocturnal flowers begin to reveal themselves—with their scent levels deepening in darkness—that our senses peak to meet them.
In watching the behavior of these flowers, I feel like I am being instructed to remember that my sense of smell is not some add-on, something lower in hierarchy to sight; it is a fundamental part of how I engage with the world around me. It’s a glory that screens cannot begin to transmit, so lovely that I can hardly stand it.
Amy directs me to touch the silvery cool of a lamb’s-ear plant she’s growing near the tobacco. It is commonly planted in moon gardens for the way it catches moonlight. She planted it because, as a shepherdess, she adores the leaves’ velveteen texture, soft as the actual ears of a newborn lamb. Also, because Honeysuckle House’s early inhabitants would likely have spent time enjoying this species in the evening, after they’d tended to their flocks.
When Amy notices a seed pod that has fallen from the tobacco, she picks it up and motions for me to open my hand. Under the pressure of her finger, the pod breaks open and seeds fall freely. I press an index finger to where they’ve pooled in the center of my palm and feel the black seeds—as hard and round as musket balls.
“Some seeds need total darkness to germinate; others need a little light,” Amy tells me. “These will do best right at the top of the soil. My hope is that these plants will self-seed and that left alone, they’ll be carried by wind.” But given that I already have a handful of dark orbs, Amy suggests that I might spread these myself, as an offering. “Just toss them in there,” she says. I roll the seeds across and out of my palm, grateful for the opportunity to participate.
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The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith; W. W. Norton, 432 pp., $35
In this devastating and essential world history, Sunil Amrith sets out how we humans, during the past thousand years, have altered Earth and, often as not, ravaged it. “To have any hope of undoing the densely woven braid between inequality, violence, and environmental harm,” he writes, “we need to understand its origins.”
Among the many significant events that Amrith discusses is Columbus’s 1492 arrival at Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that now comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti. There, Columbus and his crew discovered “trees and flowers and birds” that they could not name. Returning to the island the following year, they brought pigs, chickens, dogs, and cats, all of which reproduced prolifically. They brought barley, wheat, leeks, onions, cucumbers, broad beans, citrus fruits, olives, and parsley. They planted sugar cane. They raped, murdered, and enslaved Indigenous people. They brought disease. They destroyed the ecology of the island.
What is new about this? In Amrith’s telling, human and environmental consequences are inseparable. With regard to the European colonization of the Americas, he recounts paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman’s theory that the Little Ice Age, a colder period that peaked around 1610, resulted, in part, from the decimation of the Indigenous population, which caused enormous expanses of cultivated land to revert to “carbon-devouring tropical forests.” An interesting idea, somewhat—though not entirely—supported by the study of ice cores and other evidence.
In envisioning major historical events through the lens of ecology, Amrith brings to light matters less familiar to nonspecialists. In World War I, the German release of chlorine gas at the Battle of Ypres in April 1915 was a turning point in human history: the first battlefield effort to destroy enemy soldiers by turning their environment against them. In World War II, governments used food as a weapon. Mass starvation played a part in the Nazis’ genocidal plan, and Winston Churchill, who despised Gandhi and looked down on the people of India, helped trigger a famine in Bengal.
Throughout this recasting of history, Amrith highlights culture—the arts and the artists who envisioned the connection between humans and Earth. For example, in Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, a conventional and conformist man, finding that he is terminally ill, spends his remaining days working to create a green space in his neighborhood. Also enlightening are figures profiled (beyond the well-known Hannah Arendt and Rachel Carson) who worked for human rights or environmental restoration. For example, the Brazilian labor activist and environmentalist Chico Mendes stood against powerful ranching interests that were encroaching on the Amazon forest and abusing workers. Ranchers had him murdered in 1988, along with some 90 others that same year, but not before he had become a charismatic and influential environmental leader.
For readers whose comprehension of world history has been shaped primarily by American perspectives, Amrith’s global reach will be eye opening. But he covers so much ground that The Burning Earth can feel like a whirlwind tour, going from one thing to another to another. For instance, the chapter on worldwide postwar development of infrastructure like dams, roads, and oil wells, titled “Freedom’s Promise,” begins in San Francisco at the 1945 inaugural conference of the United Nations. It proceeds to Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Mexico, then to Egypt and the High Dam at Aswan. It continues to the Caterpillar company in Illinois and its Earth-morphing, earth-moving equipment, then to Singapore (where Amrith grew up), Brazil and its oil production, Iran and its oil production, China and Mao’s environmentally devastating “Great Leap Forward,” back to the United States and the 52 million cars on our roads by 1955, then to East Germany and its enthusiasm for the “petrochemical adornments of modern life.” Climatologists call this post-1945 era “the great acceleration,” and it’s easy to see why. There’s a lot to take in.
Among the more recent developments that Amrith covers are the Green Revolution (high-yielding crops), its benefits (more food for more people), and its downsides (egregious use of fossil fuel and pesticides, the wrecked livelihoods of small farmers). He addresses the destruction of rainforest to produce beef (Brazil), palm oil (Indonesia), and wealth (for elites). He highlights the ecological catastrophe wrought by the oil industry in Nigeria and the resistance movement led, in part, by activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. He recounts the long-running disinformation campaign undertaken by Exxon and Mobil to convince the public, wrongly, that the science on climate change was not conclusive.
Is there reason to hope? Hope arrives, Amrith writes, with the increasing feasibility of alternative forms of energy. What about overpopulation? Perhaps, as Indira Gandhi contended at the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, the problem is not population but maldistribution of resources such as food. Whatever the case, hope arrives as millions of people become aware that saving the planet, combined with social justice, is how we will save ourselves. Against which are aligned powerful interests that value profit over ecological restoration. Against which is our own drive to consume. There’s hope, yes, but points of no return are fast approaching. There’s hope, if only a sliver. The struggle continues. This book is part of it.
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The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; Penguin Press, 448 pp., $35
Initially, some readers might be puzzled by the subtitle of Wright Thompson’s new book—“The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” The torture and murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955, in a barn outside Drew, Mississippi, made headlines around the world—as did the acquittal weeks later of his killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The event, which galvanized the civil rights movement, has been the subject of numerous books over the past seven decades, including Timothy B. Tyson’s 2017 bestseller, The Blood of Emmett Till. The murder likewise inspired a critically acclaimed 2022 film. So what secrets could Thompson be referring to?
To begin with, he shows how in the decades following the murder, white Mississippi politicians, legal authorities, parents, and teachers managed to keep news of it from their own children. I was born 30 miles from Drew, exactly one year and one day after the murder took place, but I first learned of it only after I began graduate school in another state, at the age of 24. Thompson, like me a native of the Mississippi Delta, took a required ninth-grade class in Mississippi history. But the textbook I studied in 1971 omitted any mention of the murder, and that book was used throughout the 1960s and into the mid-’70s. When Thompson took the class in the early 1990s, he studied from a text that devoted a single 117-word passage to the episode, labeling Till “a young black man from Chicago” who “allegedly made a pass at a white woman.” The passage concludes that media coverage of the murder and trial “painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.”
Drew became famous in the late ’60s and early ’70s as the hometown of the football star Archie Manning. One of the most revealing passages in The Barn comes when Thompson, a senior writer at ESPN, hears Manning say that growing up in Drew was like living in Mayberry, the idealized southern town from the popular 1960s television comedy The Andy Griffith Show. “Archie,” Thompson writes, “never knew Emmett Till had been tortured and killed 3.1 miles west of his childhood home.”
But Thompson is after an even bigger secret, and though it’s one that I know the truth of in my bones, I have never before seen it laid out so methodically. The secret is of the land itself. In a museum in Seville, Spain, Thompson studies a map drawn by Alonso de Santa Cruz in 1544—the first to depict the land on which the barn stands. He pores over records in the Sunflower County Courthouse in my hometown of Indianola, tracing the ownership of “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2,” a phrase repeated so often in this narrative that it achieves incantatory powers, as if Thompson intends to burn it into our memory. He discovers “lenders from New York and England and the Netherlands dropping money all over this square of Sunflower County,” even turning up a connection to the company that produced Zyklon B for use in the Nazis’ extermination chambers. “Money’s only ethic,” he tells us, “is to reproduce itself, and it keeps on moving, circling, finding the best margins. Once upon a time it found those best margins in the Mississippi Delta.”
But Thompson is after an even bigger secret, and though it’s one that I know the truth of in my bones, I have never before seen it laid out so methodically.That time, of course, coincided with the cotton boom. In 1919, when a loaf of bread cost a dime, Delta cotton often sold for a dollar a pound. Fabulous fortunes were made overnight. But cotton is a labor-intensive crop. To produce the kind of wealth that they had come to consider their birthright, Delta planters required a ready supply of cheap Black labor. By the summer of 1955, when Mamie Till-Mobley overcame her fears and allowed her son to travel to Mississippi to help his sharecropping uncle get his cotton crop in, Delta planters could feel control slipping from their grasp. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled “separate but equal” schooling unconstitutional, and Black Mississippians understandably demanded that the state integrate its schools. They were also beginning to demand voting rights. What might they demand next? An actual living wage?
Throughout the state’s tortured racial history, poor whites like Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam and his brother Leslie—who, Thompson alleges, took part in the murder but was never charged—had been the ones who enacted the violence that perpetuated the status quo. “Emmett Till died in Section 2,” Thompson writes, “because that’s where Leslie Milam farmed, and Leslie Milam farmed there because for a very long time human beings have been trying to extract wealth from this square of land. The secret history of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people, by extreme structural value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life, is the story of how a group of people all ended up in the same barn on the same night in 1955.” Some readers may instinctively recoil from the deterministic tone of this and other passages in The Barn, but to me they ring true.
I would be remiss not to acknowledge that this is an artfully constructed book. The barn where Till was tortured and killed was officially recognized by the town of Drew as the site of Till’s death only in 2022. Yet the building and the date of the killing serve as the focal point to which Thompson always returns after journeys into the past and the future, across oceans and continents, in relentless pursuit of connections to that plot of Delta soil where a child was murdered. In this way, it reminds me of another swirling narrative, by Mississippi’s greatest novelist, who wrote a book that also deals with race and murder and the blurring of time. I am thinking of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! I suspect Wright Thompson will be untroubled by the comparison.
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IAmong canonized composers of classical music, Charles Ives—born 150 years ago this autumn—possesses the most elusive, least stable reputation. There are composers whose standing has sharply declined (the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer were once repertory staples) or risen (Sergei Rachmaninoff is no longer despised as a sentimental anomaly). There are composers whose full stature was only recognized generations after they died (Hector Berlioz’s opera The Trojans languished for a century). But Ives remains a moving target.
That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers, a figure protean and iconic, must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we’re not sure who we are. Even our orchestras and instrumentalists perform him far less than they should. If it follows that the present Ives sesquicentenary is insufficiently observed, that is all the more reason to take stock.
Though Ives lived and worked in New York City, he was and remained quintessentially a product of New England. He was born in Danbury, Connecticut; he eventually settled in nearby West Redding. His dates—1874 to 1954—are misleading: his creative years began in the 1890s and mainly ended by 1926. That he was therefore a product of the late Gilded Age and early 20th century, preceding the modernist decades, is initially difficult to grasp because his music was only later discovered. The momentous (though poorly attended) New York City premiere of his Concord Piano Sonata, finished by 1919, took place in 1939; Lawrence Gilman wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: “It is … the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication.” Ives’s Second Symphony, finished by 1909, was first heard in 1951. The conductor was Leonard Bernstein, who called Ives “an authentic primitive—a country boy at heart,” “wandering in the grand palaces of Europe like one of Henry James’s Americans abroad, or better still like Mark Twain’s innocents abroad.” Of these two famous assessments, Gilman’s was more apt. Bernstein’s—which he repeated as late as 1987—misreads Ivesian complexities as untutored. As an undergraduate at Yale, Ives composed a song, “Feldeinsamkeit,” that bears comparison with the lieder of the German masters. He moved on from there. The “primitive” in Ives is a sometime pose.
Ives’s first reputation, congealing midway through the 20th century, was framed by modernists who pedigreed “originality.” Ives’s “experiments” in tonality and rhythm were compared to those of Arnold Schoenberg, whose music he did not know. In his landmark volume Our New Music (1941), Aaron Copland ventured: “Ives was far more originally gifted than any other member of his generation. … [He] had the vision of a true pioneer, but he could not organize his material.” (In 1968, Copland declared himself guilty of a “misapprehension,” having ultimately found in Ives “a richness of experience … unobtainable in any other way.”) Elliott Carter—compared with Copland a later, higher modernist—discovered in Ives “a lack of logic. … The esthetic is … often too naïve to express serious thoughts.” In that same 1939 assessment (which he would, like Copland, later reconsider), Carter joined a parochial debate that long usurped riper assessment: “The fuss that critics make about Ives’ innovations is … greatly exaggerated, for he has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is probably impossible to tell just at what date the works assumed the surprising form we know now.” This obsession with “Who got there first?” pigeonholed Ives as an intriguing historical oddity rather than an expressive genius. It placed him firmly in play, but proved essentially patronizing.
Once the modernist criterion of originality dissipated, however, it became possible to resituate Ives not as an anomalous victim of repressive materialistic decades—a view tenaciously pursued by Frank Rossiter in Charles Ives and His America (1975)—but as a complex product of a dynamic period of American growth itself undergoing revision. (Among historians, the term “Gilded Age” no longer signifies barbarian businessmen, wealthy snobs, and corrupt politicians.) Jan Swafford’s 1996 Ives biography is a case in point. My own Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siècle (2012) relocates Ives as an intelligible product of turn-of-the-century ferment. Meanwhile, J. Peter Burkholder, today’s éminence grise among Ives scholars, has devoted decades to inquiring into the composer’s indebtedness to past musical models and materials.
Hence the opportunity at hand as we celebrate the 150th birthday of this most volatile cultural bellwether. With Ives ensconced in a ubiquitous fin-de-siècle moment, we can at last thrust him onto the international stage he deserves and inquire: What about Ives resonates with musical developments abroad—not as a possible harbinger of Schoenberg’s innovations, but as a precise contemporary of Gustav Mahler, the European composer he most strikingly resembles?
What is more: the American experience is today ever more crippled by a condition of pastlessness. Ives both curates the American past and is himself—no less than Herman Melville, no less than Mark Twain—an American icon. He must be remembered.
IIThe essential similarity linking Ives and Mahler has long been loudly audible: both oscillate boldly between the quotidian and the sublime. And the quotidian content basically derives neither from Ives’s New York (the life insurance practice he co-founded) nor from Mahler’s Vienna (the Court Opera he commanded), but from the everyday of long ago: both composers glance heavenward one moment, and in the next remember a rural bandstand or barracks bugle. A landmark analysis, “Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses to the End of an Era,” was published by Robert P. Morgan in 1978. Of equal interest is Carl Schorske’s “Mahler and Ives: Populist Archaism and Musical Innovation” from 1983. Writing as a music historian, Morgan explored the high-low duality in Mahler and Ives as a musical strategy. Schorske perceived a mutual temperamental predilection. I here adduce a third perspective: Ives and Mahler as products of fin-de-siècle dislocation, engaged in exigent identity quests conditioned by the unmooring pressures of modernity.
Mahler, betwixt and between, famously declared himself “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” In his symphonies and songs, he resorted to shards of memory to supply points of anchorage. He piled on the past—motley childhood sounds and sensations traceable to his native Iglau (today’s Jihlava, in the Czech Republic), a birthplace Austrian, Bohemian, and Jewish—to buttress the present.
It bears stressing that this strategy was something not to be found in the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven lineage that Mahler passionately embraced. Hints occur in Franz Schubert’s torrid final year, 1828. In the first of his Drei Klavierstücke, the whiff of a tavern zither invades a dark landscape of the soul. Late Schubert also evokes the existential fractures of the self we associate with later times: the Andantino of the A major Piano Sonata, D. 959, succumbs to an eruptive collapse of tonal order; the song “Der Doppelgänger” narrates the horror of a man looking out a window and seeing himself on the dark street below. But Schubert was shattered (and also shuttered) by terminal illness, not by a civilizational pivot. In his essays, Richard Wagner—like Schubert, a composer for whom Mahler felt profound affinity—extrapolated an elaborate historical context for his innovations; and Wagner’s musical leitmotivs are, again, an exercise in memory. Even so, Mahler’s memory shards are singular and unprecedented—save for the contemporaneous music of a heretical American an ocean away.
There exists no evidence that Ives knew the music of Mahler (though he demonstrably knew of it). It is rumored that while in New York (1907–1911) Mahler discovered Ives’s Third Symphony in score and thought to conduct it, but no proof survives. The resemblances binding these composers are wholly coincidental. The coincidences, however, are meaningful.
Mahler’s Iglau was a German island within a Hapsburg Czech dominion. Born to an upwardly mobile Jewish household—his father ran a liquor business—Mahler spoke German from birth. He intimately knew Czech folk ensembles and the military band of the imperial garrison. He must have heard synagogue chant. Ives’s Danbury was also musical, with his father a leading figure. George Ives led patriotic band music, theater music, reels and dirges, choral music for church services and revival meetings. The Taylor Opera House hosted minstrel shows and operettas. The annual Firemen’s Parade featured as many as three dozen bands and drum corps. The Rossini Musical Soirée, the Mozart Musicale, and the Mendelssohn Musicale were women’s music clubs. All of this flooded Ives’s memory bank, alongside baseball games and circus parades.
No homespun musical medium more links Mahler and Ives than the band: winds and brass, cymbals and drums. In the finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony, an offstage contingent of trumpets, triangle, and drum strikes a military tattoo while the orchestra launches an ardent song—“isolated sounds of a barely audible music,” Mahler instructs, “carried in the wind.” A pertinent anecdote, told by his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner, records Mahler’s reaction to the outdoor cacophony of a military band, men’s choral society, and multiple barrel organs. “You hear? That’s polyphony, and that’s where I get it from! Even when I was quite a small child, in the woods at Iglau, this used to move me so strangely.” Ives’s delight at hearing Danbury bands playing simultaneously in different meters and keys is well known—and evoked in his Putnam’s Camp (1912–1914). This phenomenon of unruly memory shards unpredictably imposed signifies something more than an experience of auditory delight. “Move[d] me strangely,” Mahler says. He and Ives recall “scenes from childhood” of a different stamp than previous Kinderszenen.
And the same may be said of the childhood tunes that both composers decontextualize: they serve a need unknown to Mozart or Béla Bartók or countless others who notably recall songs learned early. Mahler rarely quotes songs literally—the exception proving the rule being “Frère Jacques,” transformed into a grotesque funeral march for solo double bass in his First Symphony. Typically, he culls a familiar vernacular genre, like the Alpine folk song he improvises in movement three of his Third Symphony. He launches that symphony by citing the finale of Brahms’s First, in a fortissimo passage scored for eight horns. Five movements later, he launches the Adagio finale with a theme from Beethoven’s Op. 135 String Quartet tickling his ear. In his Fourth Symphony, Mahler adopts Schubert’s innovation of a children’s paradise finale—and clinches the debt by conspicuously quoting the heavenly last movement of Schubert’s D major Piano Sonata. Many another composer would resist the notion of surreptitious borrowings; Mahler, an open book, wishes to conceal nothing.
And so it is with Ives, except that his remembered music is all pervasive. It is cited directly and indirectly, explicitly and subliminally, and serves many a purpose. He even anticipates the “messages in a bottle” that Dmitri Shostakovich would sneak into his symphonies and string quartets, quoting songs whose titles or temper instruct the knowing listener. That is: when Ives echoes Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” in the finale of his Second Symphony, we are expected to remember the words and absorb—as Ives put it in a letter to the conductor Artur Rodzinski—“sadness for the slaves.” The citation in question, sung first by a solo horn and later by a solo cello (instruments that evoke the human voice), unforgettably elevates Foster’s “Gone are the days”—words made to reverberate down long corridors of time. In fact, as J. Peter Burkholder has memorably demonstrated, Ives’s Second is “all made of tunes”; it weaves a singular American tapestry, whose every melodic scrap may be traced to another source. An inane college song—“Where, O Where Are the Verdant Freshmen?”—becomes the second movement’s lyric second subject. Much more familiar to present-day ears are “Camptown Races,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and—driving the final, refulgent climax—“Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Also, evoking Mahler’s practice, there are fugitive whiffs of Bach, Brahms, and Wagner. In these feisty passages, Ives is father to the parent. A snatch of Brahms’s Third Symphony provokes a polytonal disruption. An allusion to Brahms’s First is italicized by a snare drum. A striding bass line uses Bach as a straight man for slapstick.
Some of Ives’s most telling, most original borrowings occur in his tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s heroic Black Civil War regiment: “The St. Gaudens in Boston Commons.” Keying on the proud Black faces and striding Black bodies of Augustus St. Gaudens’s familiar bas-relief, this ghost dirge evinces a fog of memory suffused with weary echoes of Civil War songs, work songs, plantation songs, church songs, minstrel songs. Its obscure tonality and turbid scoring produce a patriotic mirage. Its hypnotic tread conveys stoic fortitude. An accompanying poem, a “black march” by Ives himself, references “generations of pain.”
One searches in vain for musical precedents. Franz Liszt specialized in “reminiscences.” These are personal impressions of operas by Meyerbeer, Vincenzo
Bellini, and Giuseppe Verdi for virtuoso pianists. The chosen memories are shrewdly calibrated. They seamlessly combine opportunities for keyboard display with worldly exercises in cultural inventory. For his Rigoletto reminiscence, Liszt chose a sublimely palpitating residue of the Act Three quartet, a perfumed elixir divorced from the action of the opera. Most exceptionally, Liszt experiences the final duet in Verdi’s Aida as a Wagnerian love-death; in the hands of a sorcerer pianist like Claudio Arrau, the result is a masterpiece of musical alchemy, “O terra, addio” becoming a memory at the mercy of the rememberer.
The memory shards in Mahler and Ives, in comparison, are a chronic intrusion: the rememberer at the mercy of the memory. Their occurrence is made to seem involuntary, unpremeditated, unwilled. In “The St. Gaudens in Boston Commons,” the outcome is spectral: a haunting of the present.
IIIMemories unbidden, memories intermingling generate another mutual characteristic binding Mahler and Ives: impressions of collage or stream of consciousness. This is what makes their music seem to some “shapeless,” “excessive,” “cluttered.” And the streaming memory shards—the snatches of song, the glimpses of childhood—do not typically coalesce as ordered musical structures; rather, they congeal as memory swaths: tropes of personal experience embedded in the psyche.
A well-known story: Young Gustav fled to escape his quarreling parents and heard on the street a barrel organ playing the children’s tune “Ach, du Lieber Augustin.” When Mahler conferred with Sigmund Freud in 1910, Freud inferred from this anecdote that the conjunction of “light amusement” with “high tragedy” was fixed in Mahler’s mind. In his symphonies, Mahler does not quote “Ach, du Lieber Augustin.” But neither does he escape the dark ripples of a foreboding home environment ruled by a tyrannical father. And there was death—of 10 of his siblings; of his adored first child, Maria Anna, nicknamed Putzi. In Manhattan in 1908, working in bed, he was transfixed by a funeral procession on the street below, a massive cortege flanked by bareheaded throngs. A fireman had drowned in the flooded basement of a burning store. The thudding bass drum heralding the finale of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony is said to remember this event.
Tunes signaling light amusement equally signal a morbid susceptibility that shadows Mahler’s musical moods. If his culled shards of memory are often biting, satirical, or insinuating, a signature memory swath is funereal: public rituals of mourning written into the dirges of his symphonies. Not only are there funeral march movements in the First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies; the funeral mode may also intrude at any moment—as when the clarion fortissimo opening of the sanguine Third instantly dissipates to the wailing winds and searing trumpet cries of a pianissimo processional: a stream of consciousness non sequitur.
If Mahler’s memories are frequently ominous, Ives’s are often consoling. A pertinent memory swath, distinctive to Ives, is of sounds heard over water. In the 1920 booklet Essays Before a Sonata, he fixes on a passage in Thoreau evoking “a melody, as it were, imported into the wilderness”:
At a distance over the woods, the sound acquires a certain vibratory hum as if the pine-needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. … A vibration of the universal lyre. … Just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to the eye by the azure tint it imparts.
“A horn over a lake,” Ives continues, “gives a quality of sound and feeling that is hard to produce in any other way.” In “Thoreau,” the final movement of his Concord Piano Sonata, he pictures the writer sitting in his sun-drenched doorway, “rapt in reverie.” “His meditations are interrupted only by the faint sound of the Concord bell,” windswept over Walden Pond. An optional part for solo flute, performed offstage, evokes Thoreau playing his flute from afar.
Ives’s fundamental memory was of his father, with whom he lovingly and fervently identified, and who died during his freshman year at Yale. “Father died just at the time I needed him most,” he would recall. He also testified to daily communion with his deceased parent. The song “Remembrance” (1921), less than a minute long, sets words by the composer:
A sound of a distant horn
O’er shadowed lake is born
my father’s song.
The exquisite piano accompaniment, marked pianissimo and “with both pedals” (that is, softly smeared), is a polytonal wash—as of water and mist. Memory beckons: a siren song.
It was Harmony, Ives’s wife as of 1908, who most filled the parental void. Her first love letter reads: “I never wrote a love letter and I don’t know how. If I don’t mail this today you won’t get mail until Monday and I can’t wait that long to have you see in my writing what you’ve seen these perfect days in my face—that I love you, and love you, and love you and no numbers of times of saying it can ever tell it. But believe it and that I am yours always and utterly—every bit of me.” Harmony, too, inspired a song over the water. Ives recalled its provenance:
The “Housatonic at Stockbridge” was suggested by a Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge, the summer after we were married. We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember. Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” paints this scene beautifully.
Johnson’s poem—verses as provincial as Ives’s setting is elemental—reads (as excerpted by Ives),
Contented river! In thy dreamy realm
The cloudy willow and the plumy elm:
Thou beautiful!
From ev’ry dreamy hill
What eye but wanders with thee at thy will …
Ah! there’s a restive ripple,
And the swift red leaves
September’s firstlings faster drift;
Wouldst thou away, dear stream?
Come, whisper near!
I also of much resting have a fear:
Let me tomorrow thy companion be,
By fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!
In 1910, Ives set “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” as a symphonic work, the third of his Three Places in New England. Remembering his courtship, Ives begins with a layered rendering of the river: steady in the low bass, trembling atop. The “distant singing from the church” is a tune as enraptured as its source, the hymn “Dorrnance,” is plain. Then—an ecstatic moment—the “restive ripple” redoubles in a rush toward the Atlantic. The ending, a five-second pianississimo sonic residue, contradicts caricatures of Ives the naif; no American composer was ever more immune to cliché. In sum, Ives’s memory song about courtship and marriage is equally a transcendental nature song, in which the becalming wife and eruptive husband are the Housatonic’s dreamy realm and restive ripples.
Ives told a story that further contextualizes “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” and more. He had a habit, going back to his teens, of setting poems already famously set. His version of “Feldeinsamkeit,” among the most sublime of all Brahms’s songs, was under scrutiny by his Yale composition teacher, Horatio Parker, when George Chadwick turned up reeking of beer. Parker was objecting to the mobile harmonic raptures of Ives’s ersatz lied. Chadwick, New England’s saltiest “official” composer, winked at Parker and quipped: “That’s as good a song as you could write.” He also said: “It’s different from Brahms, as in the piano part and the harmony it takes a more difficult and almost opposite [approach], for the active tranquility of the outdoor beauty of nature is harder to express than just quietude.” As the source of this anecdote is Ives himself, perhaps “active tranquility” paraphrases rather than quotes. What matters is that the observation is precisely apt—and not only for “Feldeinsamkeit,” with its whispered, gently bristling “wrong notes” in the piano. It characterizes Ives’s nature pieces to come, in which a restless quiescence, aquiver with elemental living matter, conveys both serenity and an internal thrust and power. It is the “restive ripple” that drives the Housatonic to the Atlantic—and that could suddenly drive Charles Ives to his couch, as observed in his retirement, collapsed and panting.
Ives wrote: “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression … of great muddiness. … The mud may be a form of sincerity.” He endorsed the “mud and scum” that Ralph Waldo Emerson extolled in his poem “Music”: “There alway, alway something sings.” “Feldeinsamkeit,” “Remembrance,” “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” “Thoreau,” and other outdoor reveries are in Ives invariably discordant, however faintly. The water, the ether are never wholly limpid; harmonic and textural impurities abound. Ives’s visions of river and meadow, woods and mountaintop are layered with Emersonian mud and scum: particles of sound; particles of memory.
It speaks volumes that Ives’s favorite painter was J. M. W. Turner, whose obscurely layered landscapes resist clarity. Of the “shadow lines” Ives often adds to his crowded textures, Jan Swafford writes in his exceptional Ives biography that they “suggest other realities, parallel memories, the subconscious. They murmur sometimes inaudibly … but float up now and then like a phantom presence within the music. Always they suggest something beneath the surface, beyond the immediate time and place.”
IV In Mahler’s Vienna, the leading painter was Gustav Klimt, who comparably practiced a psychological realism stressing desire and anxiety, neurosis and transcendence. His mural Philosophy (1900) shows a tangle of naked bodies floating aimlessly: an aqueous cosmos inhabited by torpid humanity. As in other Klimt paintings, the liquefied medium suggests a stratum of primal subjectivity, an unconscious world of instinct: a stream of consciousness. The gently irregular harp tones punctuating the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony similarly suggest particles adrift in an amniotic medium. In Mahler’s Ninth, harp tones articulate the slow motion of both outer movements; the seemingly random forward motion of this music in fact generates structure in the relative absence of the sonata forms that Mahler more commonly deployed. And so for Mahler, “water” is not—as in Ives—“nature.” Rather, nature is the rarefied Alpine meadows Mahler signifies (in two of his symphonies) with the distant clamor of cowbells. And, like his water music, Mahler’s mountain mode distills harmony and texture; it abjures mud and scum.
Ives, too, maps mountain summits, peaking with the tingling closing pages of his Second String Quartet and Fourth Symphony (the same music, redeployed). This is not the thin, rarefied air Mahler breathes aloft, but something muddy with hidden possibilities. Ives pertinently writes of Emerson: “As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them along the ground first.” More fundamentally: like Mahler, Ives discovers the transcendental in outdoor tramps and reveries. Like Mahler’s, his is a religious personality rejecting dogma, seeking and finding the divine in nature, and so silencing his demons and surmounting worldly travail.
And Ives and Mahler were composers with sundry demons to silence: demons, I am suggesting, that may be the ultimate source of the urgency of remembrance they experienced. Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed as “weightlessness” the prevalent erosion of personal identity bred by the decline of religion, and by the anomie and enforced passivity of modern urban life. It is a condition we readily associate with fin-de-siècle Vienna—Mahler’s wife, Alma, being a prominent example of the city’s “neurasthenics,” victims of “nervous prostration.” But neurasthenia was also rampant among American women of the same era. Many points of dissimilarity may be adduced in juxtaposing Vienna and New York in the decades before World War I: the Americans remained buoyed by gusts of moral uplift long passé abroad; the Viennese avidly succumbed to currents of aesthetic decadence stigmatized in the New World. But the psychic stress of modernity was experienced in common. Ives and Mahler were powerfully buffeted by this seismic change.
Consider the magnitude of Mahler’s dislocation as an assimilated Jew from Bohemia. The polyglot Hapsburg Empire was increasingly gripped by ethnic and political pressures. Jews enjoyed new social and physical mobility—and in sending Gustav to Vienna to study music, the ascendant Mahlers were ascending further. Even so, to take over the Court Opera 22 years later, Mahler had to convert to Catholicism (toward which he was not unsympathetic). Culturally, he identified as German. He married into a privileged precinct of non-Jewish society with anti-Semitic tendencies: unlike the city’s composers and writers, its visual artists—Alma’s milieu—were not Jews. His Jewish friends felt abandoned and betrayed. Meanwhile, the musician in Mahler was persecuted by overtly anti-Semitic critics who questioned his very pedigree. Add to this the death of his first daughter in 1907, the concurrent diagnosis of a diseased heart, and the consequent pressures on a marriage already incongruously and incompletely fused.
If Mahler in important ways remained an outsider in Vienna, Ives was ever more a stranger to the 20th century. In retirement, he spurned owning a radio or phonograph. He disliked using the telephone. He would flaunt his cane and curse overhead airplanes. He had in 1920 elaborately proposed a direct democracy amendment; decades later, disillusioned, he spurned newspapers and distanced himself from world events. He visited Danbury and found it too much changed; he moaned aloud, burying his head in his hands. His health, always erratic, declined. His recurrent cardiac symptoms and nervous collapses were classically neurasthenic. He also suffered from diabetes. And he stopped composing—the music would not come. These symptoms may suggest irrational submission to his father’s world (and Ives wanted to “see father again”). But they also signal a principled rejection of what life had become. The “Alcotts” movement of his Concord Sonata records the domestic pleasures and spiritual fortitude of a famous New England family, about which Ives wrote prophetically in 1920:
Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves—much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty.
No previous composer had been as subject to a rupture of past and present. For Mahler and Ives both, the fin-de-siècle was a momentous synapse, a state of sustained creative tension and flux. Subject to gusts of nostalgia, they could not go back—Ives’s Danbury, Mahler’s Iglau were no more. At the same time, both clung to Germanic ideals of uplift. “A symphony must be a world,” Mahler said; more, his symphonies aspire to redeem the world. Ives’s Fourth Symphony is comparably a world surging toward redemption. Mahler’s incomprehension of the new music of Schoenberg—not just its means, but its purposes—was chronic. Ives rejected Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky as unwholesome.
The creative act, however understood, is therapeutic: a conversation with the self. For Mahler, for Ives, shards of memory proved an exigent mooring ingredient. And both secured a final mooring. Mahler said, “My time will come”—and meant it. His stunning death mask radiates fruition. Ives equally knew who he was and what he had done. In a 1942 birthday tribute, his daughter Edith wrote,
Daddy, I have had a chance to see so many men lately—fine fellows, and no doubt the cream of our generation. But I have never in all my life come across one who could measure up to the fine standard of life and living that you believe in. … You have continually given to humanity right from your heart, asking nothing in return;—and all too often getting nothing. The thing that makes me happiest about your recognition today is to see the bread you have so generously cast upon most ungrateful waters, finally beginning to return to you. All that great love is flowing back to you at last. Don’t refuse it because it comes so late, Daddy …
Charles Ives died of a stroke in the company of his wife and daughter. According to the pianist John Kirkpatrick, who had premiered the Concord Sonata:
Edith told afterwards how the three of them held hands quietly—that it was a time of the kind of luminous serenity that animates his greatest music; he seemed as if transfigured. It was an intimate communion of unspoken awareness she could never have imagined, a serenity resolving all the tensions of his life that somehow persisted intact after he had quietly stopped breathing.
A last necessary topic is a footnote: New York City. Rather astonishingly, Mahler and Ives resided in Manhattan at the same moment—and their frustrations have contributed to misimpressions that endure. Pre–World War I New York was a world musical capital. More: the late Gilded Age maps the peak decades of American classical music. In Manhattan, the dominant figures were the composer Antonín Dvořák, directing the National Conservatory of Music (1892–1895), and the conductor Anton Seidl, leading the Metropolitan Opera (1885–1891) and New York Philharmonic (1891–1898). As New World cultural leaders, they tirelessly endeavored to jumpstart an American canon of symphonies and operas. Seidl, who had once been Wagner’s amanuensis, was also high priest of a Wagnerism movement that flavored intellectual discourse nationally and “cured” many a neurasthenic. Dvořák himself acquired an American style to point the way. Seidl’s protégés included Victor Herbert, whose Second Cello Concerto (a delightful work still performed) inspired Dvořák (still in New York) to write the most popular of all cello concertos. Slightly later, in the wake of Seidl’s early death, the Met eclipsed venerable European companies showcasing a “Golden Age” of operatic art. Oscar Hammerstein, an impresario of genius, concurrently fielded the Manhattan Opera Company, which was every bit as impressive as the Met. Then, in 1908, Arturo Toscanini arrived to galvanize New York opera all over again.
Though indisputably a great conductor, Mahler was a minor player in this musical surge. At the Met, beginning in 1908, he introduced two novelties: a stylized Secessionist staging of Fidelio by Vienna’s Alfred Roller, and a new style of Mozart performance stressing intimacy and ensemble. The Toscanini juggernaut forced him out, however, and these innovations were forgotten. He wound up leading the New York Philharmonic—and introducing what had already confounded Vienna: his own symphonies, and retouched versions of symphonies by Beethoven and other masters. As at the Met, he was ahead of his time. More crucially, he failed to advance music by Americans. Though he has typically been portrayed as a casualty of New York’s ostensible innocence, he was plausibly judged a failure by those who remembered Dvořák and Seidl.
Ives’s full-time New York City years are 1898 to 1912. As he attended symphonic concerts, he unquestionably heard Mahler conduct. He was aware of Dvořák’s recipe for American composers, relying on African-American and Native American sources—and critiqued it. His Yale professor Horatio Parker had previously taught at Dvořák’s National Conservatory. When Charles and Harmony attended a 1905 Hartford performance of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, their courtship turned a corner; they called it “La Vita Nuova.” The slow movement of Ives’s own First Symphony pays homage to Dvořák’s Largo. But Ives was alienated by musical New York. He grew tired of European masterworks. He equally ignored the city’s musical bad boys: Edgard Varèse and Leo Ornstein. He was impatient for a different species of radical change—and would have felt no differently anywhere else. Arnold Schoenberg’s impatience with musical Vienna is a pertinent cross-reference.
During the interwar decades, Aaron Copland—remembering visits to Mexico, where composers “direct[ed] the musical affairs of the nation”—complained that American composers labored “in a vacuum.” He did not realize (few did) that not so long before, New York’s musical leaders and patrons—including Germans, Italians, and Jews who by no means represented the social elite—jostled vigorously for precedence. Or that in Boston, Henry Higginson had invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony, built Symphony Hall, and made his orchestra the city’s cultural hub and bellwether. It would be obtuse to deny that Ives, however disgruntled, fed off the agenda and energies of musical New York in its heyday. No more than Mahler was he the victim of a musical backwater. There was no “vacuum.”
The larger picture here is of fin-de-siècle cultural ferment. It did not only occur in Vienna, Paris, and London. That Ives, like Mahler, relied on memory as a catalyst no more impugns New York than Mahler’s memory shards impugn Vienna. Both cities were musical metropolises that variously stranded and empowered experimentation. Rooted in the past, seeking the future, pursuing strenuous dual lives in business and art, Ives embodied dissonances—paradoxes and contradictions—that fired his genius even as they strained body and soul. Insisting on the goodness of mankind, unable to relinquish his ideals, he ultimately withdrew from the 20th century with a tenacity that calibrated the existential abyss into which he would otherwise have plunged.
VGustav Mahler, multifarious, is ever discovered anew. For Schoenberg, he signified a fresh sonic template, replacing the recessed cathedral sonority of the Romantics with a kaleidoscopic tapestry of individual voices. For Leonard Bernstein, citing the evaporative ending of the Ninth Symphony, Mahler was a prophet of 20th-century doom, “telling something too dreadful to hear.” Obviously, these perspectives tell us as much about Schoenberg and Bernstein, their needs and circumstances, as they do about Mahler. Today’s Mahler, I would say, is a remedial custodian of cultural memory, whose shards of recollection furnish ballast in times less doom-laden than lethally shallow. In this role, he could hardly be more pertinent.
And Charles Ives even more so: he both curates the American past and is himself a necessary link. As he wrote in the Epilogue to Essays Before a Sonata: “America is not too young to have its divinities, and its place-legends.” No other American composer connects more explicitly with the New England Transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. No other resonates so mightily with the ragged New World arts species epitomized by Herman Melville. Both Melville and Ives eschewed finishing school in Europe—the treasures and literary traditions of Italy and France, the conservatories of Vienna and Berlin. Concomitantly, both embraced a democratic ethos. Melville’s schooling was obtained on the South Seas among sailors of every race and stripe. Ives insisted that his second vocation—selling life insurance—enhanced his musical vocation. “Get into the lives of the people!” he thundered. Melville’s masterpieces are proudly unkempt. So it is with Ives: a frontier trait. If Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno are peak American achievements in large and smaller forms, so are Ives’s 50-minute Concord Piano Sonata and four-minute “Housatonic at Stockbridge.” And an early Ives composition, his Second Symphony, parallels Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; fearlessly mining American vernacular speech and song, they are kindred landmarks in appropriating the European novel and symphony. In short, the pantheon of the self-created, “unfinished” American genius—the high canon of Emerson, Melville, and Twain, also of Walt Whitman, George Gershwin, and William Faulkner—is Ives’s rightful home. And yet he remains less known, less widely appreciated.
If Nietzsche, processing decades of bewildering flux, diagnosed a condition of “weightlessness,” today’s affliction is pastlessness. Our world of social media and mounting, ever-multiplying gadgetry swims in bits and pieces, in disconnected dots, in superficia and ephemera. And the cause is global: technological. Looking at the big picture, positing a “new theory of modernity,” the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls the governing dynamic “social acceleration.” He surveys evaporating family structures, vanishing political and religious ties severed by the rocketing velocity of change. He evokes alienated “masses excluded from the processes of acceleration and growth” who will “take a stand against the acceleration society.” He predicts an “unbridled onward rush into an abyss.” It is a veritably Ivesian perspective, a trajectory hurtling toward memory’s cancelation. Processing the lapse in cultural memory evident all around us, we should fear losing touch with the arts—with civilization—as a renewable reservoir.
Leonard Bernstein’s recovery of Ives’s Second Symphony in the 1950s—widely reported and acclaimed—should have secured Ives a firm foothold in the American symphonic repertoire. Bernstein broadcast and recorded Ives. He espoused Ives on national television. He took Ives abroad. He laid the groundwork, but it never happened. Incredibly, tellingly, the present Ives sesquicentenary is mainly being celebrated abroad. In the United States, it will be commemorated most ambitiously not by any orchestra or music director, but by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, which in October hosts nine days of cross-disciplinary exploration supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Who else—what institutions of education and performance—will remember Charles Ives in the years to come? It is not an idle question. It is now 78 years since the composer Lou Harrison unforgettably wrote,
I suspect that the works of Ives are a great city, with public and private places for all, and myriad sights in all directions. … In the not-too-distant future it may be that we will enter this city and find each in his own way his proper home address, letters from the neighbors, and indeed all of a life, for who else has built a place big enough for us, or seen to it that all were equally and justly represented? Such is the work of Ives, and if we here, in the United States, are still really homeless of the mind, it is not because men have not spent their hearts and spirit building that home … but simply because we refuse to move in.
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On Freedom by Timothy Snyder; Crown, 368 pp., $32
Intellectuals, like baseball players, don’t handle every position well. The philosopher tries to write an Umberto Eco novel, but drops the ball. The psychologist decides she’s also a poet, but strikes out. Add the historian who transitions into a philosopher-memoirist. If one admires and appreciates Yale historian Timothy Snyder, as I do, it’s difficult to know what to make of the hodgepodge that is On Freedom. As a scholar and public intellectual, he’s on the side of the angels: skilled as a researcher, indefatigable as an author, antifascist to the core, a fount of worthy policy goals, and the historian who brought Eastern European history to nonspecialist readers. Alas, it may be his very success that explains this departure from the previous high quality of his work.
Snyder first drew significant attention as a historian of Eastern Europe in 2003 with The Reconstruction of Nations, which scholars welcomed as a magisterial account of how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth evolved over centuries of ethnic strife into Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. Later came Bloodlands (2010), in which Snyder controversially contended that Stalin’s mass killings and the better-known Nazi horrors amounted to interrelated genocides that together claimed 14 million lives. Admirers celebrated (and some critics complained) that the book de-emphasized German Holocaust history, championed Poland’s heroism amid European atrocities, and focused intently on the Soviet Union as an under-recognized villain. Anne Applebaum, who like Snyder often favors Polish narratives of the 20th century, praised Bloodlands as “a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century.” The majority of reviewers also applauded 2015’s Black Earth, a paradigm-shifting work that moved past German- and Auschwitz-centric interpretations of the Holocaust. In it, Snyder asserted that fear of environmental crisis had triggered Hitler’s imperialism and cautioned that modern-day climate change could prompt fascism to rise again—a warning that signaled his drift from pure historian to prognosticator and activist.
Those books, although not universally well received (some reviewers strenuously objected to the author’s interpretations), raised Snyder’s profile. After Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s presidential win two years later, his academic expertise and his willingness to apply it to current events helped vault him to the peak of celebrity as a public intellectual. Yale launched a 23-hour series of Snyder’s lectures about Ukraine on YouTube, and he became a regular commentator on cable news networks and a contributor to prestige outlets such as The New York Review of Books. Snyder became even better known in 2017 with the release of his breakout bestseller, a slim, by-the-cash-register book called On Tyranny. Written in an imperative voice that exhorted Americans to resist Trumpian autocracy, it mixed predictable political admonitions (“Do not obey in advance”) with more surprising ones (“Read books”). Two more works followed: The Road to Unfreedom (2018), in which Snyder doubled down on his growing status as a political theorist and policy activist, and last year’s Our Malady, about his near death from a postappendicitis infection that developed into sepsis. Just as history offers lessons for the future, he seemed to have decided, so too does autobiography. In Our Malady, Snyder upped his inclination to comment on everything from American health care to the decline of local journalism.
Now we have On Freedom, and here, unfortunately, Snyder’s interweaving of vignettes from his life as a small-town Ohio kid, a Cincinnati Reds fan, and a gradual pal of Eastern European intellectuals like Adam Michnik and Leszek Kołakowski comes across as disjointed and distracting. Also odd is Snyder’s potted “Intro to Atomic Theory,” offered in advance of his pitch for fusion energy, and his occasional riffs on mass incarceration as purely racist rather than connected to criminality. It’s as if Snyder decided that On Freedom should give him the freedom to shoehorn his every political thought into the manuscript.
Snyder insists that concepts like freedom and reason are misunderstood—and that only a slice of their meaning stands as a legitimate part of their definition.One can best characterize the book as a work of secular existentialism, though Snyder writes as if his readers have never heard of Sartre or Camus. His central position is that freedom divides into “negative freedom” (elimination of constraints) and “positive freedom” (achieving goals as an autonomous individual). But whereas “negative freedom is our common sense,” he writes, only positive freedom is coherent. He thinks we get the word freedom wrong. He then hammers home his hostility to negative freedom with numbing redundancy, going so far as to assert that thinking of it as removing hindrances prevents positive freedom.
Positive freedom, he continues, requires five social conditions: sovereignty (the creation of free human beings), unpredictability (the capacity of humans to do the unexpected), mobility (the capacity to move to new places in society), factuality (respect for truth), and solidarity (wanting the same for others as for oneself). All make social sense. The chief merit of Snyder’s existentialism is that, unlike his French precursors, he always homes in on the concrete, practical, worldly underpinnings of freedom. It leads him to enthusiastic advocacy of policies, such as early childhood education.
Philosophically and stylistically, however, On Freedom’s weaknesses include exaggeration, repetition, excessive recycling of thoughts from Snyder’s earlier works, and an insistence that concepts like freedom and reason are misunderstood—and that only a slice of their meaning stands as a legitimate part of their definition. It doesn’t help that in contrast to his method as a historian, Snyder fails to adequately acknowledge the substantial literature in the field, from John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin. Even as recent a book as Cass Sunstein’s On Freedom (2019), which Snyder’s somewhat mirrors in its approach, goes unmentioned.
Many political philosophers would agree that freedom divides into negative and positive aspects. They would likewise point out, however, that negative and positive freedom are separate from each other and that Snyder is mistaken to contend that only positive freedom is legitimate. He might have listened more closely to Wittgenstein: the way we use a word is the meaning of that word. In a rare inclusion of contrary thinking, Snyder acknowledges that one of his incarcerated students didn’t quite buy the idea that negative freedom—getting out of jail—wasn’t freedom.
Snyder takes for granted that freedom is the value that makes all other values possible. But Aristotle pointed to courage, just as other thinkers have advocated for wisdom. Snyder never considers another possibility. He believes that one must understand history in order to understand the future. I hope that in his own future, Snyder applies the same scholarly rigor he has brought to Eastern European history to his philosophical and political observations.
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When Henry Thoreau was a boy, he asked his mother, Cynthia, what he should do when he grew up. “You can buckle on your knapsack,” she told him, “and roam abroad to seek your fortune.” It was a familiar route into the world for second sons especially, but for Henry the possibility was too awful to contemplate. As tears filled his eyes, his older sister, Helen, came to his rescue. “No,” she assured him, “you shall not go: You shall stay at home and live with us.” So Henry did, virtually all his life, and paid his way in pencils.
John Thoreau, Henry’s father, had entered the pencil business in 1823, after his brother-in-law happened upon a vein of plumbago, or graphite, in the New Hampshire hills. By then, John and Cynthia had four children, including Henry, and needed a lucky break. As a young man, John had borrowed against his expected inheritance to open a store. But the early death of his father, combined with mismanagement of the family estate, meant that John’s inheritance never came through. His store failed, and afterward he struggled to earn a living beyond his debt by clerking, farming, and ultimately selling his gold wedding ring.
Once John got started in pencils, he and Cynthia were determined to recover the economic security and social standing they had lost. Pencils made by the family firm, initially called J. Thoreau & Co., quickly gained local recognition, winning an award in the first year of production, but financial success still proved elusive.
More than a decade later, John proposed that Henry apprentice himself to a cabinetmaker—sensible training for a future pencil manufacturer. But when Henry passed Harvard’s entrance exam in 1833, Cynthia insisted that he attend, even if sending him to the college would be a financial stretch. In 1835, near the end of Henry’s second year, the Thoreaus gave up their brick house in Concord and moved into a smaller one with two of John’s spinster sisters.
Fifteen miles away in Cambridge, Henry felt their sacrifice keenly. In November 1835, the Board of Overseers of Harvard College voted to allow enrolled students to take up to 13 weeks off to earn money teaching, and Henry was one of the first to apply for leave. A month later, he became the master of a one-room schoolhouse and 70 boys in Canton, about 20 miles to the south. By the time he returned to Cambridge in the spring, he had acquired a new contempt for Harvard’s classical curriculum as well as symptoms of what historians now think was the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him.
In May 1836, increasingly sick, Henry left Harvard again, and this time it wasn’t clear whether he would be going back—whether he had the strength, or his family the money. Late in the summer, just before the start of the fall term, Henry and his father packed up boxes of pencils and set out on a trip to New York, where they hoped to earn money for tuition.
Henry returned to Cambridge that fall with mixed feelings. He finished 19th in his graduating class of 41, good enough to earn him a prize of $25 and a prestigious speaking role in the commencement ceremony. He and two other students were assigned to speak on a theme of special relevance: “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times, Considered in Its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary Character of a Nation.” Many members of his class were struggling to find jobs amid an economic crisis that would come to be known as the Panic of 1837. Thoreau wondered whether they should even be trying. He had a job in the pencil factory waiting for him, but he wanted nothing to do with it.
Imagine looking down at Earth from “an observatory above the stars,” Thoreau asked the hundreds assembled for the graduation ceremony. How would this “beehive of ours” appear from that height? Men “hammering and chipping, baking and brewing … scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface”—precisely what his father did all day while mixing graphite dust into pencil leads. For Henry, these working men had given away the most important thing they possessed: their freedom. The commercial spirit, Thoreau argued, was too much “the ruling spirit.” Its triumph had made every man “a slave of matter.”
After graduation, Henry started a teaching job in Concord, only to quit 10 days into the academic year rather than continue to discipline his students with a ferule, as ordered by the town. He appealed to friends for word of other openings, but none appeared. Out of options, he joined his father in the pencil factory after all.
That autumn, Henry started to dig into the complex technical problems that had made American pencils notoriously “coarse, brittle, greasy, and scratchy,” as Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls describes them, especially compared with European imports. Possibly through research in the Harvard library, Henry developed a formula for kiln-fired pencil leads—a mix of finely ground graphite and clay—that could be reliably graded from hard to soft. The improved Thoreau product appealed especially to engineers, surveyors, carpenters, and artists who valued its consistency.
And yet, the manufacturing solutions that Henry came up with didn’t address the greatest challenge of pencil making—one that scholars have long overlooked.After this initial success, Henry tried to get away again. In 1838, he returned to teaching and later opened a school with his brother, John. They taught together until John Jr.’s health—he, too, suffered from tuberculosis—worsened. In January 1842, John died of tetanus, and before long, Henry found himself back in his father’s factory. “I have been making pencils all day,” he wrote with resignation in his journal that March.
In 1844, Henry made another breakthrough, inventing a grinding machine that produced exceptionally fine graphite powder—the key to a strong, even point, and in turn a clear, steady line. On the strength of these innovations, Thoreau pencils won more awards in 1847 and 1849, and they were celebrated as the equal of any English ones. No one in the United States made better pencils than the Thoreaus, and the reason for their success was Henry.
His inventions helped to lift his family into Concord’s comfortable middle class. In 1849, the Thoreaus bought a large house on Main Street, and Henry helped attach the pencil factory sheds to the back. Inside, a fine graphite dust coated all the furniture. Around the same time, John Thoreau changed the name of the family business from J. Thoreau & Co. to J. Thoreau & Son.
And yet, for all their technical complexity, the manufacturing solutions that Henry came up with didn’t address the greatest challenge of pencil making—one that scholars of Thoreau’s life and work have long overlooked. Making high-quality pencils in the middle of the 19th century required a special kind of wood from a tree that grew in the southern states, especially in Florida and around the Gulf of Mexico, where it was harvested and prepared by enslaved workers.
In the first half of the 19th century, Concord was “the birthplace of American pencil-making,” according to historian Robert A. Gross. At one point, 13 pencil makers were at work in and around the town. The first and largest of them, William Munroe, had ended up in the business by accident. A cabinetmaker by trade, Munroe turned to pencils in 1812, taking advantage of a wartime opportunity. By the middle of the 1820s, Munroe was selling hundreds of thousands of pencils each year, all over the country, and climbing the economic ladder of Concord.
Munroe’s success surely inspired John Thoreau. Gross has shown that John probably poached Munroe’s trade secrets in 1823 to get a jump-start in the business. Yet despite Munroe’s ingenuity and experience, there was one part of pencil making that he always considered his “greatest difficulty,” no matter what innovations or improvements he made to his manufacturing process: where to find the wood.
When Munroe was making furniture, wood hadn’t been an issue. He got the cheap, common stock—pine for furniture and coffins—from local forests and sawmills. He got expensive specialty lumber—mahogany for chests and clock cases—from merchants connected to ports, including Boston, where ships offloaded tropical hardwoods alongside sugar and other prized Caribbean commodities. Yet pencils were a different story.
Munroe described his tentative entrance into the trade in his unpublished autobiography, written primarily in the late 1830s. Without too much difficulty, he had established that the wood pencil casings his European competitors used were cedar. What he didn’t know, despite his experience as a cabinetmaker, was that the two most common varieties of cedar—red and white—differ significantly. This he learned only after he went looking for cedar in the swamps around Concord, found some white cedar boards at a local sawmill, and bought up as much as he could, thinking himself lucky. When he got the boards back to his workshop, he realized that the light, brittle wood wasn’t the right kind for pencils at all.
Red cedar was more difficult to source than white, but not because it was scarce. On the contrary, the tree usually called red cedar—Juniperus virginiana, actually a variety of cypress—is one of the most widely dispersed on the North American continent, covering the eastern seaboard from southern Canada to southern Florida. As Henry Thoreau noted in his journals, there was red cedar growing around Walden Pond. Munroe found some in the woods outside Concord, but the problem again had to do with quality.
Northern climates compress the cedar growing season, compacting the trunks, cinching and skewing the grain. Exposed to New England winters, red cedar can grow into a spectacularly gnarled and contorted tree—rich in regional symbolism, but useless for pencils. By contrast, in warmer southern climates, red cedar grows tall and straight, its trunk clear of branches far off the ground, its soft but durable heartwood run through with a long, even grain, softening as it ages. With precious little good wood to be found locally, Munroe learned that what he needed was “Mobile cedar”—that is, logs shipped out of that port on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.
Cedar came from Mobile because cotton did. The district that became Alabama had once been a Spanish colony and an independent republic. By 1798, it was part of the Mississippi territory, though more sparsely settled than the western sections on the river above New Orleans. That changed with the “Alabama Fever” of 1817, when settlers and speculators rushed in to claim a patch of the newly established U.S. territory. They had their eyes on cotton land, and the migration of would-be planters only accelerated after statehood in 1819. In 1810, Alabama’s population had been estimated at less than 10,000. In 1830, by the time of the Indian Removal Act, it was more than 300,000. The land these new arrivals favored, hugging the rivers north of Mobile and Pensacola bays, was thickly forested, and sawmills were often the first organized commercial operations up and running in promising hamlets.
Cedar thrived in the same lime-rich soil prized for cotton. By association, a towering stand of cedar trees was a promising advertisement for plantation land. As forests became plantations in Alabama and across the old Southwest, cedar trees were felled to make way for cotton plants by the same enslaved workers who were forced to work in the fields. Some planters turned their red cedar into plantation houses; others lashed the logs together into rafts, loaded their cotton on top, and floated the whole package downriver to Mobile, where wholesalers would send the bales and the logs on to markets on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1839, William Munroe bought 20 tons of cedar from a New York merchant, assuming that the logs had come from Mississippi. Twenty tons was a mountain of wood, enough to make well over a million pencils, by Munroe’s reckoning—but even this was only a little more than a year’s supply. Given how much cedar he used, it’s telling that Munroe assumed rather than knew the origins of this most critical material. Perhaps the wood had come from Mississippi. More likely, Munroe had bought it from a commission merchant who had shipped it out of New Orleans without any special indication of its origin. At any rate, the expansion of the United States around the Gulf of Mexico simplified the cedar trade in the 1840s—the most important decade for Thoreau pencils and for Henry Thoreau himself.
“Every boy and girl that reads the Magazine has whittled a lead pencil.” That sentence, from an 1850 issue of Robert Merry’s Museum, a children’s periodical published in Boston, tells the story of a small revolution. When Thoreau, fresh out of Harvard, taught school in the fall of 1837, writing lessons still involved ink wells and goose quills that often survived for only a page or two before cracking and bleeding dark ink everywhere. After Thoreau quit his classroom—facing the prospect of the pencil factory—he wrote to friends teaching elsewhere to ask whether they knew of any schools with “hands to guide” and “pens to mend.” Yet not much more than a decade later, pencils were universal, at least among students whose parents could afford Robert Merry’s Museum.
The increasing availability of pencils coincided with a shift in the cedar trade that the magazine thought would make for a good story: “Do you know where the fragrant cedar comes from of which they are made?” The answer was meant to surprise. “From Florida. Yes, most of that used in this State”—Massachusetts—“comes from Florida; and they tell me the Indians prepare a great deal of it for the market.
Some immense trunks they find lying on the ground, with the sapwood all decayed. These are the round logs we see on the wharves. If you notice the style in which the timber is hewed, you will not doubt about the savages having a hand in it. Some of it looks as unfinished as though a broad-axe had been thrown at it! Or at best struck with but one hand, and that trembling from the effects of ‘fire water!’ It is very evident from these logs that the young ‘Osceolas’ abjure the square and compass of the ‘pale faces.’
Robert Merry’s Museum was right and wrong (and racist). By 1850, most pencil cedar was coming from Florida, and dead trees did make good pencils, but Seminole Indians weren’t the ones harvesting them.
In Florida, the cedar trade was tied up not only with cotton and slavery but also with war. After President James Monroe made Florida a territory in 1821, Andrew Jackson led the territorial government, charged with opening up roads and mail routes. Beginning in 1835, Florida’s settlers were volunteering to fight in the Second Seminole War, which would devastate the Indigenous population. When Florida was finally admitted as a state in 1845, most of its counties along the Gulf Coast consisted of small farmed tracts rather than expansive plantations. Slaveowners there raised livestock; planted cotton and food crops, including corn; and worked alongside the people they enslaved.
Well into the 19th century, the isolation and comparatively sparse population of the Gulf Coast made it fertile ground for timber thieves, usually sponsored by—and selling to—European naval powers. In 1822, a federal law was passed to deter and punish thefts, and boats were sent to patrol the coast. In 1826, the U.S. Navy built a permanent station in Pensacola, largely using slave labor. By 1834, 25 sawmills were operating around Pensacola, and local boosters were determined to make their town into another Mobile. Florida pine was tapped for tar and turpentine and fashioned into all manner of products in growing cities in the South, the Caribbean, and eventually the northern states, too. Cypress and live oak were highly valued for construction and shipbuilding—famously, “Old Ironsides” had been built from Florida live oak. But red cedar was the only wood suited for pencils, and in the 19th century, Florida had the world’s best cedar stands, which grew from “hammocks” of accreted soil slightly elevated above the swampy plains.
It’s hard to know the extent of enslaved workers’ involvement in the production of any given lot of Florida cedar. Work in the forests varied. Especially after the riverbanks were cleared, loggers camped deep in cedar hammocks for months at a time. Cutting the trees and dragging them to navigable water was, to say the least, difficult. The cedar logs on the wharves of Boston appeared rough and “primitive” because the camps where they had been cut were exactly that. Often, enslaved workers on nearby plantations were hired out to the logging camps, which also recruited wage laborers from the North. By 1860, Florida had 87 lumber mills, some small, with water-powered saws connected to plantations, and others large, steam-powered complexes that were as integrated and hierarchical as any industrial operation at the time. Especially in the steam-powered sawmills built after 1830, much of the workforce was enslaved, including cooks for the men who lived onsite.
One of antebellum Florida’s largest mill complexes was owned by William L. Criglar and his partner George Bachelder. The latter was from Danvers, Massachusetts, and had gone south as a young man to work on the Pontchartrain Railroad. After several years in New Orleans, he moved to Cedar Grove, Florida, east of Pensacola. Not long after, he and Criglar built a lumber mill and yard in nearby Milton and grew it into an industrialized operation with 99 saws worked by nearly 200 enslaved people. Bachelder and Criglar also owned more than 5,000 acres of timberland in Florida, plus lumber yards in New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola. From there they shipped wood to buyers from Boston to Rio.
Cypress and live oak were highly valued for construction and shipbuilding. But red cedar was the only wood suited for pencils, and in the 19th century, Florida had the world’s best.The trade in Florida pencil cedar reached around the world. At the start of the 1850s, Eberhard Faber, heir to a German pencil-making family in business since 1761, began to buy up vast swaths of Florida’s Gulf Coast. His purchases included the richest cedar stand in North America, known as the Gulf Hammock, stretching from the mouth of the Suwanee River south past the Withlacoochee, including the Cedar Keys, a group of limestone islands two miles out in the Gulf. During the Second Seminole War, the islands had been developed as a military installation, with a prison camp for Indians awaiting removal west. After the war ended in 1842, there were plans to turn the outpost into a depot for the cotton expected to be raised along the Suwanee River. Instead the main crop was cedar.
While his lumber crews were working in the Gulf Hammock, Faber set up a sawmill and later a company town on one of the Cedar Keys, turning out uniform slats for efficient shipping to Faber pencil factories on both sides of the Atlantic. In the second half of the 19th century, Cedar Key became what Concord had been in the first: the pencil capital of the nation.
The leading pencil makers in the United States and Europe came to rely on Florida cedar. But could it be that J. Thoreau & Son had a different source? After all, the Thoreaus were “Concord’s first family of antislavery activists,” as Robert A. Gross puts it. And their commitment to antislavery politics had grown along the same timeline as Henry’s involvement in the pencil business.
Thoreau’s pioneering work on kiln-fired leads in the fall of 1837 coincided with the visit of abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimke to Concord. Two months later, Henry’s mother, Cynthia, and his older sister, Helen, helped organize the Concord Female Antislavery Society. The youngest member of the Thoreau family, Sophia, joined soon after. These commitments carried over to the Thoreau household, where Cynthia refused to have sugar on her table. Helen quit the Unitarian Church because it permitted slaveholders to preach.
By contrast, Henry tended to hang back from public politics until at least the mid-1840s, and John Thoreau was probably the least politically active member of the family. He was a Whig, and his politics were oriented toward economic development, though not at any cost. In 1840, the whole Thoreau family, John Jr. and Henry included, signed a petition opposing Florida’s admission to the union as a slave state.
Commodity-based complicity posed a tricky question in New England and transatlantic abolitionist circles alike. Since the beginning of the antislavery movement in England in the late 18th century, Quakers especially had boycotted slave-produced commodities, applying strict religious notions of purity to everyday economic life. At the same time, other factions of the abolitionist movement, even deeply committed and radical ones, downplayed and dismissed the importance of consumer activism. William Lloyd Garrison, who reckoned slavery a moral issue rather than an economic one, boastfully described going home after antislavery meetings and eating slave-produced sugar. Nonetheless, through the 1850s, women and Black Americans, including former slaves, continued to argue for the potential influence of boycotts. Yet even those who agreed often found the standard of “free produce” too difficult and expensive to uphold with any consistency. Slavery was implicated in too many things to be completely avoided.
But what about locally sourced substitutes—maple sugar instead of sugar cane, Massachusetts cedar instead of Florida cedar? When he was just starting out, William Munroe had managed to make a few decent pencils from cedar he found in the Middlesex hills. Henry Thoreau knew those woods better than anyone. At least one old woodsman in Concord, a town with plenty of them, said that Thoreau “was the best man he had ever known in the woods.”
Thoreau knew the Maine woods, too. He had a cousin, George Thatcher, in the lumber business in Bangor, where hundreds of sawmills were frantically transforming the state’s forests into stacks of lumber. Thoreau’s only extended absence from Walden between 1845 and 1847 was a trip he made to Mount Katahdin with Thatcher at the end of the summer of 1846, when he was awed by the scope of the operations he witnessed: “the arrowy Maine forest … sacrificed—soaked bleached—shaved—& slit” into “board, clapboards, laths, and shingles.” When he stopped at a store for supplies, Thoreau noticed local pencils for sale: by his standards, “bungling.”
Back at Walden, Thoreau heard the train pass and knew well what it was carrying: “Here goes lumber from the Maine woods … pine, spruce, cedar—first, second, third, and fourth qualities.” It was almost certainly white cedar. But putting aside for a moment the environmental obstacles to finding “first quality” red cedar in Maine, if there was a source of pencil cedar there, harvested without slave labor, Henry Thoreau was more likely to know about it than anyone else in the world.
If the Thoreaus did have a private source, they didn’t tell anyone about it, not even their employees. On its own, this would have been perfectly in character. Horace Hosmer, one of John Thoreau’s few employees in the pencil factory and a longtime friend of the family, called his boss the most secretive man he had ever met. John strictly avoided writing anything down, and Henry seems to have kept to the same policy, hardly mentioning pencils in his otherwise exquisitely detailed journals. As a result, virtually no archival evidence from the Thoreau pencil factory survives. John worked like “a monk in his cell,” refusing to “impart his knowledge or expand his business” much beyond his own household. To Hosmer, who made pencils for three decades himself, this seemed a significant loss, for John Thoreau’s knowledge and pencils were both of a rare quality.
By contrast, Hosmer had a keen eye for opportunity and loved to talk about it. With the onset of the Civil War, shipments of Florida cedar to northern pencil manufacturers were halted. The next year, Confederate troops abandoned the area around Pensacola, burning sawmills and lumberyards as they went, to prevent their seizure. With no new supply of red cedar, pencil manufacturers’ stocks dwindled quickly, even as demand for their product increased: soldiers carried pencils into the field to jot notes, record impressions, and write letters in unprecedented volume, spurred on by the recent invention of the envelope. As a result, the price of red cedar “was enormously high,” as Hosmer put it. Anyone who could get it, or even a passable substitute, was guaranteed a jackpot. Pencil makers in Europe and the United States alike scouted forests around the world.
Hosmer’s idea was Maine. He got a tip from a “Maine man” that he might find red cedar of a “superior quality” in Oxford County, in the foothills between the coast and the mountains. Hosmer made an exploratory trip in June 1862, a month after Henry Thoreau died of tuberculosis. After trawling the woods near the hamlets of Hiram and Porter, Hosmer seems to have returned to Concord empty-handed, for he later wrote that during the war, cedar simply “could not be obtained.” Maybe there was high-quality red cedar in Maine. Maybe “the Maine man” who had helped Hosmer was Henry Thoreau’s cousin George. Maybe Hosmer did find trees where the tipster had pointed. But even in this best-case scenario, the wood still wasn’t plentiful enough, or good enough, to make pencils on any significant scale.
The question of why Thoreau went to Walden has never been answered definitively. To write is the most familiar and compelling answer, and perfectly true as far as it goes. But for Thoreau, writing also meant something more: getting away from the pencil factory.
When Henry ended up scraping dust and chipping wood with his father after graduating from Harvard, he could envision even more clearly the life he really wanted. In the very first entry in a journal that eventually grew to roughly 7,000 pages and two million words, he wished for a “garret” where no pencil making would impinge: where the “spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.” Even as he worked diligently in the pencil factory, refining innovations crucial to his family’s livelihood, he was also eager to break free.
By 1845, after completing his work on the graphite grinder that would bring Thoreau pencils new renown, Henry was ready to write a book—an account of a boat trip he had taken with his late and beloved brother, John, a sort of memorial, which became A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. That spring, Thoreau built his house at Walden Pond on land Ralph Waldo Emerson had bought on a whim. Emerson could afford it in part because he received a reliable annual income from the estate of his late and beloved first wife, Ellen Tucker. As Emerson knew, Ellen’s father, Beza Tucker, had been a wealthy Boston merchant dealing in West Indies goods, meaning slave-produced commodities. According to Robert Richardson, who did not mention these connections to slavery in his biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Beza Tucker also owned a rope factory in Boston. Given the orientation of his business toward the Caribbean, it’s likely that the rope he made was used to rig the ships carrying the goods he traded—and to bind the enslaved people compelled to produce them. This was Emerson’s income. Writing in his journal on July 6, 1845, his third day living on Emerson’s land at Walden, Thoreau described his move as a “self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man’s thinking.”
Keeping his own house seems to have emboldened Thoreau politically. He began to fashion a public persona, one “that could stand up to all the scrutiny and defend his private self from the glare of publicity” he now attracted, as biographer Walls describes. The character he developed was the town scold, “keeper of the public’s conscience.” His “every act was a sermon, and his every encounter—even a casual meeting on the road—was a challenge to explain, to justify, to proselytize.”
Thoreau’s “iron-pokerishness,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne put it, takes on a new facet with pencils and cedar in mind. Why would Thoreau’s neighbors in Concord, a town full of pencil makers, have tolerated a hectoring performance from someone standing on a pile of slave-produced lumber?
Yet that question risks getting the problem backward. His neighbors didn’t bring it up, and he didn’t make a point of it, because the cedar wasn’t hidden, least of all by Thoreau himself.
Late on a sunny afternoon in July 1846, Henry Thoreau left his house by Walden Pond and walked two miles to the cobbler’s in the center of Concord. On the way, Thoreau happened to run into his hunting partner Sam Staples, the town constable and tax collector. As he often had, Staples asked Thoreau about his overdue poll taxes—four years’ worth, about six dollars. Warning that jail was next, Staples offered to pay the tax bill on Thoreau’s behalf. When Thoreau declined the offer, Staples responded, “Well come along,” and Thoreau did.
Neither Thoreau’s tax refusal nor his imprisonment was directly related to the Mexican-American War, which had begun a few months earlier. Thoreau had stopped paying taxes years before, and the timing of his arrest owed more to Staples’s laziness than anything else. Yet when Thoreau retrospectively described his arrest as an act of protest, he focused the story on the expansion of slavery around the Gulf of Mexico—through cedar country. “I love mankind,” he wrote in his journal shortly after his night in jail. “I hate the institutions of their forefathers.”
Thoreau wrote the text that became “Civil Disobedience” as a two-part speech, which he delivered in Concord in January and February 1848. When the speech was solicited for publication the next year, he had little time to revise it. The original audience for one of the most influential essays in global history was local. Thoreau’s listeners already knew his story, as well as his family’s politics and business. When he asserted that “I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society,” for “I am not the son of the engineer,” they knew exactly whose son he was.
Why would Thoreau’s neighbors in Concord, a town full of pencil makers, have tolerated a hectoring performance from someone standing on a pile of slave-produced lumber?John Thoreau makes a brief but noteworthy appearance in his son’s essay, which detours through a story that highlights their differences. “Some years ago,” Henry writes, “the State met me on behalf of the Church, and commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. ‘Pay,’ it said, ‘or be locked up in the jail.’ I declined to pay.” The anecdote has no known basis in fact. Robert A. Gross doubts whether it happened at all, for church taxes had been discontinued by the time Henry was old enough to pay, and jail was no penalty for unsubscribing from a congregation’s rolls. Told in the broad strokes of a parable, the story helps to frame Thoreau’s tax refusal as a matter of character and conscious principle rather than feckless impulse or chronic delinquency.
But John Thoreau’s presence in the story also marks his son’s essay as a protest against him. Henry goes out of his way to cast his father—the only character named in the essay who would have been personally known to the audience—on the wrong side of the question. John represents his son’s presumptive guilt by association. Was there an analogy between John Thoreau and his church and John Thoreau and his state? Did John “attend” the services of the government that made war in Mexico on behalf of slaveholders? Henry seems to have been saying that despite appearances and assumptions, J. Thoreau and son didn’t worship the same creed, or subscribe to the same institutions.
“Civil Disobedience” is an inquiry into the problem of complicity and what to do about it. Thoreau pieced together an answer through metaphors drawn from his family business. “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man,” writes Thoreau, “I must restore it to him though I drown myself.” His foundational metaphor for justice was lumber, which of course meant slavery. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine,” the inventor of sophisticated graphite grinders advised his audience.
But that was asking a lot, and Thoreau knew how many people were reluctant to take such a stand, with their livelihoods at stake. He was among them. “I do not wish to … set myself up as better than my neighbors,” he explained. “What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
After Thoreau was released from Concord jail—to his chagrin, someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax on his behalf—he went back to Walden Pond and kept writing. By the time he left his house by the pond in September 1847 and moved back in with his parents, he had finished a draft of the book about his brother. The problem was that no one wanted to publish it. Determined, Thoreau kept reworking the manuscript for a year and a half more. In 1849, the same year that “Civil Disobedience” was published, Thoreau paid around $290—roughly equivalent to a year’s wages—to print 1,000 copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He raised some of the money by making and selling extra pencils. Perhaps he did not “lend himself” to the slavery he condemned, but he did borrow from it.
Even as he was working on “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau was eagerly looking for an alternative to the pencil factory, something better to do to contribute to his family’s livelihood. In the spring of 1849, he took his first surveying job, laying out the road the town planned to build in front of the family home—so much the better for getting cedar in and pencils out. Yet his work as a surveyor often left him wracked with guilt over the changes to the land that he was enabling, speeding forests on their way to the sawmills.
And then, at the end of 1849, the year “Civil Disobedience” was published, the Thoreaus got an opportunity to avoid lumber altogether. They began selling their graphite, precisely ground using the technology Henry had invented, for use in electrotyping instead. Over the next few years, the Thoreaus wound down operations in the pencil factory, just as the German firm Eberhard Faber was claiming a larger share of the U.S. pencil market and buying up Florida cedar hammocks. By the time Thoreau spoke on “Slavery in Massachusetts” in Framingham on July 4, 1854, J. Thoreau & Son had been out of the pencil business for about a year. Of course, the advantages the Thoreaus had drawn from that business—the houses, the educations, the books, the money, the time, the freedom—remained theirs, and even gained new currency, the family having shed its most direct associations with the systems and institutions Henry now decried even more loudly.
“The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle,” Thoreau argued in “Slavery in Massachusetts.” Instead, he went on, “it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.” “Thoreau’s address,” writes Walls, “propelled him into the most militant ranks of the radical abolitionists.” The press covered it avidly, alongside publicity notices and advance excerpts of Walden, set to be published a month later. Thoreau, Walls writes, was pitched as “the ‘Massachusetts Hermit’ who had stepped boldly into the glare of radical abolitionism.”
Thoreau is arguably as famous for his hypocrisy as for his writing. Even some of his most sympathetic readers and fans delight in charging him with ethics violations against himself, as if his point in moving to Walden Pond was to take a stand against going home for dinner. Yet this overly literal practice of moral bookkeeping says more about our notions of right and wrong than about Thoreau’s.
In the past two decades, historians have traced an expanding web of once-obscured connections that remap the history and legacies of slavery, and in the process reframed the stories of individuals and institutions not conventionally understood in that light. But it’s possible that such a method itself obscures a larger point.
In antebellum Concord, it wasn’t possible to “discover” an individual’s, a family’s, or an institution’s connections to slavery, which were already known to be everywhere. It wasn’t necessary for Thoreau to call attention to the slave-produced red cedar his family made into pencils, for there was no presumption that it did not exist. There was no assumption that the financial beneficiaries of slavery could simply pay what they owed to the victims, call it square, and carry on. Slavery was the entire plank, the whole pile of lumber.
The real question was the one that led Thoreau to Walden Pond, and then to jail, and kept him up at night: What to do about it now? His answer changed over time. In the fall of 1859, on the night he heard of John Brown’s assault on Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau put a pencil and piece of paper underneath his pillow, as if to ensure that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. When he woke up in the middle of the night, he picked up the pencil and wrote:
Our foes are in our midst and all about us. There is hardly a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice; and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds. … These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.
In the end, Thoreau’s pencils point to this other Thoreau—conflicted, frustrated, opportunistic, guilty, but also angry, even fearsome, and determined, for he understood that the world that could be redeemed by Walden Pond alone never existed.
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I lived in New York City when it was more violent and dangerous than it is now. Needle Park was still a place where people were killed and women were raped, and the Lower East Side was a place where you wanted to be careful. Mobsters shot each other in the city, as in Joey Gallo getting gunned down in Umberto’s clam bar in Little Italy. Morningside Heights was a place to avoid after dark, and Harlem wasn’t as friendly as it had once been. It is hard to evoke the mood of New York in the early 1970s, but it had a whiff of Belfast about it, violent, poor, and seemingly unchangeable.
In those days, I was a graduate student in the newly established MFA program at Columbia, where the novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford was one of my teachers. Jean was in her 50s, slender, her hair short, her face scarred from an automobile accident that her first husband, Robert Lowell, had gotten her into in 1938. He had crashed their car into a concrete embankment, leaving her not only with a scar on one side of her face but also with a broken nose that never properly healed.
My shyness came into play—although I wanted to make friends, I didn’t really know how. Jean was from a different world, accomplished, elegant, and aware of life in a way that I wasn’t. She had taught a class in a building on 110th Street that at one time had been a women’s hospital. (One of my classes was held in its former operating theater, and a woman who sat next to me said, “Shit, you know what? I had two kids in this room.”) The classroom where Jean taught had a view of a courtyard that the university was using for storage. One December day, it began to snow. Having recently arrived from California, I was seeing snow for the first time—it was impossible not to stare out the window. After class, I said to Jean, “I’m sorry that I was distracted in class, but I had never seen snow before.” Her expression was one of delight and keen distress, as though she were thinking of some moment from her past. We went to her office, and she told me she had grown up in Anaheim, on a piece of land that her father had owned and run as a citrus grove, and that Disneyland had been built there.
I approached our relationship with tentativeness, and with the certainty that she would hurt me. Getting to know her seemed risky for us both, given the difference in our ages. She had been married three times—her last marriage, to A. J. Liebling, ending with the journalist’s death in 1963. I thought that maybe I should just leave her alone. Still, I spent time in the renovated outbuilding behind her house in East Hampton, where she and Liebling had lived until his death and which she called the “chicken coop,” since that is what it had been. The two-story, 19th-century main house was faded and sedate, and when I first saw it, it seemed a little Dickensian. Not quite like Mr. Wemmick’s castle in Great Expectations, but Victorian and surprising. Downstairs, the house had a kitchen, a living room, a back parlor, and a bathroom. Jean’s office was upstairs, and one bedroom was there, too, although the two other bedrooms had been made into offices, since Jean didn’t want any overnight guests in the house. Only in the chicken coop.
Jean could be forgiving, but she was also demanding, and I knew that if my reaction to a subject was clumsy or not thoroughly considered, we would both be injured. How to be a good friend to someone 30 years older who had suffered through two bad divorces and the death of a third husband? I loved her in many ways, but when I was with her, I was often terrified. When I sat opposite the scarred face of a once beautiful woman who had been hurt by so many people, I was honest but cautious, too.
We drank in her living room, Jean in a comfortable chair and me on a blue horsehair sofa. Jean laughed and told me stories—she liked to tell stories, though at the heart of them was often a cheerful dismay at the things that had happened to her. And what was I to say? With each story, we were slowly becoming friends, much to my pleasure and amazement. She trusted me, and I didn’t want to do anything to interfere with that trust.
She told me many stories about her marriage to Lowell. Once, she went to see him in a quiet asylum in upstate New York, where he thought he was Napoleon. When Jean arrived, he was drilling his troops, and one of his generals was Judy Garland.She told me of her hysterectomy, performed by a southern doctor who had said, “Don’t you worry, Miss Jean. You can go on having sexual intercourse with all your friends.” Jean loved to assume the accent of the people who appeared in her stories—particularly southerners. She liked to tell of the time she and Liebling had visited with Earl Long, the governor of Louisiana, imitating Long’s drawl with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
She told me many stories about her marriage to Lowell. Once, she went to see him in a quiet asylum in upstate New York, where he thought he was Napoleon. When Jean arrived, he was drilling his troops, and one of his generals was Judy Garland. She told me this with an air that conveyed both a cheerful sense of the ridiculous and a feeling of profound dismay. Then there was the time Lowell wanted to become a Catholic and insisted that Jean go to early Mass with him. When she had done this for a year or more and decided she couldn’t do it any longer, she told Lowell that she was going to leave him. He said, “Don’t worry, Jean. We can stop going to Mass. I’ve got the vocabulary now.”
As a wedding present, Lowell’s mother had given her a plot in the family cemetery, but after the divorce, Mrs. Lowell wrote to ask for the plot back. Or, as Jean said, with that laugh of dismay and amazed cheer, “My remainders were no longer welcome.”
I laughed with her in complete amazement that such things had happened, but also so that I could convey how much I really cared for her and how flattered I was that she liked to be with me.
In 1973, Jean wrote an op-ed for Newsday, for which, she said, she had not been paid. In lieu of sending her the $250, the newspaper gave her a sort of runaround, saying that as a proof of goodwill, her fee hadn’t been reported to the IRS—as though this compensated for not being paid at all. I was living in the chicken coop for a week, and I said that I would serve as her attorney and sue Newsday in small claims court for the $250 plus some expenses. She was happy for me to do this, and so I went to the courthouse in East Hampton and obtained a summons, which we then had to serve on Newsday.
On a hot summer day, we got into her blue Chevelle, Jean with a scarf over her hair and wearing dark glasses and me behind the wheel. She touched the scars on her face and said, “How is your driving?” This was after I had been a cabdriver in New York, and so I could say in all honesty, “Never better.” We drove through the heat of Long Island to Riverhead, the window down, Jean’s scarf blowing in the wind, her expression one of delight taken in a little old-fashioned mischief. Since delight is contagious, I was delighted, too, although I wasn’t sure why.
I pulled the Chevelle into the parking lot and got out with court papers in hand. Jean sat in the car, smoking a cigarette, keenly alert to the possibilities. The door of the Newsday building was one of those institutional aluminum-and-glass items that seemed a little dreary, or maybe just opaque. The receptionist sat behind a piece of glass with a hole in it, like a cashier in a movie theater. The barrier had a lot of space under the speaking hole, and I knew that if you served papers on someone, you had to touch the recipient with the summons.
In the car, Jean said, “What happened?”
“I reached in and touched the receptionist with the papers, and she said, ‘You can’t do this,’ and I said, ‘I already have.’ ”
Jean said nothing, but that small, slight, deep smile was right there. As we drove back to East Hampton, Jean smoked a cigarette, her expression that of a prison escapee temporarily on the loose, one who knows she will be caught again.
“Let’s go home and drink up a storm of beer,” she said.
But it all came to nothing. The next evening, when I went to have a drink with her, Jean was crestfallen. She apologized to me for having “blabbed” about our adventure to the editor of The East Hampton Star. We decided to let the matter go, despite how much fun we had had.
One evening, Jean told me of the time when she and Liebling went to the races in England. They had taken a chauffeured car, and Liebling had packed a hamper of roast pheasant and excellent white wine. I told her some stories about Los Angeles, and what my life was like in New York City. She had more to drink, and then got out a recording of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”
Before she played it, she said that she had been on the set of The Misfits, the movie with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. She turned to me with that look of dismay and slight grief. She said that when she was introduced to Clift, he responded, in a halting, impressed sort of way, “Oh, how nice to meet you. I have all your records.” He had confused her with the singer Jo Stafford. Then Jean played “Is That All There Is?” As she listened, she got up and danced, swaying in time to the music, eyes closed, heartbroken, longing for Liebling, I thought, longing not so much for another place as for another time. And as her friend, I was left with uncertainty as to what I should do. I felt as if I could see years of pain in every line in her face, in the scars from the accident with Lowell, as well as what it might be like to spend a life trying to write well. I wasn’t old enough to understand the passage of time, the nature of disappointment, and endless regret. And so I sipped my drink, kept my eyes on her, and let her dance without judgment or comment, without anything but my admiration and affection.
When she had a stroke a few years later, I called her from the city, tried to talk to her as though nothing was wrong, but she couldn’t really speak, and I could sense in her silence and in her slight stutter that things were not right. I wanted to protect her dignity, since she was proud, and yet there are times when dignity only makes for loneliness, although I didn’t know that at the time. I told her that I would do anything I could for her, if she needed something done in the city. I still don’t know if this was the right thing to say. Perhaps I should have said, “Oh, Jean, I’m coming to see you. I’ll be there soon.” I wish I had, but our mutual reticence in this moment made it difficult.
When I went to the graveyard in East Hampton in 1979 and found the headstone that read, Jean Stafford Liebling, I felt the ache of those times when we were together, when the risk had been so high and the affection so great. There was a rumor that I was her illegitimate son. At the time, whoever started this did so out of malice, but when I stood by the headstone, I realized how much I had wished it to be true. It is a rare item to have malice turned into pleasure.
The New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg once joked that Jean’s scarred face was the product not of a car crash but of a “cheap nose job.” Jean had laughed when telling me this, and I had laughed, too. When I stood by her headstone, I could almost hear that laughter, so wise, so vital, and so hurt.
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Roman Year: A Memoir by André Aciman; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pp., $30
André Aciman’s introduction to Italy was a nightmare. His first memoir, Out of Egypt (1994), describes how a prosperous, sophisticated Turkish-Jewish family was forced out of Alexandria in the mid-20th century by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s campaign to rid Egypt of “Egyptianized” foreign nationals. In the years between 1952 and 1970—from the anticolonial coup that brought Nasser to power, through the Suez Crisis of 1956 that brought the waterway under Egyptian control, to the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel—Alexandria, the great capital city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, lost most of the people who ensured its immemorial mix of cultures, languages, and religions. Alexandrians with Greek, Italian, English, Maltese, French, Jewish, and Armenian connections, identified broadly as “European” and “Western,” fled increasingly restrictive educational and economic policies—some with foresight, and others, like the Acimans, only after their situation had deteriorated beyond repair. By the time the 15-year-old André, his younger brother, and their mother boarded a ship from Alexandria to Naples in 1966, only two members of the extensive clan remained in Egypt: the boys’ father and their aunt Elsa, who decamped not long afterward to Paris. Nasser’s punitive financial policies—made worse by the bad faith of the agents who helped the Acimans spirit their savings abroad—left the deaf mother and her two boys destitute, dependent for survival on their relatives in Italy. Roman Year begins as their ship pulls into Naples, and their uncle Claude, now known as Claudio, negotiates the trio’s way out of a Neapolitan refugee camp.
Aciman remembers the ride from Naples to Rome, where Uncle Claude has offered to lease them an apartment, as “the worst hour of my life.” The volatile uncle loses his way in Naples, stops to ask directions of a traffic cop (vigile) in Italian, and then loses his temper in blood-curdling French, no doubt with some Turkish expletives thrown in:
But on reaching an uphill crossroads … and not finding … the directions in any way fathomable, [he] banged both hands on the steering wheel and began shouting, first at the car, then at Naples, which he called a befouled hole filled with urchins and criminals, then let out his fury on the three of us. I was a complete imbecile, he said, with a fourth-grade knowledge of Italian, my brother a simpering toad who might as well be deaf like his mother, and finally my mother, who should have tried a bit harder to help him with directions but naturally couldn’t understand a word because her illiterate parents had put her in the care of a witch doctor who made sure to keep her a deaf-and-dumb mutant condemned to deaf-dumbness for the rest of her deplorable meaningless life.
When Aciman points out that Uncle Claude has driven in the opposite direction from the one suggested by the vigile, the volatile man erupts again, railing against “failures, imbeciles, and that holy idiot—me.”
The apartment turns out to be a walkup on Via Clelia, a side street of the ancient Via Tuscolana, which still leads to the hillside resort town where Cicero famously owned a villa. But in 1966, the poor, working-class neighborhood was a vision straight out of Pasolini: a Fascist-era tenement built to house the people displaced by Mussolini’s archaeological excavations and urban renewal programs, carefully sited far enough away from Rome’s city center to deter any would-be demonstrators. The boys quickly discover that, until they moved into it, their new home had been a brothel.
When Aciman points out that Claude has driven the wrong way, the volatile man erupts again, railing against “failures, imbeciles, and that holy idiot—me.”Eventually, mother and sons board the bus, number 85, that leads from their forsaken outpost into the historical heart of Rome, and the Eternal City casts its spell. Twelve years after the Aciman boys, I commuted aboard the same smelly rattletrap along its enchanted route: past the Colosseum, past the ruddy bricks and grubby white marble of the Forum, past the Emperor Augustus’s colossal Temple of Mars the Avenger, past the marble column carved with the exploits of Emperor Trajan, past the immense marble pile of the King Victor Emmanuel II monument (in those days known as “the typewriter”), past the Renaissance Palazzo Venezia (Mussolini’s former office), past the Baroque façade of San Marcello: an incomparable journey despite the discomforts that rooted it in the all-too-human present. Rome’s beauties of golden light, deep culture, greenery, and glorious monuments clearly helped to heal, but also to sharpen, the loss of everything that was Alexandria for the brothers Aciman. So, too, the very roughness and uncertainty of life on Via Clelia, its grinding awfulness and its flashes of beauty, evidently transformed this perpetually displaced teenage refugee into a writer who has become a consummate poet of sublime, fugitive moments.
Aciman suggests (though not in these exact words) that in many ways, Uncle Claude’s epithet “holy idiot” stuck with him for life. As a Jew of the diaspora, as the child of a deaf woman (who was also a proficient lip-reader), as a refugee from storied Alexandria, he experienced language, place, family, education, sexuality, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness in complicated mixtures that have given his writing its poignancy and its versatility, not to mention flashes of wicked humor. Uncle Claude gets his comeuppance when his two nephews notice that he is wearing nothing beneath his wide-legged shorts. The description of what they see on unintentional display is a vendetta as delightful for the reader of this remarkable memoir as the sight itself must have been for the beholders.
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In 1935, Berenice Abbott was photographing scenes for her monumental collection Changing New York when a male bureaucrat at the Federal Art Project admonished her. “Nice girls” didn’t venture into rough neighborhoods like New York City’s Skid Row, he said.
“Buddy, I’m not a nice girl,” the 37-year-old Abbott snapped back. “I’m a photographer … I go anywhere.”
Abbott is among an extraordinary array of “not-nice girls” whose work is now on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in an exhibition titled “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939.” The works suggest the dramatic differences among these expatriate American artists, writers, and performers who found their way to Paris from the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War II. Only some of these women—Black and white, straight and queer, wealthy and barely scraping along—knew one another, and each brought her own story to the city of art. But they had in common a fierce desire for freedom: from sexual repression, from racism, from the stifling social conventions they experienced to varying degrees at home. Abbott herself discovered her gift as a photographer making portraits of her contemporaries in Paris. “We were completely liberated,” she declared years later.
The artists range from African Americans like Loïs Mailou Jones and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, who were free to exhibit in the Paris Salon but lived in straitened circumstances, to white heiresses like Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks. The exhibition also shows the importance of formal groups: Barney’s salon on the rue Jacob, with its tucked-away garden and classical “temple of friendship,” attracted a glittering company of artists and intellectuals (not all of them women, though Barney’s writing and publicized love affairs made it clear that she had created a cult site for the celebration of lesbian love). The salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on the rue de Fleurus set a more sober tone, as revealed in Man Ray’s photograph of the two women surrounded by their art collection; that cult was dedicated to the most exacting experiments in modern art: the paintings of Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Juan Gris. “No American writer is taken more seriously than Miss Stein by the Paris modernists,” wrote Janet Flanner, who, under the pen name Genêt, became the recording angel of her peers’ artistic exploits in The New Yorker’s “Letters from Paris” from 1925 to 1975. Sylvia Beach’s visionary bookshop Shakespeare and Company provided yet another refuge where French and American writers could gather, becoming legendary when Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Stein described the lure of Paris in her story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” based on the artists Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire: “They were in a way both gay there where there were many cultivating something”—one of the earliest uses of gay to suggest homosexuality. Paris gave all these women a space where they could reinvent themselves and “cultivate something.”
Josephine Baker, 1926. Stanislaw Julian Ignacy Ostroróg, known as Walery (1863–1929). Gelatin silver print, 8 ¾ × 6 ⅜ inches. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
The spectacularly elastic singer and dancer Josephine Baker brought her own electrifying revolution to Paris in 1925, when she was just 19 years old. When Flanner wrote about Baker in one of her first “Letters,” she hardly knew what to make of the performer. In 1972, Flanner did penance for this incomprehension in the introduction to her book Paris Was Yesterday:
[Baker] made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood, like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instant of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater.
Baker almost steals the exhibition, so striking is her presence in the portrait by Walery, the pochoir lithograph by Paul Colin, the watercolor by José María Escacena, and other lively photographs and posters. In Walery’s picture, she’s dancing the Charleston, crossing her arms over her legs in the “bee’s knees” maneuver, her body’s geometry echoed in the Art Deco backdrop of skyscrapers and ocean liners, her smile a delirious triangle. Baker’s remarkable life story extends beyond the bounds of the exhibition. She danced across Europe, spied for the French Resistance during World War II, addressed the crowd at the March on Washington in 1963, was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur, and was inducted into Le Panthéon in a symbolic coffin (her body remains buried in Monaco).
Flanner—Genêt—emerges as another dominant figure in the exhibition. She knew everyone in Paris and picked up all the scuttlebutt, her New Yorker letters documenting 50 years’ worth of the city’s gossip and scandals, politics and cultural goings-on. Like so many of these women, she was a lesbian, first living in Paris with the writer Solita Solano, eventually leading a complicated life with romantic attachments to three women at the same time: Solano, the singer Noel Haskins Murphy, and the Italian broadcaster and editor Natalia Danesi Murray. Flanner’s story, like Baker’s, stretches far beyond this show. She spent World War II in New York writing on European politics, but in November 1944 she returned to Europe and hurtled around the war-ravaged continent reporting on Buchenwald (new corpses were discovered on the day of her arrival), the Nuremberg trials, and the masses of displaced and traumatized people. In 1958, she documented the Algerian crisis that brought France to the brink of civil war.
In the 1920s and ’30s, however, Genêt witnessed frivolity, not atrocity, and her early letters reflect this. Her rhythmic wit still stings. Describing how the demimondaine Liane de Pougy was “launched” at the Folies Bergères by the prince of Wales, Flanner wrote that the courtesan “sent a note saying, ‘Sire: Tonight I make my debut. Deign to appear and applaud me and I am made.’ He did and she was. Shortly after this, men began dying for her. She made suicide fashionable.”
Flanner dressed as stylishly as she wrote. Abbott fixed the iconic image of the writer wearing a top hat decorated with two Mardi Gras masks (the hat belonged to her friend Nancy Cunard’s father). Beneath their empty eye sockets, Flanner stares directly at the camera with an amused look that is somehow both whimsical and serious. She expresses complete and unrepentant self-possession.
Self-Portrait, c. 1932. Berenice Abbott (1898–1991). Gelatin silver print, 5 9⁄16 × 4 5⁄16 inches. National Por-trait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
In her self-portrait, Abbott gazes at us with mesmerizing eyes.
The more I gaze back, the more radically seen I feel, as if she were reading my soul. She’s a snake charmer. Her sitters must have felt this way.Abbott watched the expatriate Parisian world as searchingly as Flanner did, and a great deal that we know about it, we know from her pictures. Like Flanner, she came from the Midwest. Her father, like Flanner’s, committed suicide. But where Flanner’s family was shakily middle-class, Abbott’s skidded almost to destitution. Impatient for a more challenging artistic life, she left Ohio State University without a degree, bobbed her hair, and followed friends to Greenwich Village, where she survived on odd jobs, started sculpting, and consorted with the radical intelligentsia. She arrived in Paris in 1921 with almost no money but a mad faith that things would work out. And they did: Man Ray, whom she had known in New York, eventually hired her as a darkroom assistant for his flourishing photography business. She taught herself to take and develop photos and thus discovered her life’s work. She also discovered that she loved women. She began to frequent lesbian bars and had a few brief romances (including one with the American artist Thelma Wood and one with the Russian-Polish model Tylia Perlmutter), though she seems to have reserved her main energies for art, not for love. A cranky, determined visionary, Abbott soon set up her own studio. Her first solo exhibition in Paris, in 1926, presented portraits of contemporaries Djuna Barnes, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Marie Laurencin, and James Joyce, pictures that have become classics. One reviewer called her “the best portrait photographer in Paris, which is to say, in the world.”
In her self-portrait, Abbott gazes at us with mesmerizing eyes. The more I gaze back, the more radically seen I feel, as if she were reading my soul. She’s a snake charmer. Her sitters must have felt this way. “We cannot go on just looking at things on the surface—we must go deeper,” she said in a 1939 interview. With her pale, oval face, her dark bangs, her chin resting on her hand, she looks like a waif or a pixie. She had no family support, nothing to fall back on. She lived for and in her art. She was a purist, the seer par excellence of her era.
Sylvia Beach, 1928. Berenice Abbott (1898–1991). Gelatin silver print, 3 ¾ × 3 ⅛ inches. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
One of the people she saw was Beach, whose bookstore became a sanctuary for Abbott, too shy and poor to hobnob with Natalie Barney’s crowd or to frequent the Stein and Toklas salon. Brought up partly in Paris because her father had served as associate pastor of the American Church there, Beach returned to Europe during World War I to work for the Red Cross. Inspired by her friend (and future lover) Adrienne Monnier, who ran the French bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres, Beach opened her own store in November 1919, just as the armistice was signed. Beach, too, was a seer: she intuited which books would matter, supported authors financially, hosted readings in English and French. Shakespeare and Company became the Grand Central Terminal of international modernist writing.
Abbott’s photo captures Beach in an unusual pose and garb. With her dark hair cropped short and brushed back, a little wildly, from her wide forehead and firmly modeled face, Beach is seated, twisting to the left with her left elbow stuck out. She’s wearing a dramatic shiny black leather coat and a white scarf. She glistens with intellectual intensity. The woman who helped bring Ulysses into the world has no time for nonsense.
Spanning four decades, “Brilliant Exiles” charts rapidly changing conventions in art. Ethel Mars, one of the earliest of the “exiles,” arrived in Paris with her lifelong companion, Maud Hunt Squire, in late 1905 or early 1906. They were both professional illustrators who had been supporting themselves in New York. In Mars’s Woman with a Monkey, which she showed at the Paris Salon in 1908, she handles the postimpressionist idiom with aplomb. Probably a self-portrait, the painting presents a fashionably dressed young woman, seated, wearing an elaborate hat—a sculpture in and of itself, a dead bird hanging off one side. Mars toys with convention in this portrait as she did in life. The lady has a magazine-pretty face with symmetrical features and a pert nose. She holds a fan in her graceful hand, a nod to the popular Japonisme of the period and to Mars’s interest in Japanese prints. But the lady’s dark eyes smolder, she slightly bares her teeth, and both the bird on her hat and the monkey perched on a shelf just above her suggest an animal energy quite at odds with the sitter’s demure femininity. Mars, depicted in Stein’s story as “Miss Furr” (another animal touch), was both “regular” and “gay,” the two sly, playful words on which Stein built her portrait of Mars and Squire: “They did then learn many ways to be gay and they were then being gay being quite regular in being gay.” In her typically oblique way, Stein challenges her readers to think about conformity and nonconformity in queer life.
Woman with a Mon-key, 1908. Ethel Mars (1876–1959),.Oil on canvas, 42 ½ × 31 ½ inches. Springfield Art As-sociation of Edwards Place.
By the time Loïs Mailou Jones arrived in Paris in 1937, to study at the Académie Julian at the age of 32, modern painting had gone through the convulsions of Cubism and the postwar return to diverse forms of figuration. Jones had trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Designer’s Art School in Boston, and she had been teaching at Howard University. But she had been consistently hampered by racism and discrimination, finding limited opportunities to teach and exhibit her work outside historically Black colleges. In Paris, she said, she felt “shackle-free.” She painted with fervent energy; she became friends with French painters, especially Céline Tabary, with whom she shared expeditions in painting for years to come; her work was shown at the Société des Artistes Français and praised in the press. Her self-portrait, made on her return to Howard in 1940, is a far cry from Mars’s lady of 1908. Whereas Mars’s image declares elegance, sophistication, and a shade of fin-de-siècle naughtiness, Jones depicts force and determination. She has caught the spirit of Cézanne, simplifying planes and bending perspective. This woman stands boldly at her easel, her broad, powerful face glinting in bronze. Her cadmium-red blouse and loose blue jacket hold the foreground, and she grips a bunch of brushes in her right hand as if they were weapons. Behind her hangs a replica of her celebrated still life Les pommes vertes, which critics had admired in Paris, and in the lower left corner stand two African statuettes, the kind she had studied at the Musée de l’Homme. She holds her own. She has synthesized the style of the École de Paris with her African heritage and made a strikingly unified statement.
Jones’s work is preserved in major collections, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The sculpture of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet—who had Narragansett-Pequot as well as African-American ancestry—met a different fate. It is a tragedy that so little of it survives, since in her late years she was too poor to store it properly. She spent 12 years in Paris, arriving in 1922. She had graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, training she paid for by working as a maid. In Paris, where many artists were poor, her poverty also stood out; she often didn’t have enough to eat, and she was frequently sick. She seems to have been an obsessed solitary, utterly committed to her art. Not completely alone, however; she corresponded with W. E. B. DuBois, who clearly admired her, and other artists in Paris were aware of her, though perhaps wary of approaching her.
Self-Portrait, 1940. Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998). Casein on board, 17 ½ × 14 ½ inches. Smithsonian Ameri-can Art Museum. Bequest of the artist.
The two carved wood heads by Prophet in the catalog (though not in the exhibition) are works of majestic discipline. They can stand next to anything by Constantin Brâncuși. Both the narrow, androgynous Untitled (Head) and Congolais, the head of a Maasai warrior suggesting Prophet’s mixture of Central and East African styles, achieve a radical simplification of form while at the same time honoring an essential realism. In this delicate balance they resemble ancient Egyptian sculpture. In the exhibition, the mysterious sculptor is more present in images of her, rather than by her; a photograph from 1924 shows her in profile, wearing a loose patterned blouse and a string of beads, head slightly bowed as if in reverence to art. In another, she’s dramatically costumed in a pilgrim hat, high-collared coat, and the same heavy beads. Prophet’s work did win recognition in Paris; she exhibited regularly at the Salon d’automne and in 1929 at the Paris Salon, where a critic called her “one of the most expressive sculptors of her country and her time.”
Natalie with Vio-lin, date unknown. Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931). Oil on canvas, 78 ⅜ × 44 ⅛ inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in memory of their mother, Alice Pike Barney.
It wrenches the mind to turn from Prophet’s severe concentration to the extravagance of Natalie Barney’s salon. Bilingual, partly brought up in France, Barney created her dazzling center honoring lesbian love using the fortune she had inherited. It would have been impossible to launch a mission on this scale in the puritanical United States. Barney’s physical beauty was also extravagant, as was her erotic appetite: her long string of love affairs with famous and titled women makes for exhausting reading. Barney’s mother, the painter Alice Pike Barney, depicted her daughter in an astonishing manner—a full-length portrait exuding sensuality. The young woman sits enthroned, her famous Venetian gold tresses flowing over her shoulders and an almost papal, floor-length red velvet robe revealing, in radical décolleté, a Rubenesque bust. This model is not a sex object but a sex subject, fully aware of her powers. Her large, heavily lidded eyes look invitingly sleepy, her full lips invitingly soft. Perhaps Maman was imagining Natalie as Sappho, or a muse: she holds a violin in her right hand and a musical score on her lap.
The younger Barney wrote and published a number of books, mainly collections of poetry in English (and sometimes in French), verse of stultifying preciosity. “Ethereal vibrations / And soulful pulsations / Of song …” reads the poem entitled “Singing.” But her true works of art were herself and her salon. It’s a different story with the painter Romaine Brooks, Barney’s romantic partner of 50 years (along with her other “steady,” the Duchesse Élisabeth de Gramont). Abandoned by her parents and raised in poverty, Brooks inherited a fortune after her mother’s death in 1902. She knew early on that she was attracted to women and that she would be a serious artist. She established herself in Paris in the early years of the century, painting fashionable portraits that created a stir at her first solo show, at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1910. She adopted impeccable gentlemanly dress, as seen in her self-portrait from 1923. She’s the artist as dandy—slender, vertical, wearing a tightly fitted dark suit with the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur in the lapel, and a dark, androgynous hat that shadows her eyes. She has a long, narrow face; only her red lips suggest a feminine touch. Her hands are protected by gray gloves. The whole painting is keyed to tones of gray; she stands against a claustrophobic sky and a ghostly seaport.
Self-Portrait, 1923. Romaine Brooks (1874–1970). Oil on canvas, 46 ¼ × 26 ⅞ inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of the artist.
The American women who reimagined their lives in Paris from 1900 to 1939 were fortunate in their timing. They came just as Paris was incubating modern art for the world. As foreigners, they weren’t subject to the conventions of French bourgeois society, while escaping similar constraints at home. Some of them experienced the shock of the Great War, more or less indirectly, but they nearly all took part in the heyday of Les Années folles that followed. They not only made themselves, they also helped make modern culture.
“Brilliant Exiles” concludes with a second great shock, Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. Civilization takes centuries, and immense effort, to create. As we keep learning, over and over, it can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. This is the note in Janet Flanner’s letter from September 3, 1939. She called the war that had just been declared “a commonplace war” (little did she know!) but, she concluded, it “is only because of its potential size that it may, alas, prove to be civilization’s ruin.” Civilization, albeit forever changed, survived that war, as this radiant, defiant exhibition proves. Yet the show also warns us to cherish the freedoms that peace allows, and never to take peace for granted. l
The exhibition Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 is on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., through February 23, 2025. It will then travel to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville and the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens.The post Reborn in the City of Light appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “How Do I Love Thee” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared first on The American Scholar.
They are a baseball family, and they have a baseball rule: if you go to the game, you stay to the end. Always.
They are from St. Louis, so they are a Cardinals family. Even after they scattered and lived elsewhere, they remained a Cardinals family. Susan Perabo is now 55, a college professor in Pennsylvania whose major physical adornment—since she tends toward understated dress—is the wry smile that sneaks onto her face when she says something funny. Her 23-year-old son, Brady, is a Cardinals fan, though he has never lived in St. Louis. “We gave him no choice,” Perabo says. Her daughter, Chase, is less smitten, though Perabo thought she gave her no choice either. (Cue wry smile.) When they visit Perabo’s parents in St. Louis, days are organized around baseball games. The Cardinals are ingrained for life.
Perabo knows of only one breach of her family’s baseball rule. It happened before she was born, even before her father was born, on a day when her paternal great-grandfather went to a Cardinals game at Sportsman’s Park. He might have been alone. He was definitely without his wife, which might not be so surprising—in vintage baseball photos, you rarely see women in the stands. In the midst of play, fire broke out at his apartment building, a blaze significant enough to have been visible from the stadium. So he left for home. Ever after, when the next three generations of Perabos were at a game and saw people leaving early, they made the requisite comment: “Must be a fire.” Or, “Clearly an emergency.”
When she was growing up, Perabo accompanied her father, who worked in community affairs for Ralston Purina, to Cardinals games about six times a season, taking advantage of comped company tickets when available. Sometimes Perabo’s father brought along a business associate, and sometimes her mother or older sister went, but they didn’t love baseball the way Perabo loved baseball.
She loved watching it, and she loved playing it.
Though she is now a celebrated writer who has published four books of fiction, Perabo wasn’t the kind of kid who spent her childhood inside reading. She was always outdoors, playing baseball with the neighborhood boys. Eventually, she’d play baseball competitively, becoming the first woman to play NCAA baseball while an undergrad at Webster University. One day, her mother called weeping from a pay phone outside the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, because she’d just seen a plaque about Perabo in a “Women in Baseball” exhibit. No one from the Hall of Fame had mentioned the exhibit to the family.
As a girl, Perabo sometimes took her glove to Cardinals games. If a ball neared, she’d jump up for a catch. Others flinched or retreated. Her older sister was ball shy in this way, and Perabo always thought, “Oh, what a wimp.”
One afternoon when Perabo was about 13, her father came home from work and changed into his game clothes: red hat, red shirt, khaki pants. Then she and her father headed for the old Busch Stadium. They had company tickets that day, good seats to the left of third base, in the second section away from the field, but still fairly close in. As they sat, Perabo noticed four men chatting in front of her and her father. They were still in work clothes, though they had taken off their jackets and were loosening their ties.
Early in the game, a left-handed batter came up and, as Perabo puts it, “hit this screaming foul ball” to the opposite field. Sometimes, she adds, foul balls are “kind of loopy, and you have a chance to get under them” for a catch. Not this one. “You couldn’t even see it. It was so fast.” But she could hear it making a hollow sound on impact, as if hitting something hard. At first, she thought that something hard was her chest. Now she guesses she imagined this because fear knocked the wind out of her. Strangely at first, her father also thought the ball had hit her. In fact, it hit the head of the man sitting directly in front of Perabo, and he fell forward onto the concrete.
You could say a lot of kind things about Perabo’s father. He was funny and supportive, a wonderful dad with a profound ability to make others feel valued. But he did not have a talent for handling a crisis, at least not during the initial moments, perhaps because he was somewhat squeamish. When the ball landed, he was sitting to Perabo’s left. He stood to block her view of the injured man and twisted her away from the field. “Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,” he cried. But Perabo couldn’t help looking. She peered around her father and saw the man, lying face up. Now the physics of the memory puzzles her. How could he have fallen forward and landed that way, given the tight stadium rows? Perhaps his friends turned him over? His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t moving. No blood, just total stillness. Perabo thought he was dead.
For Perabo, the memory of this event, which happened more than 40 years ago, is at once fuzzy and sharp. “It seemed like everything stopped,” she recalls. “I don’t remember people—at least for a moment—rushing to do things, but they may have been. It just seemed like time was suspended. And that everybody was just frozen. And then probably he moved or opened his eyes. I don’t remember. But it became clear that he wasn’t dead.”
Not that he was well. Medics carried him out, though Perabo doesn’t remember a stretcher. Perhaps he was able to get to his feet and walk? Whatever the case, she knows he left, and his friends gathered their belongings and followed.
As for Perabo and her father, they stayed. Because of the family’s baseball rule. If you go to the game, you stay to the end.
There’s another rule of the game that applies not just to Perabo’s family but to everyone. The Baseball Rule, a doctrine that comes from the realm of U.S. tort law, holds that a ballpark or team is not liable for injuries suffered by a spectator who is struck by a ball if protected seating is on offer in the stands. The rule dates back to the 1910s, and as long as it has been around, such seating has been available, at least behind home plate—where netting protects vulnerable fans. Presumably if you choose to sit elsewhere, you assume the risk of getting hit. If the man who had been bonked on the head in front of Perabo was in a litigious mood, he had only to look at the back of his ticket to see a disclaimer—all baseball tickets have them, even electronic tickets, which have a “terms and conditions” link—recognizing that attendance at a game is voluntary and may result in personal injury, thereby absolving the team of any responsibility.
After the accident, Perabo was phobic about the ballpark, as scared of being hit as she was of reliving the panic and helplessness she’d experienced that day. At the next game, she and her father were in different company seats, but they were still good seats in foul ball territory. Perabo was on edge the whole game.
Her fear was hardly off base. People have been terribly hurt, even killed, by foul balls. In 1970, a teenage boy named Alan Fish died after being hit in the head by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium. Tragedy struck again in Los Angeles in 2018, when Linda Goldbloom, a 79-year-old Dodgers fan, was killed by a foul ball that hit her head. And it isn’t only fans who are at risk. On August 31, 2007, Cardinals outfielder Juan Encarnación was hit by a foul ball that crushed his left eye socket, thereby ending a successful career that had started when he was spotted playing in the Dominican Republic at 16. At the time he was struck, Encarnación was 31 and in the second year of a $15 million contract. Years later, a character in Perabo’s novel The Fall of Lisa Bellow, a high school baseball player, would suffer the same injury.
Encarnación’s disappointment, though, was nothing like what Tino Sanchez suffered. In a minor league game in July 2007, Sanchez hit a foul ball that struck and killed his coach Mike Coolbaugh, who was standing in the first-base coaching box. Sanchez’s teammates repeatedly told him that it was not his fault, but in a September 24, 2007, article in Sports Illustrated, S. L. Price quotes the grieving player as saying, “They’re still telling me that it was an accident, and that’s been very supportive. But whether it was my fault or not, literally I killed a human being.” About six weeks after the Sports Illustrated article ran, first- and third-base coaches in the major and minor leagues were required to wear helmets. Not that the new rule would have helped Coolbaugh, who was hit in the neck. The day before the accident, Coolbaugh and Sanchez had lunch together. Coolbaugh’s wife was pregnant with her third child, Sanchez’s wife with her first, and Coolbaugh was giving Sanchez advice, telling him that his life would never be the same again.
Well, true enough, but not for the reasons Coolbaugh thought.
Part of what frightened Perabo about the accident was how it had snuck up on her. She never saw the ball that struck the man, only sensed it coming. She thought she should have been paying better attention.
When her father bought tickets, they were farther away. But when they had Purina tickets, they got what they got, and Perabo kept quiet. She didn’t want to
worry her father or mess with the bond they shared over the game.She needn’t have been so hard on herself. Even adults don’t fare all that well in similar situations. On an April 2016 episode of HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, Gumbel and his producers asked community volunteers of all ages to sit behind a protective glass placed 75 feet from a machine that fired baseballs. The producers wanted to test whether fans did indeed have enough time to react to a foul ball coming toward them. They had asked Major League Baseball (MLB) to answer this question, but when their inquiries went unanswered, they turned to Washington State University’s Sports Science Laboratory, which specializes, as its website says, in “the dynamics of bat and ball collisions.” On air, lab technicians fired a baseball at 95 miles per hour toward the protective glass. A few people managed to react and raise their hands or duck before the ball hit the glass but not quickly enough to have blocked or dodged the ball altogether. And they were all expecting the ball—they knew they were part of an experiment. Those who were only slightly distracted by chitchat with Gumbel, a quick glance at a cell phone, or a mouthful of hot dog stood no chance. Without that protective glass shield, they would have been nailed.
When Perabo went to games in the months following the accident, she would watch every pitch with such intensity that she couldn’t enjoy herself. As soon as the ball left the pitcher’s hand, she would tense up, trying to focus on the exact moment of contact between ball and bat so that she could get out of the way if needed.
“Look out!” fans and announcers call when a ball is headed for the seats. Or, “Watch out!” And Perabo did. She and her father kept going to games, even though she was no longer enjoying herself. She let her father know that she wished they had seats farther away but was otherwise too embarrassed to confess her fears. When her father bought tickets—that is, when they didn’t have company seats—they were farther away. But when they had the Purina tickets, they got what they got, and Perabo kept quiet. She didn’t want to worry her father or mess with the bond they shared over the game.
A little more than a year after the accident, Perabo and her father received Purina tickets for the very same seats as on the day of the accident. Perabo’s fears had waned some in the preceding months, but when she realized where they would be sitting, she became as anxious as ever. As she and her father settled in, they saw the man who had been injured the previous year sitting in front of them. He was with three others. Perabo wasn’t sure whether his companions were the same men as before, or whether this was the first time the man had been back since the day of his accident, but the others clearly knew the story, because they were gently teasing him, saying, “Hey, we’re going to look out for you.” And, “We’ll protect you.” Perhaps the man who had been injured hadn’t been hurt all that badly? Would they have been poking so much fun at him—and would he be so good-natured about it—if he had been?
Even though they were relaxed, Perabo wasn’t.
Early in the game, a left-handed batter hit a foul ball. Not a sharp line drive like the previous time, but a looping, arcing fly ball—the kind Perabo dreamed of, because you could catch it if you got your mitt under it. Other fans knew this, too. Perabo stood. Her father stood. Her whole section of the stadium rose. Typical in-the-stands behavior for a towering fly. The only person who Perabo didn’t see standing was the man right in front of her: the man who had been bonked on the head. He was sitting, legs apart, a modest manspread, and he was holding a Coke or beer or some other drink in one hand. The ball traced a perfect arc and landed in his lap.
His friends went crazy. Perabo’s father likely made some comment—they felt so in on the moment. The former victim was (in Perabo’s memory) quiet. Not laughing as his friends were. There’s a saying in baseball: The ball will always find you. If you’re nervous, if you aren’t ready to play, if your head’s not in the game, the ball will invariably be hit in your direction. For Perabo, however, this startling coincidence didn’t feel inopportune: “It felt like the baseball gods were giving him a gift” and also giving her a gift in the form of a message, which was, “Don’t be afraid anymore. The odds are so slim that you will be badly hurt by a ball. Most of the balls that come at you are not going to hurt you. And in fact, most of them are going to come like this, and they’re going to be those loopers that you have a chance to catch.” This sounds so much like a metaphor for life (if you’re an optimist), but Perabo didn’t go that far. She just felt she could go to baseball games again, and she did. And does. Without fear. She still occasionally thinks about the possibility of being injured, but not with the emotions she once had.
In one sense, she was right: the odds of being badly hurt at a baseball game are slim. But that doesn’t mean that foul balls aren’t dangerous. Alan Fish, Linda Goldbloom, Juan Encarnación, Mike Coolbaugh, and Tino Sanchez are all reminders of that.
When a 13-year-old girl was killed in 2002 by a hockey puck, the National Hockey League reacted immediately, requiring higher netting behind goals and higher Plexiglas above the sideboards. By contrast, decades would pass following Fish’s death in 1970 before MLB would act. The league added netting only incrementally and initially not all that much of it. Such netting was always required in the area behind home plate, but most serious injuries occur along the foul lines. And each ballpark was left to decide how far to extend the netting beyond home plate.
Enter Andy Zlotnick, a New York Yankees fan whose own experiences with foul balls led him to change the face of American baseball.
Zlotnick’s first foul ball story is the fun one. In 2008 or 2009—he can’t remember the exact year—he was high up in the Yankee Stadium stands, under the awning on a rainy day. A foul ball managed to bounce on the stadium stairs in such a way that he caught it in the crook of his elbow. He then unbent his arm so that the ball could fall into his son’s hands. A sweet moment, though not particularly newsworthy. Not like the next time.
On August 25, 2011, Zlotnick was at another rainy Yankees game with his son, though now sitting fairly close to the field, when a ball slammed into his face, crushing his left eye socket and shattering the left side of his face. If you’re inclined to gore, you can Google the quite disturbing photos of the injury and subsequent surgery.
Zlotnick is a lawyer, though not a particularly litigious one. He’s general counsel and executive vice president at a New York City real estate development company. Still, given the trauma of his experience and the five-hour reconstructive effort to rebuild his eye and place titanium plates in his cheeks to hold his face together, he wanted to speak to Yankees president Randy Levine after his surgery.
He had two requests. First, he wanted the Yankees to ban umbrellas during games—a third of MLB stadiums at the time forbade them because they blocked views of both the game and anything that might be flying toward the seats. Not the Yankees, though. Zlotnick had been behind an umbrella when the ball hit him and had not seen the ball coming. Second, he wanted the Yankees to pay his out-of-pocket medical costs, which amounted to $25,000. Levine seemed amenable to both asks and gave Zlotnick his cell number, even inviting him to spring training. When nothing had happened by the following January, Zlotnick was back in touch. Levine now told him that his “insurance folks” had advised him not to change the umbrella policy or to pay the bills. It was clear to Zlotnick that the Yankees “had lawyered up.” (Levine did not respond to repeated requests for his take on this incident.)
A year later, Zlotnick was still in significant pain, with partial numbness in his mouth, double vision, and retina damage. Reluctantly, he decided to sue the Yankees. As his case moved through the justice system with all deliberate torpor (as my father used to say about many administrative proceedings), Zlotnick was becoming increasingly aware that his accident wasn’t as “freak” as he’d supposed. Among the many horrific injuries he learned about: a woman whose head was impaled by a splintered baseball bat at Boston’s Fenway Park.
Up until 2014, there were no publicly available figures related to foul ball injuries. If MLB officials kept such statistics, they weren’t sharing them. They were saying they were concerned about fan safety, but as MLB executive John McHale told David Glovin of Bloomberg News, “There is no epidemic of foul ball damage yet that would warrant some sort of edict or action by the commissioner’s office.”
Remember, hockey did not need an epidemic to act. Just one unacceptable death.
Even if the word epidemic was inaccurate, foul ball injuries, when they did occur, were becoming increasingly severe. At newer ballparks, stands are often closer to the playing field (to give fans a more intimate experience of the game) and players are stronger, hitting balls harder—exit velocity stats have become increasingly valued by players, coaches, and front offices. Balls could be coming toward a spectator’s face at 100 miles per hour.
What changed in 2014 to make injury statistics available? That’s the year Glovin and Bloomberg News released some numbers, based not on MLB stats but on their own informed estimates. Glovin had talked to ambulance drivers, victims, lawyers, and others with firsthand knowledge of fan injuries, and he knew that public hospitals, which operate first-aid booths at ballparks, had to have records, even if they didn’t want to share any numbers. So Glovin filed a Freedom of Information Act request. He determined how many people had been treated at first-aid booths at three ballparks over select years and factored in data from a 2000 lawsuit filed by a fan against the Boston Red Sox and from a two-year study of injuries at Camden Yards in Baltimore. After consulting mathematicians about the accuracy of his methodology, Glovin published his findings in Bloomberg News: 1,750 people a year, he wrote, suffered injuries serious enough to warrant treatment. That figure got the attention of reporters, who now began referencing it repeatedly.
Glovin’s work did not help Zlotnick in his lawsuit, which was initially dismissed in 2014, then rejected on appeal in 2017, thanks to the Baseball Rule. But although Zlotnick couldn’t do anything about his personal situation, he now had a mission: to raise awareness of the number and severity of fan injuries. He sought advice from Raymond Bonner, a writer for The New York Times and The New Yorker who lived in the same Upper West Side apartment building as he did. Bonner told Zlotnick to contact Joe Nocera at the Times. That sounded good to Zlotnick. How would he do that? “Andy,” Bonner said, “he lives right upstairs from you.”
Meanwhile, Nocera was on a mission of his own, looking to change his fortunes at the Times. As he tells it, “I’d been kicked off the op-ed page by my boss and sent to the sports department, which I wasn’t that happy about. I was going to write a sports business column, they told me. I was trying to figure out a rock ’em sock ’em first column. I’m walking across Broadway at 88th, and Ray Bonner is walking in the other direction.” When Nocera told Bonner about his predicament, Bonner advised him to talk to his neighbor Andy Zlotnick.
Nocera (and pretty much everyone who reports on the issue of foul ball injuries) calls Zlotnick the hero of this story, and he very much is: a dog with a bone who took on what he refers to as the Sports Industrial Complex. Nocera asked Zlotnick whether he was advocating for extended netting. Zlotnick hadn’t actually thought about it till then, but he answered, “Maybe I am.”
In November 2015, Nocera wrote a long story in the Times about Zlotnick, and the article (along with Glovin’s 2014 Bloomsberg article) did result in a change: a recommendation (but not a mandate) from MLB that ballparks extend the netting behind home plate 10 or 12 more feet in both directions.
That was okay but clearly not enough.
Zlotnick kept up his nonstop outreach. He knew how busy journalists were, so he tried to make it easier for them to cover fan injuries by providing the information they needed for their game reports. He compiled an annual Foul Ball Injury Fact Sheet, with links to his sources. He got in touch with other victims so that they would not feel (as he had) alone in their misfortune, and he shared the stories of those affected.
And finally, after much persistence, Zlotnick persuaded producers at HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to cover the issue. An April 2016 episode told Zlotnick’s story while addressing the question of whether the fan experience would be diminished by more protective netting. To find out, Real Sports traveled to the Tokyo Dome, where almost all fans sit behind netting. Those who don’t want to sit behind netting can purchase “excite” seats, which come with a helmet, a glove, and a warning about the danger. Most important, the episode featured a wide spectrum of those affected by injuries, from broadcasters describing how chilled they were by all they’d seen to players crossing themselves, tearing up, or taking a knee in horror as they waited to find out what happened to someone they had hit.
Why was Major League Baseball so dead set against adding netting? Why resist, given the grievous injuries? Apparently, the thinking was that fans wouldn’t like it, that it would take away from the experience of the game, that those who bought the close-up, expensive tickets would be particularly aggrieved.
Reporting on a game he watched behind netting in 2016, Nocera wrote, “There is no question that it felt a little less intimate. And though the mesh was thin, it wasn’t invisible. It took me a few innings to get used to it. But it was like wearing glasses with a new prescription: It wasn’t long before I stopped paying attention to it.”
There were some high-profile complaints. Author Stephen King was particularly voluble, asking in a Boston Globe op-ed when protection becomes overprotection. Even as he referenced some hideous injuries, including the death of 14-year-old Alan Fish, he wrote that almost 74 million fans attended MLB games in 2015. So why require a change, given that the odds of being hurt were so low? “There’s something almost ludicrous,” King wrote, “about wrapping America’s baseball stadiums in protective gauze when any idiot with a grudge can buy a gun and shoot a bunch of people. I’d much rather see some action taken on that little problem.”
King’s reasoning astounds me. First, this isn’t an either-or situation. And yes, the risk of getting hurt at a baseball game may be relatively low for you as an individual, but doesn’t it matter that 1,750 people, including children, are going to be on the short end of those odds?
In September 2017, again at a Yankees game, New York third baseman Todd Frazier’s foul ball hit a two-year-old girl in the face. “Oh, no,” the TV announcer said. “It’s a little kid. Oh, boy. A real little kid.” The victim was at the game with her grandfather, and she almost died. “This time,” Nocera wrote in a February 1, 2018, op-ed for Bloomberg, “Andy didn’t have to sound the alarm; there were immediate calls for the Yankees—and all the other holdouts—to add netting.”
After that incident, many teams extended netting to the ends of the dugouts, but, that, too, was not enough. So Zlotnick lobbied local legislators. Illinois senator Dick Durbin had seen the episodes of Real Sports and had already been urging MLB officials to do more. In a 2019 op-ed in USA Today, Durbin quoted a constituent—Chicago Cubs outfielder Albert Almora Jr., who could barely speak after his foul ball fractured the skull of a two-year-old girl at a game in Houston—as saying, “I want to put a net around the whole stadium.” After Zlotnick read that op-ed, he reached out to Durbin, then arranged to bring injured fans to meet with the senator in D.C. Durbin subsequently contacted team owners and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to urge them to do more to protect fans.
And more was being done. Additional ballparks were extending their netting beyond the dugouts—half had gone all the way to the foul poles. But half still hadn’t. Finally, facing increasing pressure, MLB made an announcement. On December 7, 2022, extensive protective netting would be required at all major and minor league parks. Unless the configuration of a given ballpark obviated the need, netting had to go to the foul poles. Zlotnick, as Real Sports producer Nick Dolin says, “changed baseball history.”
If you’ve been at an issue for a long time and seen no change, it’s hard not to despair. The baseball issue has some parallels with the gun issue. The Baseball Rule was written more than 100 years ago, when the dangers in ballparks were different than they are now. Shouldn’t the law (and even precedent) take into consideration the passage of time? The Constitution was ratified 237 years ago. Arms then weren’t what arms are now, and yet the right to bear arms remains almost completely inviolate.
Ultimately, Zlotnick believes he lost the battle (his personal court case) but won the war. Now it is relatively safe to go to a baseball game, and Zlotnick does not need to maintain a foul ball injury list to share with media outlets. Not that relative safety means Zlotnick is ready to root, root, root for the home team. “My injury was one of the most painful, negative experiences in my life,” he has written, adding that the love and support he received for his public advocacy and support of other victims “vastly outweighs all that pain and suffering.” A statement that strikes me as perhaps overly gracious.
In the summer of 2023, Zlotnick went with his guitarist son to Citi Field (home of the New York Mets) to see Dead and Company, the band composed of former Grateful Dead members. He otherwise had not been to a ballpark since the day of his injury in 2011. Zlotnick says, “We were sitting in the outfield, and I looked up from our seat, and there’s the netting. I started to tear up. I realized it’s here. It’s really here.”
In 2023, Webster University celebrated Perabo and three other notable alums in the documentary film Untold Stories: Webster Women Speak. The school also asked the Cardinals to invite Perabo to throw out the first pitch for one of the season’s final games. The Cardinals said yes. “Of course,” Perabo wrote me in an email that fall,
I freaked out. The whole family freaked out, especially my dad and my son, Brady. Brady became my catcher and I started practicing. On September 30, I went to St. Louis, did the whole backstage thing at Busch Stadium with my dad and Brady, then threw out the first pitch and watched the game with family and friends—and here’s the part you’ll love—from seats behind the netting on the third base side.
I had not chosen the tickets. The Cardinals sent them to me. As soon as I got them, of course I looked to see where they were, and I was like, holy crap. Then—you’ll love this part, too—I immediately Googled, “Where does the netting end at Busch Stadium?” and happily discovered that it ended beyond our section … so no fear! AND, when we sat down, after the pitch and everything, my dad points a few sections to the right and says, “That’s the section of the old ballpark where we were when the guy got hit.”
Two months later, in December 2023, another postscript email arrived in my inbox, this one from Andy Zlotnick: “Bryant Gumbel is ending his show HBO Real Sports after 29 years and said on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday that getting netting extended in MLB ballparks is one of his biggest victories. And they used a clip of me. Can’t believe it. Took so long to convince any journalist that the story was real and newsworthy, but eventually it caught on, got legs and made some ‘good trouble,’ as John Lewis once said.”
That is: the kind of trouble that can redeem the soul of America or, in this case, the soul of America’s game.
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I am not the first person to consider a tree a friend. The Giving Tree, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Secret Life of Trees, just to name a few books, are testaments to the reciprocity between trees and humans. I recall a friend from Israel who would speak at length of his childhood, of how he would sit beneath a fig tree and be blessed by the shade of its foliage and by its fragrance—the sweetness of earth and fruit and sunlight. He was clearly moved by the memory. And I think of my friend the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who has written about her Palestinian father longing to grow a fig tree in the back yard of every home the family lived in when she was growing up in the American South. The nationalities of the two men are not lost on me. The figs that each would have enjoyed grew on opposite sides of a boundary. I, too, am somewhere in that story: when I was a young girl, I lived briefly in war-torn Beirut.
It is simple to love a tree, to savor both its boughs and the fruit it offers. And though it doesn’t bear edible fruit, my tree friend is the coastal redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. It is tall and stately. Not one to offer low branches to climb, the redwood seems to have been made for a scale outside––and beyond––that of humans. Mature trees can reach a height of 300 feet and a width of 27 feet, and are protected by fire-resistant bark. The scent that rises when the sun hits that bark is nearly inextricable from everything around it: California bay, poison oak, nettles, blackberry. And yet, I think I can distinguish its signature in the blend. Warm. Earthy. Ample. When I walk through a redwood grove, as I sometimes do in the mountains near my home, I feel as though I am walking through a 2,000-year-old church, arches reaching up into the heavens.
At the entrance of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a diagram of a split section of trunk shows us how old that particular redwood was. Look closely at its rings, each representing a year of its life, and you know the tree had been around since the colonization of the North American continent, the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, even the birth of Jesus.
Mature trees are protected by fire-resistant bark. The scent that rises when the sun hits that bark is nearly inextricable from everything around it. And yet, I think I can distinguish its signature in the blend. Warm. Earthy. Ample.When visitors come from abroad, I ask whether they would like to go see the redwood trees. And if I am far from home for any length of time, I find myself describing the redwoods to a new friend, or even a stranger. When you are in a distant land, there are many ways to ease your homesickness. You might prepare some of the dishes you are accustomed to, or listen to some of your favorite music, or buy some familiar flowers at a market, but you cannot conjure up a tree, especially one that grows in a fairly limited range—in the case of the redwood, this extends from southern Oregon to California’s Santa Lucia Mountains. My mother, who was born on the island of Barbados, lived for decades in Half Moon Bay, on the foggy crescent of coast below San Francisco, and tried in vain to grow a casuarina tree in the corner of her yard. It’s a lovely tree, easy to find in Barbados. A pine-like tree with long, draping needles and curved branches. Think willow mixed with your favorite Christmas tree and you’ll be in the right neighborhood. Needless to say, the tree did its best but suffered. It thinned a bit more each year. It would never look like the trees from home, and though she knew this, my mother couldn’t bring herself to cut it down.
I have thought about moving to other places, farther south or north, but always wonder what I would do without the redwoods, whether I could ever truly adjust to their absence. How the trees will fare with the ever-hotter seasons is a question that scientists are observing, and one with a discouraging outlook. But I can’t help but hope we will keep overlapping, the redwoods and I, in this narrow band, for whatever time we both have left.
I’d like to think these trees know me, and I speak to them as confidants, as friends. Perhaps it’s because, as a child of immigrants, I am not surrounded by older relatives. Perhaps because I am simply drawn to the company of their steadfast presence. Whatever the reason, when I come home from traveling, I go to the redwoods to pay my respects. I sit in their silent circles. I let them know I’m home.
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Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul by Rowan Jacobsen; Bloomsbury, 288 pp., $28.99
Your meal at Hank’s Oyster Bar, a small seafood chain in the Washington, D.C. area, always ends in something sweet, even if you don’t order dessert: a petite glass bowl loaded with chunks of dark chocolate, a gift from the house. As with most gifts, you don’t ask questions. You just savor the morsels, as the chocolate crumbles and slowly melts, releasing buttery, subtly fruity flavors across your tongue.
This brief moment of bliss, however, is not free of guilt, as I learned recently after asking Jamie Leeds, the chef and owner of Hank’s, about the source of her treats. These nuggets of dark chocolate are made by Callebaut, a large Belgian company that blends beans from three countries, including Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where farmers have mercilessly altered the landscape to become the epicenter of cacao production. As journalist and author Rowan Jacobsen writes in his latest masterwork, Wild Chocolate, “The land where these farms were being cleared was rainforest, much of it in ostensible preserves, but there was nobody to mind the store. Today, Ghana and Ivory Coast account for two-thirds of world production, a huge amount of it from supposed preserves, and their forests are essentially gone.”
The sacrifices that Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have made to become world leaders in cacao production are many: not just rainforests, but genetic diversity (and the loss of flavor associated with their preferred hybrids) and even basic human decency. Millions of Africans collect about a dollar a day, Jacobsen informs us, to grow the beans that are transformed into our chocolate pleasures, which assuredly cost more than farmers earn for their daily labor. What’s more, according to the U.S. government, more than 1.5 million children still work in the cacao industry in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, despite repeated pledges from Big Chocolate to end the practice.
Jacobsen doesn’t let you, me, or the rest of the Western world’s chocoholics off the hook for this sorry state of affairs. “The real villain was the market,” he writes, “and the fact that rich nations were happy to let these struggling young nations liquidate their natural and human capital at the lowest possible price.” If Wild Chocolate sounds like a plodding indictment of Big Chocolate and the people who prop it up, rest assured that Jacobsen also has a better, more hopeful, story to tell. But to tell it, he has to provide some history to explain how a beloved indulgence—one hopelessly intertwined with love, joy, and sex—masks a multibillion-dollar industry rooted in human exploitation and environmental destruction.
The backdrop helps you appreciate the overlapping stories that Jacobsen lays out, each focused on an outlier who has struggled to reclaim parts of a chocolate industry lost to a commodity system that values price and plausible deniability above all else. Jacobsen introduces us to fearless souls who hack their way through jungles in search of wild cacao trees that established chocolate professionals thought had been extirpated. They’re often enterprising souls, too: do-gooders who want to cut out the many middlemen between the farmer and the consumer, bringing more transparency to chocolate lovers and more money to cacao farmers.
Jacobsen doesn’t let you, me, or the rest of the Western world’s chocoholics off the hook for this sorry state of affairs. “The real villain [is] the market,” he writes.Jacobsen takes us on a trip to Bolivia to meet Volker Lehmann, a German agroforestry expert who harvests wild cacao in the Beni lowlands of the Amazon, now understood to be ground zero for chocolate, not Mesoamerica as previously thought. Lehmann purchased a 13,000-acre parcel packed with cacao trees—land later discovered to be part of the ancient Casarabe civilization—and somewhat reluctantly entered a specialty chocolate trade that, he would soon learn, could be as cutthroat as that of the big boys.
Jacobsen meets up with other pioneers in the bean-to-bar movement, the chocolate equivalent of farm-to-table. We are introduced to Emily Stone, an American who uprooted her comfortable life in Boston to move to Belize and build a thriving specialty export business good for chocolatiers, consumers, and farmers alike. We spend time with Luisa Abram, who quit medical school to devote her life to the wild cacao of the Brazilian Amazon, harvesting the pods and transforming their seeds into exquisite chocolates. We learn about the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund, a nonprofit organization that identifies and preserves endangered cacao varieties.
Along the way, Jacobsen and his sources have encounters with wild animals, bloodthirsty insects, and mysterious locals, sometimes armed, who aren’t always thrilled at the idea of losing the cacao trade to white interlopers. These adventures, on the river and in the jungle, seem to have had an effect on Jacobsen: he repeatedly lapses into the first-person plural, as if he had moved from neutral observer to active participant in the process of reporting his book. He also tells stories mostly from the point of view of the entrepreneurs, not the farmers, who, I suspect, might have a different tale to tell on the bean-to-bar movement.
The greatest appeal of Wild Chocolate comes in its slow, page-by-page seduction. After absorbing Jacobsen’s prose about bars produced from wild cacao—he describes a Juruá chocolate from Luisa Abram as having a “perfume, like jasmine blossom, but also tropical fruit notes, and really beautiful herbals”—you can’t help but want to try some yourself. So one afternoon I spent more than $50 on a one-pound bag of Felchlin dark couverture chocolate, made from Bolivian cacao, which tasted of caramel, nuts, and stone fruit.
This, I thought, is the price not just of superb chocolate, but of supporting a nascent industry that cares as much about people and the environment as it does profits.
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Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death by Susana Monsó; Princeton University Press, 264 pp., $29.95
Tahlequah gave birth to a daughter in July 2018. The infant lived for only half an hour, but for 17 days, across more than 1,000 miles, Tahlequah would not let her baby go. The mother carried her infant’s corpse halfway across an ocean, balancing it on her snout to prevent it from sinking—a feat all the more impressive since, as an orca, Tahlequah had no hands, and her newborn calf weighed hundreds of pounds. The story of the bereaved orca went viral, inspiring poems, essays—and debates about how, or even whether, animals understand death.
The study of this provocative topic is a new field, known as comparative thanatology, and the subject of philosopher Susana Monsó’s new book, Playing Possum. The discipline traces its origin, Monsó tells us, to another, equally moving incident. In 2008, at a rescue center in Cameroon, an elderly chimp named Dorothy died. To show the other 16 resident apes what had happened, two staffers slowly pushed a wheelbarrow containing Dorothy’s corpse past the apes’ enclosure. The normally noisy, active chimps stared at the body in solemn silence. A photo published in National Geographic prompted a number of researchers to pool observations of other animals’ reactions to death, launching this new field of inquiry.
Comparative thanatology nestles within another young branch of study: the philosophy of animal minds, Monsó’s field of expertise. Until relatively recently, some scientists and philosophers were loath to admit that animals even had minds. Scientific journals initially rejected publishing Jane Goodall’s groundbreaking 1960 observations that chimps used tools (the first animals other than humans reported to do so). Editors accused her of anthropomorphism because she named her study animals rather than numbering them like rocks.
Today, those editors would be criticized for their anthropocentrism—the false assumption that humans alone possess thoughts, feelings, and intrinsic value. Monsó points out that now “there is a huge and growing quantity of studies in comparative psychology that show that many nonhuman species are capable of making inferences, remembering the past, anticipating the future, planning, innovating, adapting to changing circumstances, and many other behaviors that in us require some form of thinking.” One after another, animals have crossed many Rubicons supposedly separating humans from the rest of animate creation.
Do other animals have a concept of death? What does it really mean to understand it? And how can we know what animals may be mentally experiencing in these circumstances? Sometimes animals’ reactions to death—like those of Tahlequah and Dorothy’s chimpanzee comrades—look so much like ours that it seems impossible to conclude they aren’t grieving, much in the same way we do. And why shouldn’t they? Placental mammals share 90 percent of our DNA.
But at times, behavior may be misleading. Burying the dead, for example, was long held to be unique to Homo sapiens. Until recently, when careful reexaminations of excavated skeletons and archaeological records proved otherwise, not even our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, were thought to have done so. Yet ants (as well as bees) systematically carry away and often bury their dead. Ants will also come to the aid of endangered sister members of their colonies. (Male ants do little else than fly and mate; females do not help them when they are hurt.) Monsó describes an experiment in which researchers trapped ants under sand with nylon snares. Other ants diligently dug in the sand and pulled on the victims’ legs to get them out. When that didn’t work, they chewed through the nylon thread to free them. Rather than thinking and feeling, the ants seemed to be “offering a pre-programmed response to a chemical stimulus,” writes Monsó. Struggling ants give off a chemical call for help; dead ants give off a different odor, from oleic acid. Drop some of the latter on a live ant, and her comrades will carry her away to the ant graveyard—despite her vigorous protestations.
By the same token, animals that behave in ways unlike us in the presence of death may be misunderstood or overlooked. Monsó describes a German shepherd who ate chunks off his deceased human’s face and neck—despite the presence of a nearby bowl half-full of dog food. There have been more than a few such incidents in coroners’ reports. Yet, Monsó notes, comparative thanatologists pay no attention to this interesting and not uncommon reaction. Why? The answer is what Monsó calls “emotional anthropocentrism”—which she importantly defines as “presupposing … the only way of emotionally reacting to death is the human way.”
We find the German shepherd’s menu choice here unsettling. Most humans don’t eat the faces off their dead, but that doesn’t mean the dog didn’t love its owner or wasn’t upset by the death. By licking its owner’s face, the dog was probably trying to revive him, and was surely disturbed when that failed, Monsó writes. Anxious dogs frequently self-soothe by nibbling and gnawing, explaining many a shredded rug and chewed shoe. And often, as veterinary surgeons know well, dogs swallow what they have chewed.
Because we don’t like death, we humans turn our backs to it. Though every human dies, it is rare for people in the developed world (apart from combat military and medical professionals) to watch someone do it. Monsó wisely reminds us that animals have a lot more experience. Most wild animals die before their first birthday, often in front of a parent. Predators have to cause other animals to die; prey animals regularly witness the death of others of their species.
Other animals’ understanding of death may be different from ours, but perhaps theirs is, in some ways, wider and deeper. This riveting book—often surprisingly uplifting, sometimes even funny—will enhance and expand our understanding of how other minds may apprehend one of life’s greatest mysteries.
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Eight years ago, painter Paolo Arao was invited to be a visiting artist with the Fibers and Materials Studies program at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. A curator there prompted Arao to transform three of his paintings into a tapestry using a digital Jacquard loom, which can take images uploaded from a computer and turn them into textile art. “It completely changed the trajectory of my work,” Arao says. “It was this fascinating moment where, in my bones, I felt like I should have been working with textiles all along.” Arao has been creating tapestries ever since, and a dozen of his works were recently part of a solo exhibition, Devotion, at the David B. Smith Gallery in Denver.
- Étude (Breakers), 2024, hand-stitched cotton thread, pieced + sewn cotton + denim, hand-woven cotton, wood frame. 12 x 9 inches. (Photo by: Chromatics Studio NYC.)
- Étude (Constellation), 2024, hand-stitched cotton thread, pieced + sewn cotton + denim, hand-woven cotton, wood frame, 12 x 9 inches. (Photo by: Chromatics Studio NYC.)
- Nocturne (Olive), 2024, hand-stitched cotton thread, pieced + sewn cotton + denim, hand-woven cotton, wood frame, 14 x 11 inches. (Photo by: Chromatics Studio NYC.)
While researching for Devotion, Arao (who was born in the Philippines) learned that Indigenous Filipino cloth patterns were individually designed to offer spiritual protection to whomever is holding or wearing the textile. Each work in the Devotion series depicts one of Arao’s friends or family members, complete with characterizations of the subject’s personality. Étude (Mandarin) represents Arao’s husband, whose favorite color is orange. “Years ago, he made this comment about why I never used orange in my paintings, and he was absolutely right,” Arao says. “After that, I started introducing orange into everything that I made, even if it was just a little speck of orange hidden somewhere, because it’s like, I’m doing this for you.” As Arao constructed these portraits during the winter, hand-stitching by the light of his fireplace, the name of the exhibition became clear to him. “There’s so much happening inside each of these works, an immense world encapsulated on such an intimate scale,” he says. “Making something by hand requires patience and love and care, and I wanted to put all of that into these pieces. It became a devotional act.”
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On June 1, 1800, an 18-year-old Henri Beyle stole off to a concert. His army unit, bringing up the rear of Napoleon Bonaparte’s main force, had just arrived in Novara, a Lombard town about 20 miles to the west of Milan. Although the soldiers were mostly buoyant, the locals, suddenly hosting the French troops, were apprehensive. Beyle’s commanding officer, worried there might be violence, warned his men not to wander the streets at night. Armed with a sword he had never used, Beyle ignored the warning and set off for the town’s modest opera house.
That evening’s production of Domenico Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio segreto, or The Secret Marriage, was as opulent as the setting. The soprano, it seems, was not bothered by a missing front tooth. Neither was Beyle. The performance, he later recalled, was a “sensation I will never forget.” Having encountered “the divine Cimarosa,” everything the teenage Frenchman had until then done and known—even risking his life in crossing the Alps and encountering cannon fire—was now “coarse and base.” Suddenly, he was filled with a “sublime happiness”—so sublime, in fact, that for the time being, he foreswore describing it for fear of committing exaggerations or falsehoods.
Beyle’s life would now veer in a direction from which he would sometimes stray, but always return: “I had just glimpsed where happiness lay.” Back in his army camp that night, Beyle took a vow: “I must first live, see the world, and become a worthy soldier. After a year or two, I will return to music, my only love.” That promise made him feel “renewed,” perhaps even reborn. From this point on, both the vow and music itself became “the basis of all [his] thoughts.”
And so would music remain for Stendhal, the most lasting of the hundreds of pseudonyms Beyle would adopt and discard during his life. Of course, Stendhal’s international renown today rests on his two greatest novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, but during his lifetime his fame and, at times, his infamy issued from his nonfictional work: biographical and musical writings. In fact, this year marks the 200th anniversary of his book that fused both genres: La Vie de Rossini. This quirky life of the Italian operatic composer Gioachino Rossini offers precious insights not only into the life of its author but also into why so many of us feel like the Stendhal who confessed, “Without music I could not live.”
In La Vie de Rossini, Beyle declared that music was still waiting for the arrival of its Lavoisier—the brilliant 18th-century French chemist and biologist—“the genius who will eventually submit the whole system of the aural nerves, and indeed the human heart itself, to a series of accurate scientific tests and experiments.” Legions of Lavoisiers have since arrived, busy mapping the place where music reigns.
The striking thing about musical activity is that it lights up every region of the brain and every neural subsystem known to scientists. (Since a typical brain contains 100 million neurons, it seems likely that one or two subsystems are yet to be discovered.) Most important, connections between the frontal lobe and the cerebellum are in constant communication. The latter harbors the emotions ignited by music, while the former scrambles to process and structure the sounds. These connections, observes the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “run in both directions, with each structure influencing the other.”
Yet more intriguingly, Levitin cites recent research showing that intense musical emotions are tied to regions like the amygdala and frontal cortex, which form “the brain’s award system”—namely, the unleashing of dopamine. In his own studies, Levitin found that listening to music—just about any kind of music—sparks rewarding and reinforcing functions in our brains by both increasing dopamine levels and regulating emotions. What occurs, he writes, is a precise “choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.” If you’ve got rhythm and if you’ve got music, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve also got your girl or guy: you already have the makings of an intense emotional experience.
Beyle was a miserable musician—the fault, he claimed, of his father, who “had all the prejudices of religion and aristocracy,” and who vehemently prevented him from studying music when he was 10 years old. “At sixteen,” Beyle recalled, “I learned successively to play the violin, to sing, and to play the clarinet. Only in the last way did I manage to produce sounds which gave me pleasure.”
Yet his passion for music was boundless. As he blurts in his Memoirs of an Egotist, the “only things I have loved passionately in life are Cimarosa, Mozart, Shakespeare.” The first two great loves were contemporaries. But this is where things turn curious. You know the name Mozart, but most likely not Cimarosa. Don’t worry: few people today know the name Domenico Cimarosa, fewer have heard his music, and those few, thanks to the lilting sigh of its opening movement, probably know only his Oboe Concerto in C major.
As for Cimarosa’s many operas—he composed more than 80—they are rarely revived, apart from Il Matrimonio segreto, or The Secret Marriage. First performed in Vienna in 1792, the sprightly two-act comedy soon became a staple across Europe, including at the Théâtre Italien, created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1801. The opera drew larger audiences in Paris than Mozart’s efforts. Later, no less a figure than Giuseppe Verdi believed that the opera had “everything a comic opera should have.”
Today, Il Matrimonio segreto is, at best, a historical curiosity that opera companies, if only to vary their repertoire, periodically dust off and perform. As the opera critic Joseph Kerman pronounced, a few composers “rose above the banalities of their condition—after years in the galley”—namely, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Mozart, and Verdi—with dozens instead going down with the galley. For Kerman, Cimarosa is among the drowned.
And yet, Beyle heard something in Cimarosa’s music, something true and compelling. If we take him at his word, he attended more than 100 performances of Il Matrimonio segreto in Paris. Beyle and his contemporaries emphasized Cimarosa’s light touch and antic spirit—traits that seemed so true to the Italian character. If only we could hear a Cimarosa aria the way Cimarosa’s contemporaries did. After all, social and aesthetic conventions change over the years, and composers thought to be as inspired as Mozart are judged by later generations to be as insipid as Salieri.
Il matrimonio segreto was the first piece of music Beyle heard after crossing into Italy. Later in life, when he recollected that moment of supreme happiness, one that bordered on an epiphany, he had a soundtrack to accompany the images and emotions. Even if the soprano was missing not one but two front teeth, the music would still fit the singular moment of happiness that Beyle experienced and never stopped recalling. Music—and its meaning—happens when sound meets the mind. The mind, in turn, is shaped by countless social, cultural, and material factors. Our temporal lobes, moreover, work only with what they are given, but what they are given must fall within the horizon or gently nudge against it. If the sounds are too unfamiliar, they will strike us as mere noise.
But there is also a more complicated fact, one that brings us closer to why music was so important to Beyle. The older he got, the shallower Cimarosa seemed to him. If you heard one of his melodies, Beyle came to believe, you heard them all. Beyle even expressed astonishment that delirious audiences demanded not one or two, but five encores of the same aria from a Cimarosa opera: “It’s a terrible flaw: once we know several of his songs, we can predict how those we’ve yet to hear will develop.” The time had come for someone new to push the horizon and point toward the future. Beyle did not have to wait long.
“Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna. From Paris to Calcutta, his name is on every tongue. The fame of this hero knows no bounds save those of civilization itself.” Rossini was only 32 when Beyle penned these opening lines to his life of the composer. Though he would live another 44 years, this world-historical figure had already tossed off nearly all his enduring works. (And though Beyle was already 41, he had yet to write the books for which he is remembered.)
The musicologist Herbert Weinstock dismissed Beyle’s book as little more than a “psychological self-portrait of its author, a parade of enthusiasms and detestations.” But this is the very reason why Beyle’s book fascinates: it is less about the Italian composer than the French writer. By the time of the book’s publication, Beyle was associated with the dilettanti, a group that, depending on one’s perspective, was either respected or ridiculed for its behavior at musical performances. As Beyle makes clear in the book, a member of the dilettanti was immediately recognizable: “Lost in his private and ecstatic universe of contemplation, anger and impatience are the only reactions that he is likely to manifest towards the importunate intrusions of other people—towards anyone who is rash enough to come between him and the rapture of his soul.”
This state of rapture was a thing to behold. “His mouth,” Beyle writes, “will gape half-open, and every feature will bear traces of intolerable enthusiasm—or, rather, will seem utterly drained of the last thin drop of vitality; his eyes alone may give some insight into the fiery recesses of his soul, and even then, should anybody chance to advise him of the fact, he will bury his head in his hands, so desperate is his contempt for other people.”
It is easy to smile at this portrait of such odd and outlandish behavior—I suspect Beyle was smiling as he wrote it—but he knew that it also represented something important about how listeners were responding to the new kind of music they beheld. Rossini’s music, with its technical brilliance, with its sheer power and range of sonorities, overwhelmed Beyle. He praised Rossini as a composer of genius, one who “flings down whole handfuls of new ideas with careless condescension, sometimes hitting his mark, sometimes missing altogether; his music is a jumble, a conglomeration, an indescribable profusion of negligent luxury, all thrown together pell-mell with the incautious profligacy of inexhaustible wealth.” It fired the imagination of the listener, who was free to conjure up images in the mind that may not necessarily have been intended by the composer.
Curiously, Beyle was far more attracted to operatic than instrumental performances. In fact, he positively disliked the latter, complaining that “difficult and boring concertos are everywhere.” Music had a deeper and more enduring effect on the listener, he argued, when conveyed by words, with instruments serving only as accompaniment. The one advantage to instruments, he scoffed, is that they can produce greater volumes of sound than the human voice. Otherwise, “the human voice still maintains its superiority over any instrument yet invented.” For Beyle, the value of any instrument was directly proportionate to its voice-like qualities.
The Frenchman carried this logic to its end by concluding that the words in an opera’s libretto themselves hardly matter; instead, “the inflexion of the words is of far greater importance.” And, as far as he was concerned, no one did inflexion like the Italians. Here was a language that hewed to human feeling closer than other language. Take a young Italian—indeed any young Italian, so long as his “whole being is preoccupied with some imperious passion,” and he will invariably burst into song, choosing “among all the tunes he knows, the one which seems most aptly to echo his own mood.”
Thus Beyle’s claim, while describing Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri, that words do not suffice to do it justice. “But how on earth,” he sighs, “are you to start explaining this to fools who understand nothing but the libretto?” Though I qualify as one of those fools—my nights at the opera are spent with my eyes bolted on the surtitles—I think I understand Beyle’s claim. When I listen to, say, Angelika Kirschlager’s rendition of Bach’s “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” from the St. Matthew Passion or Lucia Popp’s account of Strauss’s “Beim Schlafengehen” from the Vier Letzte Lieder, I confess that, though I have read the texts in translation, I still do not know the meaning of the individual words. And yet, I also know that I am deeply moved by the music. So much so that, like Stendhal, “I dare not say what I feel because I’ll pass for a madman.” The vocal music of Bach, Strauss, and Brahms—whose choral work Nänie, based on a poem I don’t know by Schiller, always brings me to a stop—always conjures moments in my life that made or remade me.
Of course, high Baroque or late Romantic vocal music does not have a monopoly on this effect. I know that my youngest child Basil’s emotions are galvanized by The Deftones’ “Be Quiet and Drive”—not by the words themselves, nearly incomprehensible when sung, but by how those words are sung by the group’s vocalist, Chino Moreno. I was stunned by the song when I first heard it, hammered by the clatter of guitars and wails of Moreno. When we are driving somewhere together and the song is playing, and I spy Basil gazing out the window, clearly moved, neurons and images connecting, I see what Beyle meant by the promise of happiness.
The post Nights at the Opera appeared first on The American Scholar.
After the pandemic, which in Spain led to an immediate three-month house confinement, weekend cottages on a parcel of land were in high demand. So were camping vans. Where before you’d hardly noticed any at all, you now saw them everywhere, and VW vans were the ones most in evidence, both the kind that came factory-fitted for camping, and the utility vans that could be turned into campers for much less money. To convert a utility van into a camper, you could buy one of the many kits available online and do the work yourself, or you could take your van to a garage specializing in making and installing to-order inserts. It was the second possibility that a friend of mine with a new VW Caravelle was leaning toward. I went along one morning when he visited a business making customized models, from basic to luxury. The business was set up in a corner of an enormous garage specializing in farm machinery, and the man in charge of the new sideline was Miguel, the son of the garage owner. When we arrived, we saw a young man we guessed to be Miguel in the glassed-in office, busy with a customer, and so we waited in the foyer.
When the young man stepped out with his client, he greeted us and said if we’d give him a minute to finish with the client, he’d be right with us. It was exactly the kind of greeting you’d expect in that situation, but within the standard phrasing is lots of room for variation in delivery. This fellow’s manner hit the middle ground between officious and ingratiating, a good place. He seemed to be in his mid or late 20s, and was neither tall nor short, not muscular but not frail, and not handsome but nice enough looking. He wore a black hoodie and his left arm was in a sling, a glove on that hand. When he returned to us, I noticed that the whole arm, shoulder down, seemed thin. The glove he wore was loose over his hand, which appeared shrunken, like his arm. He had a long, wide scar on his neck, five inches of it in view before it disappeared inside his collar. It seemed likely there was a connection between the scar and the arm. Was there a connection too between the damaged limb and his highly confident manner?
We spent about 45 minutes with Miguel, talking about options, costs, materials, and principles of construction. Particle board was no good, plywood was fine. A sink and plastic water reservoir with a pump and a spray attachment on a hose were cheap and easy, and if you wanted hot water, you could either use the fuel for the van or an electric heater running off an extra car battery. A stove with a gas line was asking for trouble, but a gas camping stove was easy, cheap, and safe. I nodded at everything he said. After we left, I turned to my friend and commented that the guy impressed me as knowledgeable and forthright, and my friend agreed. He’d as good as decided to give Miguel the job.
“I wonder what happened to his arm,” I said as we drove away, back along the coast toward Gijón. I often felt I needed a third hand for manual tasks, but I believed Miguel would have no trouble with just one hand. He had operated his phone perfectly, cradling it against the injured left arm and using his right hand to work it. “Did you notice the scar?” I inquired, but my friend hadn’t.
“Would you rather lose an arm or a leg?” I next asked.
“An arm, don’t you think?” my friend said, and I agreed, even though I use my legs only for getting from one spot to another, whereas I use my arms and hands all the time. So why my answer? Because I had watched Miguel manipulate handles, drawers, loose hardware, and his phone, all with no difficulty. I had viewed the enormous panel van he had fetched from the Netherlands and was converting into a camping van for himself and his girlfriend. One-armed work didn’t seem impossible. It didn’t even appear difficult. In high school, I knew a student who had a hook for a hand. He liked to surprise new acquaintances by holding out his hook to shake. Until he did, often these people did not even know that he was missing a hand. Once, at an airport coffee shop, I’d stood in line with a man who had two hooks, yet managed to carry away his coffee with no difficulty. In contrast, although many people adapt beautifully to a prosthetic leg, I have never encountered such a person. And without witnessing someone else rise to the challenge, I doubted I would be able to myself. Cut off my leg, and I’ll collapse. Cut off my arm, and I’ll summon thoughts of Miguel. Including the puzzle of how he drove his new van from the Netherlands all the way to Spain with one working hand and the other tucked inside a sling against his chest. How indeed! Though he has essentially only one arm, he did not bring the van home single-handedly, but with his girlfriend—his other right hand. Maybe even his better right hand.
The post The Challenge appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Nâzim Hikmet’s poem “The Cucumber,” translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Cucumber ” by Nâzim Hikmet appeared first on The American Scholar.
At this year’s Olympics, the men’s gymnastics team made it onto the podium for the first time since 2008, winning bronze thanks to stunning overall performances and a perfect routine from Stephen Nederoscik, the Pommel Horse Guy. Team USA’s stars have, for many years now, been on the women’s team, with Simone Biles the most decorated American gymnast in history. But there’s one record Biles hasn’t beaten yet: the six medals that George Eyser won on a single day in October 1904—which he managed to do on one leg. How this incredible athlete accomplished his feat—and how much else has been forgotten about him besides his disability—is the subject of Joshua Prager’s Summer cover story for The American Scholar, “A Forgotten Turner Classic.” Prager, himself disabled, traces what little we know about George Eyser, from his troubled childhood in Germany to his new home in Denver, Colorado, from his incredible 1904 wins to his devastating 1919 suicide.
Go beyond the episode:
- Read Joshua Prager’s cover story, “A Forgotten Turner Classic
- Meet the Team USA’s 2024 bronze winners
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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The post Going for Gold appeared first on The American Scholar.
In my early 20s, having received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, I sought to cobble together a living by teaching. Although I had taught an undergraduate class as part of my fellowship, I hadn’t yet published a book, so the only such work available to me was intermittent and, often, unconventional. I spent the first summer after I graduated not working with words but performing the same kind of maintenance and handyman tasks that had helped pay for college—this time for the university from which I had just received an expensive degree. Some of the rooms I cleaned and refurbished had recently been vacated by the students I had just taught.
As my summer maintenance work came to an end, I found a part-time job teaching creative writing at the state prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. Twice a week, I’d drive to Max, as the maximum-security facility was known, a three-story gray-brick building that was topped by an imposing green cupola and surrounded by razor wire. It had been built in the 1870s and expanded several times since, but little seemed to have changed since the 19th century except for the gates, which were now operated by electricity. I would park behind a chainlink fence and, upon entering the building, place everything except my teaching materials in a locker. Then I’d present my credentials to the first of many guards whom I would encounter on any given day.
The inmates were suspicious of me at first, asking whether I was there “to observe the animals” or betting that I would simply stop showing up, as had so many of their previous instructors. The prison officials did their best to contribute to this attitude, telling my students that I hadn’t arrived that first day, when I was already sitting in the classroom waiting for them, or deliberately delaying me so that I would be late. Sometimes they would ignore me when I presented my teaching ID; other times, they would let me through one set of rolling, barred gates, only to leave me trapped before the next set of gates while the warden wandered off to get a cup of coffee. But I persisted. And though the inmates gradually began to accept that I could be relied upon and didn’t have a hidden agenda, I was still a puzzle to them.
“You talk funny,” one man said to me.
“Well, I’m from South Africa.”
“What the hell you doing in this dump?” he asked.
I explained that I earned $20 an hour doing this gig and needed the money.
Before I started working there, my girlfriend had visited the prison with the previous instructor, thinking she might take the position. She had been advised to say she was married, and she wore her grandmother’s ring as proof. (She passed on the job after a warden and the writing instructor regaled her with lurid details about the crimes some of the men had committed.) When one day I inadvertently referred to her as my girlfriend, one of the guys yelled out: “That chick, A—, who came here with Wacky Joe? She said youse guys were married.”
“Yeah, I know. She did that so no one would hit on her.”
They seemed happy that I gave an honest answer, though one man told me: “You tell your girlfriend that it ain’t nice to lie to people.”
A beefy prisoner wearing a coat that resembled a duvet, enhancing his resemblance to the Michelin Man, added: “You’re smart. I wouldn’t let my woman hang around this riffraff.”
The classes took place in the educational wing, its sparse collection of books—mostly dictionaries and an encyclopedia—earning it the title of prison library. The wing was run by an affable and intelligent guard who clearly cared about the inmates; he had bought them a coffee urn with his own money and done what he could to liven up the area under his charge. He was also a former Golden Gloves boxer who would occasionally challenge an obstreperous student to step in the ring with him, and the inmates treated him with respect.
The previous teacher (the one they called Wacky Joe) had distributed copies of a short-fiction-anthology-cum-manual by one of my own teachers at Brown: R. V. Cassill’s Writing Fiction. I continued using the anthology for a while, and I gained some cachet by arranging a visit from the anthologist himself. I also brought stories that seemed suitable for brief in-class assignments, having realized that many of the inmates were hyperactive and had short attention spans. My prompts were intended to allow someone to write a poem or anecdote in 20 to 30 minutes. For example: “Write a tall tale, where you present something obviously untrue in a way that makes it believable.” This was a favorite exercise, since the inmates had already read Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” I also suspected that they had practice coming up with plausible falsehoods. One writer invented a clever explanation for his lack of hair: he’d been attacked by bald eagles while hiking in the Sierras—the eagles had needed hair for their nests.
One day, I brought in a favorite book on teaching poetry—Kenneth Koch’s I Never Told Anybody—and said that I would like to share some of the responses from a workshop that my girlfriend and I had conducted in the local old-age home.
“You teach in an old-age home?” said Angel, a powerfully built man who was in for bank robbery. “Boy, that must be depressing.”
I looked around at the barred windows of the educational wing, probably the nicest space in the whole prison. “I suppose,” I said, “but poetry can make you forget your surroundings.”
“Nothin’ can make me forget these surroundings,” Angel muttered. “But, geez, sitting around in one of those places, waiting to die.”
Louis, a lean older man, snorted. “You think this is different, Angel?” He had been on death row until the Rhode Island Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. He was also a good deal smarter than most of the other inmates and didn’t mind letting them know it. Louis wrote stark, accomplished poems that would have gotten him into any MFA program in the country, but he was dismissive of the value of his own talents. His usual comment on the published stories we read was, “Bullshit! Just another scam.”
I read a poem by an elderly man in our workshop at the old-age home. It described the death of his mother when he was five. He and his father had embarked on a journey by donkey cart lasting several days until they got to a town with enough Jewish men to form a minyan.
For once, Louis was impressed.
“This guy is, what, 100 years old, and he still misses his mom?” he said. “That’s something.”
There often weren’t enough copies of the anthology or handout to go around, so I generally read a story aloud before we discussed it. One day, I opened a book at random and said, “How about Sartre’s ‘The Wall’? That’s a good story.”
Angel, whose biceps were as thick as my calves, snatched the book out of my hands and declared, “I’ll read it. You’re always reading to us, and I’m tired of it!”
At least two other men in the room had been on death row. And here I had chosen a story set in the Spanish Civil War in which the narrator, Pablo, and his companions are passing the night, waiting to be shot in the morning.He read aloud in a steady monotone, like a diligent middle-schooler, his voice free of emphasis or inflection. He rarely paused, just read steadily with the same weight on every word, sweat making his head gleam even more than usual. I had time to observe the other men’s faces and wondered if I’d made a big mistake. At least two other men in the room, aside from Louis, had been on death row. And here I had chosen a story set in the Spanish Civil War in which the narrator, Pablo, and his companions are passing a slow, terror-filled night, waiting to be shot in the morning.
The story delves into their involuntary physical changes as the hours pass—they know that death is imminent, and their bodies react to the knowledge of their fate no matter how hard they try to think of something else. Sartre dwells on the condemned men’s hatred of the doctor who is observing them, a man who will go home to his familiar comforts in the morning, enjoying food and drink and a soft bed after the narrator and his comrades have ceased to exist. As Pablo says,
My life was in front of me, shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a beautiful life. But I couldn’t pass judgement on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing. … Death had disenchanted everything.
There was absolute silence in the room other than Angel’s droning voice. The men stared fixedly at him; even Louis had dropped his habitual air of bored abstraction. There was none of the restless moving about, the fidgeting, the jumping up to refill a coffee cup, nothing to suggest that I was in a room full of students with limited attention spans. I had last read the story for a college philosophy course, our discussion remaining abstract and centering on the ways in which the narrative illustrated the principles of existentialism. We were young, and the thought that death could be imminent and should inform how we live meant little to us. Now, Pablo’s words rang true—I had understood nothing.
“The Wall” has a surprise, O. Henry–style ending. The narrator is kept alive and waiting while each of his companions is taken outside and shot. After a while, he is led into a room where two officers ask him about the whereabouts of an important revolutionary figure, Ramon Gris. Pablo knows where Gris has been hiding but has no intention of revealing the truth to his captors. He no
longer cares about life or death, and out of this indifference, just for laughs, he makes up a different location and watches with amusement as the officers prepare for a task he is sure will be a waste of time. Unbeknownst to him, Gris has left the safe house and is now hidden in the graveyard digger’s shack in the cemetery, the very location Pablo identifies. Gris is killed in a shootout with Franco’s soldiers.
After reading the final sentence, Angel hurled the book across the room.
“Goddamn it,” he yelled. “I hate that stupid ending. Listen, Teach, you better get hold of this Sarter dude and tell him to come up with an ending that isn’t a pile of horse crap.”
An inmate known by the state he was from, Tennessee, slammed both his fists on the table and shouted, “Why’d he do that? Why’d he ruin it?”
Louis looked at me with his cold killer’s eyes, watching me react to the men’s anger and adrenaline. There would be no talk about “craft” today, just a visceral response to feeling cheated.
“It was good until that last page,” Louis said. “And then …” He shook his head. “Bullshit. Another scam.”
The post Bards Behind Bars appeared first on The American Scholar.
In Spain, white wine is vino blanco, but red wine isn’t, as you’d expect, vino rojo. Instead, it’s vino tinto. Tinted wine. If you arrange to meet with friends before lunch to have something to drink, you’re having a vermú, an aperitif to stimulate your appetite, even if you don’t order vermouth but rather a beer or a soft drink. “Shall we stop and have something?” you might say to a friend. “It’s the vermouth hour.” “Yes, let’s go for a vermouth,” your friend answers. Un vermú. If your friend is not Spanish, but Colombian, she’ll laugh merrily and likely agree to stop, yes, but for a tinto.
“A tinto?” I repeated when my new friend proposed meeting for a tinto. Calling the hour of the aperitif the red wine hour was really no stranger than calling it the vermouth hour.
She smiled wisely. Then explained that in Colombia you meet for a tinto, not a vermú, though a tinto is coffee, not wine. You can, however, have whatever you want, just as in Spain. Okay. Tinto isn’t tinto but coffee, and meeting for a tinto isn’t meeting for coffee, but meeting for an aperitif. A little convoluted, but not impossible to understand. “No, no,” corrected my friend. “In Colombia, you meet for a tinto any hour of the day.” She added that in her country, people are always ready to share a moment with friends.
I think I have it down.
But no, not yet. Because a tinto, coffee, isn’t coffee as in Spain, but more like an infusion, coffee grounds steeped with other substances to make a drink that is lighter, sweeter, and richer than coffee. Colombian coffee is the best in the world, she explained, meaning both the bean and the drink made from it. And where, I wondered, do you go to drink it? Not to a bar, which is a general word for an establishment serving drinks and some light food, or to a café, a similar place but probably offering pastries as well as sandwiches, but to a tienda, a shop. A shop in the vein of a general store, a meeting place. Such multipurpose establishments were once common in Spain, as well, but are ever harder to encounter.
Once I had all that straight, I asked my friend, who immigrated to Spain two years ago to secure a better future for her children, what other differences she’d noticed between her homeland and her new home. In Spain, she quickly replied, everyone is equal, and no one looks down on you because of your education or job. In Colombia, a doctor is a person of importance whereas a street cleaner is not. Social distinctions are more important there than here, she explained. My friend has a master’s in administration, but in Spain she would have to work in a bar, or as a house cleaner, or as a caretaker for an elderly person, and she had expected her work to influence how people received her. It was not so. And really, why should it be? “I clean my own house without pay, I can certainly clean someone else’s for pay,” she told me. Her parents had died at 63, but she certainly knew how to take care of old people. She knew how to prepare food, and she was ready to do that as well. Her children were ready too. And so it was: with provisional papers and temporary work permits, all the family members, mother and three children, were now working. No one cared what the work was.
Which brought her to another difference between Spain and Colombia, which is how passive the youth are about working to get ahead. Why work when you can sign up for unemployment benefits? Why struggle when you can get aid from the government? She appreciated the welfare state, was here because of it, yet deplored how youth let the opportunities provided by the state replace those they could secure through hard work.
“Hmmm,” I answered. Spain has high unemployment. Not everyone finds work so easily. We both had smartphones, so it was easy to check on my assertion. Spain’s unemployment is 12 percent, higher than any other European Union country. For youth it is much higher than that.
“Exactly!” People don’t work because they don’t want to was her view. Mine was a little different. How to explain myself? While I was thinking, I sipped my tinto: not vermouth or coffee or a glass of wine but a clara, half beer and half lemonade. Then we thought some more about the positive and negative, the good and the bad. We didn’t agree on every topic, but we agreed that meeting for a tinto was a fine thing.
The post Un Tinto appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads David Gewanter’s “Stick the Landing.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Stick the Landing” by David Gewanter appeared first on The American Scholar.
“My art is about exploring the unknown,” says painter Marlana Stoddard Hayes. “How do we maintain our sense of optimism through indeterminacy? Our world has some very dark spaces in it, and the throughline in my work is learning to navigate through darkness.” Stoddard attributes this quest to her having been adopted as an infant and going through adolescence without knowing her biological parents. “At two or three years old, I started drawing on the walls of the family house, and my energy got ahead of my mother,” she says. “She would clean the wall, and a drawing would appear again. I just couldn’t stop.” Stoddard eventually went on to study at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she cites calligrapher Carl Kurtz and lithographer Bill McKim as two of her biggest influences.
- Autumn Garden, 2018, 48 x 24 inches.
- Alluvium, 2023, each panel 20 x 20 inches.
- Remembrance, 2024, oxides, plant waters and leaves on hosho, mounted to panel.
Stoddard creates pigments from plants in her garden, mixing them with oxides and salts to create textured whorls on Japanese mulberry paper. These paints change color over time, “constantly evolving,” she says. “They’re alive, and you can see the movement of water. You don’t have any control over it. And I like seeing that, too — there are aspects of our world that we cannot control.” Stoddard is no stranger to the twists of fate: for the past 14 years, she has battled leiomyosarcoma, a rare form of muscle cancer. One of her pieces, Darmera Pertalta, addresses the turmoil of daily chemotherapy treatments, the painted blooms mirroring the shape of Petri dish–grown organisms that eventually become cancer-treating drugs. Living with the unknown has also taught Stoddard about hope—and how to grapple with an uncertain future. “I’ve learned that my body is exceedingly strong,” she says. “I’m just thankful. And my artwork helps me to cope with going through this; you’ve got to use your creativity and your own mind to keep your body going.”
The post Marlana Stoddard Hayes appeared first on The American Scholar.
Greek myths were among my favorite stories when I was little, thanks to Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s charmingly illustrated (and thoroughly sanitized) collection of retellings for children. When I was older, Edith Hamilton’s nonfiction and Mary Renault’s novels introduced me to the society that invented those myths. In my teens, I read The Iliad and The Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s poetic English renderings and was swept away by their epic accounts of heroism and adventure. Several decades later, however, I began to have mixed feelings about these literary cornerstones. While I was reading the myths to a son not long past his toddler years, it occurred to me that the Greek gods were in essence all-powerful, immortal two-year-olds: willful, focused exclusively on their own desires, inclined to wreak havoc when thwarted and enraged. That realization amused me at first, until I thought about the fact that the havoc wrought by the gods included war, famine, and human sacrifice. The myths depict a violent, unpredictable, and fundamentally unjust world that the ancient Greeks apparently accepted as a given. Rereading The Iliad a few years ago, I was struck by it less as a masterpiece of poetry (which it is) and more as an emblem of a brutal military culture.
I am clearly not the only one to have had these thoughts in the past two decades. Since 2005, when Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad gave Odysseus’s long-suffering wife a tart voice and a skeptical view of his fabled travels, some two dozen novels have retold various Greek myths from feminist perspectives. In 2023 alone, new books by genre veterans Natalie Haynes (Stone Blind), Jennifer Saint (Atalanta), and Claire Heywood (The Shadow of Perseus) were joined by debuts from Costanza Casati (Clytemnestra) and Lauren J. A. Bear (Medusa’s Sisters) along with reissues of Katharine Beutner’s Alcestis and Jessie Burton’s Medusa. This summer brings Saint’s fourth novel, Hera, and in December, Booker Prize–winner Pat Barker will come out with The Voyage Home, the final volume in her trilogy about the Trojan War. Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles and Circe, is at work on a novel about Persephone.
Looking at ancient tales through a contemporary lens may offend some guardians of classical culture, but philosopher Simon Critchley argues in Tragedy, the Greeks and Us that this is precisely what Greek dramatists of the fifth century BCE did. “Tragedy arises at the point when a gap opens up between the new legal and political thought of the democratic city on the one hand, and mythic and heroic traditions of the archaic past on the other,” he writes. “The hero has become a problem and heroism has become a problem, a vast question mark.” Critchley has articulated a fundamental issue that spans millennia.
The writers retelling these ancient Greek stories make up a varied group. Barker’s trilogy continues her career-long preoccupation with the effects of violence on individuals and society. Haynes, who began her professional life doing stand-up and has a long-running BBC radio show featuring comic routines about ancient Greeks and Romans, salts her books with earthy humor. She and Barker employ blunt, deliberately nonmythic prose, whereas Miller and Bear favor more lyrical styles. Saint and Heywood imbue their characters with contemporary personalities and motivations that are certainly anachronistic but make for vivid emotional drama. All these authors, meanwhile, imagine internal lives for their protagonists that are absent from the myths themselves. They also insist on the gritty realities of rape, plunder, enslavement, and murder—not for them the simple, romanticized accounts of gods falling in love with mortals and heroes fighting over a beautiful woman or performing glorious deeds. They want to make sure we see everyone in these ancient tales, not just the heroes and the gods.
Riffing on the famous opening words of The Odyssey (“Sing, muse”), Haynes has an exasperated Calliope exclaim, “If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him.”And they have an explicit quarrel with the male poets who minimize or demonize women’s actions. Saint’s Atalanta is furious about being left out of most accounts of the Argonauts’ adventures and reduced to a maiden tricked into marriage with a few dropped apples. Bear, meanwhile, takes greater consideration of the Argive princess Danaë’s feelings in Medusa’s Sisters. In myth, Zeus takes the form of a golden rain shower, which falls on Danaë and enters her womb, resulting in the birth of Perseus. In Bear’s telling, the eldest Gorgon, Stheno, wonders whether Danaë actually welcomed the golden rain: “I’m sure no poet thought to ask her.” In her 2020 version of the Medusa legend, Athena’s Child, Hannah Lynn concludes mournfully, “Medusa’s truth was lost, and all that remained was the story of monsters and heroes, though the world would never truly know which was which.” Casati’s Clytemnestra knows that she will be reviled as a husband killer while Agamemnon’s murder of their daughter will be glossed over as a necessary sacrifice: “But it doesn’t matter. She was there. She knows songs never tell the truth.”
In these novels, women tell their own stories. Many of them are written in the first person, and almost all the rest are told from a woman’s point of view. (Notable exceptions are The Song of Achilles, narrated by Achilles’s male companion Patroclus, and Barker’s Trojan War novels, which alternate a first-person account by Achilles’s enslaved concubine Briseis with portions told from several male points of view.) Riffing on the famous opening words of The Odyssey (“Sing, muse”) in her account of the Trojan War’s aftermath, A Thousand Ships, Haynes has an exasperated Calliope exclaim, “If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him.” The muse continues, “I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. … They have waited long enough for their turn.”
Critiques of male violence and the glorification of war are underpinned in several novels by the acknowledgment that men are also victimized by this culture.Heroes get decidedly short shrift in these stories. “Really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas?” Penelope inquires in A Thousand Ships. (Haynes’s sharp wit is on full display as Penelope’s initially loving letters to Odysseus grow irritable and then infuriated the longer he’s gone and the more she hears about his sojourns with sorceresses and goddesses.) In the first paragraph of The Silence of the Girls (the opening volume of Barker’s trilogy), Briseis calls Achilles—lauded by bards as the quintessential Greek hero—“the butcher.” Later, after Troy has fallen and Achilles’s son Pyrrhus is lionized for killing King Priam, Briseis comments, “You might be forgiven for wondering how many honours a teenage boy deserves for having hacked one frail old man to death.” The fabled warriors of myth are universally portrayed as men who measure their glory in piles of corpses and the verses that immortalize their feats. Perseus is “a vicious little thug” (and none too bright) in Haynes’s Medusa reboot, Stone Blind. Multiple novels depict Agamemnon hungering for Troy’s riches long before Helen runs off with Paris. In Amanda Elyot’s The Memoirs of Helen of Troy, for example, Helen remarks that Agamemnon used Greek patriotism “to conceal the shabby, all-consuming self-interest and thirst he shared with men for more: more land, more power, more goods, more slaves.” Odysseus gets some credit for choosing a smart wife, but we are reminded in several novels that he’s a serial adulterer who, upon his much-delayed return, doesn’t just kill the suitors plaguing Penelope but also orders his son to hang the 12 handmaids who had sex with them—not exactly a voluntary activity for female servants in ancient Greece.
Rapes and coerced marriages are givens in the world of myths, but such events are no mere afterthought for these contemporary writers. In Clytemnestra, Casati provides a backstory often elided by ancient sources: Clytemnestra was made to marry Agamemnon (to further her father’s political ambitions) after Agamemnon murdered her first husband and son. After Briseis’s city falls to the Greeks in The Silence of the Girls, she and the other women are paraded in front of the soldiers so that they can be parceled out as war trophies. Precisely what this means is made clear in the bitterest rejoinder to the cult of honor and male pride to be found in any of these novels. When Briseis hears Priam pleading with Achilles to return his son Hector’s corpse (“I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son”), she says: “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.” As for all those tales of sex between a god and a mortal romanticized in Renaissance paintings, Katharine Beutner’s Alcestis—no saintly, self-sacrificing wife here but a mouthy disrespecter of received wisdom—can speak for all these fed-up females: “An accepted path. A god saw a beautiful woman, desired her, raped her, and left her alone except for the half-Olympian children in her belly.”
The immortals’ bad behavior, cataloged without comment in mythology, is judged as cruel, selfish, petty, and vengeful. For starters, there’s the habit of punishing women for male misdeeds. Medusa is the prime example; multiple women novelists direct our attention to the fact that Athena turned her into a Gorgon for the sin of being raped by Poseidon in a temple dedicated to the goddess. Poseidon takes equally unjust vengeance after King Minos keeps for himself a sacred bull intended for sacrifice; the offended god punishes not the king but his wife, Pasiphae, afflicting her with an unholy lust for the animal that results in the birth of the Minotaur. Jennifer Saint has Ariadne remark angrily of her bestial half brother, “What the gods liked was ferocity, savagery, the snarl and the bite and the fear … our fear.” That’s the broader assessment: the gods thrive on human misery, yet wretched mortals continue to make offerings to those same gods. Madeline Miller’s Circe characterizes the divine order as “a great chain of fear,” and in Athena’s Child, Lynn’s Medusa offers a provocative (albeit decidedly modern) take on the fallout from the gods’ cruelty: “They show men everything they cannot have control over and, as such, force men to claim dominion over the one thing they can”—women.
Critiques of male violence and the glorification of war are underpinned in several novels by the acknowledgment that men are also victimized—or at minimum, warped—by this culture. The Song of Achilles might seem an outlier in a collection of feminist literature, with Patroclus as its protagonist and narrator, but Miller’s 2011 debut was a precursor of things to come; it depicts a society that disdains gentleness as weak and unmanly, and it suggests that Achilles’s love for Patroclus is a truer expression of his deepest self than his prowess in battle. Barker goes further in The Silence of the Girls, describing this greatest of Greek warriors, who kills as effortlessly as he breathes, as “not a man at all but an angry child,” rendered bereft and needy by the sea-nymph mother who abandoned him. In The Women of Troy, Barker enters the thoughts of Achilles’s son Pyrrhus as he strives to emulate his father’s every feat, though doing so terrifies and sickens him. “There’s no choice. There’s never been a choice,” Pyrrhus concludes bleakly.
Perseus, contemptuously dismissed in most of the Medusa revisions, gets a slightly more sympathetic treatment from Heywood in The Shadow of Perseus, which views him through the eyes of three women. The first is his mother, Danae (Heywood does not use the dieresis in spelling her name), who unwittingly stokes his delusions of grandeur by spinning the tale of Zeus and the golden shower to cover up the truth: after a romance with a baker’s son leaves her pregnant, her father casts her out to sea. Given shelter in a foreign land by a kindly fisherman, Danae sees her sensitive son, scorned by other boys, desperately seeking acceptance by lording it over her. When the ruler of their new homeland asks Danae to marry him, her teenage son declares, “It is my agreement you should be seeking, as her guardian.” Medusa here is no snake-haired monster but leader of a group that shelters abused women; they call themselves Gorgons, and stories abound in the outside world about the monsters who live on their secluded island. She finds Perseus there, searching for “the fearsome Gorgon,” and befriends him despite the warnings of her sisters. He falls in love and asks Medusa to go away with him, threatening her with a knife after she refuses. Seeing “the gentle boy she knew” struggling internally with the domineering man he thinks he should be, Medusa manages to talk him down from his fury but then makes the fatal mistake of telling him, “I knew you were not like other men.” Back comes the rage, and off comes her head. In myth, Perseus rescues Andromeda from a sea monster by producing the head of the slain Medusa, thus turning it to stone. But in Heywood’s book, Andromeda isn’t in need of rescue. She marries Perseus to prevent him from killing her parents, knowing perfectly well that whatever he’s carrying in that reeking bag is not the death-dealing head of a monster, as he claims. As Perseus’s wife, she pragmatically settles for managing her husband’s fragile ego: “She would build a life she could survive.”
Contemporary writers seem impelled by the desire to point out that “monster” is a label frequently pinned on those judged as deviant or disruptive to the social order.The Shadow of Perseus demonstrates the potential pitfalls of this genre. It’s a blatant parable about toxic masculinity awash in overly easy psychological analysis. It’s also terrific entertainment and a bracing counternarrative that freely rewrites mythology to give its female subjects more agency, or at least a voice. This is a common strategy used by Heywood and her peers. Without minimizing the violence inflicted and limitations imposed on women, they revise myths as needed to make their protagonists fully legible human beings.
Haynes’s The Children of Jocasta is perhaps the most extensive rewrite. Her Jocasta is not the queen whose most notable act in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is exiting offstage to hang herself after learning that her husband is also her son and that it was he who killed her first husband, King Laius. Haynes’s Jocasta is a powerful woman who falls deeply in love with the young stranger who arrives in Thebes shortly after Laius’s mysterious death. In this version, Oedipus may not be Jocasta’s son at all. When a plague strikes Thebes and rumors fly that the city is being punished because she married her son, the source of these rumors is revealed as the vindictive servant who falsely told Jocasta that her first child—conceived with a courtier because Laius was “not interested in women”—had died at birth.
Did the baby survive, and is Oedipus that infant? We don’t know, but Haynes depicts Thebes as an insular city, its residents hostile to being governed by a woman and a foreigner, happy to believe the worst kind of gossip about them. Alternating with Jocasta’s story in the novel are chapters set decades after the couple’s downfall (the depiction of which also departs radically from the myth); these sections are narrated by their daughter Ismene, a much more assertive character than the wishy-washy rule follower depicted in Sophocles’s Antigone. Antigone is depicted in that play as a pious Greek maiden who defies the edict to leave her brother unburied because duty to the gods outweighs human law; viewed through her sister’s eyes, she is a power-hungry manipulator who schemes to rule Thebes.
The Medusa legend gets the most varied rewrites. Heywood’s invention of a shelter for victims of domestic abuse seems positively restrained compared with Bear’s mischievous twist in Medusa’s Sisters: Athena isn’t simply outraged by the rape of Medusa as a violation of the temple, she’s in a jealous fury because Medusa was her lover as well as her priestess. Natalie Haynes and Jessie Burton both decide that Medusa is justified in petrifying her persecutors, Athena in Stone Blind and Perseus in Burton’s Medusa. Contemporary writers seem particularly driven to offer new views of Medusa, impelled by the desire to point out that “monster” is a label frequently pinned on those judged as deviant or disruptive to the social order.
What happened in the first two decades of the 21st century to prompt a considerable number of women to rewrite Greek myths and an even more considerable number of readers to buy them? (Haynes, Miller, Saint, and Heywood, arguably the genre’s most dedicated practitioners, have published multiple bestsellers.) I can only speculate about other people’s motives based on my own experiences. My initial discomfort with the ugly aspects of Greek myths, sparked by reading them to my son a quarter century ago, slowly faded into the background as he moved on to other interests and I went back to reading and writing about contemporary fiction. During the pandemic, barred for 18 months from the regular theatergoing that was such an important part of my life, I found myself turning to reading plays and, eventually, all 33 of the surviving Greek dramas of the fifth century BCE. I’ve written in these pages about what the plays revealed to me about theatrical techniques, but that essay was not the place to air my thoughts on how many of those plays, rooted in Greek mythology, matter-of-factly depict violence against women and women’s subordinate position in society. The first of these novels happened to be published around the time the phrase “Me Too” was coined to raise public consciousness about sexual harassment. And the trickle of classical retellings turned into a flood after 2017, when the first news reports appeared about Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of sexual predation and the movie industry’s willful blindness to it. Women everywhere had long been thinking about the culture of silence surrounding this kind of behavior and wondering how they could raise their voices against it. For women who feel the power of classical literature, as the writers discussed here clearly do, the question becomes: What can we do to critique these ancient tales without denying their eternal appeal and beauty?
Myths endure because they are founded on elemental truths about human nature and express our perpetual quest for meaning in an indifferent universe. A goad for the artist arises in the gap between the values that myths incarnate, archaic in both senses of the word, and more modern sensibilities. Whereas Greek dramatists worried about individual heroes (and uppity women) as potential disrupters of the rule of law, the contemporary revisers of Greek myth have concerns rooted in the social discontents of our times, in particular the use of violence to perpetuate gender inequality. The eloquent, angry women of Greek drama—Clytemnestra, Antigone, Medea—are their foremothers, but they have added more female voices and a contemporary sensibility to the chorus.
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While walking down the lane where I live to run an errand in town, or on my return from completing one, I often find my elderly neighbor seated on the bench at the side of her house, a strategic spot for watching the comings and goings on the street, and I always stop to greet her. In nice weather, an old friend of hers who lives a couple of blocks away often shows up around noon to share my neighbor’s bench. Side-by-side they sit, both in their 90s, both thin with rounded shoulders, both wizened. Two peas in a pod, you could say. In Spanish it’s dos gotas de agua, two drops of water. They even have the same name, Consuelo, though my neighbor goes by Concha and her friend by Conchita.
But look a little closer and differences appear. The friend, Conchita, comes on her own steam, though her caretaker’s arm steadies her. Concha needs no one’s arm but does rely on her two forearm crutches to hobble her 50 meters up or down the lane. Conchita’s hair is thin and pure white; Concha’s is thinning and dyed a reddish brown. Conchita wears nice slacks and a wool jacket with gleaming buttons, and now, in summer, a straw hat, looking as if she were on parade. Concha wears a polar fleece over a housecoat, and on her feet are slippers. I’ve never seen her in a hat, or seen Conchita without one. Concha has family who come to check on her and lend a hand. Conchita has a caretaker, a very energetic and cheerful woman who chats with her charge while guiding her slowly along the lane, commenting on the weather or the flowers, often remarking on the differences between Castilian Spanish and the Spanish of Colombia, where she is from and where she lived until immigrating to Spain two years ago. Her name is not María, but that’s what she goes by because Conchita cannot pronounce her real name.
Often María and Conchita walk on past Concha’s house all the way to the end of the dead-end lane, just beyond my house, turn around, and head back, and from my living room or my patio I hear María’s singsong voice as she comments on what she sees or engages her charge’s interest with a question. María appears to be interested in everything. She is a different pea from a different pod. Her accent, her life’s experiences, her job, her determined cheer. It’s not that the older two women complain, but they seem braced for whatever misfortune is in store. A lifetime of hard work and hard times along with the good times has made them wary. They make no fuss about difficulties, but they also take no special delight in an exceptionally fine day, a funny coincidence, or a spot of good news.
Concha has a daughter, a son-in-law, and four grandchildren. The grandchildren drop in from time to time and seem very loving. Until this year, Concha also had a son, who shared the bulk of the caretaking with his sister. In late May, he died, both unexpectedly and yet not surprisingly because, as neighbors said, shaking their heads sadly, he did not take care of himself. He was 61. On my first encounter with Concha after his death, Conchita and María were sitting beside her on the bench. What would I say, how would I bring the subject up? Four days had passed. I approached, a little solemnly, wondering how to phrase what needed to be said. A small dog I had never seen before was on Concha’s lap, looking around timidly, and I asked, “Who is this?”
“It’s Sonya’s,” Concha said, looking right at me, her eyes suddenly full of tears. Tears for the changes, including the dog that had been left temporarily in her company to cheer her, I supposed, while the owner, a granddaughter, either the niece or the daughter of the deceased son, saw to tasks having to do with the death. No need for me to introduce the subject because it was already in the air. “I’m so sorry,” I said, and put my hand on hers. María shook her head sadly and sighed, murmuring that it was terrible, terrible. Conchita said nothing. Concha, eyes full, said, “What are you going to do.”
Conchita, too, has children. I don’t know where they all are or what role they play in her life. This particular heartache Conchita might never have known. But take a step back, and we’re all peas, we’re all drops of water, like our tragedies, just drops in a bucket.
The post Drops in a Bucket appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Roy Campbell’s “Tristan da Cunha.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Tristan da Cunha” by Roy Campbell appeared first on The American Scholar.
Who defines paradise, and who gets to live in its verdant incarnation on Earth? This is the question animating Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, which ranges across the history of the English landscape, from John Milton’s writing of Paradise Lost to Laing’s own restoration of a walled garden. Alighting on the heartbreaking pastorals of 19th-century poet John Clare and the queer visions of 20th-century artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, Laing pulls strands of history, literature, and resistance from the green blur that, for now, still surrounds us, even as it deceives us. Landscape architects like Capability Brown—so named for his capability to impose his will on any vista—were, as Laing writes, able “to fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring, though what has actually taken place is the seizure of once common ground.” The author of five books of nonfiction and a novel, Olivia Laing joins Smarty Pants this week to explore both the powers that shaped the garden as we know it, and the power it has to change how we treat the earth, and ourselves.
Go beyond the episode:
- Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
- Listen to John Clare’s “I Love to See the Summer Beaming Forth” on our sister podcast, Read Me a Poem
- In the essay “Jane Austen’s Ivory Cage,” Mikita Brottman looks over the ha-has of Mansfield Park to see who else might be enclosed alongside the garden
- We have visited stately houses and their grounds twice before on Smarty Pants: with Adrian Tinniswood, who discussed the history of the country house after World War II, and with Hopwood DePree, who was attempting to restore his crumbling ancestral pile
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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For more than two decades, Mickalene Thomas has explored Black femininity through a variety of media: painting, photography, drawing, video, and installation. Arguably her most striking images, however, are her collages—rhinestones, acrylic, paper, and enamel layered with figures cut out from her own studio photographs, vintage Jet magazine calendars, or other archival images. Whether reimagining the subjects of a classic painting (her Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires at once celebrates and challenges Édouard Manet) or coyly cropping and covering found photographs (as in her NUS Exotiques series), Thomas uses glitter, vibrant patterns, and surprising textures to place Black women at the center of her work.
Thomas was born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey. While pursuing an MFA at Yale, she began taking carefully staged photographs of both herself and her mother, a former fashion model. These she later remixed into multilayered collage portraits. All About Love—Thomas’s first major international tour (named for a 1999 book by the Black feminist and social activist bell hooks)—brings to The Broad in Los Angeles a cross section of her work. “To truly love,” hooks wrote, “we must learn to mix various ingredients.” For Thomas, these ingredients include art history, Black resistance, the female gaze, elements of fashion, and her own identity and history. She invites viewers to linger in her colorful spaces, subverting their understanding of what it means to see and be seen.
Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge, 2023. Rhinestones, acrylic, and glitter on canvas mounted on wood panel (90″ x 110″). © Mickalene Thomas
A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel (108″ x 144″). © Mickalene Thomas
Portrait of Mickalena, 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel (60″ x 120″). © Mickalene Thomas
Monet’s Salle a Manger Jaune, 2012. Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel (108″ x 144″). © Mickalene Thomas
Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher, 2009. Rhinestones and acrylic paint on canvas mounted on wood panel (82″ x 72″). © Mickalene Thomas
August 1975, 2021. Rhinestones, graphite, glitter, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel (86″ x 72″). © Mickalene Thomas
Resist #11: A Price to Pay, 2023. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on canvas mounted on wood panel (84″ x 108″). © Mickalene Thomas
The exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is on display at The Broad in Los Angeles through September 29, 2024. It will then travel to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, London’s Hayward Gallery, and les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France.
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During the last week of June 2023, as the academic year was winding down, my B2 level English class of two students started a new unit. The B2 is an upper-intermediate level, also called an independent level, and passing the exam for certification attests that you can interact fluidly and spontaneously with a native speaker without strain for either person. In Spain, as in other European countries, many study programs and many employers require B2 certification in English. My students, both young women, were signed up to take the B2 exam in July, and I wasn’t sure they’d pass. They would need to make the most of the time left before the exam: two more classes, then almost a month on their own to review the grammar and vocabulary we’d hit during the time they’d been enrolled at the language school. If they passed the exam, I would likely never see them again. If they didn’t, they might return in the fall for more classes and another stab at the exam. But they might decide that studying at the school hadn’t worked for them, and, instead, look for a different approach to learning English. Neither student was studying English for love of the language but because having the B2 would make it easier to find a job—a first job for one and a new job for the other. Both were thinking of their future prospects. One was 19, the other in her early 20s.
The new unit was titled “Nothing but the Truth,” a phrase that rang no bells for either student. I explained the use of the words in U.S. courtrooms, and asked what they could recall of courtroom dramas they might have watched, but neither of the two was a fan of detective shows, police procedurals, or true crime. I asked if they had heard about any recent crimes. Again, the answer was no.
I had one story to tell, though it didn’t quite fit the bill. Rather than a crime, it was the tale of a recent terrible accident: the loss of the submersible Titan, which had been launched into the North Atlantic from a support ship a week earlier, on June 18, en route to the wreck of the Titanic. Within two hours, it had lost communication with the waiting support ship, and then, later that day, failed to resurface as scheduled. A search began. Four days later, debris was found on the ocean bottom, proof that the submersible had imploded and all five occupants were dead. “Did you hear about the accident?” I asked. The students had heard nothing.
The rest of my information was sketchy, but I shared it, mentioning some particulars about the construction and operation of the craft, some safety concerns, and who was on board: the pilot, a father and son paying for the ride at $250,000 per ticket, another paying passenger, and a Titanic expert who would serve as a guide to the wreck. I wasn’t sure how we would incorporate our new vocabulary, related to truth and justice, in talking about the accident, but maybe my students would see a way.
Of the five people in the submersible, it was the son who got my sympathy. He had been terrified to go on the dive, according to some sources, but because the launch was on Father’s Day, he had gone as a present to his dad. I asked my students if they thought the father had coerced the son. Both said no. Unless a threat was issued, it was just one person trying to influence another, nothing criminal about it.
“A father will have power, emotional influence. Trying to get a particular outcome—isn’t that coercive?”
“No, not if the son was an adult,” said the older student. She had long dark hair almost down to her waist and a habit of shifting her eyes that I had learned was from shyness, not caginess.
The other student was a competitive swimmer with strawberry-blond hair and freckled skin. She had an exuberant manner when speaking that quickly faded into blankness when her classmate was talking, as if she couldn’t be bothered to listen to the other student. But what looked like boredom might have been her way of stepping away from the spotlight to leave space for her classmate. “How old was he?” she asked, returning to the conversation.
“Nineteen, like you.”
In Spain, at 19 you are an adult. Chances are, you are still living with your parents because for young people, leaving home is not so strong an urge as it is in the States, and economically it’s often not feasible.
The young man had a seat on the Titan because his mother gave up hers. Had he refused to go, he’d be a wealthy man today, instead of a dead one. Wealthy, saddened to have lost his father, and amazed he’d so narrowly avoided death. Instead, it was his mother who escaped. Did she send him to his death? Criminal, we say about such outcomes, but they aren’t really—just deplorable and shocking, as bad luck often is.
Then I asked about Stockton Rush, the pilot for that excursion and the CEO of OceanGate, the company that produced and owned the Titan. About Rush’s demise, one feels differently than about the others: he had been warned by several people about the possibility of implosion, and he had apparently sought to mitigate the legal ramifications of any potential mishap by calling his paying passengers participants and the fee they paid an investment. The trouble was the material he used for the Titan: carbon fiber, which weakens and breaks down under repeated stress. Each test dive to prove the submersible seaworthy actually made it less so. Of carbon, you cannot say, as is true of steel and perhaps of people, that what doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger. Yet, though Rush put his passengers and crew at risk, he joined them. One wants to imagine him thinking until the last second that whatever might go wrong on this dive, he would emerge stronger, his mettle tested.
Nevertheless, in his eagerness to corner the market of underwater tourism, he had cut corners and ignored concerns from experts about the safety of the submersible. Could he be accused of criminal negligence?
“But the paying guests wanted to go?” the first student asked.
“Yes.”
“Then no.”
I confided to my students that I would have never climbed into the submersible for any dive, much less one to a depth of 4,000 feet, the limit of the craft. Onboard, there was no location system, and the vessel was dependent on text messages from the support ship to know where it was and where it should go. Even the hatch of the submersible could not be opened from inside. The support ship was everything, and launch was the equivalent of being cut free, bringing to my mind an infant birthed into water, exposed and set loose in a sometimes harsh environment. But cut free also suggests a balloon released into the atmosphere, sailing up, up, and away. My students, as young adults, were sawing through the ropes binding them to the support system of their parents. The older was already living with her boyfriend, though still dependent on her mother for lots of logistical help. The younger, still at home, was a swimmer and would be lifeguarding at the beach that summer, her first job, earning enough to pay some of her expenses. With a happy grin she said she planned to spend part of her earnings on clothes because she liked fashion. She liked shopping, too: the array of choices, the colors, the different materials, the feel of fabric between her fingers.
When I last saw them, more than a year ago, my two students were about to launch from the school, prepared with years of English study. How did it turn out for them? The older passed her exam. She was safely on her way. The younger did not. Did the outcome make her stronger and more determined? I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since I wished them both luck at the close of our final class. At least, unlike Rush, she gets another chance if she chooses.
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Amanda Holmes reads William Carlos Williams’s “The Last Words of My English Grandmother.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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While taking a watercolor class more than 30 years ago, Sheep Jones became bored with painting daffodil blossoms in vases and decided to focus instead on the parts of the flower below the surface—the roots and bulbs suspended in water. That inspired her to think about what she could put in the earth within her paintings, she says—“bugs, worms, water tables, little gnomes, fish.” Jones, who studied painting at the University of Southern Maine and was an artist at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, for two decades, has worked in a variety of media over her 50-year career. Her current pieces use a combination of oil and cold wax on wood panel to create mysterious, dreamlike scenes inspired by her home in Belfast, Maine.
- Hide 25, oil on wood, 12x12 inches.
- Shed & Chandelier 41, oil on wood, 20 x 20 inches.
- Gardener 18, oil on wood, 24 x 24 inches.
Jones’s two most popular series have been her “Fish Walkers” and “Hide” paintings. “Fish Walkers,” which she says dovetailed from that initial desire to explore the underground, shows various men, women, and nonbinary figures in water up to their calves—as they “walk” a fish on a leash. “After I did my first one, it was sort of a breakthrough painting for me,” Jones says. “I thought, I’m so thrilled with this.” To date, she has done more than 110 of these works, each one showing a different figure walking a different fish. Her “Hide” series, meanwhile, showcases childlike figures wearing animal hides on their heads. Jones can’t recall exactly where the idea came from—“maybe my son was wearing a funny hat one day,” she says. The series title, she notes, has a double meaning: the figures are not only wearing hides but are also hiding within the shadows created by them.
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On an early spring afternoon in 1965, a month or so before my 27th birthday, I was browsing in a bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 1964. Leafing through it, I thought of how dearly I’d love to have one of my stories chosen for this annual anthology, which had been edited by Martha Foley for more than two decades. My literary career was, at that moment, all but nonexistent—I’d written eight unpublished books and accumulated nearly 3,000 rejections—and I recall telling myself that if I didn’t have a book published by the time I was 30, I’d have to consider giving up the idea of being a novelist.
That evening, Joe McCrindle, editor of the Transatlantic Review, called to ask whether I’d heard that “The Application,” a story of mine that had appeared in the Autumn 1964 issue of that publication—after being rejected by 33 magazines in a four-year period—had been selected by Martha Foley for The Best American Short Stories 1965. Soon after, Joyce Hartman, an editor at Houghton Mifflin (publisher of the anthology), wrote to say that she had read “The Application” in galleys and was wondering whether I had a book in the works. I said that I was indeed writing a new novel, Big Man. Houghton Mifflin accepted the manuscript and brought it out the subsequent spring. What followed was a series of publications: a second novel, Listen Ruben Fontanez, in 1968; my first collection of short stories, Corky’s Brother, in 1969; and Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey, in 1970. These publications led to teaching positions at Stanford University and the State University of New York’s College at Old Westbury, and in 1971, I was offered a tenure-track position at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where I would remain for the next 30 years as professor and writer-in-residence. This sustained period of good fortune was possible only because of Martha Foley.
Martha moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1973, two years after her only son, David Burnett, died of a drug overdose. Around that time, Joyce Hartman called to tell me that Martha, depressed over David’s death, was not doing well. Her grief was intensified by the fact that she had never gotten over the loss of her husband, Whit Burnett, with whom she had founded and edited STORY magazine—Whit had left Martha to marry Hallie Southgate, a young woman who had been a runner-up in a STORY short fiction contest. At the time of the separation, David was 10 years old.
Martha was living about 10 miles away from me, and the two of us soon became friends. On some afternoons, I’d take along one or more of my three children to her two-room furnished apartment. She loved talking with them, teasing them, serving them Russell Stover chocolates and Sara Lee pound cake, which they called “Martha Foley cake.” When my parents visited, Martha came over for dinner. She’d spend hours telling them about her childhood (“In Boston, one never went to bed. Oh, no! One retired for the night!”), about her career in the newspaper business, about her fight for women’s rights in the 1920s and ’30s, and about her years in Paris, Haiti, Vienna, Majorca, and Los Angeles. She was full of marvelous tales about Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, William Shirer, Dorothy Thompson, William Saroyan, Ray Bradbury, and others. She said that many of those tales, which she also related to the graduate students in one of my fiction-writing workshops, would be included in a memoir she was working on. When I told her how thrilled my parents and graduate students were to hear these stories, and how delighted I was that they would be in print one day, she laughed. “I suppose,” she said, “you could say that I’m in my anec-dotage.”
In the last years of Martha’s life, she continued editing Best American Short Stories, working on her memoir, corresponding with friends, and grieving for her son. When she talked about David, she did so glowingly, never alluding to his addiction or the overdose that killed him—or that she had, for many years, been supporting him financially. According to her, David had been killed by incompetent doctors during an operation for ulcers. She knew the truth, of course. But what she didn’t know about her son was that he had fathered two daughters, and these half sisters—her granddaughters Nina and Marcia—would not know of the other’s existence until 48 years after David’s death.
David Benjamin Foley Burnett, who died in New York City on November 21, 1971, shortly before his 40th birthday, co-edited The Best American Short Stories with his mother for the last 13 years of his life. He was born in Vienna in 1931, the year Martha and Whit brought out the first issue of STORY magazine. When he was living in Paris in the ’60s, David produced a film, Candy Kisses, with Terry Southern, who would go on to write the screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Barbarella, Casino Royale, and The Magic Christian. David also founded and edited the magazine New Stories, in which he published work by Southern, Mason Hoffenberg, Mordecai Richler, and James Baldwin. “A lot of the funny shit Terry wrote was just the ideas of David Burnett,” Hoffenberg said in a November 1973 interview published in Playboy. “Like, we’d be sitting around smoking hashish in a café or something and David would come up with an idea for a quiz show called What’s My Disease [which is] in one of Terry’s books.”
Hoffenberg was a heroin addict whose recovery was aided by a two-year methadone program. It was Hoffenberg’s methadone, however, that inadvertently caused David’s death, as he explained in that same Playboy interview:
I don’t go to New York much any more, but I went a couple of years ago to try to get some kind of writing job. I used to run into a lot of people I knew in New York; now it’s like Hong Kong to me. So I’m wandering around with two bottles of methadone in a basket and some clean underwear, and suddenly I’m face to face with Burnett, who’s one of the few people from the past I have nothing against. So we went into this bar, talked for a while, and I left. But I forgot my basket. So he very naturally went through it. He and another guy drank the methadone, and they both died.
On the evening of September 4, 1977, Martha’s typist, Judy Stark, called to tell me that Martha was in the intensive care unit at Northampton’s Cooley-Dickinson Hospital. Martha died shortly after midnight. She was 80 years old. In the morning, Judy and I got together with the two women who, once a week, cleaned house for Martha and who drove her around town on errands. We met at Martha’s apartment, went through her folders and her telephone book. We talked with lawyers. And because we could not determine whether Martha had any living relatives—she had not prepared a last will and testament—we made the final arrangements. At about 9:30 that morning, a real estate agent showed up and asked when the apartment would be cleaned out and available to rent.
Several months later, Judy and I drove to Mystic, Connecticut, to go through some three dozen cartons that Martha had left in storage there in 1973. By this time, we had located Martha’s brother, Francis, a pharmaceutical salesman living in a mobile home in East Wareham, Massachusetts. We learned that he and Martha had been separated since before Martha’s fifth birthday and had grown up in different homes. Because Martha never filed for Social Security, the Social Security Administration awarded Francis more than $20,000 in back payments that had been owed to Martha. In Martha’s storage cartons, in addition to jars of jam, cans of beans, and boxes of chocolates (eight boxes of Russell Stover chocolates were also hidden away in the closets, drawers, and file cabinets of her apartment), we found several unpublished manuscripts: a novel-in-progress, a draft for a book on the craft of writing, a selection of novellas for a proposed collection (Martha claimed, in a 1936 issue of STORY, to have coined the term novella for the long short stories previously called novelettes), and material intended for her memoir.
The cartons also contained David’s notes on matters occult, manuscripts of novels that former students had sent to Martha (although she never graduated from college, Martha taught writing workshops at Columbia for 20 years), books inscribed to her from writers she’d encouraged and helped, letters of gratitude (including my own) from writers chosen for Best American Short Stories, and thousands of orange, blue, and white index cards on which she had written brief comments for each of the more than 8,000 stories she read in a year.
On the drive home from Connecticut, I thought of the rich literary world Martha had helped shape during the previous half century. She had been on intimate terms with the major writers of several generations and had given many of them their crucial breaks. Among the many American writers whose first publications appeared in STORY were J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, Joseph Heller, Truman Capote, Jerome Weidman, Ludwig Bemelmans, Jean Stafford, William Saroyan, Erskine Caldwell, Nelson Algren, Peter DeVries, and James T. Farrell. Martha and Whit also published stories by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Irwin Shaw, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Budd Schulberg, Louis L’Amour, Gertrude Stein, Conrad Aiken, John Gunther, Albert Maltz, and Aldous Huxley, writers who could not get published in larger, mass-circulation magazines. Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Flannery O’Connor also made appearances. And STORY was the first magazine in America to publish many writers from abroad—Robert Musil, Ignazio Silone, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Flann O’Brien, Eric Knight, Mikhail Zoschenko—as well as the first English translations of work by, among others, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Isaac Bein, and Ivan Bunin.
When I arrived home, I began writing an essay about Martha and about the writers she had published in STORY and in Best American Short Stories, writers whose work had been central to the literary life of that era and of so much that was to come. As I wrote in that essay,
I thought of what Martha’s life was like during her last years—of her constant pain from a back injury, of her two-room furnished apartment, of her awful financial situation, of her unpublished manuscripts, of her unfinished memoir, of her isolation. I had not known her well. Nor had her typist [Judy Stark] or the two sisters who cleaned for her and drove her around town once a week. I was astonished—sadly and angrily so—to realize that we were, during the last years of her life, her only friends in the town where she lived. The literary life indeed.
On Sunday, February 21, 1979, under the title, “Martha Foley, Discoverer,” The New York Times published my essay on the front page of its Book Review. A few weeks later, Carol Houck Smith, an editor at W. W. Norton, asked whether I’d be willing to complete and edit Martha’s memoir, and to supply an introduction and afterword for it.
George Brockway, president and chairman of Norton, had contracted with Martha for the memoir—he had never forgotten being cheered by a personal rejection note he had once received from her—and Martha had been submitting the work, chapter by chapter, during the four years she was living in Northampton. I immersed myself in the history of the American short story and Martha’s role in that history, and I used my Times essay as the basis for an introduction and afterword. I completed work on the memoir within a year, using drafts of chapters Martha had written, material and notes I found in her papers, and information I received in correspondence with writers whom Martha had published early in their careers. In the book’s prologue, I included this bedtime story:
“Tell me about when you were young,” a little boy named David, who was never to grow old, used to ask. He’d settle down in his bed, his yellow hair and dark blue eyes obscured by the enormous Stetson hat his grandfather had brought him from a Utah ranch. … “Tell me about when you were a newspaper reporter and went with my father to Vienna where I was born and you started a magazine people said was a crazy thing to do and to Spain where you wouldn’t go to bullfights and came back to America when everybody was poor, and even some of the famous writers you knew were hungry …”
“Whoa, cowboy!” Martha says, and tells David that he’s asking for “an awful lot of story for one bedtime,” but that she’ll continue the story on the next night and on many more, after which he asks her to promise not to forget the funny parts. Then:
I am remembering now but I am remembering alone. Real loneliness, I feel today, is not when nobody loves you, but when you have nobody to love. The little boy grew up to be a handsome, talented young man who died too soon, and the story he loved has taken on a different meaning with the years. Still, though there will be only the silence of a grave for an answer, I shall tell it here once more, not as if to the child David was, but as if to the man he would be today … and I promise not to forget “the funny parts,” because before trouble came there was great happiness along the way.
On an index card to a draft of what would be the memoir’s final chapter (called “Hollywood and the War Years”), Martha had written:
Norton! ! !
Ending! Good night, my darling. Turn off the light, shut the door. David sleeps.
And in the folder that contained the index card, I found a handwritten note:
There are times when the emotions need an anaesthetic as much as nerves laid bare by a surgeon’s knife. … For three months after my son died I stayed drunk. Really falling down drunk … onto a floor from which I had to be picked up. Happy people do not get drunk. Nor do happy people take drugs. They do not need relief from inexorable pain. The pity is that our society, always demanding visible tangibles, physical causes, mistakes symptoms for causes and damns the sufferer.
Martha’s memoir, The Story of STORY Magazine, was published in May 1980 to excellent reviews, including William Saroyan’s rapturous review-reminiscence in The New York Times Book Review, “Editor and Heroine.” In that essay, Saroyan mentioned how, after receiving an acceptance letter from Martha, he wrote back to say that in the flush of no longer being an “unpublished writer,” he would write her a story every day for the next month. Despite receiving a telegram from Martha midmonth asking him to please stop, he sent her 35 new stories in 30 days.
In September 1981, 16 months after the publication of Martha’s memoir, I received a two-page, single-spaced, typed letter from Uta West, forwarded to me from W. W. Norton, in which she told me that David Burnett was the father of her 16-year-old daughter, Nina, and that she was writing to me at Nina’s request: “This is probably the most difficult letter I have ever had to write. I have put it off for a long time, ever since The Story of Story came out. But I promised my daughter I would write to you before her 16th birthday, which is tomorrow, so here goes.”
She told me that she was still married when she met David, at a time when both of them were young writers living in Greenwich Village and hanging out at the White Horse Tavern. “This was in 1956,” she wrote, “when David was 25 years old, and it was shortly after this time, I believe, that David became seriously addicted to heroin. When I knew him, he was charming, witty, but already in poor health. He told me he did not expect to live past the age of thirty, but I thought it was part of the Rimbaud image he affected.”
“David was 25 years old, and it was shortly after this time, I believe, that David became seriously addicted to heroin. He told me he did not expect to live past the age of thirty, but I thought it was part of the Rimbaud image he affected.”Uta left New York and her husband in 1958, lived in Mexico and California, and married for a second time. When her second marriage was in crisis, she returned to New York and met David again. “He had just received an advance for a book (which he never finished) and was temporarily drug-free and solvent, an unusual situation that brought out his finest qualities,” she wrote. “We fell, unexpectedly, in love, and even more unexpectedly, I became pregnant.”
Uta, then 36 years old, had never been able to become pregnant before; her second husband, Art West, who had contracted mumps a few years earlier, was sterile. “David was very eager for me to have this baby,” she explained, “and I knew it was pretty much my last chance for motherhood.” But as soon as she and David made the decision to keep the baby, “things began to fall apart.” They ran out of money, and David “was once more reduced to going to Martha for hand-outs.” He began doing drugs again.
“I was desperate,” she wrote. “My husband found out about the pregnancy, and asked me to return to California, to see what we could work out. To the combined dismay and relief of David, I went. Art offered to adopt the baby, and to come to live with me in New York. … When I got back to New York, David was badly strung out on barbiturates and involved with another woman.” Art returned to New York and saw Uta through “the last difficult months of pregnancy and a Caesarian delivery,” she continued. “He diapered, fed and cared for the baby, and probably saved my life as well as my sanity.”
In 1973, when Nina was eight years old and Uta and Art had “separated for good,” Uta moved to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where she and Nina lived for the next five years. “During this time,” she wrote, “I kept thinking of contacting Martha Foley, but could not bring myself to do it.” After returning to New York in the fall of 1978, however, Uta became afraid that Nina might hear something about David from someone else. By this time, too—Nina was now 13—Art West “had, mysteriously, ceased to communicate with us [and] we didn’t even know where he lived.”
In the last paragraph of her letter, she wrote,
When Martha died, I was filled with grief and remorse, especially when I learned how alone and isolated she had been and thinking that, through my cowardice, I had deprived her of a grandchild. Anyway, the time had come to tell Nina the truth. She seemed to accept it well. She knew about David Burnett, since his paintings had been hanging in our living room since she could remember. When Martha’s memoir came out, I bought the book for her. Since then she has been asking me to write to you about getting permission to see David’s papers, writings on the occult, or whatever. She is going through a very difficult adolescence and it might help her emotionally to find out more about David. … Sorry to bother you with the soap opera of my life, but I didn’t know of any other way to present our case.
She signed her letter, “In perplexity, Uta West.”
It was, to say the least, the most unexpected of letters. But alas, I didn’t have much to tell her. What little I knew about David was in the book, I replied. I told her that Martha’s papers—along with David’s—had been purchased from Francis Foley and were archived in the libraries of the University of Wyoming and Boston University. If she had any other questions, I’d be happy to talk with her or Nina, and would do my best to be helpful.
I never heard from Uta again.
Thirty-eight years later, on March 30, 2019, I received an email from Martha’s other granddaughter, Marcia Goldenberg:
I am writing, a bit out of desperation, to ask if you might have any information for me about Martha Foley and David Burnett. My story is this: I was born in November 1958 in New York City to a Jewish mother, non-Jewish father, and immediately placed for adoption. I attempted to search for my birth parents many years ago but hit only dead ends. Recently I went the way of most adoptees these days—I sent DNA samples to Ancestry.com and to 23 and Me and received some surprising results. It seems quite clear that my birth father is David Burnett.
Marcia provided a brief description of her “fevered sleuthing.” She mentioned that the first edition of Best American Short Stories that David co-edited with Martha, in 1958—the year of Marcia’s birth—was dedicated to Marcia’s mother, Harriet Kahan. Meanwhile, DNA results led to conversations with relatives of David Burnett and Harriet Kahan and to her subsequent discovery. She asked whether I’d be willing to communicate with her and tell her whatever I knew or remembered about Martha and David, “no matter how sad or disturbing.”
“I hope this isn’t too intrusive,” she wrote, “but I’m going down every path that might reveal information, stories, pictures, letters, etc. I am a college professor in the school of nursing at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, an avid reader and audiophile, and singer. I am working on this search at the age of 60 so, sadly, most of my family of that generation are long gone. Thank you in advance for considering my request.”
I told her what I’d told Uta West nearly four decades before: that most of what I knew about David and Martha was in The Story of STORY Magazine. But I also mentioned the letter I’d received from Uta after the memoir was published. I told her about Uta’s long-term, on-again off-again relationship with David, about Uta’s husband Art West, and about the fact that David was the father of Uta’s daughter, Nina Felicia West.
“Uta and Art West (and David) are gone,” I wrote. “I have no idea about what happened to Nina. But you may, or may not, have a half sister named Nina West.”
Marcia replied the next day to say that she was “a bit blown away” by the news, and that she had returned to her sleuthing and believed she had found Nina Felicia West, who was living in Wellfleet. “David B,” she added, “certainly was a profligate young man.”
Two and a half weeks later, Marcia wrote to say that she had indeed “found the right Nina West”:
I sent her a long letter and she responded immediately by phone. We had a long and interesting chat last Saturday and, as it turns out, she will be in NYC this weekend as well. She suggested that we meet at the 55 Bar in the village where David and his crowd spent many intoxicated nights during the 50s and 60s. It seemed fitting, if not a bit perverse, but what the hell. So I do indeed have a half-sister and I have you to thank for this knowledge.
Marcia and I had already made plans to spend some time together on the coming weekend so that she could learn more about Martha—“I’m fascinated by her—and I’m still digesting the fact that I have an Irish Catholic grandmother. And from Boston!”—and she now wrote to say, “How about Saturday afternoon? I’m meeting my new sister at 6 pm but could meet you before that.” Marcia and her husband, Michael, stopped by my apartment that Saturday afternoon, and I gave Marcia the letter I’d received from Uta West 38 years before, so that she could give it to Nina. Then they proceeded to 55 Bar, where Marcia and Nina met for the first time.
Later that year, Marcia and Michael twice visited Nina in Massachusetts, and early in 2020, they met again, this time in Portland, Maine. During the pandemic, the half sisters continued to talk regularly, and Marcia kept me posted about a possible New York City get-together.
That happened on Friday evening, March 25, 2022, in my apartment on New York’s Upper West Side—a few blocks from Columbia University, where Martha had taught for 20 years. Wine, champagne, toasts, conversation, laughter, and music (Marcia sang, accompanied on guitar by Michael) flowed freely. I put out several copies of The Best American Short Stories anthologies, as well as issues of STORY magazine from the ’30s that contained work by Anton Chekhov, Kay Boyle,
Erskine Caldwell, William March, Sherwood Anderson, William Saroyan (including his first published story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”), and two of Martha’s own stories. I told them that Martha had had five pieces of her own chosen for Best American Short Stories in the years before she became its editor, and that during her 37-year tenure as editor, writers often referred to the anthology as “The Foley Collection.”
I told them that Martha had had five pieces of her own chosen for Best American Short Stories in the years before she became its editor, and that writers often referred to the anthology as “The Foley Collection.”As they’d been doing the previous two years, Marcia and Nina continued to fill each other in on the stories of their lives. Nina, an only child who had majored in classics at Hunter College, said that she had taught middle-schoolers in Harlem and been an artist; she’d also been a bartender, photographer, and journalist. When she was 16 and working as a stagehand, she became friendly with Gail Gerber, an actress working as a stage tech. Gail was Terry Southern’s longtime companion, and Nina soon learned that Terry talked about David all the time. Terry and Gail invited Nina to dinner, and Terry gave her a photo of her father (the only one of him she had ever seen), and also, in honor of his friendship with David and their times together in Paris and New York, the typewriter on which William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch.
Marcia, whose older (adopted) brother died in a car crash when he was 48 and she 45, told me that the first conversation she ever had with Nina went on for hours. “We’re both talkers!” Marcia said, as if that could explain everything you needed to know about how well and easily they got along. “And we had an abundance of things in common—we were both passionate and outspoken about a whole range of things—about literature, music, politics …” When she mentioned their shared far-left politics, I recalled an evening when Martha had spoken at the annual awards ceremony for the University of Massachusetts MFA writing program. The fiction award was named in memory of Harvey Swados, who began teaching in the program the same year I did, 1971, but had died of a brain aneurysm less than two years later. “I liked Harvey,” Martha said. “He was a good man, and he was a damned good writer.” She smiled, looked out at the room of mostly young writers, then pounded on the arm of her chair with her fist. “And he was a socialist too!” she declared.
After a few hours, Marcia, Nina, Michael, and I adjourned to Le Monde, a nearby French restaurant. We drank some more, had dinner, and continued to exchange stories, toasts, and hugs. We left the restaurant sometime past midnight. Marcia, Nina, and Michael insisted on walking me back to my apartment building, where we said our farewells and vowed to arrange another reunion. “We should do this at least once a year,” Marcia said, and we all agreed. I waved goodbye, and watched Nina and Marcia walk toward Broadway, their arms around each other.
Back home, I recalled how, earlier in the evening, I’d talked about the afternoons when I’d taken my children to visit with Martha. I thought of how my children had enjoyed these visits and their “Martha Foley cake,” of how Martha had loved talking with them and teasing them—of the easy delight she took in them, and the affection she showed them—and I thought, too, of how deeply unfortunate it was that she had never had the chance to do the same with the daughters of her only son.
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In his commencement address to Oberlin College’s 2018 graduating class, later published as an essay, David Sedaris offered some advice: be yourself. Unless, he clarified, being yourself means behaving like a woman he’d encountered several years earlier at one of his readings. At the time, he was helping to recruit bone marrow donors for the charitable foundation Love Hope Strength, and at his readings, he had begun allowing attendees to jump the book-signing line if they registered. As long as volunteers were under 50, the cut off age for donors, all they had to do was fill out a form and allow a cheek swab to match them with patients waiting for bone marrow transplants. Sedaris would usually get about 50 people to register out of an audience of 2,000. It doesn’t sound like much, he told the Oberlin graduates, but in a 40-city tour, it adds up. It was good work, and easy enough—until a woman in Napa, California, accused him of ageism.
The woman appeared to Sedaris to be around 65, but she wanted the quick path to the front of the line and threatened to sue for discrimination if he didn’t let her jump the queue. It was a small theater, and 20 people had signed up as donors, people willing to undergo a painful procedure to save a stranger’s life. “That, to me,” Sedaris writes in his essay, “is real heroism.” And then, he continues, you have this woman, wanting to get to the front of the line as quickly as possible so she can leave, masking her hurry as a fight against injustice. “Now that’s an asshole, a person you never want to be,” he writes. If you are like that woman, try not to be true to yourself.
Sedaris’s pushy woman made me think of aggressive drivers, who, by flashing their lights as they bear down on you, give the impression that you are in the wrong for following the speed limit. They’ll zoom right up behind you and ride your tail until they can pass. What do they think they are accomplishing by crowding the driver in front of them? One Saturday evening in early June, a friend and I were heading home on a four-lane, divided highway on the hilly coast of Cantabria. A small blue subcompact came hurtling up on a boxy silver SUV in the passing lane, which was itself passing a sedan in the right lane. The blue car got very close. I thought of how a tailgater will often cause me to slow down instead of speed up. On the face of it, this is a reasonable response. Slower is safer. But slowing down might also enrage the other driver, someone already prone to dangerous decisions at high speeds. So my prudence isn’t really prudence, but a disguised counterattack. You push, I’ll push back, I’ve thought at those times, frowning into my rearview mirror. And now I wondered if the driver of the silver car would react the same way. “That blue car’s way too close,” I commented to my friend, who was driving.
He kept his eyes on the road. Traffic was fluid but steady. It was drizzling. It was dusk. He grunted, as if the other driver’s conduct were not worth commenting on.
The blue car moved still closer. It appeared to be about two feet from the silver car. Both cars were going around 65 miles an hour. The speed limit was 75.
“Just look at that!” I exclaimed.
How many cars, I wondered, would be caught up in the accident if the blue car rammed the silver one. Would we?
I had rooted for the silver car to keep to its course and not let the blue car intimidate it, just as, reading Sedaris’s essay, I had rooted for him to stick to his guns and let only donors jump the queue. But now I hoped that the silver car would do the only sensible thing and quickly get out of the way.
Watching the drama from the relative safety of the other lane, I reflected that fear has to reach a certain intensity before it can overcome our natural tendency to resist pressure. Fear of a scene, fear of appearing foolish, fear of dying in a car crash. Was Sedaris’s woman under some pressure herself? Pressure that she was resisting with her demands and her threats? Pressure of aging, of losing power, perhaps? She should have accepted the inevitable. Sedaris himself should have bowed to the impossibility of a uniformly well-mannered audience. The SUV driver should have bowed to the importance of avoiding a collision. And the blue subcompact driver? The blue driver—a man, I feel quite certain—should have thanked his lucky stars he didn’t cause an accident.
At the Napa book signing, Sedaris faced the woman who had threatened him. Whether he had made her wait her turn or let her cut, I couldn’t tell. He signed her book, writing, “Yore an awful woman.”
She laughed.
He told her that he really meant it—truly, she was a bad person.
She laughed all the harder.
“That’s the drawback to writing humor,” Sedaris says in his essay. “People always think you’re kidding.”
Maybe not in this case, though. His reaction to her couldn’t have come as a surprise to the woman. Maybe she just wanted the last laugh.
As for the driver of the blue car, I couldn’t believe that even when the SUV slid into the other lane, he didn’t ease up but almost shaved it as he shot by. “That driver shouldn’t be allowed to get away with driving like that!” I told my friend as we proceeded down the darkening highway. Someone should teach him a lesson, but I’m glad no one tried to. It would have been nothing to laugh about.
The post Last Laugh appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Charles Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” translated from the French by Cyril Scott. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “À une passante” by Charles Baudelaire appeared first on The American Scholar.
Synchronized, scientific, ornamental, fancy, pretty: so many adjectives have been attached over the years to performative swimming, especially when done by women. Now known at the highest level as “artistic swimming,” it was for decades one of the few athletic activities women could pursue, albeit in uncomfortable, baggy, and not exactly aerodynamic attire. Despite—or perhaps because of—its popularity, synchronized swimming’s status as a legitimate, elite sport would be contested for just as long—until 1984, in fact, when it finally debuted at the Los Angeles Olympics in all its sparkly glory. In her new book, Swimming Pretty, Scholar contributor Vicki Valosik dives into “the untold story of women in water,” from Victorian starlets like Lurline the Water Queen to Annette Kellerman, the godmother of synchronized swimming and the woman we can all thank for not having to wear petticoats in the water.
Go beyond the episode:
- Vicki Valosik’s Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water
- Read all about the aquatic theater that Wilbert E. Longfellow devised in the name of safety
- Learn some killer moves from Everard Digby’s 1587 manual The Art of Swimming
- Dip your toes into the films of Esther Williams with this iconic scene from Million Dollar Mermaid, about the life of swimming Annette Kellerman
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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The post Bathing Badasses appeared first on The American Scholar.
It’s my first full night in Homer, Alaska. I arrived in Anchorage last night, sleeping fitfully on an airport massage chair. Now I have a cabin all to myself, a desk with a window view, and the company of five other writers for the month of June, all of us here for a writing retreat. Our residency is on the coast of Cook Inlet, a crescent of sloping forest with the Kenai Peninsula to the east. The mountains across the water are etched blue on blue, capped in brightest white. Really, these mountains are volcanoes, Iliamna and Augustine, part of the tectonic Ring of Fire. We will soon learn to distinguish the volcanoes’ active steam from the ambient fog that drifts with the wind.
The artist residency employs a chef, who cooks individual lunches and communal dinners, and we’re in charge of cleanup afterward. At the welcome dinner, we do the usual surveys: your genre, your proposed project, your actual project, where you traveled from, who is partnered, who has kids. After the last clatter of plates being hand-dried and silverware being sorted, the other residents clear out of the main house. I sit on the couch longways, my feet pointed toward the row of bay windows, and stare, hoping to spot some wildlife. We’ve already glimpsed our first bald eagles soaring—“doing thermals,” or flying into convection currents, the residency’s coordinator explained.
I have a book in my lap, but I’m not reading it. Instead, I notice distinctive patterns of movement on the water, halfway between the piny tree line and the horizon. A blow of mist and then a gray swell. A blow of mist, a gray swell. Mist, swell. Mist, swell. I recognize these rhythms: a small pod of humpback whales is making its way in front of the residency. I am delighted, and sad, because I am remembering. There is only one other place where I’ve seen whales.
Within an hour after my arrival, I met the chef in the kitchen. She lined up three products on the counter: a tub each of nondairy butter, nondairy feta, and nondairy yogurt. “What do you think of these options?” she asked. The look on my face was probably not good. She was excited to bake for me, to work around my allergies, to provide so many options—
“Please don’t ask me to eat these things,” I blurted out.
I didn’t know how to explain 40-plus years of training my body to be on high alert for the colors, textures, and tastes that these foods were meant to mimic. How impossible it was for me to find them appetizing, even if I knew on a rational level that they would not harm me.
Fortunately, she took my response in stride. “Everyone’s got their thing,” she said, “when it comes to food.” We talked about where I keep my EpiPens. She asked about how an allergic reaction starts, what my symptoms would be.
When I got back to my cabin, I was tempted to call my mother. She would have laughed at this terrifying mock-milk parade. Commiserating is what we often do during our phone calls. We replay. We vent. Though she doesn’t share a single one of my food allergies, she knows them better than anyone else.
But I didn’t want her fretting over me for the next month. I could instead hold off and send her snapshots of the meals to come: massaman chicken curry; acorn squash garnished with quinoa and chorizo; coho salmon brushed with raspberry barbecue sauce, pineapple-wasabi salsa on the side; green goddess soup; ratatouille; pork chili verde. I could tell her about the chef and her assistant taking turns bringing us bento box lunches, each midday meal a mix of skillfully reimagined leftovers and fresh crudités, delivered in picnic baskets to our cabin doors. No milk, no eggs, no cashews, no shrimp, no cucumbers, no mango.
In 2011, I published a memoir about growing up with food allergies and dedicated it to my mother, referring to her as the one who “taught me the balancing act.” She taught me how to navigate the world with my allergies, how to express my needs plainly, how to toggle between fruitful risks and necessary precautions. But now, in my adulthood, I am trying to disentangle her good life lessons from the damaging ones. The downside of learning a balancing act is that you also internalize, along the way, that your life is being lived on a high wire.
I believe my mother is an anxious person, which is counterintuitive because she goes extremely calm when something is truly wrong, as do I. The first time I heard my husband frame one of our evenings out in terms of managing her anxiety, I was jolted both by his frank take and by the lack of judgment in his voice. For him, planning around his mother-in-law’s moods is a practical matter. For me, this sparks a question of causality: am I an allergic daughter, born to an anxious mother? Or am I the daughter whose allergies made her mother perpetually anxious?
Nature primed the pump for my mother and me to intertwine psyches. My first allergic reactions were to her breast milk, which my body couldn’t process. In my preverbal years, as my parents cautiously determined the safety zones of apple juice, rice, and creamed turkey, my mother was my primary interpreter of hives. Later on, when I came to view a reaction as something to be dreaded and hidden if possible, she was the one who gently pushed me to report an itchiness in my throat or a creeping inability to breathe. She was the one who wrangled ordering at restaurants and the annual bureaucracy of the school clinic’s intake forms.
She managed these responsibilities as well as anyone could in the 1980s, before a marked rise in the prevalence of food allergies increased mainstream understanding. Then, right as my sister was born in early 1990, my father’s service in the Army Reserves began to intensify under Desert Shield, then Desert Storm. The second decade of my memory, the first 10 years of my sister’s life, would be pitted with his absences.
She managed these responsibilities as well as anyone could in the 1980s, before a marked rise in the prevalence of food allergies increased mainstream understanding.Solo parenting might have felt manageable had our other support structures stayed intact. For much of my childhood, my grandparents’ house in McLean, Virginia, had been our refuge. My grandfather Carl Pruett—my mother’s father—puttered in his garage workshop, where he polished stones and made quirky little sculptures out of driftwood and shells collected from his Navy travels, figures accented with pipe cleaners and acrylic paint. My grandmother Jean kept a tidy garden of peonies and hydrangeas. They had an outdoor swing on which they sat in summer, and a screened porch with a stove where they sat in winter. The wall by their central stairs was decorated with photographs and clippings from my grandfather’s days as a medical doctor with NASA; adjacent stood my grandmother’s china cabinet with a collection of Wade Whimsies, animal figurines collected from boxes of Red Rose Tea. But in January 1991, my grandfather died from the variety of bacterial pneumonia known as Legionnaire’s Disease.
My grandmother lived until 2018, never remarrying. Her final years were marked by increasing disorientation, causing her to be moved from the home she loved. Of Jean’s three children, my mother lived closest to the care facility. She took her mother weekly lunches. She had to break the news of my grandfather’s death over and over and watch for bedsores or unexplained bruising. She had to constantly explain to her mother, You live here now.
A friend has asked me to contribute to an anthology on grief in poetry. I knew that I’d send her some of the poems written for my grandparents—Carl, elegized in my first collection, and Jean, elegized in my fourth. Lately I’ve been talking to my undergraduate students about reclaiming our grandparents on the page, about saying screw that to anyone who ever tells you that it’s too sentimental a topic for workshop. In addition to three poems, I am supposed to include a 500-word essay. This is the first thing I turn to writing in Alaska.
I roll my chair into position behind the desk and look out across the inlet at Augustine. Rereading the poems I plan to submit, I discover a funny thing. I usually refer to the contents of my first book as “heart-poems”; there’s little point in denying the conflation of speaker and poet. But this elegy for my grandfather, when I look at it again, is distinctly an act of persona. Sure, the speaker riffs on the same magazines that I pored over as a kid in my grandparents’ sunken living room. But she also must be an adult, because she signs paperwork at the hospital.
The speaker, I realize, is a projection of my mother’s voice layered over my own.
How could I not have noticed that?
While my grandfather was in the hospital, unopened Christmas presents waited, still wrapped, in my grandparents’ upstairs closet. After his death, his subscriptions to Reader’s Digest and National Geographic and Time were not immediately canceled, and the magazines piled up, unread, on the coffee table. My poem’s framing conceit, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, came to me from one of those publications: the 1968 Reader’s Digest condensed book series featured David McCullough on the flood, which killed about 2,200 people. By the time my mother was the age that I am now, she had an infant daughter, an older daughter with significant medical needs, a deployed husband, a father newly gone, and a widowed mother. The water was high.
Back in September 2018, I traveled with my family to Kinmundy, Illinois, for the interment of my grandmother’s ashes next to those of my grandfather. Their plot in Evergreen Cemetery is part of the larger constellation of Pruetts, spanning multiple generations. Carl’s father and mother are there—Walter S. Pruett, born in 1883, and Bertha Wilhelmina Pruett, born in 1887. Years ago, my mother first told me the story of Walter and Bertha’s first daughter, my mother’s namesake: Roberta, born in 1914, died at the age of three, after falling through a flimsy well covering on the family property. In Kinmundy, I found the small stone commemorating Roberta Eloise, born and buried before Carl arrived. That he and Jean would later give Roberta’s name to their youngest daughter was both sweet and slightly eerie.
From my desk in Alaska, I pull up The Kinmundy Express death announcement for Roberta Eloise Pruett. Though brief, the notice leads me to one important additional detail—Bertha was pregnant and gave birth to Carl’s older brother, Walter, just two days after the accident. I picture a three-year-old able to toddle away into the yard, unchaperoned. When I dive more deeply into the Kinmundy Historical Society’s archives, I am even able to find two photos of snub-nosed baby Roberta in a white gown, her awed eyes looking straight at the camera.
In one of the photos, Roberta sits on her father’s lap while her mother leans in from a nearby piano bench, sheet music in hand. I hadn’t known much about Bertha other than that she was German, born Bertha Wilhelmina Steuber. Now I know that she played piano. I wonder whether she thought future relatives would inherit her love of music, or whether she could have fathomed her great-granddaughter thinking about her 105 years later, in a cabin 4,000 miles away from Kinmundy.
I have a hard time shaking fear around my allergies. When I serve myself first, I take more than I have an appetite for, just in case the person after me cross-contaminates the whole dish. When I serve myself last, I hawkishly eye the dregs left in the dish, afraid that they’ll disappear from the fridge before I have the chance to enjoy any the next day. Where others see endless possibilities in a crowded shelf of leftovers or a drawer full of sandwich fixings, I perpetually hunt for the One Safe Thing.
My mother did not teach me to be this way, not intentionally. But she has imprinted on me her worried expressions, her sharp intakes of breath as oblivious dinner guests carry knives from one serving plate to another or lean across the table with forks extended. When we discovered a brand of oatmeal raisin cookie that I could eat as a child, she bought packages by the dozen rather than risk not having any on hand for my school lunches. Her pantry still overflows with triplicates and quadruplicates of food items past their expiration dates because I’m no longer there to eat them.
Going into the residency’s quiet weekend, when the staff will be gone, the chef warns that the main house is running out of storage containers; more are on order. In my cabin’s minifridge, I’ve hoarded seven lidded servings of this and that. Plus a cling-wrapped sandwich bun. Plus a cling-wrapped chicken thigh.
I turn away from my grief essay. I pull out the containers and make a plan to quietly clean and return them to their rightful place. The almond soup, which has begun to separate into layers, is drained into the disposal. The souring curry salad is emptied into a Ziploc bag that I surreptitiously trash. The blood orange slices go into my water for the day. Garlic-lemon tahini gets a fresh stir to check consistency. The cherries are hanging on. The chicken thigh is sliced, reheated with a scrap portion of spinach linguine and tomato sauce, and eaten for my breakfast.
I have visited the Hawaiian Islands five times. The first two, I traveled as a daughter, with my parents and sister. The third, I flew as the guest of a friend who had a timeshare and enough mileage points to cover my ticket. The fourth was for my honeymoon. The fifth time was as one-fourth of the unholy quartet of me, my husband, and my parents. That trip took us to Barking Sands, the military base on Kauai where my father did consulting work for the Pacific Missile Range.
My husband and I couldn’t afford plane tickets to Kauai on our own, much less rent a beachside hotel, so we agreed to fly over with my parents and share a cabin. My gut churned at the thought of the four of us traveling the island crammed into one rental car, but I packed my bags. Making a playlist to pipe through the rental car’s speakers, I stuck mostly to slack-key guitar, nothing too dear to me. I’d learned that lesson years before, when my beloved cassette of Pet Sounds had become the soundtrack to my parents’ 40-minute fight as we backtracked along a winding mountain road in—Maui? the Big Island?—while my sister and I sat silent in the backseat. I’ve forgotten the cause of the fight, but I remember the ever-deepening blues in the sky. We were missing the sunset, which made the fight worse.
If you were to ask my mother what she looks for in a vacation, her answer would be the sunset. Maybe also a particular museum, or time to read. Maybe a good meal that she doesn’t have to cook. But mostly the sunset. This should be a modest request. Yet when our family gets to that museum, maybe it’s a pain to find parking. When we try to find a good meal, maybe the early tables are taken, and my allergies eliminate fast-casual options. Next thing my mother knows, she’s counting down to a 15-minute window when we must be seated, the sky in optimal viewing position, our wine already poured. If the window closes, a fight commences. Every day brings a new sunset that my mother is in danger of missing.
One of our first days in Kauai, my husband and I joined my parents on an afternoon boat ride that cut through the waves at high speeds, taking us past spinning dolphins and gamboling mountain goats. We also got doused in chilly spray with no dinner plan for after. Disaster was averted in the form of a modest fish camp a block from the dock, where I found Sandra-safe Kalua pork amid the fried options. My husband was happy with shrimp. My dad was happy with a cold beer. My mother was happy because we’d make it back to base in time for the sunset.
We made it all the way to the military base’s entrance gate, where checking identification cards should have been a quick formality. The young guard squinted at my driver’s license. “District of … Columbia,” he said, clearly unfamiliar. “Is that in the United States?”
We assured him that D.C. was, in fact, the capital of these United States. He asked us what state it was located in. Then he called his supervisor, who was all the way at the other end of the base. My father smacked the steering wheel, then settled his gaze into a resolute stare. My husband and I looked at each other. The sun proceeded to set while my mother sighed and sighed again.
As it turned out, the base would not allow any of us to come and go without my dad and his military ID. The plan my husband and I had of venturing out on our own fell by the wayside. We would have to sit in the backseat behind my parents, or stay in.
On the days we stayed in, Barking Sands offered a nearly empty beach with crashing waves; a TV; a post exchange store with good deals on tequila, vodka, and mixers; and near-daily sightings of humpback whales. One morning, I noticed a subterranean rumble beneath my mother’s mood, a too-heavy pour in the juices we’d both been spiking. I suggested to my mother that we fix lunch, something starchy—something, as she quickly picked up on, to take the edge off her blood-alcohol content.
Her voice got loud. She said I couldn’t know how hard it had been, caring for her mother day after day. How lonely. Her voice got louder. She slammed a door. My father took the car and left. My husband stepped into our bedroom. “That’s not okay,” he said, “the way she’s talking to you.” He gripped my forearms while my body shook.
Fight or flight, they say. I hadn’t wanted to fight and had no option for flight. A few years later, a therapist would explain that there is a third survival option, freeze, and then the frantic energy release that comes after.
I went to a picnic bench in front of the cabin, in the grassy middle space between rough lawn and pure sand. After a few minutes, my mother walked past me, carrying a folding chair, which she forcibly plunked down by the water. She paced. At first, I thought she was on her cellphone; then I realized she was talking to herself. I retreated to the front porch. Soon she came swerving up to me, leaning in to hiss that I didn’t understand a damn thing, and I flinched.
Several mothers I know, when I mention this later, tell me that they understand where my mother was in this moment: she had simply hit her limit. I don’t know how to reconcile these moments with my sweet mother, who sends me birthday cards with $20 bills tucked inside in case I need emergency cash, who picks out holiday-themed socks for me, who decorated my childhood bedroom with glow-in-the-dark stars accurately aligned to the constellations, who mails me clippings of every article about poetry in The Washington Post. My mother, who offers to bake Sandra-friendly applesauce-spice muffins every time I go on a long road trip, in case I can’t find food on the way. My mother, who sometimes—in ways I may never fully understand, having chosen not to have children—hits her limit.
By nightfall, we were all trying to act like nothing had happened. My father eventually returned. My husband and I cooked dinner. There wasn’t anything worth watching on cable TV. We sat woodenly on the slumpy couch and stared out the window at the ocean, tracking the humpback whales that swam parallel to the horizon line.
A blow of mist, a gray swell. A blow of mist, a gray swell.
In Illinois, after my grandmother’s interment, we had just enough hours left of sunlight to look for the graves of her parents. The larger group from the memorial service split, some going back to the hotel. The rest of us drove the half hour to Orchard Hill Cemetery, just off Vandalia Road in Louisville.
Jean was the daughter of George R. Kepley, born in 1896, and Pauline Farrell Kepley, born in 1904. George died in 1959, but Pauline lived all the way until 1991, at one point remarrying and taking the last name Helmick. I have a faint memory of meeting her once, visiting her retirement home as part of a road trip with my grandparents to Disney World. That time, my mother and I rode in the back seat. An antiseptic smell rises unbidden in flashback. As a child of seven or eight, I was transfixed by my great-grandma’s earlobes, which seemed to droop low toward her shoulders—a consequence, I was warned, of wearing overly heavy earrings in her younger days. I vowed never to do that.
We found my great-grandfather’s place in the Orchard Hill Cemetery mausoleum, his name inscribed in crisp black against the white marble square set into the wall. A crystal bud vase with pink nylon flowers sat on the ledge, and a small American flag stood upright. Our group added a red rose carried over from my grandmother’s memorial service.
Pauline was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, she had sold her space in the Louisville mausoleum years ago, with no intention of being buried in Illinois, but my grandmother had decided to overrule her wishes. Where was she?
At only 10 years old, I couldn’t understand being so tied to someone else that his death felt essentially like dying yourself. Was this, I wondered, what love should look like?We fanned out over the cemetery, covering each hill to find her before twilight set in. I’d almost given up before spotting Farrell on a family stone, just shy of the road that defined the cemetery’s edge. She had been buried adjacent to her parents. A ledger stone marked her individual grave: Pauline Farrell Kepley Helmick, 1904–1991. In a photo from that day, I am bouncing in the toes of my black Mary Janes, a 38-year-old woman with fingers clasped. I found you, I found you.
She is the source of my middle name, Farrell. Beyond that, I have only a shadowy sense that my great-grandmother was a difficult woman. She had one child, at age 20, while everyone around her went on to have kids in threes and fours. She is said to have passed along the dramatic skills that her daughter took to an actual stage—Jean performed with the San Diego Civic Light Opera, which put on shows at the Starlight Musical Theater in Balboa Park—while Pauline remained, simply, a “dramatic” person.
I can’t imagine what my grandmother thought when her mother remarried and moved to the coast—daring to reinvent her life—while her mother-in-law modeled 27 years of stoic widowhood. Or, rather, I guess we have the answer. Jean brought Pauline back to the Midwest plains to be buried in the same cemetery as her first husband. Just as my other great-grandmother, Bertha, never remarried after Walter’s death, my grandmother Jean never remarried after Carl’s. Evidently, she wanted her mother, Pauline, to be forever remembered as George’s widow.
At some point in the weeks after Carl’s death, I stole a peek at my grandmother’s calendar book. On the square for the day he’d died, after a month-long hospitalization, Jean wrote, in calm ballpoint script, Carl died. Life is over. At only 10 years old, I couldn’t understand being so tied to someone else that his death felt essentially like dying yourself. Was this, I wondered, what love should look like?
A few days into the retreat, my fellow writers and I board the Danny J fishing boat, which ferries us across Kachemak Bay to Halibut Cove on Ismailof Island, where a boardwalk staggers along the coast above the sea. On the way, we loop around Gull Island, a bird preserve, and for the first time I see puffins in the wild. I try to take a photo, but the camera lens turns the puffins to black blobs low in the water, their orange beaks hidden from view.
As we make our way across the bay, I focus on spotting sea otters, which are much bigger than the freshwater variety I’ve seen at the National Zoo. This time of year, late May and early June, is peak birthing season for sea otters. They don’t have dads, at least not in the practical sense. Each mother otter takes sole responsibility for her pup, and for much of the six-month period after its birth, she carries the small creature on her belly. When she needs to hunt for food, she swaddles the kid in a raft of seaweed to maintain buoyancy. I dig my binoculars out of my purse as six otters—mothers plus pups—bob 10 yards from our boat.
If a baby otter is making a racket, the mother will lick its head to quiet it and, if that doesn’t work, place a paw over its mouth.
I do not refer to my mother as a “mama otter” in my memoir. I refer to her as a lab scientist, a detective, and a contracts lawyer. I chose to focus on her heroism, which felt good. The truth is more complicated. If she hadn’t had to be a scientist, a detective, a lawyer, a nurse, and a hero, maybe she could’ve enjoyed being a mother more.
Our last morning at Barking Sands, I moved back and forth between packing my suitcase and clearing out the kitchen. My father was at a loss for how to deal with the groceries we’d accumulated. When he was there by himself for work, he’d buy sashimi-grade tuna and slice it straight out of its Styrofoam tray and into his mouth for dinner, with a handful of Maui Style potato chips on the side. But my mother had overstocked the fridge for her allergic daughter. We had boxed spinach and bacon and frozen peas and linguine and jarred salsa and, and, and.
My father urged us to dump what was open into trash bags and leave the unopened stuff for the cleaning crew. Maybe I would have done that if we had been headed to the airport. Instead, we were headed to Princeville, where our hotel rooms would be outfitted with much fancier showers, but no stovetops, and I was fighting to quell the worry that our trip would end in an anaphylactic reaction at some restaurant. I swept the kitchen for anything that might survive the car ride and the half day’s wait before we could check in. My mother surfaced occasionally from my parents’ bedroom. We were not quite back to speaking.
I only had a single Tupperware, which I’d used to bring a pilaf for the long flight from Dulles to Oahu. What to salvage? I decided on the pack of masago we’d bought at the Japanese fish market. While my husband wrestled with where to stash our swimwear, still wet and stinky from the day before, I boiled a bag of rice. Minutes before being pushed into the car, I layered the fish roe on top of the rice and packed a fork.
The next two hours were a muddle of errands and a prolonged check-in. Everyone’s stomachs rumbled, but we were determined to make it up to the hotel rooms that, blessedly, were not conjoined. While my husband pondered the room service menu, I turned to my plan.
I peeled back the lid to reveal a gelatinous mess. Still-warm rice had steamed the fish eggs to bursting, congealing all into an orange brick. I gagged.
So much for planning ahead and being self-sufficient. My stomach growled, and I felt a rising anxiety, a stiffness and clenching in my shoulders. I dumped the Tupperware contents into the toilet, flushing several times over, and asked whether we had any honey-roasted peanuts left. Soon, it would be time to meet with my parents and find four chairs. The drinks would be poured. We had a sunset to catch.
Carl died. Life is over. The force of my grandmother’s words makes it tempting to reduce her widowed years to those dimensions. In fact, at first, I do exactly that. “She tended her hydrangeas, was active in the church choir, and babysat her youngest grandchild,” I write in my essay for the anthology.
I hit send—and then, minutes later, email an apology and a corrected version: “She tended her hydrangeas, was active in the church choir, went abroad with Shillelagh’s Travel Club, and babysat her youngest grandchild.”
The difference to anyone else is probably slight. But how could I have forgotten about her years of sightseeing with Shillelagh, the affordable “country club of the air” headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia? In his Navy days, my grandfather had been the adventurer. He’d brought back dozens of souvenirs, from delicate hand-painted fans to a walking stick with a hidden blade. In the too-short stretch of his retirement, he and my grandmother had traveled together, and he’d filled his pockets with seashells for sculptures and rocks for polishing. But his death didn’t mean the end of her trips. She went to Prince Edward Island, Ireland, and the Great Wall of China. She even came all the way to Alaska.
My mother is a painter. Sunsets frequently show up on her canvases. But for many years, while my sister and I were children, she did not paint. Preserving the time to even watch a sunset would have been a victory while organizing a day according to everyone else’s needs. The cruelty of children is that they may be the ones who beg you to show off your creative side, all the while making it impossible to do so.
Once or twice, my mother specifically mentioned that I was allergic to something in the materials she used for oil painting. Years later, at one of the first artist colonies I attended, a woman my mother’s age called that a flimsy excuse for not painting. But even had I not been allergic, how could my mother have had the time?
In my teenage years, I was relentless in my efforts to jumpstart her art making, thinking it would bring her some happiness that I couldn’t quite name as missing. I gave her watercolor pads and travel paints, brushes, Conté pencils, book after book of other people’s art. During my high school talent show, when my mother was expecting me to sing, I went out and read poems instead—including one about her blank canvases, her not-painting—oblivious to how that would make her feel, sitting in the audience.
I wrote about that experience for The Washington Post, and I’m writing about it again in this moment. At every turn, my mother made art a valid thing for me to pursue, and so I did. But because I was around to pursue my art, she didn’t get to pursue hers for years and years. I am trapped in a variation on that Francisco Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Son. Except in this incarnation, I am the one with mouth wide open and teeth sharp: the ravenous child.
On the drive from the Homer airport to the residency, I saw my first moose. The residency coordinator pointed it out, and I jerked my head to the window just in time to see the animal’s preternaturally tall shape, a horse with humped shoulders and shaggier hair. I was surprised when we didn’t turn the car around for a longer look. “You’ll see plenty of them,” the coordinator assured me.
She was right. “Moose,” I said, the first time I saw one at the head of the residency driveway, grabbing my phone for a series of quick snapshots.
“Moose,” I said, another night, when I stepped outside the main house for the 10-foot walk back to my cabin, but no one was there to hear me. “Baby moose,” I said, seeing a second join the bigger one. I reached for my phone, but it was not in my pocket; I’d left it on the kitchen counter.
“Moose!” we frantically alerted each other many times over in our group text all throughout the first week, sometimes with a grainy photograph or shaky video. There seemed to be a mother, a baby, and another that hung around the residency. The chef explained that the midsize third moose was probably the previous year’s baby; once they become yearlings, their mothers abandon them. We became aware of spots where they liked to rest late at night, and where they’d feed midmorning. Their hulk and bulk shook the ground. A telltale thump accompanied their approach.
One night, while I was working, the other residents had the first sighting of all three moose at once. I only learned this later, seeing the chatter of 20 texts when I picked up my phone before going to bed. A grainy snapshot. A shaky video. A week before, I’d have been bereft to have missed the sighting. Now I trusted that the moose would be back. The next day, they were.
A voice in my head often whispers that the refrigerator is running low, and our shelves are running empty. That to prove you’ve done the best possible job of loving someone else, you have to turn yourself inside out. That you should make a show of having no love left for yourself. This voice says there can be a mother-artist or a daughter-artist, but not both. Unless we drop everything for the next 15 minutes of watching the sunset, we have failed this day entirely.
Except the sunsets are so long in Alaska, in this month of the summer solstice. A person could spend hours watching the skies turn pink and then purple, cook and eat dinner, put the dishes away and come back—and the sunset would still be there. I want my mother to see this abundance. I am trying to figure out a way to bring it home to her.
The post To Catch a Sunset appeared first on The American Scholar.
After a fellow early-morning dog walker accosted me some weeks ago about cleaning up after my dogs, I suffered half the morning from anger and chagrin. I both feared the possibility of seeing the woman again the next day and rejoiced at the prospect of being put to the test again—not the test of picking up poop (which I had not seen because I had been distracted) but of maintaining my calm. I even imagined our second meeting. She would see me approaching, step back in surprise, and start forming some ugly words. Who could blame her? I had, after all, called her an unpleasant woman. “No, no,” I would say this time, before she got a word out. “Don’t worry, please. I just wanted to say I was sorry. I am sorry.” That would stop her in her tracks.
Stopping people in their tracks is not a laudable goal. But a person who feels misunderstood or ill-judged, and who has come out badly in the first round, might be forgiven for harboring a fantasy of the perfect gambit in a rematch. It would be a fantasy not of revenge, really, but of triumph. Maybe even shared triumph.
In my fantasy, before this woman could recover and huffily move off, I would explain myself. “You see, I was just very surprised the other day. First at your tone—so aggressive!” I’d pause a split second to let that sink in but continue before she had time to rebuff me. “I know, I know—you’d probably had a bad morning. An argument with your husband, perhaps. Or your kids! I know how that goes!” She’d want to deny it, but before she could, onward with my act. “It doesn’t really matter what put you in a bad mood. I should have been more forgiving. I’m so sorry.”
I’d need to take a breath by now, and would have to stop. She’d take the opportunity to remind me that I had indeed done what she’d accused me of: walked away without picking up my dog’s excrement. The thing to do at that point would be to acknowledge that truth. “You are so right!” Then I would pile on talk about how astonishing that I hadn’t realized. “You have to believe me! I really didn’t notice it. I was already stopped, you see, placing the recycling in the bins, so there was no telltale pull at the leash to alert me.” She would eye me warily.
But why would I go to all this trouble to win over a woman I did not like and who did like me? Why even bother to imagine another meeting? Better to put her out of my mind, forget her. Were I to encounter her again, the best response would be to walk the other way. And yet, my imagination wouldn’t let it go.
She was obviously a woman accustomed to frowning and finding fault, I told myself, so she wouldn’t warm to me right away. But I would be patient. At exactly the right moment, I’d slip my arm through hers, ask which way she was going, and tell her I’d keep her company. She would be no match for my mix of ingenuousness and sincerity. “My fault entirely!” I’d exclaim if she even murmured the word but. Our altercation in the streets of La Pola would have a happy outcome as we made friends. That isn’t beyond belief. We have in common being early risers, dog owners, and responsible people who clean up after our dogs. Yet that probably isn’t enough to overcome an initial dislike and cause a reversal of mutual scorn.
Or is it? In William Trevor’s story “A Meeting in Middle Age,” such a reversal almost happens. The story is about two strangers, a woman and a man. She is an unhappy wife wanting a divorce, which in mid-20th century Ireland meant supplying evidence of adultery. He is a lonely bachelor who, for a fee, agrees to play the part of the co-respondent by spending the night with her in a hotel room. As planned, they meet up on a train, then spend the evening visibly together, first in the hotel bar and then in the grill-room, before retiring to the room for the night. She, Mrs. da Tanka, is the more worldly one. “You must not feel embarrassment,” she tells him early on. “We are beyond the age of giving in to awkwardness in a situation. You surely agree?” Mr. Mileson doesn’t know how he feels.
During the evening, someone makes a wrong comment, someone is impatient, someone is rude, and, little by little, anger builds, bickering erupts, and personal remarks are made by these two strangers. They insult each other. Through the night it continues. Facing each other the next day in an empty carriage of the train, it goes on. Mrs. da Tanka taunts him with his solitary life. “When you die, Mr. Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs. da Tanka.”
Mr. Mileson, who has tried on other occasions to imagine his funeral, is taken off guard and answers. “Cow-parsley, I suppose.”
“Cow-parsley?” she echoes. She is surprised. She remembers cow-parsley from her happy childhood days. She remembers sitting in the sun amid bunches of it. “Why did you say cow-parsley?” she asks him, twice. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t answer. She tries to say something, but after the night they have passed, she can find no words that fit. She looks at him, imagining a different outcome to their meeting. She pictures them strolling out of the hotel, arm-in-arm, discussing and agreeing which direction to turn. On the train, he senses something and wants to speak, but his suspicion of her is too strong, and the words die on his lips. The two go on in silence. They leave the train together at their stop, then separate. The love affair that might have developed never gets a start, both people having joined in to ruin a chance. It makes you feel for these proud, wary, people, and it makes you think about all of the people destroying their own happiness in petty ways. The details of these two people’s lives and the complicated scenario of the subterfuge to end a marriage make the outcome plausible. But truth is stranger than fiction, and such senseless loss probably occurs every day in terribly mundane circumstances as people give in to fate and do not try to climb from the hole that, with a rude or thoughtless word, they’ve dug themselves into. It’s different for me, you might tell yourself. I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t start it. But even if you haven’t been guilty this time, you certainly don’t want to be next time. Better than to avoid the woman in the red raincoat or pursue her is to remember her.
The post Woman in a Red Raincoat appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Peter Quince at the Clavier” by Wallace Stevens appeared first on The American Scholar.
Our lives are filled with dust: on our desks, under our couches, and in the air we breathe. If we’re very unlucky—like the residents of Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico—it includes uranium blowing off heaps of mining waste. Or the carbon particles carried along by the wood smoke of forest fires. Or microplastics rubbing off car brakes and tires as we screech across the 120 million miles of road in the world. Or a sandy cloud from the Sahara Desert, blowing across the ocean. You get the picture: dust coats the planet, and for the past few centuries, we’ve been the progenitors of increasing amounts of it. In her book Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, the London-based writer and researcher Jay Owens argues that we ignore these tiniest byproducts at our own peril, and she demonstrates their consequences in a variety of places: a California lake drained to service LA in the 1930s, the cracked bed of the Aral Sea, icy Greenland, and smog-choked Tudor England.
Go beyond the episode:
- Jay Owens’s Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles
- Sand is a kind of dust—and we’re running out of it
- Jorge Otero-Pailos’s series The Ethics of Dust uses the latex sheets that conservationists use to clean grimy stonework
- John Evelyn’s extraordinary 1661 treatise on air pollution, Fumifugium: or, The inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London dissipated together with some remedies humbly proposed by J.E. esq. to His Sacred Majestie, and to the Parliament now assembled
- Owens Lake returns
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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The post Turning the World to Powder appeared first on The American Scholar.
I served for a decade on the jury of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize, awarded each year to the architect who best represents the values of traditional and classical design. As Martin C. Pedersen observed recently on his website Common Edge: “The Driehaus is architecture’s traditional-classical design version of the Pritzker Prize. Although it comes with a hefty $200,000 check—twice the size of the Pritzker’s honorarium—and previous winners include such luminaries as Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, Léon Krier, and Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the award still exists in a sort of media vacuum.”
Pedersen is right. The design press pays scant attention to the Driehaus Prize, probably because its readers—the architectural mainstream—have little interest in traditional/classical architecture. Never mind that this approach accounts for countless private residences nationwide, as well as academic buildings, public libraries, concert halls, a federal courthouse, and a presidential library. One building that should have penetrated the media vacuum is 15 Central Park West, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan whose record-breaking commercial success gained it renown among real-estate mavens; the stately limestone façades consciously recall such prewar classics as the Apthorp and the Beresford.
But popular acclaim counts for little in the closeted architectural world. As the New York architect Peter Pennoyer, this year’s Driehaus winner, told Pedersen, “There is a deep-seated interest—if not delusion—in the idea that the avant-garde, the cutting edge, the next new thing is what we should all be concerned about, at the exclusion of history, tradition, community, and context.”
The next new thing. Précisément! It was a French book published in 1923 that sparked the attitude that Pennoyer describes. The author was a Swiss-born architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who had recently adopted the pen name Le Corbusier, and the book was his spirited manifesto, Vers une architecture (literally Towards an Architecture). The first English translation was titled Towards a New Architecture, adding a word that was not inaccurate, for despite including illustrations of ancient temples and Hadrian’s Villa and referring to Donato Bramante and Raphael, Le Corbusier’s book was determinedly forward looking in its message. “We do not appreciate sufficiently the deep chasm between our own epoch and earlier periods,” he proclaimed. “If we set ourselves against the past, we are forced to the conclusion that the old architectural code, with its mass of rules and regulations evolved during four thousand years, is no longer of any interest; it no longer concerns us; all the values have been revised; there has been revolution in the conception of what Architecture is.” Stirring stuff.
All the values have been revised. Le Corbusier made it sound as if the modern era, propelled by the Great War, represented an epochal moment, which it did in many ways, but he didn’t count on one thing: how rapidly things would change in the modern age. The ponderous Farman Goliath biplane that he featured in Vers une architecture was out of service in less than a decade, and the majestic Cunard ocean liner Aquitania, whose white superstructure served him as an architectural model, was decommissioned in 1950. Le Corbusier often used his own Voisin C7 automobile as a prop in photographs of the villas he had designed in the Paris suburbs—the boxy car and his boxy architecture were all of a piece. But less than a decade later, Gabriel Voisin introduced the C25 Aérodyne, a streamlined beauty that wasn’t boxy at all. Where did that leave the “new” architecture? Having cut itself off from the old rules and regulations, as Le Corbusier put it, it had no choice but to keep changing with the changing times.
Regularly reinventing architecture is exciting, but it faces a number of challenges. Architecture is an art, hence creativity is important, but it is an applied art, which makes it fundamentally empirical—that is, ruled not by theory but by experience. What works is worth repeating; what doesn’t, isn’t. As a result, building design has traditionally depended on rules of thumb: the dimensions of tread and riser that make for a comfortable stair, the pleasing proportion between the width of a room and its ceiling height, the shapes and details that ensure a roof doesn’t leak. The skill of the architect lies in knowing when to innovate and when to stick to the tried and true.
Architects rushing to discover the next new thing tend to undervalue the tried and true. Willfully ignoring experience and implementing untested new solutions can be risky, as I. M. Pei, a talented architect, found after he designed the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The exterior of the new wing, completed in 1978, is covered in pink Tennessee marble to match the old gallery. There is nothing particularly novel about using marble as a cladding. The ancient Romans covered the brick Pantheon with marble, and more than a thousand years later, John Russell Pope designed basically the same system—thick, self-supporting walls of marble—for the main building of the National Gallery. Pope concealed the necessary expansion joints behind moldings and pilasters, but Pei wanted the surface of his walls to be smooth and unbroken, so he used thin marble panels and supported them individually on stainless steel hangers that were embedded in the concrete structure. Only 33 years after the building opened, the panels started to show signs of buckling, and the entire marble skin—some 16,000 panels—had to be removed and reinstalled on new hangers, at a cost of more than $80 million. The debacle was in sharp contrast to Pope’s enduring building next door.
Ignoring the past often means ignoring the good ideas of one’s immediate predecessors. In the past, copying masters was a valuable part of architectural design—Andrea Palladio copied Bramante, Inigo Jones copied Palladio, Christopher Wren copied Jones. Now copying is taboo. For example, the work of early Scandinavian modernists such as Sigurd Lewerentz and Alvar Aalto, who humanized their stripped-down modern designs with interesting handcrafted details, was ignored by later generations. Similarly, when Louis Kahn produced the sublime skylit vaults of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, his ingenious solution was highly praised, but it was never repeated. As a result, instead of a considered evolution, modern architecture has been marked by a succession of fresh starts, some real and many false.
Reinventing architecture faces another, less obvious challenge. When Le Corbusier presented his Plan Voisin—a fictive proposal to rebuild the center of Paris with high-rise office towers—he took it for granted that the new would entirely replace the old. But of course, real cities consist of both new and old buildings. The old buildings are not historic relics but functioning places where people live, work, study, and in the case of old concert halls, listen to music. For most people, old buildings are as much a part of modern life as flat-screen televisions and smartphones. Le Corbusier maintained that the old architectural values need no longer concern us. But the contrary is true: the old buildings are often cherished, not primarily—or at least not only—because they are old, but because they are, well, beautiful.
It was perhaps inevitable that a reaction to ahistorical modern architecture would emerge at some point. This happened in the 1980s, and the reaction was largely facilitated by the architectural movement known as postmodernism. Although short-lived, this facile flirtation with history opened the door to a more serious reconsideration of the past. This included not only the American Renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is a touchstone for many classicists, but also the work of inventive masters such as Bertram Goodhue, who designed the Nebraska State Capitol; Ralph Adams Cram, who was responsible for Rice University; and Raymond Hood, the lead architect of Rockefeller Center.
It turns out that there are advantages to reconnecting with history. Without the imperative to constantly innovate, which can lead to risky experimentation and construction failures, architects can rely on time-tested methods of construction, and traditional materials and details. The modern steel frames of the Nebraska State Capitol and the buildings of Rockefeller Center, for example, are clad in traditional limestone. Architects who are free to find inspiration in their predecessors and contemporaries produce buildings that not only work but also gain the affection of the general public: libraries and courthouses that don’t look like flashy casinos, academic buildings that cannot be mistaken for workaday office buildings, and places of worship that don’t resemble utilitarian industrial plants.
It would be inaccurate to say that people don’t like modern architecture. After more than a century, it’s an accepted feature of contemporary life, almost a tradition. Office workers expect their workplaces to be sleek; shoppers expect high-fashion boutiques and automobile showrooms to be minimalist exercises in bare concrete and industrial details; and museumgoers expect galleries to resemble artists’ lofts, and museum cafés to have chic furniture and Zen-like décor.
But there are limits. It’s okay to have a minimalist kitchen or bathroom, but a living room shouldn’t look like an Apple store, and a house shouldn’t look like an upscale health spa. Nor should a college campus be mistaken for a suburban office park. Many colleges and universities, especially those built in the early 1900s in the prevalent Collegiate Gothic style, have enthusiastically embraced traditional design—you can’t have too much of a good thing.
In this house on Long Island, Thomas A. Kligerman blends traditional materials with minimalist details such as the knife-edge eaves and the porch’s skinny double columns. (Richard Powers)
Is traditional/classical architecture simply a reactionary movement, as its detractors maintain, led by bow-tied anti-modernists seeking to turn back the clock—the architectural equivalent of historical reenactments? Well, yes, in part. Traditional/classical architecture does represent a reaction against the ahistorical attitude that has come to typify mainstream architecture, and it definitely has looked to the past for inspiration. But which past?
In a famous 1959 lecture, Philip Johnson told his Yale audience, “We cannot not know history.” Yet with a few exceptions, today’s classical architects have been highly selective in choosing exactly which history to know. In the debate over President Trump’s executive order privileging classicism for federal buildings, for example, both critics and supporters assumed this meant fluted columns and garlanded entablatures. Indeed, it does sometimes appear as if classicism stopped with the richly bedecked buildings of Charles McKim and Stanford White. But as my friend the Greek architect Demetri Porphyrios pointed out years ago in an influential essay, “classicism is not a style.” The mannered classicism of Michelangelo was very different from the earlier classicism of Bramante or the later classicism of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Prussian classicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin (1830) was more different still, as was the stripped classicism of Paul Philippe Cret’s Federal Reserve Board Building (1937). A reason that classicism takes different guises, apart from the unstoppable imagination of architects, is that despite its ancient Greek and Roman roots, it inevitably reflects the taste of its own time. Schinkel was affected by his interest in Gothic buildings, just as Cret was influenced by the art deco movement, and even by the International Style. Could one imagine a 21st-century classicism that broadens its language to incorporate elements of the modernist past? That’s a tall order in our bifurcated time, when architectural correctness mandates that you belong to one camp or the other.
“I’m actually getting sort of tired of correctness,” architect Thomas A. Kligerman told me. “I like both/and, the adventure of either/or, bringing seemingly disparate things together.” After receiving a graduate degree in architecture from Yale in 1982, Kligerman spent seven years with Robert A. M. Stern Architects, a practice that specializes in traditional/classical design, before founding his own firm with John Ike, another Stern alumnus. A decade later, they were joined by Joel Barkley. Over the next 23 years, Ike Kligerman Barkley, based in New York, gained a national reputation for its exceptional residences. Architectural Digest, which featured many IKB projects, praised the firm’s work as “timeless, considerate architecture and buildings with soul.”
In 2023, following an amicable dissolution of the partnership, Kligerman continued on his own. Despite having been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome and being a devoted watercolorist, he has an unusual approach to tradition. Some of his work is modern with traditionalist overtones, and some is traditional with modernist overtones. An oceanside house on Long Island’s East End appears at first glance to be an example of the popular shingle style, which originated in the late 19th century in summer houses that were built up and down the New England seaboard. But in Kligerman’s hands, this old American chestnut takes an unexpected turn. The walls and large protective roofs are shingled, but the house combines this traditional material with minimalist details. Instead of a fascia board at the eaves, the knife-edge recalls the skinny hovering roof of the Barcelona Pavilion (designed for the 1929 International Exposition by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich). Skinny, too, are the double columns of the porch, which are wood, and the railings, which are steel; in the manner of the Mies Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, both are painted white. This unexpected aesthetic blend is the architectural equivalent of fusion cuisine.
Another Kligerman residence, this one by a lake in Connecticut, is not shingled but uses an old Victorian technique: board-and-batten siding. Board-and-batten is often associated with Carpenter Gothic, and there are other hints of that 19th-century vernacular style: gables that recall stylized classical pediments, a window bay supported on decorative console brackets, and verticals between the windows that resemble simplified colonnettes. “I saw this house as having a high/low quality,” Kligerman explained to me in an email, “simple, barn-sided boxes stained a lowly brown with flourishes of high gloss black, classical pediments and details.” This undramatic house reminds me of the midcentury modern houses that architects such as William Wurster and Joseph Esherick built in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their casual layouts reflected the casual lifestyle of their owners, and the modest architecture intentionally stayed in the background, so much so that Frank Lloyd Wright once described Wurster as “that shack architect.” Kligerman’s elegant design is hardly a shack, but it has a similar unprepossessing, throwaway quality; the stark simplicity of the interior could be described as modern—or Amish. Thus the house is a conversation, albeit in hushed undertones, between tradition and modernity.
Ever since Palladio, architects have used houses as vehicles for exploring new ideas. I don’t know whether blending tradition and modernity will be the next new thing, or whether the gulf that exists between the two camps will be—or can be—bridged. In any event, Kligerman’s new-old houses remind me of what Duke Ellington once said of another art form: “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.”
The post The Next New Thing appeared first on The American Scholar.
A man is riding home in a horse-drawn sleigh on “the darkest evening of the year.” He stops for a while to watch his neighbor’s woods fill with snow. The driver is tempted to drop the reins and let the sleigh slide off into the forest. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” he says. He almost succumbs to their allure—almost but not quite.
These are the events that unfold in Robert Frost’s remarkable poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It’s one of many poems that readers of Frost, who was born 150 years ago in March, have come to love. It’s frequently quoted and probably still turns up on New England–themed calendars. And though it’s a lovely poem on its surface, as with many of Frost’s best works, there’s more here than immediately meets the eye.
We know Frost as a New England poet and a poet of rural life, but he was born in San Francisco and lived for some time in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, before he moved north to farm in New Hampshire and Vermont. Frost had a difficult time getting his early work published. When he was nearly 40, he finally found an appreciative editor and a group of literary allies (including the unlikely Ezra Pound) in England. Frost returned to America in 1915 and thrived. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times, was poet in residence at Amherst, the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Dartmouth. He read a poem at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and traveled as a goodwill ambassador to Russia, where he apparently charmed Nikita Khrushchev.
Frost lived a long time—he died in 1963 at the age of 88, wrote well into his final years, and reigned consistently as America’s best-loved poet. He could also be what Lionel Trilling called him: a “terrifying poet.” Frost wrote more distressing poems than “Stopping by Woods,” but it surely has its disturbing dimension. What prevents the rider from dropping the reins and giving in to the seduction of the woods, “lovey, dark, and deep”? Giving in would almost certainly mean freezing to death—it’s snowing and it’s cold. And who hasn’t, at one time or another, thought about sliding off the mortal coil, especially if one can do it readily and without much pain? When the speaker observes that he’s traveling on the “darkest evening of the year,” the darkness may be more than atmospheric. A darkness of the soul? Yes, maybe so.
The traveler stops and savors the prospect of a rather luxurious death, but then another impulse arises:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
“Sleep,” like “darkest evening of the year,” contains what we might call a Frostian depth-charge. He’s apparently talking about rest after a long day, but he may also be talking about the ultimate rest. “And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep”: the repetition is ominous. But you can easily ignore the dark undertones and think of this as simply a poem about a man pausing for a moment on an arduous trip. I understand that some readers believe that “Stopping by Woods” is a poem about Saint Nicholas delivering his gifts on Christmas Eve, with miles to go before he takes his well-earned rest.
Frost did not like Trilling calling him a terrifying poet—the occasion was a banquet celebrating Frost’s 85th birthday, the setting the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. (There were many such banquets, many honors.) Frost wanted to be popular, and he wanted to sell books—he was, and he did. Remarks like Trilling’s could be bad for business. Frost earned a lot of money, which he spent on himself and on his family. Frost has been characterized as a miserable father and husband; it’s true, he could be self-absorbed and even cruel. But as Jay Parini, author of an excellent biography on Frost writes, “By any standard, Frost’s dedication to his wife and family was extraordinary. … That he had been a devoted father cannot be questioned. The children had grown up with him in the house as a constant presence. … No parent or spouse is ever perfect and Frost—a man who fought with depression and anxiety throughout his life struggled with his family responsibilities; for the most part, he bore them well.”
Frost wasn’t always dark or terrifying. One of his most memorably beautiful poems is “Putting in the Seed”:
You come to fetch me from my work tonight
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea),
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
So far, what we have is a lovely poem about gardening. But then matters shift, and the poem becomes richer and stranger.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Anyone with a passion for gardening will recognize the feelings that infuse the poem. In the springtime, people fall in love with planting and with imagining the bounty to come. It’s the time of hope for the gardener before pests or bad weather interfere with the dream of plenty. Frost himself was a gardener and intimately knew the passion for growing.
Yet the poem is about more than gardening, much as “Stopping by Woods” is about more than a sleigh-ride in the cold. It is also about the act of love, putting in the seed that leads to pregnancy and birth. “Love burns through the Putting in the Seed”: life begins with sex, passion inspired by love. But love continues on past the moment of lovemaking, into the days of pregnancy, when husband and wife together wait for birth. And then comes the seedling, the child, sturdy and strong, “shouldering” away the earth crumbs.
The poem is about fidelity. The husband is there for the act of love, yes. But he’ll be there through the pregnancy and on to the birth. This is a marriage poem, about a love that will abide on into the future, going beyond simple passion into regions of care, compassion, and respect.
Like “Stopping by Woods,” the poem is up to two things at once. You can read it as a simple hymn to the joys of spring planting, and not be wrong. But you can also see it as a hymn to sex, marital love, and devotion. Frost wouldn’t have blinked twice if you missed the sexual connotations of the poem; just as he’d probably have been unfazed if you read “Stopping by Woods” and said nothing about easeful death. If you want to follow Frost into his depths, that’s fine; if not, his reputation as the good white-maned poet of New England remains intact.
Frost has a genius for doing two things at once. In “Birches,” he makes a boy’s tree climbing, which combines daring with studious care, into a metaphor for how to live one’s life, balancing risk and bravado. In “Two Tramps at Mud Time,” Frost shows us subtly how chopping wood feeds his poetic art. It helps him combine his avocation (farming) with his vocation (writing). They merge, he writes, “as my own two eyes make one in sight.” Farming provides Frost with the subjects and metaphors for his poems. He surely feels that the country and the farm are the places where reality is most intensely concentrated. “Mending Wall” is a poem about two men restoring a stone wall, and it’s also a brilliantly revealing encounter between progressive and conservative temperaments. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” says that progressive. To that the conservative replies, “Good fences make good neighbors.” When pushed, he says it again. “He will not go behind his father’s saying, / And he likes having thought of it so well …” The resonances of the poem reach forward in time to us and all of our current talk about borders and limits, and the building of walls.
Frost offers surface pleasures, to be sure, and they are very real. Readers who simply stop and savor them won’t be making a mistake. But he also invites you to experience perceptions and possibilities that are more richly complex. One hundred and fifty years after his birth, it’s worth our while to go back and read him again, and yet again.
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After a snowboarding accident a few years ago, my son went to a physical therapist whose wife, it turned out, I knew. A neighbor of friends of mine, she had come to my house for English conversation classes about a dozen years earlier, when she was 20. I hadn’t seen her in some time, though I had heard that she’d married and had a child, then I heard she’d had another. I’d also heard that she and her husband had renovated an old building next to her parents’ house. Physical therapy is a booming business, and after their second child was born, they’d built a new house just up the lane. Her brother was also married and also had two children. Like his sister, he lived near the parents, in a rural Gijón neighborhood that is a mix of old farmhouses, fields, baroque mansions, and enormous new modern homes. When my son noticed that the physical therapist no longer had pictures of his wife up on social media, he asked me what I knew about them. How are they? he wondered.
When I knew her, the wife was a very beautiful young woman. Her English wasn’t great, and she needed to beef it up to pass a test for a course she was taking. Whether she quit coming before or after she took the test I do not remember, or even whether she passed the test and the course. But for those several weeks that we met in the spring of that distant year, I sat beside her on the sofa and asked her all kinds of questions about her life and answered hers about mine—favorite movies, travels, hobbies, and so on. I learned about her extraordinarily jealous boyfriend Adrián, who worked in a bar on the weekends and who sometimes flew into a rage when she went to visit him there. He would see or imagine he saw someone flirting with her. He ranted and raved. Sometimes he broke things. That didn’t sound good, I commented. No, she agreed.
“What do you say when he acts that way?”
“I say, ‘Adrián!’”
We both laughed.
I was legally separated, so she asked me if I had a boyfriend.
“I did until recently,” I was about to say. Instead, I burst into tears.
As I wiped my eyes, abashed at crying in front of this girl I hardly knew, she comforted me. “It’ll be okay,” she said. She leaned forward to hug me. “You’ll find someone soon,” she said. A week later, for my birthday, she baked a cake and brought it to me. My consolation prize. She had not yet broken up with her jealous boyfriend, but I could have predicted the same for her: she would meet someone. He would make her happy.
“The happiness of one man and one woman is the greatest thing in all the world,” says detective Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s 1920 novel, Mysterious Affair at Styles. Because it is, Poirot decides to let an innocent man suffer the distress of a murder trial that he, Poirot, but not the defendant, is certain will end in acquittal. Why does Poirot do this? The false accusation brings the accused’s estranged wife running to his defense and opens the way for these two proud people to reconcile. Poirot lets both husband and wife suffer uncertainty, fear, and inconvenience in order to bring them together again. It is a happy moment when the freed prisoner rushes into the room and gathers his wife into his arms. The reader can sigh with pleasure for the overjoyed couple, and smile indulgently at the accused’s brother, also a suspect and also in love, and also now seeing eye to eye with his romantic interest. All their suffering is nothing compared with the wonder of their prize: each other. It is the outcome that counts.
So what to make of blissful love that does not endure, and what to think when death separates lovers? In Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film depicting the life of the Thracian slave and gladiator, the hero’s wife, Sura, bidding the dying Spartacus goodbye, doesn’t doubt that she’s come out ahead despite the pain of losing her husband. She has his child to live for. Even without the child, having known love seems a triumph, though you lose it. So say the poets. Such a reckoning makes sense, according to Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem, “The Weighing”: “So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance.” How wonderful, I thought, on reading those lines, sent to me by my stepmother. And yet, I might nevertheless prefer never to have had Spartacus than to love and lose him so cruelly.
Could Poirot and Hirshfield be right? One happy couple and the scales balance, no matter how many belligerent or bickering or disappointed couples crowd the other scale? It would let all us less-than-enraptured people off the hook because surely somewhere out there will be someone and that person’s true love to keep the balance so we can go on in our grumbly way. The physical therapist and his wife are not that loving couple: I found out from my friends that they are separated, he has the big new house, she has the house next to her parents, and the children go back and forth between them. It may never be okay in the same way again, I could tell her. You were happy though—the same thing she could have told me. When and where those golden moments of happiness were harvested, in which field or which year, doesn’t matter.
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Amanda Holmes reads Linda Pastan’s “The Answering Machine.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Answering Machine” by Linda Pastan appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1921, at the newly opened swimming pool at Washington University, St. Louis, a crowd of 2,500 gathered across two nights to witness America’s first water pageant. A portly man dressed as Father Neptune, with a long gray beard and trident, emerged from the water as a bugler heralded his arrival. Standing on the pool deck, the foil-gilded king of the sea looked around quizzically and, addressing the people seated in the bleachers, demanded to know the purpose of this strange, rectangular body of water. A master of ceremonies joined Neptune and explained that the pool was built for four noble reasons: health, safety, sport, and fun. The four-act spectacle that followed, “Showing Father Neptune,” illustrated each of these, with marching drills in the pool; demonstrations of water rescues and resuscitation methods; relay races and diving displays; water clowns and pajama races.
Thousands of these water pageants—plays performed in lakes, rivers, oceans, or pools—were produced across the United States in the first half of the 20th century. This genre of aquatic theater was the brainchild of Wilbert E. Longfellow, who wanted to do something about the nation’s abysmally high drowning rates—10,000 Americans died in the water each year—at a time when most people in this country couldn’t swim. Longfellow, whose motto was to “educate them gently while entertaining them hugely,” believed that the best way to interest the public in swimming was to put on a good show. His water pageants merged the theatrical elements of dialogue, costumes, and colorful set designs with aquatics, featuring demonstrations of various strokes, aquatic stunts, and lifesaving techniques as well as take-home messages about the importance of water safety. Not only did generations of Americans learn how to swim, but the pageants also helped popularize the then-nascent sport of synchronized swimming—one that I have practiced for years. And even though artistic swimming, as the Olympic event is now called, has long since abandoned the trappings of aquatic theater, water pageants provided the sport its earliest platform, leading to its widespread popularity.
As a young man, Wilbert Longfellow worked as a marine journalist on the Rhode Island waterfront. After covering more than his share of watery deaths and being saved twice from drowning himself, he began to develop a passion for swimming and lifesaving. He joined the United States Volunteer Life Saving Corps, the first lifesaving organization dedicated to protecting the American public (as opposed to sailors and seamen). Longfellow quickly rose to a position of leadership—receiving the title of Commodore in 1905—and drowning rates in Rhode Island and New York fell dramatically. Eager to expand his work beyond the Northeast, he persuaded the American Red Cross in 1914 to establish the first nationwide program dedicated to lifesaving and water safety. Serving as national field director for the new Red Cross Life Saving Corps, Longfellow chartered 61 corps across the country in his first three years.
“With his height and bulk and booming voice,” wrote a friend, “he needed only a flowing robe, a wig and long gray beard, a gilded cardboard crown and the symbolic trident to perfectly personify the mythological god of the sea.”Longfellow’s goal was to make “every American a swimmer” and “every swimmer a lifesaver,” but that would require vastly different teaching methods than those previously used. In the early 20th century, beginning swimmers were often strapped in harnesses suspended from overhead pulley systems that supported them in the water as they worked on the basic movements of the breaststroke. This method severely limited the number of students who could learn at any given time, and it also kept swimmers from learning to trust their natural ability to float.
New pedagogical techniques were, however, emerging. In 1906, George Corsan, a member of the Canadian Royal Life Saving Society, had introduced the first mass teaching method, at the Detroit YMCA. Departing from the conventional breaststroke, which was difficult for fledgling swimmers to coordinate, Corsan opted to teach the crawl stroke and flutter kick, which he could do on land with large cohorts of children before transitioning them to the water. Meanwhile, B. Dean Brink of the American Swimming Association encouraged beginners to visualize images they could imitate, such as a hungry duck sticking its face under the water or a sleeping turtle gently floating on the surface.
Longfellow combined these methods and added his own twist. As he traveled across the country training lifeguards and giving swimming demonstrations, he would gather his young pupils at local swimming holes and weave imaginative tales—those of near drownings due to horseplay or ignorance and of heroic rescues by trained lifeguards—and have them act out the stories. Sometimes he played the drowning victim and asked the tiniest tots in the group to tow him by the hair to safety, thereby proving that someone of any size could save lives in the water. These sessions were so popular that Longfellow began planning ahead, shaping his stories around local lore or celebrations in the towns he was visiting. When Washington University asked him in 1921 to help dedicate its new pool, he wrote “Showing Father Neptune.” The portly figure of Father Neptune? That was Longfellow himself. “With his height and bulk and booming voice,” wrote a friend, “he needed only a flowing robe, a wig and long gray beard, a gilded cardboard crown and the symbolic trident to perfectly personify the mythological god of the sea.”
The United States entered a pool-building spree in the 1920s, and by 1924, “Showing Father Neptune” had been performed at the dedication ceremonies of at least 75 swimming pools. A female adaptation, “Showing Neptune’s Daughter,” was developed by the Girl Scouts. It was also an era of massive growth in physical education programs and organized recreation for youth—from the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, the Camp Fire Girls, and the YMCA and YWCA to the proliferation of summer camps. The Red Cross was highly influential, too, and with its robust endorsement, water pageants caught on. Soon, recreation and education leaders were writing their own scripts, which were shared at professional conferences and in journals.
In 1934, Olive McCormick, the Girl Scouts’ national adviser on water safety, published the first book on the subject, Water Pageants: Games and Stunts, which included a foreword by Longfellow and covered music, casting, lighting, set designs, and costuming. Turtles, gnomes, water lilies, satyrs, and even human totem poles could be wardrobed with inexpensive materials such as cheesecloth, rope, muslin, wire, and waterproofed cardboard. McCormick advised that a combination of aluminum powder and banana oil slathered on one’s legs could give the illusion of a shimmery mermaid’s tail. As the title of her book implies, she also provided instructions for performing a variety of swimming “stunts,” isolated movements that members of England’s renowned Royal Life Saving Society, as well as generations of vaudeville performers, had used to demonstrate mastery in the aquatic element. Within a decade of Longfellow’s writing his first script, pageants were being produced pretty much anywhere youth and water came together. A 1937 survey of 140 high schools, colleges, universities, and camps found that 36 percent produced water pageants; more than half of those that did not would have done so but for the lack of proper swimming facilities.
Some swimming instructors and educators had already begun experimenting with ways to combine aquatic stunts with group formation work and music—thanks to the availability of portable Victrolas, which instructors could roll onto a pool deck. This combination became the basis of synchronized swimming, which got its name during a performance organized by physical educator Katharine Curtis at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair—and which would feature prominently in water pageants. In “Neptune’s Cure for Piracy,” another of Longfellow’s works, water nymphs help a band of pirates overcome their fear of swimming by artistically swirling in and out of circles and lacy patterns illuminated by lanterns dangling from bamboo poles. The nymphs coax the pirates from their canoe and teach them the crawl stroke and aquatic stunts like somersaults and “the porpoise.” By the end of the pageant, the pirates have transformed into skilled swimmers and join their nymph teachers in a coed water ballet.
We still bedazzle our swimsuits and wear lipstick at our competitions. Even as the sport has grown considerably harder, we perform our athletic maneuvers with a smile and forgo goggles so that we can make eye contact with the judges.After Curtis and others ushered synchronized swimming into the world of competitive sports, Longfellow wrote “Swimming in Peace and War: A Water Ballet.” In that guide, he called synchronized swimming the “newest phase of aquatic dramatics.” Although synchronized swimming would soon drop the scripts and dialogue—or “trite versions of King Neptune,” as one instructor put it—in favor of emphasizing the beauty, rhythm, and precision associated with swimming, a strong element of performance would remain. Nearly a century later, we still bedazzle our swimsuits and wear lipstick at our competitions. Even as the sport has grown considerably harder, we perform our athletic maneuvers with a smile and forgo the comfort of goggles so that we can make eye contact with the judges.
Longfellow retired in 1947, a year after the first national-level synchronized swimming championship. By that time, the drowning rate in the United States had dropped by half and 80 million Americans had taken up water activities of some kind. The Red Cross, meanwhile, had qualified 100,000 water safety instructors and issued 4.5 million swimming and lifesaving certificates. As Longfellow wrote, “The art of swimming is increasing very rapidly, and human beings are attaining a great mastery over the comparatively unfamiliar element of water.” But he also knew what was needed to inspire new generations of aquaphiles: “Let us not neglect to keep swimming a great game, full of fun and color and glamorous experiences.” Thanks to his pioneering work, it would remain just that.
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My older brother Stephen was always tall. Extremely tall. He was that kid who occupied precisely the middle position in the last row of every class picture in elementary school. His arms hung awkwardly out of the sleeves of his shirts, which could never keep pace with his weedy growth. “Dear Friends,” our dad wrote in his annual Christmas letter in 1961, “Stephen is a 1st grader at Overlook school … He is a TALL 1st grader, standing just 4 inches below his daddy’s chin. We hope that this growth-pace declines.” It didn’t.
When I encounter Steve in family photos from the years before I was born, there’s still an unguarded lightness to him, a receptivity to the world. He was tall, yes, but he hadn’t been diagnosed with anything. He was seen—and, I believe, saw himself—as a child who simply happened to be unusually lanky and tall. He fit in among the other kids in our suburban Baltimore neighborhood, where children observed difference but did so ingenuously. They hadn’t yet acquired the malevolent acumen to sort, rank, and harass other kids based on physical characteristics. As I look at these photos, decades later, my heart aches for Steve. It’s as if he didn’t suspect anything was wrong. Whatever he imagined for his life in those days had nothing to do with what followed. He was enjoying a particular kind of innocence: it was the last time when his inner battle with the idea of normal wasn’t an elemental part of his existence.
What is normal? Is genetic variation something to be corrected? Or is variation simply variation, a natural (and crucial) link in the evolutionary chain?The question of how to think about human difference is nothing new. In the late 19th century, at the dawn of what one British biologist declared to be the “century of the gene,” scientists were already debating the answer. English polymath Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, and his journal, The Eugenics Review, endorsed selective breeding and the sterilization of the atypical as a means of eliminating deviation from genetic norms. But Galton’s cousin Charles Darwin put forward a different view. Darwin called mutations “sports,” a more benign, even playful term. The opposite of the sport was not a normal gene but a wild type, the one most often found in the natural world. Likewise, physician Archibald Garrod influentially wrote about chemical individuality.
The new world of gene editing has reinvigorated the debate. In 2003, scientists completed mapping the human genome, and last year, the FDA approved CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing therapy to treat sickle cell anemia. These developments have the potential to change fundamentally our understanding of (and approach to) human abnormality. Medical ethicists sometimes distinguish between genetic “treatment” and “enhancement”—condoning the former, condemning the latter—but the distinction is arguably flimsy. As it becomes ever easier to manipulate genes to our liking, how will we feel about genetic characteristics that fall short of affliction, such as lack of athleticism, but nevertheless deny certain advantages to those who inherit them? What about atypicalities, such as neurodivergence, deafness, dwarfism, and scores of others? Those who have these conditions don’t necessarily see them as disabilities. Might such people become candidates for gene editing? Whereas patients with mild symptoms might once have been able to pass as genetically normal, the mapping of the genome has largely eliminated this possibility. It’s disquietingly simple to envision a world, already fast approaching, in which the lack of genetic perfection itself comes to feel like an affliction.
What is normal? Is genetic variation something to be corrected? Or is variation simply variation, a natural (and crucial) link in the evolutionary chain? Much depends on how we perceive the line between the normal and the abnormal, the typical and the atypical, whether we approach genetics solely from a scientific standpoint or broaden our understanding to take in social, cultural, and political factors.
When Steve was around 10, a doctor informed him and my parents that he most likely had a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. Suddenly, the idea of physical normalcy became deeply and personally relevant. My brother’s life story had converged with the story of genetic medicine.
Victor McKusick was one of the founders of medical genetics, and for many years, he was my brother’s doctor. At Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s, he encountered cases of Marfan, including one involving a patient with a serious heart anomaly. The patient was tall and gangly, with disproportionately long fingers and limbs, and had dislocated eye lenses. He looked malnourished, but he wasn’t. At the time, little was known about Marfan, named in 1896 after the French pediatrician who first documented its distinctive features. By the late 1930s, it had been determined that Marfan was an autosomal dominant hereditary trait, meaning that it’s expressed with only one copy of the gene from a parent. McKusick would later trace his professional legacy, in part, to this patient’s bedside. He was awed by the “intricate jigsaw puzzle” of connective tissue, in general, as well as the syndrome’s flamboyantly diverse manifestations and the questions that it raised. Genetically, how could being tall relate to catastrophic heart failure? Why would someone with an eye problem have long fingers?
McKusick had no platform on which to study Marfan or, as he called it, “the Marfan.” The term medical genetics had been knocking around for decades, but it wasn’t a discrete discipline. Hopkins was a good incubator for the emerging field because different specialists mingled in its cafeterias and corridors, and as McKusick saw it, genetics gave a doctor “license to swashbuckle through all of medicine.” Throughout his career, he described his work like this, as an invitation to “go on safari” intellectually, to delve into the invisible, uncharted world of the chromosome as if he were a global adventurer. After he arrived in Baltimore in 1943, he never left. Hopkins was “on the trade routes,” he said. “Thus I could pitch my tent beside the road and keep in touch with what was going on in far off Cathay without ever traveling there myself.”
Doctors usually saw people with Marfan as eye or orthopedic patients, but McKusick, ingeniously, redefined them as genetics patients with a genetic affliction. McKusick hypothesized that the gene in question must control the production of connective tissue. Problems arising from abnormalities in this gene can range from the innocuous (stretch marks after pregnancy) to the lethal. A human heart beats around three billion times in an average life, and over time, the force of a Marfan patient’s own pulse can catastrophically tear the aorta. It’s a paradox that Marfan is one of the most common single-gene disorders and yet one of the stealthiest, even to a physician. You’ve probably met people with this condition and haven’t known it; they may not know they have it themselves. Early studies of Marfan patients record deaths out of the blue. One dropped dead in the middle of a job interview, another after completing a high dive at a pool. Sportswriter Grant Wahl had undiagnosed Marfan and died suddenly while covering the 2022 World Cup.
At Hopkins, McKusick “collected a large number of Marfan patients.” He pored over medical files and amassed cases from every department. He also mined records at the Baltimore morgue for instances of coronary dissection, a condition that results from a tear in the wall of one of the heart’s arteries. In 1955, he described 74 Marfan cases and related disorders in what remains a flagship work in the field of medical genetics, Heritable Disorders of Connective Tissue. Two years later, he gave the emerging field an institutional home: the Moore Clinic at Hopkins, now the McKusick-Nathans Institute. The clinic had previously focused on chronic diseases like syphilis, but McKusick reasoned that genetic defects were the “ultimate chronic disease” and nudged syphilis aside to make room for medical genetics.
To move his work forward, McKusick needed access to contained, insular communities, characterized by intermarriage, where rare recessive genes were likelier to get expressed. In correspondence, this generation of geneticists would make comments such as, “On the wildcat road of the stony fork this afternoon, I found a nice trait of deaf-mutism,” and “Did you happen to see the Newsweek … in which there was a picture of a dwarf?” Well into the 1980s, McKusick made research trips into the Amish communities of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He got a fundamentally “different concept of people,” he said, when he saw them “in situ”—nested in their lives, observing genetic anomaly in its habitat, where any number of stories about atypical bodies could be told. In her 2005 book, Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine, science historian M. Susan Lindee describes the gossipy intimacy that McKusick enjoyed with many families, allowing him to collect blood and urine samples, family genealogies recorded in Bibles, and intimate secrets. His field notes are interspersed with various personal details: how he bought brooms from one family, purchased jams on his way home from another, and was “bitten by a small dog” during an interview.
Yet McKusick also needed access to urban populations. Medical geneticists could familiarize themselves with rare genetic disorders only in places densely populated enough to yield more than one or two cases. In August 1957, he offered a certain Miss Hawkins a job as a “pedigree-tracer” in the newly formed Division of Medical Genetics at the Hopkins medical school. Hawkins would gather “extensive information on members of families of persons with various hereditary diseases” by driving around Baltimore, collecting biographical and medical information, drawing blood, taking urine samples, and abstracting families’ physician reports and medical records. To do this work, as McKusick described it, Hawkins would have to obtain “the rapport and cooperation of the family.” Some cases required extraordinary finesse, since mutations might expose through the back door the open secret of infidelity. “Illegitimacy is so much more frequent than mutation,” McKusick wrote. Data collection in these cases required the “utmost tact and resourcefulness.” Indeed.
In the years that followed, McKusick’s growing number of colleagues generated data on Marfan and other genetic conditions in a variety of ways. For one study, they took measurements of 2,100 children in Baltimore’s public schools. In a festschrift published in 2012, British geneticist Malcolm A. Ferguson-Smith described how McKusick designed a study of chromosomal abnormalities that involved surveying “delinquent boys, county schools, and pediatric clinic populations” in Baltimore. By the early 1960s, “state institutions for the mentally retarded [had become] intellectually exciting places,” McKusick wrote in a 1975 survey of his field published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. His colleagues had discovered two new genetic syndromes through research at Rosewood, Maryland’s home for the “mentally retarded.” The patients’ specific treatment was not thereby “altered one whit,” but the institutions received attention and became something “other than the equivalent of pesthouses.” Conditions there may not have changed, but as McKusick saw it, genetic research reintegrated these exiled patients into the human population.
That language is jarring to 21st-century ears and ethics, as are the methodologies: trawling at public schools, reform schools, and state institutions for research subjects, or traveling the streets of Baltimore to collect samples. Keep in mind, this was before standardized HIPAA, or codified informed consent and institutional review boards. But for atypical humans like my brother, McKusick’s approach was turning perceptions away from spectacle. He repudiated older moral judgments that hereditary afflictions among children were the result of parental vices or failings. McKusick and his colleagues replaced this 19th-century narrative of parental sin and genetic retribution with an equally powerful yet morally disinterested clinical gaze.
Eventually my brother was among those collected. When he was diagnosed, Steve’s narrative about himself began to change. Having a genetic condition transliterated physical eccentricity into affliction, a rare genetic case. This wasn’t an inconsequential semantic matter, either for Steve, who had a life to navigate, or for McKusick, who had an ambitious new field of knowledge to advance against the indifferent and skeptical. Being physically atypical means you’re going to be looked at—it’s only a question of how (imagine never being able to blend into a crowd or be physically anonymous when you want to). McKusick tried to ensure that his patients were looked at in a particular way. For him, humans were not normal or abnormal; they existed on a continuum. He deliberately spoke of “instructive” cases, not “interesting” cases—the former emphasized a clinical sensibility; the latter, something closer to carnival freak shows.
I looked up to Steve, in both senses. He was my big brother in height and age. To me, he was normal—or as normal as anything else, since the term had no valence.But doctors, and medicine, enjoyed a great deal of power and latitude all the same. In the 1950s, doctors were at the height of their cultural mystique and authority, and my mother delivered Steve into their arms on the expectation of merciful omnipotence. McKusick’s medical genetics course at Hopkins included the study of Baltimore families with hereditary disorders. For one assignment, he instructed, “students may wish to call in children who are affected with the Marfan syndrome. … The primary purpose would be to compare the growth characteristics of this group with normal data and with their normal sibs.” Steve was among the children summoned, and one day, he and our mother stood center stage in an amphitheater, where doctors pointed out to other doctors the physical traits of Marfan. “I didn’t realize there would be so many people,” my mother recalled, and she was intimidated—but compliant. It didn’t occur to anyone involved to question the psychological wisdom of this exhibition. My mother remembered only that “they kept talking about how long Steve’s arms were, and pointing.” My brother wasn’t presented as a carnival freak or the incarnation of parental sin but as a medical genetics subject, and that difference must have mattered—being gawked at and being studied can’t possibly feel the same. But neither can they feel entirely different.
It was the gene that had caused things to happen, not context, social attitudes, or people’s behavior. Steve embraced this idea, believing that his identity was both fixed and unfixable. The thought grew in his mind that he was a sort of transcriptional error—a fateful typo, if not a full-blown mistake. Steve used the term mutation a lot. By the time he reached high school, he seemed to have decided that he didn’t have a mutation; he was a mutation. Being almost 12 years younger than Steve and still in a somewhat feral stage, I provided a refuge for him—I had no demeaning agenda of pity or largesse. I looked up to Steve, in both senses. He was my big brother in height and age. To me, he was normal—or as normal as anything else, since the term had no valence. He used to play a terrifying zombie game with me: he’d go outside, knock on our door, stand there mutely with dead, unblinking eyes, arms extended straight out, and then he’d lurch at me like Frankenstein’s monster, never saying a word. I’d scream every time he did this, in turn terrifying my older sister, who would scold me for saying “there’s a monster in the house” when it was only Steve.
I understand the zombie game better, or at least differently, today. A fledgling genetics journal, founded in 1968, called itself Teratology, from the Greek for “the study of monsters.” The title, in turn, echoed prodigy books of early-modern Europe that interpreted unusual or extraordinary natural events and attributed imperfecta—abnormal human bodies—to supernatural causes. The atypical was monstrous, yes, but also powerful, imbued with a darkly divine provenance. Maybe this was the kind of power that Steve wanted to possess, play with, and inhabit; maybe it was the story of mutation that he preferred.
In high school, Steve was neither physically abnormal enough to be swaddled in pity nor normal enough to be ignored. This made him a prime target for bullying. Every day, he ran a gauntlet of jeers and taunts, a crucible imagined and reenacted long into adulthood. The bullying he suffered, like all bullying, was about the enforcement of normalcy and its authority—and some of the early figures in genetic medicine would pretty much have agreed with the self-loathing and genetic judgment that my brother applied to himself. They saw genetic medicine as aspiring toward the same goal: the dominance of the normal. In a 1950 paper, “Our Load of Mutations,” for example, American geneticist (and eugenicist) Hermann Joseph Muller outlined his vision of an ideal “all-normal man.”
But McKusick thought differently. He was a clinician, not a genetic idealist like Muller, and he envisioned a zone of normalcy, running from “normal or unaffected individuals” on one side to “affected individuals” on the other. In the middle are mildly affected individuals in a “zone of overlap,” where they can’t even be “recognized as abnormal.” Indeed, before the mapping of the human genome, genetic passing was possible. Doctors might know that a gene was involved in some disorder, but not its location. Besides, no genetic testing was yet available. This ambiguity was especially true with Marfan, which has a vast range of expressivity—the degree to which a genotype, the genetic code, is evident in the phenotype, the individual’s body. McKusick always suspected that Abraham Lincoln had Marfan and wanted to get a biological sample to confirm his hunch. (He never succeeded.) But other cases of the disease are more self-evident, such as that of a baby with Marfan who, McKusick wrote, died at eight months, the child’s heart so overactive that it caused the bed to shake. The atypical body can be lethally crippling or profitably exotic—a deadly genetic trait passing as a lucrative asset. Sometimes, it can be both. Genetically “perfect” bodies can be impeccably normal or spectacularly atypical—athletic and tall enough for someone to play in the NBA or become a supermodel.
McKusick respected this ambiguity. In a 1969 textbook, he warned that “the dividing line between normal and abnormal variation is not fixed; indeed no dividing line exists. ‘Disease’ or ‘dis-order’ are not easily defined terms. Variation in one environment or social setting may be considered pathologic, where in another it may be advantageous. Keep in mind a variation constitutes a continuum.” Even so, harsher and more rigid attitudes toward those who lived outside the zone of normalcy kept insinuating their way back into the field of genetic medicine, past checkpoints of delicacy, tact, and sophisticated reasoning. In his 2012 book, The Science of Human Perfection, historian Nathaniel Comfort asserts that the boundary between eugenics and medical genetics was ideologically membranous. The medical geneticist’s goal of alleviating individual human suffering and the eugenicist’s goal of populational betterment were subtly interleaved throughout the 20th century, and the origin story of McKusick as the “father of medical genetics” created a useful but misleadingly clean break between the two. Comfort isn’t alleging that medical geneticists were eugenics advocates; indeed, McKusick couldn’t have condemned eugenics any more passionately than he did, discrediting the idea as “abominable” and “outrageous.” And in the clinic, when he encountered Steve, McKusick was concerned about his well-being rather than atypicality. He wasn’t striving for Steve to be normal but to have a full and long life.
So, the border drawn by medical geneticists against eugenicists was an adamantly sincere one—yet difficult to patrol. McKusick wrote expansively about the “mutational repertoire of man,” but even he championed the study of the “morbid map” of abnormal genes by noting how much that map could elucidate the normal. However sincere the intention to speak of variation and not aberration, genetic language was getting powerfully magnetized toward the poles of normal and abnormal. And in a 1973 volume edited by McKusick, contributor F. Clarke Fraser wrote, “If we are to aim at reducing the amount of ill health caused by deleterious genes we must aim at avoiding their transmission … by reducing the likelihood that [the ‘abnormal infant’] will be born or even conceived.” Fraser thought it “perfectly proper,” when counseling couples, “to say the equivalent of, ‘Now be quite sure that you have really thought about what another defective child would mean.’ ” He wrote also of the “deformed or diseased child.” However benevolent the intention, it’s hard to discern in this comment where the alleviation of human suffering ends and human improvement begins. As Comfort writes, “What they called preventive eugenics we today would call prenatal diagnosis with therapeutic abortion.”
As an adult, Steve was no longer an object of ridicule; he became merely “the tall guy.” For Steve, the world was a Procrustean exercise and puzzle. How could he better conform himself to its circumscriptions, spaces, boundaries, and limits? “I wish I could hack off the middle part of my legs,” he’d say—this wasn’t the ecumenical view of genetic variation that McKusick tried to champion. Barring a leg hack, how would he make himself fit? This was a literal question he had to answer every day, as he ducked to fit through doors, slumped into sofas to shrink himself down, stooped to look in a mirror or read a sign, tucked in his legs and arms on crowded trains. He custom-designed his bicycles; he shifted car seats as far back as they would go; he moved quickly, masking conspicuousness with speed, making himself a blur—bounding headlong through crowds, long limbs flying and head ducked. He shopped for groceries late at night to avoid people. And he leaned over hundreds of pool tables, many thousands of times.
The struggle to fit provoked an ambient envy in his life, and the idea of a deranged genetic code—“all the luck of the dice,” he’d say—deepened the existential injustice.In his 20s, Steve was already an indefatigable pool player, on his way to becoming a nationally ranked amateur. I would hear him practicing in the basement, billiard balls making contact and plopping into a pocket, one after another after another. He was so good, even at the start—long fingers, able to make a beautiful bridge, such fluidity in his stroke. He could lean into shots and over tables better than anyone. This suited him. A billiards stance while shooting takes a good several inches off your height. You’re leaning, with cue in hand, and no one is likely to notice how long your legs are in that position. But if they notice how long your arms are, all the better. It’s an advantage. For Steve, pool took physical ungainliness and made it liquid, turned it into something elegant, beautiful, and normal. He was momentarily in conformity with a material world that otherwise almost cropped him. The sport sparked a psychological and a physical transformation in Steve. As he got better, he would talk about “mental toughness.” What it meant to him, specifically, was the capacity to be in control of which balls went where, in what order, and how the game unfolded and ended, entirely under his code and design.
The struggle to fit provoked an ambient envy in his life, and the idea of a deranged genetic code—“all the luck of the dice,” he’d say—deepened the existential injustice. Those who covet the normal, by definition, are unrelievedly confronted by the thing they covet every single day. For Steve, the subtractive simplicity and modesty of his longing only made it worse. Unlike the person who envies extraordinary physical traits, athleticism, or beauty and must seek them out—at stadiums, on movie screens, in magazines—Steve found hundreds of objects of ordinary desire in each moment. How many of us come to feel, as Steve did, that we’re waging the same struggle with normalcy to some lesser degree or another; that having a typical body, be it typical in weight, height, the construction of limbs, the proportion of limbs to torso, the angle of facial features and cheekbones, the straightness of the spine, the clearness of the skin, the size of the breasts, the daintiness of the nose, or the bulk of the muscles, would resolve our lives and set things straight? I learned from him that normal is the most profoundly craved thing when we don’t have it and the most effortlessly ignored thing when we do.
Steve and McKusick were obsessed with mutations, albeit in different ways. One Christmas, McKusick sent us a beautiful card featuring an image of Madonna and child, but the Madonna was an Amish mother with Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, a rare dwarfism, who had an extra digit on both hands.
The early phases of his work were about observing and cataloging. McKusick always had a camera with him. Every person he met was part of his fieldwork. He took photographs of my parents once, when their paths crossed at a party. McKusick engaged in more systematic cataloging on the first Wednesday of each month, when his colleagues gathered at his home in the verdant, affluent Baltimore neighborhood of Guilford. As they drank coffee and enjoyed homemade sticky buns, they prepared index cards summarizing articles in medical journals pertinent to genetic conditions. These index cards became the first entries in the groundbreaking Mendelian Inheritance in Man, known today as the OMIM (the O standing for “online”). It’s the definitive database of human genetic identity—hailed as “the bible of clinical genetics”—with entries on 16,000 genes. Steve is #154700.
McKusick considered this work one of his most important achievements, yet it was still what he called an “encyclopedia of phenotypes”—and looks deceive. McKusick tellingly compared the distinction between genotype and phenotype to that of a person’s “character and reputation. Genotype and character are what one really is. Phenotype and reputation are what one appears to be.” A reputation can lie, but character cannot. Our authentic identity resides in DNA. It’s almost as if in cases of genetic passing, the phenotype has pulled one over on the genotype: appearance is a trick of the eye, or an act of diagnostic treachery.
At a conference on birth defects, McKusick famously elaborated this point with reference to “lumpers and splitters.” He argued that doctors were often guilty of “lumping” patients into one syndrome because of physical similarities, or “excessive and improper splitting” of patients with the same genetic disorder into separate identities because of physical variations. We are what our genes say we are. Those working on genes had become impatient with gray zones: “Disease A and Disease B are either the same disease, if they are based on the same mutation, or different diseases.” And if this was so, McKusick concluded, then what he really needed wasn’t an encyclopedia.
He needed a map.
Some of McKusick’s colleagues viewed his aspiration to locate and map every disease-causing gene as dilettantism akin to stamp collecting and about as edifying as bricklaying. In August 1968, a Newark Evening News reporter likened McKusick’s annual Bar Harbor “short course” on medical genetics to the engrossing pointlessness of counting angels on the head of a pin. What did the discovery of a defective gene for “the circus-rubber-man syndrome” gain humanity in comparison with other research? A doctor who played agent provocateur at the course lectured that most of the information harvested by medical genetics had no practical application, was “not very interesting,” and was largely “a waste of time.” But none of this extinguished McKusick’s “burning interest in mapping.” So often a momentous, paradigm-shifting idea gets smuggled inside a cozy metaphor, and this was true for genetic medicine. In 1975, New York Times science reporter Harold Schmeck Jr. did much to popularize a gene-centric worldview by drawing heavily on McKusick’s adventurous notion of himself as a voyager to “chromosomal continents,” the expeditionary mapmaker of “uncharted terrain.”
Steve continued to visit McKusick at Hopkins mostly to determine whether his aorta was dilating. Steve admired and spoke highly of McKusick. He found him gracious and well mannered, calm and tolerant. At a checkup in the 1980s, McKusick asked Steve what he was up to. My brother was early into his 33-year career as a cartographer with the federal government. “The two of us are not so different,” McKusick said. “I’m a cartographer, too. I map genes.” This made him the cartographer of my cartographer brother’s affliction. I used to think that Steve liked maps because their point of view normalized his own. In cartography, the view from high up is the privileged one. As for McKusick, he later wrote, “I am not certain why … I became enthralled with mapping genes on human chromosomes.” It would be useful for “understanding the basic derangements in birth defects,” but his inspirations were also visceral. There “are people, and I am one, for whom mapping has an intrinsic attraction.”
The completion of the genome map gave a powerful boost to the authority of the genetic code as a set of instructions for our identities. In McKusick’s term, a map “confers a concreteness” to genetics. Before the map existed, a patient with mild symptoms could still pass as genetically normal and the concept of physical normalcy itself maintained a tensile ambiguity owing to incomplete genetic knowledge. But as it became apparent that the human genome would be decoded in his lifetime, McKusick, an instinctive humanist, anticipated that the future of genetic medicine would seek to accommodate, not edit, human variation (although he did predict “gene surgery” as early as 1981). It would involve “gene screens” and “interpreting the results to individuals, and designing programs to make the most of the strong points … and to avoid troubles from some of the weak points.” McKusick believed that maps drew and bound people together—not genotypical subgroups, but all of us.
Inevitably, though, maps define boundaries that group people within and exclude them without. People create maps, and then maps create them. In the 1990s, epidemiologist Abby Lippman criticized the genome map for defining normal and abnormal as a genetic construct, not a social one. Yet mapping is, as much as anything else, a political and cultural project. The genetic normal began as a gray zone. Then it became a binary, and then, over time, with the genome mapped, it became slyly normative. James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA structure, wrote in 1995 that “the genetic dice will continue to inflict cruel fates on all too many individuals. … Decency demands that someone must rescue them from genetic hells.” In milder terms, the United States Office of Technology predicted, also in 1995, that the Human Genome Project eventually would mean that each of us has “a paramount right to be born with a normal, adequate, hereditary endowment.” In a 1993 New York Times advertising supplement, the March of Dimes described its quest for “perfectly beautiful” and “beautifully perfect” babies—the two standards transposed—“born free of sickness and disability.” Underlying this ideal, wrote feminist scholar Joan Rothschild, is the “imperfect child … who cannot be allowed to happen.”
At one time, these statements were hypotheticals, albeit disturbing ones, but now the innovation to support them is here. Science gallops ahead of ethics. It’s tempting to analogize the relationship between the two to an exquisite, impeccably designed sportscar—a McLaren or a Bugatti—that’s put in the hands of a 16-year-old, who then totals it. After the discovery of a gene responsible for a common form of dwarfism, a scientist went to the annual Little People of America convention and saw a dwarf wearing a T-shirt that said, “Endangered Species.”
Toward the end of his life, McKusick seemed to be grappling with problems of human empathy and solidarity that his own work as a founder of genetic medicine had provoked. Did the “mere existence” of the map pose a danger per se, if it risks “distort[ing] the way we think about ourselves and our fellow human beings?” McKusick warned of the “absurdity of determinism, that what we are is a direct and inevitable consequence of what our genome is.” He also worried about “the absurdity of reductionism,” a “misconception that we … know everything it means to be human.” We may lose “profound respect” for the genetic variability that benefits both the species and the individual. The “genetical-commercial complex,” he said, might lead to “the Madison Avenue type of pressure” for couples to make “value judgments” on gametes that would corrode meaningful freedom of choice. “In this era of growing scientific sophistication,” McKusick said in a 1997 interview, “people need to learn to look through a variety of lenses to understand what’s happening.”
How did a gene-centric worldview change perceptions for the physically atypical? For Steve, did it matter to know the mapped location of his mutated gene? Did DNA tell him who he was and write his biography? Did that knowledge afford him absolution, fortitude, insight, solace, or self-knowledge? I think that it did, and it didn’t. Genetic medicine was a double helix that translated everything into nothing and nothing into everything. One story about Steve, and a plausible one, is that the nothing of a minuscule genetic typo became the everything of his fate. His genetic code became the scrivener of his life—and of his sudden death. He died in 2015, just two days shy of his 60th birthday. The cause was a birth defect, inscribed by a gene: his aorta dissected while he was on his daily 30-mile bike ride. He had lived his life with a genetic condition that someday could kill him. Then that someday arrived. Even in death, his genetics dictated things: cremation was delayed because Steve’s body was too long for the standard crematory.
It’s incomprehensibly lopsided—a fate determined by one wrongly transcribed gene in the equivalent of 300 volumes of code. The gene is located at 15q21.1: it’s on the long arm (q) of chromosome 15, at band 21 and sub-band 1. The gene’s molecular location is from base pairs 48,408,306 to 48,645,788. These 237,482 base pairs, like all others, are built of four nucleotides that must be arranged in a precise sequence for the gene to work. In this case, the amino acids are strung together to create fibrillin-1. At position 6169 on this gene, a C (cytosine) is replaced by a T (thymine). Geneticists note the change as “FBN1 Exon 50/c.6169C>T; Arg2057Term.” Because of this genetic typo, an amino acid down the line gets a STOP instead of a GO message. As with Christmas tree lights, one faulty bulb causes the entire string to short out.
One story about Steve is that the nothing of a minuscule genetic typo became the everything of his fate. His genetic code became the scrivener of his life—and of his sudden death.In December 2013, more than 50 years after he was diagnosed with Marfan and just 20 months before it killed him, Steve got confirmation from the Connective Tissue Gene Tests laboratory in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that he did, indeed, have Marfan syndrome. Then again, McKusick had known it decades ago—just by looking at Steve. The record from my brother’s last visit at Hopkins noted that he was “diagnosed long ago based on clinical features by Dr. Victor McKusick.” Steve’s genetic code might have been a nothing that became everything, but it was also an everything that became nothing. Genes don’t tell us who we are; how we tell about genes tells us who we are. This was McKusick’s insight, now in ethical remission—that much depends on how we create habitats and tell stories, on how much we embrace atypicality as part of a shared human experience rather than a deviation to be palliatively edited. It’s the difference between seeing a little person as locked in a “genetic hell” or as an example of natural variation.
When Jennifer Doudna, the co-inventor of CRISPR, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2020, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, the committee enthused that their work was about “rewriting the code of life.” McKusick was a first step in that process; one of his patients, my brother, rewrote the code of a life—his own. In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari describes the revolution of more than 70,000 years ago, when humans developed the capacity to tell fictional stories and communicate about things that don’t exist. Ever afterward, we have lived in a “dual reality,” of things real and imagined. This sounds like an evolutionary liability. Someone who imagines unicorns squanders time away from prime directives of reproduction and survival. But the opposite is true, Harari asserts, because stories allow humans to bypass the genome. Through storytelling, we can alter behavior quickly and transmit new behaviors to the next generation. We create solidarities and communities around a god, a flag, an idea, or a logo. Other social animals can change only when their DNA changes through a protracted, uncertain evolutionary process in which their behavior is “determined to a large extent by their genes,” Harari writes.
The stories Steve told to himself about himself as an adult bypassed DNA and moved more quickly than mutation, and this made him an early resister to genetic determinism. Although he never stopped jumping at the shadow of the person he was at 15, he embraced ideas and places that freed him from the genome’s conceits. His pool game, where his body fit with the table and motions; libertarianism, with its ferocious individualism that removed genetic determinism, or any kind of determinism, from the equation; and a virtual life that removed physical normalcy, or any kind of physicality, from the picture. Also, he loved sports. He looked always for moments of belonging and found them in the tribe of fans. Steve sent me an email after a memorable Baltimore Ravens victory in 2000 and described how all the fans had felt the energy—“70,000, as one.” As cartographers, my brother and his doctor preferred the painstaking labor of observing and charting variations and then drawing them together into a whole. Sports, not mutations. I learned only at Steve’s memorial service from his acquaintances and colleagues that he had never once mentioned Marfan, the genetic story of his life, to any of them.
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A few months ago in my adult pre-intermediate class, we started a new chapter in our textbook that was set up around a murder mystery. First, we discussed the vocabulary of crime, handy in all kinds of real-life situations, whether talking about recent shocking occurrences reported on the news, or about a favorite TV detective show, or about how mad you were at your daughter for leaving her wet towel in a heap on the floor. The students practiced the new vocabulary, including burgle and rob, steal and murder. By chance, it was the first day of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, but we barely touched on that because the new vocabulary wasn’t extensive enough to cover all the crimes Trump was, or could be, accused of.
Then came the murder mystery. The students would hear an audio recording of two people talking on the street in the English village of Yately. Afterward, they were to identify the speakers from a cast of six characters presented in the book and then match all six names with the correct descriptors. This they did, identifying the two speakers as Mary, a village newcomer, and Alice, the owner of the corner flower shop, then the other characters: two business partners, the wife of one, and their son, Adam. In the audio, Alice tells Mary the big news: there’s been a murder! She drops in some gossip, namely that the victim, a married man, had been planning to leave his wife, who was distraught because her marriage provided the only joy in her life, especially since the couple’s son had been sent to prison for theft.
Then the task. The four students were to speak in pairs about who might have committed the crime. They didn’t have much to go on, but that was okay, they were game. I would listen in to both conversations, making quick corrections or taking note of common errors to point out later, for the benefit of all. Of the four students, one is a 50-year-old teacher and another a 30-something lawyer. The teacher practically smacks her forehead at a correction that reminds her again of what she already knows about verb tense or the pronunciation of a word with a silent letter. She appears equally annoyed at herself for making the error and at me for pointing it out. The lawyer squints and frowns as he searches for the exact word he wants.
The other two are young adults, one a computer programmer and the other a history student. The student is the youngest of the four, and his English is the best. His manner is calm and precise. When I correct him, he pauses almost imperceptibly before giving the smallest nod to signal that he has understood and absorbed my point. The programmer’s English is the worst, and he stutters and twists in his seat when he speaks. He practically writhes, giving a very convincing appearance of confusion and embarrassment. His thought process, however, is anything but confused. I think of him as someone who is locked-in, full of observations and insights but with no way to communicate them. His trouble with the language, his eagerness to succeed, and his auburn hair and creamy, freckled skin all contribute to a boyish mien. Beside him, the history student, who delivers his careful answers in a low tone, seems oddly mature. It’s an interesting group. Who, among the four, do you think will solve the murder mystery? The schoolteacher with her years of experience reading parents and children? The lawyer with his habit of sniffing out the truth? The student because he has the language skills to quickly evaluate the clues offered in the book? Or the programmer with his evident intelligence and energy?
Before making the first stab at guessing the murderer, the students listened a second time to learn when the murder occurred, where the body was found, when the new Yately Garden Centre had opened, what the two owners were arguing about the day before the murder, how the victim was killed, why the son, Adam, was sent to prison, and when he was released. That accomplished, I had the students review the information to make use of relative clauses: the man who, the place where, and so forth. “So,” I asked the students, “Who committed the murder and why? Talk with your partner.”
It was 7:40 in the evening. I glanced over the head of the programmer, seated with his back to the window. The sky was still blue but washed out at that hour of approaching dusk. Lights were on in the apartments across the street. A woman stepped out on her balcony, a cell phone in her hand, but she wasn’t talking, only holding it as she leaned on the railing to gaze into the street below. I turned my attention back to my students, concentrating with their partners on the murder at hand, books open before them instead of a detective’s dossier, a whiteboard on the wall instead of a bulletin board pinned with notes on the case. The students accepted the premise that to talk, you need something to talk about. These adults were better at entering into the spirit of such an exercise than are many other, younger students, especially the teens, who, despite their rebelling or scoffing or reticence, still worry about looking foolish. I loved that these four people, after their long days working or studying, would put their minds to this game of make believe. “Well?” I asked.
The programmer, with some clumsy phrases and some clever pantomiming, suggested a motive and a murderer. The others were more circumspect. “Maybe,” was as far as they would venture.
“Let’s look at the evidence the police turned up,” I suggested, and we continued on to the next exercise, which in the form of some hotel receipts with time stamps, a rose, and a black button, provided proof for the programmer’s theory. Yes, they all figured it out, but the programmer said it first. So three mysteries were solved: who killed the victim, who was able to guess, and how an hour-long class can pass in half that time.
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Amanda Holmes reads Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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When Chris Combs worked as a product manager for Washingtonian magazine in 2016, he questioned the ethics of collaborating with certain advertisers—namely those that surveilled visitors to the magazine’s website. “Are we perpetuating data privacy problems for hundreds of thousands of website visitors in exchange for a revenue stream?” he wondered. Five years ago, Combs, a Corcoran School of Arts graduate and former photo editor at National Geographic, began exploring the ramifications of this quandary through art, returning to a childhood love of robotics to create multimedia installations that critique the way companies mine our digital data.
- Allegheny Data Company, 2023, reclaimed wood, screens, E-waste, found objects, PLA, sawdust, 11 x 22 x 8 ft.
- Campfire, 2019, alert beacon, custom circuit board, microcontroller, addressable lights, touch sensors, felt, PLA, pie tin, 7 x 9 x 9 in.
- Pollination, 2023, aluminum, DIN terminal blocks, wire, screens, computers, 5 x 4.5 x 4 ft.
In his 2023 multimedia piece Pollination, Combs uses cameras, screens, and microphones arranged in the shape of a flower—to juxtapose the “invisible data everywhere” with “pollen being emitted by plants.” The surveillance devices record viewers faces, distorting them as they gaze at the installation. Another piece, Allegheny Data Company, now on view at the Gradient Project Space gallery in Thomas, West Virginia, is modeled after the Davis Coal & Coke Company tipple—a structure used by miners to load coal into railcars during the first half of the 20th century, the height of the region’s mining boom. “I covered [the structure] with consumer electronics”—such as Ethernet cables, laptops, and virtual reality headsets—“to address this idea that data mining is just as extractive as coal [mining], but on a much larger scale,” he says. Combs hopes his work will inspire viewers to reflect on how technology has changed the world and how we experience it. “When you buy a product these days,” he says, “you become a product.”
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In 1952, the Central Intelligence Agency covertly supported an unprecedented international arts festival lavish in cost and purpose: “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century.” It took place in Paris over the course of a full month. The mastermind was Nicolas Nabokov, Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, then the major instrument of American Cold War cultural propaganda.
Nabokov’s premise was that the United States had displaced Europe and Russia as the reigning home for the Western arts. And the 20th century’s presiding genius, for Nabokov, was his friend Igor Stravinsky, resident in Los Angeles (and, like Nabokov, living in self-imposed exile from his Russian homeland). Stravinsky dominated the repertoire for Nabokov’s myriad Paris festival performances. Nabokov’s concept was to celebrate “free artists”—cosmopolites liberated from parochial national schools and from the oppressive Soviet yoke. His larger claim—that only “free societies” produce great art—was the fundamental cultural premise of the CIA, State Department, and White House. (In my book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and the Cultural Cold War, I dub this counterfactual Cold War doctrine the “propaganda of freedom.”)
Nabokov’s favorite case in point was Dmitri Shostakovich. As a widely acknowledged expert on Soviet culture, he denigrated Shostakovich as a Soviet stooge (and named Vittorio Rieti and William Schuman composers of greater consequence). Of the hundreds of compositions programmed in Paris in 1952 (by the leading opera companies of Vienna and London, by the New York City Ballet, and by orchestras from Boston, West Berlin, Paris, Geneva, and Rome), Shostakovich was represented by a single piece: a suite from his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Nabokov chose it because this, notoriously, was the subversion—condemned by Pravda as “muddle instead of music”—that enraged Stalin and provoked a musical crackdown. Wholly unnoticed was that another Russian composer of consequence, like Stravinsky living in the United States, was not played at all. This was the late Sergei Rachmaninoff, written off as a hopeless anachronism.
Today, Nabokov is the anachronism. As I write in The Propaganda of Freedom, Stravinsky in Hollywood, cut off both from his Russian roots and his California surroundings, was “free not to matter.” Rachmaninoff, antithetically, remained Russian (he never mastered English) in his domestic and musical trappings. To support himself and his family, he became a touring concert pianist. His creative output plummeted. Had he died in his 50s, that would have been the story of his exile. But two late works—the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (composed in Switzerland in 1934) and the Symphonic Dances (composed in the U.S. in 1940, less than three years before his death)—changed everything. The first, an ingenious showpiece in which the influence of jazz syncopations is readily detectable, was instantly popular and has remained so. The second, Rachmaninoff’s final opus save for a Tchaikovsky transcription, has steadily grown in reputation as Stravinsky’s modernist moment recedes. Pace Nabokov, I would certainly call it a “Masterpiece of the Twentieth Century.”
Rachmaninoff was famously private. His severe crewcut and gimlet eyes disclosed little to the world at large. And yet the Symphonic Dances confides a searching personal valedictory. Its three movements—originally titled “Mid-day,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight”—are stations of life. The sublime coda to movement one pacifies the “vengeance” motto of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony—a naked autographical opus he had discarded 45 years earlier when its premiere proved a fiasco. So the Symphonic Dances puts these private demons to rest: a closing of the circle. Its finale incorporates a second self-quotation—the ninth movement of the liturgical All–Night Vigil, in which Christ’s resurrection is proclaimed.
Rachmaninoff left two versions of the Symphonic Dances: one for orchestra, the other for two pianos. He premiered the latter, privately, with Vladimir Horowitz. What that sounded like we can only guess. But he also inadvertently left a third version—which eventually became the biggest classical music find of recent decades.
Because Rachmaninoff refused to permit broadcasting or recording of his live performances, we only have his RCA recordings: studio jobs. But on December 21, 1940, the conductor Eugene Ormandy privately recorded Rachmaninoff playing through the Symphonic Dances in preparation for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s premiere performance the following month. This “third version” was released in 2018 as part of a three-CD Marston Records set titled Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances. As I wrote in a review for The Wall Street Journal: “The result is one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound. … As privately imparted to Ormandy, Rachmaninoff’s impromptu solo-piano rendering … documents roaring cataracts of sound, massive chording, and pounding accents powered by a demonic thrust the likes of which no studio environment has ever fostered.” It equally registers a trembling undertow of memories faraway and yet omnipresent. This unprepared, off-the-cuff, 26-minute rendition of a 35-minute composition is also necessarily hit and miss, and full of gaps. It sets a towering bar; it documents a lost world. But it is incomplete.
Now we have another find: a seminal new Deutsche Grammophon recording of the two-piano version, by Sergei Babayan and Daniil Trifonov, that realizes in full the magnitude of Rachmaninoff’s musical leave-taking. Their performance is in no way a replica. At the very start, the march tempo is much faster than Rachmaninoff’s “non Allegro.” And the ripeness of Rachmaninoff’s reading, shading a final ritual of retrospection, is unrecapturable. The shadows with which he streaks the second-movement waltz are wholly his. And it is Rachmaninoff, traversing the finale’s central “Lento assai,” who discovers a graveyard wind conjuring intimations of heaven. Authentically rendered by Babayan and Trifonov, however, are Rachmaninoff’s magisterial fluidity of tempo and pulse, the heroic range of dynamics, the convulsive ebb and flow, seething and poignant, of an epic confessional. It is a validation overwhelming and unprecedented.
Rachmaninoff considered assigning the lyric second subject of movement one to Marian Anderson. He wound up with something almost as unusual: a solo alto saxophone. In Ormandy’s home, Rachmaninoff inhabits this sad tune with a range of color and expression no saxophone could duplicate: it is a piano master class. As scored for two pianos, this passage has always seemed to me makeshift, a transcription. But Babayan and Trifonov discover their own fullness of feeling here and make the spare texture sound essential. In fact, an elemental resonance informs the entire traversal.
When Babayan and Trifonov performed in New York City in March 2018, their mastery of the Romantic two-piano idiom was instantly apparent: they are a historic tandem. The program included the two Rachmaninoff suites. These are supreme studies in kaleidoscopic texture and sonority. (You can hear them, as well, on the new CD.) The Symphonic Dances is all that and more. Consummating a life’s journey, it culminates in a blaze of glory when a liturgical refulgence silences the “Dies irae.” Rachmaninoff’s private recording omits this humbling ending. But I cannot imagine a more ecstatic leave-taking than the tidal cadences with which Babayan and Trifonov cap their interpretation.
Rachmaninoff’s manuscript here bears the inscription: “Alleluya.”
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Suppose you need the police. In Spain, you can choose between the municipal police, also called the local police, the national police, and the civil guard. Each force has its special tasks and concerns, and although their duties sometimes overlap, something as pedestrian as a lost set of keys would be a matter for the local police. About a year ago, I dropped my house keys while out walking my dogs, so it was to the local police I went to ask if anyone had turned them in. “No,” said the man behind the desk. Then he checked in a box under the counter. “No, nothing here.”
If someone turned in a set of keys at the national police office across town, I asked, would the local police be notified? The officer told me that no central lost and found existed and that I would have to check with the national police directly. So I did. No luck. By the time I got home, I had found my keys—in an inside pocket. But for several days, I wondered why the two agencies couldn’t cooperate to ease a simple problem like recovering a lost object.
Recently, when my dogs, a black Lab and a German shepherd, escaped from their yard, I hurried straight to the local police to report them missing and to find out what else I should do. My dogs are not aggressive, but they are big. I didn’t think they’d pursue a runner or cyclist on the nearby river path, but if they saw a chicken wandering loose on a rural lane, they would give chase. Worse, if they spotted a lamb in a fenced field, they’d find a way in. Worst of all to contemplate would be a child in their path. My dogs would never attack a child, but isn’t that what so many dog owners say? “Not my dog,” they keep insisting, dumbfounded and horrified after a freak incident. A number of such stories had been circulating lately, and I wanted to get my dogs back quickly.
At the police station, I confirmed that the dogs were microchipped and had collars with tags. Nothing to do but wait, the police officer told me. He had my name and number and said he’d let me know if he got a call about any stray dogs. As I was leaving, he suggested I alert the civil guard, just in case, because it has jurisdiction over rural areas, where my dogs might be picked up. The civil guard has a station in La Pola, and there I hurried.
Before I was even done reciting my story, the officer helping me, a woman in her 30s, told me I should have gone to the local police.
“But I did,” I said, and explained.
The woman grumbled something and started away. Another officer in the same room asked what was up, and the woman angrily said it was the local police again and she was sick of it and was going to give them a piece of her mind. Shirking their duty, worming out of work! She snatched up a phone and called. “Wait,” I wanted to say, and explain that no one had passed the buck, no one was dodging their duties. But she seemed to have forgotten me. So I waited, and that was how I witnessed her half of the conversation, belligerent in tone and full of accusations. It went on for seven or eight minutes, and nothing was settled or solved in that time. After a while, the other two officers sitting at their computers began telling her to hang up on the guy. She did not want to. She angrily told the person on the other end that she was going to report him—to whom, I wondered—and asked for his identification number, which she repeated. Agent 37.
Hanging up, the woman complained some more to her fellow officers, who were vaguely sympathetic without being the least bit riled up. As for her, she gradually became calm. With no apology or explanation, she finished taking my personal information, still insisting that the problem of my missing dogs was for the local police, not for the civil guard. I was astonished at the bad relations between the civil guard and the local corps and sorry I’d ever said who’d sent me. Poor Agent 37.
I recovered my dogs that very afternoon. It was another 10 days before I could stop back at the local police station. The officer I’d spoken to wasn’t there. Had I to describe him, I’d have been at a loss, but I didn’t need to because I could identify him: Agent 37.
When I returned during Agent 37’s shift, I reminded him of the lost dogs, said I’d retrieved them, and thanked him for his help. He was as amiable as before. Then I said I had overheard the civil guard officer who called him that day, and I was very sorry for the tone she’d used. I had been astonished, I said. “Oh yes,” he answered, “I remember.”
On the one hand, I was offering sympathy, which he might appreciate. On the other hand, perhaps he blamed me, thinking something I had said set the other officer in motion. Plus, I was the outsider, the civilian, and maybe loyalty to the police, any police, would cause him to close ranks, as it were. Instead, he shook his head and smiled a trifle grimly. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “The argument is an old one.” He seemed neither worried nor much aggrieved by the tongue-lashing. A cool head. Local, I thought, is better.
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Amanda Holmes reads C. P. Cavafy’s “He Asked About the Quality,” translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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As the weather warms and air-conditioned living rooms beckon, you might find yourself in the mood for patriotic films like Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) or Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940). I’ll add to the list The Great Escape, John Sturges’s masterly 1963 movie with a memorable Independence Day scene. To celebrate the holiday, American soldiers Hilts (Steve McQueen) and Hendley (James Garner) serve homemade hooch to their fellow prisoners of war, mostly British airmen, in a German concentration camp. Laconic and cool, McQueen raises his glass and says, “To independence.”
By the time The Great Escape came out, Sturges had established himself as a master of the action epic with The Magnificent Seven, a Hollywood remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 tour de force The Seven Samurai. In Sturges’s film, Kurosawa’s seven swordsmen are gunslingers, but they have the same mission: to rescue a village of farmers from the bandits that prey upon them. Elmer Bernstein’s score is justly celebrated—and was appropriated in 1963 as the music for the famous “Marlboro Man” cigarette commercials.
The Great Escape, an equally powerful action epic with a score from the same composer, is based on Paul Brickhill’s book of the same title, a true account of the mass escape by captured British airmen from Stalag Luft III in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1944.
The talented ensemble cast includes three of the hombres that formed The Magnificent Seven. McQueen plays ace pilot Hilts. Charles Bronson plays Danny, whose peerless digging skills have earned him the nickname “Tunnel King,” despite his being deathly claustrophobic. James Coburn plays a wily Australian named Sedgwick.
The Luftwaffe runs the POW camp, from which the prisoners believe it is not just their right but their duty to escape—while causing as much mischief as possible for their captors. The first half of The Great Escape depicts the planning of the escape, heroic in its ambition, a team effort capitalizing on each man’s aptitude. There is a comic element, as if the escape were a game, generating amusement as well as edge-of-seat excitement. The Gestapo puts an end to the fun in the movie’s more somber second half.
The cast is primarily British. Richard Attenborough plays Roger Bartlett, the chief architect of the escape, whose prior exploits have earned him the sobriquet “the Big X.” Donald Pleasence is Blythe, an expert forger. David MacCallum plays Eric, who figures out how to dispose of the sand produced by digging lengthy tunnels starting from beneath the men’s sleeping quarters; holes in the pockets of their trousers prove an excellent means of distributing sand on the campgrounds. Two Scots play important roles: Gordon Jackson is MacDonald, in charge of security, and Angus Lennie is Ives, Hilt’s buddy—separated from him by a wall—in solitary confinement, in “the cooler.”
Of the Americans on hand, we have Hendley, a skillful scrounger and charmer who outwits a guard into handing over a highly sophisticated camera, which Blythe uses to create plausible identity cards and passports. Danny’s mate Willie, played by John Layton, helps Danny to overcome his claustrophobia, at least temporarily.
The escapees run into more than one mishap. The Germans discover and shut down one of the tunnels. The nearsighted Blythe gradually loses his sight and becomes increasingly dependent on Hendley. Hilts, an insubordinate cuss, breaks down and is shot while trying to climb the camp fence in broad daylight. Despite the loss of their compatriot, the determined prisoners persevere.
When the big night comes, no fewer than 76 prisoners, dressed in civilian clothes and outfitted with the necessary accoutrements (civilian clothes, different for each man; forged documents; a travel case), traverse the tunnel one at a time on a sled-like trolley that runs from underneath their barracks to the outskirts of the barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. The men take off by foot to the nearest villages, then try every means of transportation they can find.
Three escapees are completely successful. Danny and Willie get away in a rowboat en route to a steamer bound for Sweden. Sedgwick, who fabricated the tools for the escape, steals a bicycle, rides it into France, stops at a café, witnesses the Resistance ambush a trio of German officers, and heads to Spain.
The others aren’t so fortunate. Though Hendley and Blythe luck into a Luftwaffe training aircraft, which flight lieutenant Hendley lifts off the ground, the plane runs out of petrol just short of the Swiss border. They crash land on a hill overlooking a band of Nazi soldiers on the hunt for them. Hendley survives the encounter and is shipped back to the POW camp.
The most thrilling of all escape routes, albeit unsuccessful, is the one “Cooler King” Hilts takes, on the motorcycle he has nabbed from a German soldier—along with the soldier’s gray uniform. Hilts rides the motorbike past a roadblock and then eludes scores of uniformed pursuers over hill and dale before he is finally caught and returned to the camp.
Bartlett, MacDonald, and Eric are among those who try the train. One has a moment of glory (Eric), the other folly (MacDonald). Eric gives his life to create a diversion that will let two others go free. MacDonald falls for the same ruse that he warned the men against; after trying to pass himself off as French, he replies in English to a German officer wishing him “good luck.” The most harrowing atrocity the film records is the shooting of 50 unarmed escapees who were rounded up and caught by the Gestapo.
The Great Escape is one of four prisoner-of-war films on my short list, the others being Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), and David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). William Holden stars in two of these pictures, embodying the American male ideal in the postwar era (see my January 2020 column for more).
Not the least compelling aspect of The Great Escape is that—to adopt (and adapt) Marshall McLuhan’s media categories—its chief hero, Hilts (McQueen), is precisely a “cool,” understated version of the “hot” Bill Holden. Each is a loner, with a strong independent streak. In The Great Escape, Hilts whiles away the time playing catch with a ball bouncing off the prison walls, his ever-present baseball glove an assertion of his American identity. He never blows his top or makes an impassioned speech.
Some World War II films don’t make much of a distinction between ordinary German soldiers and the thugs of the Gestapo and SS. The Great Escape does. The breakout from the POW camp creates an uncertain fate for camp commandant von Luger (Hannes Messemer), a Luftwaffe officer. Von Luger has been strict but not strict enough, and certainly not as sadistic and ruthless as the Nazis would have liked. Still, he has the film’s last word. As the Gestapo drives up to the camp, he tells Hilts, “It looks, after all, as if you will see Berlin before I do.”
The post Tunneling to Freedom appeared first on The American Scholar.
Dressed up in the clothes of the woman whose flat she is staying in, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s short story “Experience” feels she is in disguise, and this makes it easy for her to behave uncharacteristically. She is carefree and flirtatious, as if she were playing a part. Lee Chang-Dong’s point-of-view character in the short story “Snowy Day” has a similar experience. Whenever punishment follows an unfortunate run-in with a superior, he tells himself he is playing a role, and thus can go through the motions required of him, such as standing on his head in the snow. One afternoon this past winter, when I was preparing to leave for work and anxious about the five and a half hours of classroom time ahead of me, I wondered if I could free myself of my anxiety by pretending that instead of my classroom, the space I occupied was my living room, and that instead of students, the people who came were friends, acquaintances, or neighbors dropping in on me. “When it rains it pours!” I’d exclaim on finding a new set of visitors at my entrance when I opened the door to show out a set of earlier arrivals. “Come in! So nice to see you again. How are you? How have you been?”
If the game worked, it would be because the responsibility of making good use of the hours together was lifted from my shoulders and placed on the students’. They would have come to me, dropping in uninvited, after all, in my reimagining of our afternoon together. But I found that entertaining guests for all those hours seemed just as stressful as teaching students. I had no tea and cake to offer, no choice of comfortable chairs to steer them to. What would I talk about? In Alice Munro’s story “Differently,” a woman throwing a dinner party treats the whole evening as an impromptu play. “Brandy!” she says, “I knew there was something else you did at dinner parties. You drink brandy!” What could I say to my students-as-guests? “A story! I knew there was something else you did with visitors! You amuse with stories!”
I like all my students. Some I even like a lot, and I would be glad to spend time with them as friends, as equals, even the children. The Spanish custom of children using their teachers’ first names encourages the confusion that children and teachers are peers, and I have bought in and made treating my students as pals my teaching style. “We’re just all here together, let’s talk, let’s laugh.” So I already camouflage myself in the garb of chatty, affable neighbor. It is already a bit of fakery. How long before I get caught at it?
Fear of discovery as a fraud is apparently very common and even has a name: imposter syndrome. In a New Yorker article on the subject, the author, Leslie Jamison, reveals that she too has felt like an impostor, first as a PhD candidate and later, as a journalist. Not surprising: researchers have found that everyone suffers from feelings of inadequacy. The possibility that my students, too, feel like impostors doesn’t relieve me. Here’s some relief though: when mothers came to Pauline Clance, one of the psychologists behind the idea of the impostor phenomenon, and described their impostor feelings about parenting, her advice was to get more child care. Perhaps what I need is simply a teacher’s aide. In addition to the practical help of smoothing my way, having to fool a single helper, as opposed to several students, might reduce my stress. That helper would no doubt be trying to pull one over on me and the students while the students would have to worry about inadequacy in the eyes of both teacher and aide. Yes, the syndrome is that common. Rather than syndrome, the author suggests, a better word is phenomenon. “It names the gap that persists between the internal experiences of selfhood—multiple, contradictory, incoherent, striated with shame and desire—and the imperative to present a more coherent, composed, continuous self to the world.”
In other words, I’ve got to live with it. But next time I am desperate enough for a disguise, maybe it should be the role of schoolmarm I try on—stern and unsmiling. Won’t my students be in for a surprise if one day I pretend to be a real teacher!
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Amanda Holmes reads Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” translated from the German by Pierre Joris. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles; Penguin Press, 336 pp., $30
Araminta Ross, or “Minty,” was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1820s. Catastrophe marked her early life. She was six years old when she was sent away from her mother to work as a weaver; three of her sisters were sold into the Deep South. As a teenager, Minty suffered a blow to the head, delivered by an overseer, that left her prone to chronic pain, nightmares, visions, and epileptic seizures. In her early 20s, she adopted her mother’s given name and her husband’s surname—and that is how history remembers her, as Harriet Tubman. “Names were important to enslaved people,” Tiya Miles writes in Night Flyer. Tubman was hardly the first formerly enslaved person to reinvent herself. But most people did so after escaping bondage; Tubman began using her new name when she was still in captivity—an early strike against her so-called masters, Miles speculates, that “casts a glow of foreshadowing over her story.”
That story is well known. In 1849, Tubman fled her captors and headed north. Under cover of darkness, she walked nearly 150 miles through dense woods and along the banks of creeks and rivers until she reached the safety of Philadelphia. Within a couple of years, at great risk, she began trekking back into slave country to rescue relatives, associates, even strangers. Tubman, five feet tall and slight of build, made 19 such trips in the years prior to the Civil War—at a time when the Fugitive Slave Law meant she or any of her charges could have been apprehended. In the face of this, Tubman began leading road-weary freedom seekers farther north, into southern Ontario, beyond the bounds of American law.
Night Flyer joins nearly a dozen biographies of Tubman, but it doesn’t march in a linear way through the same familiar chronology. Miles’s book is a world-building enterprise, with a novel’s sensitivity and a poet’s sensibility rooted both in Tubman’s daily life and in her more mystical inclinations. Our understanding of Tubman has long been shrouded in myth. “At no time in the history of the Republic has such womanhood ever attained a higher level of excellence than the indomitable heroism of a runaway slave named Harriet Tubman,” wrote literary and social critic Albert Murray in 1970. But how should we account for the mistakes she made? Or the heartbreak she suffered? During her rescues, Tubman pushed herself beyond the point of exhaustion. She likewise disciplined those in her charge with threats of violence or death. On one of her first trips south, she’d gone to bring back her husband, only to discover that he had taken a new wife. When he refused to go with her to Philadelphia, she found others who would, expanding her reach beyond immediate family and friends.
What did Tubman desire for herself? Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, seeks to discover “who she was on the inside.” Primary sources offering insight into Tubman’s early life are few. (Sometimes this was by Tubman’s own design: historians still aren’t certain of the precise route of her initial escape.) Much of what we know has come to us from well-meaning white women, antislavery advocates who nonetheless held a paternalistic view of Black women and their traditions. Miles, by focusing her research on ecology and spirituality, offers us a more complex portrait. She positions Tubman as an intellectual who employed an ecowomanist liberation theology, embodied in her rescues as well as in her speeches, songs, work as a healer, and activism. According to Melanie L. Harris, a professor at Wake Forest University, ecowomanism is a methodology in which “ecowisdom,” defined by “spirit, nature, and humanity,” is practiced by women of African descent. Tubman, in this view, was more than a brave spirit acting on instinct; she was a practitioner of a cogent set of ethics Miles calls “Tubman’s Way,” which had clear origins and lasted until the end of her life.
Tubman came of age during the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. She “oriented to the world from a place of immersive religious belief,” Miles writes. This was due, at least in part, to her upbringing: she attended a Methodist Episcopal church alongside other Black Marylanders who infused West African traditional practices and beliefs into their Christianity. She prayed often, maintaining a constant stream of communication with the divine that involved songs and incantations, many of which were preserved in interviews. She believed that God spoke to her in the form of dreams and visions. Before her first escape, Tubman endured a series of emotional and spiritual trials, common occurrences in the accounts of many mystics. “Whenever she closed her eyes,” Miles writes, “Harriet saw white men on horseback hunting her people, hunting her.” She dreamed of open fields, border crossings, of flying like a bird. An active belief in the supernatural was not uncommon among “holy” Black women of her era, such as Zilpha Elaw, Old Elizabeth, and Julia A. J. Foote. For them, as for Tubman, their personal relationships with the divine provided the courage necessary to challenge their own subjugation. Tubman saw slavery as an evil that she would fight with God at her side. Miles believes Tubman’s acts of rescue were her form of ministry.
The 19th-century Black women who wrote and preached against slavery believed that the natural world could be a conduit to an encounter with God. Tubman, “arguably the most famous Black woman ecologist in U.S. history,” writes Miles, spoke to trees, memorized the directions of streams, foraged for food, and knew the healing salves that could be extracted from particular plants. She took refuge in the natural world and, during the Civil War, provided intelligence for a Union Army raid on Confederate plantations and supply depots along South Carolina’s Combahee River.
Miles acknowledges that many questions about Tubman’s life remain unanswered. Who taught her so much about the land? What was her meeting with John Brown like? What were the circumstances of her grandmother Modesty’s capture by slave hunters? Still, Miles broadens our understanding of Tubman by treating her as part of a collective of like-minded Black women whose piety and belief in the supernatural she shared—and which emboldened her to set out on a righteous but dangerous path.
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On August 16, 1918, a bookkeeper in Denver named George Eyser wrote a will. He was not married and had no children. And so it was to his only sibling, his sister Ottilie, with whom he lived in a two-story brick house at 420 Downing Street, that he bequeathed his property and possessions: money, the proceeds from an insurance policy, a gold watch and chain, a scrapbook that chronicled the nearly three decades he spent as an amateur gymnast, and his crowning glory—the six Olympic medals he won on a single October day in 1904.
One hundred and twenty years later, as we near this summer’s Paris Olympic Games, no athlete has won as many medals on a single day as Eyser did. The three golds, two silvers, and one bronze he received at the St. Louis games remain just two shy of the record for individual medals at an entire Olympiad (a record shared by swimmer Michael Phelps and gymnast Aleksandr Dityatin). And yet, it is not Eyser’s medals that most distinguish him. It is rather, as a category on Jeopardy! once put it, his “anatomical oddity”: George Eyser had a wooden leg.
That a one-legged athlete would so much as reach the Olympics is, of course, remarkable. That Eyser also won—and won and won and won and won and won—enshrined him in Olympic lore. Still, it is above all Eyser’s missing limb, not Eyser himself, that is recalled today. For all but nothing is known of the man—of his family, his disability, the 48 years he lived until his death in 1919, just months after he wrote his will. Eyser, wrote Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic, “vanished from the history books.” Even his cause of death has, until now, remained a mystery. As one Olympics blogger asked back in 2010: “George Eyser, what happened to you?”
Way back in 1870, at a hospital in the German port city of Kiel, a doctor pondered a similar question as he wrote a report about George’s father titled “Medical examination of the state of mind of the businessman Georg Eyser.” Georg was a new patient. Thirty, Lutheran, and middle class, he had been admitted three weeks before, leaving his pregnant wife and daughter in the town of Husum, some 50 miles away on the North Sea. For two years, Georg had been decompensating, feeling at first “irascible and careless,” he told his doctor, and then distrustful, anxious, and violent. He had left his job as a merchant and declared that “he ought to die,” and then that relatives wished to kill him.
The hospital noted that one of Georg’s uncles had died “mentally ill.” And when Georg did not improve, he transferred to a mental asylum in the town of Schleswig. He was a patient there when, on August 31, 1870, his wife gave birth to a boy: Georg Ludwig Friedrich Julius Eyser.
Young Georg and his older sister, Ottilie, were soon orphaned: their father died at the Schleswig asylum in 1873, their mother five years later. Georg was 14, a foster child in the city of Lübeck, when he and his sister boarded the SS Rugia for the United States. They were off to live with a paternal uncle (John, formerly Johannes) and an aunt (John’s sister, also named Ottilie) in Denver, which had a significant German community that was home to German newspapers, churches, and schools. After moving twice, the four Eysers settled into a two-story brick house they rented in a rural neighborhood just outside the city.
John had been an educator, the principal of a German boys’ school in St. Louis, and then a teacher of astronomy. Nearing 60, he was now retired, and he paid his sister $20 a month to keep house and look after him. Ottilie already sewed, managed boarders, and raised chickens—and she would soon patent a “smoke-consuming furnace.” But she now also had to mind her brother’s clothing, medicine, food, beer, and tobacco, and raise her niece and nephew, too. In 1887, at the age of 17, George (his name now Anglicized) finished school and took a job stripping tobacco for a cigarmaker. He also joined a local gymnastics club.
The club was part of the Turner movement, founded in Germany in 1811 by an educator named Friedrich Jahn. Wanting to mold men of fine mind and body, Jahn set out to combine German culture and liberal politics with gymnastics, and he invented many of its apparatus, including the rings, pommel horse, and parallel bars. He also coined a motto for the Turners: frisch, fromm, fröhlich, frei—“fresh, pious, cheerful, free.”
Jahn’s movement flourished; by midcentury, there were hundreds of thousands of Turners. But following the defeat of the German revolutions of 1848–49, many of them emigrated to the United States, where they set up Turnvereinen, or gymnastics clubs. (Turner means “gymnast” in German. A Verein is a society or an association.) At heart, the Turnvereinen were social centers—tools of acculturation and reminders of home—its members speaking in German of the old country and bygone ideals.
Among those German transplants was George’s great-uncle Charles Eyser, who had come to the United States in 1847 at the age of 24. The youngest of eight children, he was successful in his new home, working in mining, prospecting, and contracting. He established Turnvereinen in both Iowa and Colorado, and in 1865, he was among the founding members of the Denver Turnverein.
Decades later, his great-nephew George would enroll in beginners’ classes at that club, one of many kids, instructor Jacob Schmitt recalled, with “puny limbs, round shoulders and flat chests.” Added Schmitt: “Step by step, the little ones are sent upward.”
George was 19 when, in 1889, his great-uncle Charles died of suicide by morphine. One year later, tragedy again seized the Eyser family, when John began to exhibit the same madness that had overtaken two of his uncles and his late brother Georg. Paranoid and disturbed, he developed, the press reported, “a mania for spending money,” and a medical report noted that he “was often violent” to his sister. After finding him at home one day with a bottle of poison, Ottilie took her brother to county court. On September 2, 1890, a jury declared John Eyser, age 63, “insane,” and a judge sent him to an asylum, the Jacksonville State Hospital in Illinois.
I wanted to know more. But books on gymnastics, the Turners, and the Olympics—including an account of the 1904 games published just one year later—made no mention of Eyser beyond his Olympic performance.That summer, the Denver Turnverein had moved into a new home on Arapahoe Street downtown, a brown sandstone building complete with dining room, library, lodge, ballroom, bowling alley, and gym, the last equipped with electric lights and filled with every apparatus, from trapeze to pommel horse. Here the Turners trained. And in late September, 100 miles to the south in the city of Pueblo, Eyser participated for the first time in a Turner festival, one of 30 gymnasts competing in eight events—a run, a rope climb, jumps, exercises on various bars and horses. The top 10 finishers received a laurel wreath or a diploma, and Eyser finished ninth. His was a successful debut. He was an athlete on the rise. He was also a handsome young man of 20, of medium height with hooded eyes, a square chin, and brown hair high off his forehead. He spent the weekend with his fellow Turners at a banquet, a parade, and a ball.
The next year, in 1891, Eyser lost a portion of his left leg.
In 2008 and 2012, respectively, two South African amputees, the swimmer Natalie du Toit and the runner Oscar Pistorius, competed in the Olympics. Journalists looked in the historical record for other amputee Olympians and made passing mention of Eyser. I wanted to know more about him. I love sports and am disabled: back in 1990, when I was 19 years old, a bus accident broke my neck and left me hemiplegic. But Madrigal’s article in The Atlantic was right: books on gymnastics, the Turners, and the Olympics—including an account of the 1904 games published just one year later—made no mention of Eyser beyond his Olympic performance.
I thus began to search far afield for traces of Eyser, looking—in America and Germany—in censuses and city directories, auction and burial records, patient and probate files, newspaper archives and logbooks. Slowly, Eyser began to reveal himself. And yet, as for how he lost his leg, I found only vague references to “an injury” (1895, the Kansas City Daily Journal) or “an accident” (1908, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch). (The assertion, in recent decades, that Eyser was disabled in a train accident is baseless.)
Eyser lost his leg. I had contacted a Denver man named Robert Graeber, whose grandfather Albert Graeber had competed alongside Eyser. Robert had inherited a trunk filled with paper records of his grandfather’s star career. And last year, Robert opened it for me, finding—inside an 1895 issue of Western Athletics magazine—a photo of Eyser performing a back lever on the parallel bars, his arms grabbing the bar behind his back, his prone body parallel to the ground. “Mr. Eyser,” read the photo caption, “was confined to a sick room for many months from 1891 to 1893, walking on crutches when able to be about, and finally having his left foot amputated just above the ankle.”
A subsequent surgery, I learned, amputated the leg below the knee. Eyser needed a prosthetic limb.
The U.S. Civil War had left some 60,000 young men without limbs, an epidemic of amputations that triggered, as reported in an enormous 1896 treatise on artificial limbs, “a prosthetic revolution.” The new prosthetics—jointed wood with rubber hands and feet—approximated the shape and feel of natural limbs as never before. The legs were known as “cork legs.” Eyser got one.
It is possible that Eyser was injured at work; in 1891, he was in the employ of a man named Peter Snow who was a plumber and gas fitter. It is also possible that Eyser was injured at home. In May of that year, his uncle John returned to his family after the asylum in Illinois determined that he was no longer dangerous. But perhaps he was. After John died the following February, his sister sued his estate, seeking payment for the care she had provided him. A friend of the family, a Mrs. E. Dunbar Wright, testified in the case that “he looked wild” and that she had been terrified of John Eyser until his death.
In September 1893, after two long years of rehabilitation from his injury, Eyser returned to his Turnverein and to gymnastics. There were, already, several one-legged gymnasts right there in Colorado. But they were theater acts, men with stage names like “Mr. Dare” and “Frank Melrose” and later “The Great Zenos.” And if Eyser never tried to conceal his disability—often practicing on the horse or horizontal bar without his prosthetic—neither did he wish to make use of it. He hoped to compete in spite of his disability and trained continually for a year until he had become, as that caption in Western Athletics magazine put it, “a splendid illustration of what the Turner system of physical training can do for one under adverse circumstances.” Eyser, added the magazine, “has not only a thoroughly developed muscular system, but performs many acts upon horizontal and parallel bars that would puzzle Turners possessing all members and muscles in perfect condition.”
In August 1894, 11 months after rejoining his Turnverein—and days after becoming a U.S. citizen—Eyser returned to competition at a Turnfest in Wyoming. He won and was crowned with a laurel wreath, the Cheyenne press reported, “by a number of handsome young ladies.”
Eyser was days shy of 24. He still lived with his aunt and sister. But the Turnverein was his home. There were Turner dances and picnics. There were committees, Eyser helping to raise funds toward a Christmas tree and serving refreshments at a Shrove Tuesday ball. And, of course, after work at the cigarmaker, there was the gym, Eyser training with teammates he then competed alongside at festivals across the country.
As the years passed, Eyser represented various Turnvereinen in Denver. At every stop, he won. The gymnast was a star. An Omaha paper would soon call him “one of the most remarkable athletes of his time.” And yet, for all his accomplishments, no publication profiled him. His German past and troubled family and even the basic facts of his life remained unknown; one Iowa newspaper misidentified his late father, and another in Missouri misidentified which leg he had lost.
The press alluded regularly to Eyser’s disability. He was “the crippled turner,” “the little man with the wooden foot,” “the one-legged Denver crack.” Still, newspapers focused far more on his gymnastic achievements. When, in 1895, he won an event at a national Turner meet in Kansas City, the Kansas City Daily Journal reported that Eyser
went up that big rope with long swings of his arms that never slackened or shortened until he swung his right arm over the bar and calmly drew himself up for a short rest forty-six feet above the ground. He was given a cheer that was enough to turn any man’s head, for a time, but he was impassive as a stone and came down with perfect composure and then bowed his acknowledgements to his friends.
The article noted that his routine on the horizontal bar “won equal applause.”
It was Eyser’s muscled arms that won him those events. But his legs supported him, too. He was competitive in the horse vault (which required gymnasts to run and leap over the apparatus but did not yet offer the aid of a springboard) as well as in jumping. Indeed, in June 1900, at a national Turnfest in Philadelphia, Eyser covered a full 36 feet in the hop, step, and jump. The exercise required competitors to “first land upon the same foot with which he shall have taken off,” then on the reverse foot, and then on both. If Eyser’s result was seven feet short of the victor’s, it was also, as a German paper in Baltimore, Der Deutsche Correspondent, reported, “astonishing.”
Days before that meet, Eyser and his East Denver Turner teammates had posed with their coach, Jacob Schmitt, for a team photo that would run in newspapers. The men, their white tees tucked into belted pants, stood unsmiling and with arms folded, the better to flex their biceps. All were clean shaven save Schmitt and Eyser, who wore mustaches.
Eyser had lived more than half his life in Denver. He had arrived there as a boy of 14 and was still there at 30, living with the two Ottilies. The city had been good to him. He had found community in the Turnverein, stardom in gymnastics, and steady work; in 1900, never mind his prosthetic, Eyser was a driver for a laundry and then a bookkeeper at a meatpacking company. He had money, too, having inherited almost $1,200 from the estate of his late uncle John.
Still, there was little keeping Eyser in Denver. He had no home of his own, no wife, no child. And in June 1901, he decided to move to Dayton, Ohio, where he set up a life much like the one he had left, working as a bookkeeper and joining a Turnverein, the Dayton Turngemeinde. Two years later, he moved to St. Louis, taking a bookkeeping job at a limestone quarry and teaming up with the local Turners.
The club he joined was the Concordia Turnverein. Eyser knew that in just another few months, he and his new teammates would be able to compete right there in St. Louis in what The New York Times would soon call “the greatest athletic meeting of modern times”—the 1904 Olympics.
The modern rebirth of the ancient Olympic games had taken place in Athens in 1896. A second Olympiad had followed in Paris in 1900. Chicago was to host the third in 1904, but the games were moved to St. Louis to coincide with the World’s Fair. Since the fair would last seven months, the Olympic games were stretched from July through November, with gymnastics slated for both July and October. It was thus difficult for some foreigners to participate. Indeed, although a dozen countries would be represented in St. Louis, 523 of the 630 athletes set to compete in the 1904 Olympics were from the United States. Years later, some critics would cite that figure to disparage the competition. But the previous Olympics were much the same: in Athens, for example, 230 of the 311 athletes were Greek. Still, the gymnastics competition that summer of 1904 promised to be stiff, with Germany—the other gymnastics powerhouse besides the United States—sending seven gymnasts to St. Louis to take on 112 American gymnasts, Eyser among them.
Eyser had been a gymnast for 14 years, a star the previous 10. But he was unknown to St. Louis. And when, on the first of July, competition began with exercises on the horizontal and parallel bars and the horse, the gymnast, according to The St. Louis Republic, “attracted much attention from the fact that he [had] only one leg.” The Westliche Post added that there was “general regret when he stepped up to the apparatus.”
Eyser did not react. He simply performed. The Mississippi Blätter ran a photograph of him on the high bar in mid-kip, his hips flexed, legs extended, as he prepared to cast to a handstand. And there, at World’s Fair Stadium—a newly constructed concrete oval and grandstand that was, The New York Times gushed, “as nearly as possible a counterpart of the ancient stadium at Olympia”—the gymnast won the crowd over. As the Westliche Post reported, the regret generated by his cork leg “immediately turned into loud enthusiasm … which was expressed in never-ending applause.”
And yet, Eyser had no chance of winning this first Olympics competition; it required the gymnasts to compete in various track and field events. The next day, against a field of 117 others, Eyser finished 76th in the shot put and dead last in both the long jump and 100-yard dash, running the race in 15.4 seconds. That a one-legged man had finished the race only 4.8 seconds behind the winner (a Turner from Indianapolis) was remarkable. But Eyser had nonetheless dropped far from medal contention. He would have to wait until late October for that second Olympics competition—one that would not involve any track and field components—and he trained for it at his Turnverein, a dozen or so blocks from his apartment on Ohio Avenue.
The gymnast, according to The St. Louis Republic, “attracted much attention from the fact that he [had] only one leg.” The Westliche Post added that there was “general regret when he stepped up to the apparatus.”As summer turned to fall, the Olympics were generating great excitement, “a vigorous spectacle suited to an energetic and confident nation,” writes the sports historian George Matthews. World’s Fair Park, on the grounds of Washington University, hosted everything from archery and roque (an American variant of croquet) to weightlifting and tug of war. And on Friday, October 28, crowds filed into its concrete grandstand to watch Eyser and his fellow local Turners take on the best.
Eyser was slated to compete in five events and paid a $1 entrance fee for each. Four of the events primarily involved the upper body: the rope climb, parallel bars, horizontal bar, and pommel horse. The fifth, the horse vault, required legwork, the gymnast needing to hurtle himself over the horse and land squarely on two feet. In addition, Eyser would be up for a sixth medal based on a combined score of all events save the rope climb.
It was a lovely fall day, the temperature rising to 64 degrees. And at one p.m., Eyser stood in his belted pants and shirt, ready at the age of 34 to seize the great moment of his career.
The competition called for the gymnasts to perform on each apparatus three times. The parallel bars were first, and Eyser pulled himself up onto them under the watch of three judges who would score his routine (from zero to five) for difficulty, form, and “beauty.” Eyser won gold, edging out Anton Heida, a star Czech-born Turner from Philadelphia, by a single point, 44–43.
Next was the horse vault. Two years prior, Heida had been the national vault champion. For Eyser, it was the most difficult apparatus; hurtling aside, he had to land three times. This he did in a manner, the judges ruled, equal to Heida. The men tied, each winning gold.
Heida then bested Eyser in the two events that followed—the pommel horse and horizontal bar. Still, Eyser was brilliant, winning a silver in the former and a bronze in the latter. Last was the rope climb. The gymnasts started their 25-foot climb with the shot of a pistol. Eyser was first to the top, striking the bell that marked the end of his climb after seven seconds flat. It had been a brilliant performance: five medals in five events. And Eyser’s combined scores in the first four events won him silver in the combined “all-round” competition. Heida may have won gold, but everyone in attendance knew that Eyser had done what he had done on a wooden leg. The Westliche Post referred to the competition as “the ‘Eyser’ festival.”
History would not celebrate the 1904 Olympic Games. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, was livid that they had been moved from Chicago to St. Louis, and he would later write in a 1931 memoir that “the St. Louis Games were completely lacking in attraction.” But in truth, despite some notable problems (among them a marathon marred by poor officiating, cheating, and a lack of drinking water), the 1904 games—the first to award gold, silver, and bronze medals to the top three finishers—were a triumph. Organized by the Amateur Athletic Union, the games drew crowds, press, and public support. They introduced new Olympic events (including boxing and the decathlon), set world records, and saw barriers broken—George Poage and Joseph Stadler, for example, becoming the first African Americans to compete (and medal) in the Olympics. They also featured a one-legged gymnast who won six medals.
Eyser’s historic day did not change his life. He continued bookkeeping at the quarry and training at the Turnverein. But he was now the unquestioned star of his Concordia team—its representative on a St. Louis gymnastics committee and at the center of nearly every team portrait. So Eyser was in a photograph taken in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1908, his left pantleg visibly empty below the knee.
The men had traveled to Germany along with some 1,000 American Turners for a gargantuan international meet, sailing in late June from Baltimore on the German ocean liner SS Main. Twenty-four years had passed since Eyser had left Germany, 13 since Germany had accused him of not showing for military service and of leaving the country without the required permit. But Eyser was welcomed back. Indeed, as he and his teammates trained in Wiesbaden and partook in marches and drills and massive exhibitions—including one that featured 14,000 men in 35 columns doing calisthenics—it was the American Turners in particular who received, in the words of the American Physical Education Review, “the cream of the people’s enthusiasm”—cheers and flowers hurled at them from windows and sidewalks.
The competition was no less grand. Held over four days in July, it drew roughly 100,000 daily visitors, among them Prince Oscar, son of Emperor Wilhelm II. Fans filled tented pavilions and grandstands, looking out at 50 parallel bars, 44 horses, and 16 horizontal bars, all simultaneously in use. Here, amid thousands of gymnasts, Eyser and his Concordia teammates stood out: during one contest with a field of 2,298 entrants, they performed “nearly perfect” routines, according to the American Physical Education Review, and captured six of the 20 victories by American gymnasts.
For all that, the festival was about much more than competition. It was, as the American Physical Education Review put it, “an extension course in physical, vocal, social and ethical training.” Away from the gym, the Turners came together in song and dance and discussion, and shared meals and attended lectures about competition and work. The festival was thus true to the vision of Friedrich Jahn, founder of the Turner movement, and Eyser and his teammates posed with an American flag in front of a bust of Jahn, a photograph preserving them in suit and bowtie. After an extended tour of Germany, the Turners returned home.
Twenty-four years had passed since Eyser had left Germany, 13 since Germany had accused him of not showing for military service and of leaving the country without the required permit. But Eyser was welcomed back.
Back in St. Louis, Eyser grew restless. He switched jobs at the quarry from bookkeeper to cashier, and he moved, renting a room in a single-family brick house in Tower Grove South, a pleasant neighborhood beside a large park. Eyser continued to perform, traveling to Cincinnati for a big Turnfest in 1909. The local press reported that he still possessed, months shy of 40, “the same agility as other Turners.” But he had all but stopped competing in June 1914, when, at the age of 43, he participated at a local meet with his Concordia teammates.
Weeks later, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered the start of World War I, and anti-German feeling spread across the United States. Eyser left St. Louis the next summer to be with his sister and aunt in Denver, where he found work as a bookkeeper. The large German community that he now rejoined was desperate to make clear its loyalty to the United States; a 1916 editorial in the German-language Denver Colorado Herold declared itself “Für Amerika Zunächst”—“For America first.” No less desperate, a large number of Denver Turners left their Turnverein. The club was soon broke, and in August 1916, its grand home was repossessed. When Eyser subsequently began to coach, he did so not at a Turnverein but at a YMCA. And when, in late 1916, he wished to compete, he entered not a Turner meet but the Amateur Athletic Union gymnastic championship of Southern California. Forty-six years old, he won it.
Eyser remained in California a few months into early 1917, living in the Oviatt Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Still, three newspaper ads he placed looking for bookkeeping work went for naught. And Denver soon beckoned him home when, in mid-March, his Aunt Ottilie died. Eyser moved back in with his sister.
The next month, the United States declared war on Germany. Anti–German-American sentiment was aflame, and in Denver, German salespeople were boycotted, German books were burned, and a school superintendent with suspected German sympathies was tarred and feathered. Weeks after his nation declared war, Eyser performed for a final time, at an exhibition at his YMCA, lifting himself up onto parallel and horizontal bars.
The following summer, Eyser wrote a will, bequeathing all he owned—an estate valued at $2,001—to his sister and housemate, Ottilie. The will, a single typed page, stipulated that if Ottilie predeceased him, his possessions would instead go to six friends who lived in the various places he had previously called home: Los Angeles, Dayton, St. Louis, Germany. On September 12, 1918, in the presence of two witnesses, Eyser signed his will. He was 48 years old.
The calendar turned to 1919. There was a feeling of revival in the air, the war having finally ended in November. But at 11 p.m. on March 6, 1919, inside a small brick house in south-central Denver, George Eyser raised a pistol to his left breast and pulled the trigger. He died 10 minutes later.
The next day, The Denver Post carried news of the suicide—six sentences on the bottom of page 11. The notice made no mention of Eyser’s having been a gymnast. It relayed only his age (which it got wrong), his address, profession, and cause of death, as well as the names of the coroner and undertaker. It further asserted that Eyser had been sick. “Eyser was in poor health,” it read, “and this is thought responsible for his action.”
If Eyser had indeed been sick, he had become so only recently—for his will had accounted for the possibility that his (healthy) sister might predecease him. It is thus logical to wonder whether the mental illness that had so long seized his family had finally come for him. Indeed, though Eyser was known for a physical disability, mental illness had more profoundly shaped his life.
Four days after his suicide, at a cemetery on the South Platte River some four miles downstream of Denver, Eyser was cremated. The urn containing his ashes was taken to Hofmann Mortuary in central Denver for a private ceremony at two in the afternoon.
Eyser had bought burial plots for both his aunt and his sister in Block 21 of Fairmount Cemetery in east Denver, and in 1946, the cremated remains of his sister Ottilie would be interred there. But there is no record that Eyser’s ashes were too. After his urn was taken to the Fairmount Cemetery office on March 12, the record goes blank. There is no indication that his sister, or anyone else, picked it up. In such cases, the mortuary generally retained possession of the deceased’s remains. Today, Hofmann Mortuary is defunct, its records lost. It is not known whether Eyser’s remains were buried and, if so, where.
Also unknown are the whereabouts of Eyser’s scrapbook and most of his Olympic medals. His gold for the rope climb and his bronze for the horizontal bars did turn up in recent years at auction, and I traced their provenance back some 40 years to a long-shuttered thrift shop in Covina, California. How the medals got there can be surmised: the shop was a little more than 30 miles from Long Beach, where Eyser’s sister lived during the last 15 years of her life.
Eyser died 105 years ago. Those who knew him have died as well, and none of the descendants of the friends he named in his will have even heard of him. Nor have Eyser’s only living relatives—distant cousins in Denmark. In the absence of information, people see what they wish to in Eyser: one sportswriter told The Wall Street Journal that the success of a one-legged gymnast was proof that the 1904 Olympic Games were “best forgotten.” But the opposite is true: 120 years ago, a man named George Ludwig Friedrich Julius Eyser did something remarkable, and that is best remembered.
The post A Forgotten Turner Classic appeared first on The American Scholar.
My older brother Stephen was always tall. Extremely tall. He was that kid who occupied precisely the middle position in the last row of every class picture in elementary school. His arms hung awkwardly out of the sleeves of his shirts, which could never keep pace with his weedy growth. “Dear Friends,” our dad wrote in his annual Christmas letter in 1961, “Stephen is a 1st grader at Overlook school … He is a TALL 1st grader, standing just 4 inches below his daddy’s chin. We hope that this growth-pace declines.” It didn’t.
When I encounter Steve in family photos from the years before I was born, there’s still an unguarded lightness to him, a receptivity to the world. He was tall, yes, but he hadn’t been diagnosed with anything. He was seen—and, I believe, saw himself—as a child who simply happened to be unusually lanky and tall. He fit in among the other kids in our suburban Baltimore neighborhood, where children observed difference but did so ingenuously. They hadn’t yet acquired the malevolent acumen to sort, rank, and harass other kids based on physical characteristics. As I look at these photos, decades later, my heart aches for Steve. It’s as if he didn’t suspect anything was wrong. Whatever he imagined for his life in those days had nothing to do with what followed. He was enjoying a particular kind of innocence: it was the last time when his inner battle with the idea of normal wasn’t an elemental part of his existence.
What is normal? Is genetic variation something to be corrected? Or is variation simply variation, a natural (and crucial) link in the evolutionary chain?The question of how to think about human difference is nothing new. In the late 19th century, at the dawn of what one British biologist declared to be the “century of the gene,” scientists were already debating the answer. English polymath Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883, and his journal, The Eugenics Review, endorsed selective breeding and the sterilization of the atypical as a means of eliminating deviation from genetic norms. But Galton’s cousin Charles Darwin put forward a different view. Darwin called mutations “sports,” a more benign, even playful term. The opposite of the sport was not a normal gene but a wild type, the one most often found in the natural world. Likewise, physician Archibald Garrod influentially wrote about chemical individuality.
The new world of gene editing has reinvigorated the debate. In 2003, scientists completed mapping the human genome, and last year, the FDA approved CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing therapy to treat sickle cell anemia. These developments have the potential to change fundamentally our understanding of (and approach to) human abnormality. Medical ethicists sometimes distinguish between genetic “treatment” and “enhancement”—condoning the former, condemning the latter—but the distinction is arguably flimsy. As it becomes ever easier to manipulate genes to our liking, how will we feel about genetic characteristics that fall short of affliction, such as lack of athleticism, but nevertheless deny certain advantages to those who inherit them? What about atypicalities, such as neurodivergence, deafness, dwarfism, and scores of others? Those who have these conditions don’t necessarily see them as disabilities. Might such people become candidates for gene editing? Whereas patients with mild symptoms might once have been able to pass as genetically normal, the mapping of the genome has largely eliminated this possibility. It’s disquietingly simple to envision a world, already fast approaching, in which the lack of genetic perfection itself comes to feel like an affliction.
What is normal? Is genetic variation something to be corrected? Or is variation simply variation, a natural (and crucial) link in the evolutionary chain? Much depends on how we perceive the line between the normal and the abnormal, the typical and the atypical, whether we approach genetics solely from a scientific standpoint or broaden our understanding to take in social, cultural, and political factors.
When Steve was around 10, a doctor informed him and my parents that he most likely had a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. Suddenly, the idea of physical normalcy became deeply and personally relevant. My brother’s life story had converged with the story of genetic medicine.
Victor McKusick was one of the founders of medical genetics, and for many years, he was my brother’s doctor. At Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s, he encountered cases of Marfan, including one involving a patient with a serious heart anomaly. The patient was tall and gangly, with disproportionately long fingers and limbs, and had dislocated eye lenses. He looked malnourished, but he wasn’t. At the time, little was known about Marfan, named in 1896 after the French pediatrician who first documented its distinctive features. By the late 1930s, it had been determined that Marfan was an autosomal dominant hereditary trait, meaning that it’s expressed with only one copy of the gene from a parent. McKusick would later trace his professional legacy, in part, to this patient’s bedside. He was awed by the “intricate jigsaw puzzle” of connective tissue, in general, as well as the syndrome’s flamboyantly diverse manifestations and the questions that it raised. Genetically, how could being tall relate to catastrophic heart failure? Why would someone with an eye problem have long fingers?
McKusick had no platform on which to study Marfan or, as he called it, “the Marfan.” The term medical genetics had been knocking around for decades, but it wasn’t a discrete discipline. Hopkins was a good incubator for the emerging field because different specialists mingled in its cafeterias and corridors, and as McKusick saw it, genetics gave a doctor “license to swashbuckle through all of medicine.” Throughout his career, he described his work like this, as an invitation to “go on safari” intellectually, to delve into the invisible, uncharted world of the chromosome as if he were a global adventurer. After he arrived in Baltimore in 1943, he never left. Hopkins was “on the trade routes,” he said. “Thus I could pitch my tent beside the road and keep in touch with what was going on in far off Cathay without ever traveling there myself.”
Doctors usually saw people with Marfan as eye or orthopedic patients, but McKusick, ingeniously, redefined them as genetics patients with a genetic affliction. McKusick hypothesized that the gene in question must control the production of connective tissue. Problems arising from abnormalities in this gene can range from the innocuous (stretch marks after pregnancy) to the lethal. A human heart beats around three billion times in an average life, and over time, the force of a Marfan patient’s own pulse can catastrophically tear the aorta. It’s a paradox that Marfan is one of the most common single-gene disorders and yet one of the stealthiest, even to a physician. You’ve probably met people with this condition and haven’t known it; they may not know they have it themselves. Early studies of Marfan patients record deaths out of the blue. One dropped dead in the middle of a job interview, another after completing a high dive at a pool. Sportswriter Grant Wahl had undiagnosed Marfan and died suddenly while covering the 2022 World Cup.
At Hopkins, McKusick “collected a large number of Marfan patients.” He pored over medical files and amassed cases from every department. He also mined records at the Baltimore morgue for instances of coronary dissection, a condition that results from a tear in the wall of one of the heart’s arteries. In 1955, he described 74 Marfan cases and related disorders in what remains a flagship work in the field of medical genetics, Heritable Disorders of Connective Tissue. wo years later, he gave the emerging field an institutional home: the Moore Clinic at Hopkins, now the McKusick-Nathans Institute. The clinic had previously focused on chronic diseases like syphilis, but McKusick reasoned that genetic defects were the “ultimate chronic disease” and nudged syphilis aside to make room for medical genetics.
To move his work forward, McKusick needed access to contained, insular communities, characterized by intermarriage, where rare recessive genes were likelier to get expressed. In correspondence, this generation of geneticists would make comments such as, “On the wildcat road of the stony fork this afternoon, I found a nice trait of deaf-mutism,” and “Did you happen to see the Newsweek … in which there was a picture of a dwarf?” Well into the 1980s, McKusick made research trips into the Amish communities of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He got a fundamentally “different concept of people,” he said, when he saw them “in situ”—nested in their lives, observing genetic anomaly in its habitat, where any number of stories about atypical bodies could be told. In her 2005 book, Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine, science historian M. Susan Lindee describes the gossipy intimacy that McKusick enjoyed with many families, allowing him to collect blood and urine samples, family genealogies recorded in Bibles, and intimate secrets. His field notes are interspersed with various personal details: how he bought brooms from one family, purchased jams on his way home from another, and was “bitten by a small dog” during an interview.
Yet McKusick also needed access to urban populations. Medical geneticists could familiarize themselves with rare genetic disorders only in places densely populated enough to yield more than one or two cases. In August 1957, he offered a certain Miss Hawkins a job as a “pedigree-tracer” in the newly formed Division of Medical Genetics at the Hopkins medical school. Hawkins would gather “extensive information on members of families of persons with various hereditary diseases” by driving around Baltimore, collecting biographical and medical information, drawing blood, taking urine samples, and abstracting families’ physician reports and medical records. To do this work, as McKusick described it, Hawkins would have to obtain “the rapport and cooperation of the family.” Some cases required extraordinary finesse, since mutations might expose through the back door the open secret of infidelity. “Illegitimacy is so much more frequent than mutation,” McKusick wrote. Data collection in these cases required the “utmost tact and resourcefulness.” Indeed.
In the years that followed, McKusick’s growing number of colleagues generated data on Marfan and other genetic conditions in a variety of ways. For one study, they took measurements of 2,100 children in Baltimore’s public schools. In a festschrift published in 2012, British geneticist Malcolm A. Ferguson-Smith described how McKusick designed a study of chromosomal abnormalities that involved surveying “delinquent boys, county schools, and pediatric clinic populations” in Baltimore. By the early 1960s, “state institutions for the mentally retarded [had become] intellectually exciting places,” McKusick wrote in a 1975 survey of his field published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. His colleagues had discovered two new genetic syndromes through research at Rosewood, Maryland’s home for the “mentally retarded.” The patients’ specific treatment was not thereby “altered one whit,” but the institutions received attention and became something “other than the equivalent of pesthouses.” Conditions there may not have changed, but as McKusick saw it, genetic research reintegrated these exiled patients into the human population.
That language is jarring to 21st-century ears and ethics, as are the methodologies: trawling at public schools, reform schools, and state institutions for research subjects, or traveling the streets of Baltimore to collect samples. Keep in mind, this was before standardized HIPAA, or codified informed consent and institutional review boards. But for atypical humans like my brother, McKusick’s approach was turning perceptions away from spectacle. He repudiated older moral judgments that hereditary afflictions among children were the result of parental vices or failings. McKusick and his colleagues replaced this 19th-century narrative of parental sin and genetic retribution with an equally powerful yet morally disinterested clinical gaze.
Eventually my brother was among those collected. When he was diagnosed, Steve’s narrative about himself began to change. Having a genetic condition transliterated physical eccentricity into affliction, a rare genetic case. This wasn’t an inconsequential semantic matter, either for Steve, who had a life to navigate, or for McKusick, who had an ambitious new field of knowledge to advance against the indifferent and skeptical. Being physically atypical means you’re going to be looked at—it’s only a question of how (imagine never being able to blend into a crowd or be physically anonymous when you want to). McKusick tried to ensure that his patients were looked at in a particular way. For him, humans were not normal or abnormal; they existed on a continuum. He deliberately spoke of “instructive” cases, not “interesting” cases—the former emphasized a clinical sensibility; the latter, something closer to carnival freak shows.
I looked up to Steve, in both senses. He was my big brother in height and age. To me, he was normal—or as normal as anything else, since the term had no valence.But doctors, and medicine, enjoyed a great deal of power and latitude all the same. In the 1950s, doctors were at the height of their cultural mystique and authority, and my mother delivered Steve into their arms on the expectation of merciful omnipotence. McKusick’s medical genetics course at Hopkins included the study of Baltimore families with hereditary disorders. For one assignment, he instructed, “students may wish to call in children who are affected with the Marfan syndrome. … The primary purpose would be to compare the growth characteristics of this group with normal data and with their normal sibs.” Steve was among the children summoned, and one day, he and our mother stood center stage in an amphitheater, where doctors pointed out to other doctors the physical traits of Marfan. “I didn’t realize there would be so many people,” my mother recalled, and she was intimidated—but compliant. It didn’t occur to anyone involved to question the psychological wisdom of this exhibition. My mother remembered only that “they kept talking about how long Steve’s arms were, and pointing.” My brother wasn’t presented as a carnival freak or the incarnation of parental sin but as a medical genetics subject, and that difference must have mattered—being gawked at and being studied can’t possibly feel the same. But neither can they feel entirely different.
It was the gene that had caused things to happen, not context, social attitudes, or people’s behavior. Steve embraced this idea, believing that his identity was both fixed and unfixable. The thought grew in his mind that he was a sort of transcriptional error—a fateful typo, if not a full-blown mistake. Steve used the term mutation a lot. By the time he reached high school, he seemed to have decided that he didn’t have a mutation; he was a mutation. Being almost 12 years younger than Steve and still in a somewhat feral stage, I provided a refuge for him—I had no demeaning agenda of pity or largesse. I looked up to Steve, in both senses. He was my big brother in height and age. To me, he was normal—or as normal as anything else, since the term had no valence. He used to play a terrifying zombie game with me: he’d go outside, knock on our door, stand there mutely with dead, unblinking eyes, arms extended straight out, and then he’d lurch at me like
Frankenstein’s monster, never saying a word. I’d scream every time he did this, in turn terrifying my older sister, who would scold me for saying “there’s a monster in the house” when it was only Steve.
I understand the zombie game better, or at least differently, today. A fledgling genetics journal, founded in 1968, called itself Teratology, from the Greek for “the study of monsters.” The title, in turn, echoed prodigy books of early-modern Europe that interpreted unusual or extraordinary natural events and attributed imperfecta—abnormal human bodies—to supernatural causes. The atypical was monstrous, yes, but also powerful, imbued with a darkly divine provenance. Maybe this was the kind of power that Steve wanted to possess, play with, and inhabit; maybe it was the story of mutation that he preferred.
In high school, Steve was neither physically abnormal enough to be swaddled in pity nor normal enough to be ignored. This made him a prime target for bullying. Every day, he ran a gauntlet of jeers and taunts, a crucible imagined and reenacted long into adulthood. The bullying he suffered, like all bullying, was about the enforcement of normalcy and its authority—and some of the early figures in genetic medicine would pretty much have agreed with the self-loathing and genetic judgment that my brother applied to himself. They saw genetic medicine as aspiring toward the same goal: the dominance of the normal. In a 1950 paper, “Our Load of Mutations,” for example, American geneticist (and eugenicist) Hermann Joseph Muller outlined his vision of an ideal “all-normal man.”
But McKusick thought differently. He was a clinician, not a genetic idealist like Muller, and he envisioned a zone of normalcy, running from “normal or unaffected individuals” on one side to “affected individuals” on the other. In the middle are mildly affected individuals in a “zone of overlap,” where they can’t even be “recognized as abnormal.” Indeed, before the mapping of the human genome, genetic passing was possible. Doctors might know that a gene was involved in some disorder, but not its location. Besides, no genetic testing was yet available. This ambiguity was especially true with Marfan, which has a vast range of expressivity—the degree to which a genotype, the genetic code, is evident in the phenotype, the individual’s body. McKusick always suspected that Abraham Lincoln had Marfan and wanted to get a biological sample to confirm his hunch. (He never succeeded.) But other cases of the disease are more self-evident, such as that of a baby with Marfan who, McKusick wrote, died at eight months, the child’s heart so overactive that it caused the bed to shake. The atypical body can be lethally crippling or profitably exotic—a deadly genetic trait passing as a lucrative asset. Sometimes, it can be both. Genetically “perfect” bodies can be impeccably normal or spectacularly atypical—athletic and tall enough for someone to play in the NBA or become a supermodel.
McKusick respected this ambiguity. In a 1969 textbook, he warned that “the dividing line between normal and abnormal variation is not fixed; indeed no dividing line exists. ‘Disease’ or ‘dis-order’ are not easily defined terms. Variation in one environment or social setting may be considered pathologic, where in another it may be advantageous. Keep in mind a variation constitutes a continuum.” Even so, harsher and more rigid attitudes toward those who lived outside the zone of normalcy kept insinuating their way back into the field of genetic medicine, past checkpoints of delicacy, tact, and sophisticated reasoning. In his 2012 book, The Science of Human Perfection, historian Nathaniel Comfort asserts that the boundary between eugenics and medical genetics was ideologically membranous. The medical geneticist’s goal of alleviating individual human suffering and the eugenicist’s goal of populational betterment were subtly interleaved throughout the 20th century, and the origin story of McKusick as the “father of medical genetics” created a useful but misleadingly clean break between the two. Comfort isn’t alleging that medical geneticists were eugenics advocates; indeed, McKusick couldn’t have condemned eugenics any more passionately than he did, discrediting the idea as “abominable” and “outrageous.” And in the clinic, when he encountered Steve, McKusick was concerned about his well-being rather than atypicality. He wasn’t striving for Steve to be normal but to have a full and long life.
So, the border drawn by medical geneticists against eugenicists was an adamantly sincere one—yet difficult to patrol. McKusick wrote expansively about the “mutational repertoire of man,” but even he championed the study of the “morbid map” of abnormal genes by noting how much that map could elucidate the normal. However sincere the intention to speak of variation and not aberration, genetic language was getting powerfully magnetized toward the poles of normal and abnormal. And in a 1973 volume edited by McKusick, contributor F. Clarke Fraser wrote, “If we are to aim at reducing the amount of ill health caused by deleterious genes we must aim at avoiding their transmission … by reducing the likelihood that [the ‘abnormal infant’] will be born or even conceived.” Fraser thought it “perfectly proper,” when counseling couples, “to say the equivalent of, ‘Now be quite sure that you have really thought about what another defective child would mean.’ ” He wrote also of the “deformed or diseased child.” However benevolent the intention, it’s hard to discern in this comment where the alleviation of human suffering ends and human improvement begins. As Comfort writes, “What they called preventive eugenics we today would call prenatal diagnosis with therapeutic abortion.”
As an adult, Steve was no longer an object of ridicule; he became merely “the tall guy.” For Steve, the world was a Procrustean exercise and puzzle. How could he better conform himself to its circumscriptions, spaces, boundaries, and limits? “I wish I could hack off the middle part of my legs,” he’d say—this wasn’t the ecumenical view of genetic variation that McKusick tried to champion. Barring a leg hack, how would he make himself fit? This was a literal question he had to answer every day, as he ducked to fit through doors, slumped into sofas to shrink himself down, stooped to look in a mirror or read a sign, tucked in his legs and arms on crowded trains. He custom-designed his bicycles; he shifted car seats as far back as they would go; he moved quickly, masking conspicuousness with speed, making himself a blur—bounding headlong through crowds, long limbs flying and head ducked. He shopped for groceries late at night to avoid people. And he leaned over hundreds of pool tables, many thousands of times.
The struggle to fit provoked an ambient envy in his life, and the idea of a deranged genetic code—“all the luck of the dice,” he’d say—deepened the existential injustice.In his 20s, Steve was already an indefatigable pool player, on his way to becoming a nationally ranked amateur. I would hear him practicing in the basement, billiard balls making contact and plopping into a pocket, one after another after another. He was so good, even at the start—long fingers, able to make a beautiful bridge, such fluidity in his stroke. He could lean into shots and over tables better than anyone. This suited him. A billiards stance while shooting takes a good several inches off your height. You’re leaning, with cue in hand, and no one is likely to notice how long your legs are in that position. But if they notice how long your arms are, all the better. It’s an advantage. For Steve, pool took physical ungainliness and made it liquid, turned it into something elegant, beautiful, and normal. He was momentarily in conformity with a material world that otherwise almost cropped him. The sport sparked a psychological and a physical transformation in Steve. As he got better, he would talk about “mental toughness.” What it meant to him, specifically, was the capacity to be in control of which balls went where, in what order, and how the game unfolded and ended, entirely under his code and design.
The struggle to fit provoked an ambient envy in his life, and the idea of a deranged genetic code—“all the luck of the dice,” he’d say—deepened the existential injustice. Those who covet the normal, by definition, are unrelievedly confronted by the thing they covet every single day. For Steve, the subtractive simplicity and modesty of his longing only made it worse. Unlike the person who envies extraordinary physical traits, athleticism, or beauty and must seek them out—at stadiums, on movie screens, in magazines—Steve found hundreds of objects of ordinary desire in each moment. How many of us come to feel, as Steve did, that we’re waging the same struggle with normalcy to some lesser degree or another; that having a typical body, be it typical in weight, height, the construction of limbs, the proportion of limbs to torso, the angle of facial features and cheekbones, the straightness of the spine, the clearness of the skin, the size of the breasts, the daintiness of the nose, or the bulk of the muscles, would resolve our lives and set things straight? I learned from him that normal is the most profoundly craved thing when we don’t have it and the most effortlessly ignored thing when we do.
Steve and McKusick were obsessed with mutations, albeit in different ways. One Christmas, McKusick sent us a beautiful card featuring an image of Madonna and child, but the Madonna was an Amish mother with Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, a rare dwarfism, who had an extra digit on both hands.
The early phases of his work were about observing and cataloging. McKusick always had a camera with him. Every person he met was part of his fieldwork. He took photographs of my parents once, when their paths crossed at a party. McKusick engaged in more systematic cataloging on the first Wednesday of each month, when his colleagues gathered at his home in the verdant, affluent Baltimore neighborhood of Guilford. As they drank coffee and enjoyed homemade sticky buns, they prepared index cards summarizing articles in medical journals pertinent to genetic conditions. These index cards became the first entries in the groundbreaking Mendelian Inheritance in Man, known today as the OMIM (the O standing for “online”). It’s the definitive database of human genetic identity—hailed as “the bible of clinical genetics”—with entries on 16,000 genes. Steve is #154700.
McKusick considered this work one of his most important achievements, yet it was still what he called an “encyclopedia of phenotypes”—and looks deceive. McKusick tellingly compared the distinction between genotype and phenotype to that of a person’s “character and reputation. Genotype and character are what one really is. Phenotype and reputation are what one appears to be.” A reputation can lie, but character cannot. Our authentic identity resides in DNA. It’s almost as if in cases of genetic passing, the phenotype has pulled one over on the genotype: appearance is a trick of the eye, or an act of diagnostic treachery.
At a conference on birth defects, McKusick famously elaborated this point with reference to “lumpers and splitters.” He argued that doctors were often guilty of “lumping” patients into one syndrome because of physical similarities, or “excessive and improper splitting” of patients with the same genetic disorder into separate identities because of physical variations. We are what our genes say we are. Those working on genes had become impatient with gray zones: “Disease A and Disease B are either the same disease, if they are based on the same mutation, or different diseases.” And if this was so, McKusick concluded, then what he really needed wasn’t an encyclopedia.
He needed a map.
Some of McKusick’s colleagues viewed his aspiration to locate and map every disease-causing gene as dilettantism akin to stamp collecting and about as edifying as bricklaying. In August 1968, a Newark Evening News reporter likened McKusick’s annual Bar Harbor “short course” on medical genetics to the engrossing pointlessness of counting angels on the head of a pin. What did the discovery of a defective gene for “the circus-rubber-man syndrome” gain humanity in comparison with other research? A doctor who played agent provocateur at the course lectured that most of the information harvested by medical genetics had no practical application, was “not very interesting,” and was largely “a waste of time.” But none of this extinguished McKusick’s “burning interest in mapping.” So often a momentous, paradigm-shifting idea gets smuggled inside a cozy metaphor, and this was true for genetic medicine. In 1975, New York Times science reporter Harold Schmeck Jr. did much to popularize a gene-centric worldview by drawing heavily on McKusick’s adventurous notion of himself as a voyager to “chromosomal continents,” the expeditionary mapmaker of “uncharted terrain.”
Steve continued to visit McKusick at Hopkins mostly to determine whether his aorta was dilating. Steve admired and spoke highly of McKusick. He found him gracious and well mannered, calm and tolerant. At a checkup in the 1980s, McKusick asked Steve what he was up to. My brother was early into his 33-year career as a cartographer with the federal government. “The two of us are not so different,” McKusick said. “I’m a cartographer, too. I map genes.” This made him the cartographer of my cartographer brother’s affliction. I used to think that Steve liked maps because their point of view normalized his own. In cartography, the view from high up is the privileged one. As for McKusick, he later wrote, “I am not certain why … I became enthralled with mapping genes on human chromosomes.” It would be useful for “understanding the basic derangements in birth defects,” but his inspirations were also visceral. There “are people, and I am one, for whom mapping has an intrinsic attraction.”
The completion of the genome map gave a powerful boost to the authority of the genetic code as a set of instructions for our identities. In McKusick’s term, a map “confers a concreteness” to genetics. Before the map existed, a patient with mild symptoms could still pass as genetically normal and the concept of physical normalcy itself maintained a tensile ambiguity owing to incomplete genetic knowledge. But as it became apparent that the human genome would be decoded in his lifetime, McKusick, an instinctive humanist, anticipated that the future of genetic medicine would seek to accommodate, not edit, human variation (although he did predict “gene surgery” as early as 1981). It would involve “gene screens” and “interpreting the results to individuals, and designing programs to make the most of the strong points … and to avoid troubles from some of the weak points.” McKusick believed that maps drew and bound people together—not genotypical subgroups, but all of us.
Inevitably, though, maps define boundaries that group people within and exclude them without. People create maps, and then maps create them. In the 1990s, epidemiologist Abby Lippman criticized the genome map for defining normal and abnormal as a genetic construct, not a social one. Yet mapping is, as much as anything else, a political and cultural project. The genetic normal began as a gray zone. Then it became a binary, and then, over time, with the genome mapped, it became slyly normative. James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA structure, wrote in 1995 that “the genetic dice will continue to inflict cruel fates on all too many individuals. … Decency demands that someone must rescue them from genetic hells.” In milder terms, the United States Office of Technology predicted, also in 1995, that the Human Genome Project eventually would mean that each of us has “a paramount right to be born with a normal, adequate, hereditary endowment.” In a 1993 New York Times advertising supplement, the March of Dimes described its quest for “perfectly beautiful” and “beautifully perfect” babies—the two standards transposed—“born free of sickness and disability.” Underlying this ideal, wrote feminist scholar Joan Rothschild, is the “imperfect child … who cannot be allowed to happen.”
At one time, these statements were hypotheticals, albeit disturbing ones, but now the innovation to support them is here. Science gallops ahead of ethics. It’s tempting to analogize the relationship between the two to an exquisite, impeccably designed sportscar—a McLaren or a Bugatti—that’s put in the hands of a 16-year-old, who then totals it. After the discovery of a gene responsible for a common form of dwarfism, a scientist went to the annual Little People of America convention and saw a dwarf wearing a T-shirt that said, “Endangered Species.”
Toward the end of his life, McKusick seemed to be grappling with problems of human empathy and solidarity that his own work as a founder of genetic medicine had provoked. Did the “mere existence” of the map pose a danger per se, if it risks “distort[ing] the way we think about ourselves and our fellow human beings?” McKusick warned of the “absurdity of determinism, that what we are is a direct and inevitable consequence of what our genome is.” He also worried about “the absurdity of reductionism,” a “misconception that we … know everything it means to be human.” We may lose “profound respect” for the genetic variability that benefits both the species and the individual. The “genetical-commercial complex,” he said, might lead to “the Madison Avenue type of pressure” for couples to make “value judgments” on gametes that would corrode meaningful freedom of choice. “In this era of growing scientific sophistication,” McKusick said in a 1997 interview, “people need to learn to look through a variety of lenses to understand what’s happening.”
How did a gene-centric worldview change perceptions for the physically atypical? For Steve, did it matter to know the mapped location of his mutated gene? Did DNA tell him who he was and write his biography? Did that knowledge afford him absolution, fortitude, insight, solace, or self-knowledge? I think that it did, and it didn’t. Genetic medicine was a double helix that translated everything into nothing and nothing into everything. One story about Steve, and a plausible one, is that the nothing of a minuscule genetic typo became the everything of his fate. His genetic code became the scrivener of his life—and of his sudden death. He died in 2015, just two days shy of his 60th birthday. The cause was a birth defect, inscribed by a gene: his aorta dissected while he was on his daily 30-mile bike ride. He had lived his life with a genetic condition that someday could kill him. Then that someday arrived. Even in death, his genetics dictated things: cremation was delayed because Steve’s body was too long for the standard crematory.
It’s incomprehensibly lopsided—a fate determined by one wrongly transcribed gene in the equivalent of 300 volumes of code. The gene is located at 15q21.1: it’s on the long arm (q) of chromosome 15, at band 21 and sub-band 1. The gene’s molecular location is from base pairs 48,408,306 to 48,645,788. These 237,482 base pairs, like all others, are built of four nucleotides that must be arranged in a precise sequence for the gene to work. In this case, the amino acids are strung together to create fibrillin-1. At position 6169 on this gene, a C (cytosine) is replaced by a T (thymine). Geneticists note the change as “FBN1 Exon 50/c.6169C>T; Arg2057Term.” Because of this genetic typo, an amino acid down the line gets a STOP instead of a GO message. As with Christmas tree lights, one faulty bulb causes the entire string to short out.
One story about Steve is that the nothing of a minuscule genetic typo became the everything of his fate. His genetic code became the scrivener of his life—and of his sudden death.In December 2013, more than 50 years after he was diagnosed with Marfan and just 20 months before it killed him, Steve got confirmation from the Connective Tissue Gene Tests laboratory in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that he did, indeed, have Marfan syndrome. Then again, McKusick had known it decades ago—just by looking at Steve. The record from my brother’s last visit at Hopkins noted that he was “diagnosed long ago based on clinical features by Dr. Victor McKusick.” Steve’s genetic code might have been a nothing that became everything, but it was also an everything that became nothing. Genes don’t tell us who we are; how we tell about genes tells us who we are. This was McKusick’s insight, now in ethical remission—that much depends on how we create habitats and tell stories, on how much we embrace atypicality as part of a shared human experience rather than a deviation to be palliatively edited. It’s the difference between seeing a little person as locked in a “genetic hell” or as an example of natural variation.
When Jennifer Doudna, the co-inventor of CRISPR, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2020, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, the committee enthused that their work was about “rewriting the code of life.” McKusick was a first step in that process; one of his patients, my brother, rewrote the code of a life—his own. In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari describes the revolution of more than 70,000 years ago, when humans developed the capacity to tell fictional stories and communicate about things that don’t exist. Ever afterward, we have lived in a “dual reality,” of things real and imagined. This sounds like an evolutionary liability. Someone who imagines unicorns squanders time away from prime directives of reproduction and survival. But the opposite is true, Harari asserts, because stories allow humans to bypass the genome. Through storytelling, we can alter behavior quickly and transmit new behaviors to the next generation. We create solidarities and communities around a god, a flag, an idea, or a logo. Other social animals can change only when their DNA changes through a protracted, uncertain evolutionary process in which their behavior is “determined to a large extent by their genes,” Harari writes.
The stories Steve told to himself about himself as an adult bypassed DNA and moved more quickly than mutation, and this made him an early resister to genetic determinism. Although he never stopped jumping at the shadow of the person he was at 15, he embraced ideas and places that freed him from the genome’s conceits. His pool game, where his body fit with the table and motions; libertarianism, with its ferocious individualism that removed genetic determinism, or any kind of determinism, from the equation; and a virtual life that removed physical normalcy, or any kind of physicality, from the picture. Also, he loved sports. He looked always for moments of belonging and found them in the tribe of fans. Steve sent me an email after a memorable Baltimore Ravens victory in 2000 and described how all the fans had felt the energy—“70,000, as one.” As cartographers, my brother and his doctor preferred the painstaking labor of observing and charting variations and then drawing them together into a whole. Sports, not mutations. I learned only at Steve’s memorial service from his acquaintances and colleagues that he had never once mentioned Marfan, the genetic story of his life, to any of them.
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When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30
Five years ago, still struggling to explain Donald Trump’s political success, The New York Times alighted on the 1619 Project, by which one could view Trump’s election as merely one manifestation of the racism that, per the project, has always defined American life. Phrases such as white supremacy, systemic racism, and white privilege became conversational boilerplate, and to people of a certain cast of mind, it all suddenly seemed so obvious and simple.
John Ganz’s book is something of a 1990 Project: an attempt to locate the proximate origins of MAGA success in the combative and at times racially sordid right-wing fringe of the early 1990s. Foreshadowing abounds. Pat Buchanan demagogues the Mexican border and seems amused when a liberal protester gets roughed up at one of his rallies. David Duke tests the appeal of a bland-Klan platform. Samuel T. Francis, one of the far right’s deep thinkers, refers to mainstream conservatives as “losers.” Randy and Vicki Weaver, two heartland economic casualties susceptible to neo-Nazi blandishments, stand for well-armed, widespread, white Christian nationalism. Private sector impresario-turned-presidential candidate Ross Perot assures a recession-panicked and mostly white middle class that he alone can fix it. New York City Mayor David Dinkins’s appeal to racial transcendence only inflames the city’s white ethnic rabble, who are further roused by the cynical Rudy Giuliani (who succeeds the noble Dinkins in much the same way that Trump succeeded the dignified Barack Obama—i.e., rudely). A riot by off-duty NYPD officers brings to mind January 6. And so on.
As an analysis of right-wing culture-war pathologies in and of themselves, the book is often sharp and interesting. But the focus on racial resentment tells us far less about Trump’s rise than Ganz seems to realize. From the 2012 presidential election through the 2020 presidential election (a period encompassing two Trump candidacies and one Trump presidency), the Democratic margin of victory among the nonwhite working class decreased by 18 points, while its margin among college-educated whites increased by 16 points. The party dedicated to calling out white privilege in all its manifestations has increasingly become the party of privileged whites, while alienating the minorities it presumes to defend from right-wing racism. Recent polls suggest that this nonwhite rightward drift could be even more significant this election year, particularly among working-class Hispanics. (Not that Democrats are losing the nonwhite vote overall, of course. They merely risk losing enough of it to lose a general election.)
Some might remember when the Democratic Party was the party of organized labor and the working class, when—to touch on one hot-button issue—it was the party advocating for tighter border control. Complaining that Mexico was “exporting” its poverty and that “illegals” and “wetbacks” were being allowed into the country to take jobs, depress wages, and break strikes, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez mobilized a UFW march on the border and was joined by civil-rights icon Ralph Abernathy and by Senator Walter Mondale, a titan of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a future U.S. vice president. (Chavez received more general support from Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy as well.) The UFW even set up a “wet line”—basically a southern border-cum-union picket line enforced by vigilante means, including physical violence. Was this all just xenophobia? Ugly nativism? Racism? (If so, it’s quite the rainbow coalition of racists.) Or was it something more complicated?
A person truly curious about the rise of populism and the rightward drift of the working class (not just the white working class) would do better to ponder, among other things, long-evolving labor and border policies and the legacy of NAFTA (which Bill Clinton signed over the objection of most members of his own party) than to devote a whole chapter and then some to the kooky and always inconsequential David Duke—however neatly Duke fits into today’s simple narrative of white racial resentment. It’s just possible things are more complicated even now.
The degree to which Duke and the Duke-adjacent haunt Ganz’s narrative brings to mind a scene from Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in which a group of revolutionary street-theater types in blackface and wielding toy nightsticks confront a young Black man, whom they try to goad (literally) out of his false consciousness, insulting the man’s intelligence and saying he should be angry at the cultural appropriation by the white trustafarians in their midst. (They’re all at an outdoor rock concert in San Francisco’s Panhandle.) But when Didion asks a teenage girl nearby what the political point of this taunting is, all the girl can answer, after turning the question over in her mind, is, “Maybe it’s some John Birch thing.” Such a person, Didion writes, is not so much engaged with society as “ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts.”
The most publicized self-doubt in the age of Trump—at least for many—is whether American society has ever really made a dime’s worth of racial progress. A corollary is the reflexive confidence with which those same many have put all unwanted developments down largely to ineradicable white racism, including the specter of a second Trump presidency and the much-bruited threat to democracy that such a presidency would entail. All the more astounding, therefore, is the irony that the greatest threat to democracy (as conceived by those who’ve wrapped themselves in the mantle of that abstraction this election season) might be nothing more—if trends hold—than the brown-skinned demos turning out and exercising their right to vote.
It has been 60 years since Freedom Summer, perhaps the last time the Democratic establishment (at least elements of it) had this much to fear from enfranchised nonwhites. That thought ought to be the despair of every white progressive. And yet, somewhere in Louisiana’s St. Tammany Parish, the former grand wizard himself might be cracking a wry smile and marveling at how things work out—though marveling for not quite the same reasons John Ganz spends so many pages imagining.
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I served for a decade on the jury of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize, awarded each year to the architect who best represents the values of traditional and classical design. As Martin C. Pedersen observed recently on his website Common Edge: “The Driehaus is architecture’s traditional-classical design version of the Pritzker Prize. Although it comes with a hefty $200,000 check—twice the size of the Pritzker’s honorarium—and previous winners include such luminaries as Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, Léon Krier, and Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the award still exists in a sort of media vacuum.”
Pedersen is right. The design press pays scant attention to the Driehaus Prize, probably because its readers—the architectural mainstream—have little interest in traditional/classical architecture. Never mind that this approach accounts for countless private residences nationwide, as well as academic buildings, public libraries, concert halls, a federal courthouse, and a presidential library. One building that should have penetrated the media vacuum is 15 Central Park West, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan whose record-breaking commercial success gained it renown among real-estate mavens; the stately limestone façades consciously recall such prewar classics as the Apthorp and the Beresford.
But popular acclaim counts for little in the closeted architectural world. As the New York architect Peter Pennoyer, this year’s Driehaus winner, told Pedersen, “There is a deep-seated interest—if not delusion—in the idea that the avant-garde, the cutting edge, the next new thing is what we should all be concerned about, at the exclusion of history, tradition, community, and context.”
The next new thing. Précisément! It was a French book published in 1923 that sparked the attitude that Pennoyer describes. The author was a Swiss-born architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who had recently adopted the pen name Le Corbusier, and the book was his spirited manifesto, Vers une architecture (literally Towards an Architecture). The first English translation was titled Towards a New Architecture, adding a word that was not inaccurate, for despite including illustrations of ancient temples and Hadrian’s Villa and referring to Donato Bramante and Raphael, Le Corbusier’s book was determinedly forward looking in its message. “We do not appreciate sufficiently the deep chasm between our own epoch and earlier periods,” he proclaimed. “If we set ourselves against the past, we are forced to the conclusion that the old architectural code, with its mass of rules and regulations evolved during four thousand years, is no longer of any interest; it no longer concerns us; all the values have been revised; there has been revolution in the conception of what Architecture is.” Stirring stuff.
All the values have been revised. Le Corbusier made it sound as if the modern era, propelled by the Great War, represented an epochal moment, which it did in many ways, but he didn’t count on one thing: how rapidly things would change in the modern age. The ponderous Farman Goliath biplane that he featured in Vers une architecture was out of service in less than a decade, and the majestic Cunard ocean liner Aquitania, whose white superstructure served him as an architectural model, was decommissioned in 1950. Le Corbusier often used his own Voisin C7 automobile as a prop in photographs of the villas he had designed in the Paris suburbs—the boxy car and his boxy architecture were all of a piece. But less than a decade later, Gabriel Voisin introduced the C25 Aérodyne, a streamlined beauty that wasn’t boxy at all. Where did that leave the “new” architecture? Having cut itself off from the old rules and regulations, as Le Corbusier put it, it had no choice but to keep changing with the changing times.
Regularly reinventing architecture is exciting, but it faces a number of challenges. Architecture is an art, hence creativity is important, but it is an applied art, which makes it fundamentally empirical—that is, ruled not by theory but by experience. What works is worth repeating; what doesn’t, isn’t. As a result, building design has traditionally depended on rules of thumb: the dimensions of tread and riser that make for a comfortable stair, the pleasing proportion between the width of a room and its ceiling height, the shapes and details that ensure a roof doesn’t leak. The skill of the architect lies in knowing when to innovate and when to stick to the tried and true.
Architects rushing to discover the next new thing tend to undervalue the tried and true. Willfully ignoring experience and implementing untested new solutions can be risky, as I. M. Pei, a talented architect, found after he designed the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The exterior of the new wing, completed in 1978, is covered in pink Tennessee marble to match the old gallery. There is nothing particularly novel about using marble as a cladding. The ancient Romans covered the brick Pantheon with marble, and more than a thousand years later, John Russell Pope designed basically the same system—thick, self-supporting walls of marble—for the main building of the National Gallery. Pope concealed the necessary expansion joints behind moldings and pilasters, but Pei wanted the surface of his walls to be smooth and unbroken, so he used thin marble panels and supported them individually on stainless steel hangers that were embedded in the concrete structure. Only 33 years after the building opened, the panels started to show signs of buckling, and the entire marble skin—some 16,000 panels—had to be removed and reinstalled on new hangers, at a cost of more than $80 million. The debacle was in sharp contrast to Pope’s enduring building next door.
Ignoring the past often means ignoring the good ideas of one’s immediate predecessors. In the past, copying masters was a valuable part of architectural design—Andrea Palladio copied Bramante, Inigo Jones copied Palladio, Christopher Wren copied Jones. Now copying is taboo. For example, the work of early Scandinavian modernists such as Sigurd Lewerentz and Alvar Aalto, who humanized their stripped-down modern designs with interesting handcrafted details, was ignored by later generations. Similarly, when Louis Kahn produced the sublime skylit vaults of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, his ingenious solution was highly praised, but it was never repeated. As a result, instead of a considered evolution, modern architecture has been marked by a succession of fresh starts, some real and many false.
Reinventing architecture faces another, less obvious challenge. When Le Corbusier presented his Plan Voisin—a fictive proposal to rebuild the center of Paris with high-rise office towers—he took it for granted that the new would entirely replace the old. But of course, real cities consist of both new and old buildings. The old buildings are not historic relics but functioning places where people live, work, study, and in the case of old concert halls, listen to music. For most people, old buildings are as much a part of modern life as flat-screen televisions and smartphones. Le Corbusier maintained that the old architectural values need no longer concern us. But the contrary is true: the old buildings are often cherished, not primarily—or at least not only—because they are old, but because they are, well, beautiful.
It was perhaps inevitable that a reaction to ahistorical modern architecture would emerge at some point. This happened in the 1980s, and the reaction was largely facilitated by the architectural movement known as postmodernism. Although short-lived, this facile flirtation with history opened the door to a more serious reconsideration of the past. This included not only the American Renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is a touchstone for many classicists, but also the work of inventive masters such as Bertram Goodhue, who designed the Nebraska State Capitol; Ralph Adams Cram, who was responsible for Rice University; and Raymond Hood, the lead architect of Rockefeller Center.
It turns out that there are advantages to reconnecting with history. Without the imperative to constantly innovate, which can lead to risky experimentation and construction failures, architects can rely on time-tested methods of construction, and traditional materials and details. The modern steel frames of the Nebraska State Capitol and the buildings of Rockefeller Center, for example, are clad in traditional limestone. Architects who are free to find inspiration in their predecessors and contemporaries produce buildings that not only work but also gain the affection of the general public: libraries and courthouses that don’t look like flashy casinos, academic buildings that cannot be mistaken for workaday office buildings, and places of worship that don’t resemble utilitarian industrial plants.
It would be inaccurate to say that people don’t like modern architecture. After more than a century, it’s an accepted feature of contemporary life, almost a tradition. Office workers expect their workplaces to be sleek; shoppers expect high-fashion boutiques and automobile showrooms to be minimalist exercises in bare concrete and industrial details; and museumgoers expect galleries to resemble artists’ lofts, and museum cafés to have chic furniture and Zen-like décor.
But there are limits. It’s okay to have a minimalist kitchen or bathroom, but a living room shouldn’t look like an Apple store, and a house shouldn’t look like an upscale health spa. Nor should a college campus be mistaken for a suburban office park. Many colleges and universities, especially those built in the early 1900s in the prevalent Collegiate Gothic style, have enthusiastically embraced traditional design—you can’t have too much of a good thing.
In this house on Long Island, Thomas A. Kligerman blends traditional materials with minimalist details such as the knife-edge eaves and the porch’s skinny double columns. (Richard Powers)
Is traditional/classical architecture simply a reactionary movement, as its detractors maintain, led by bow-tied anti-modernists seeking to turn back the clock—the architectural equivalent of historical reenactments? Well, yes, in part. Traditional/classical architecture does represent a reaction against the ahistorical attitude that has come to typify mainstream architecture, and it definitely has looked to the past for inspiration. But which past?
In a famous 1959 lecture, Philip Johnson told his Yale audience, “We cannot not know history.” Yet with a few exceptions, today’s classical architects have been highly selective in choosing exactly which history to know. In the debate over President Trump’s executive order privileging classicism for federal buildings, for example, both critics and supporters assumed this meant fluted columns and garlanded entablatures. Indeed, it does sometimes appear as if classicism stopped with the richly bedecked buildings of Charles McKim and Stanford White. But as my friend the Greek architect Demetri Porphyrios pointed out years ago in an influential essay, “classicism is not a style.” The mannered classicism of Michelangelo was very different from the earlier classicism of Bramante or the later classicism of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Prussian classicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin (1830) was more different still, as was the stripped classicism of Paul Philippe Cret’s Federal Reserve Board Building (1937). A reason that classicism takes different guises, apart from the unstoppable imagination of architects, is that despite its ancient Greek and Roman roots, it inevitably reflects the taste of its own time. Schinkel was affected by his interest in Gothic buildings, just as Cret was influenced by the art deco movement, and even by the International Style. Could one imagine a 21st-century classicism that broadens its language to incorporate elements of the modernist past? That’s a tall order in our bifurcated time, when architectural correctness mandates that you belong to one camp or the other.
“I’m actually getting sort of tired of correctness,” architect Thomas A. Kligerman told me. “I like both/and, the adventure of either/or, bringing seemingly disparate things together.” After receiving a graduate degree in architecture from Yale in 1982, Kligerman spent seven years with Robert A. M. Stern Architects, a practice that specializes in traditional/classical design, before founding his own firm with John Ike, another Stern alumnus. A decade later, they were joined by Joel Barkley. Over the next 23 years, Ike Kligerman Barkley, based in New York, gained a national reputation for its exceptional residences. Architectural Digest, which featured many IKB projects, praised the firm’s work as “timeless, considerate architecture and buildings with soul.”
In 2023, following an amicable dissolution of the partnership, Kligerman continued on his own. Despite having been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome and being a devoted watercolorist, he has an unusual approach to tradition. Some of his work is modern with traditionalist overtones, and some is traditional with modernist overtones. An oceanside house on Long Island’s East End appears at first glance to be an example of the popular shingle style, which originated in the late 19th century in summer houses that were built up and down the New England seaboard. But in Kligerman’s hands, this old American chestnut takes an unexpected turn. The walls and large protective roofs are shingled, but the house combines this traditional material with minimalist details. Instead of a fascia board at the eaves, the knife-edge recalls the skinny hovering roof of the Barcelona Pavilion (designed for the 1929 International Exposition by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich). Skinny, too, are the double columns of the porch, which are wood, and the railings, which are steel; in the manner of the Mies Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, both are painted white. This unexpected aesthetic blend is the architectural equivalent of fusion cuisine.
Another Kligerman residence, this one by a lake in Connecticut, is not shingled but uses an old Victorian technique: board-and-batten siding. Board-and-batten is often associated with Carpenter Gothic, and there are other hints of that 19th-century vernacular style: gables that recall stylized classical pediments, a window bay supported on decorative console brackets, and verticals between the windows that resemble simplified colonnettes. “I saw this house as having a high/low quality,” Kligerman explained to me in an email, “simple, barn-sided boxes stained a lowly brown with flourishes of high gloss black, classical pediments and details.” This undramatic house reminds me of the midcentury modern houses that architects such as William Wurster and Joseph Esherick built in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their casual layouts reflected the casual lifestyle of their owners, and the modest architecture intentionally stayed in the background, so much so that Frank Lloyd Wright once described Wurster as “that shack architect.” Kligerman’s elegant design is hardly a shack, but it has a similar unprepossessing, throwaway quality; the stark simplicity of the interior could be described as modern—or Amish. Thus the house is a conversation, albeit in hushed undertones, between tradition and modernity.
Ever since Palladio, architects have used houses as vehicles for exploring new ideas. I don’t know whether blending tradition and modernity will be the next new thing, or whether the gulf that exists between the two camps will be—or can be—bridged. In any event, Kligerman’s new-old houses remind me of what Duke Ellington once said of another art form: “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.”
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Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin by Howard Markel; W. W. Norton, 368 pp., $35
In June 1860, the Oxford Natural History Museum hosted an open plenary session on a new book, The Origin of Species. Two thousand people turned up, a prizefighters’ crowd. The discussion period got seriously out of hand. The aftershocks of that day are with us still.
In Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin, physician and medical historian Howard Markel portrays the two years surrounding the publication of Darwin’s dangerous text. The vital close-up is an oratorical duel between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of the Church of England, defending Creation-based natural history, and Darwin’s stand-in, London biologist Thomas Huxley, who advocated for fact-led research. Their mythic conflict still fascinates.
Emphasis on mythic. For Markel, the showdown at the conference has become, in cultural memory, “a dangerous morass. … a demi-glace of apes, ancestry and snappy quips [that] creates a savory and syrupy version of history that we blindly follow at our peril,” thanks to “slanted histories” and, worse, the irrepressible “brigade of scientists, novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and journalists [who] have produced carloads of books and articles, with no end in sight.”
If anyone can set them all straight, Markel’s the man—in medicine, a pediatrician; in media, a wunderkind who has churned out podcasts, columns, hundreds of articles, thousands of interviews. (He and a colleague even invented the Covid-era catchphrase “flattening the curve,” inspired by a weirdly bulging container of room-service pad thai.) Markel’s six previous popular histories map the wreckage that can result when science meets personality—Freud and his frenemies battling cocaine, the unpleasant Kellogg brothers battling each other, Watson and Crick gleefully oppressing crystallographer Rosalind Franklin in the race to understand DNA. At the University of Michigan, his alma mater, Markel holds appointments in history, history of medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics and communicable diseases, and health management and policy. (Language and literature, too, since he co-teaches a course in literature and medicine; Markel in his youth was an English major who loved comedy and show business and yearned to become a playwright.)
Origin Stories promises not one mystery but two. Darwin is the most famous sick scientist ever, but the reason for his strange medical ordeals has eluded researchers and clinicians for well over a century. In an all-too-brief chapter, Markel reviews the case, then makes a determination: “This physician believes Darwin most likely suffered from systemic lactose intolerance. The diagnosis, however, must be credited to a team of biochemists from Cardiff and a gastrointestinal pathologist and a historian of science from Leeds.” But his irritable dismissal of other answers feels like attending grand rounds with a celebrated expert who only skimmed the chart.
Darwin’s other trial wasn’t a trial at all. On that crucial summer day in Oxford, there was no debate per se, the word evolution never came up, and Huxley’s famous retort—that he would prefer to be descended from a miserable ape than a corrupt bishop—was barely heard in the uproar, if, indeed, he even said it. “Alas, the physiological quirks of memory, literary embellishments, and bibliographical idiosyncrasies have left us with a blurred picture of a brief encounter,” Markel declares. “We are forced—as Eartha Kitt once warbled in what might serve as the siren song for diviners of the past—to ‘proceed with caution, but, lover, please proceed.’ ”
Among the rewards of Origin Story are its reconstructions. Markel offers both a natural history of Darwin’s 150,000-word technical treatise and a tutorial in recovered evidence. He is very good on the backstage politics of Victorian science, especially the daring of Darwin’s canny handlers, Huxley (soon to be known as “Darwin’s bulldog”) and botanist Joseph Hooker. He also plays the insult comic, and indulges in you-are-there prose, sometimes simultaneously: “Thousands of eyes watched as the Bishop of Oxford shifted his bulky haunches from side to side on a hard chair—perhaps so that he might majestically turn the other cheek.” Or: “Then again, it is amusing to imagine how ardently [Emma Darwin] must have prayed for her husband’s soul.”
Markel seems to sympathize more with Huxley the sharp-elbowed showman (“a scientist with a huge chip on his shoulder and the gift of gab”) than with Darwin the procrastinating, neurotic trust-funder. Yet as Stephen Jay Gould noted, Darwin was radical in his scientific ideas, liberal in his political and social views, and conservative in personal lifestyle, and the tension between his heritage as a gentleman and his honor as a naturalist was profound, and agonizing. Years before the Oxford rumble, he wrote to Hooker, “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”
Origin Story is a midlist addition to the Markel canon. Those new to his work might first try The Kelloggs (2017), a lively, groundbreaking origin tale for the American wellness industry. Darwinology is boggy ground, still mapped best by Janet Browne of Harvard, whose magisterial two-volume life (Voyaging and The Power of Place) remains unsurpassed. Her landmark 2022 essay in the Journal of the History of Biology, “Reflections on Darwin Historiography,” lucidly explains what Markel skips: the ways Darwin studies have become decolonized and decentered, moving away from great-man history to broader pictures of the social and intellectual movements that shaped him, and vice versa.
Since 1885, the name Charles Darwin has appeared in the title of some 1,026 books, in myriad languages. A twice-told tale, done well, can be its own pleasure, and Origin Story is the good-parts, biopic version of Darwin’s earliest appointment with immortality. Fate, chance, destiny, inheritance, selection, adaptation: the retelling is all, and so, sometimes, is the second opinion.
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In my early 20s, having received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, I sought to cobble together a living by teaching. Although I had taught an undergraduate class as part of my fellowship, I hadn’t yet published a book, so the only such work available to me was intermittent and, often, unconventional. I spent the first summer after I graduated not working with words but performing the same kind of maintenance and handyman tasks that had helped pay for college—this time for the university from which I had just received an expensive degree. Some of the rooms I cleaned and refurbished had recently been vacated by the students I had just taught.
As my summer maintenance work came to an end, I found a part-time job teaching creative writing at the state prison in Cranston, Rhode Island. Twice a week, I’d drive to Max, as the maximum-security facility was known, a three-story gray-brick building that was topped by an imposing green cupola and surrounded by razor wire. It had been built in the 1870s and expanded several times since, but little seemed to have changed since the 19th century except for the gates, which were now operated by electricity. I would park behind a chainlink fence and, upon entering the building, place everything except my teaching materials in a locker. Then I’d present my credentials to the first of many guards whom I would encounter on any given day.
The inmates were suspicious of me at first, asking whether I was there “to observe the animals” or betting that I would simply stop showing up, as had so many of their previous instructors. The prison officials did their best to contribute to this attitude, telling my students that I hadn’t arrived that first day, when I was already sitting in the classroom waiting for them, or deliberately delaying me so that I would be late. Sometimes they would ignore me when I presented my teaching ID; other times, they would let me through one set of rolling, barred gates, only to leave me trapped before the next set of gates while the warden wandered off to get a cup of coffee. But I persisted. And though the inmates gradually began to accept that I could be relied upon and didn’t have a hidden agenda, I was still a puzzle to them.
“You talk funny,” one man said to me.
“Well, I’m from South Africa.”
“What the hell you doing in this dump?” he asked.
I explained that I earned $20 an hour doing this gig and needed the money.
Before I started working there, my girlfriend had visited the prison with the previous instructor, thinking she might take the position. She had been advised to say she was married, and she wore her grandmother’s ring as proof. (She passed on the job after a warden and the writing instructor regaled her with lurid details about the crimes some of the men had committed.) When one day I inadvertently referred to her as my girlfriend, one of the guys yelled out: “That chick, A—, who came here with Wacky Joe? She said youse guys were married.”
“Yeah, I know. She did that so no one would hit on her.”
They seemed happy that I gave an honest answer, though one man told me: “You tell your girlfriend that it ain’t nice to lie to people.”
A beefy prisoner wearing a coat that resembled a duvet, enhancing his resemblance to the Michelin Man, added: “You’re smart. I wouldn’t let my woman hang around this riffraff.”
The classes took place in the educational wing, its sparse collection of books—mostly dictionaries and an encyclopedia—earning it the title of prison library. The wing was run by an affable and intelligent guard who clearly cared about the inmates; he had bought them a coffee urn with his own money and done what he could to liven up the area under his charge. He was also a former Golden Gloves boxer who would occasionally challenge an obstreperous student to step in the ring with him, and the inmates treated him with respect.
The previous teacher (the one they called Wacky Joe) had distributed copies of a short-fiction-anthology-cum-manual by one of my own teachers at Brown: R. V. Cassill’s Writing Fiction. I continued using the anthology for a while, and I gained some cachet by arranging a visit from the anthologist himself. I also brought stories that seemed suitable for brief in-class assignments, having realized that many of the inmates were hyperactive and had short attention spans. My prompts were intended to allow someone to write a poem or anecdote in 20 to 30 minutes. For example: “Write a tall tale, where you present something obviously untrue in a way that makes it believable.” This was a favorite exercise, since the inmates had already read Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” I also suspected that they had practice coming up with plausible falsehoods. One writer invented a clever explanation for his lack of hair: he’d been attacked by bald eagles while hiking in the Sierras—the eagles had needed hair for their nests.
One day, I brought in a favorite book on teaching poetry—Kenneth Koch’s I Never Told Anybody—and said that I would like to share some of the responses from a workshop that my girlfriend and I had conducted in the local old-age home.
“You teach in an old-age home?” said Angel, a powerfully built man who was in for bank robbery. “Boy, that must be depressing.”
I looked around at the barred windows of the educational wing, probably the nicest space in the whole prison. “I suppose,” I said, “but poetry can make you forget your surroundings.”
“Nothin’ can make me forget these surroundings,” Angel muttered. “But, geez, sitting around in one of those places, waiting to die.”
Louis, a lean older man, snorted. “You think this is different, Angel?” He had been on death row until the Rhode Island Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. He was also a good deal smarter than most of the other inmates and didn’t mind letting them know it. Louis wrote stark, accomplished poems that would have gotten him into any MFA program in the country, but he was dismissive of the value of his own talents. His usual comment on the published stories we read was, “Bullshit! Just another scam.”
I read a poem by an elderly man in our workshop at the old-age home. It described the death of his mother when he was five. He and his father had embarked on a journey by donkey cart lasting several days until they got to a town with enough Jewish men to form a minyan.
For once, Louis was impressed.
“This guy is, what, 100 years old, and he still misses his mom?” he said. “That’s something.”
There often weren’t enough copies of the anthology or handout to go around, so I generally read a story aloud before we discussed it. One day, I opened a book at random and said, “How about Sartre’s ‘The Wall’? That’s a good story.”
Angel, whose biceps were as thick as my calves, snatched the book out of my hands and declared, “I’ll read it. You’re always reading to us, and I’m tired of it!”
At least two other men in the room had been on death row. And here I had chosen a story set in the Spanish Civil War in which the narrator, Pablo, and his companions are passing the night, waiting to be shot in the morning.He read aloud in a steady monotone, like a diligent middle-schooler, his voice free of emphasis or inflection. He rarely paused, just read steadily with the same weight on every word, sweat making his head gleam even more than usual. I had time to observe the other men’s faces and wondered if I’d made a big mistake. At least two other men in the room, aside from Louis, had been on death row. And here I had chosen a story set in the Spanish Civil War in which the narrator, Pablo, and his companions are passing a slow, terror-filled night, waiting to be shot in the morning.
The story delves into their involuntary physical changes as the hours pass—they know that death is imminent, and their bodies react to the knowledge of their fate no matter how hard they try to think of something else. Sartre dwells on the condemned men’s hatred of the doctor who is observing them, a man who will go home to his familiar comforts in the morning, enjoying food and drink and a soft bed after the narrator and his comrades have ceased to exist. As Pablo says,
My life was in front of me, shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a beautiful life. But I couldn’t pass judgement on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing. … Death had disenchanted everything.
There was absolute silence in the room other than Angel’s droning voice. The men stared fixedly at him; even Louis had dropped his habitual air of bored abstraction. There was none of the restless moving about, the fidgeting, the jumping up to refill a coffee cup, nothing to suggest that I was in a room full of students with limited attention spans. I had last read the story for a college philosophy course, our discussion remaining abstract and centering on the ways in which the narrative illustrated the principles of existentialism. We were young, and the thought that death could be imminent and should inform how we live meant little to us. Now, Pablo’s words rang true—I had understood nothing.
“The Wall” has a surprise, O. Henry–style ending. The narrator is kept alive and waiting while each of his companions is taken outside and shot. After a while, he is led into a room where two officers ask him about the whereabouts of an important revolutionary figure, Ramon Gris. Pablo knows where Gris has been hiding but has no intention of revealing the truth to his captors. He no
longer cares about life or death, and out of this indifference, just for laughs, he makes up a different location and watches with amusement as the officers prepare for a task he is sure will be a waste of time. Unbeknownst to him, Gris has left the safe house and is now hidden in the graveyard digger’s shack in the cemetery, the very location Pablo identifies. Gris is killed in a shootout with Franco’s soldiers.
After reading the final sentence, Angel hurled the book across the room.
“Goddamn it,” he yelled. “I hate that stupid ending. Listen, Teach, you better get hold of this Sarter dude and tell him to come up with an ending that isn’t a pile of horse crap.”
An inmate known by the state he was from, Tennessee, slammed both his fists on the table and shouted, “Why’d he do that? Why’d he ruin it?”
Louis looked at me with his cold killer’s eyes, watching me react to the men’s anger and adrenaline. There would be no talk about “craft” today, just a visceral response to feeling cheated.
“It was good until that last page,” Louis said. “And then …” He shook his head. “Bullshit. Another scam.”
The post Bards Behind Bars appeared first on The American Scholar.
It’s my first full night in Homer, Alaska. I arrived in Anchorage last night, sleeping fitfully on an airport massage chair. Now I have a cabin all to myself, a desk with a window view, and the company of five other writers for the month of June, all of us here for a writing retreat. Our residency is on the coast of Cook Inlet, a crescent of sloping forest with the Kenai Peninsula to the east. The mountains across the water are etched blue on blue, capped in brightest white. Really, these mountains are volcanoes, Iliamna and Augustine, part of the tectonic Ring of Fire. We will soon learn to distinguish the volcanoes’ active steam from the ambient fog that drifts with the wind.
The artist residency employs a chef, who cooks individual lunches and communal dinners, and we’re in charge of cleanup afterward. At the welcome dinner, we do the usual surveys: your genre, your proposed project, your actual project, where you traveled from, who is partnered, who has kids. After the last clatter of plates being hand-dried and silverware being sorted, the other residents clear out of the main house. I sit on the couch longways, my feet pointed toward the row of bay windows, and stare, hoping to spot some wildlife. We’ve already glimpsed our first bald eagles soaring—“doing thermals,” or flying into convection currents, the residency’s coordinator explained.
I have a book in my lap, but I’m not reading it. Instead, I notice distinctive patterns of movement on the water, halfway between the piny tree line and the horizon. A blow of mist and then a gray swell. A blow of mist, a gray swell. Mist, swell. Mist, swell. I recognize these rhythms: a small pod of humpback whales is making its way in front of the residency. I am delighted, and sad, because I am remembering. There is only one other place where I’ve seen whales.
Within an hour after my arrival, I met the chef in the kitchen. She lined up three products on the counter: a tub each of nondairy butter, nondairy feta, and nondairy yogurt. “What do you think of these options?” she asked. The look on my face was probably not good. She was excited to bake for me, to work around my allergies, to provide so many options—
“Please don’t ask me to eat these things,” I blurted out.
I didn’t know how to explain 40-plus years of training my body to be on high alert for the colors, textures, and tastes that these foods were meant to mimic. How impossible it was for me to find them appetizing, even if I knew on a rational level that they would not harm me.
Fortunately, she took my response in stride. “Everyone’s got their thing,” she said, “when it comes to food.” We talked about where I keep my EpiPens. She asked about how an allergic reaction starts, what my symptoms would be.
When I got back to my cabin, I was tempted to call my mother. She would have laughed at this terrifying mock-milk parade. Commiserating is what we often do during our phone calls. We replay. We vent. Though she doesn’t share a single one of my food allergies, she knows them better than anyone else.
But I didn’t want her fretting over me for the next month. I could instead hold off and send her snapshots of the meals to come: massaman chicken curry; acorn squash garnished with quinoa and chorizo; coho salmon brushed with raspberry barbecue sauce, pineapple-wasabi salsa on the side; green goddess soup; ratatouille; pork chili verde. I could tell her about the chef and her assistant taking turns bringing us bento box lunches, each midday meal a mix of skillfully reimagined leftovers and fresh crudités, delivered in picnic baskets to our cabin doors. No milk, no eggs, no cashews, no shrimp, no cucumbers, no mango.
In 2011, I published a memoir about growing up with food allergies and dedicated it to my mother, referring to her as the one who “taught me the balancing act.” She taught me how to navigate the world with my allergies, how to express my needs plainly, how to toggle between fruitful risks and necessary precautions. But now, in my adulthood, I am trying to disentangle her good life lessons from the damaging ones. The downside of learning a balancing act is that you also internalize, along the way, that your life is being lived on a high wire.
I believe my mother is an anxious person, which is counterintuitive because she goes extremely calm when something is truly wrong, as do I. The first time I heard my husband frame one of our evenings out in terms of managing her anxiety, I was jolted both by his frank take and by the lack of judgment in his voice. For him, planning around his mother-in-law’s moods is a practical matter. For me, this sparks a question of causality: am I an allergic daughter, born to an anxious mother? Or am I the daughter whose allergies made her mother perpetually anxious?
Nature primed the pump for my mother and me to intertwine psyches. My first allergic reactions were to her breast milk, which my body couldn’t process. In my preverbal years, as my parents cautiously determined the safety zones of apple juice, rice, and creamed turkey, my mother was my primary interpreter of hives. Later on, when I came to view a reaction as something to be dreaded and hidden if possible, she was the one who gently pushed me to report an itchiness in my throat or a creeping inability to breathe. She was the one who wrangled ordering at restaurants and the annual bureaucracy of the school clinic’s intake forms.
She managed these responsibilities as well as anyone could in the 1980s, before a marked rise in the prevalence of food allergies increased mainstream understanding. Then, right as my sister was born in early 1990, my father’s service in the Army Reserves began to intensify under Desert Shield, then Desert Storm. The second decade of my memory, the first 10 years of my sister’s life, would be pitted with his absences.
She managed these responsibilities as well as anyone could in the 1980s, before a marked rise in the prevalence of food allergies increased mainstream understanding.Solo parenting might have felt manageable had our other support structures stayed intact. For much of my childhood, my grandparents’ house in McLean, Virginia, had been our refuge. My grandfather Carl Pruett—my mother’s father—puttered in his garage workshop, where he polished stones and made quirky little sculptures out of driftwood and shells collected from his Navy travels, figures accented with pipe cleaners and acrylic paint. My grandmother Jean kept a tidy garden of peonies and hydrangeas. They had an outdoor swing on which they sat in summer, and a screened porch with a stove where they sat in winter. The wall by their central stairs was decorated with photographs and clippings from my grandfather’s days as a medical doctor with NASA; adjacent stood my grandmother’s china cabinet with a collection of Wade Whimsies, animal figurines collected from boxes of Red Rose Tea. But in January 1991, my grandfather died from the variety of bacterial pneumonia known as Legionnaire’s Disease.
My grandmother lived until 2018, never remarrying. Her final years were marked by increasing disorientation, causing her to be moved from the home she loved. Of Jean’s three children, my mother lived closest to the care facility. She took her mother weekly lunches. She had to break the news of my grandfather’s death over and over and watch for bedsores or unexplained bruising. She had to constantly explain to her mother, You live here now.
A friend has asked me to contribute to an anthology on grief in poetry. I knew that I’d send her some of the poems written for my grandparents—Carl, elegized in my first collection, and Jean, elegized in my fourth. Lately I’ve been talking to my undergraduate students about reclaiming our grandparents on the page, about saying screw that to anyone who ever tells you that it’s too sentimental a topic for workshop. In addition to three poems, I am supposed to include a 500-word essay. This is the first thing I turn to writing in Alaska.
I roll my chair into position behind the desk and look out across the inlet at Augustine. Rereading the poems I plan to submit, I discover a funny thing. I usually refer to the contents of my first book as “heart-poems”; there’s little point in denying the conflation of speaker and poet. But this elegy for my grandfather, when I look at it again, is distinctly an act of persona. Sure, the speaker riffs on the same magazines that I pored over as a kid in my grandparents’ sunken living room. But she also must be an adult, because she signs paperwork at the hospital.
The speaker, I realize, is a projection of my mother’s voice layered over my own.
How could I not have noticed that?
While my grandfather was in the hospital, unopened Christmas presents waited, still wrapped, in my grandparents’ upstairs closet. After his death, his subscriptions to Reader’s Digest and National Geographic and Time were not immediately canceled, and the magazines piled up, unread, on the coffee table. My poem’s framing conceit, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, came to me from one of those publications: the 1968 Reader’s Digest condensed book series featured David McCullough on the flood, which killed about 2,200 people. By the time my mother was the age that I am now, she had an infant daughter, an older daughter with significant medical needs, a deployed husband, a father newly gone, and a widowed mother. The water was high.
Back in September 2018, I traveled with my family to Kinmundy, Illinois, for the interment of my grandmother’s ashes next to those of my grandfather. Their plot in Evergreen Cemetery is part of the larger constellation of Pruetts, spanning multiple generations. Carl’s father and mother are there—Walter S. Pruett, born in 1883, and Bertha Wilhelmina Pruett, born in 1887. Years ago, my mother first told me the story of Walter and Bertha’s first daughter, my mother’s namesake: Roberta, born in 1914, died at the age of three, after falling through a flimsy well covering on the family property. In Kinmundy, I found the small stone commemorating Roberta Eloise, born and buried before Carl arrived. That he and Jean would later give Roberta’s name to their youngest daughter was both sweet and slightly eerie.
From my desk in Alaska, I pull up The Kinmundy Express death announcement for Roberta Eloise Pruett. Though brief, the notice leads me to one important additional detail—Bertha was pregnant and gave birth to Carl’s older brother, Walter, just two days after the accident. I picture a three-year-old able to toddle away into the yard, unchaperoned. When I dive more deeply into the Kinmundy Historical Society’s archives, I am even able to find two photos of snub-nosed baby Roberta in a white gown, her awed eyes looking straight at the camera.
In one of the photos, Roberta sits on her father’s lap while her mother leans in from a nearby piano bench, sheet music in hand. I hadn’t known much about Bertha other than that she was German, born Bertha Wilhelmina Steuber. Now I know that she played piano. I wonder whether she thought future relatives would inherit her love of music, or whether she could have fathomed her great-granddaughter thinking about her 105 years later, in a cabin 4,000 miles away from Kinmundy.
I have a hard time shaking fear around my allergies. When I serve myself first, I take more than I have an appetite for, just in case the person after me cross-contaminates the whole dish. When I serve myself last, I hawkishly eye the dregs left in the dish, afraid that they’ll disappear from the fridge before I have the chance to enjoy any the next day. Where others see endless possibilities in a crowded shelf of leftovers or a drawer full of sandwich fixings, I perpetually hunt for the One Safe Thing.
My mother did not teach me to be this way, not intentionally. But she has imprinted on me her worried expressions, her sharp intakes of breath as oblivious dinner guests carry knives from one serving plate to another or lean across the table with forks extended. When we discovered a brand of oatmeal raisin cookie that I could eat as a child, she bought packages by the dozen rather than risk not having any on hand for my school lunches. Her pantry still overflows with triplicates and quadruplicates of food items past their expiration dates because I’m no longer there to eat them.
Going into the residency’s quiet weekend, when the staff will be gone, the chef warns that the main house is running out of storage containers; more are on order. In my cabin’s minifridge, I’ve hoarded seven lidded servings of this and that. Plus a cling-wrapped sandwich bun. Plus a cling-wrapped chicken thigh.
I turn away from my grief essay. I pull out the containers and make a plan to quietly clean and return them to their rightful place. The almond soup, which has begun to separate into layers, is drained into the disposal. The souring curry salad is emptied into a Ziploc bag that I surreptitiously trash. The blood orange slices go into my water for the day. Garlic-lemon tahini gets a fresh stir to check consistency. The cherries are hanging on. The chicken thigh is sliced, reheated with a scrap portion of spinach linguine and tomato sauce, and eaten for my breakfast.
I have visited the Hawaiian Islands five times. The first two, I traveled as a daughter, with my parents and sister. The third, I flew as the guest of a friend who had a timeshare and enough mileage points to cover my ticket. The fourth was for my honeymoon. The fifth time was as one-fourth of the unholy quartet of me, my husband, and my parents. That trip took us to Barking Sands, the military base on Kauai where my father did consulting work for the Pacific Missile Range.
My husband and I couldn’t afford plane tickets to Kauai on our own, much less rent a beachside hotel, so we agreed to fly over with my parents and share a cabin. My gut churned at the thought of the four of us traveling the island crammed into one rental car, but I packed my bags. Making a playlist to pipe through the rental car’s speakers, I stuck mostly to slack-key guitar, nothing too dear to me. I’d learned that lesson years before, when my beloved cassette of Pet Sounds had become the soundtrack to my parents’ 40-minute fight as we backtracked along a winding mountain road in—Maui? the Big Island?—while my sister and I sat silent in the backseat. I’ve forgotten the cause of the fight, but I remember the ever-deepening blues in the sky. We were missing the sunset, which made the fight worse.
If you were to ask my mother what she looks for in a vacation, her answer would be the sunset. Maybe also a particular museum, or time to read. Maybe a good meal that she doesn’t have to cook. But mostly the sunset. This should be a modest request. Yet when our family gets to that museum, maybe it’s a pain to find parking. When we try to find a good meal, maybe the early tables are taken, and my allergies eliminate fast-casual options. Next thing my mother knows, she’s counting down to a 15-minute window when we must be seated, the sky in optimal viewing position, our wine already poured. If the window closes, a fight commences. Every day brings a new sunset that my mother is in danger of missing.
One of our first days in Kauai, my husband and I joined my parents on an afternoon boat ride that cut through the waves at high speeds, taking us past spinning dolphins and gamboling mountain goats. We also got doused in chilly spray with no dinner plan for after. Disaster was averted in the form of a modest fish camp a block from the dock, where I found Sandra-safe Kalua pork amid the fried options. My husband was happy with shrimp. My dad was happy with a cold beer. My mother was happy because we’d make it back to base in time for the sunset.
We made it all the way to the military base’s entrance gate, where checking identification cards should have been a quick formality. The young guard squinted at my driver’s license. “District of … Columbia,” he said, clearly unfamiliar. “Is that in the United States?”
We assured him that D.C. was, in fact, the capital of these United States. He asked us what state it was located in. Then he called his supervisor, who was all the way at the other end of the base. My father smacked the steering wheel, then settled his gaze into a resolute stare. My husband and I looked at each other. The sun proceeded to set while my mother sighed and sighed again.
As it turned out, the base would not allow any of us to come and go without my dad and his military ID. The plan my husband and I had of venturing out on our own fell by the wayside. We would have to sit in the backseat behind my parents, or stay in.
On the days we stayed in, Barking Sands offered a nearly empty beach with crashing waves; a TV; a post exchange store with good deals on tequila, vodka, and mixers; and near-daily sightings of humpback whales. One morning, I noticed a subterranean rumble beneath my mother’s mood, a too-heavy pour in the juices we’d both been spiking. I suggested to my mother that we fix lunch, something starchy—something, as she quickly picked up on, to take the edge off her blood-alcohol content.
Her voice got loud. She said I couldn’t know how hard it had been, caring for her mother day after day. How lonely. Her voice got louder. She slammed a door. My father took the car and left. My husband stepped into our bedroom. “That’s not okay,” he said, “the way she’s talking to you.” He gripped my forearms while my body shook.
Fight or flight, they say. I hadn’t wanted to fight and had no option for flight. A few years later, a therapist would explain that there is a third survival option, freeze, and then the frantic energy release that comes after.
I went to a picnic bench in front of the cabin, in the grassy middle space between rough lawn and pure sand. After a few minutes, my mother walked past me, carrying a folding chair, which she forcibly plunked down by the water. She paced. At first, I thought she was on her cellphone; then I realized she was talking to herself. I retreated to the front porch. Soon she came swerving up to me, leaning in to hiss that I didn’t understand a damn thing, and I flinched.
Several mothers I know, when I mention this later, tell me that they understand where my mother was in this moment: she had simply hit her limit. I don’t know how to reconcile these moments with my sweet mother, who sends me birthday cards with $20 bills tucked inside in case I need emergency cash, who picks out holiday-themed socks for me, who decorated my childhood bedroom with glow-in-the-dark stars accurately aligned to the constellations, who mails me clippings of every article about poetry in The Washington Post. My mother, who offers to bake Sandra-friendly applesauce-spice muffins every time I go on a long road trip, in case I can’t find food on the way. My mother, who sometimes—in ways I may never fully understand, having chosen not to have children—hits her limit.
By nightfall, we were all trying to act like nothing had happened. My father eventually returned. My husband and I cooked dinner. There wasn’t anything worth watching on cable TV. We sat woodenly on the slumpy couch and stared out the window at the ocean, tracking the humpback whales that swam parallel to the horizon line.
A blow of mist, a gray swell. A blow of mist, a gray swell.
In Illinois, after my grandmother’s interment, we had just enough hours left of sunlight to look for the graves of her parents. The larger group from the memorial service split, some going back to the hotel. The rest of us drove the half hour to Orchard Hill Cemetery, just off Vandalia Road in Louisville.
Jean was the daughter of George R. Kepley, born in 1896, and Pauline Farrell Kepley, born in 1904. George died in 1959, but Pauline lived all the way until 1991, at one point remarrying and taking the last name Helmick. I have a faint memory of meeting her once, visiting her retirement home as part of a road trip with my grandparents to Disney World. That time, my mother and I rode in the back seat. An antiseptic smell rises unbidden in flashback. As a child of seven or eight, I was transfixed by my great-grandma’s earlobes, which seemed to droop low toward her shoulders—a consequence, I was warned, of wearing overly heavy earrings in her younger days. I vowed never to do that.
We found my great-grandfather’s place in the Orchard Hill Cemetery mausoleum, his name inscribed in crisp black against the white marble square set into the wall. A crystal bud vase with pink nylon flowers sat on the ledge, and a small American flag stood upright. Our group added a red rose carried over from my grandmother’s memorial service.
Pauline was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, she had sold her space in the Louisville mausoleum years ago, with no intention of being buried in Illinois, but my grandmother had decided to overrule her wishes. Where was she?
At only 10 years old, I couldn’t understand being so tied to someone else that his death felt essentially like dying yourself. Was this, I wondered, what love should look like?We fanned out over the cemetery, covering each hill to find her before twilight set in. I’d almost given up before spotting Farrell on a family stone, just shy of the road that defined the cemetery’s edge. She had been buried adjacent to her parents. A ledger stone marked her individual grave: Pauline Farrell Kepley Helmick, 1904–1991. In a photo from that day, I am bouncing in the toes of my black Mary Janes, a 38-year-old woman with fingers clasped. I found you, I found you.
She is the source of my middle name, Farrell. Beyond that, I have only a shadowy sense that my great-grandmother was a difficult woman. She had one child, at age 20, while everyone around her went on to have kids in threes and fours. She is said to have passed along the dramatic skills that her daughter took to an actual stage—Jean performed with the San Diego Civic Light Opera, which put on shows at the Starlight Musical Theater in Balboa Park—while Pauline remained, simply, a “dramatic” person.
I can’t imagine what my grandmother thought when her mother remarried and moved to the coast—daring to reinvent her life—while her mother-in-law modeled 27 years of stoic widowhood. Or, rather, I guess we have the answer. Jean brought Pauline back to the Midwest plains to be buried in the same cemetery as her first husband. Just as my other great-grandmother, Bertha, never remarried after Walter’s death, my grandmother Jean never remarried after Carl’s. Evidently, she wanted her mother, Pauline, to be forever remembered as George’s widow.
At some point in the weeks after Carl’s death, I stole a peek at my grandmother’s calendar book. On the square for the day he’d died, after a month-long hospitalization, Jean wrote, in calm ballpoint script, Carl died. Life is over. At only 10 years old, I couldn’t understand being so tied to someone else that his death felt essentially like dying yourself. Was this, I wondered, what love should look like?
A few days into the retreat, my fellow writers and I board the Danny J fishing boat, which ferries us across Kachemak Bay to Halibut Cove on Ismailof Island, where a boardwalk staggers along the coast above the sea. On the way, we loop around Gull Island, a bird preserve, and for the first time I see puffins in the wild. I try to take a photo, but the camera lens turns the puffins to black blobs low in the water, their orange beaks hidden from view.
As we make our way across the bay, I focus on spotting sea otters, which are much bigger than the freshwater variety I’ve seen at the National Zoo. This time of year, late May and early June, is peak birthing season for sea otters. They don’t have dads, at least not in the practical sense. Each mother otter takes sole responsibility for her pup, and for much of the six-month period after its birth, she carries the small creature on her belly. When she needs to hunt for food, she swaddles the kid in a raft of seaweed to maintain buoyancy. I dig my binoculars out of my purse as six otters—mothers plus pups—bob 10 yards from our boat.
If a baby otter is making a racket, the mother will lick its head to quiet it and, if that doesn’t work, place a paw over its mouth.
I do not refer to my mother as a “mama otter” in my memoir. I refer to her as a lab scientist, a detective, and a contracts lawyer. I chose to focus on her heroism, which felt good. The truth is more complicated. If she hadn’t had to be a scientist, a detective, a lawyer, a nurse, and a hero, maybe she could’ve enjoyed being a mother more.
Our last morning at Barking Sands, I moved back and forth between packing my suitcase and clearing out the kitchen. My father was at a loss for how to deal with the groceries we’d accumulated. When he was there by himself for work, he’d buy sashimi-grade tuna and slice it straight out of its Styrofoam tray and into his mouth for dinner, with a handful of Maui Style potato chips on the side. But my mother had overstocked the fridge for her allergic daughter. We had boxed spinach and bacon and frozen peas and linguine and jarred salsa and, and, and.
My father urged us to dump what was open into trash bags and leave the unopened stuff for the cleaning crew. Maybe I would have done that if we had been headed to the airport. Instead, we were headed to Princeville, where our hotel rooms would be outfitted with much fancier showers, but no stovetops, and I was fighting to quell the worry that our trip would end in an anaphylactic reaction at some restaurant. I swept the kitchen for anything that might survive the car ride and the half day’s wait before we could check in. My mother surfaced occasionally from my parents’ bedroom. We were not quite back to speaking.
I only had a single Tupperware, which I’d used to bring a pilaf for the long flight from Dulles to Oahu. What to salvage? I decided on the pack of masago we’d bought at the Japanese fish market. While my husband wrestled with where to stash our swimwear, still wet and stinky from the day before, I boiled a bag of rice. Minutes before being pushed into the car, I layered the fish roe on top of the rice and packed a fork.
The next two hours were a muddle of errands and a prolonged check-in. Everyone’s stomachs rumbled, but we were determined to make it up to the hotel rooms that, blessedly, were not conjoined. While my husband pondered the room service menu, I turned to my plan.
I peeled back the lid to reveal a gelatinous mess. Still-warm rice had steamed the fish eggs to bursting, congealing all into an orange brick. I gagged.
So much for planning ahead and being self-sufficient. My stomach growled, and I felt a rising anxiety, a stiffness and clenching in my shoulders. I dumped the Tupperware contents into the toilet, flushing several times over, and asked whether we had any honey-roasted peanuts left. Soon, it would be time to meet with my parents and find four chairs. The drinks would be poured. We had a sunset to catch.
Carl died. Life is over. The force of my grandmother’s words makes it tempting to reduce her widowed years to those dimensions. In fact, at first, I do exactly that. “She tended her hydrangeas, was active in the church choir, and babysat her youngest grandchild,” I write in my essay for the anthology.
I hit send—and then, minutes later, email an apology and a corrected version: “She tended her hydrangeas, was active in the church choir, went abroad with Shillelagh’s Travel Club, and babysat her youngest grandchild.”
The difference to anyone else is probably slight. But how could I have forgotten about her years of sightseeing with Shillelagh, the affordable “country club of the air” headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia? In his Navy days, my grandfather had been the adventurer. He’d brought back dozens of souvenirs, from delicate hand-painted fans to a walking stick with a hidden blade. In the too-short stretch of his retirement, he and my grandmother had traveled together, and he’d filled his pockets with seashells for sculptures and rocks for polishing. But his death didn’t mean the end of her trips. She went to Prince Edward Island, Ireland, and the Great Wall of China. She even came all the way to Alaska.
My mother is a painter. Sunsets frequently show up on her canvases. But for many years, while my sister and I were children, she did not paint. Preserving the time to even watch a sunset would have been a victory while organizing a day according to everyone else’s needs. The cruelty of children is that they may be the ones who beg you to show off your creative side, all the while making it impossible to do so.
Once or twice, my mother specifically mentioned that I was allergic to something in the materials she used for oil painting. Years later, at one of the first artist colonies I attended, a woman my mother’s age called that a flimsy excuse for not painting. But even had I not been allergic, how could my mother have had the time?
In my teenage years, I was relentless in my efforts to jumpstart her art making, thinking it would bring her some happiness that I couldn’t quite name as missing. I gave her watercolor pads and travel paints, brushes, Conté pencils, book after book of other people’s art. During my high school talent show, when my mother was expecting me to sing, I went out and read poems instead—including one about her blank canvases, her not-painting—oblivious to how that would make her feel, sitting in the audience.
I wrote about that experience for The Washington Post, and I’m writing about it again in this moment. At every turn, my mother made art a valid thing for me to pursue, and so I did. But because I was around to pursue my art, she didn’t get to pursue hers for years and years. I am trapped in a variation on that Francisco Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Son. Except in this incarnation, I am the one with mouth wide open and teeth sharp: the ravenous child.
On the drive from the Homer airport to the residency, I saw my first moose. The residency coordinator pointed it out, and I jerked my head to the window just in time to see the animal’s preternaturally tall shape, a horse with humped shoulders and shaggier hair. I was surprised when we didn’t turn the car around for a longer look. “You’ll see plenty of them,” the coordinator assured me.
She was right. “Moose,” I said, the first time I saw one at the head of the residency driveway, grabbing my phone for a series of quick snapshots.
“Moose,” I said, another night, when I stepped outside the main house for the 10-foot walk back to my cabin, but no one was there to hear me. “Baby moose,” I said, seeing a second join the bigger one. I reached for my phone, but it was not in my pocket; I’d left it on the kitchen counter.
“Moose!” we frantically alerted each other many times over in our group text all throughout the first week, sometimes with a grainy photograph or shaky video. There seemed to be a mother, a baby, and another that hung around the residency. The chef explained that the midsize third moose was probably the previous year’s baby; once they become yearlings, their mothers abandon them. We became aware of spots where they liked to rest late at night, and where they’d feed midmorning. Their hulk and bulk shook the ground. A telltale thump accompanied their approach.
One night, while I was working, the other residents had the first sighting of all three moose at once. I only learned this later, seeing the chatter of 20 texts when I picked up my phone before going to bed. A grainy snapshot. A shaky video. A week before, I’d have been bereft to have missed the sighting. Now I trusted that the moose would be back. The next day, they were.
A voice in my head often whispers that the refrigerator is running low, and our shelves are running empty. That to prove you’ve done the best possible job of loving someone else, you have to turn yourself inside out. That you should make a show of having no love left for yourself. This voice says there can be a mother-artist or a daughter-artist, but not both. Unless we drop everything for the next 15 minutes of watching the sunset, we have failed this day entirely.
Except the sunsets are so long in Alaska, in this month of the summer solstice. A person could spend hours watching the skies turn pink and then purple, cook and eat dinner, put the dishes away and come back—and the sunset would still be there. I want my mother to see this abundance. I am trying to figure out a way to bring it home to her.
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The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World by Daisy Dunn; Viking, 512 pp., $35
In The Missing Thread, alongside the female stars of classical antiquity, like Sappho, Cleopatra, and Boudica, British classicist Daisy Dunn introduces us to a selection of arresting minor figures: the swimmer who disabled ships during the Persian Wars, a painter and a historian (their works now lost), the Roman civil warrior Fulvia, and many more. But the book’s central contention—that women “shaped the course of ancient history” in “tangible ways”—brims with problems.
Dunn’s starting point, to which she keeps returning, that textile production allowed women the means to do creative and empowering work, finds little support in what we know or can infer about the millions of female slaves and confined wives and daughters in Greek and Roman domains who toiled over carding baskets, spindles, and looms—not to express themselves or to build enterprises in their own right, but simply because they had no choice. Women complained when they dared. In Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, for instance, women are quoted telling the male head of their household that they resent working at a textile business he set up for them, while he does nothing.
Dunn’s sole specific example of a woman player in history known for making cloth is the first Roman imperial consort, Livia, whom she describes as the “power behind the throne.” And indeed, the historian Tacitus shows her as a puppeteer of the aging emperor, a suspected poisoner, an unbearable shrew, and a ruthless kingmaker. Male authors impute to nearly all famous women much more power than they likely had, thereby putting on them wildly disproportionate responsibility for the brutality of male regimes. Dunn seems to take Tacitus largely at his word with regard to Livia’s power (if not her crimes). But the available facts say otherwise. Livia was expropriated from her husband, a quelled opposition leader, and given by him in marriage to Octavian three days after the birth of the couple’s child. The public ceremony served as a powerful warning from Octavian to the Roman aristocracy to fall in line. Afterward, Livia, together with her stepdaughter and step-granddaughter, found herself enacting a farce of old-fashioned domestic subservience, making traditional garments under the patriarch’s beady eye. The younger women could not endure such a life, rebelled, and were punished with annihilating exile. Livia’s rewards for knuckling down excluded any latitude not convenient to Octavian, and the perks that came her way during her years as a symbol of service to his regime were not secure during her long widowhood, when her mighty protector was gone. Livia had her will nullified and her memorial honors denied; that is, she ended up with less freedom and dignity than an ordinary matron.
Such outcomes were cemented in place by custom. Married off in their teens and almost never treated as full human beings, even the most privileged women could neither get out of the system nor rise safely within it. And like Nabokov’s Lolita, they had nowhere else to go.
I cannot single out Dunn for relying on narrative paradigms that are thousands of years old, but the denial of the truth has to stop. Whereas other oppressed groups push for a full account of their sufferings and losses—an account that allows for mourning, anger, and a resolve to pursue a different kind of future—women are routinely swindled of their real history. If we look back honestly, even someone as able and important as Cleopatra appears rather pathetic, her treatment at men’s hands leading to a choice between public abasement and suicide. She was excluded from critical, male-led deliberations and deals and betrayed by her sexual and childbearing maneuvers. She likewise lacked essential military training. The fantasy that women can transcend such brutal disadvantages is helpful to misogynists’ ongoing assertion that the gender does just fine—in fact, too well.
The realm of culture was not as thoroughly dismal for women as that of politics. There were, for example, a number of female poets, including one uncontested genius, Sappho. And yet, Dunn is uncritical of the tradition, which may have originated centuries after Sappho’s lifetime, that Sappho pioneered women’s institutional education (instead of simply having a cultivated social life that included young women—and her verses may exaggerate even that). Dunn would have done better to stress the literary achievement visible in the fragments: a new stanza form still in use, word choice and imagery to keep you awake at night, a challenge to Homer’s vision of war as the thing to love most in the world, and other signals of acuteness and courage.
In her insistence that women were shapers of the course of history, Dunn sometimes plays fast and loose with evidence. Of the purely legendary Lucretia, for example, she writes, “It could even be argued that, without [her], there would have been no Roman Republic at all.” What is more troubling, Dunn depicts Lucretia as an epochal champion of rape survivors. In doing so, whether purposely or by mistake, she switches around crucial dialogue in Livy’s From the Founding of the City. In Livy’s account, it is Lucretia’s husband and his friends, not she, who urge that guilt comes only from intention: the men say that the fact a woman was raped—and Lucretia is the pitiable example before them—exempts her from punishment. Also in Livy, it is Lucretia, not the men, who declares (using the lofty third person) that “no unchaste woman shall live by Lucretia’s example.” The men try to prevent her suicide, but she goes through with it on the principle that it is better for an innocent woman to die after a rape than to plead her powerlessness. Otherwise, Lucretia implies, hordes of sluts would be able to avoid the capital punishment they deserve by lying that they were raped; the rare good woman like herself should be willing to die in the cause of terrorizing bad women. Dunn gives to the men the decree of suicide for all raped women, and to Lucretia the high-minded consideration of intention.
How fragile and grandiose would women be to need fabricated role models hovering far above any imaginable historical circumstances, like an angel mobile above a baby’s crib? Wouldn’t we be better off aiming for an equal share of the ordinary human condition? And without the truth, what hope is there for that aim?
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The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil; Viking, 432 pp., $35
In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectually challenging things … for a machine to do.” One month later, Google released an AI program that did exactly what he’d deemed impossible.
It’s easy to chuckle at Poggio, but the pace of technological change nowadays leaves many of us dizzy—and according to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer, we ain’t seen nothing yet. This book builds on Kurzweil’s 2005 title, The Singularity Is Near, which argued that accelerating advances in computer science and other domains, coupled with positive feedback loops, would eventually produce a superhuman intelligence far beyond anything we can conceive—an event he dubbed the Singularity. (Kurzweil always capitalizes the term, like the Rapture.) He wrote the new book—a curious mix of sober historical analysis and wild, futuristic leaps—to show how high the stakes are: “If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social, and political challenges posed by these advances,” he declares, “by 2045 we will transform life on earth profoundly for the better.” But “if we fail, our very survival is in question.”
One core aspect of Kurzweil’s vision involves linking human brains to computers to exploit the latter’s superior processing power. In support of this idea, he notes that impressive neural implants already exist and can even partially replace structures like the hippocampus, a vital node in the brain for forming and storing memories. Currently, installing such devices requires a lengthy, invasive surgery, so Kurzweil suggests implanting them through “noninvasive” (and yet-to-be-invented) means—like injecting billions of nanobots into our bloodstreams, bots that will worm their way into our brains and start implanting electrodes there. “Even our blood supply may be replaced by nanobots,” he adds. I conclude from this that Kurzweil and I have very different definitions of “noninvasive.”
Even if people willingly underwent such procedures, the very notion of grokking with supercomputers seems uncertain, as the book’s own anecdotes show. In 2011, IBM’s Watson computer crushed two human champions on Jeopardy! During the television broadcast, viewers got to see not only Watson’s top response to clues but also its next two best guesses—guesses that, Kurzweil notes, “were often laughably wrong.” In the “European Union” category, one clue read, “Elected every 5 years, it has 736 members from 7 parties.” Watson answered correctly (“What is the European Parliament?”), but its third guess was “universal suffrage,” which makes no sense. Kurzweil concludes “that even though Watson’s gameplay seemed human, if you dig down just beneath the surface … the ‘cognition’ Watson was doing was quite alien to our own.” Similarly, ChatGPT regularly invents false responses to user queries and even lies about doing so, a glitch euphemistically called “hallucinating.” In summary, Kurzweil says, AIs employ “arcane mathematical and statistical processes very different from what we would recognize as our own thought processes.”
Fascinating stuff. But if these programs process information so differently, can we really just hook our brains up to them and start churning? Wouldn’t the result be an incoherent jumble? (Or would we just fry our brains, like plugging an American appliance into a European electrical outlet?) We could maybe overcome this problem with hardware and software designed to mimic our brains. Except, as Kurzweil admits, we have only a vague idea how human cognition works. How much parallel
processing occurs in our brains? And to simulate human thought, would replicating the network connections between neurons be enough (doable), or do we need all the nitty-gritty of biomolecular interactions (much harder)? Despite such gaping holes, Kurzweil predicts that “by the late 2030s”—little more than a dozen years from now—we’ll overcome all our ignorance and all our squeamishness, and we’ll be so gung-ho about brain-machine interfacing that “our thinking itself will be largely nonbiological.”
In the Singulartopia, Kurzweil also envisions transforming old, thing-based industries—food production, manufacturing, health care—into information technology. To be sure, exciting changes are afoot in these fields: 3D printing, vertical farming, and genetic engineering really could revolutionize how we build homes, manufacture goods, and grow food. And he’s so jazzed about using AI to discover new drugs that “by the end of the 2030s,” he declares, “we will largely be able to overcome diseases and the aging process.” I’m not convinced. There’s no Moore’s Law for tomatoes: no matter how quickly farmers shuttle information around, it still takes a certain amount of time to grow food. Similarly, however slick a drug looks in silico, it needs to be tested on flesh-and-blood creatures. Such bottlenecks exist in many fields because material things don’t always reduce to bits and bytes. That fact will act as a drag on the upward zoom toward the Singularity. Physical reality is stubborn.
And humans are stubbornly attached to it. At one point, Kurzweil discusses using virtual reality to provide a fully immersive Mount Everest experience, allowing us nonclimbers to see the roof of the world and hear the wind whipping about up there. It sounds amazing. But then Kurzweil muses whether anyone will still bother climbing Mount Everest when it is possible to “go” there virtually. “People will have to wrestle with whether it’s worth doing the real thing,” he says, “or whether the danger was part of the attraction all along.” I hate to break it to Kurzweil, but the danger was always at least half the attraction, with the other half being the sheer challenge of overcoming obstacles, enduring pain, and achieving what seemed impossible. No Edmund Hillary or Tenzing Norgay will trade crampons and ropes for some VR goggles. They’ll still climb it because it’s still there.
Perhaps I’m being hard on Kurzweil. The book contains several delightful philosophical digressions as well as an impressive rundown of all the many (many) advances that humankind has made lately in curbing poverty and disease. It’s stirring. And many of Kurzweil’s predictions could indeed happen—someday. Kurzweil certainly has a fertile mind, and who knows? Maybe this review will look silly when I’m 10 years younger in the late 2030s. But his unrelenting insistence that the Singularity is nigh undermines an otherwise sharp and provocative book.
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For more than two decades, Mickalene Thomas has explored Black femininity through a variety of media: painting, photography, drawing, video, and installation. Arguably her most striking images, however, are her collages—rhinestones, acrylic, paper, and enamel layered with figures cut out from her own studio photographs, vintage Jet magazine calendars, or other archival images. Whether reimagining the subjects of a classic painting (her Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires at once celebrates and challenges Édouard Manet) or coyly cropping and covering found photographs (as in her NUS Exotiques series), Thomas uses glitter, vibrant patterns, and surprising textures to place Black women at the center of her work.
Thomas was born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey. While pursuing an MFA at Yale, she began taking carefully staged photographs of both herself and her mother, a former fashion model. These she later remixed into multilayered collage portraits. All About Love—Thomas’s first major international tour (named for a 1999 book by the Black feminist and social activist bell hooks)—brings to The Broad in Los Angeles a cross section of her work. “To truly love,” hooks wrote, “we must learn to mix various ingredients.” For Thomas, these ingredients include art history, Black resistance, the female gaze, elements of fashion, and her own identity and history. She invites viewers to linger in her colorful spaces, subverting their understanding of what it means to see and be seen.
Din avec la main dans le miroir et jupe rouge, 2023. Rhinestones, acrylic, and glitter on canvas mounted on wood panel (90″ x 110″). © Mickalene Thomas
A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel (108″ x 144″). © Mickalene Thomas
Portrait of Mickalena, 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel (60″ x 120″). © Mickalene Thomas
Monet’s Salle a Manger Jaune, 2012. Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel (108″ x 144″). © Mickalene Thomas
Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me), Higher and Higher, 2009. Rhinestones and acrylic paint on canvas mounted on wood panel (82″ x 72″). © Mickalene Thomas
August 1975, 2021. Rhinestones, graphite, glitter, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel (86″ x 72″). © Mickalene Thomas
Resist #11: A Price to Pay, 2023. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on canvas mounted on wood panel (84″ x 108″). © Mickalene Thomas
The exhibition Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is on display at The Broad in Los Angeles through September 29, 2024. It will then travel to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, London’s Hayward Gallery, and les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France.
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In August 2017, my husband, Josh, and I traveled to South Carolina to see a total solar eclipse for the first time. Filled with wonder and awe at the ghostly halo of our sun’s corona, we became eclipse chasers. In 2019, we witnessed this astronomical event in Chile’s Elqui Valley. And this year, on April 8, when a total solar eclipse crossed North America from Mexico to Canada, I was in the path of totality once more, this time in Texas. Alas, it will be 20 years until I’ll have the chance to witness a total eclipse again, at least in the contiguous United States. (Planning for Spain 2026 is underway.)
When I try to explain what it is like to watch a total solar eclipse, I often refer to Annie Dillard’s famous line: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.” Most people who have seen an eclipse have encountered a partial. Totality is something on another order. During a total eclipse, when the moon crosses in front of the sun, the two bodies appear to be the same size. That’s because the moon is both 400 times closer to us than the sun and 400 times smaller. As the moon ever so precisely blocks the sun’s visible light from our view, everything goes dark and cool here on Earth. But that isn’t the most amazing part. In a total solar eclipse, you can see the sun’s corona—its outer atmosphere—which normally isn’t visible because the sun’s surface is so much brighter. As soon as the moon blocks the sun, the bright white corona pops into view. In a partial eclipse, the sun is never completely blocked, and you never see the corona. Even in an annular eclipse—when the moon is farther away at the time of the crossing—too much sun comes through for the corona to be visible.
Josh is a NASA engineer, and both of us are space nerds. Back when we were dating, I bought him a Dobsonian telescope—a large-aperture reflector—which we often took with us on stargazing weekend getaways. (Friends of ours who wanted to join us had to drive to the destination separately; the telescope took up the whole back seat of my car.) We knew that we wanted to see the August 2017 eclipse, the first in a century to pass across the United States from coast to coast, leaving the country by way of Charleston. When I got a job doing public outreach for NASA, our journey became a work trip. I was given the task of broadcasting the astronomical event from the rooftop of Fort Moultrie, located in Charleston Harbor. We would be bringing the eclipse to the world using our own telescope and homemade sun filter (without which the sun’s intense light, focused into the small opening of an eyepiece, would fry the viewer’s retina).
On a hot August day, we packed our telescope into a rented minivan and drove from our home in Virginia to South Carolina. Our hotel, about 10 miles outside Charleston, was packed with members of the media and amateur enthusiasts. We saw cameras everywhere: under coffee tables, in elevators, in the hands of white-haired men in unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts. Cities located along the path of totality—from Salem, Oregon, to Jackson, Wyoming, to Nashville, Tennessee—had been preparing for massive crowds, and in South Carolina alone, an estimated 1.6 million people had come to witness totality.
The morning of the eclipse, we woke up early, met the three other members of my team in the hotel lobby, loaded our equipment into vans, and drove south. The roads were eerily quiet, a state of affairs very much at odds with the large flashing signs warning motorists about expected heavy traffic. The forecast for Charleston, it turned out, had called for mostly cloudy skies with a chance of scattered thunderstorms—hardly the optimal conditions for seeing an eclipse. And so, many people had headed farther inland, where the weather was supposed to be better. Now, as we drove toward Fort Moultrie, Josh hardly spoke: he would have surely joined that inland exodus had he not agreed to talk about the eclipse on our live broadcast.
We arrived at the fort (which is part of the Fort Sumter National Monument and is administered by the National Park Service) and made our way up to the rooftop. At eight in the morning, the air was oppressive and wet, and we used paper towels to dry the sweat from under our shirts. Because I was supposed to be on camera, I’d decided to wear makeup, which was now smearing in the heat. A group of students from the College of Charleston boarded a Coast Guard boat to travel a few miles offshore, where they would launch a weather balloon into the stratosphere. Some of my colleagues went along to film them. Meanwhile, other students from the college joined us on the rooftop; they would watch the eclipse and record data transmitted by the balloon. All of us began to worry, however, that there would be nothing to see. The sky was one big continuous cloud, with flashes of lightning in the distance, and a Park Service official warned us that the rooftop would be evacuated if the lightning came any closer. When we started our show, we noted the conditions, feigning excitement about how people in other locations along the eclipse’s path would be treated to a magnificent view.
Wearing a cowboy hat, his NASA polo shirt tucked into his jeans, Josh pointed our Dobsonian reflector at the clouds. Without a clear view of the sun, however, we weren’t able to frame the telescope to test the feed and ensure that the exposure was correct—on the off chance that we would see the eclipse. We rolled through our broadcast program in a formulaic manner. Interview the ground crew. Interview a Park Service representative. Pretend to be excited—even though all we could think about was how we might miss the event. The partial eclipse had started, but we hardly knew it. No need to don any protective glasses (necessary for a partial but not a total eclipse): there was barely any sun to block. During a brief break in our program, I headed to one of the rooftop overlooks. I looked out over the water, then down at my notecards, preparing for the next segment, rereading the script I had studied a thousand times. That’s when I heard people shouting on the other side of the roof. The clouds were parting, and the moon was slowly crossing in front of the sun.
We were three minutes away from going live again, and now that the sun was out, we had a chance of actually capturing the eclipse. The clouds were still intermittent, so Josh was finding it hard to frame up the telescope on the sun. He scanned across the sky, pointing it where the sun was supposed to be, but the camera’s viewfinder was still just black.
“It’s not going to work,” he said.
“It has to work,” I said frantically. “It’s our only option.” We knew that without the telescope, we’d having nothing to show during totality. We’d be back on the air in less than a minute, and we wanted a view of the corona.
The corona came out with aplomb: the final event, right on time, a gorgeous white web emanating from a black velvet moon, jellyfish tentacles flowing outward—tentacles that had been there all along yet were hidden from us until now.I opened the aperture, lowered the shutter speed, and raised the light sensitivity. Josh moved the telescope around, trying to point it directly at the sun. And suddenly, there it was. The sun was almost gone, and a black circle was closing in on it. The color changed so quickly that we almost didn’t notice until dusk hung all around us, tinted with a shade of yellow. Everyone’s faces looked like a dream, gray with a golden hue, as if all of us were characters in a very old movie.
“Oh my word!” the boy next to us shouted. He was a junior ranger I had interviewed earlier.
We all shouted to no one and everyone all at once: “Yes! Wow!” It was as if we had all lost control of our voices, experiencing and expressing emotions we would not normally share with strangers.
“The corona! Totality!” we chanted, though our stream was not picking up our voices; it was only transmitting the telescope’s feed.
“There they are—Baily’s Beads!” Josh shouted with the enthusiasm of a child. He was referring to the last flash of sunlight right on the edge, illuminating the crevasses and textures of the moon’s mountains and valleys. And then, the sun was gone. The corona came out with aplomb: the final event, right on time, a gorgeous white web emanating from a black velvet moon, jellyfish tentacles flowing outward—tentacles that had been there all along yet were hidden from us until now. We cheered as if we were part of a large crowd at a rock concert, say, or a football game. As we stood on the roof of that fort, dripping with sweat, our perception of the sun changed completely when that white lion’s mane burst forth from the huge ball of hydrogen and helium we’d always known, extending into the corona and then out and out, touching everything in our solar system. The perfect circle, typically the only visible part of the sun, was not visible during the eclipse.
One minute and 36 seconds after it began, the total eclipse was over. The sun came back out, and the eclipse was a partial, meaning that we had to don safety glasses to view it. And there we were, on a rooftop with people we would never see again, but whose voices would make us cry when we’d later watch the video, over and over again, trying to relive the experience. We had witnessed the opening of a portal to the sacred, an experience that we will never forget, one shared with total strangers. We had all been indoctrinated into the cult of the corona.
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Jigme led the girl’s horse to the river’s edge. The girl sat her saddle as if it were a throne. The ford was shallow but boulder strewn, and the water flowed fast. It posed hazards no matter how you threaded your way. Up and down the riverbank they probed, Jigme leading the girl and her mount, sizing up the footing, the pools, the obstructive rocks. Then he started the horse into the flow. Jigme gave a sharp tug, and the horse gingerly followed. The girl held on, swaying with the animal’s cautious steps.
We had been told she was seven or eight. This was her fifth day on horseback and her fifth day of separation from her mother and village. Yet from the start, in the saddle and in camp, she seemed to possess the composure of a princess. Even at the close of day, when, like everyone, she was hungry and spent, she maintained her cheer.
We were a medical expedition roaming the limits of farthest Dolpo, on the back side of Nepal’s Himalayan crest, almost in Tibet. We were a traveling village of 80 or more people (including doctors, nurses, a dentist, a traditional healer, camp tenders, and guides) and a similar number of mules and horses. Week by week and village by village, we’d held clinics that provided medical care to people who rarely received it. Also in our party was the highest lama of the region, whom we called Rinpoche (the most familiar of his several titles), along with his attendant monks. Wherever we traveled, people joined us from many miles away, to see Rinpoche and receive his blessing.
In one village, a destitute mother asked Rinpoche to adopt her daughter. He agreed. But Roshi, our teacher, disapproved, as did most of us. Roshi was the abbot of a Zen retreat in the United States. The medical expeditions she organized had served Rinpoche’s domain for several years, and his endorsement of her efforts opened doors for us, both literal and figurative, throughout the region. Roshi told him—politely and respectfully at first, and then later with the considerable bluntness for which she was known—that although generous, the adoption would lead to no good, that he would open himself to dangerous and ugly accusations and thereby put the entire expedition at risk. The girl was too young, for goodness sake, and such a child should not leave her mother, let alone be given to a stranger, and a man at that, no matter how august his reputation. But Rinpoche was as stubborn as he was gentle. He accepted the girl as his daughter, as her mother had asked. The girl, despite her tender years, gave no sign of resentment.
Adoption may suggest a formality that was never present in the transaction we had witnessed. The girl’s village lay in the shadow of snow-clad Dhaulagiri. No matter where you were in the village, whether you looked at the soaring, cloud-wreathed mountain or the bleak stone houses, you felt the contrary pulls of majesty and poverty. Out of this world stepped the mother of the girl.
We were walking a dirt lane between goat pens, Rinpoche in the lead. There was nothing strange in the woman’s approach, for everyone freely approached Rinpoche. In a land of much holiness, he was especially revered because he was seen as a tulku, a reincarnated being in a line of lamas who had embodied the same spiritual essence for age upon age. Everyone knew this. He had come to the village to be close to his people, to be approached. So the woman came up to him.
She said she had three children but could feed only one. She had no goats, no sheep, only a little plot of barley and a mustard garden. She said her husband had not been seen for seven years. He was a trader. He traveled. The yaks he took with him had not been seen again either. He may have died. He may have chosen to live somewhere else. After three years, she took a second husband, the brother of the first. But he, too, went trading and disappeared. She had to keep her eldest child, a 13-year-old girl who was old enough to work. And the boy of nine had gone to be a monk in Pokhara, which meant one less hungry stomach. But there still remained the youngest child, whom she could not support. Would Rinpoche accept her as a humble gift?
Rinpoche, a small man in his 30s with large glasses and ears that projected like wings from his head, tried to visit every family in every village. He had heard tales of sickness and accident. Tales of beatings and abandonment. The importunate woman’s account was one of several he had heard that concerned hunger verging on starvation. But it was the first that ended with the offer of a child. He paused, considering the mother. She was sincere, not at all equivocal. She modestly lowered her eyes and stood before him.
Whereupon a small, slight girl in quilted pants and sooty jumper stepped from behind the mother’s broad skirts and peered up into the lama’s bespectacled eyes. The girl’s cheeks were smudged with grime. A mustache of snot crusted her upper lip. She neither smiled nor frowned. She leaned against her mother’s hip, regarding him. Her gaze was unafraid, her eyes bright. “What is your name?” he asked. Meekly she said, “Pema Khandro.” She watched him carefully.
Among the lama’s first thoughts, I would later learn, was the idea that nothing in his experience had prepared him for this moment. But that did not seem right to him. No, all of life prepared one for all of life. He had heard of such adoptions. Still, they were rare. A week earlier, he had accepted two boys who would come with him to Kathmandu and become monks. But they were almost teenagers, and they would join the temple, or gompa, not his household. They would still belong to their parents.
The child offered a wan smile. He gestured toward one of the monks who attended him and told the woman, “Show this one where you live, and I will send an answer when I have decided.” He bowed to the woman and her child, and made as though to move on, but the woman edged into his path. “Yes?” he said. The woman did not speak. She placed her two hands over her heart, palms against her breast. She sought the gaze of the lama and held it. Her eyes glistened. Then bowing, she backed away, her daughter clinging to her skirt. They watched as the lama and his entourage resumed their progress down the lane.
The next day, while our medicos conducted a clinic, the lama continued visiting each home in the village. He listened to recitals of concern and woe. He encouraged proper spiritual practice. Occasionally he provided a little money to help with an urgent problem, such as needing to travel to Kathmandu to see a dying relative or to escape an abusive spouse. Sometimes Roshi was with him, sometimes not.
The expedition was a pilgrimage as well as a medical mission. We visited ancient gompas, attended ceremonies, and sat for meditation daily. Most mornings before we set out, Rinpoche and Roshi gathered us for instruction. Rinpoche discoursed on the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva. Roshi (whose practice was Zen) gave counsel on the tricky business of living fully in the present and other near impossibilities. Many in our group were devout. Others, like me, were sympathetic but resigned to low aspirations.
As we traveled, news of Rinpoche’s approach spread fast and far. People came to greet him on the trail, often crossing a river or a mountain to do so. When we entered a village, a delegation might prepare tea, warming it over a bowl of smoldering yak dung, and bring stools for him, for Roshi, and for his principal monk, a scholar of ancient texts. His devotees crowded near to receive his blessing and to give him theirs. They wore their finery, the women bearing curious and enormous brooches, almost breastplates, which hooked together the folds of their thick shawls. In warmer, more verdant lands, they might have brought flowers, but here flowers were few and rarely in bloom, so they brought prayer scarves—katas—sometimes exquisite, more often of the cheapest material, folded to conceal a precious five- or 10-rupee note, an offering they could scarcely afford except in celebration of so luminous a visitor. They basked in Rinpoche’s presence, as though he were an oasis in the desert of the world.
At monasteries, the greetings were more elaborate. The monks might play fanfares on reedy, flatulent horns. Sometimes they wore crested headdresses as gaudy as the plumage of a tropical bird. At one monastery, the monks deployed a horn three meters long. Two boys carried its bell in a sling between them, and a stout monk blew into its mouthpiece with all his force, producing a tremulous bass note, like the groan of a whale.
Rinpoche was more than a celebrity. For many he was the avatar of all that was good, and to travel with him in his domain was like traveling with Elvis or Muhammad Ali. No one was immune to the excitement he generated.
Sometimes on long, empty stretches between villages, when he was not obliged to receive well-wishers or visit a sacred place, I had the opportunity to walk with him. Once, he asked my age.
“Sixty-eight,” I replied.
He shook his head. “I am half that, but I will never live so long,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I have not Saturday or Sunday, as you do.”
He meant that he had no rest days. His duty was to be available at all times, and in many roles, as leader, teacher, counselor, scholar, and master of ritual. He spoke of his burdens without complaint, as though describing unalterable facts of the weather.
One day, he told me how he had found his path in life, or rather, how it found him.
He grew up in a village a few days’ journey from where we then were walking. “Over there,” he gestured. “Behind those mountains.”
He was eight years old when word arrived that the Dalai Lama would soon speak and teach in Kathmandu. The news, which may have been only a rumor, enlivened him. Although he had never traveled farther than the stark hills where he grazed the family’s sheep and goats, he ached to go.
His grandfather announced that he would make the trip, and the boy begged to be taken along. But his mother refused. He was too young, she said.
On the day of his grandfather’s departure, the boy drove the livestock out to graze as usual. He led the sheep and goats to a mountainside where they could be seen from the village and where there were no boulders or gullies to hide a snow leopard. They would be safe there.
From his vantage on the mountainside, the boy watched the trail that led south from the village. This was the trail everyone took when departing for Kathmandu. When he saw his grandfather and one of his uncles on the trail, he abandoned the animals and headed south as well. But he did not use the well-worn trail. He followed it from above, high on the mountainside, watching where it went and scrambling along parallel to it, lest he be found and taken back. When other travelers on the trail passed within sight of him, he hid behind a boulder, or if there was no place to hide (for no plants at that altitude grew taller than his knee), he crouched motionless and covered his face so that he disappeared into the mountain.
Eventually the day waned, and the land changed. The trail began to descend into a broad valley. And then, the vegetation changed. Enormous plants, stiff at their cores but pliant at their outward limits, stippled the slopes. He had never seen such plants before. They had strange, gesticulating arms and loomed darkly. They seemed hostile, for they blocked his view of the distance. The more he descended, the thicker they grew. In the gathering darkness, they hissed in the evening wind, and the harder the wind blew, the louder they hissed and the more threatening their gestures became. They seemed possessed by demons. The boy chanted holy mantras to ward off their evil, but still his skin prickled with fear.
This was Rinpoche’s first encounter with trees.
Now he was hungry. The few balls of tsampa he had pilfered from his mother’s reserve were gone. He was also cold, and the dark trees still hissed. Cautiously he descended toward the trail. His heart leapt when he tasted wood smoke in the air. He followed the smell. Soon he was looking at a rare flat widening of the trail, where a man fed twigs to a tentative fire. In the falling light, he recognized his grandfather and then saw his uncle approaching with a pail of water. They were making a meal. With relief he came to the clearing and showed himself, but beyond a sideways glance, neither man acknowledged him. The boy sat and watched as they prepared tsampa.
When he moved toward them, his grandfather stood up and shooed him away, saying, “Go naughty boy, go, stay back, stay away.”
The grandfather and the uncle ate their dinner in silence. It was dark now.
When the men finished, the grandfather at last turned to the boy and said, “All right, naughty one, come in and be warm.”
They were a day’s walk from home, too far for the men to take him back. Now, after more scolding, they admitted they would have to take him to Kathmandu.
The next morning, soon after setting out, they met a traveler bound for their village. They asked him to pass word of what had happened, with assurance that the grandfather would look after the boy.
The wonders of the journey had only begun. After another day’s walk, they encountered a road along which they met occasional motorbikes and small trucks. They passed the night beside the road, and in the morning a moving house appeared. It was loud and terrifying, but his grandfather bade him come into the house in spite of his fears. There they sat on benches, and soon the house began to move again, roaring and reeling. This was a bus, and it took them all the way to Kathmandu.
While the boy was in the capital, the story of his running away from home came to the notice of certain lamas, who asked to see him. Sometimes singly, sometimes several at a time, they examined him, asking many questions. Was the idea to come to Kathmandu his own? What did he know of the Dalai Lama and when did he learn it? What were his dreams? They also questioned his grandfather.
Rinpoche never told me if he saw the Dalai Lama on that trip. But a few months later, when he was again at home herding sheep and goats, a message arrived from the lamas. They offered to send him to school in Dharamshala, India, where many Tibetans lived in exile. The lamas had determined that he was a tulku. His parents could not refuse the offer. Now his path in life was clear.
For almost two decades, he studied in India. When at last he returned to Nepal, he established himself in Kathmandu, where his mother joined him and maintained his household. He now travels and teaches widely, including in Europe. He returns to his district when he can, but penetrating past its fringes is difficult. The passes are high and the distances long. There are almost no roads. To minister to his people, he needs equipment and support. For this reason, Roshi’s assistance, which had enabled him to visit the farther reaches of his territory, had been invaluable.
A weathered gatehouse guarded entry to the village where Pema Khandro lived. Downhill from the gatehouse, 20 or more people waited for Rinpoche beside a little creek. They waited without restlessness, in the unfidgety way of people who use no clocks and who do not ask whether they should be somewhere else. Roshi and the rest of us had reached the village an hour earlier. After resting at our camp, which lay within the village core, we drifted back to the hilltop gateway that overlooked the place where Rinpoche would receive his welcome.
Rinpoche typically traveled late and last, delayed by small ceremonies and the obligatory exchange of blessings with people who sought him along the trail. On this day, he wore a yellow jacket over his rust-red robe, and his principal monk dressed the same. They made a bright sight when they rounded the nose of the last ridge and beheld the waiting throng, which now stirred to action. A drum began to beat, and someone clapped a rhythm with cymbals larger than dinner plates. A pair of wheezy horns struck up a quavering salute. Beside the creek, someone raised a pole bearing a checkered flag, and all the men stood to a kind of attention. The women stood too, brushing the fronts of their shawls, the patterns of which were nearly identical, so that a triad of earth-toned stripes ran down the back of each of them. They made a pool of warm dark color in the gray ravine.
There being no bridge, the scout who had scampered across the creek to meet Rinpoche led him by the hand to a line of stepping stones. Rinpoche gathered the skirts of his robe in one hand, and, holding onto his guide with the other, he hopped from one shining white rock to another. Safely across, he lifted his eyes to the people, clasped his hands in a gesture of prayer, and approached them bowing. They brought him to a chair before a little low table. When he was settled, some of the welcomers waved vigorously at us to come down. It was Roshi they wanted. They pointed to a rug on the ground beside Rinpoche, where the principal monk already sat. “Oh, I was hoping to get out of this,” Roshi muttered as she started down. The tea drinking, uncomfortable sitting, and bestowing of blessings often tested the endurance of anyone with a normal bladder or back muscles. And we had just finished a hard day of walking.
Now tea was poured from a thermos, and Rinpoche blessed the woman who poured it. He reached a gloved hand to her head, or almost to her head, for she wore a large, precarious headdress supporting squares of tin that recalled solar panels on a pitched roof. Bowing, she backed away, and other women crowded forward, also bowing and pushing before them their small children, who frowned with worry. Rinpoche blessed the children and received yellow prayer scarves from the women, which he blessed and hung back on their necks. Roshi flicked little blessings of tea mist on those who jostled toward her. Meanwhile, the drummer kept beating his irregular rhythm, and the cymbal man clashed his tin cymbals, and the horn men, now joined by a man blowing long drones from a conch, continued the bleat of their instruments.
As the women pressed forward, the men stood back, some swinging censers, others spinning prayer wheels. The woman with the elaborate headdress produced thermos after thermos of tea and offered cups all around. Sometimes Rinpoche poured the tea himself and pressed cups into the hands of his well-wishers. His attendant monks chanted mantras. After the women received Rinpoche’s blessing for themselves and their children, they stood off to one side, with their babies on their backs, wrapped in the folds of their shawls. They looked very satisfied. The rest of us from the expedition, western and Nepali alike, formed an outer ring around the celebrants and villagers. Phone or camera in hand, we took pictures like paparazzi.
Finally Rinpoche put his red hat on his shaved head and rose from his chair. The conch man and the drummer and the cymbal man took their cue and started up the trail toward the gatehouse. The horn men went only a little way, then stood aside and blew a continuous fanfare as Rinpoche and his party filed by. Then came the women who carried not just their babies but also the chair, the rug, the table, and the cups and thermoses. And with the horns wheezing until the last of us had made it to the top, we climbed the hill and passed through the village gate, which was built in the form of a little temple, open at two ends. The gateway embodied the devoutness and hardship of the village. The elements of its ornate, multitiered roof were said to symbolize the mind of the Buddha, whereas the passageway itself was a practical thing, narrow enough so that in the old days, a few brave men with spears could hold off any number of bandits.
The day Rinpoche agreed to take the child was our last in that village. The relieved mother threw herself into action, soliciting from friends and relatives the handful of things her daughter would need. Rinpoche’s people eyed the bedding she produced with suspicion, and after a spate of anxious discussion, the child-size quilts were rejected and a spare sleeping bag produced from among the resources of the camp. The girl also needed footwear, a change of clothes, a jacket, and a hat. She had most of these things, and in a few instances, the mother traded items the girl already possessed for others less ragged.
The villagers threw us a going-away party that evening to express their thanks for Rinpoche’s visit and for the care our day-long medical clinic had provided. We had seen nearly a hundred patients and dispensed ibuprofen for arthritis, applied creams for impetigo, pulled a few teeth, dressed a wound, and counseled mothers-to-be on nutrition. We distributed vitamins, toothbrushes, and sunglasses. One of our Nepali doctors promised to treat several of the more serious cases in Kathmandu that winter, should the patients be able to get there.
The thank-you event took the form of a cultural performance. Five women, four of them very old and one a teenager, and three old men began to sing and, very slowly, to dance. A fourth man accompanied them on a dranyan, the six-stringed lute of the Himalaya. Other villages had put on similar performances for us, sometimes with great polish and skill. This one was rough but earnest. The men mumbled the songs, seeming to forget many words, and barely shifted their weight from foot to foot. The women were better. They stood in a line in their best chubas—wraparound dresses cinched by a figure-concealing apron. They sang in high, songbird voices and moved in unison, forward and back, side to side, their steps light, mincing, and mysterious. For all our effort, none of us could replicate the dance.
They sang in a dialect that would have sounded ancient even to their grandparents and great-grandparents. It was a way of speaking now reserved for ceremonies and hallowed traditions, a language of memory, also a language of riddles and perplexities:
There is a place where they bought a horse.
But they haven’t saddled that horse for three years.
If they don’t saddle it this year,
Its color may change.In that place was a man.
He didn’t tell her the truth for three years.
If he doesn’t tell the truth this year,
She may change her mind.
The sun had sunk behind the bulk of Dhaulagiri even before the songs began. The dusk was long and soft. Next to me in the little crowd stood a woman with night-black hair that reached to the middle of her back. She had weary eyes. I recognized her from the tea ceremony. Her bronze skin shone warmly in the half light. She had been looking at me, waiting to meet my gaze. When I returned her smile, she gestured toward a boy playing by the dancers. She began to speak, but I did not understand a word. The boy, not more than four, wore a soiled green hoodie with the Union Jack on the front. He stood by one of the dancers, mimicking her movements. Then he knelt to pick up something shiny from the ground. The woman beside me continued speaking. When I glanced at her, she gestured anew at the boy. I smiled and nodded, then turned back to watch the boy and the dancers.
Another song, and the evening’s cold tightened its grip. I turned up the collar of my jacket. The performance would have to end soon. The woman beside me now held the boy in her arms. She turned him to look at me. His eyes were sleepy. He vaguely waved something at me. It might have been the lid of a sardine tin. The woman spoke again, more urgently. I saw that Jigme was in reach. I tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to interpret. He stepped closer and listened to the woman. Then he snapped a single word at her and abruptly turned away. “Jigme, what did she say?” I asked.
“Nothing. She say nothing.”
“No, please, tell me what she said.”
Jigme, stone-faced, refused, but I persisted.
To my third or fourth entreaty, he finally said, “She want to give you the child. She say he give you many stories.”
I was stunned, also bewildered, and in a strange way, flattered. Another child to be given away. Why to me? Perhaps my white hair, my age. In the falling darkness, the dancers had faded to outlines. The dranyan and the thin, high voices of the women sang on. Jigme’s rebuke had caused the woman to step back. I turned to her and sought her eyes in the gloom. They were at once winsome and plaintive. I said in English, “Thank you, but I cannot.” I made an awkward bow. As I backed away, the woman offered a grim smile.
I went to the other side of the circle. I tried to watch the dancers, but soon I was peering through the darkness, searching for the woman who had offered me her son. I thought I saw her, but I could not be sure. She must have seen me write on my notepad; hence the notion that her boy would give me stories. Clearly, Rinpoche’s acceptance of the girl, Pema Khandro, had excited her dreams. I wondered how she conceived the gift of her child—as the creation of opportunity for the boy or the removal of a burden she could not bear? Or rather, which of those motives counted more? I felt regret—and guilt—not least because Jigme had rebuked her so harshly, and I wondered whether her feelings were much hurt. Rinpoche made gifts of money. I wondered whether I should do so. I was not carrying cash, but perhaps I could borrow? And if I did, how many wadded bills should I press into her hand to apologize for declining the gift of her child? The idea invited a valuation of the purest absurdity. How could I think such thoughts? Meanwhile, her dilemma—to weigh her son against a prospect of starvation—was dizzying. I felt disoriented, out of balance. For a moment, I fantasized about adopting the boy, and what I first imagined was agreeable—the play, the exploration of a novel world, the development of a friendship, the blooming of a person. But immediately I laughed at myself, at the spectacle of an elderly American, seen by the law of both Nepal and the United States as a doddering kidnapper, abducting a small boy with no papers, no legal identity, a boy he claims as “a gift” of the mother, whom he would carry to the far side of the world and call his “son.”
Now only the wan lights of a few phones and headlamps illuminated the dancers. With relief I felt the night envelop me. Somewhere across the circle, the woman and the boy stood shrouded in a solitude of their own.
Days have passed. We have crossed the treacherous ford, and we are in camp before the last great pass. We eat dinner in darkness, the toil of more than 15 high-altitude miles having consumed the sunlit day. An intense cold settles on the little plain where our tents cluster, and soon all of us hasten to our sleeping bags. I have no doubt that Pema Khandro has gone to a warm bed with a full stomach. But I wonder if doubt besets her in the quiet moments before sleep arrives and if she weeps for her mother and sister and the home that she will not soon see again, if ever. I wonder if she has tired of Rinpoche and his solicitous monks and if she might suddenly throw a fit, as my own children would surely have done at that age, yielding to anger and frustration and letting loose a mournful wail through the camp.
But no such eruption takes place, not then or later. Our princess never loses composure or lashes out. Or if she does, I never hear of it. From the start, Pema Khandro has appeared reconciled to her circumstance, an old soul in an eight-year-old body, traveling to Kathmandu as Rinpoche did at the same age. Not that she lacks mirth. In the morning, as we prepare for the high pass—an ascent to more than 18,000 feet—she skitters about, peeking into tents, watching the loading of the mules, petting the soft noses of the horses. She revels in the novelty of her new life, which does not seem to faze her.
Soon we are on the trail, and again she sits her equine throne, eyes forward, spine straight, Jigme before her, leading her mount up the steep side of a canyon and then onto a broad high sweep of tundra that curls up and up, ever steeper, into the blue distance. The horses plod. Those of us on foot trudge. No one speaks. We covet the thin air, stopping often to inhale it in hungry gulps. Finally the trail culminates in the pass, where around us in every direction gunmetal peaks stab the sky.
We celebrate raucously. We high-five and embrace and pump our fists into the air. The wind blasts us, and every fold in our clothing flaps furiously. We shout to be heard. I call out to Charlie McDonald, our medical director, “Have you ever been this high before?” He yells back, “Once! When I did Kilimanjaro. You?”
“Once! When I did LSD!” We laugh and clap each other on the back and then clap the backs of others who come to share their high feelings with us.
Eventually the wind gets the better of our euphoria, and we begin our descent into an immense and featureless valley painted in geologic pastels of rose, yellow, and tan. I see Jigme and the princess far below on a switchback of the trail. Jigme had not paused on the crest of the pass. Perhaps he knew, or intuited, something the rest of us did not—that the campsites we were counting on, not just our first choice, but also the second and third, lack sufficient water for so large a group. It turns out that we are obliged to continue our march hours into the night before we reach a habitable place.
From that grueling day until the end of the trip, I rarely see the princess. On the trail, we press hard for distance. In the evening, we eat fast and crawl off early to bed. The bonhomie of our little community slowly dissolves into hurry and fatigue, all the more so when we learn that our flight to Kathmandu from a regional airstrip has been canceled. We rent SUVs and split into small groups to drive to the airport of a lowland city. The route is serpentine and potholed, the hours fatiguing and anxious. Finally, we arrive at an air terminal where monkeys forage in the shrubbery. The humid air tastes heavy and stagnant as our group reassembles. I watch Rinpoche, hand in hand with his new daughter and with several monks close behind, cross a patch of tarmac to enter the little building that constitutes a waiting room. Monkeys scamper past the security checkpoint in front of them, and Rinpoche yells at the monkeys, stamping his foot, “Boarding pass! Get boarding pass!” The princess may not have known what a boarding pass was for, but Rinpoche’s mock alarm delights her and she squeals with laughter.
We settle into plastic chairs in the waiting room, grateful to be still, grateful to be where we need to be, feeling the repressed weariness of the past few days finally place its weight on us. It seems strange to be out of the wind and to breathe such thick air. I look around and begin to have the sense that everyone is shrinking. We were big up in the moonscape above the tree line, on the endlessly winding trail. We’d been self-reliant, mission driven, journey hardened. Perhaps we borrowed our bigness from the mountains. Now we shrink back into our ordinary selves. Roshi is again a small woman in a black robe, sinking into her chair with a mild and relieved smile. Our expedition foreman, a man of natural authority who for five weeks commanded dozens of workers without once raising his voice, has returned to being a short, nondescript fellow easily lost in a crowd. And Rinpoche, the Elvis of the outback, the agent of so many people’s hopes and the object of their veneration, is once again a diminutive and somewhat worried-looking young man, who now rummages in his shoulder bag as though he has lost something.
I am writing notes on my pocket pad when the princess comes to stand by me. She watches me write. I wonder if she has ever seen writing. Perhaps she has never held a pencil or possessed a sheet of paper.
I hand her the pad and pen. She draws a few tentative squiggles, as though confirming that the pen has ink. Then she smiles and hands them back. I draw a circle and give it two round eyes and the curve of a smiling mouth. She looks at the face, grins, takes the pad and pen, and with earnest concentration and wobbly lines, copies the smiley face. And again returns the pad and pen. Then I draw a stick man with stick legs and feet and five stick fingers at the end of each stick arm. She gives a little hop of excitement and takes the pad and pen. She puts the pad on the armrest of the chair and leans over it, pressing the pen into the paper with intense deliberation. She draws a not-quite-closed circle for the head, places circles inside it for eyes and dots inside the circles for pupils. Then she adds two loopy, spidery arms that end in three, not five, hooked fingers. She skips the body altogether and draws two parallel lines down from the head—stick legs, presumably. And there she pauses, regarding her work. The feet of her stick person seem to elude her. She makes a vague semicircle, and then a squiggle within it. And again hands the pad and pen back to me. That is good enough, she seems to say, for she grins a luminous grin and skips away to stand by Rinpoche. She peers into the gaping shoulder bag in which he continues to rummage. She says nothing and, stepping back, contemplates him and his bag as though they were an entertainment. Rinpoche looks up, briefly meets her gaze with a smile, and returns to his bag. Again, a grin spreads on her face. She thinks it is funny to watch Rinpoche search like this. Pema Khandro doesn’t quite laugh, but plainly, this fleeting, precious moment is funny.
The post The Given Child appeared first on The American Scholar.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan; Knopf, 288 pp., $28
In Japan, on a cold day in the winter of 2012, Australian writer Richard Flanagan stood at the entrance of the mine where his father had labored as a POW during the Second World War. He found “no memorial, no sign, no evidence … that whatever had once happened had ever happened.” The following year, Flanagan published The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a novel inspired by his father’s experiences that won the 2014 Booker Prize.
Flanagan’s new book, Question 7—named for the seventh question in Anton Chekhov’s “Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician”—is a collection of fragments of memoir, fiction, and history. Together they form an account of various historical events that have affected, albeit often indirectly, the lives of
Flanagan and members of his family. Flanagan writes about H. G. Wells’s romance with Rebecca West, the mass killing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples by British colonists in the 19th century, the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape now threatened by development, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the work of physicists involved in the development of nuclear fission.
“Who loves longer,” Chekhov asks in his seventh question, “a man or a woman?” Flanagan grapples with this throughout Question 7, explaining that he understands it to be “about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world.” The absurdity of the world, of war, of trying to decipher truth from memory or history, of trying to express oneself adequately with language, and of trying to understand why things occur and why people act in certain ways—these are Flanagan’s preoccupations. Who loves longer? “You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer?” he asks. The larger question stands in the background: “Why do we do what we do to each other?” Having stood at the site of his father’s internment and reckoned with the past in the most personal of ways, Flanagan hazards an answer: “There is no why.”
The bombing of Hiroshima is a central event in Question 7. Flanagan credits the bomb with saving his father’s life and, by extension, making his own life possible. “None of this is an argument for the bombing of Hiroshima,” he writes. “We pretend there is a moral calculus in war … that there is … an answer for all things that can be found in numbers.” And yet, despite his protestation, Flanagan does compare the numbers—of those who died at Hiroshima, those killed in other bombings, and those who might have been killed had the atomic bombs not been dropped on Japan. Some comparison of these losses is, I think, implied, with Flanagan’s questioning of our current accounting.
This tension—between the author’s desire to judge and compare and his assertion that to seek such answers is to entertain absurdity—haunts Question 7. Even the reader is not spared; we are divided by Flanagan into “good readers” and “poor readers.” Turning the judgment back on himself, Flanagan similarly divides writers into “good writers” and “poor” ones. Life “is never binary,” he writes, and yet, throughout Question 7, the binaries of virtue and evil, hero and villain, good and poor, are ever present.
Flanagan may have intended his book to be a meditation on uncertainty and absurdity, but the overall effect can be confusing. Question 7 relates disparate historical events to Flanagan’s own life, while simultaneously musing on the unreliability of memory, the foibles of moral judgment, and the limitations of language. This is a lot to bite off in fewer than 300 pages. With regard to Hiroshima, Flanagan writes that, as in Chekhov’s stories, “the only fools are those with answers” and that there is no “moral calculus to death.” Elsewhere, though, he presents us with stories of heroes and villains, good and evil, in which his own moral judgments seem clear. Question 7 is a work of literature in which the author questions literature’s ability to fully express the world.
Question 7 is at its most moving when it shifts from philosophical debate and does away with fictionalized retellings of the lives of scientists and the love life of H. G. Wells to look instead at Flanagan’s complex relationship with his family, particularly his parents. He writes that his father was a “vaporous” presence, a man who “had passed through something … [that] wasn’t ever really talked about.” And yet, when watching the television “on a late Saturday afternoon,” he “would pick us up and we would slowly waltz.” In these descriptions, Flanagan moves beyond the hero-villain binary and anxiety over passing moral judgment. His simple prose belies his critique of the limitations of language: in these passages, his words are enough.
The post Numbers Game appeared first on The American Scholar.
I was telling a white friend about my great-grandfather, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and college professor who began his career in the 1890s, when her face wrinkled in puzzlement.
“Was he married to a white woman?” she asked.
Stunned, I stammered, “No,” and explained that in South Carolina—where laws prohibiting intermarriage dated back to the 1700s—it might have cost him his life just to have gazed too long in a white woman’s direction.
Our conversation was decades ago, but I still sometimes marvel at how little my friend knew of Black history, and how her ignorance (there’s no other word for it) fueled the incredible assumption that a Black man could have made something of himself only by marrying a white woman. Though I tried to explain, I’m not sure she understood that African Americans like my great-grandfather have always managed, somehow, to invent and reinvent themselves despite a world that regarded them as less than human, improvising a way out of no way. What could be more American than that?
One day in the late 1970s, my mother, Ruth, a librarian at the Library of Congress, ventured into the attic of her Washington, D.C., rowhouse. There she found trunks, suitcases, and cardboard boxes filled with letters, diaries, photographs, and a few flaking copies of The Light, one of the newspapers that my great-grandfather edited. A few letters dated from the late 1800s—they’d been there since her father bought the house in 1928.
I’m not sure she understood that African Americans like my great-grandfather have always managed, somehow, to invent and reinvent themselves despite a world that regarded them as less than human.After Ruth died, I inherited this material, but 20 years would pass before I finally began to examine the trail she left for me to follow. What I discovered was a distinguished family tree. I found forebears who’d repatriated themselves and died in Africa. I found a great-uncle who collaborated with Langston Hughes on a musical during the Harlem Renaissance. I found that great-uncle’s sister, who met François “Papa Doc” Duvalier during her two-year sojourn in Haiti in the 1940s. And then there was that great-grandfather whose story my friend was unable to imagine.
Named Casper George Garrett, he invented himself after Reconstruction’s end, a feat that inspires me as much as the story of his great-grandfather, an African who bought his freedom in 1819 and then managed, somehow, to release his wife and two of his children from bondage. Happenstance allowed C. G. Garrett to escape slavery—he was born just months after the end of the Civil War—but the rest was his doing. Educated by Black and white missionaries who ventured south after war’s end, and encouraged by his mother, he taught in a country schoolhouse before training as a teacher, then went on to earn bachelor’s and law degrees. He seldom practiced as a lawyer, but he edited or published three newspapers and taught for more than 20 years at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. And if all that was not enough, he was active in local and state Republican politics, helped found the Colored State Fair, and was a staunch advocate for laymen in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.
My search for Garrett, and those who’d come before him, was a quest for what the historian David Levering Lewis dubbed “psychic citizenship” in an email he sent me. Born in the United States, I spent my childhood in Jamaica. When I returned at age nine, I felt out of place, a burden that has never quite eased. The more I learned about Garrett’s life, the more I felt both admiration and a sense of connection. It isn’t just that he went from almost-slavery to becoming certified to appear in South Carolina courtrooms when he was only 24. It is what he did afterward, becoming an example of what the historian John F. Marszalek calls “unknown black leaders”—men and women little recognized outside their communities who selflessly devoted themselves to education and uplift in the difficult decades that marked “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society,” as another historian, Rayford Logan, put it. These Black Victorians—sober, industrious, thrifty, and self-restrained—worked in hope of a better future.
Though parts of Garrett’s program to better the race and, eventually, prove its members worthy of full citizenship sound a lot like the now-discarded notion of respectability politics—he believed in education, homeownership, obeying the law, voting, and “proper leadership”—I sometimes think we could do worse than to return to those principles today. Saying that I admire him, however, is not to imply anything so simple as hero worship. To claim him, I also had to accept his failings.
Though Garrett was ambitious, he often failed to achieve his goals because he lacked the ability to compromise. Seeking the editorship of the A.M.E. Church Review, comparable to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis in its time, he alienated the Church’s bishops by demanding a greater voice in AME affairs for laymen. Not surprisingly, he was not appointed. Later, during World War I, he encouraged Black men to pay their poll taxes because a “man who fights for his country’s flag should vote for his rulers.” But he also caused a Black pastor who had allegedly made anti-white statements to flee for his life when he accused the pastor of “race rot.” And he met with U.S. Senator Nathaniel B. Dial, offering to relay information about warring Republican factions, in the hopes that the senator would support him for a federal appointment; Dial did not.
When I told her how Garrett had been selected to ride with Booker T. Washington, she sniffed, “Well, while your great-grandfather was on that train, my great-grandmother was on her hands and knees, scrubbing some white woman’s floors.”One of the highlights of Garrett’s life came when he was one of nearly 30 “prominent colored citizens of South Carolina” invited to accompany Booker T. Washington on a train tour of the state in 1909. The tour was part of Washington’s lifelong endeavor to convince white Americans that Blacks had progressed sufficiently since slavery to be worthy of white southerners’ “friendship and good will.” The men who accompanied Washington on his “special car” (there seem to have been no women) were pastors, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and journalists: proof of that progress. And yet, Garrett’s name was 13th on the official list of those “distinguished and prominent” men onboard, and set in substantially smaller type than those that preceded his. Worse, he was identified as C. F.—not C. G.—Garrett.
Such slights symbolize the frustration of Garrett’s life: doomed to be counted as one among many, he too seldom led. Perhaps it was inevitable, given that there was so much that was protean and quixotic about him, an American restlessness and refusal to be confined that expressed itself in his crisscrossing the country on AME Church business from Florida to Canada, South Carolina to California. Columbia remained his home, but he surveyed a greater interior landscape.
I began by recounting one friend’s reaction to the story of my great-grandfather, so I’ll end by recounting what another friend, this one Black, said when I told her how Garrett had been selected to ride with Booker T. Washington. “Well,” she sniffed, “while your great-grandfather was on that train with Booker T. Washington, my great-grandmother was on her hands and knees, scrubbing some white woman’s floors.”
The difference in circumstance is obvious, but my friend’s great-grandmother did have something in common with C. G. Garrett’s mother, who washed, ironed, and cooked for others so that her only son could go to school. Like my friend’s ancestor, Garrett’s mother did what she had to, working to give others the chance at opportunities denied her. She aspired to more, even if she herself could not enjoy it. She and the other Garretts reached toward the green light of the American dream, even as it eluded them. What could be more American than that? They were my forebears, but their story just might be yours, too.
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American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation by John Kaag; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $28
One November afternoon, while jogging on the edge of a swamp about two miles from his house in Massachusetts, John Kaag encountered a lone wolf. As he ran frantically homeward, he discovered a rock cave in his own back yard that he had never noticed before. His wife, though, knew about it. “That cave has a name,” she told him. “The Bloods called it ‘Wolf Rock.’ ”
Thus Kaag introduces readers not only to the family at the center of his book but also to the work’s governing metaphor: the Bloods’ “wildness,” their wolfish nature. Wolves and wildness reappear throughout the narrative, in epigraphs that introduce the book and its various chapters. Both themes appear in quotations Kaag selected from Henry David Thoreau and tie explicitly to the Blood family. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau wrote; in his attribution, Kaag adds, “conceived on a walk to visit Perez Blood.” “We need the tonic of wildness,” Thoreau commented in Walden; “written three miles from Blood Farm,” Kaag notes.
Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, decided to write about the Bloods after finding a privately published family history, The Story of the Bloods, in a hidden room in his house—a dwelling built in 1745 by one Josiah Blood. So who were the Bloods? Why should we care? According to Kaag, the family “embodied the risks and rewards that were taken in laying claim to the lands that would become the United States,” as one of the “first and most expansive pioneer families” at “the very core of a nation.” Kaag starts with the tale of a Blood who stayed in England but nevertheless remained a wolf “on the prowl”: a thief named Thomas Blood, who in 1671 tried and failed to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Each successive chapter focuses on one or another of Thomas’s relatives (they aren’t all his direct descendants), exploring their life stories set against the concerns of the day, such as their involvement with Native peoples or with the institution of slavery. Additionally, as a philosopher himself, Kaag refers when appropriate to the contemporaneous writings of political philosophers, most notably Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Marx, as well as to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau.
The progenitors of the family in North America were Thomas Blood’s nephews—Robert, John, and James, whom Kaag terms “notorious hell-raisers.” Robert is the brother Kaag emphasizes, for he established Blood Farm, the original 3,000-acre tract on the border of Concord that included the small portion that now belongs to Kaag and his family. Robert married Elizabeth, the daughter of Simon Willard, a prominent leader of early Concord, and prospered, fathering a large family.
Next comes Thaddeus Blood, a minuteman in April 1775, born almost two decades earlier in what is now Kaag’s house. Emerson interviewed him in 1835 about the historic events at Concord’s North Bridge. Thaddeus turned out to be less helpful than his interlocutor had anticipated, telling Emerson simply, “The truth will never be known,” although he did indicate that he had seen and heard the first shot fired by the British as it rippled the water next to the bridge.
Kaag’s attention then turns to Thaddeus’s son, Perez, perhaps the prime example of the wildness theme in the Blood family. Perez lived a frugal, isolated existence in the woods of Blood Farm, gazing at the stars nightly through a treasured telescope. When Thoreau visited Perez, as he did regularly, he was “utterly captivated,” as was Emerson, by Perez and the view through that telescope.
With the next generation, the theme shifts to a different sort of wolfish behavior. A son of another branch of the family, Aretas Blood, born in Vermont in 1816, became a successful industrialist. Aretas moved around, ending up in Manchester, New Hampshire, having achieved great financial success during the Civil War. At this point—as we begin to wonder about female members of the family—Kaag introduces Aretas’s wife, Lavinia, and their daughters, who became leaders in late-19th-century charitable associations.
Another Blood son born in Vermont, the law-abiding James Clinton Blood, co-founded Lawrence, Kansas, in 1854 under the auspices of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, the abolitionist organization that also involved John Brown in those early days of “bleeding Kansas.” Another James Blood (middle name Harvey)—and especially his reputed wife, the notorious Victoria Woodhull—displayed entirely different priorities. James Harvey and Victoria traveled widely, promoting spiritualism and claiming that she had the power to heal illness, before she founded a stock brokerage firm, engaged in insider trading, and ran for president.
The final chapter features Benjamin Paul Blood, a “seer-mystic” who described in an obscure 1874 publication what seems to have been the first psychedelic trip in the United States. Kaag contends that Blood was an “enduring guide” to William James, observing that “philosophers have overlooked and therefore discounted the wild—which is to say euphoric and horrific—realizations of men like Benjamin Blood.” He confesses that he did not fully understand James’s friendship with Blood “until I met the rest of the American Bloods.”
Ending the book much as he began it, Kaag recounts his young son Henry’s startling encounter with an unidentified long-tailed animal [read: wolf] in the woods near his house in October 2022. He saw it, too, warning Henry, “Let’s all be careful—it lives in there,” as the animal retreated into the darkness. In this way, Kaag the philosopher tells us he no longer lives “too much in my head” and reveals the effect of the Bloods’ wildness on him.
Kaag’s early references to philosophers like Hobbes and Locke are refreshing, for few works focusing on early American families try to establish an intellectual context for their lives and actions, except those featuring prominent clergymen such as Increase and Cotton Mather. Thoreau and Emerson are ever present in American Bloods, which is understandable given their presence in Concord; indeed, their names head the longest entries in the book’s index. But as we delve deeper into the narrative, philosophers seem less relevant—and frankly, Benjamin Blood is weird. Kaag’s motif with regard to the wild, wolfish qualities of the Bloods is unconvincing because it does not apply to all of his subjects. He admits that James Clinton “had a healthy respect for the rule of law,” and clearly the theme accords more to James Harvey’s wife, Victoria, than to himself. We might give Kaag credit for attempting such an unconventional approach to historical writing, but unfortunately, in a narrative as episodic and disjointed as this one, the Blood clan fails to emerge as something greater than the sum of its parts.
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Growing up in Chile, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz doodled incessantly. “Like any teenager, and especially a queer teenager coming out,” they say, “I had a lot of questions and feelings that I was trying to express through those drawings.” The subject of gender, especially how it is often reduced to a binary, preoccupied them. “I was obsessed with popular characters that have a double: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Daisy—basically how they are the same character except for their clothes.” Now, as a part of the solo exhibition “Deep, Deep Woods,” at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Schliebener Muñoz has created a site-specific installation “about the construction of childhood and how that intersects with gender and class.” It centers on Raggedy Ann and Andy.
- Deep, Deep Woods, 2024, view of multimedia installation at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy Mattress Factory, credit Tom Little.)
- Deep, Deep Woods, 2024, view of multimedia installation at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy Mattress Factory, credit Tom Little.)
- Deep, Deep Woods, 2024, view of multimedia installation at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo courtesy Mattress Factory, credit Tom Little.)
The Mattress Factory is home to the archived papers and works of the late transgender artist Greer Lankton, including her site-specific installation It’s All About ME, Not You. Schliebener Muñoz pored over the archive and noticed striking resonances with their own work. Some of Lankton’s drawings, for example, happened to feature Raggedy Ann and Andy, so Schliebener Muñoz incorporated them throughout “Deep, Deep Woods.” The drawings are flanked by wall murals that show the dolls picking at their seams, a way of deconstructing gender as the dolls deconstruct themselves. “Gender can be performative or used an accessory, no?” Schliebener Muñoz says. “I think my works are super playful.”
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I am two levels down in Tokyo’s massive central railway station, eating seafood with my wife, Penny, and a crowd of hungry Japanese commuters and travelers. In August 2023, the Japanese government, with the blessing of the International Atomic Energy Agency, released more than a million metric tons of still-radioactive water from the nearby Fukushima nuclear power plant, which had suffered a catastrophic meltdown 12 years earlier. The seafood we are eating—large pieces of shrimp tempura and fatty tuna laved with soy sauce—could well have been caught in waters containing traces of radioactive tritium, but no one seems particularly bothered. If they are, they’re not letting it interfere with dinner.
Most of the Japanese people we talk to seem to believe that their government would not advise them to do something that wasn’t safe. We learn that surfers, for example, have returned to much of the Pacific coast near Tokyo, even if only a few dare to catch a wave in the immediate vicinity of Fukushima.
The Tokyo train station is jammed with every imaginable kind of Asian cuisine, and the long corridors are thronged with people eating fish. We go deeper to explore a restaurant serving conveyor-belt sushi. Once we’re seated at our table, we punch our order into a beeping device, and almost at once, salmon, tuna, sea urchin, and squid come around on the belt. I think about the young man who, not long ago, took a piece of sushi off a conveyor belt, licked it, and put it back on the dish, all the while being filmed by a buddy. He posted the video, and it went viral. Within days, both young men were prostrate on the floor of a television studio, begging the Japanese public for forgiveness. (Here, people take proper behavior seriously. Most Tokyo residents walk on the left side of the pavement so as not to collide with those headed in the other direction, a sensible practice when 14 million people inhabit your city. Few people throw trash on the street, and even in so crowded a city, you rarely hear car horns or raised voices.)
The 2011 earthquake, which triggered the Fukushima meltdown, also damaged thousands of fishing boats and hundreds of ports. Thanks to assistance from the Japanese government, the industry has largely recovered. The government also spent money to help with the shortfall in seafood sales, which plummeted nationally when China and Hong Kong halted all imports of Japanese fish. We are constantly reminded of the crisis: printed on some restaurant menus is a notice that the fish being served comes from “far to the south.”
You might think that this history would result in extreme caution when it comes to eating fish that once swam in contaminated water. But perhaps this very history has inured Japanese fish consumers—especially older diners—to any possible risks.These days, older Japanese people tend to be the main consumers of fish; younger diners show a preference for meat. I ask one young Japanese restaurant patron whether the possibility of eating irradiated fish has altered his habits. He tells me that he has been eating fish only once a week for other reasons. “Shellfish absorbs plastics, so it’s unhealthy,” he says. “I don’t eat octopus because they’re intelligent, and it would be like eating a cat. Wild-caught salmon’s hard to get and too expensive. So is wild-caught shrimp.”
The bluefin tuna catch, meanwhile, has declined by more than 90 percent since the 1960s. Buyers still barter furiously at the Tsukiji Market, where whole frozen tunas are lined up on the floor of what looks like a morgue. Elsewhere at this historic marketplace, established in the 1600s, you can find a shoehorn-tight bazaar of 400-odd stalls selling vegetables, fruit, spices, condiments, and every sort of cookware. Seafood is grilled over charcoal and served to standing gourmands. When we visit, we enjoy abalone, crab (hairy and thorny), eel, more tuna, all finished off with a sweet and savory pickled cucumber on a stick. In makeshift mini-restaurants, turnover is quick and operators jealously guard their spaces. But as I finish my bottle of Kirin, with Penny off buying a bamboo cooking spoon, I find myself thinking not only about the meal we’ve just had but also of the Second World War, and the atomic bombs that killed a quarter of a million people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They left in their hideous wake radioactivity, leukemia, and other horrors. It occurs to me that this is a country with a historical uneasiness about radiation. You might think that this history would result in extreme caution when it comes to eating fish that once swam in contaminated Fukushima water. But perhaps this very history has inured Japanese fish consumers—especially older diners—to any possible risks.
We decide to try a famous place in Nakano City, one of a seemingly endless chain of interlocking neighborhoods. This one’s called Maguro Mart, and it’s jammed into a maze of crowded streets. Steps lead up to an open second floor with low tables and benches, where diners can seriously get down with tuna. We’re provided with a card showing a dozen cuts and a diagram of the fish itself.
Cuts from the head down to the belly arrive on a slab of wood accompanied by a pile of salt and freshly grated wasabi. While studying the diagram, we eat various kinds of sashimi, including fatty tuna and a cut from the base of the tail that contains slivers of soft, edible bone. We’re served almost every part of the tuna (the eyeballs, for some reason, never come), and our soy sauce dishes are soon brimming with pale pink, translucent flesh. At the end of the meal, what’s left of the fish arrives with little hand-carved, sharp-edged wood disks that allow us to scrape out the last holdouts between the ribs. Though we’re up to our gills in tuna, we aren’t willing to stop until every scrap is gone, minute traces of tritium be damned.
It’s an incredible indulgence, we know. Eating a threatened species is hardly exemplary. The tuna is arguably doomed, but then so are we. According to scientists, mammals are at the midpoint of their long, fortunate existence. We’re all downstream of Fukushima now, a bleak realization that occurs to us amid so much pleasure, our bellies full and heads light from all that pure protein, as we step out into the forever amazing Tokyo night.
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Anthony Lane, in a 2023 New Yorker movie review that I recently read, describes a film by Paul Tremblay as set in seclusion, like other films by the director. We should take that setting as an omen, warns Lane. We should be under no illusions, I took him to mean, and should expect something grisly.
The phrase in seclusion reverberated with me because a few weeks earlier—as I described in this space a few weeks ago—a friend of mine, a former running mate, had been brutally attacked and repeatedly bitten by a pair of dogs when she was training. She was lucky, because though she often goes off on her own into wilderness areas to train for the long-distance races she participates in, that day she was on an asphalt country lane on the outskirts of Gijón, not a populous area but not entirely secluded either. A delivery van came along and the driver was able to scare the dogs away and call for help, though according to my friend, the driver was so agitated by the scene—woman face-down, covered in blood, with a pair of dogs mauling her—that he almost couldn’t manage to make the call. A pair of cyclists arrived and helped hold off the dogs, which had not gone far and were edging closer, and then the police and ambulance came. The woman was saved. Which wouldn’t have been the case in a truly isolated area, where she might not have been found at all. Semi-seclusion saved her.
About a month later, in a small village in the mountains, a middle-aged man attacked his septuagenarian father with an axe one evening in the home they shared. It was 10 p.m. and dark. The wounded father escaped into the street and went straight to his neighbors’ house, 20 yards across the road, calling for help while his axe-swinging son pursued him. A lot of screams, a lot of commotion—the elderly neighbors called 112, the emergency number in Spain, but did not open up. They didn’t know who was outside their door or what was happening. It’s perhaps just as well they didn’t open up—the son was deranged, and after decapitating his father on these neighbors’ doorstep, he went down to the roundabout, carrying the head in one hand and the axe in the other, and shedding his bloodied clothes as he went. The half-naked man swinging his axe at passing cars while holding aloft his father’s head must have been a terrifying sight. No one else was injured, and the national highway police soon arrived and subdued the man, who was sedated and sent to the hospital, pending the investigation to determine the cause of what appeared to be a psychotic break. A couple of days later, I was in class, making small talk with a 20-year-old student while waiting for his two classmates to arrive.
“Spring fever,” I said, to describe the way students, at this time of year, arrive late to class, seem distracted, and in general have their minds on subjects other than their studies. “Everyone’s got spring fever,” I said. “Do you know the phrase? It means people get restless and excited with spring. They go a little crazy.” I considered calling up the theme song from the musical State Fair to let my student listen, but instead the story of the decapitation popped into my mind, so I mentioned it. “Speaking of crazy, did you hear on the news about the man who attacked his father with an axe?”
He had not heard it. As I began the tale, the second student arrived, and because he had heard the news, I asked him to tell the story. When he finished, the three of us expressed our horror and disbelief. The third student, arriving just then, did, too.
By coincidence, the English lesson that day was centered around films, and soon we were talking about The Godfather movies, favorites of one of the students. Impossible to discuss these movies without reference to bloody acts of revenge, violence, and death in teeming New York, Las Vegas, and Cuba. Nothing set in seclusion about the venues where various members of various crime families did their murderous business. Suffering from spring fever is the lament of the teenage Margy, heading off to the fair with her family. She knows it doesn’t have to be spring to have spring fever, and a story doesn’t have to be set in seclusion to have a bad ending.
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Amanda Holmes reads Liu Xiaobo’s “One Letter,” translated from the Mandarin by Jeffrey Yang. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter; Bloomsbury, 368 pp., $32
In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act Three of his production of The Cherry Orchard.
Stanislavsky confessed that he asked the stage manager to fill her cup with scalding water. “You have to do everything, anything, even stupid things, to get what you need in the theater,” he said.
This sentiment—unfashionable as it may be today—holds true for other arts, too. I thought of it while reading Philip Gefter’s engaging new book about the making of the 1966 movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? By leaning into stupid things, Gefter, the author of several books about visual culture, gives readers a rich, messy, accurate picture of how artists, especially collaborative artists, do things. (Stupid things are what’s missing from Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a biopic of Leonard Bernstein that presents so anodyne a vision of the creative process that it might as well be about dentistry.)
Cocktails with George and Martha is a dishy, process-heavy appreciation of a cinematic masterpiece. Gefter shows how, after almost 60 years, the kitchen-sink savagery of the movie—and Edward Albee’s 1962 play, on which it is based—still shatters. The film portrays a long, cocktail-infused Saturday night at the home of middle-aged history professor George (played by Richard Burton in the movie) and his wife, Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). Martha has invited another couple over for drinks, with whom they begin to bicker, then flirt, then wage war. Their heaviest weapon is their imaginary child (they are, in fact, childless), whom they use as a punching bag and a life raft. Gefter locates Albee’s genius in the creation of the child and his poetic language, but also in the tender ending, which suggests that for George and Martha, at least, the sparring has been play-acting, albeit of the most serious kind.
As fun as that is, is it enough for a book? After all, many of the characters involved are already well known. Mark Harris’s 688-page biography of Mike Nichols, the director of the film, was published only three years ago. Nonetheless, the answer is yes—and for two reasons. First, Gefter deftly connects the stupid things that made Woolf a part of the zeitgeist. He credits the scandal that Albee’s hit play incited, which haunted the 1966 movie, for ushering in a more permissive era. Albee had his characters curse, drink, and have sex, but more important, he portrayed a battle-scarred middle-class marriage as a norm, not an exception. Woolf was not just about George and Martha; it was about all marriages and is thus a “dividing line” for movies about marriage, Gefter asserts: before, screwball comedies; afterward, scathing exposés, Bergman, Woody Allen, and Cassavetes. Gefter also ties the play’s success to many cultural shifts, including the publication, in the same era, of two big books: Betty Friedan’s 1963 feminist tome about female discontent, The Feminine Mystique, and Richard Yates’s 1961 novel of suburban anomie, Revolutionary Road. Some reviewers of Albee’s play considered it necessary viewing, but others complained about Martha’s obscenities and the play’s display of nihilism and narcissism. In The New York Times, Joseph Hayes damned Albee’s “sick views”—code for his homosexuality. Some critics may have tried to marginalize Woolf. No one could ignore it.
All of that creates a convincing portrait of a masterpiece, or what the critic Richard Gilman called a “flop hit”—a play people admired but also loathed. But Cocktails With George and Martha has a second arrow in its quiver: the daily production journals of Ernest Lehman, the novelist who wrote and produced the film. Gefter was one of the first researchers to see the journals, embargoed for 25 years at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Lehman, who had created iconic American films including Sabrina, North by Northwest, and The Sound of Music, kept, according to Gefter, “a systematic chessboard-like description of the daily activities, obstacles, minuscule dramas, and protracted sagas.”
Among those dramas was Lehman’s decision, against Albee’s wishes, to cast Liz Taylor, at the time 33 years old and considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, as frowsy Martha. (Albee wanted Bette Davis.) “I don’t think you’re enough of a harridan,” her then-husband Richard Burton told her. Lehman picked him to play George. The power couple, whose real-life quarreling added to the film’s allure, insisted that Lehman bring in their friend Mike Nichols to direct. Nichols, who at the time had never directed a film, immediately understood his challenges: translating three-plus hours of dialogue into images while retaining Albee’s poetry, fighting the studio and the Motion Picture Association of America censor, and besting Lehman. Indeed, the epic and petty fights between Lehman and Nichols were like a schtick from The Odd Couple. But they were not trivial. From his first move—reversing Lehman’s “improvements” to Albee’s script, which included making the imaginary child real and having that character kill himself—Nichols made the film what it would be.
Lehman proved no match for the director, whose moxie Gefter both admires and shrinks from. One of Nichols’s classic moves was to bulldoze opponents by flaunting his wealth and connections—for example, leaving a conversation with Lehman to talk loudly on the phone to a celebrity.
Gefter contends, for the most part convincingly, that Nichols’s peacocking protected his vision of Woolf from the stars and the suits. He won many battles, including getting Taylor to agree to an unheard-of three-week rehearsal to help prepare her for the role of Martha. (He had less luck persuading the actress to arrive on set at nine a.m.) He plotted to get the first cameraman on the set fired to make way for genius cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Nichols’s control was so absolute that Lehman was left rounding up white lilies and turquoise jewelry for Taylor.
Like the film itself, Cocktails with George and Martha has a happy ending. Studio head Jack Warner fires Nichols but delays the sacking so that the director can make good on his promise to bring Jackie Kennedy to the Catholic Office for Motion Pictures screening, held at the Warner Brothers office in New York. Nichols and Kennedy sit behind Monsignor Thomas F. Little and praise the movie. “Jack would have loved this film,” she says. Woolf passes the studio censor, which itself would dissolve two years later, contributing to the creation of the modern movie ratings system. And the film, finished late and insanely over budget, wins five Oscars, including Best Actress for Taylor. What sticks in my mind is what it took to get there—in other words, the stupid things.
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I’m still surprised that no one ever told me about the incubator baby kidnapping. To be fair, it happened 63 years before I was born, but it also happened half a block from where I was born, and little Marian Bleakley was perhaps the most famous baby in the country even before she was kidnapped. My great-grandfather’s uncle, moreover, was the county attorney who got the kidnappers convicted. Marian went on to graduate from my high school and attend the college where I now teach. And yet, I’d never heard of her until a few years ago, when I stumbled across a bizarre headline in a digitized newspaper archive: INCUBATOR BABY AGAIN KIDNAPED [sic].
Yes, “again.” It turns out that Marian’s 1909 abduction from her Topeka home was just another chapter in perhaps the most dramatic custody dispute since the one adjudicated by King Solomon—although I may simply be surrendering to that comparison after seeing so many journalists use it. Thousands of articles were published about little Marian between 1904 and 1914—sensationalistic, gossipy, confused, and often contradictory pieces typical of the news at that time. It didn’t help that journalists had landed on one of the most protracted, pretzel-plotted sagas in the history of American weirdness. I’ve probably read 100 of those articles now, and I feel less confident in my ability to tell the true story of the incubator baby than I did after reading the first one. But it’s not going to tell itself.
On February 15, 1904, Charlotte Bleakley gave birth prematurely at the so-called private sanitarium of a St. Louis midwife named Mary J. Merrifield. Bleakley was chloroformed during the delivery and was told afterward that the baby had not survived. She wrote to her husband, from whom she was estranged, requesting money for the burial.
But the baby was still alive. An unwed actress named Edith Stanley had given birth in the sanitarium at the same time, and there had been a switcheroo. Believing that the Bleakley baby was hers, Stanley had left her in the care of the midwife, whose services included arranging adoptions. (Laws regulating adoption at the time were lax, to say the least. Merrifield frequently placed ads in the Sunday Post-Dispatch: “Pretty baby girl and boy for adoption, free.”) But because the two-pound preemie was in danger of dying, Merrifield turned her over to the Imperial Incubator Concession Company, a popular exhibitor at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Visitors thronged the incubator display, drawn to the novel sight of impossibly tiny babies struggling toward viability in newfangled artificial wombs.
In the case of the Bleakley baby, they were also drawn by something else they saw in her face: its seeming resemblance to that of a chimpanzee. A nurse affixed the name “Emily Darwin” to her incubator, a joke that was apparently considered affectionate rather than cruel. Journalists, however, treated the girl’s simian appearance as a phenomenon with serious evolutionary implications: “A constant stream of medical men has been pouring in to look at the latest scientific curiosity, a baby in whom is a living proof of the Darwinian theory.”
“Emily Darwin” grew into a conventionally beautiful baby. One of the exhibitors at the fair, Stella Barclay, became so emotionally attached to her that she relocated her perfume concession to be closer to the incubator. Wealthy and childless, Barclay and her husband inquired about adopting little Emily. By that time, Charlotte Bleakley had learned that her daughter was still alive—though newspapers give multiple, conflicting accounts of how and when the switcheroo was revealed to her. Emily graduated from the incubator, and after a warm exchange of letters with Stella Barclay in November 1904, Bleakley signed paperwork authorizing the adoption. Emily Darwin became Thelma Barclay of Moline, Illinois, the sole heiress to a substantial fortune.
Then Charlotte Bleakley read Les Misérables and, moved by the story of Cosette, decided she wanted her baby back. She sued for custody in Illinois in May 1905, arguing (dubiously) that she had been tricked into giving up the child and (probably correctly) that the adoption contract was invalid under Missouri law. The court ruled in her favor, the Barclays appealed, and while the appeal was pending, Bleakley fled to her home in Kansas with Thelma, whom she’d renamed Marian.
The next several years were a judicial free-for-all, with Kansas, Illinois, and federal courts at various levels awarding custody first to the Barclays, then to Bleakley, again and again. Marian remained with Bleakley despite her ever-shifting legal status, in part because Bleakley kept absconding with her. “Since the litigation commenced the baby has been hurried around the country to prevent the serving of papers on its custodians and has even been kidnaped [sic] on one or two occasions,” the Topeka Daily Capital reported in November 1907. Two months earlier, Stella Barclay and a private detective had tracked Marian down in the tiny Kansas town of Elgin and ripped her from Bleakley’s arms. An angry mob led by Bleakley and her mother pursued the abductors to the train station, and a brief fight followed, in which Bleakley bit a wealthy cattleman. While the authorities tried to sort that situation out, Bleakley again fled town with the girl.
At some point in the midst of all this, the Barclays learned the story of Edith Stanley and became convinced that Bleakley wasn’t Marian’s biological mother. “She was the child of an actress,” Stella Barclay now insisted. “And, by the way, little Marian is the exact picture of her. The strong similarity of features to my mind makes the identification complete.” This was a risky argument for the Barclays to pursue in court because it could have nullified their claim to have legally adopted the girl from Bleakley. But pursue it they did, enlisting Merrifield to testify that Charlotte Bleakley’s baby had, in fact, been stillborn. By this time, though, the midwife had told so many different stories that her credibility was shot. (It’s pretty clear that the sanitarium’s services included illegal abortions, and fear of scrutiny would have made Merrifield evasive.)
In 1909, Stella Barclay again hired a private detective, Freeman Tillotson, whose employees traced Bleakley and the child (now five) to 1027 Garfield Avenue in Topeka. Tillotson’s people spent several months surveilling the house, going so far as to rent the place directly across the street. On the morning of August 21, with the help of a woman posing as a soap vendor, a Tillotson deputy named Joseph Gentry entered the Bleakley house and pried Marian from the arms of her grandmother. When a visiting cousin of Bleakley’s tried to intervene, Gentry knocked him out with the butt of a revolver. He then carried the screaming child to a nearby car, where Stella Barclay was waiting.
One day when he and one of the grandsons were playing in the library, Clark noticed two big scrapbooks on a shelf. His friend told him they were full of old newspaper clippings: “My grandmother was the incubator baby.”During the subsequent trial, Tillotson and Gentry testified that they genuinely believed they were returning a child to her rightful mother. Ably prosecuted by John J. Schenck, my great-great-grandfather’s younger brother, both men were sentenced to terms in the state penitentiary. Tillotson was later pardoned by the governor, at the urging of a magnanimous Charlotte Bleakley. Charges against Stella Barclay were dismissed, also with Bleakley’s approval. Remarkably, some version of the custody case wandered all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. According to a 1914 article in the Topeka Daily Capital, “The long legal fight for possession of the St. Louis exposition ‘incubator baby’ was dismissed in the supreme court today because neither party to the suit had printed the record.”
The name Charlotte Bleakley shows up in the papers just a handful of times—brief mentions in society-page items—between 1915 and 1977, the year she died at age 97. A scattering of “Where is she now?” notices appeared when Marian got married in 1925, including a couple of lines in Time magazine, and again when she divorced in 1927, but nothing more. One salutary effect of this hard-won irrelevance was that it permitted the family something like an ordinary life. Charlotte and Marian both became teachers. Marian’s brief first marriage produced a daughter. She remarried in 1939, to Howard Adams, a prominent banker and Kansas state senator from the little town of Maple Hill. He was nine years her senior, with a body ravaged by polio and two spinster sisters who suspected that Marian was a gold digger. “And perhaps she was,” says Nick Clark, a Maple Hill native and the town’s unofficial historian, “but people didn’t care. She took really good care of Howard.” He died in 1959, leaving her roughly half a million dollars, on which she lived comfortably for 35 more years.
My brother, who pastored for many years at Maple Hill’s one church, had put me in touch with Clark. He says he grew up with Marian’s three grandsons and spent a lot of time in the Adams house. He vividly remembers Marian and Charlotte, both of them prim and elegant. Marian dyed her hair dark brown but kept a dramatic white streak down the center. He never saw her angry or heard her say an unkind word, but he remembers that she was strict with her grandsons.
The older residents of Maple Hill found Charlotte haughty and affected, Clark recalls, but children adored visiting her. “They had the best library in town,” he says, “and Mrs. Bleakley would have us come in and sit down on the floor, and she’d read from classic children’s books. She would also have little scripts for plays we would act out.”
One day when he and one of the grandsons were playing in the Bleakley library, Clark noticed two big scrapbooks on a shelf. His friend told him they were full of old newspaper clippings: “My grandmother was the incubator baby.”
“I was probably in junior high at the time,” Clark says. “I didn’t think too much more about it.”
Only recently, when he got curious and dug into the archives himself, did Clark learn that there was once a question as to whether Charlotte was Marian’s birth mother. And barring DNA test results from their descendants, he says, he’s not inclined to doubt it now. “Those two women were remarkably alike—the same height, the same body shape, even the same voice. When one was speaking, you had to look to see who it was.”
Ultimately, it’s not surprising that the Bleakleys’ final disappearing act was so, well, final. There was something particularly of-its-moment about the incubator baby saga. Every element of it stirred up anxiety. At a time when science and technology were threatening humanity’s longest-held assumptions about itself, here was a baby being publicly raised by a machine, her evolving appearance seemingly confirming Darwin’s theories. At a time of social unease about the “New Woman” who wanted to get a job and ride a bicycle and vote, here were two women—one married and wealthy, one single and poor—driven to an identical, primal ferocity by the prospect of lost motherhood. It may be that America didn’t so much lose interest in the incubator baby’s story as lose the ability to be interested. Nothing is as quaint as yesterday’s terrifying notions of the future.
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Roger Angell, writing in 2012 about the death of his wife, Carol, some months earlier, tells what their son dreamed on the night his mother died. Angell writes,
She is hovering close to him, and they are on 110th Street, close to the Harlem Meer, at the northeast corner of Central Park. The Park is bursting with spring blossoms. She is walking a dog that might be our fox terrier Andy. Then she falls behind John Henry. He turns to find her, and she has become an almost black shape and appears to be covered with feathers or black-and-dark-gray Post-its. She and the dog lift off the ground and go fluttering past him, and disappear over the low wall of the Park.
Lifting off the ground, topping the low wall, disappearing over the park, dog on a leash sailing away too: the description brings to my mind Mary Poppins, who arrives and leaves through a park, with an umbrella or bunch of balloons in hand, remarkable to the children who watch open-mouthed, though she touches down and departs as matter-of-factly as if she were taking a bus. The children soon know that when the wind changes, Mary Poppins will be gone. By the time we’ve lived many years, we know those fickle, changing winds, know that people do depart, and that others are left behind. The survivors, as they are called in the obits, manage to go on.
Published in The New Yorker along with the essay, which is called “Over the Wall,” is a photo from decades earlier of the two of them, Carol and Roger Angell, sitting together on the top step of their front porch in Brooklin, Maine. Her face is turned, and we see her in profile, laughing toward her husband, who sits close beside her, smiling straight at the camera. Her laughter puts starchy Mary Poppins to shame, as does the dog she owned. An umbrella or kite or bunch of balloons are all very well, but a fox terrier on a leash is better, homier, more enjoyable. A dog is a companion, not just a prop. “She,” I say aloud, “looks like so much fun,” as if I were reporting on her. Him I address directly, as if, though much older by the time of publication than in the picture and probably deaf, he can hear me. But it is now a dozen years since his essay was published, and he has departed too, over the park, so I am somewhat confused about whom I’m addressing: the man in his mid-40s sitting on the top step, or the 92-year-old author of the essay, or the deceased 101-year-old. I say, “You must be so proud of her.” I’m trying to see the happy side, because I am sorry for his loss. I’m sorry even though he himself no longer is.
He writes in the essay of losing some details over time, but says that he no longer worries about what he might forget: enough of her endures. He describes revisiting her in photographs and enjoying, in particular, looking at her hands. She died in April, he published the essay in November. He says a lot of time has passed, though I think seven or eight months is nothing. Yet it is enough time to alter his feeling about the dead whose graves he has visited in the cemetery in Maine over the spring and summer. These people are his wife, his parents, a brother, and a daughter, among others, and he sees them, by the time he writes his essay, as cleansed by time, free of cares and pleasures that once bound them to earth. The dead, Angell writes, are less and less aware of us. It is as if they sink deeper and deeper into their graves, farther removed from the living, slowly reverting to a state of innocence. He writes, “I think of them often—my seniors, my innocents, my babies—and envy them, and believe that many others my age have had this passing thought as well, and have from time to time felt a flow of protective love for them, and even a bit of pride that we can stand in for them, or stand up for them.”
He was proud of her, I imagine, the way you are proud of a group of kindergarten children on a spring day, all happy to be in line and holding hands while waiting for the bus to come take them on their school trip. Protective love, he says. Would you not worry about the weather, about the wind whipping up and the clouds scudding by, the change at first providing a touch of excitement and a welcome distraction for the waiting children? You would, you do—I did when I saw a small hoard of Spanish schoolchildren all holding hands in preparation for a school outing, though you can do nothing to stop the gusts or ensure the lasting sunshine.
When Roger Angell died two years ago, did he float over the wall after Carol and Andy? Why ever not. The dead don’t need umbrellas, balloons, or terriers on leashes. The dead, Angell seems to suggest, are free.
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Amanda Holmes reads Emily Dickinson’s “How Happy Is the Little Stone.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “How Happy Is the Little Stone” by Emily Dickinson appeared first on The American Scholar.
When Esteban Cabeza de Baca was a child, his father often recounted tales of his time as a bodyguard for farm-labor activist Cesar Chavez in the 1960s and ’70s. “My dad had to pat people down before they would go into the hall to hear Chavez talk,” he says. “One guy came in with sticks of dynamite wrapped onto his body, and my dad had to take that apart and get him out of there.” A graduate of Columbia University’s studio art MFA program, Cabeza de Baca has spent the past year painting scenes from his father’s life. Those works are part of an ongoing solo exhibition, Cesar’s Angels, at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles.
- March To Sacramento, 2024, acrylic and cochineal on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. (Courtesy the Artist, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.)
- Dolores, 2024, acrylic and cochineal on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. (Courtesy the Artist, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.)
- The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth, 2024, acrylic and cochineal on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. (Courtesy the Artist, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.)
Cabeza de Baca’s surrealist-tinged paintings are a sort of “Mobius strip, where you can’t distinguish between foreground and background, and there’s not a linear point of view,” he says. One painting in the exhibition, March to Sacramento, depicts the Delano grape strikers, who, in 1966, trekked 300 miles to Sacramento to demand better working conditions. In the painting, giant ladybugs march alongside farm workers, whose legs elongate into the foreground. Cabeza de Baca’s work, both in this exhibition and more broadly, deals with underlying currents of climate change and how environmental problems can disproportionately affect marginalized communities. The solution is, at least in part, for people to reconnect to the land. “We have to work toward a better way of realizing our interrelationships with the environment,” he says. “And I think those themes were running through the farm workers’ movement, too.”
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We were saddened to learn that Alice Munro passed away on May 13, 2024, at the age of 92. This short story, which our previous editor, Robert Wilson, called “mysterious and affecting,” appeared in the first issue of the Scholar to feature fiction.
I saw the crypt before my husband did. It was on the left-hand side, his side of the car, but he was busy driving. We were on a narrow, bumpy road.
“What was that?” I said. “Something strange.”
A large, unnatural mound blanketed with grass.
We turned around as soon as we could find a place, though we hadn’t much time. We were on our way to have lunch with friends who live on Georgian Bay. But we are possessive about this country and try not to let anything get by us.
There it was, set in the middle of a little country cemetery. Like a big woolly animal—like some giant wombat, lolling around in a prehistoric landscape.
We climbed a bank and unhooked a gate and went around to look at the front end of this thing. A stone wall there, between an upper and a lower arch, and a brick wall within the lower arch. No names or dates, nothing but a skinny cross carved roughly into the keystone of the upper arch, as with a stick or a finger. At the other, lower end of the mound, nothing but earth and grass and some big protruding stones, probably set there to hold the earth in place. No markings on them, either—no clues as to who or what might be hidden inside.
We returned to the car.
About a year after this, I had a phone call from the nurse in my doctor’s office. The doctor wanted to see me. An appointment had been made. I knew without asking what this would be about. Three weeks or so before, I had gone to a city clinic for a mammogram. There was no special reason for me to do this, no problem. It is just that I have reached the age when a yearly mammogram is recommended. I had missed last year’s, however, because of too many other things to do.
The results of the mammogram had been sent to my doctor.
There was a lump deep in my left breast, which neither my doctor or I had been able to feel. We still could not feel it. My doctor said that the mammogram showed it to be about the size of a pea. He had made an appointment for me to see a city doctor who would do a biopsy. As I was leaving he laid his hand on my shoulder. A gesture of concern or reassurance. He is a friend, and I knew that his first wife’s death had begun in just this way.
There were 10 days to be put in before I could see the city doctor. I filled the time by answering letters and cleaning up my house and going through my files and having people to dinner. It was a surprise to me that I was busying myself in this way instead of thinking about what you might call deeper matters. I didn’t do any serious reading or listening to music, and I didn’t go into a muddled trance as I so often do, looking out the big window in the early morning as the sunlight creeps into the cedars. I didn’t even want to go for walks by myself, though my husband and I went for our usual walks together or for drives.
I got it into my head that I would like to see the crypt again and to find out something about it. So we set out, sure—or reasonably sure—that we remembered which road it was on. But we did not find it. We took the next road over and did not find it on that one either. Surely it was in Bruce County, we said, and it was on the north side of an east-west unpaved road, and there were a lot of evergreen trees close by. We spent three or four afternoons looking for it and were puzzled and disconcerted. But it was a pleasure, as always, to be together in this part of the world looking at the countryside that we think we know so well and that is always springing some sort of surprise on us.
The landscape here is a record of ancient events. It was formed by the advancing, stationary, and retreating ice. The ice has staged its conquests and retreats here several times, withdrawing for the last time about 15,000 years ago.
Quite recently, you might say. Quite recently now that I have got used to a certain way of reckoning history.
A glacial landscape such as this is vulnerable. Many of its various contours are made up of gravel, and gravel is easy to get at, easy to scoop out, and always in demand. That’s the material that makes these back roads passable—gravel from the chewed-up hills, the plundered terraces, that have been turned into holes in the land. And it’s a way for farmers to get hold of some cash. One of my earliest memories is of the summer my father sold off the gravel on our river flats, and we had the excitement of the trucks going past all day, as well as the importance of the sign at our gate. Children Playing. That was us. Then when the trucks were gone, the gravel removed, there was the novelty of pits and hollows that held, almost into the summer, the remains of the spring floods. Such hollows will eventually grow clumps of tough flowering weeds, then grass and bushes.
In the big gravel pits you see hills turned into hollows—as if a part of the landscape had managed, in a haphazard way, to tum itself inside out—and hollows where before there were only terraces or river flats. The steep sides of the hollows grow lush, in time, bumpy with greenery. But the tracks of the glacier are gone for good.
So you have to keep checking, taking in the changes, seeing things while they last.
We have special maps that we travel with. They are maps sold to accompany a book called The Physiography of Southern Ontario, by Lyman Chapman and Donald Putnam—whom we refer to, familiarly but somewhat reverentially, as Put and Chap. These maps show the usual roads and towns and rivers, but they show other things as well—things that were a complete surprise to me when I first saw them.
Look at just one map—a section of southern Ontario south of Georgian Bay. Roads and towns and rivers appear, as well as township boundaries. But look what else—patches of bright yellow, fresh green, battleship gray, and a darker mud gray, and a very pale gray, blue and tan and orange and rosy pink and purple and burgundy brown. Clusters of freckles. Ribbons of green like grass snakes. Narrow fluttery strokes from a red pen.
What is all this?
The yellow color shows sand, not along the lakeshore but collected inland, often bordering a swamp or a long-gone lake. The freckles are not round but lozenge shaped, and they appear in the landscape like partly buried eggs, with the blunt end against the flow of the ice. These are drumlins—thickly packed in some places, sparse in others. Some qualifying as big smooth hills, some barely breaking through the ground. They give their name to the soil in which they appear (drumlinized till—tan) and to the somewhat rougher soil that has none of them in it (undrumlinized till—battleship gray). The glacier in fact did lay them down like eggs, neatly and economically getting rid of material that it had picked up in its bulldozing advance. And where it didn’t manage this, the ground is naturally rougher.
The purple tails are end moraines. They show where the ice halted on its long retreat, putting down a ridge of rubble at its edge. The vivid green strokes are eskers, and they are the easiest of all features to recognize when you’re looking through the car window. Miniature mountain ranges, dragons’ backs—they show the route of the rivers that tunneled under the ice, at right angles to its front. Torrents loaded with gravel, which they discharged as they went. Usually there will be a little mild-mannered creek running along beside an esker—a direct descendant of that ancient battering river.
The orange color is for spillways, the huge channels that carried off the meltwater. And the dark gray shows the swamps that have developed in the spillways and are still there. Blue shows the clay soil, where the ice water was trapped in lakes. These places are flat but not smooth, and there is something sour and lumpy about clay fields. Heavy soil, coarse grass, poor drainage.
Green is for the beveled till, the wonderfully smooth surface that the old Lake Warren planed in the deposits along the shore of today’s Lake Huron.
Red strokes and red interrupted lines that appear on the beveled till, or on the sand nearby, are remnants of bluffs and the abandoned beaches of those ancestors of the Great Lakes, whose outlines are discernible now only by a gentle lift of the land. Such prosaic, modem, authoritative-sounding names they have been given—Lake Warren, Lake Whittlesey.
Up on the Bruce Peninsula there is limestone under a thin soil (pale gray), and around Owen Sound and on Cape Rich there is shale at the bottom of the Niagara Escarpment, exposed where the limestone is worn off. Crumbly rock that can be made into brick of the same color it shows on the map—rosy pink.
My favorite of all the kinds of country is the one I’ve left till last. This is kame, or kame moraine, which is a chocolate burgundy color on the map and is generally in blobs, not ribbons. A big blob here, a little one there. Kame moraines show where a heap of dead ice sat, cut off from the rest of the moving glacier, earth-stuff pouring through all its holes and crevices. Or sometimes it shows where two lobes of ice pulled apart and the crevice filled in. End moraines are hilly in what seems a reasonable way, not as smooth as drumlins, but still harmonious, rhythmical, while kame moraines are all wild and bumpy, unpredictable, with a look of chance and secrets.
I didn’t learn any of this at school. I think there was some nervousness then about being at loggerheads with the Bible in the matter of the creation of the Earth. I learned it when I came to live here with my second husband, a geographer. When I came back to where I never expected to be, in the countryside where I had grown up. So my knowledge is untainted, fresh. I get a naive and particular pleasure from matching what I see on the map with what I can see through the car window. Also from trying to figure out what bit of landscape we’re in before I look at the map—and being right a good deal of the time. And it is exciting to me to spot the boundaries, when it’s a question of the different till plains, or where the kame moraine takes over from the end moraine.
But there is always more than just the keen pleasure of identification. There’s the fact of these separate domains, each with its own history and reason, its favorite crops and trees and weeds, its special expression, its pull on the imagination. The fact of these little countries lying snug and unsuspected, like and unlike as siblings can be, in a landscape that’s usually disregarded, or dismissed as drab agricultural counterpane. It’s the fact you cherish.
I thought that the appointment I had was for a biopsy, but it turned out not to be. It was an appointment to let the city doctor decide whether he would do a biopsy, and after examining my breast and the results of the mammogram, he decided that he would. He had seen only the results of my most recent mammogram—those from 1990 and 1991 had not arrived yet from the country hospital where they had been done. The biopsy was set for a date two weeks ahead, and I was given a sheet with instructions about how to prepare for it.
I said that two weeks seemed like quite a while to wait.
At this stage of the game, the doctor said, two weeks was immaterial.
That was not what I had been led to believe.
But I did not complain—not after a look at some of the people in the waiting room. I am over sixty. My death would not be a disaster. Not in comparison with the death of a young mother, a family wage earner, a child. It would not be apparent as a disaster.
It bothered us that we could not find the crypt. We extended our search. Perhaps it was not in Bruce County but in next-door Grey County? Sometimes we were sure that we were on the right road, but always we were disappointed. I went to the town library to look at the 19th-century county atlases, to see if perhaps the country cemeteries were marked on the township maps. They appeared to be marked on the maps of Huron County, but not in Bruce or Grey. (This wasn’t true, I found out later they were marked, or some of them were, but I managed to miss the small faint Cs.)
In the library I met a friend who had dropped in to see us last summer shortly after our discovery. We had told him about the crypt and given him some rough directions for finding it, because he is interested in old cemeteries. He said now that he had written down the directions as soon as he got home. I had forgotten ever giving them. He went straight home and found the piece of paper—found it miraculously, he said, in a welter of other papers. He came back to the library where I was still looking through the atlases.
Peabody, Scone, McCullough Lake. That was what he had written down.
Farther north than we had thought—just beyond the boundary of the territory we had been doggedly covering.
So we found the right cemetery, and the grass-grown crypt looked just as surprising, as primitive, as we remembered. Now we had enough time to look around. We saw that most of the old slabs had been collected together and placed in the form of a cross. Nearly all of these were the tombstones of children. In any of these old cemeteries, the earliest dates were apt to be those for children, or young mothers lost in childbirth, or young men who had died accidentally—drowned, or hit by a falling tree, killed by a wild horse, or involved in an accident during the raising of a barn. There were hardly any old people around to die in those days.
The names were nearly all German, and many of the inscriptions were entirely in German. Hier ruhet in Gott. And Geboren, followed by the name of some German town or province, then Gestorben, with a date in the ‘60s or ‘70s of the 19th century. Gestorben, here in Sullivan Township in Grey County in a colony of England in the middle of the bush.
Das arme Herz hieniedan
Von manches Sturm bewegt
Erlangt den renen Frieden
Nur wenn es night mehr schlagt.
I always have the notion that I can read German, even though I can’t. I thought that this said something about the heart, the soul, the person buried here being out of harm’s way now, and altogether better off. Herz and Sturm and nicht mehr could hardly be mistaken. But when I got home and checked the words in a German-English dictionary—finding all of them except renen, which could easily be a misspelling of reinen—I found that the verse was not so comforting. It seemed to say something about the poor heart buried here getting no peace until it stopped beating.
Better off dead.
Maybe that came out of a book of tombstone verses, and there wasn’t much choice.
Not a word on the crypt, though we searched far more thoroughly than we had done before. Nothing but that single, amateurishly drawn cross. But we did find a surprise in the northeastern corner of the cemetery. A second crypt was there, much smaller than the first one, with a smooth concrete top. No earth or grass, but a good-sized cedar tree growing out of a crack in the concrete, its roots nourished by whatever was inside.
It’s something like mound burial, we said. Something that had survived in Central Europe from pre-Christian times?
In the same city where I was to have my biopsy, and where I had the mammogram, there is a college where my husband and I were once students. I am not allowed to take out books, because I did not graduate, but I can use my husband’s card, and I can poke around in the stacks and the reference rooms to my heart’s content. During our next visit there, I went into the Regional Reference Room to read some books about Grey County and to find out whatever I could about Sullivan Township.
I read of a plague of passenger pigeons that destroyed every bit of the crops one year in the late-19th century. And of a terrible winter in the 1840s, which lasted so long and with such annihilating cold that those first settlers were living on cow cabbages dug out of the ground. (I did not know what cow cabbages were—were they ordinary cabbages kept to be fed to animals or something wild and coarser, like skunk cabbage? And how could they be dug up in such weather, with the ground like rock? There are always puzzles.) A man named Barnes had starved himself to death, letting his family have his share, so that they might survive.
A few years after that a young woman was writing to her friend in Toronto that there was a marvelous crop of berries, more than anybody could pick to eat or dry, and that when she was out picking them she had seen a bear, so close that she could make out the drops of berry juice sparkling on its whiskers. She was not afraid, she sai—she would walk through the bush to post this letter, bears or no bears.
I asked for church histories, thinking there might be something about Lutheran or German Catholic churches that would help me. It is difficult to make such requests in reference libraries because you will often be asked what it is, exactly, that you want to know, and what do you want to know it for? Sometimes it is even necessary to write your reason down. If you are doing a paper, a study, you will of course have a good reason, but what if you are just interested? The best thing probably, is to say you are doing a family history. Librarians are used to people doing that—particularly people who have gray hair—and it is generally thought to be a reasonable way of spending one’s time. Just interested sounds apologetic, if not shifty, and makes you run the risk of being seen as an idler lounging around in the library, a person at loose ends, with no proper direction in life, nothing better to do. I thought of writing on my form: research for paper concerning survival of mound burial in pioneer Ontario. But I didn’t have the nerve. I thought they might ask me to prove it.
I did locate a church that I thought might be connected with our cemetery, being a couple of country blocks west and a block north. St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran, it was called, if it was still there.
In Sullivan Township you are reminded of what the crop fields everywhere used to look like before the advent of the big farm machinery. These fields have kept the size that can be served by the horse-drawn plough, the binder, the mower. Rail fences are still in place—here and there is a rough stone wall—and along these boundaries grow hawthorn trees, chokecherries, goldenrod, old-man’s-beard.
Such fields are unchanged because there is no profit to be gained in opening them up. The crops that can be grown on them are not worth the trouble. Two big rough moraines curve across the southern part of the township—the purple ribbons turning here into snakes swollen as if each of them had swallowed a frog—and there is a swampy spillway in between them. To the north, the land is clay. Crops raised here were probably never up to much, though people used to be more resigned to working unprofitable land, more grateful for whatever they could get, than is the case today. Where such land is put to any use at all now, it’s pasture. The wooded areas—which everybody in our part of the country calls the bush—are making a strong comeback. In country like this the trend is no longer toward a taming of the landscape and a thickening of population, but rather the opposite. The bush will never again take over completely, but it is making a good grab. The deer, the wolves, which had at one time almost completely disappeared, have reclaimed some of their territory. Perhaps there will be bears soon, feasting again on the blackberries and thimbleberries and in the wild orchards. Perhaps they are here already.
As the notion of farming fades, unexpected enterprises spring up to replace it. It’s hard to think that they will last. SPORTS CARDS GALORE, says a sign that is already weathering. TWO-DOOR DOGHOUSES FOR SALE. A place where chairs can be re-caned. TIRE SUPERYARD. Antiques and beauty treatments are offered. Brown eggs, maple syrup, bagpipe lessons, unisex haircuts.
We arrive at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church on a Sunday morning just as the bell is ringing for services and the hands on the church tower point to 11 o’clock. (We learn later that those hands do not tell the time, they always point to 11 o’clock. Church time.)
St. Peter’s is large and handsome, built of limestone blocks. A high steeple on the tower and a modern glass porch to block the wind and snow. Also a long drive shed built of stone and wood—a reminder of the days when people drove to church in buggies and cutters. A pretty stone house, the rectory, surrounded by summer flowers.
We drive on to Williamsford on Highway 6, to have lunch and to give the minister a decent interval to recover from the morning service before we knock at the rectory door to seek out information. A mile or so down the road we make a discouraging discovery. Another cemetery— St. Peter’s own cemetery, with its own early dates and German names—making our cemetery, so close by, seem even more of a puzzle, an orphan.
We come back anyway, at around two o’clock. We knock on the front door of the rectory, and after a while a little girl appears and tries to unbolt the door. She can’t manage it, and makes signs for us to go around to the back. She comes running out to meet us on our way. The minister isn’t home, she says. She has gone to take afternoon services in Williamsford.
Just our informant and her sister are here, looking after the minister’s dog and cats. But if we want to know anything about churches or cemeteries or history, we should go and ask her mother, who lives up the hill in the big new log house.
She tells us her name. Rachel.
Rachel’s mother does not seem at all surprised by our curiosity or put out by our visit. She invites us into her house, where there is a noisy interested dog and a self-possessed husband just finishing a late lunch. The main floor of the house is all one big room with a wide view of fields and trees.
She brings out a book that I did not see in the Regional Reference Room. An old soft-covered history of the township. She thinks it has a chapter about cemeteries.
And in fact it does. In a short time she and I are reading together a section on the Mannerow Cemetery, “famous for its two vaults.” There is a grainy photograph of the larger crypt. It is said to have been built in 1895 to receive the body of a three-year-old boy, a son of the Mannerow family. Other members of the family were placed there in the years that followed. One Mannerow husband and wife were put into the smaller crypt in the comer of the cemetery. What was originally a family graveyard later became public, and the name of it was changed from Mannerow to Cedardale.
The vaults were roofed with concrete on the inside.
Rachel’s mother says that there is only one descendant of the family living in the township today. He lives in Scone.
“Next door to the house my brother’s in,” she says. “You know how there’s just the three houses in Scone? That’s all there is. There’s the yellow-brick house and that’s my brother’s, then the one in the middle, that’s Mannerows’. So maybe they might tell you something more, if you went there and asked them.”
While I was talking to Rachel’s mother and looking at the history book, my husband sat at the table and talked to her husband. That is the proper way for conversations to go in our part of the country. The husband asked where we came from, and on hearing that we came from Huron County, he said that he knew it very well. He went there straight off the boat, he said, when he came out from Holland not long after the war. In 1948, yes. (He is a man considerably older than his wife.) He lived for a while near Blyth, and he worked on a turkey farm.
I overhear him saying this, and when my own conversation has drawn to a close, I ask him if it was the Wallace Turkey Farm that he worked on.
Yes, he says, that was the one. And his sister married Alvin Wallace.
“Corrie Wallace,” I say.
“That’s right. That’s her.”
I ask him if he knew any Laidlaws from around that area, and he says no.
I say that if he worked at Wallaces’ (another rule in our part of the country is that you never say the so-and-sos, just the name), then he must have known Bob Laidlaw.
“He raised turkeys too,” I tell him. “And he knew Wallaces from when they’d gone to school together. Sometimes he worked with them.”
“Bob Laidlaw?” he says, on a rising note.
“Oh, sure, I knew him. But I thought you meant around Blyth. He had a place up by Wingham. West of Wingham. Bob Laidlaw.”
I say that Bob Laidlaw grew up near Blyth, on the Eighth Line of Morris township, and that was how he knew the Wallace brothers, Alvin’s father and uncle. They had all gone to school at S.S. No. 1, Morris, right beside the Wallace farm.
He takes a closer look at me and laughs.
“You’re not telling me he was your dad, are you? You’re not Sheila?”
“Sheila’s my sister. I’m the older one.”
“I didn’t know there was an older one,” he says. “I didn’t know that. But Bill and Sheila. I knew them. They used to be down working at the turkeys with us, before Christmas. You never were there?”
“I was away from home by then.”
“Bob Laidlaw. Bob Laidlaw was your dad. Well. I should have thought of that right away. But when you said from around Blyth, I didn’t catch on. I was thinking Bob Laidlaw was from up at Wingham. I never knew he was from Blyth in the first place.”
He laughs and reaches across the table to shake my hand.
“Well now. I can see it in you. Round the eyes. That’s a long time ago. It sure is. A long time ago.”
I am not sure whether he means it’s a long time ago that my father and the Wallace boys went to school in Morris Township, or a long time since he himself was a young man fresh from Holland, and worked with my father and my brother and sister preparing the Christmas turkeys. But I agree with him, and then we both say that it is a small world. We say this, as people usually do, with a sense of wonder and refreshment. (People who are not going to be comforted by this discovery usually avoid making it.) We explore the connection as far as it will go and soon find that there is not much more to be got out of it. But we are both happy. He is happy to be reminded of himself as a young man, fresh in the country and able to turn himself to any work that was offered, with confidence in what lay ahead of him. And by the looks of this well-built house with its wide view, and his lively wife, his pretty Rachel, his own still alert and useful body, it does look as if things have turned out pretty well for him.
And I am happy to find somebody who can see me still as part of my family, who can remember my father and the place where my parents worked and lived for all of their married lives, first in hope and then in honorable persistence. A place that I seldom drive past and can hardly relate to the life I live now, though it is not much more than twenty miles away.
It has changed, of course, it has changed utterly, becoming a car-wrecking operation. The front yard and the side yard and the vegetable garden and the flower borders, the hayfield, the mock-orange bush, the lilac trees, the chestnut stump, the pasture, and the ground once covered by the fox pens are all swept under a tide of car parts, gutted car bodies, smashed headlights, grilles, and fenders, overturned car seats with rotten, bloated stuffing—heaps of painted, rusted, blackened, glittering, whole or twisted, defiant, and surviving metal.
But that is not the only thing that deprives it of meaning for me. No. It is the fact that it is only twenty miles away, that I could see it every day if I wanted to. The past needs to be approached from a distance.
Rachel’s mother asks us if we would like to look at the inside of the church before we head off to Scone, and we say that we would. We walk down the hill, and she takes us hospitably into the red-carpeted interior. It smells a little damp or musty as stone buildings often do, even when they are kept quite clean.
She talks to us about how things have been going with this building and its congregation.
The whole church was raised up some years ago to add on the Sunday School and the kitchen underneath.
The bell still rings out to announce the death of every church member. One ring for every year of life. Everybody within hearing distance can listen and count the times it rings and try to figure out who it must be for. Sometimes it’s easy—a person who was expected to die. Sometimes it’s a surprise.
She mentions that the front porch of the. church is modem, as we must have noticed. There was a big argument when it was put on, between those who thought it was necessary and even liked it and those who disagreed. Finally there was a split The ones who didn’t like it went off to Williamsford and formed their own church there, though with the same minister.
The minister is a woman. The last time a minister had to be hired, five out of the seven candidates were women. This one is married to a veterinarian and used to be a veterinarian herself. Everybody likes her fine. Though there was a man from Faith Lutheran in Desboro who got up and walked out of a funeral when he found she was preaching at it. He could not stand the idea of a woman preaching.
Faith Lutheran is part of the Missouri Synod, and that is the way they are.
There was a great fire in the church some time ago. It gutted much of the inside but left the shell intact. When the surviving inside walls were scrubbed down afterward, layers of paint came off with the smoke, and there was a surprise underneath—a faint text in German, in the Gothic German lettering, which did not entirely wash off. It had been hidden under the paint.
And there it is. They touched up the paint, and there it is.
lch hebe meine Augen auf zu den Bergen, von welchen mir Hilfe Kommt. That is on one side wall. And on the opposite wall: Dein Wort ist meines Fusses Leuchte und ein Licht auf meinem Wege.
I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.
Nobody had known, nobody had remembered that the German words were there, until the fire and the cleaning revealed them. They must have been painted over at some time, and afterward nobody spoke of them, and so the memory that they were there had entirely died out.
At what time? Very likely it happened at the beginning of the First World War, the 1914–18 war. Not a time to show German lettering, even spelling out holy texts. And not a thing to be mentioned for many years afterward.
Being in the church with this woman as guide gives me a slightly lost feeling, or a feeling of bewilderment, of having got things the wrong way round. The words on the wall strike me to the heart, but I am not a believer, and they do not make me a believer. She seems to think of her church, including those words, as if she were its vigilant housekeeper. In fact she mentions critically that a bit of the paint—in the ornate L of Licht—has faded or flaked off and should be replaced. But she is the believer. It seems as if you must always take care of what’s on the surface and what is behind, so immense and disturbing will take care of itself.
In separate panes of the stained-glass windows are displayed these symbols:
The Dove (over the altar).
The letters Alpha and Omega (in the rear wall).
The Holy Grail.
The Sheaf of Wheat.
The Cross in the Crown.
The Ship at Anchor.
The Lamb of God bearing the Cross.
The Mythical Pelican, with golden feathers, believed to feed its young on the blood of its own torn breast, as Christ the Church. (The Mythical Pelican as represented here resembles the real pelican only by way of being a bird.)
Just a few days before I am to have my biopsy I get a call from the city hospital to say that the operation has been canceled.
I am to keep the appointment anyway, to have a talk with the radiologist, but I do not need to fast in preparation for surgery.
Canceled.
Why? Information on the other two mammograms?
I once knew a man who went into the hospital to have a little lump cut out of his neck. He put my hand on it, on that silly little lump, and we laughed about how we could exaggerate its seriousness and get him a couple of weeks off work so that we could go on a holiday together. The lump was examined, but further surgery was canceled because there were so many, many other lumps that were discovered. The verdict was that any operation would be useless. All of a sudden, he was a marked man. No more laughing. When I went to see him he stared at me in nearly witless anger. He could not hide it. It was all through him, they said.
I used to hear that same thing said when I was a child, always said in a hushed voice that seemed to throw the door open, half-willingly, to calamity. Half-willingly, even with an obscene hint of invitation.
We do stop at the middle house in Scone, not after visiting the church but on the day after the hospital phoned. We are looking for some diversion. Already something has changed. We notice how familiar the landscape of Sullivan Township and the church and the cemeteries and the villages of Desboro and Scone and the town of Chesley are beginning to seem to us, how the distances between places have shortened. Perhaps we had found out all we are going to find out. There might be a bit more explanation—the idea of the vault might have come from somebody’s reluctance to put a three-year-old child under the ground—but what has been so compelling is drawn now into a pattern of things we know about.
Nobody answers the outside door. The house and yard are tidily kept. I look around at the bright beds of annuals and a rose of Sharon bush and a little black boy sitting on a stump with a Canadian flag in his hand. There are not so many little black boys in people’s yards as there used to be. Grown children, city dwellers, may have cautioned against them—though I don’t believe that a racial insult was ever a conscious intention. It was more as if people felt that a little black boy added a touch of sportiness and charm.
The outside door opens into a narrow porch. I step inside and sound the house doorbell. There is just room to move past an armchair with an afghan on it and a couple of wicker tables with potted plants.
Still nobody comes. But I can hear loud religious singing inside the house. A choir singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Through the window in the door I see the singers on television in an inner room. Blue robes, many bobbing faces against a sunset sky. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir?
I listen to the words, all of which I used to know. As far as I can tell these singers are about at the end of the first verse.
I let the bell alone till they finish.
I try again, and Mrs. Mannerow comes. A short, competent-looking woman with tight grayish-brown curls, wearing a flowered blue top to match her blue slacks. She says that her husband is very hard of hearing, so it wouldn’t do much good to talk to him. And he has just come home from the hospital a few days ago, so he isn’t really feeling like talking. She doesn’t have much time to talk herself, because she is getting ready to go out. Her daughter is coming from Chesley to pick her up. They are going to a family picnic to celebrate her daughter’s husband’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.
But she wouldn’t mind telling me as much as she knows.
Though being only married into the family, she never knew too much.
And even they didn’t know too much.
I notice something new in the readiness of both this older woman and the energetic younger woman in the log house. They do not seem to find it strange that anybody should wish to know about things that are of no particular benefit or practical importance. They do not suggest that they have better things to think about. Real things, that is. Real work. When I was growing up, an appetite for impractical knowledge of any kind did not get encouragement. It was all right to know which field would suit certain crops, but not all right to know anything about the glacial geography that I have mentioned. It was necessary to learn to read, but not in the least desirable to end up with your nose in a book. If you had to learn history and foreign languages to pass out of school, it was only natural to forget that sort of thing as quickly as you could. Otherwise you would stand out. And that was not a good idea. And wondering about olden days—what used to be here, what happened there, why, why?—was as sure a way to make yourself stand out as any.
Of course some of this kind of thing would be expected in outsiders, city people, who have time on their hands. Maybe this woman thinks that’s what I am. But the younger woman found out differently and still seemed to think my curiosity understandable.
Mrs. Mannerow says that she used to won der. When she was first married, she used towonder. Why did they put their people in there like that, where did they get the idea? Her husband didn’t know why. The Mannerows all took it for granted. They didn’t know why. They took it for granted because that was the way they had always done it. That was their way and they never thought to ask why or where their family got the idea.
Did I know the vault was all concrete on the inside?
The smaller one on the outside too. Yes. She hadn’t been in the cemetery for a while, and she had forgotten about that one.
She did remember the last funeral they had when they put the last person in the big vault. The last time they had opened it up. It was for Mrs. Lempke, who had been born a Mannerow. There was just room for one more, and she was the one. Then there was no room for anybody more.
They dug down at the end and opened up the bricks, and then you could see some of the inside, before they got her coffin in. You could see there was coffins in there before her, along either side. Put in nobody knows how long a time ago.
“It gave me a strange feeling,”she says. “It did so. Because you get used to seeing the coffins when they’re new, but not so much when they’re old.”
And the one little table sitting straight ahead of the entrance way, a little table at the far end. A table with a Bible opened up on it.
And beside the Bible, a lamp.
It was just an ordinary old-fashioned lamp, the kind they used to bum coal oil in.
Sitting there the same today, all sealed up and nobody going to see it ever again. “Nobody knows why they did it. They just did.”
She smiles at me with a sociable sort of perplexity,
her almost colorless eyes enlarged, made owlish by her glasses. She gives a couple of tremulous nods. As if to say, it’s beyond us, isn’t it? A multitude of things, beyond us. Yes.
The radiologist says that when she looked at the mammograms that had come in from the country hospital, she could see that the lump had been there in 1990 and in 1991. It had not changed. Still in the same place, still the same size. She says that you can never be absolutely 100 percent certain that such a lump is safe, unless you do a biopsy. But you can be sure enough. A biopsy in itself is an intrusive procedure, and if she were in my place, she would not have it. She would have a mammogram in another six months instead. If it were her breast, she would keep an eye on it, but for the time being she would let it alone.
I ask why nobody had told me about the lump when it first appeared.
Oh, she says, they must not have seen it.
So this is the first time.
Such frights will come and go.
Then there’ll be one that won’t. One thatwon’t go.
But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even a casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.
On our way home from the city hospital, I say to my husband, “Do you think they put any oil in that lamp?”
He knows at once what I am talking about.
He says that he has wondered the same thing.
The post What Do You Want to Know For? appeared first on The American Scholar.
Smarty Pants will be back in June with all new interviews. Until then, enjoy some of our favorite episodes from the past eight years.
The late Budi Darma, one of Indonesia’s most beloved writers, spent a formative chapter of his life far from home, studying at Indiana University in the 1970s. He wrote a series of strikingly lonely short stories that would go on to form the collection People from Bloomington, first published in Indonesian in 1980. A man befriends his estranged father only to control him and ends up controlled himself. Someone steals his dead roommate’s poetry and enters it into a competition. Another character desperately tries to make contact with the old man across the street who may or may not be trying to shoot people from his attic room. With this absurd but oddly real little collection—and with his next novel, Olenka, also Indiana-inspired—Darma ascended into the pantheon of Indonesian literature, winning numerous awards, including the presidential medal of honor. Budi Darma may be barely known in the United States, but Tiffany Tsao—who has recently translated People from Bloomington for Penguin Classics—hopes that an English-language audience is ready to embrace this unparalleled Indonesian artist.
Go beyond the episode:
- Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, translated by Tiffany Tsao
- Read Tsao’s post in memory of Budi Darma, who died in August 2021
- Check out these other Indonesian writers mentioned in the episode: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Umar Kayam, Chairil Anwar, Ajip Rosidi
- Want to hear more about the art of translation? Listen to these conversations with German-English translator Susan Bernofsky, Bible translator Robert Alter, Malagasy writer Naivo and his translator Alison Cherette, and Tibetan-English translator Tenzin Dickie
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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The post Indiana Absurd appeared first on The American Scholar.
The first sign is posted in the window of the empty ranger station and written in the style of a ransom note: w-A-R-n-i-N–g. The second flashes on a giant electronic sign just below the largest American flag I have ever known—alternating between park closure dates and announcements for an upcoming triathlon: warning. The third is fastened to a wooden stake stabbed into the edge of the dunes, its sides curling scroll-like in the morning wind:
Red tide present.
May cause eye, throat, or skin irritation.
May cause coughing or sneezing.
Avoid the beach if you have asthma or a respiratory condition.
Onshore winds and rough surf worsen its effects.
Can kill fish and other sea animals.
Do not swim near dead fish or touch them.
Wear shoes to prevent injuries from stepping on bones of dead fish.
Keep pets away from the water, sea foam, and dead fish.
Red tide is caused by naturally occurring algae.
Today, my dog, Arrow, and I are the only ones on this Tampa Bay beach. Everyone else has either heeded the warnings or flown back north, spring breakers and snowbirds having taken their fill of Florida sunshine. Things quiet down around here in midspring, just before Easter and its season of rebirth.
As I watch from the shore for bottlenose dolphins, I contemplate the use of bold type on the third warning sign. If the sign were a poem submitted in one of the classes I teach, I might chastise the author for being seduced by the siren call of a lazy typeface over the arduous but satisfying work that good prose requires. While my students’ eyes stray to the screens of their phones, I might ramble on about the perils of underestimating their readers’ intelligence. I would remind them that the point isn’t, in fact, about naturally occurring red tide. The fault, I would say, is that the bold highlights the wrong information, misguiding readers, leading us down the wrong path.
The earliest records of red tide on Florida’s west coast have been widely misattributed to the 16th-century Spanish conquistador Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of four survivors of a 600-person crew that attempted, but failed, to colonize the region. Led by Pánfilo de Narváez, the venture was beset by gross miscalculations, shipwrecks, mutinies, indigenous attacks, and disease. In La Relación, a firsthand account of the event and the subsequent eight years he spent traversing the New World, Cabeza de Vaca writes of the Indigenous peoples he has come to know well: they “judge of the seasons by the ripening of fruits, by the time when the fish die.” Although he is describing fish kills, it’s unlikely they were due to red tide. By this point in his journey, Cabeza de Vaca and the other men who’d survived Narváez’s utterly incompetent leadership were on the coast of Texas, where, even today, red tide is rare. Karenia brevis, as it is officially known, has been reliably recorded in Florida only since the 1840s, a time that, the older I get, I realize is not so very long ago.
Though there’s ample evidence to suggest that the incidence of red tide has been exacerbated by humans, Florida’s leaders blame this year’s case, in part, on another naturally occurring phenomenon: Hurricane Ian.Red tide is an algal bloom, a layer of microscopic plantlike organisms that grow rapidly in warm waters, causing discoloration and scum buildup on the water’s surface. Freshwater algal blooms typically appear bright green and are relatively harmless, but red tide carries toxins that, when dispersed by wind, can cause coughing, sneezing, burning eyes. Some research suggests that algal blooms harm local economies; in recent years, conflicts have arisen between rental property owners and vacationers who want their money back because the bloom kept them from enjoying the beach. But red tide can also be dangerous. In some rare cases, it can be life-threatening to people with respiratory conditions. Eating marine life contaminated with red tide can make people sick, and some hospitals have seen an increase in respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses during years when blooms have been especially intense.
Red tide is naturally occurring, but only to a point. Historically, in the Gulf of Mexico, red tide peaked in the summer, when the water temperature was at its highest, and slowed down in the winter, when temperatures cooled. But on the morning Arrow and I go to the beach, red tide levels are moderate to high and have been for months. Though there’s ample evidence to suggest that the incidence of red tide has been exacerbated by humans, Florida’s leaders blame this year’s case, in part, on another naturally occurring phenomenon: Hurricane Ian. The storm didn’t create red tide but tossed it around, pushing it toward the shore where the water was shallower and warmer. Once there, the bloom thrived.
Driving back home from the beach, I listen to a radio report about the upcoming hurricane season. The scientist being interviewed explains how conditions begin to ripen when waters in the Gulf of Mexico reach 76 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, and that hurricanes can form at 79 degrees. “Portions of the Gulf have currently recorded water temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit,” he says.
The silence following this statement hangs just long enough to suggest that the reporter hopes the scientist will elaborate. Perhaps in the same way that, when I write, I presume a reader’s intelligence, the scientist presumes the same of his listeners.
“When does hurricane season begin?” the reporter finally asks.
“June 1st, officially,” says the scientist.
“It’s only April,” says the reporter. “What you’re saying is we have hurricane conditions in April.”
There is a question in there somewhere, but the scientist can’t or won’t answer it.
The calendar is outdated, obsolete. But no one is yet brave enough to accept the immense responsibility of devising a new, more accurate one.
Every morning, before the beaches open to the public, county employees and contractors paid by the hour rake the sands for dead fish and other wildlife, scoop the bodies into front-end loaders, and pile the detritus into industrial-size dumpsters that have their own special signs: For dead fish and wildlife ONLY. News outlets and scientists report the dead animals not in pounds but in tons. Once the dumpsters are full, they are trailered to a waste-to-energy facility where a small percentage of their contents is incinerated. The rest—the majority of the dead matter—ends up in a landfill, which officials assure the public won’t contaminate groundwater.
This morning, the dumpsters on our beach have been emptied. The air does not stink of rotting sea; the wind does not make my throat itch. Arrow appears unbothered. I might’ve begun to believe the worst was behind us were it not for the color of the water, which, depending on the time of day and amount of cloud cover, should appear aquamarine, jade, turquoise, or sapphire, but not, as it does today, like dried blood.
Down the beach, a man struggles to walk a chocolate Lab. The dog pulls on a leash attached to a choke collar, a training tool that, when misapplied, can bruise the esophagus, crush the trachea, cause spinal and neck injuries, kill. The man yells and yanks. The dog snatches the leash in her jaws and yanks back, eager to be free. As Arrow and I draw closer, man and dog greet us, the Lab’s bark like an emphysemic’s cough.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” says the man, nodding at the red tide warning staked into the dunes. “There aren’t any dead fish on this beach.”
“They cleaned up this morning,” I say. “The dumpsters are all empty.”
“They?” The man casts his gaze around, searching. We are the only ones on the beach, and in the absence of any evidence to support my claim, he remains skeptical of the ever-mysterious they.
Leaning over, he unclasps the leash from the Lab’s collar. She wheels around and kicks up plumes of sand as she barrels down the beach. Beside me, Arrow watches with mild interest, though not enough to chase after the other dog, who throws herself into the rust-colored bay. For a moment, the water parts for her, providing a glimpse of the bay as it should look before its discoloration pools back up around her.
“I’ve been living in Florida all my life,” says the man. “Red tide happens every year. Hasn’t killed me yet.”
When I first moved to Florida, I erroneously called red tide crimson tide until an old friend of mine—who supported the University of Alabama’s famed college football team with near-religious fanaticism—corrected me.In the mid-1990s, just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania, teaching English to middle and high school students. For two straight years, every time I walked into my school’s main office, the secretaries there would ask me if I was a member of the CIA. It was like an Abbott and Costello sketch, minus the slapstick and laughter.
“Of course not!” I’d say. “I’m just here to teach English.”
“Sure you are,” they’d say, nodding in an exaggerated manner clearly reserved for idiots and toddlers.
“Really,” I’d insist. “I’m just a teacher.”
“Uh-huh.” They’d wink.
At that time, households in Romania were multigenerational; young adults lived with their parents until they married and started families of their own, and sometimes even after that. It was inconceivable to these women and most of the Romanians I knew that an American woman who’d only just graduated from college would willingly come to their country without family and friends and live there alone for two years. These women had lived through decades of a totalitarian regime that spied on its citizens and recruited citizens to spy on each other. It made sense that they would find the CIA an entirely plausible explanation for my being there. In the past, even Americans have launched the same accusations at Peace Corps volunteers, though no one has yet been able to provide solid evidence to support a connection between the organization and the CIA. The fact was, I had no way of disproving the secretaries’ claims, and my protests only fueled their staunch belief in my secret life of espionage.
In my classroom, I ran into a different but related challenge. With the Iron Curtain finally removed, my Romanian students were making up for lost time by learning everything they could about the West, particularly the United States. They did this mainly by consuming hours of Western television. Though I explained that what they saw in episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 and Dallas wasn’t the way average Americans lived, and that reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman perpetuated racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples, I could tell many of them were skeptical. Why would they take my unsubstantiated word over what they saw with their own eyes on TV every day?
Karenia brevis was named after Karen Steidinger, a researcher at the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute who dedicated her professional life to the study of red tide, enhancing our current understanding of its causes and effects. The name strikes me nonetheless as a dubious honor, one I’d feel reluctant to celebrate or be so intimately associated with.
When my husband and I first moved to Florida, in 2015, I erroneously called red tide crimson tide until an old friend of mine—who supported the University of Alabama’s famed college football team with near-religious fanaticism—laughingly corrected me. Still, the imprecision of both names has always bothered me. Aren’t tides controlled by the moon? Aren’t they supposed to recede? Receding would be terrible for a high-ranking college football team, but a receding red tide would be excellent for all those enraged vacationers unable to get refunds on their beach rentals, to say nothing of the sea life killed by algal blooms and the thousands of humans whose health can be threatened.
Red tide also reminds me of another scarlet phenomenon that to this day refuses to recede: the Red Scare. Throughout American history, the Red Scare has mostly been a hoax concocted by leaders ruthless in promoting their political agendas. The most notorious among them, Senator Joseph McCarthy, resuscitated his dying political career when he delivered a speech on February 9, 1950, to the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. In it, he raised alarms about espionage in the U.S. government, claiming that he had a list of 205 known Communists who worked in the State Department. In a telegram to President Truman, McCarthy later revised the number to 57; their names were never made public. Red Scare tactics have also been used to flame anti-immigration sentiment, discredit the labor and civil rights movements, and delegitimize left-leaning politicians and their proposed policies. The message is always the same: Communism is coming to get us and will bleed its way into all the crevices of our culture if we don’t stop it first.
Red tide is named for the way it discolors water; Red Scares get their name from the red flags of Communist countries. In Communist countries themselves, the color was (and in some instances still is) identified with the blood of the proletariat, the workers who sacrificed themselves for the betterment of the state. In Florida (as elsewhere in the United States), the people most likely to resemble former dictators—who are better described not as Communists but as authoritarians—are the same people who insist red tide has nothing to do with us and claim to be protecting American freedom from socialists. But the American flag has always had red in it.
The next time I take Arrow to the beach, it is May. Soon, it will be too hot and wet for us to come. Hurricane season will bring heavy rains, and the mosquitoes will make it impossible to enjoy our weekly walks. It will also bring the sea turtles that nest on these beaches.
In the distance, a truck carves two even lines of tire tracks in the sand. As it approaches, the park ranger behind the wheel slows down, waves. She, like all the rangers here, is easygoing and warm, smiling at Arrow even as she points out the sign that says No Dogs Past This Point, placed to protect the site of the sea turtles’ delicate nests. “Keep your dog close,” she says as she reaches down from her open window to hand Arrow a biscuit.
Red tide produces toxins that damage the animals’ nervous systems; within 30 minutes of ingesting these toxins, the turtles begin to swim in circles and bob their heads, appearing sleepy and uncoordinated, drunk.When we arrive at the sign, Arrow veers away from the bay and onto the park utility trail that runs behind the dunes. Overhead, ospreys eye us from their nest atop a plywood platform fastened to a telephone pole, the last remaining after our most recent hurricane. One of the birds launches, swoops, and dips especially close to Arrow, who is oblivious. It is not a threat so much as a warning: Do Not Mess With the Nest.
At the breakwater where the bay meets the Gulf of Mexico, we encounter another ranger. He is leaning over the concrete barrier, peering down below. When I draw close, he greets me before returning his attention to a narrow patch of sand. A wide, shallow track runs from the Gulf up the shore and to the breakwater where it reverses, making a U-turn back toward the water.
“A false crawl,” says the ranger. Some turtle lost sight of its destination.
Mature sea turtles are supposed to return to the place of their birth to make their nests and lay eggs, but sometimes false crawls happen instead. Scientists don’t know why, though they suspect it has something to do with the artificial light produced by humans. Turtles, like so many other creatures that migrate each year, follow Earth’s magnetic fields. The theory is that the light and perhaps other human-made disruptions throw them off course.
“It’ll find its way, though,” says the ranger. “They usually do.”
Even if most false crawls end up corrected, human activity still spells collateral damage for the turtles. Each year, scientists count the number of sea turtles—which can live to be 100 and have been on this earth for approximately 110 million years—along this beach and others on Florida’s west coast. Although the latest report says that the numbers are down from the previous year, scientists don’t yet have enough evidence to say whether this is specifically because of red tide. But red tide is certainly killing the turtles, along with manatees, bottlenose dolphins, and birds; just like the fish, their bodies wash up on the shores. Red tide produces toxins that damage the animals’ nervous systems; typically within 30 minutes of ingesting these toxins, the turtles begin to swim in circles and bob their heads, appearing sleepy and uncoordinated, drunk. Their muscles twitch and jerk. Turtles, like manatees and dolphins, swim to the surface to breathe. But red tide paralyzes them. Cause of death? Drowning. When scientists conduct necropsies, they uncover traces of red tide in the folds of the sea animals’ brains.
The next time we go to the beach, the Lab and her owner have returned. They are far from where Arrow and I stand, having walked beyond the sign that forbids dogs (and presumably their owners) from passing. Along the edge of the dunes, the dog digs furiously, tearing up beach grass, unearthing what no doubt does not wish to be unearthed.
“Maybe we should move,” says my husband whenever I report the conditions on the beach. One of the reasons we moved here was for the beach. It’s been a huge plus. “If we can’t go, what’s the point?”
Years earlier, I would’ve thought the same thing. Just move already. Why stay? I have always been confounded by people who remain in places that appear inhospitable, even hostile. But after eight years of making Florida my home, I understand better. Now, when my husband suggests moving, I feel paralyzed, one hemisphere of my brain afire while the other shuts off completely, my train of thought looping endlessly around and around as if I were paddling with only one flipper.
Before we moved from Boston to Florida, a neighbor said we were brave. To leave behind what you have for years understood, to be open to learning something you did not yet know, he said, took courage and humility, two things most people don’t possess. At the time, I found his words embarrassingly grandiose. We had enough money, cardboard boxes, a moving van. It seemed simple, actually. Straightforward. At the time, I did not understand my neighbor’s meaning. Now I do.
After my husband and I are done talking, I go upstairs and lie down on the bed, drifting and bobbing through unsettled, restless dreams, coming up gasping for air so many times, I eventually wake more tired than I’d already been. The thought of moving, doing it all over again, saddens and exhausts me. I do not want to go. Not only because this place has found its way inside me with its unexpected and daily bursts of beauty, not only because my husband and I have bought and made a home of our own here when we’d never truly had one before, not only because I am unsure where I would go next, but also because of pride. To leave feels like a failure. Perhaps our old neighbor was wrong: I do not possess courage and humility after all.
In the beach’s empty parking lot, I open the back door of the car and let Arrow out. He jumps down and pauses to sniff the air. He sneezes.
As we approach the beach, my eyes sting and throat burns, and the stench of the dead sea grows and grows. On the path in front of us is the carcass of a brown pelican. Before I can stop him, Arrow runs up to it and leans in, rubbing his shoulder against feathers the color of dishwater. I call him away; there’s no point in going any farther. Behind us the beach flashes silver in the early morning sun, light reflecting off the dead fish, mirrors signaling a useless SOS.
In Romania, I was astonished by how much my students appeared to know. Not only did they speak English far better than I ever could have taught them to, but they also knew its grammatical rules far better than I did. Some of these students, kids no older than 13 or 14, also spoke French, German, and Hungarian and could recite poems in these languages. They could rattle off facts about world history and culture or mathematical and scientific equations. At the same time, they blamed eating too much ice cream for the onset of a sore throat, or a breeze coming through an open window for a head cold, never considering that the child they sat next to in science class had had these same ailments a week before. A good Romanian friend recently mentioned that as a student, she was taught to memorize historical facts and figures but not to think about or interpret events. What was missing for her and for my students was what appears to be missing in America today: critical thinking.
Recorded cases of red tide have been increasing dramatically in recent decades, and the outbreaks last longer. Scientists correlate this with global warming. Warmer winters mean the seas don’t cool enough to slow the growth of the algal bloom and break it up. Scientific evidence also indicates that red tide is made worse by sewage and chemical runoff from farming and yard fertilizers.
Every year, the neighbors who live in the dozen or so houses that also overlook our pond ask us to help pay for a service called the Pond Doctors. Men in small trolling boats come and spray the water to kill off an algal bloom that appears on the water during times of intense heat and drought. Our neighbors have gone so far as to indirectly suggest that the bloom is our fault. My husband and I allow vegetation to grow on the outer side of our fence so that birds, particularly the common moorhen, can nest along the shoreline, and our neighbors think the vegetation encourages the algal bloom. They do not equate the bloom with the chemical herbicides they spray on their lawns every year, or the sprays and fertilizers from the nearby golf course that make the neighborhood smell like a cattle ranch. And when, this year, the moorhens fail to come and our neighbors lament the birds’ absence, they still do not make any connection between their behavior and the altered state of their immediate environment. But I have no obvious evidence to present them, beyond scientific reports that would no doubt raise skeptical eyebrows and questions about my sources—nothing persuasive enough that they might question their own theories and absolve my husband and me of blame. To my neighbors I appear, as they do to me, to have nothing but personal conviction, and so we remain at an impasse.
Another regular occurrence since we moved to Florida is the dumping of raw or partially treated sewage into Tampa Bay. In 2021, Piney Point, a phosphate plant for chemical fertilizers on the bay and about 20 miles from where we live, caused a public health crisis when its reservoir’s liner began to leak. A state of emergency was declared, a nearby highway was closed off, and people who lived in the immediate area—more than 300 households—were ordered to evacuate. To prevent an estimated 20-foot-high surge from directly hitting local communities, officials decided the best response was to release much of the bulging reservoir’s untreated contents—water that, environmentalists noted, had 10 times more red tide–feeding nitrogen in it than raw sewage does—into Tampa Bay.
Recently, Florida’s legislators have proposed a bill that would allow construction companies to use radioactive phosphate waste, like that from Piney Point, to rebuild state roads and highways. This proposed rebuilding, they assure us, would pose no threat to public health and safety.
I replace my weekly trips to the beach with visits to a county park not far from our house. It has a meandering bike trail and picnic shelters where people gather to celebrate baptisms, quinceañeras, graduations, retirements. A small inlet, shaded by sea grape and mangroves, that washes out into the bay borders another side of the park. Recreational boaters launch from the inlet, and herons and egrets loiter there, begging fishermen to throw them bait scraps.
I leave the car at the far end of the park and walk Arrow past a group of Frisbee golfers searching for errant discs in the dense scrabble of sabal palmetto. We follow the trail through a copse of palm trees and past a sign indicating an Indigenous shell midden that holds scraps of pottery thousands of years old. In the bay, a boat lists in the shallow water. The vessel is encircled by a gelatinous, dull gray scum of dead fish. The shoreline is an archipelago of death, and the islands of floating fish look unnatural, like flotillas of discarded plastic bags and fast-food wrappers, replicas of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in miniature. Maybe there’s no simile required here: the fish are trash, at least in the minds of some.
The wind pushes the infected air onto shore, and I am overpowered by the stench. Though it is sunny and clear, I feel as uneasy as I do when walking an unfamiliar street in a strange city at night. I steer Arrow away from the bay toward the boat launch. Here, the red tide’s grip loosens and pockets of fresh air open. I wouldn’t call it normal—but the scent is weakened enough for us to continue our stroll.
From the parking lot, a car horn honks; someone shouts. Our next-door neighbor waves from behind the wheel of his pickup truck. On his days off, he takes his boat out into the Gulf to fish; he has come to the park to check out the conditions.
“We can’t go out,” he says.
“No?”
He throws his long arm out in the direction of the water, sucks on his teeth. “The water’s awful. Wouldn’t want to catch anything living out there right now. But—”
Please, I think. Don’t tell me it’s naturally occurring.
“—maybe in a week.”
“A week!” I laugh. “I like your optimism.”
He removes his baseball cap, runs the palm of his hand across his head, slips the cap back on. “It has to go away eventually,” he says. “Right?”
I am about to debate his point when our conversation is interrupted by a sound like punctured tires releasing air. In the inlet, just beyond the boat launch, a small pod of dolphins has made an appearance. Where they swim, the water is dark but untainted; the blood-red algae has not yet extended its tentacles there. I count the seconds as the animals submerge, disappearing, the surface of the water stilling, and wait for them to come back up. Just at the moment it seems they are gone for good, the dolphins reappear, shooting sprays of seawater from their blowholes into the air as they take in oxygen, the deepest of breaths, the deepest of sighs. Watching as the animals slip effortlessly above and below the water, I hope, despite all evidence to the contrary, that my neighbor, this time, is right.
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A character in a short story by Amy Bloom explains to her grown daughter that she was able to love two men at the same time, and that the two men accepted this and even loved each other. They still do. Neither man is worried about the love the woman gives to the other because his own portion isn’t diminished. “Love is not a pie,” the mother tells her daughter. Plenty exists for everyone.
I encountered the story, called “Love Is Not a Pie,” many years ago in the Best American Short Stories 1991 anthology, and I must have sighed in satisfaction: real love is not limited and not limiting. I’m not so sure anymore. In the late ’90s, I met Jacques, a Frenchman in a Spanish class I attended in Gijón. He was one of seven children, and when I expressed envy at the hoard of brothers and sisters running around the farm where they grew up, he said that seven was too many. “Why?” I asked. Not enough love for so many, he said. He was a very gentle man who had no children of his own, though I don’t remember if that was by chance or by choice. I think of the many parents I know who have only one child. Why only one? Because that’s enough. Enough what? Enough to guarantee you will be looked after in your old age, or enough for the family name to be carried on, or enough just to keep you busy? Enough to show you can? Enough of a good thing? But surely it’s true that more is merrier? My uncle had four children on that principle, and he and my aunt never regretted their houseful of offspring, as far as I know. But my cousins? What did they think about sharing with their siblings?
It was the supply—my supply to give—that I was thinking about recently. My black cat was sprawled on the sofa beside me, ready for a tummy rub. My gray cat was with me, too, perched on my knee and likely, in her new, habitual grumpiness, to turn a sharp claw on poor, inoffensive Blackster or even on me should I disturb her by shifting my leg. The third, a tabby, was crouched by the heater. My cats have caused me so much trouble, worry, grief, and expense since my move to Pola de Siero two years ago that I wonder if I even love them at this point. I must, or I wouldn’t go through the motions. But do these particular motions, including a lot of traipsing to and from the vet, mean that I love them more than I otherwise would, the way you cherish what you’ve struggled for? Or am I expending my emotional store on worry, leaving myself with less love to give? I could see it working either way. For the narrator of Alice Munro’s story “The Moons of Jupiter,” there was a third way: fear of losing her child to leukemia caused her to subtly withdraw from the little girl, as if to prepare for the final separation to come. With Blackster, I have that diagnosis of leukemia. Keeping him alive is work. Has love surged, or has it retracted in shock under the bright light of reality?
When students have trouble identifying the verb form and tense in a sentence, I suggest that they think of another sentence with the same structure but a different verb. “I have eaten all the cherries,” for example, instead of “I have read all the books” because read is tricky, the infinitive, past tense, and past participle having identical spelling: read, read, and read. When you see read in a sentence, how do you know which of the three it is? Which of the triplets are you, asks a newcomer to the family, not yet familiar enough with the three girls to know the one by the fire is Betsy, the other by the window is Mary, and the girl reading under the lamp is Trish. Their places in the room and the bits and bobs lying near them signify nothing to this uninitiated guest. But a common irregular verb like eat looks and sounds different in all its forms and therefore becomes easy to analyze. When one girl is dark-haired, the second a redhead, and the third a blond wearing glasses, they are easier to keep straight.
Doing the same for my question about love, I substitute another question that might lead me to the answer. “Do the troubles that life heaps on you mean that you cling more desperately to it, or do they instead make the idea of giving it up not as awful as you had once imagined?” Would I love life better if it were more obedient and behaved perfectly and gave me no grief instead of plenty of it?
Even better, would I love my morning coffee more if I could obtain my first delicious cup with a snap of the fingers instead of the make-coffee-heat-milk-whip-up-froth routine? Or would I love it less? Or would I just have another cup while I luxuriate in having the time to wonder and the place on the sofa in which to sit as I do, with my three cats in attendance?
I believe I would love my coffee less if it were easier to obtain. But I would also love it less if it were more trouble. My morning coffee is, I conclude, the perfect balance of effort and reward. I wouldn’t change anything. “Ella,” I say, when the grumpy cat on my knee slashes at Blackster, “love is not a pie.” Then to Blackster I say, “And life is no piece of cake.”
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Amanda Holmes reads A. R. Ammons’s “Hymn.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Hymn” by A. R. Ammons appeared first on The American Scholar.
One day in the winter of 1975, on a lunch break from my boring, first-year-out-of-college job, I read an article in Esquire magazine on how to live cheaply in France for a year. The trick, the author wrote, was to become a student. Tuition was inexpensive, and it entitled you to room and board. And, if you were serious about it, you could learn another language, something I thought would be helpful to me as a travel writer, which is what I wanted to be.
I spent the following school year living in a dorm and studying at a language institute in Aix-en-Provence. When it ended in June, I packed my big leather suitcase (in the Age of the Backpacker) and traveled to Alsace, as far as I could get from Provence—culturally if not geographically—and still be in France. And there I found a job on a farm, with a family whose son was the same age I was. For the next two months I spent every waking hour with Dany, who didn’t speak a word of English but spoke French, Alsatian, and German like a native. It was a humbling experience, after months of struggling to learn a second language, to find myself among trilingual farmers.
Dany was well-read, a student of history, and a lover of music. He thought Germany far surpassed France when it came to composers—the dynamism of Bach and Beethoven versus the airiness of Ravel and Debussy—but he was fond of the contemporary chanteurs. Afternoons in the cherry orchard, he would belt out the songs of Georges Brassens and Yves Montand, teaching me not only the lyrics to Le Temps des Cerises but also their significance. His father, picking in a neighboring tree, begged me to chime in with some Negro spirituals.
Before leaving for France, I had read a fair amount about Provence—Cyril Connolly, Lawrence Durrell, M. F. K. Fisher—and nothing about Alsace, and it seemed instructive that my summer in the latter was proving more noteworthy than my nine months in the former. Being out of the classroom contributed, of course, but there was also something I was discovering for the first time: the absorbing, generous surprise of the unsung.
Back home in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, I looked around for a newspaper job. At The Trenton Times, which then was owned by The Washington Post, I was perfunctorily handed a job application. When asked to list the duties my last employment had entailed, I wrote, flippantly if accurately, “picking cherries, baling hay, milking cows.” When asked my reason for leaving my last employment, I scribbled: “I got tired of stepping in cow shit.” In response to the “May we contact your last employer?” prompt, I wrote, “Sure, if you speak Alsatian.”
Two days later, I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview. The editor-in-chief, she told me, had been so impressed by my application that he had posted it on a wall in the newsroom.
There are two fail-safe ways to stand out: By being brilliant or by being different. I chose the one that was available to me.
After a three-month trial, I was given a job as a feature writer. This suited me fine, because I had never wanted to be a reporter. I wrote about a lumberjack, a tobacconist, a harness racing driver, simultaneous interpreters at the United Nations, a sociology professor at a local college who had researched the cultural and linguistic history of the hoagie. Feature writing was giving me the perfect training to be a travel writer, getting me out into the world—in this case, New Jersey and its environs—to meet some of the interesting people in it.
After a year and a half, I left the paper and moved to Poland. A woman—met on my way home from France—was behind my decision. That, and my unquenched desire for foreign experience. But leaving a promising career in journalism to pursue a woman behind the Iron Curtain was, for some in the newsroom, the most remarkable thing I had done since filling out my job application.
I ended up spending two and a half years in Warsaw, where I married, taught English, learned Polish, witnessed the rise of Solidarity and, in December 1981, the imposition of martial law. Walking around the deadened city, seeing Polish tanks in the streets, watching soldiers rounding up students—including one I recognized as my own—I thought, for the first time in my life: I must tell the world what I’m witnessing.
Returning home to Phillipsburg, I eagerly began work on my first book. I wrote it in longhand, on yellow legal pads. When it was finished, I typed it up in my father’s law office on South Main Street. Then I made a few Xerox copies. When the rare, positive response to a query arrived, I placed rubber bands around the manuscript—one vertical, one horizontal—placed it in a box, wrapped the box in plain brown paper, wrote the name of the publisher, or agent, on the paper, and took the box to the post office, where it was weighed and pushed to the side while I searched for money to cover the postage.
Rejections trickled in, and at first they didn’t bother me. I’d always heard that as a writer you have to get used to rejection. It is one of the natural laws of writing. Rejections are to writers what flies are to cows—a constant annoyance that we somehow attract but never really get used to.
Still, I remained hopeful. This was the ’80s, when travel writing was enjoying a heyday. It had started in 1975, with Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, and been given literary legitimacy a few years later by Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. All of a sudden, travel writing was hot. Some publishers created imprints devoted solely to travel books. Jan Morris’s travel essays appeared regularly in Rolling Stone magazine. Banana Republic put little book coves inside its clothing stores and filled them with guidebooks and travel narratives and, for one brief period, the company’s own travel magazine. Instead of glossy photographs and “10 Best” lists, Trips featured whimsical illustrations and a reminiscence by Richard Ford on growing up in his grandfather’s hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas.
It was a heady time to be a travel writer—just not a travel writer who wrote about Poland. Books about Poland were being published, but they were about the political situation. My book touched on it, naturally, but its real focus was on the people, the culture, the everyday life. “He came to believe,” Ian Hunter wrote in his biography of Malcolm Muggeridge, “that the machinations of power, how it was organized and wielded, who governed whom and by what means, all this was less important than a nation’s soul; its character; its religion; its humour and art and music and literature.” The longest chapter was about the pilgrimage I had taken on foot, along with thousands of Poles, to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Częstochowa, in the first summer of martial law.
Also not helping my cause was the fact that travel books were becoming enamored of the good life. 1989 saw the publication of A Year in Provence, which would be followed a few years later by Under the Tuscan Sun. These two bestsellers created a cottage industry of books set in France (though not Alsace) and Italy that continues today. You could write about Spain, but preferably the sunny south. If you wanted to write about the north, where it rains a lot, you pretty much had to walk the pilgrimage route of El Camino de Santiago. And that was the only pilgrimage you were allowed to write about. As economic realities hit the publishing industry, it became depressingly conservative and conformist in its tastes. I began to seriously question my belief in the value of being different.
Yet I eventually found an agent, a woman in Philadelphia who was new to the business but brought to it determination and an unsinkable spirit. After 41 publishers rejected the book, she placed it with an imprint of Houghton Mifflin. In this game, all you need is one editor to say yes, and then all the rejections become immaterial and fade from memory. Writing is that rare profession that allows you not only to overcome failure, but also to erase it.
In the meantime, I had become the travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. My goal was to bring some of the elements of the travel writing that was appearing in books into the Sunday Travel section, which had been viewed primarily as an advertising vehicle dressed up with articles and information, a bland compendium of clichés and tips. Working in my favor was the fact that the travel section was one of the lowest priorities at a newspaper and I was allowed, for the most part, to do what I wished with it.
My ambitions got me in trouble in 1991, a few weeks after the start of the Gulf War, when I ran a cover story about Baghdad. It had been sent to me by a local woman who had returned home from a teaching job in the city shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. My thinking was: Baghdad is on everyone’s mind right now, and here is an account of the city written by someone who had been living and working there. Not surprisingly, I loved getting stories from expats that, while often in need of editing, contained insights unavailable to professional travel writers.
The editor-in-chief’s words on Monday morning, and I remember them distinctly, were: “Goddammit, nobody’s going to Baghdad now!” The travel section received increased scrutiny for a while, but full attention eventually returned to news and sports. After The Best American Travel Writing debuted in 2000 (a woefully belated birth for the anthology), the Sun-Sentinel’s name appeared—either with selected stories or under “Notables” in the back—in the first nine editions.
In 2008, I became one of the first people in the history of the Sun-Sentinel to be laid off. I was a victim of newspaper downsizing, not my story-centric approach to travel, though it probably contributed to my being in the first wave.
The advantage of being a writer—as opposed to, say, a banker or an auto worker—is that you can continue doing what you do at home. I dearly missed the weekly paycheck, and the travel budget, and being an editor – especially being my own editor. But, deprived of a job, I still had a profession.
I freelanced, and wrote a book, and then started work on a memoir. I was now in my 60s—a little old, oddly, for the memoir business—but I was giving mine a focus greater than myself, braiding the story of my quest to become a travel writer with that of Poland’s struggle to regain its independence. Readers would learn not just about me but also the Cold War.
After it was completed, I discovered that publishers had become even more conservative and conformist than before. Memoirs, judging by the reviews I read, were invariably about one of a small number of seemingly approved themes: abuse, addiction, dysfunction, illness, or grief. Sometimes a memoir combined two or three. These are all important topics, and great books have been written about them: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Mary Karr’s Lit, to name just two. But why, I wondered, were they the only subjects now allowed? Why were Americans being fed a steady diet of misery, with no reprieve, no glittering outliers to brighten the gloom?
And why this unrelenting focus on the self? The United States was the most powerful country in the world and, instead of learning about the world, its citizens—its readers!—were massively turning inward. This didn’t bode well for our nation’s future.
Nor, to be honest, for my memoir, half of which took place abroad. And although it contained its share of hardship, the tone was optimistic and frequently humorous. Making it even more of a pariah in the current climate of despair, it contained not one but two happy endings: I became a travel writer and Poland regained its independence. My penchant for being different seemed to have gone from quaint to professionally suicidal.
And yet, unfashionable, atypical, idiosyncratic books were still sneaking through publishing’s mill of uniformity. If you knew where to look, you could still find signs of richness, variety, diversity—an idea all publishers now bow down before while giving it, in many houses, a sadly limited application. And, I reminded myself, rejection after rejection: all you need is one maverick editor to say yes.
The post The Importance of Being Different appeared first on The American Scholar.
Over the course of our miniseries Exploding the Canon, Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek has examined Reed College students’ efforts in 2016–2017 to fundamentally transform a mandatory freshman humanities course. Now, in the final episode, Bastek looks at how much has really changed since that time. The protestors were ostensibly successful—the Humanities 110 syllabus underwent significant revision. But though the college has bolstered several support programs for students of color, in the last decade Black, Latino, and Indigenous student enrollment at Reed has not increased. Some professors are satisfied with the current humanities program; others would like to see more change. Perhaps the fundamental lesson to be gained from Reed’s upheaval is that the work is hardly finished—and a way forward might be found in how classicists have radically reimagined their discipline in recent years.
- The 2023–24 Hum 110 syllabus, with timelines and maps
- “Racing the Classics,” co-founded in 2017 by Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Sasha-Mae Eccleston, will soon expand to a fellowship program at Brown and Princeton
- The “Classics Beyond Whiteness” initiative at Wake Forest University is the first in the world to require all classics majors and minors to take a course on race and the discipline
- From 2016–2020, Eidolon published widely on the intersections of the classical and modern world: “Black Athena, White Power “Barbarians Inside the Gate,” “Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World,” “The Body in Question”
- The Mimbres School for the Humanities offers online courses with “an impiety toward canonical texts and received ideas”
- In 2019, Reed religion professors Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Steve Wasserstrom co-authored an essay with University of Toronto professor Pamela Klassen on “White Supremacy and the Humanities: A Challenge to the University”
- The Reed College Quest won a collegiate reporting award for its investigation into the New York Times ranking of the college in the bottom eighth percentile of economic diversity
- Reed College Office of Institutional Research data on historical enrollment by ethnicity (2002–2024)
Featured voices in this episode: Salim Moore, Brittany Wideman, Paul Marthers, Mary James, Nigel Nicholson, Kritish Rajbhandari, Pancho Savery, Milyon Trulove, alea adigweme, Mary Frankie McFarland Forte, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Jan Mieszkowski, Colin Drumm, Albert Kerelis, Peter Steinberger, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Addison Bates. Thanks to the Reed staff, faculty, and students—past and present—who made this series possible.
Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.
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Transcript:
We began this miniseries with a question: how much did Reed College change in response to the student protests of 2016–2017? I’d like to answer that question in two parts, looking first at how Reed responded to the non-curricular demands, and then at the Hum 110 curriculum.
If we compare Reed today to Reed a decade ago, the support systems available to students of color—and, really, students more generally—are much better, including more peer mentors, more multicultural resource center hires, and more support aimed at students from different backgrounds. My friend Salim Moore graduated in 2011, and he remembers what it was like to be one of the few Black students at Reed. When he arrived in 2007, only three percent of the student body identified as Black—and only a further 16 percent identified as any other ethnic minority.
SALIM MOORE: When I applied to Reed, the word on the street was that Reed in terms of diversity, they had really, really good initiatives and support groups for queer students. But anything else outside of that, they did really badly. I was actually a part of one of college’s diversity efforts, which was called the Peer Mentor Program. And so the Peer Mentor Program had all of these students who are first-gen, low income, students of color, international students in one program, which is kind of wild to think about because what you would generally do is maybe have a program like that, but also have individual programs or affinity groups. So my mentee was a student from South Korea. I could tell him a lot about entering Reed and becoming an upperclassman, but could I speak to him in Korean? No. Could I talk to him about visa issues and just traveling into a different culture? Not so much. So in some ways it was kind of great because it brought a lot of people together, but in some ways it wasn’t so great because it didn’t meet people’s needs.
Brittany Wideman graduated in 2013, the same year as me, but she’s worked for Reed’s office of the registrar since February 2022. Even though she isn’t a student now, Brittany is extremely involved on campus.
BRITTANY WIDEMAN: So before I came to Reed, I was one of the students that participated in the multicultural preview days where they bring students of these marginalized identities together, the preview campus before turning in their applications and stuff. And I think that institutional practice is phenomenal and great because it builds solidarity even before you matriculate at Reed if you choose to come here. That preview day played a huge role in my decision to come to Reed. And I’m still friends with a handful of people from that group.
One of the people who initiated the fly-in program and encouraged the Peer Mentor Program was Paul Marthers, who became Reed’s Dean of Admission in 2002. By the time he left in 2009, the number of Black students on campus had gone from 12 to 50 students—a more than fourfold increase. The number of Latino students nearly doubled from 54 to 103; likewise the number of Asian students doubled from 61 to 126. And it wasn’t just the student body that was changing.
PAUL MARTHERS: Over time, we built a staff that generally had at least two people of color at all given times. And I’m really proud that by the time I left, we had on the staff an African-American Reedie, a Latino Reedie, and a Native American Reedie. And so we were probably at that point, representationally, one of the most diverse offices you could find at a liberal arts college. The second thing we did was we made it clear when we had functions, fly-in programs, or events for underrepresented students, that it couldn’t just be the admissions office doing this work. It had to be the community. So we looked for our allies and partners on the faculty, within the student life area, all across the campus.
One of Paul’s allies was Mary James, professor emerita of physics. From 2014 to 2021, Mary served as the second-ever Dean of Institutional Diversity. But she also worked closely with her predecessor, poetry professor Crystal Williams, who was the first person appointed to the position in 2004. You can see the kind of floor that people like Paul and Mary were working from when these efforts began in the early aughts.
MARY JAMES: Crystal and I initiated putting a resolution on the faculty floor—so this was spring of 2004, so 20 years ago now—that said that Diversifying Reed should be a goal in the next capital campaign. So I was asked to actually present it to the faculty. So the first thing I did was I googled diversity at Reed. Nothing came up about Reed College. But on about page three of the Google search—and who ever goes to page three of a Google search?—there was Plant Diversity 332. That was the only reference to diversity at Reed College that I could find. So I shared that with the faculty. Then I talked about the resolution. And the smartest thing I said that day was that I compared Reed College to a country club. What is great about country clubs is that everybody’s the same, and so everybody’s comfortable, right? You wear white on the tennis court, you wear golf shoes on the golf whatever. And there was definitely some people not loving that analogy, but the most important thing I said that day was, if we become more diverse, we will become less comfortable. And what was so savvy about that was then people couldn’t stand up and say, this makes me uncomfortable. But I think the institution as a whole has gotten so much better at just accepting that discomfort is part of this. And that the goal is not for everyone to be comfortable all the time.
The resolution passed, in the end, by a two-thirds majority. Things are very different now, in large part thanks to the efforts of Reedies Against Racism not only to push the institution further, but to make the work that Reed was already doing much more visible.
BRITTANY: At least a decade ago, I don’t think Reed did a very solid job of raising awareness about the resources that they had. And I think that that is, I’m not going to say it’s done a complete 180, it’s maybe done a 120 in the right direction? So there’s a lot more outside lecturers coming in that are people of color or people of marginalized identities. There’s more committees and affinity groups, at least six or seven affinity groups—anybody can join them. Faculty, staff, even students I believe can join them now. And the charge of each affinity group is basically to collectively figure out what resources are missing on campus, have a group that people can come to and network with. I mean it’s in the word, right? Affinity.
One of those initiative was Reed’s Center for Teaching and Learning, or CTL, which opened in September 2014. It took on even more importance during and after the protests. Nigel Nicholson, professor of Greece, Rome, and the Ancient Mediterranean, was dean of the faculty during this time, and he helped set up the CTL.
NIGEL NICHOLSON: I’ve only been in higher ed for 30 years, right? But a lot has changed. And one of the big things that has changed is people have come to a much more lively recognition that teaching is a kind of series of learned skills, not a kind of, well, you have it or you don’t. And if that is true, then we need to help people learn those skills, right?
MARY: When we started, we were doing very basic things. Interestingly, there were white faculty members—now, these are people who were coming to the trainings, they were interested—who couldn’t actually say out loud that they were white. Yeah, it’s really hard to get those words out. And I’m not saying that they didn’t know their race. I’m saying that they were in the process of going, oh, they fact of my race affects every interaction I have with everyone. And that’s actually a realization, that’s not something that we all know.
But as time went on, I really was very impressed by how the faculty really engaged with this, they really did learn. And as the years went on, the conversations got more and more sophisticated. And we were hiring younger faculty who, for the most part, not entirely, but part of their identity as a teacher was inclusive practices. So whether the students can see it, there’s been a lot of progress.
One program the CTL runs is with student consultants, inspired by Bryn Mawr’s program of the same name. Kritish Rajbhandari is professor of English and Humanities.
KRITISH RAJBHANDARI: I participated in that program for a different class, and then for Hum 110. And through that program with my student partner, we came up with different strategies for addressing those issues in class and for preparing the students to talk about it. So one thing that I did was to have students talk about their concerns. Okay, we are going to talk about race. What are you afraid of? What do you think might go wrong? So I have them write them down and give them to me, and then I make a list of that, and then I have a discussion with them. together with the class, we come up with ideas on how to deal with such situations and that helps with students. And that really made a big difference in how that conference went compared to my previous year’s conference.
Reed’s small community of color, especially its even smaller Black community, does a lot of heavy lifting, and did a lot in those early years on the staff and faculty side. One of the student demands from 2016 was to hire more faculty of color. And there certainly are more than when I was at Reed. Pancho Savery is no longer the only Black professor in Hum 110, but last year he was one of two. There were two more non-visiting faculty of color, out of about two dozen.
PANCHO SAVERY: I think you could count the people of color on one hand.
When I was at Reed for reunions last summer, one thing I noticed was a giant full-color poster of new faculty hires in the campus building near the mail room.
BRITTANY: I think the cohort that came in for this academic year, if you solely are just looking at the poster and you’re like, okay, I’m making assumptions about who identifies as what. Anybody as the outside observer looking at that poster would be like, okay, this is 90 percent white. And it is. The institution is making a concerted effort to hire more people from these groups. I don’t think that it is from a place of “We need to fill a quota,” if that makes any sense. I really do feel that they are trying. I haven’t been involved in any faculty search committees, but I’ve been on staff search committees, and a lot of the candidates for the positions that I’ve been involved in have been people of color.
As for students of color, the total percentage of Reed’s domestic enrollment hit 22 percent by the time Paul left in 2009, and hit 29 percent by the time that Milyon Trulove, Reed’s current Vice President and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, started in 2014. It’s increased steadily ever since, to 35 percent in 2023-24 of all domestic, non-international students. That’s the denominator I’ll be using when I talk about percentages. It’s a big change—doubling in less than 10 years, and more than tripling in 20—and one for which Reed should be commended.
But for all that, something has remained stubbornly stagnant. And that’s the percentage of Black students enrolled at Reed in any given year, which has hovered at four to five percent since the year after I graduated—meaning that, for the past decade, there has been no significant increase in the number of Black students on campus, with an average of 66. I asked Milyon about this.
MILYON TRULOVE: If you take a look at that the last decade that I’ve been here, absolutely the largest enrollment of African-American students at the college of seen. And you can see that last year, if you look at the four year average was still in the top three years in terms of African-American proportions of students. And I would absolutely expect that those numbers go up and down. We have to be really careful about commodifying students and sort of, I’m not in the business of purchasing Black students and saying, I got to get more. I got to get more. That’s not really treating people as humans who have to make choices about where they want to be. But it’s really us signaling to students that we want them here and it’s up to them to take advantage of it. And some years fewer students take advantage of it and some years more students.
So I’m taking a look at the same data from institutional research. I see an increase in almost every year for the past 10 years if you’re looking at the trend line. So while it’s incremental change, it is indeed change. And that shows that we’re about 35% students of color on campus among the domestic students for whom we know ethnicity. The year before that we’re 35. Then year before that, 33. Three years before that 31. And then if you take a look at 2012, which is a little bit more than a decade ago, we are below 30%.
But that 35 percent is due almost entirely to increased enrollment of Asian students. Non-Asian minority enrollment has been largely unchanged since 2014. To get really into the math of it all: the percentage of Hispanic students has vacillated between eight and 10 percent for a decade; it actually declined from 2015 until 2022. Ditto, Native American students—under three percent for more than 10 years. There have never been more than seven Pacific Islander students on campus, which rounds to zero percent.
For a decade, the number of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students on campus simply hasn’t increased, raising interesting questions about why this is the ceiling at Reed College. Why is the Black student population stuck at four or five percent?
PAUL: I think going beyond that level, financial aid was part of it. I’m not saying Reed should offer merit awards, but for example, there is a program called QuestBridge, and we looked at QuestBridge when I was there. It was just getting started. And you have to be willing to look at those QuestBridge students apart from the rest of your applicant pool and to commit to giving them full funding. And there was a principal at Reed at the time that was like, no, we’re not going to separate anybody out and say they deserve full funding and other students don’t. And so I respected that decision, but I also see it now as a kind of missed opportunity that probably stands in the way of reaching up to a higher number of, say, African-American students.
MARY: There are a lot of forces at play, so to speak. Just to put some things in perspective, our sister institutions in this Pacific Northwest, so we are part of a consortium of five small liberal arts colleges. The last seven years, a number of those schools have struggled to meet their enrollment goals, period. The demographics are changing rapidly. Interest in small liberal arts colleges is changing and not for the better. And so I think Milyon finds himself in an entirely different admissions environment than his predecessors.
The landscape in 2024 is obviously even more different, with the Supreme Court striking down race-conscious admissions entirely.
BRITTANY: The admissions office offered town halls before a decision was even made about that to just be like, “Hey, this is potentially going to happen.” A couple of people from the admissions office talked about data at Reed, what was going to happen if the Supreme Court ruled either way, and what the institution could do legally, not legally, kind of under the radar. And I feel like those types of conversations were pretty much kept under lock and key when you and I were students.
The admissions office is clearly thinking through what to do to ensure that Reed continues to diversify, even after the death of affirmative action. So are other groups of Reedies, like the alumni board, where alea adigweme is active.
ALEA ADIGWEME: Reedies tend to do the small E engagement in spades. But the transition from that small “e” to that big E, I think necessitates making students who are wronged by the institution feel like the institution that exists now is different from the one that wronged them. And that the institution is willing to reflect—openly, publicly—and make amends for the ways that, you know, it wronged students in the past and needs to show evidence of the fact that it’s not wronging students from similar demographics in the present. And that it cares about attracting even more students from these demographics in the future as well.
I think back to what Mary Frankie McFarland Forte told me at the end of our conversation about her time in the Black Student Union, during the 1968 occupation of Eliot Hall.
MARY FRANKIE MCFARLAND FORTE: My grandson was just asking, “Nana, where did you go to college?” First time he’s ever asked me that, but he’s 13 going on 14. And I said, “I went to a college called Reed.” “Well, what was Reed like?” We’re driving because I’m taking him to karate class. And I explained, he said, “Did you have a good time there?” I said, “Well, it was okay, but there wasn’t a lot of Black students there.” And you know, I said, “I worked hard,” and dah, dah, dah. And then he says, “Oh, well, I’m going to look at that school when I’m applying to schools.” I said, “No, you’re not.” And he jumped and looked at me and said, “Woah, you were quick to say that!” And I said, “Oh no, that would not be any place for you.”
I would never recommend Reed to a Black person. I never would.
*
I wonder whether this moment might be an opportunity for the faculty to think through whether Hum 110 can further change to make Reed more attractive to underrepresented students. And I think one place we can look to for inspiration, perhaps ironically, is the field of classics, which around the same time as the Reed protests began to have a reckoning of its own with institutional racism.
DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA: The abiding interest of students at Reed and elsewhere in revising these curricula, enrollments in ancient history classes and literature and translation classes, speaks quite persuasively to me of the felt urgency of humanistic encounter. And that is something really, really important to hold onto in this moment. This can’t really be taken for granted, not in light of recent news concerning that dismantling of humanities programs at West Virginia University
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a classics professor at Princeton, whose work on reimagining the discipline I’ve admired for a few years. I didn’t realize, though, that Dan-el actually lectured at Reed on November 1, 2016, after the protests kicked off, on “Black and Brown Classics.” He was a fellow teaching in Columbia’s core curriculum at the time, and engaged in conversations in publications like Eidolon or academic conferences about questions of race in the ancient world and racism in the discipline. And I was stunned to learn that the reception of this lecture at Reed pushed his own thinking on canons and canonicity.
DAN-EL: I would say that one of the more sort of intriguing bits of conversation emerged during the Q&A, and continued after the Q&A. The suspicion was raised by one of the students that I was not at least, to judge from the content of the lecture itself, hellbent on dismantling the curriculum in its entirety that rather I was interested in a kind of expansion. And I was initially uncertain as to how best to reply to this because while it did matter to me that we think sort of expansively about the possibilities of Hum 110, or Columbia’s core curriculum for that matter, much of me did instinctively rally to the side of that student. I thought, well, we don’t need this. And to repurpose that much-warped and much-discussed Audre Lorde line, it’s not at all clear that the master’s tools will actually dismantle the master’s house ever.
But I wasn’t entirely wedded to that position at that moment of facing up to the questioning from students. In the aftermath of the conversation though, it became clear to me that actually I wasn’t super interested in compromise either. So to give credit where credit is due, it really was the exchange that nudged me away from a certain form of intellectual complacency that held that I could just remain comfortably ensconced within a form of reactivating cannons without seriously undertaking the work of, well, exploding them.
What does that look like, to the professor popularizing the term? One could take the route of focusing on the reception and reappropriation of ancient texts—what the academy calls “reception studies,” which took off in the 1970s and ’80s and hit classics a while later. It’s also what Kambiz GhaneaBassiri was doing in his Hum conferences on the Old Testament, talking about how the Bible has been interpreted by Muslims, for example.
DAN-EL: So traditionally, when thinking about the kinds of lineages that are charted in core curriculum style setups, the tendency is to vault from this moment in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean to another moment in the early modern North Atlantic to then the modernity that styles itself as the heir to that. But one could engage in these forms of fictive genealogy and other contexts too. One could think about classical Chinese traditions and the reception, one could look to, classical Indian texts, one could do this with oratories and literatures and the African continent. One could do this even in a Mesoamerican context.
But the Mesoamerican example brings me now to what is a hurdle to be cleared in this kind of work. One of the spectacularly destructive feats of early modern Euro-American colonialism is that it did effectively overrepresent a specific form of classics and classicism to the exclusion of many other forms of knowledge. And that has to be addressed quite explicitly.
The problem at the beating heart of all of this is that the categories of philology or classics or even antiquity are rooted in an early modern moment of imperial and instead colonialist enslaving violence. And that one has to teach that moment.
Reed’s revised Hum curriculum, to its credit, does address race in the ancient world—an excerpt from Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, a hugely influential work in Black studies and specifically Afro-pessimism, is on the syllabus. And they’re reading a chapter from Saidiya Hartman in the second semester now. During the Harlem Renaissance, a number of artists engaged with ancient texts, whether Egyptian, Greek, or Roman, so there’s some reception studies too. But nothing on the syllabus reckons with the advent of “humanities” as a discipline.
One place that does reckon with this is Wake Forest University, where T. H. M. Gellar-Goad is a classics professor. In the wake of student activism in the spring of 2019, he co-organized an extracurricular series, and then a course, called “Classics Beyond Whiteness,” which addressed critical race theory, race in the ancient world, and the reception of classics both by non-white artists and in racial politics. In the summer of 2020, the classics department voted unanimously to make the course mandatory for all majors and minors.
T. H. M. GELLAR-GOAD: People think that if they can quote Aristotle or Plato or Homer, then they’ve proven their point. People love to make appeals to the Roman Empire when talking about American empire or American government. When it comes to racial politics in particular, Greek and Roman ways of thinking about race and ways we think about race in ancient Greece and Rome are both going to inform the way it plays out. One of the big examples of this is Confederate defenses of enslavement in the United States, before, during, and a little bit after the Civil War. They were appealing to Aristotle’s theory of enslavement, which is that if you’re a slave, you’re a slave by nature, that enslaved people have some internal characteristic that makes them “slave-ish” and therefore justifying it.
I have little interest in or time for Aristotle, but this was a very powerful argumentative point for intellectuals in the American South in the 1800s. And that’s the other thing, is the 19th century is such a sort of roiling time politically, and especially racially, not just in the United States but elsewhere. Europe was often struggling with antisemitism and treatment of status of Jews in various countries. That’s a racial question in that period. This is when the university system, the modern university system is really forming in Germany and elsewhere. And so you have philologists, classical philologists who are specialists in Latin grammar and Greek grammar who are also making big, bold claims about what race was like in the ancient world and how race should be in the modern world. And they’re very influential on philosophers, on politicians, on states persons.
Sasha-Mae Eccleston is a classics professor at Brown and the co-founder of the project “Racing the Classics,” for which she and Dan-el just won a $1 million Mellon grant. (Incidentally, she also guest lectured at Reed in spring 2016.) For her, critical theories of race are an essential lens for looking at the ancient world—and the present.
SASHA-MAE ECCLESTON: I don’t want to touch on these issues. They’re not like garnishes that you put on a dish. These are fundamental ways of experiencing the world and therefore making my way through that emotionally, intellectually, and as an informed citizen. This is an intellectual foundation and an epistemology that I have invested in and direct experience of in different ways that I value—because of what it allows me to see and to think about and to think with, and who it allows me to think with.
There was one thing that struck both Sasha-Mae and Dan-el in looking at the revised Hum syllabus.
SASHA-MAE: I think at times where America is really proud of its imperialist heritage, that’s when they become Roman. That narrative about expansion and imperium without end becomes really convenient as a way to legitimize that power. But in a pose of consciously or unconsciously talking about the formation of a democratic society or even high culture … that’s when you get the Greeky stuff … So I just kind of smirk to know that Rome got the good old shiv.
DAN-EL: I am very struck by effacement of Rome, not because I am all rah-rah for Rome’s inclusion, but because I am always intrigued when I see core curricula that make a gesture to greater inclusion as this one does, but that then for various reasons likes to sideline Rome. The decision immediately reinstates a logics of supremacy, even if this is disavowed, right? The Greeks are responsible for these cultural productions. They’re so outstanding, the Romans are derivative and all that. Now, in the case of Hum 110, I do appreciate that there is quite a robust effort to tackle the interaction between the Greeks and the Achaemenids as part of a much more interactive Mediterranean, one where there was an imperial formation subtly and not so subtly altering the trajectories of these Greek city-states. And that’s fine, but I mean, what can tell that story with real emphasis on the long durée histories of reception and contestation of these texts through the Roman Empire, an empire that is among other things continuously reimagining itself as an heir both to Greek and non-Greek forms of political and artistic practice.
Jan Mieszkowski is professor of German and Humanities at Reed.
JAN MIESZKOWSKI: Are we more self-critical since the protests? I’m not sure that the ancient model is as self-critical
as it used to be on paper. On paper. In other words, we try to enrich certain things. We teach Egypt a little—or we were, I don’t know right now—but we were teaching Egypt a little more richly, like narrowing the focus a little bit, trying not just to skip around so much, trying to go in depth more in certain areas. But I don’t know that that necessarily toppled the Greek miracle more than it used to be. Not on paper, anyway. I feel like if you look at the syllabus now, it’s not obvious to me that, that it’s self-evidently more critical of that tradition than the previous one was. The fall, the spring obviously is different.
Greece, especially without the long shadow of Rome, does feature prominently in the current Hum syllabus. But does the addition of Mesoamerica and the Harlem Renaissance really broaden the course beyond the West?
JAN: This is the other question, studying Mesoamerica. Are you just teaching “Here come the Spanish?” You’re just teaching European imperialism in a sense. And I think the answer is no. I don’t think we’re just teaching European imperialism. I think that efforts have been taken there to avoid that simply being the story. But then the Harlem unit is completely Eurocentric, if you want to think of it in that sense, you know? But so, I mean, so is a humanities class—that’s what I mean, on what level? Like the whole concept of this course is entirely specific to Britain and the United States, really more the United States than Britain, although there’s obviously heavy influences, but it’s completely an Anglo-American intellectual phenomenon. This is not just Euro, this is very specific to a certain kind of institution.
Colin Drumm graduated from Reed in 2011, and I talked with him and Salim a lot about the Hum protests at the time. Colin now teaches at the Mimbres School for the Humanities, an alternative education platform he set up after getting his PhD.
COLIN DRUMM: Reed could have taken the opportunity to develop a very serious curriculum that would have really prepared students to think about these issues. Really, if you can understand the Western tradition, and you can put that into dialogue with both Black studies and Indigenous studies, you are looking at the kernel of the problems that we have in the Atlantic world. That’s the curriculum that I wish that I would be put through if I were 18 years old again and were showing up to Reed College or and saying, come at me, throw me some books, I’m here to learn.
SASHA-MAE: One of the responsibilities that anyone that teaches a class has is to think about what the stuff they’re teaching is for. I don’t mean in the limited way of going to college to get a job, though that’s really important in the labor landscape and the racial history of the United States. Are you interested, ultimately, in replicating power structures or not? Are you interested in teaching these students to think about things using this particular set of historical actors and facts and events as catalysts for that?
ALEA: If I had taken a class on the history of race at Reed, that would’ve blown my little mind wide open. But I didn’t get that type of education until I took a class in my second grad program, in the history department, on like race and gender in the 19th-century United States.
Remember the course that Peter Steinberger, professor of political science and humanities, recently proposed: Rome, medieval Islam, and the Harlem Renaissance? In 2016, Peter opposed any change to the old syllabus but is now willing to decenter the Greeks! It says a lot about how far the conversations at Reed have come in the intervening eight years, and how deeply Reed’s faculty—no matter how many decades they’ve been teaching—have heeded the call to think deeply about the way that Reed was failing to think about race. All the professors I spoke with have taken advantage of the Center for Teaching and Learning and initiatives like the student consultant program.
NIGEL: I think it’s really important that students are kind of invited in. Tons about college is alienating if you’re a first-gen student, a student from a different kind of educational background, or minority groups of different sorts. I think it is incumbent on us as teachers to kind of identify, recognize folks who are struggling in that sense and, you know, make a place for them, make them feel that they belong. We’re lucky because we have a high faculty-student ratio, right? We have that time built into our kind of teaching practice. I’m not saying any of this is easy. But I do think we have sort of thought hard about these questions. Hum may not be perfect, but I think it was a very genuine response to a large-scale series of concerns and worries about the way in which the education was being framed and the ways in which people found themselves kind of interacting with the institution. And frankly, I’m really, really proud of my colleagues for making it happen.
ALEA: The cultural conversation has shifted so dramatically, I feel like, that the kind of compromise that people came to after the protests would look, I think a lot different if people were trying to kind of make that kind of compromise right now. If only because post-2020, you know, people’s attention to race has kind of changed. At the same time, I’m a little bit hesitant to think that if the curriculum were scrapped now and then something new were to come and take its place, I don’t know if, even post-racial reckoning of 2020, if that curriculum would be grounded in a place of wanting to kind of critique of the relatively recent concept of the West.
COLIN: That’s an issue that’s not particular to Reed, but is particular to the whole construction of this intellectual history in the first place. Sometime around the early modern period, what’s called the Renaissance, the influence of Islam was repressed from Western intellectual history. And that’s a very interesting phenomenon. I mean, if you did want to teach the canon, you could frame the whole medieval, early modern European history from the perspective of Islam. You’d have an awesome class. I mean, you’d really be at the cutting edge.
Getting to another revision of Hum, of any kind, is going to take empowering young faculty to have a serious hand in shaping that curriculum. One of the perennial problems—as we saw in the 1968 struggle over Black studies—is that junior faculty lack the security of tenure, and thus are wary of rocking the boat. This makes curricular conservatism the default. Pancho has tenure, and has been the most outspoken faculty member on the current flaws in Hum 110.
PANCHO: It is certainly true that non-tenured faculty don’t feel empowered. I understand that. If you’re an untenured faculty member and you stand up in a Hum meeting and you say, the way you guys are teaching this material sucks, they’re going to remember that when you come up for tenure. And so untenured people tend to remain silent in most situations. I think that’s unfortunate, but people are afraid of losing their jobs, which I understand. On the other hand, if you spend six years being silent and then you get tenure and then you say, “Now the real me is coming out,” oftentimes you have spent too much time being silent and you don’t know how to open your mouth anymore.
Pancho has been boycotting Hum faculty meetings for years now. Meanwhile, Kritish is the only junior faculty member who agreed to speak with me; he’s also the only faculty member outside of the department who could explain to me why Religion left. I don’t think this is an accident: it speaks to the way that junior faculty were trained in their disciplines. Maybe dreaming up a new Hum requires rethinking how the course is governed. This is obvious from the outside.
COLIN: I think doing this would require there to exist a strong consensus among the faculty about exactly why they were doing that, and the logic of the things. And what I see in the current syllabus is a syllabus designed by committee in which there does not exist a strong consensus or a guiding vision about what it is that we’re trying to teach you. What there is the rump of a classics curriculum that has been padded out with various things in order to avoid the accusation that you’re being racist by teaching the canon.
T. H. M.: Leapfrogging is more efficient. But at the same time, if you’re just changing the content and you’re not changing the assumptions that you bring into the why—why teach these texts, why this culture over another, why this period over another—then you’re missing the point.
And from the inside—students and professors.
ALBERT KERELIS: I mean, ideally, I think that the lens through which we view Hum does need to change. I think that that lens should be one about contextualizing Hum to our current political moment, kind of leveraging historical texts and cultures and ideas to better understand and learn how to act within our modern time and place. But I don’t think that professors are going to be able to do that if they’re in disagreement over what Hum should look like or what it should be trying to do, right? You’ll get professors who either avoid contextualizing texts to modern politics, or you get professors who advocate for like, holding on to a bunch of the old Hum curriculum, sometimes I think needlessly so.
JAN: This is where you have to understand, there is almost no course in the country that would be governed this way. It’d be totally different if I and two other people sat down, we could change the syllabus. When 30 or 40 people can vote on it, you can’t do anything. And that’s a question that’s come up increasingly: governance. I was saying, like, let’s just have it pull a name out of a hat. Okay, that person’s now the czar. Let them be the czar for three years and do whatever they want. Now, pull a name out of a hat. Like, almost autocracy would be better than this kind of democracy we have because it can’t function.
Maybe a rotating oligarchy, drawn from a handful of disciplines, where one of the seats is set aside for a junior faculty member.
PANCHO: One of the problems is that when you change the syllabus, it really takes several years for people to get up to speed on the new material, whatever that happens to be. So you can’t change the syllabus all that often because I’m sure faculty would be very frustrated with, just when you feel that you are comfort able teaching material X, then the syllabus completely changes and you have to start the process all over again. Although, as I said, I’m not opposed to changing the syllabus every X number of years. I think it’s good to have to learn and master new material as opposed to just teaching the same thing over and over and over again every year.
Since the revision, there have been annual reviews of the Hum 110 syllabus. But it has been six years now, of essentially the same material—unless you count the texts that have fallen off. And there are supposed to be reviews every three years now to see whether the faculty want to undertake a big overhaul. Covid didn’t help things.
JAN: We taught the syllabus for two years and then there was Covid. And Covid has changed a lot of things too. And actually, when I think about these things now, it’s very hard to separate the two because until this year, when we had a couple in-person lectures, we haven’t had in-person lectures for several years. They’re all recorded. And so that used to be one of the arguments for some people for Hum, was that this is the community-unifying event. Everybody at 9:00 AM has to gather—at least sometimes—and be there. And that doesn’t exist anymore. You know, it’s podcasts, it’s little videos that the students play at double speed while they’re on the StairMaster. And they complain if the faculty talk too quickly that they can’t play it on double-speed or whatever. It’s the new world or whatever. That’s very different. And I think with the changes, with the protests, Hum lost its veneer of inevitability. You know, it was suddenly, if you can change it, why can’t you change everything? Well, you can
I mean, it’s no longer revered in the community in the same way. But then Covid, I think accelerated that Covid took more of the shine off just because you no longer had these large group events and so forth.
I didn’t really hear disagreement from the faculty I spoke with about this point.
PETER STEINBERGER: There’s an important issue that arose last year, and that is, should there be a unified course? And there is, I would say, a solid third of the teaching staff in the course that think there should not be a unified course and that we should get rid of it altogether. And I’m extremely hostile to that view. I think that’s part of what makes Reed Reed, is that we have a unified first-year course and I’m very, very unhappy with the notion that that might be done away with. And we had a lot of conversations about that, and there was a move and a vote, a vote to create a committee to study this, and we voted pretty solidly not to create such a committee. So right now the majority of the staff likes the idea of a unified course. I think students like the idea of a unified course. How about you, Stephanie?
Call me nostalgic, but I like it too. I’m not the only one.
ALBERT: I have come to really value having a common core class at Reed. But I think there are a lot of problems with it, and I’m pretty disheartened that it’s not more effective at providing students with something of real value to them. A lot of students come away from Hum 110 feeling like the majority of their readings were useless that they’re not gonna think about them very often anymore. Hum 110 … it felt like I was reading texts just to read them. And I thought that was a real shame.
But maybe we don’t have to start at the beginning, in antiquity, because that’s not how we encounter influence in our everyday lives. Maybe the answer is to free ourselves from chronology.
DAN-EL: I thought that one of the most rewarding moments I had with the Columbia core curriculum and with efforts to revision it came fairly early in the pandemic. And what they had done for the opening stretch of the core curriculum for sophomores is that, rather than start with Plato or with Aristotle, they were commencing with David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” Frederick Douglas’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” And the idea there was to productively disorient by getting students to reflect on the significance of the summer of 2020 in its sort of historic perspective. But also to productively disorient by realigning the expected or conventional ordering of the core syllabus.
Maybe the answer is to really wrestle with “problematic” texts, instead of continuing the trend of taking them off the syllabus.
COLIN: What’s interesting is that the assumption that both sides of the debate share is that if something is bad and racist, then you shouldn’t read it. And so if you want to say we should read it, then you have to deny that it’s bad and racist. And if you say that it’s bad and racist, then you say, you shouldn’t read it. Well, I think we should read these things precisely because they’re bad and racist, because we need to understand how that stuff works.
Maybe the solution is putting those who’ve been repressed from the Western tradition at the center of a Western humanities course:
PETER: If you want to know what students ought to know—there are many things they ought to know—but one of the things they ought to know is the Quran and its implications for philosophy, for history. And, and there are major, major philosophical, historical, and literary texts that are written in North Africa and the Middle East. They’re hugely important stuff, and they’re great! And they would teach terrific, would really engage otherness and, and diversity in a really powerful way, it seems to me.
Maybe the solution is adding on a whole more year of requirements!
COLIN: Don’t cut things, just add things, make another year. Why not force everyone to read Greeks and Romans and then the next year force everyone to read Black studies? Why not double down on what’s right and good about having a core curriculum, which is in some ways a common reference point for an intellectual community.
Maybe the solution is to ditch antiquity altogether.
JAN: A year ago I taught a seminar, a sort of upper level seminar that had a large environmental humanities component. It was like the best class I’ve taught in so long. Like, the students were so engaged and, you know, it’s a topic that is real to them in so many different ways. Um, I think like freshman environmental humanities would be amazing, you know?
But for any of this to happen, the Hum faculty have to decide, collectively, to try something different.
JAN: So that would be amazing, but I say that almost wistfully because I’ve seen how hard it is to change anything, much less to change it how you want it. And it’s like even the notion of like, you know, Hum reform to say those words, like my heart sinks in a way because I’ve seen so many people spend hundreds and hundreds of hours of their life to make the smallest changes.
KAMBIZ: What it does require is like, you know, incentivizing people talking to each other and getting people excited about what they’re teaching in terms of, like, what they think that a course should be doing today, right?
The protests over Hum 110 did not result in the same lasting scars as the protests over Black Studies in 1968, because the administration and the faculty both took the demands seriously in 2016.
MARY: Well, I think there’s one big difference between what happened in the sixties and the seventies and what has happened in the last eight years or so. Wow, it’s been eight years. The rift in the sixties and seventies—it was absolutely campus-wide. So I got there in ’88, and this had all happened at least 15 to 17 years before. And like I say, things were still raw, and they were raw, like the biology faculty. So the sides, if you will, were campus-wide. I don’t think that’s true of this situation. But that’s in no way to minimize the rifts in the Hum faculty.
It’s clear, though, that there are still hurt feelings among the Hum faculty.
KAMBIZ: When people kept saying, “I still don’t understand your problem.” At one point I had to say like, “I didn’t know what this term ‘gaslighting’ meant. I learned it from students during the protests and that’s what it feels like. I just explained it to a bunch of 18 year olds and they understood it. I don’t know why you guys don’t understand it!”
But the fact that so many people who were directly involved in this debate were willing to engage with me says a lot, to me at least, about the hope of reimagining Hum 110.
PANCHO: I wouldn’t be opposed to that. I’m not sure what kind of agreement could be reached about what that new syllabus would entail, but I would certainly be open to having the conversation.
New approaches—whether it’s the environmental humanities program Reed started a few years ago, or whether it’s initiatives like Dan-el and Sasha-Mae’s Racing the Classics—are attracting huge numbers of students. Young people are hungry to understand the world they’re inheriting, and they’re more comfortable wrestling with complicated topics than we give them credit for.
The spirit of Reedies Against Racism lives on in all of the changes that their protests fostered. Reed no longer simply has a diversity statement, it has an anti-racism statement, and still puts out regular updates on how it is furthering that commitment. Many departments now do, too. I wonder whether that commitment could be extended to imagining what an anti-racist humanities might look like. It’s not about teaching ideology, but as Sasha-Mae said earlier, about thinking through questions of power. Part of that means acknowledging the power inherent in a course like Hum 110, and not skipping over the difficult parts. It means answering the question—in the syllabus—of why “Western humanities” didn’t always wrestle with questions of race and racism, why Egypt or Islam’s contributions were repressed, why Greece and Rome are still political weapons. Classics departments at places like Wake Forest prove that students are interested in these questions.
NIGEL: I think one of the great things about both Reed and Hum is that people do care, right? And that makes our lives very difficult. It means that students protest and faculty get angry. But of course it makes everything so much better. It means that the products we do put out are better. It means that the conversations we have are better. It means that things matter—and that matters. People are always saying that, so nobody cares about the humanities, you know, but that’s not my experience, right? They may not want to major in the humanities, but these conversations matter to people, they really matter.
Our histories are more interconnected than I was ever taught when I took Hum 110 at Reed. But it’s a framework that everyone, no matter their major, should take away from Reed, or from any liberal arts college, or from any study of the humanities. There are innumerable ways to draw the map from antiquity to today, and the fundamental lesson is that there are no straight lines. The world is complicated, the issues we face are complicated, but we can’t just throw up our hands and give up on untying that knot. The humanities should teach us to ask the questions that help untangle it. Reed has a beautiful opportunity on its hands with a mandatory class like Hum 110—and there are a lot of great ideas out there already.
ADDISON: A dream Hum 110 is extremely accessible and really honors all of the experiential knowledge that people bring to the table. And that’s why I love the idea of like resistance as a center of Hum 110, because folks who were not immersed in intellectualism, were oftentimes leading resistance efforts. It’s just important to engage young people in the idea of resistance and the idea that we don’t have to just subscribe to authority and to norms, that the lived experiences that people have, in themselves, are intellectually important.
*
This episode concludes Exploding the Canon. It was produced by me, Stephanie Bastek, with original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper. This series would have been impossible to create without everyone who spoke with me, both on and off the record, or who provided archival support and data. So thank you to the Reedies Against Racism, current students, and alumni: alea adigweme, Addison Bates, Eden Daniel, Colin Drumm, Albert Kerelis, Salim Moore, and Brittany Wideman. Thank you to the Reed staff and faculty, past and present: Tracy Drake, Libby Drumm, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Jolie Griffin, Mary James, Nathalia King, Paul Marthers, Jan Mieszkowski, Nigel Nicholson, Roger Porter, Kritish Rajbhandari, Pancho Savery, Peter Steinberger, and Milyon Trulove. Thank you to the classicists: Sasha-Mae Eccleston, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. And thank you to the Black Student Union of 1968 and its allies: George Brandon, Steve Engel, Mary Frankie McFarland Forte, Stephen Robinson, Suzanne Snively, Martin White, and André Wooten. Rest in power, Ron Herndon and Linda Gordon Howard. This series, like all of Smarty Pants, is sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and published under the umbrella of The American Scholar magazine.
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I’m a devoted fan of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting.” For many years, I’ve taught it in my personal essay workshops, not only because it’s a marvelous piece of writing but also because it demonstrates nearly everything the form can do. It creates an immediate connection between author and reader, one that grows deeper as the essay goes on. It encourages students to disregard the hoary prescription that the writer should show, not tell: Woolf spells out her themes explicitly, and shows us everything, too. But its most striking feature, and the one I make the most of in my presentation to my students, is its inflatability. It starts out small—charmingly and insistently local—but toward the end, it surprises the reader by ballooning into universality. Let me teach it now.
As “Street Haunting” opens, the reader finds the author at home, alone and feeling restless, surrounded by objects whose provenance she knows almost too well. She cherishes the memories these familiar belongings call up, but just now she wants to escape them. If only for a few hours, she longs to cast off her identity and join the “republican army of anonymous trampers” who walk the streets of London. But before she can embark on her expedition, she must invent an errand: the purchase of a pencil will do. Why does she need this pretext? The question is allowed to hang, to be addressed only near the end of the essay.
Out on the street at last, the reader feels a thrill of effortless momentum. Woolf’s mind carries us: she’s a Virgil to our Dante, and we gladly let her lead the way. At first, it’s the loveliness of the London street at dusk, with its “islands of light, and its long groves of darkness” that she commends to our attention, but we won’t linger long in the realm of pure beauty. Our nature, she observes, does not allow us to subsist on the “simple, sugary fare” of the visual. As our walk continues, she charges us to go deeper, to enter and explore the regions of human meaning. We need, Woolf tells us, an excuse “for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets,” to seek out “some duskier chamber of the being.” And so we duck into a store where we watch as a dwarf tries on a pair of shoes.
The dwarf wears the “peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed.” (The baldness of this description unsettles a present-day reader. Deformed is a word we no longer use. And dwarf has fallen out of favor in many quarters, as well.) She’s accompanied by two full-size companions toward whom she seems to feel a certain resentment. She needs these chaperones, Woolf surmises—without their endorsing presence she would get no service—but can’t quite feel grateful to them. (Neither would the reader, in her place.) But once her attendants have summoned the saleswoman, who brings the dwarf one of those special mirrors that reflect only the customer’s feet and ankles, she’s in her glory. These are the parts of her that are normal size and well formed, the parts she’s proud of, and her visit to the shoe store allows her to show them off. Her sulkiness vanishes; suddenly she’s confident, even triumphant. “Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out. … She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs.”
As the dwarf pirouettes in front of the mirror, Woolf takes the liberty of penetrating her consciousness. “She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person: women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone.” The reader can’t help smirking here, and Woolf’s authorial attitude seems to sanction this reaction. But then we remember with a guilty start that in the hundred-odd years since Woolf wrote this essay, the world has undergone an enlightenment: we understand that because fate and humanity have been so unkind to her, the dwarf is entitled to any compensatory comfort she can find, even self-deception. And can we deny that we, too, lie to ourselves in just this way, by allowing the part to substitute for the whole? This is such a familiar human failing that we feel a true sympathy for the dwarf.
But now the dwarf’s companions are growing impatient. They’re ready to leave, and she must choose a single pair of shoes and surrender the magic mirror. Without it, she can no longer dream of being loved as a woman: she must return to being a dwarf. The reader’s sympathy grows still deeper: we know the pain of relinquishing a fantasy. The dwarf and her retinue of “giantesses” depart, followed by Woolf and the ghostly reader. The question that Woolf posed as we entered the store—“What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?”— has been answered. It’s like being ourselves.
But out on the street, our newfound solidarity with the dwarf is thrown into radical doubt. Suddenly it seems that everyone in the crowd of “anonymous trampers” has picked up the rhythm of her hobbling gait. Looking around, we see that we’re surrounded by the blind, the halt, the feeble-minded. It’s as if the dwarf’s defectiveness had followed her out of the shoe store and spread into the world—as if abnormality had become the norm. The terms of our identification with the dwarf have been reversed: it’s no longer that she’s like us, but that we’re like her. This reversed perspective makes a mockery of the self-congratulatory moment when the reader presumed to grant the dwarf full equality. How can we welcome her into the human community when, at bottom, we feel so freakish that we can’t be sure we belong in that category ourselves?
Over the course of the next few sentences, Woolf’s emphasis subtly changes: physical deformity morphs into economic marginality. We’re surrounded now by the poor, by people who have “queer names” and keep themselves alive by practicing obscure trades like gold beating and accordion pleating. A defensive class guilt creeps into Woolf’s tone: she assures herself that the poor “must find life tolerable” if only because their existence is too unknowable to be tragic: “They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity.” Needless to say, we should not take Woolf at her word here: her self-parodying irony is unmistakable.
As she turns a corner, Woolf encounters “a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery.” She recalls an earlier walk when she came upon the corpse of an old woman “flung abandoned” on the steps of a public building. “Often enough,” she remarks, “these derelicts choose to lie not a stone’s throw from theatres.” Readers are bound to be jarred by this passage. The “bearded Jew” reference has an authentic ring of anti-Semitic disparagement, and we’re genuinely shocked by Woolf’s flippant line about where these unfortunates “choose to lie.” Are we to take this in the same spirit that we did her earlier remark that the poor “must find life tolerable”?
As her walk continues, Woolf reverts to the previously forsworn pleasures of noticing the surfaces of things. She admires the luxury goods displayed in the windows of Oxford Street and imagines furnishing a house with the carpets and mirrors and alabaster bowls she sees there. This self-soothing diversion leads her away from the realities of the street and into a vivid reverie about the hidden lives of the wealthy and powerful. From an imagined balcony, she surveys the mansions and gardens of Mayfair. “There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen.”
Just now a reflexive thought stops Woolf in her metaphorical tracks. Her walk is taking place “between tea and dinner” on a winter evening, but in her transporting Mayfair fantasy, it’s summer, and late at night. How, she asks herself, can she inhabit both moments at the same time? Her answer amounts to a full statement of the essay’s theme: no human being is ever all of a piece. When Nature made man, Woolf explains, “she should have thought of one thing only.” But in a moment of distraction, she turned away, and her lapse left him “streaked, variegated, all of a mixture.” From the start, then, a person is divided, his imagination at war with his conviction that he inhabits a single identity by which other people know him and by which he knows himself. We’re always subject to this disintegrative tendency: it’s as integral to our humanity as our need to make the self a permanent home. Periodically, we must break free from our settled identities and enter imaginatively into other worlds, other minds: “Is the true self,” Woolf asks, “this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?”
Woolf’s walk through London is an enactment of the human compulsion to wander beyond the recognized boundaries of the self.
Because they’ve grown up regarding Woolf as a goddess in the feminist pantheon (even if they haven’t yet gotten around to actually reading her), they approach this essay eagerly. They want to like it.As I say, “Street Haunting” is a supremely useful pedagogical model, but in recent years a certain number of my students have found it “problematic.” This group—small but growing, mostly composed of younger students—can be expected to register even stronger objections to a number of other essays I’ve taught regularly. They’ve judged James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” for all its thundering passion, to be unacceptably accommodationist, and an increasing number of workshop participants tell me they’re alienated by Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I”—another essay I particularly love. Their negative judgment rests on a misinterpretation that would have bewildered its author: they take Ginzburg’s comically deadpan portrait of her marriage to the dilettante Gabriele Baldini to be a narrative of spousal abuse. “Why does she put up with it?” they say. Or, “I hope she finds help!”
But oddly enough, their troubled reaction to “Street Haunting” is rather muted compared with their forthright condemnations of other readings: they seem more pained by it than angry at it. Because they’ve grown up regarding Woolf as a goddess in the feminist pantheon (even if they haven’t yet gotten around to actually reading her), they approach this essay eagerly. They want to like it, so when they come upon Woolf’s treatment of the dwarf and the derelicts, they’re not quite ready to condemn her. (Interestingly enough, they don’t have much to say about her very real and very English anti-Semitism, even when I make a point of alerting them to it.) Race and gender have long sat at the top of the hierarchy of intersectional categories, while “disability” and “poverty” have been seen as less important. Accusations of racism and sexism are always at the ready, but “ableist” and “classist,” though they’re more commonly used these days than they were a few years ago, must be rummaged for.
When the discussion stalls, I sometimes restart it by admitting that I, too, have always felt a little shocked by Woolf’s tone. I go on to suggest that her seemingly callous attitude might be understood as a deliberate provocation: perhaps she means to challenge her readers to examine and acknowledge their own censorable reactions. Can we honestly deny that when we see a derelict lying in the street, we feel—if only for an instant before we call down shame upon ourselves—a visceral revulsion? (Or worse: we feel resentment.) Why does Woolf insist that her readers face this squarely? Because a writer whose subject is human nature must tell the truth about it, starting with herself.
But perhaps I’m giving Woolf too much credit here. From her biographies, we’ve learned that she was arrogant and not very nice. Certainly she lived and wrote in a time before niceness became a law that constrains everyone, especially writers. But even if Woolf’s harshness was more a reflection of her personality than a conscious literary strategy, it still has the effect of forcing the reader to examine his own uncharitable heart.
This argument doesn’t always convince my students. But never mind. I’ve got another defense of Woolf at the ready, and I consider it a clincher. I tell my students that like all great literature, “Street Haunting” works against itself. Even as Woolf shocks us with her hardheartedness, her descriptive language creates a powerful undertow of literary sympathy, continually evoking the humanity of the suffering people about whom she speaks in such flippant tones—the dwarf with her deluded dreams, the hunger-bitten Jew, the idiot sucking the knob of his walking stick. Having made this point, I support it by reading aloud her remarkable description of the progress of “[two] bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them. … On they came with the unyielding but tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them.”
Woolf’s walk continues. Her next-to-last stop is a secondhand bookshop, a roost for “wild books, homeless books” and a haven where she and the reader can escape the buffeting extremes of the streets for a little while. She is immediately drawn to the drastically discounted volumes placed on high shelves, the ones nobody buys and nobody reads. These tend to be simple accounts, often self-published, of travel—a once-in-a-lifetime journey, for example, to Egypt or Greece or China—after which the author returns “to lead a parochial life at Edmonton.” Woolf’s interest in these books is an oddly personal one; she doesn’t want to read them so much as to “meet” them. To her they embody the people who wrote them, people whom she seems to consider kin. Like her (in a much smaller way, of course, and less brilliantly), they’ve taken walks through the world, noticing and describing all the while. Woolf shows her democratic instincts here: perhaps she’s not entirely the aristocratic snob we’ve taken her to be. And like every other human being, she’s lonely.
Briefly out in the street again, we are carried along by a fast-moving, homeward-bound crowd. Woolf’s ear catches ambient shreds of gossip about a woman named Kate and bits of speculative chatter between two raggedly dressed men who live in hope that a lucky bet at the racetrack will make them rich. The reader, who has been absorbed in following Woolf as she negotiates her wide associative swerves, has forgotten that her walk through London started with a purpose. Woolf herself has forgotten. “But we are come to the Strand now,” she announces, “and as we hesitate on the curb, a little rod about the length of one’s finger begins to lay its bar across the velocity and abundance of life.”
The pencil! It may have begun as a pretext, but in the end it’s the whole point. Just as, after the Fall, God punished Adam by declaring him mortal and obliging him to eat his bread “in the sweat of [his] face,” so Woolf must find and buy the tool by which she does her life’s work. The “little rod” brings her back with a jolt to the terms that existence imposes on us all. Before she ends her walk, she must fulfill a mission, instrumental and arbitrary though it seemed when she conceived it. “Really I must—really I must. … Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil.”
Even so, she hesitates. When she remembers the pencil, she is reminded that for her, as for all of us, there is no escaping real time, that even as she walks a looping route through the streets of London, she is also walking a straight line through her life, heading inexorably toward its end. As she looks out at the river, her perspective changes: for a moment she sees it through the eyes of a past self. This is not, as we might have expected, a child-self, but the self—arbitrarily chosen, it seems, from a near infinitude of time-stamped Virginia Woolfs—of six months earlier. The present-day Woolf regards this self as enviable and somehow innocent. From the perspective of the slightly older Woolf, the younger one is protected from the fear of death by the later Woolf’s knowledge that she will survive until the present moment. This is a wildly irrational assumption, but the reader understands it. Perhaps because we all long for a place of refuge—even if it’s one from which we were exiled long ago—we too tend to see our past selves as sealed off, protected from the onrushing future that assaults us in the present moment. The earlier Woolf enjoyed “the happiness of death,” but the Woolf of right now suffers “the insecurity of life.” As she contemplates a Thames that is darker and choppier than she remembers, the mood of the scene turns bleak.
Her walk completed, Woolf turns toward home. She takes care of the business of buying the pencil at a stationer’s store, where she brokers a silent reconciliation between the quarrelsome old couple that runs it. This is the only moment in which Woolf interacts with anyone but the reader: it restores the essay’s intimate scale and offers a little human warmth after Woolf’s grim ruminations on the Thames embankment. Then, pencil in hand, she makes her way through quiet, empty streets. Like most return journeys, hers is smooth and nearly featureless, not a continuation of the evening’s adventures, but a review of them. She remembers the dwarf, the blind men, the party in a Mayfair mansion. Her walk has cured her of her restlessness, relieved her of the burden of her loneliness, and reacquainted her with “those wild beasts, [her] fellow men.”
When she reaches home, she finds comfort. After her walk, she no longer feels imprisoned inside its walls, but “sheltered and enclosed.” There’s a quiet triumph in her tone as she surveys the familiar furnishings she fled a few hours earlier: “the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet.” She has returned from an adventure, and like the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s archetypal hero, she has brought back a prize: the pencil she will use to write.
In recent years, I’ve kept an anxious watch on what I say at the seminar table. I continually bite my tongue. Simultaneously, I berate myself for my cowardice. It’s quite possible, I know, that I’m overplaying the danger that something I say, or that an author says, will result in an explosion of offense. But workshops are delicate mechanisms, easily thrown out of gear by conflict; I know from experience that a single passage in a single essay or a single ill-judged remark from me can introduce a destabilizing wobble that will ramify until the class collapses. My job as leader is to keep the group on an even keel, to exercise tact and stay politically neutral (not easy when neutrality itself is construed as a political position), to promote trust among the members of the workshop. I’m not alone in my sense of constraint: I can tell from their hesitant tone and constant preemptive apologies that my students are anxious, too: like me, they fear the judgment of the others. What I hope for are those moments, more precious as they grow rarer, when the group relaxes and honest discussion becomes a little more possible.
Sometimes I’ve been tempted to dodge trouble by making a literary land-for-peace arrangement with my students. How much essayistic territory would I be prepared to cede in order to avoid provoking some student’s disruptive outrage? Would I remove “Such, Such Were the Joys” from my syllabus because in it Orwell casually quotes the following schoolboy mnemonic, which helped him recall the order of the battles of the War of the Roses: “A black Negress was my aunt: there’s her house behind the barn”? Would I spike Juno Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” because the author confesses that he’s repelled by the dusky tone that underlies the apparent whiteness of Japanese skin?
The answer in both cases is no. Only one student has ever flagged the Orwell mnemonic, and I’d be ashamed to preemptively cancel a great essay because of something so minor. Even so, whenever I teach “Such, Such Were the Joys,” I feel like a driver stopped by guards at a border checkpoint. Will they shine their flashlights into the trunk? As for “In Praise of Shadows,” I’ve always made a point of bringing up the whiteness-darkness allusion in class discussion because it’s central to the essay. Ten years ago, most of my students were able to appreciate the poignancy of Tanizaki’s color shame. Now many read it without appreciating the irony in his tone.
Why can’t we be simultaneously offended and delighted, or offended and moved, or offended and enlightened, or for that matter, offended and honestly uncertain about the ethical status of whatever it was that caused the offense?I haven’t yet eliminated anything from my syllabus for good—certainly not “Street Haunting”—but I must admit that I’ve begun to avoid certain essays that had been staples of class discussion for years. It’s been a while, for example, since I’ve assigned Phillip Lopate’s “Against Joie de Vivre.” The last time I did, many of my students found it delightful, an object lesson in the loosening up and risk taking I’d been urging them to try, but “Me Too” was in the air, and a core group of women vehemently objected to the piece, particularly to Lopate’s distinctly unchivalrous account of making love to his first wife: “I would stroke her breasts,” he writes, “and she would get a look in her eyes of quiet intermittent hunger, like a German Shepherd being petted.” The classroom reaction was explosive; it ended the discussion. In an effort to restart it, I pointed out that in his farcical depiction of marital sex, Lopate takes care to make himself look ridiculous as well (awaiting his “treasure” in a tumescent state, he has “all the consciousness of a sun mote”). When this argument failed, I made the usual tactical concession. I admitted—truthfully this time—that, like them, I couldn’t help being shocked by his comparison of a woman to a dog. But I omitted to mention that the passage in question made me laugh. It makes me laugh even now. Lopate’s candor, as Sven Birkerts puts it, is “straight gin.”
I should have confessed my amusement and gone on to challenge my students to tell me why taking offense should always constitute the last word. Why can’t we be simultaneously offended and delighted, or offended and moved, or offended and enlightened, or for that matter, offended and honestly uncertain about the ethical status of whatever it was that caused the offense? But I was too timid. The fact is that I’m even more terrified of my own anger than I am of my students’. If I hadn’t been so fearful of losing my temper, I might have anticipated the wit of the staircase and spoken my mind there in the classroom, where my students would have profited by it. Yes, I should have said, the German Shepherd passage is offensive. Yes, it’s over the top, but candor is essential to the personal essay. Can we no longer be candid? Then the form is finished.
In my darker moods, it seems to me that the personal essay is indeed vulnerable to extinction—more so than any other literary genre. Its soft spot is its intimacy. The essayist is not an omnipotent world maker like the novelist: he depends on the reader. His creation spins out of a conversation with that reader, an imagined one, of course, but a true connection nonetheless. This bond is not forged from ethnicity or gender or group membership—although these categories can always enter the essay in the form of topics or themes—but from a shared understanding of what is deepest and most universal in human nature. If the reader fails to pick up his end of the string—or, more precisely, if the essayist can no longer believe in the possibility of a reader who is capable of picking up the string—the essay itself will fail.
In “Street Haunting,” Woolf’s connection with the reader grows closer as their walk together proceeds. At the start, she takes the lead like a tour guide, tossing observations over her shoulder as she and the reader push through the densely peopled London streets, the reader struggling a little to keep up. But gradually the crowds disperse. By the time Woolf ushers the reader into the bookstore, we’ve entered the intimate spaces of her mind: in the quiet of the shelves, her tone has turned from authoritative to confiding. And a little later, when Woolf undergoes her crisis on the banks of the Thames—her sudden confrontation with the reality of her own death—the moment is both universal and intensely personal. The London walk has ended now; the crowds have disappeared. Here on the desolate Strand, only Woolf and the reader remain.
As I’ve noted, some of my students—often the ones who most delight in denunciation—seem a little baffled by “Street Haunting.” Their reaction to it is uncharacteristically low key but more plainly diagnostic than any ideological harrumphing. In the case of Woolf’s essay, the problem, if I’m right, is a hopeless one: they simply don’t get it. They’re unequipped to appreciate the honor that Woolf has done them by addressing them on terms of intimate equality.
I wonder whether things have changed so much that we are losing our understanding of human nature—or at least in the way that Woolf and the modernists who followed her understood it. Sometimes I fear that in our obsession with group identity, we’re losing the notion of psychological complexity. Certainly our obsession with group identity is incompatible with Woolf’s insight that our essential divisions are internal to individuals, and that this condition is exactly what we have most in common with one another.
I’m tempted to say that the identity movement will be the end of literature, but that’s too strong. I don’t mean that narrative will disappear. Novels that are written to survive the scrutiny of the “sensitivity reader” will most likely be dull. Their conflicts will be crudely Manichean; they will lack complex characterization and tend toward demonization or hagiography. They will have the feel and function of foundational myths, endlessly repeated to reinforce social solidarity. Nevertheless, we’ll continue to read them because we never tire of stories. Like children, we’ll demand to hear the same one over and over. Sophisticated fiction grows rarer, but what Woolf calls “the ancient sea of fiction” will never dry up. And despite my fears for the personal essay, I also don’t mean to say that nonfiction in general is doomed. The internet will go on teeming with fact and opinion pieces, thin and flat and overlong though they may be.
What really seems at risk is introspective writing. Whether fiction or nonfiction, this kind of literature springs from the modernist imperative to identify the contradictions that cut through each of us, and to do so with reference to a large, shifting, amorphous something that we recognize as human nature. In my reading, writing, and teaching, I carry on as though the liberating rule of modernism still continues, but as the years go by, I can no longer deny that something less humane has almost fully replaced it. Even so, I wait for its return: without it, how can I read or write or teach? When and how will the world reorder itself so that my students can receive the legacy of “Street Haunting”?
The post Tramping With Virginia appeared first on The American Scholar.
Six days after our friend and former running mate Carmen was released from the hospital following a vicious dog attack in March, my running partner and I went to visit her at her home. She had been in the hospital for eight days, had multiple wounds stitched up, and endured two operations on the tendons and ligaments in her left arm. She’d also been interviewed by all the local newspapers and several TV crews. Her misadventure was quite a story: running alone on back roads on the outskirts of Gijón on a Saturday morning, as she often does, she was attacked by two dogs, both of them pit bull and German shepherd crosses, which had escaped from a farm. The first sank its teeth into her calf. Then when she tried to hit at it with the small pack she wore, the other jumped in. It was impossible to beat them both off. Soon, they overwhelmed her and pulled her down. She fell on her front, not her back, a bit of luck that saved her. A bite to the neck might have killed her. Instead of her face and stomach, the dogs tore at her back, arms, and legs. She probably had 50 stitches, she told me. Two wounds were problematic: the arm because the use of her hand was affected, and her buttock because the bite was so deep that the doctors worried the wound might not close.
At home, a cast from wrist to shoulder kept her left arm immovable so the sutures wouldn’t pull out, which if they did would mean another operation to stitch them back. She greeted us with a grin. She was in her loungewear, but she did go out in the afternoons, shuffling along the street with her husband to the neighborhood terrace for a beer. She’d go crazy otherwise. We had read the newspaper stories, but we got it all over again from the horse’s mouth: how she had slipped off her pack to swing it at the dogs; how while she tried to fend off one, the other jumped at her, biting; how she had lain on the pavement in the middle of the road; how a small delivery van had come along the road very fast toward her, honking; how, as she watched the van come speeding down on her, she had thought she wouldn’t be torn apart by the dogs after all but run over by the vehicle. How with the approach of the van, one dog let go of her to retreat but the other tried to drag her off. All this she told with her usual quick laugh at a good joke.
When the van pulled up, Carmen, her face against the road surface, saw the driver jump out, yelling and waving his arms at the dogs, which withdrew 10 yards. Carmen insisted that the driver lift her off the ground, though he didn’t want to move her. But the dogs were hovering nearby, and to be still prone before them was unthinkable. The man called 112, the emergency number, but he couldn’t say exactly what the location was, so Carmen, who knew the area because she often trained there, had to give the directions. A group of cyclists came along, the police came, and the ambulance came. The dogs hung about, and it took shots fired into the air to scare them off.
The story was soon all over the internet and in the local papers, perhaps because it resonated: a few months earlier, in the province of Zamora, a woman on a solitary walk was attacked and killed by herding dogs. A detail of the attack on Carmen that was not published, and which I learned about from her, was how long the attack had lasted. She knew exactly because of the app on her GPS watch, which registered the precise moment she stopped running and the time lapse between then and when she switched off her watch, after she was back on her feet. Exactly two minutes and 40 seconds had passed. Including the time the driver was gingerly lifting her to her feet.
“Not even three minutes,” I told the pair of students I found myself relating the story to a few weeks later. One of them had visibly tensed at the loud bark of a dog in the hall outside the language school, giving me a good reason to tell the story—I wanted to sympathize with her about her fear of dogs. After describing the attack, the multiple wounds, the honking van, the shaken driver, I then asked how long they thought the attack had lasted. One said maybe 20 minutes. The other agreed. Guess again, I said dramatically. Then I told them. They exchanged wonderfully gratifying looks of horror.
“Was she very very lucky to have fallen on her stomach and very very lucky the van came along so soon after the dogs attacked,” I asked, “or was she very very unlucky to have gone out that morning at the exact time she did, alone, and without the poles she typically trains with?”
That was an interesting question, especially since the topic that day was pessimism versus optimism. Both students had characterized themselves as realist shading into pessimist, and their scores on the quiz on personality had suggested the same. So did their answers to me: they said she was unlucky. Carmen, on the other hand, is always joking, always laughing, always chatting with other runners and always making light of difficulties. In one newspaper interview, she said, “I’m fine. It’s a miracle I’m alive, but this is not going to discourage me. We’ll see when I go out and encounter dogs, but I don’t want this to affect me. I’ll continue training as usual.” To us, two old running mates, she didn’t have to offer assurances. We knew. We too had long before been bitten by the bug.
The post Bitten appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Adrienne Rich’s “Planetarium.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich appeared first on The American Scholar.
Laura S. Lewis studied sculpture at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and now, a decade later, works as a welder by day and an artist by night. “I love to weld—that’s my primary job,” she says. “I feel like it’s magic.” In her Atlanta studio, she welds sculptures out of discarded scrap metal, including 400 pounds of the stuff that she recently received from Alex Benigno, or “Atlanta’s magnet man,” who uses a bike magnet to retrieve scrap from roadways. “I have an interest in environmentalism and recycling,” Lewis says.
- Little Bluebird, 2022, scrap steel, glass cabochon, 8” x 6” x 2”.
- Millie Rose — Doofus,2018-2022, scrap steel, paint, frame.
- Little Ducky 1, 2018-2022, scrap steel, paint, frame, 20” x 18”.
In her work, Lewis tries to re-create forms and figures of the natural world, but she tries not to overanalyze her compositions. “I like to let the material inform me,” she says. “I grab a handful of scrap, throw it on my table, and it’s like a puzzle.” For Lewis, welding is a meditative practice. Most of her sculptures are representations of flowers, cats, dogs, and other animals. The art, she says, becomes a sort of meta-narrative because of the materials she uses. “It’s a bunch of raw metals that come from the Earth and are processed into this thing,” she says. “I love the process of making it back into something that resembles a natural object. Nature is the best artist there is.”
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We were saddened to learn of Paul Auster’s passing on April 30, at the age of 77. In his memory, revisit this interview, which originally ran on November 5, 2021, on the late author’s favorite writer: Stephen Crane.
In his decades-long career, the writer Paul Auster has turned his hand to poems, essays, plays, novels, translations, screenplays, memoirs—and now biography. Burning Boy explores the life and work of Stephen Crane, whose short time on earth sputtered out at age 28 from tuberculosis. Like his biographer, Crane, too, spanned genres—poetry, novels, short stories, war reporting, and semi-fictional newspaper “sketches”—striking it big in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage, which was widely celebrated at the time and is still regarded as his best work. But in Auster’s estimation, the rest of Crane’s output (and there is a surprising amount of it) is sorely neglected, and the pleasure of Burning Boy lies in reading one of the 19th century’s finest writers alongside one of today’s. Paul Auster joins the podcast to talk about the task of restoring Stephen Crane to the American canon.
Go beyond the episode:
- Paul Auster’s Burning Boy
- Read Steven G. Kellman’s review, “Poet of the Extreme”
- Eager for a taste of Stephen Crane beyond the novels? We recommend The Black Riders and Other Lines and “The Open Boat”
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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The post American Modernism’s Lost Boy-King appeared first on The American Scholar.
It must have been movement that caught my eye. Or maybe the dark shadow slicing across the white sea floor. I was in the water, far enough from shore that I would have had to yell for someone on land to hear me, had there been anyone around. This was many years ago, when I was young and unafraid of going out too far. I was casting for bonefish in the Florida Keys. It was autumn, still warm and summerlike in South Florida, and I enjoyed the opportunity to get into the water and wade on the hard-bottom sand flats. I don’t remember if this was my first or second trip to the Keys, but I had fished in saltwater many times before and knew the risks that come from entering an environment where humans are not at the top of the food chain.
I had been quite a distance from shore when I heard splashing sounds and looked to see someone headed my way, fishing pole in one hand, red cup in the other. This came as some surprise, not only for the unspoken rule about keeping one’s distance from fellow anglers, but also because it was a weekday afternoon and the flat I was fishing had been, until then, deserted. The stranger approached, a wide-brimmed hat shading his face, sunglasses concealing his eyes. He was grinning as he introduced himself as Luke.
“How’s the fishing?” he asked.
“I just got here,” I said. “Too early to tell.”
“Oh, I’ve been watching you cast,” he said. “You cast pretty well. That’s a nice fly rod.”
I couldn’t place his accent. His arms were thick and muscular.
“Thanks, I haven’t had it very long,” I said. “How’s the fishing been for you?”
“I haven’t caught anything yet,” he said as he lifted his cup for a drink, ice cubes colliding inside. I could smell some kind of alcohol, which may have explained the grin on his face and his having interrupted my fishing. “I’m prepared, though,” he added.
“How’s that?”
He twisted slightly to reveal a sheathed knife on his hip. It must have been 10 inches or more. It was strapped to his belt. “There are a lot of sharks out here, they tell me,” he said. “I got a dagger for them.” Then he took another swig from the cup as his words settled over the water around us like cold air.
“Well, I hope you don’t have to use it,” I said, moving away. “Good luck.”
With that, I headed across the flat into deeper water, farther from shore and anyone else who might happen along. When I reached the far edge of the flat, I stopped. I was in water that approached the top of my thighs. It was deep enough that its buoyancy took some of the weight off my legs, but it made walking awkward, limiting my mobility. Still, I was optimistic. It was getting to be late afternoon. The sun was lower in the sky now, taking some of the edge off the heat. The tide was coming in. And, at last, it was quiet again. For these reasons, I felt my chances of connecting with a fish were good. I cast my fly out into the water and glanced over my shoulder. The fisherman was quite a distance down the beach now. I drew a deep breath and relished the peaceful scene around me: clear water spreading out across the vast sand flat and into the open sea in the distance. Palm trees and dense stands of sea grapes and coastal scrub marked the shoreline. A light breeze blew across the flat, creating a slight ripple on the water, enough to offer some cover to any fish that might have been feeding in the shallows. Just ahead, between me and the open ocean, I could see the color transition of the water as the flat fell away into a deep channel. It was here, in this transition zone, where I cast my fly. I had been at it for 20 minutes or so when something caught my eye. There, still some distance away, was a shark headed directly toward me. With the clear conditions, light winds, and my polarized sunglasses cutting through the surface glare, I could see the shark perfectly, its tail fanning back and forth, its broad pectoral fins. I had seen sharks before on other flats I had fished—in Florida, Mexico, and the Bahamas. They were more often small blacktips and bonnetheads, sometimes lemon sharks. This one looked larger, maybe five feet in length. It wasn’t a giant, but it was large enough that I was mildly concerned. I thought of the knife hanging from Luke’s belt. What did I have with which to fend off a shark? A fragile fly rod? A pair of wading boots? My fists?
This is how it goes, I thought. They move in when you least expect it. I was in the shark’s world now. There was nothing I could do.
I watched the shark bearing down on me. That it should be tracking directly toward me, of all the space it had to swim across this expansive flat, seemed incredible. Was it drawn to the scent of the sunscreen I’d slathered on my legs? My electromagnetic field? The sight of an unusual object in the water? I didn’t know. Regardless, the shark was closing the distance. I began backing into what I hoped was shallower water, ever so slightly closer to shore, one step at a time, but it was pointless. The water still reached the top of my legs; the shore was still far off in the distance. I racked my mind, trying to decide what I would do if the shark were to attack. Would I kick at it? Yell? My options were extremely limited.
Then, as the shark neared, looking even larger and heavier than it had just a moment ago, it abruptly changed course and swam around me. I recognized it then as a bull shark. My heart hammered in my chest. Blood raced through my arteries and veins. I could feel a metronomic pulsing in my temples. I’m certain the shark detected this, too, even though only my legs were submerged. There was no question who was in charge here. It wasn’t me. We made eye contact briefIy as the shark glided past, its heavy, powerful body moving silently and effortlessly through the water until finally it disappeared into the channel.
I waded back toward the shore, into shallower water, studying the flat around me with more vigilance than before, in case the shark should return. It never did.
In 2021, the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami announced results from a study it had conducted on the population dynamics of South Florida’s sharks. Between 2009 and 2021, researchers examined nearly 3,500 sharks caught and released off Miami and the Florida Keys. Subjects ranged in size from a 20-inch Atlantic sharpnose shark to a 14-foot, 7-inch great hammerhead. The study, which was noted as the first and only assessment of South Florida’s large coastal sharks, documented some 15 species. But it was the bull shark that received most of the attention.
“In a new study of South Florida’s sharks, it has been revealed that the fearsome bull shark is actually one of the most common species,” began a July 22, 2021, article on sharkophile.com, which describes itself as “a news and entertainment site celebrating all things shark.” Similarly, an article in the Orlando Sentinel seized on the bull shark’s well-earned reputation, beginning this way: “The bull shark, a fearsome predator that could kill you with a single bite, turns out to be the fourth-most abundant shark species in South Florida, according to a new study.” Never mind that the nurse, blacktip, and lemon were determined to be the most prevalent. What mattered, at least to the public, was that there were bull sharks here and lots of them. We tend to think of great whites, tigers, and hammerheads as “maneaters,” but the bull may be the most dangerous shark of all. Although they don’t reach the gargantuan proportions of some other species, bull sharks can grow to 11 feet in length. But it’s their heavy, powerful physique that gets your attention when you see one. Bull sharks are named for their thick, stout bodies, their blunt, bovine snouts, and their pugnacious disposition. Consult nearly any authoritative description of this species, and the adjectives “aggressive,” “powerful,” and “unpredictable” will almost always appear, together with the warning that bulls are the species of shark most likely to attack humans.
Yet it’s not just the bull shark’s innate aggression that differentiates it from most other species; it’s their method of attack. Very often, they preface their attacks with powerful head butts—head butts!—that serve to stun and disorient their victims. Then they bite, often multiple times, using their powerful jaws, sharp teeth, and muscular bodies to rip their prey apart. When you examine the dentition of a bull shark, you’ll notice how perfectly suited it is for this gruesome business. Sharks have multiple rows of teeth. When a tooth is lost in an attack or feeding event, another quickly replaces it, allowing sharks to maintain their status as apex predators. But whereas other species might have five or seven layers of replacements waiting to move into position, bull sharks have up to 50 rows of teeth. Their narrow, sharply pointed lower teeth clamp onto their prey while broad, heavily serrated uppers rip and grind and sever, delivering a bite force as strong as 5,914 newtons—pound for pound, the strongest of all sharks.
In 2022, an Australian spear fisherman who was attacked by a bull shark later described seeing a “wall of teeth” sinking into his arm “like a hot knife through butter.” Perhaps just as terrifying for this diver was the savage manner in which his attacker operated, which he later explained to reporters: “You know when a dog is playing with a toy how they shake their head? That’s what the shark was doing.”
The International Shark Attack File (ISAF), maintained by researchers at the University of Florida, ranks bull sharks third on its list of species most responsible for human attacks (behind the great white and tiger). And George Burgess, former director of the ISAF, has said that bull sharks are likely responsible for many of the attacks blamed on other species. As the ISAF notes, “positive identification of attacking sharks is very difficult since victims rarely make adequate observations of the attacker during the ‘heat’ of the interaction.” ISAF records reveal that bull sharks have been implicated in at least 100 unprovoked attacks on humans around the world, 27 of them fatal. Given that this species is likely responsible for many more, the ISAF notes, the bull shark “is considered by many to be the most dangerous shark in the world.”
A bull shark has killed a Pennsylvania woman who was a passenger on a cruise ship in the Bahamas.
—Newsweek, September 7, 2022
Swimmer dies after being attacked by a shark off Sydney beach. … The last fatality from a shark bite in Sydney was in 1963 with the person recorded as “standing in the water,” according to Taronga’s Australian Shark Incident Database. The last fatality of a person swimming was in Sydney harbour in 1955, a spokesperson for the database said. Both attacks involved bull sharks.
—The Guardian, February 16, 2022
A shark expert working with the medical examiner here confirms that the terrible wounds that killed a 69-year-old swimmer were in fact caused by a shark. In an interview with CBS News Early Show Co-Anchor Jane Clayson, George Burgess of the Florida Museum of Natural History says it was probably a bull shark.
—CBS News, August 31, 2000
Some divers believed that Covert may have drowned and his body scavenged by sharks, but Dr. Gordon Hubbell and Dr. Jose Castro examined Covert’s clothing and dive equipment and concluded that he had been killed by a bull shark.
—Sharkattackfile.net, September 13, 1995
Martin was snorkeling when the shark bit him, pulling him beneath the surface three times before departing …
SPECIES INVOLVED: Three-metre [10’] bull shark.
—Sharkattackfile.net, September 13, 1988
And yet, despite agonizing reports such as these, the number of shark attacks in any given year remains extremely low, especially considering the large number of people around the world who put themselves in proximity to these predators while swimming, surfing, or fishing. The ISAF reports 41 confirmed shark-bite cases in the United States in 2022, down from 47 incidents in 2021. Fatality rates, moreover, have been declining for decades, reflecting advancements in beach safety, medical treatment, and public awareness. Yet the possibility of being attacked by a shark remains anytime we venture into its domain. And all it takes is one incident to make a tragedy.
If a guide has Florida—particularly Florida Keys—training, that’s like having a Harvard degree. The problem is that many of these fishing guides seem to forget that the client is on the water to have fun.It was summer in Florida. I hired a guide to take my family fishing in a large bay along the coast. His name was Keith. We called him Captain Keith. When we’d spoken on the phone the evening before, he asked me what we wanted to catch. I looked at my wife, Ellen, and son, Jackson. “A shark,” I said. “My son wants to catch a shark.”
As I hung up the phone, I wondered if we’d already caught one.
Fishing guides are an unpredictable lot. Some are friendly and accommodating and highly competent; others, not so much. Florida guides are generally considered the gold standard in saltwater angling, especially fly-fishing. Lodges operating in remote outposts all over the world often send their guides to Florida to learn the business. If a guide has Florida—particularly Florida Keys—training, that’s like having a Harvard degree. The problem is that many of these fishing guides seem to forget that the client is on the water to have fun. Miss a fish, let one get off the hook, bungle a cast—or worse, drop something on the boat deck—and you may discover just how cantankerous Florida fishing guides can be. That’s because your success is their success, and your failure their failure. For fishing guides, reputation is everything. Whatever else might be said about them, what matters is that they know how to catch fish, on any day, in any weather conditions, on any tide. In Florida, where fishing is a way of life, guides are not unlike celebrities. As a salty old Florida Keys guide once told me, “In the Keys, people don’t care what you do for a living or where you come from, or how much money you have. In the Keys, people judge you on your ability to catch fish, plain and simple.”
I had no idea what we’d get with Captain Keith. We boarded the vessel, and he jetted us across the bay to a quiet beach where, in years past, we’d snorkeled and gone swimming and picnicked on the sand. I shared this with Keith. “We like to go snorkeling out here,” I said.
“I wouldn’t advise that,” he told me. “The size of some of the sharks I see out here, I wouldn’t get in the water.”
I reflected on this while remembering that I’d never seen a shark in this area.
Jackson was excited about catching one. He was nine. For years, he had listened to my stories about catching sharks with my fly rod in the Bahamas. Now he wanted to catch one, too.
Keith anchored near a deep channel only 50 yards or so off the beach. In the distance, I could see the open ocean. It was sunny and hot with a light breeze, enough to put a ripple on the water. The tide was coming in, which meant the water was moving and carrying the scent of the cut bait Keith had rigged on the hook that was now in the water. Jackson held the fishing rod, and while we waited for some action, Keith tuned the boat’s radio to a country music station. Then he lit a cigarette and placed one bare foot on the gunwale. On his raised knee, he rested his arm and much of his upper body weight as he focused his gaze on the float out in the water.
“What’s the best month for tarpon?” I asked him.
He thought about it for a few seconds. Then he took a deep drag on the cigarette and exhaled. “Joo-lie,” he said.
I was reminding myself that it was late June—almost July—when the float went under. We hadn’t seen any sign of a fish until then.
Jackson leaned back and pulled. The rod bent deeply as the tip vibrated, transmitting the fish’s movements.
“I think it’s a big one!” Jackson said.
“Keep the rod up,” Keith said. He was calm and relaxed. He seemed to understand that we were here to have fun, that his client was a nine-year-old boy. This was reassuring. “Keep that line tight.”
“Way to go, Jackson!” Ellen said as she readied her camera.
The fish stayed down and darted toward deep water, then streaked back our way, moving beneath the boat. Jackson pumped and reeled, pumped and reeled. After a few minutes of this, the surface erupted in frenzied splashing. Keith netted a small shark, which he brought aboard and rested on the gunwale.
Jackson turned and smiled. “I caught a shark!” he said.
“What kind is it?” Ellen asked.
“Bull shark,” Keith said.
“I caught a bull shark!”
“Congratulations!” I said as I patted Jackson on the back.
Using a pair of pliers, Keith removed the hook and held the shark out for us to examine. It was 30 inches at most, a small one, but even at this size its jaws were lined with teeth. Just as revealing were the shark’s eyes—distant and aloof, but purposeful. They were the eyes of an apex predator. These eyes let us know to watch ourselves, that we’d pay for any carelessness or negligence while it was aboard the vessel. These eyes let us know, too, that while the shark had been caught, it was not defeated, a fact reinforced by the vigorous manner in which it swooshed away when Keith returned it to the water.
Inevitably, most people’s understanding of sharks continues to be influenced by the 1975 film Jaws, in which a rogue monster terrorizes a fictionalized New England beach town. I remember the summer when the film came out. I was five years old. As my parents were heading out to see it one evening, I announced that I was going with them. “No, you’re not,” my father replied. “You’d have bad dreams for a year,” said my mother.
Then why are you going to see it if it’s so scary? I remember wondering.
The answer, which they never articulated because I never asked, was that Jaws latched on to some of our deepest fears as humans: our dread of the deep, of that which we can’t see, of a monster attacking us when we’re most vulnerable, of being cut by a shark’s serrated teeth, of bleeding and struggling and dying, alone and far from shore. Not only this, but by virtue of our ability to develop and use technology, we as humans have asserted ourselves as the planet’s supreme predator. The thought of being attacked by a shark, then, somehow upsets our perception of the natural order and where we think we stand in relation to all other life.
If we had been wary of them before, Jaws convinced us that sharks, particularly large ones, are maneaters, leading many people to take up shark hunting. In the years following the film’s release, the population of large sharks off North America’s east coast declined by roughly half—this despite admonishments from conservationists that not only are these predators unlikely to attack humans, they also perform a vital function in the marine food web. And one has to admire a creature that has called Earth home for 400 million years and is so ideally suited to its many environments and ecological niches that it evolved very little over the eons. Sharks may well be the world’s most perfect predators—so perfect, in fact, that the bull shark I encountered as a young man in Florida apparently felt no compulsion to attack me, easily identifying me as something outside its predatory purview. Although sharks as a species are generally nonaggressive toward humans, we nevertheless continue to kill millions of them every year, often only for their fins. Clearly, in this evolutionary contest, the odds are in our favor, but it’s crucial that we learn how to live with sharks, not just fear them.
Our primal fear of sharks heavily informs our view of the dichotomy between saltwater and freshwater environments. The sea is the shark’s domain, so naturally we think of freshwater lakes and rivers as “safe” places, free of marine predators. Visit the community of Empire, Michigan, for example, and you’ll find a store or two catering to a small but dedicated cadre of Lake Michigan surfers. In recent years, these outfitters have begun pushing the idea that the area waters are not only salt free but also empty of sharks. As one local sloganeer puts it: No salt. No sharks. No worries.
But matters of the natural world aren’t always so simple. Bull sharks, for example, are known to inhabit freshwater environments for extended periods. How is this possible? The kidneys of bull sharks are designed to recycle the salt within their bodies, a process aided by two special glands near the tail. Their ability to perform osmoregulation allows bull sharks to swim in water of any salinity level. If you’re skeptical, then consider this: bull sharks have been documented 2,500 miles up the Amazon River, and in the Mississippi River as far north as Illinois. They’re so common in the Zambezi River, which flows through Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique, that people there refer to them as Zambezi sharks. Bull sharks are also known to inhabit Central America’s largest lake, Lake Nicaragua.
In July 1916, over a period of 12 days, four people were killed in shark attacks in New Jersey, and a fifth narrowly escaped with his life. Three of these attacks occurred in a tidal creek some distance from the ocean. Sometimes I wonder about the shock and disbelief that witnesses must have felt at seeing the swimmers attacked by some unseen monster while they scrambled desperately out of the water and onto dry land. How many times had they swum in those same muddy waters unscathed? How unlikely must such an event have seemed to them?
Although a great white is usually cited as the species responsible for these attacks, many believe it to have been the work of a bull shark. Whatever species of shark it was, the incident is said to have inspired Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, Jaws, from which the blockbuster film was adapted.
I once fly-fished with a guide who believed there were bull sharks swimming the Arkansas River of eastern Oklahoma, a three-hour drive from my Oklahoma City home. He claimed to have lost large catfish to these predators, and once, he said, he had actually seen a shark. My guide believed that the sharks followed shipping vessels entering the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico. From there, he thought, they swam through a series of locks and dams to gain access to the Arkansas River and, eventually, the Port of Catoosa, near Tulsa, a maritime shipping destination hundreds of miles from the open sea.
I’ve often wondered about this. Although I’ve never seen a shark in a freshwater river, much less a river flowing through the Great Plains of the American West, who’s to say it couldn’t happen? This is enough to keep me out of the Arkansas River, for I have replayed many times in my dreams the sight of that heavy shadow cutting silently through the water and slicing toward me.
These dreams are made manifest as I venture just a bit farther upstream on the Arkansas River. I visit the Oklahoma Aquarium in Tulsa, which is home to what it bills as the Western Hemisphere’s only bull shark exhibit. Entering the glass-walled tunnel where the light is low, I watch these seven-foot specimens glide through the water above me. After a while, the crowd here moves on, and for a moment I am all alone with these fascinating predators. As long as the ground on which I stand is dry, I have nothing to fear. But I’d think differently if I were with them inside this 380,000-gallon aquarium. I recall that bull shark in the Florida Keys and wonder why it elected to avoid me, to swim around me and disappear, why it didn’t bump me with its broad snout, or worse, attack me. I have no idea, especially considering this shark’s aggressive and unpredictable nature. I was fortunate. I was blessed to have been able to walk away from that encounter. Like so many others, I find reassurance in the statistical facts that people are more likely to be struck by lightning or mauled by a tiger than attacked by a shark. Nevertheless, I have felt those sharp, serrated teeth many times in my imagination, which is why I no longer wade those deep sand flats along the edges of the Florida Keys, where the fishing can be so good.
The post The Redoubtable Bull Shark appeared first on The American Scholar.
The history of the eight-hour workday is neither short nor sweet. Advances were piecemeal. In Spain in 1593, Philip II signed a royal decree establishing an eight-hour workday, making Spain the first country to regulate the workday by law. Then what happened? Nothing for a long time. But around 1810, during the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, when the working day could range from 10 to 16 hours and the work week was typically six days and child labor was common, the industrialist and reformer Robert Owen called for an eight-hour workday, instituting it in his cotton mills in New Lanark, Scotland. In England, the 1833 Factory Act limited the workday for young children to eight hours and for older children to 12. A subsequent Factory Act in 1847 capped the workday at 10 hours for women and teens. French workers won the 12-hour day after the February Revolution of 1848. Following an 1889 strike, gas workers in London became the first British workers to achieve an eight-hour day. In Australia, unions negotiated an eight-hour workday for stonemasons after a successful strike in 1856.
In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the 10-hour day. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia, led by Irish coal heavers, organized a general strike. By the following year, many labor leaders were calling for an eight-hour day. Boston ship carpenters got an eight-hour day in 1842. Then in 1886, American labor movements convened a general strike in favor of an eight-hour work day. At the time, American workers averaged slightly more than 60 hours in a six-day work week. The nationwide strike began on May 1. Three days later, when striking workers in Chicago confronted strikebreakers at the McCormick reaper plant, police fired on the crowd, and several people were killed. A rally in support of the workers and in protest of police action was quickly convened for the next day in Haymarket Square, where a bomb went off, killing a policeman. Again police fired on demonstrators, and in the melee, several more people were killed.
Three years later, with the eight-hour work day still the goal, the Marxist International Socialist Congress met in Paris and adopted a resolution to support working-class demands for the eight-hour day. In commemoration of the Haymarket affair, May 1 became International Workers’ Day. In much of the world, May 1 continues to be celebrated as labor day, el día del trabajador. All these tangled events explain why on this day my students have no school to attend, their teachers have no classes to teach, and their parents have no work to go to.
Eight men were accused of conspiracy in the Haymarket affair. Although only two of the eight were even present at the site that evening, all eight were convicted. Seven were sentenced to death and one to prison. Of the seven, two had their death sentences commuted to life terms in prison, one committed suicide on the eve of the execution date, and four were hanged. Their names are not lost. Histories describe the events, plaques name the men, movements celebrate them as martyrs, and holidays commemorate their place in the struggle for workers’ rights. That struggle goes on. All across Spain, people gather on this holiday in support of workers’ causes, among which is the first condition: the right to work, meaning a decent contract guaranteeing employment. Last year more than 70 demonstrations were organized. Royal decrees are still issued to appease workers, owners, and unions. It’s a hard job to balance everyone’s demands. In 1926, Henry Ford gave his workers an eight-hour day, thinking not only of their welfare but also of his own. How often, though, do interests of labor and management align for a win-win situation? But on this day of the worker, let us not think about that. Let us try to be idle and comfortable. The better to return to the messy mix of obligation, pleasure, drudgery, and satisfaction from a job well done.
The post A Messy Mix appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads J. R. Solonche’s “Spring.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Spring” by J. R. Solonche appeared first on The American Scholar.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib; Random House, 352 pp., $32
Growing up in the Greenbrier Houses of East Columbus, Ohio, a part of the city that the cops once dubbed “Uzi Alley,” Hanif Abdurraqib knew how to work an angle. “I came up around hustlers,” he writes in his latest book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. “I know what it takes to keep the lights on.” And yet, he doesn’t consider himself to be particularly adept at the art of deception: “I am not the best hustler.”
Perhaps, but that’s not true of his work on the page. That’s because There’s Always This Year is, in a sense, an elaborate hustle: a beneficent one, mind you, one that draws you in not by emptying your pockets but by transporting you to delicate and expansive corners of the soul. Ostensibly, Abdurraqib—an essayist, poet, and music critic, whose previous books include A Little Devil in America and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us—has written his latest about basketball. His life loosely parallels that of hoops legend Lebron James. Both came of age in the late 1990s–early aughts in Ohio; both left in early adulthood, James forsaking his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat, Abdurraqib decamping to Connecticut to live with his then partner. Both returned home, James winning an NBA championship with the Cavaliers in 2016, Abdurraqib ascending to literary superstardom after his return to Columbus, winning a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2021.
One might expect an elegiac ode to James’s supremacy, a studied reflection on the nature of sporting redemption, a lyrical love letter to hooping. And though basketball does provide a throughline, an organizing framework, this is less a sports book than a memoir, an ode to grief, a love letter to East Columbus, a place, one assumes, from which everyone is trying to escape, especially if you happen to be a basketball phenom. “White journalists salivate over it,” Abdurraqib writes. “The singular, once-in-a-generation black athlete who is born into struggle, playing to make a better life for themselves or their loved ones. Someone who had to traverse a bad neighborhood somewhere to arrive.”
But what if you love your “bad” neighborhood? What if you grew up with the “Michael Jordan of East Columbus just four doors down” from your house, as Abdurraqib did? His name was Kenny Gregory—just one of a collection of basketball legends from Ohio who attained mythical status. Maybe they didn’t all “make it out,” but as Abdurraqib contends, maybe leaving shouldn’t be the benchmark: “Let it be known that some of us have never once dreamed of leaving. Never thought about making it out of a place as glorious as this. Tell me if you have ever built a heaven out of nothing.”
When you’re evicted from your apartment, as Abdurraqib was after losing his first job, in the music section at a Borders bookstore, you learn the intimate rhythms of your neighborhood, its underground economies. You might sleep in church pews where some benevolent soul has left blankets, or land two free months of rent on a storage locker thanks to one woman’s kindness (she ensured that Abdurraqib didn’t get caught when he slept there). He committed various petty crimes—stealing sandwiches from Kroger, driving with an expired license—and got locked up. “I don’t remember the exact reason I ended up handcuffed in the back of a cop car in the fall of 2004,” he writes—the officers ran his plates and reportedly discovered a warrant for his arrest. His relationship with his family had by then deteriorated. His mother had died when he was 13; he had run “afoul” of the rest of his clan “too many times to rely on them for help.” He never reveals the particulars of his familial undoing, but grief and regret haunt his account, dense subcurrents that bubble to the surface even as their true depths remain obscured.
Abdurraqib never thought he’d make it to 40, and hyperawareness of his mortality informs There’s Always This Year. The book is structured like a basketball game, broken down into 12-minute quarters, the clock ticking down in each section until it hits zero, habitual reminders that the end grows ever nigh. Spotting the gray that has recently sprouted in Lebron’s beard affirmed for Abdurraqib that even the basketball legend isn’t immortal. They were still just kids when he first watched Lebron play high school ball at St. Vincent-St. Mary outside Cleveland: “There is something about witnessing greatness before the rest of the world fully arrives to it. The witnessing can make you feel like you, too, have access to anything and everything. For a moment, it feels like no horror will ever befall you.”
Which is why we watch sports, for these glimpses, every now and again, of something magical, something majestic—“Federer Moments,” as David Foster Wallace called them, in a 2006 essay he wrote for Play magazine about the exquisite Swiss tennis player: moments when Roger Federer pulled off some outlandish, surreal shot, moments that gave us a glimmer of hope that we, too, could transcend the physical limitations of our own bodies, however fleetingly, moments of reconciliation akin to a religious experience. Abdurraqib witnessed one such moment—a Lebron Moment—in 2007, when the hoopster scored Cleveland’s final 25 points in Game Five of the Eastern Conference finals, leading the Cavaliers to an overtime victory: a performance that “can be best described as the supernatural or the divine, something holy enough to trick even the nonbelievers into thinking something good might come their way if they knock loudly enough at the gates, if they kneel humbly enough at the altar, if they face the holy land and close their eyes.”
Nike seized on these religious undertones from the start: “We are all witnesses,” proclaimed an ad campaign unveiled in 2005. “It was a campaign for an entire city, with a mission statement: believe what your eyes are telling you is real,” Abdurraqib writes. “There is a church to be made here, now. A church in our arena.”
And when Lebron returned to the Cavaliers after his stint with the Miami Heat, the prodigal son looking to make good, Nike once again capitalized on the emotional backstory, producing a commercial in which Lebron huddles with his teammates on court and exhorts them to win a championship for the long-suffering fans of Cleveland, as the entire city gathers together as one. The ad, which has Lebron’s words ringing through the streets, left Abdurraqib sobbing on the floor of his Connecticut apartment, still separated from his own hometown, even as he was aware of the manipulative nature of the seduction, aware that the image of unity is a mirage. Because ours is a divided country, one in which Henry Green and Tamir Rice and other Black Ohioans have been killed by police, the same police who might dismiss a neighborhood as a warzone, as “Uzi Alley.”
On the night that Lebron finally led the Cavaliers to an NBA title, Abdurraqib once again recognized the false promise of the moment—a moment of confetti-laced ecstasy, to be sure, but one that could not last, fading like a reverse Polaroid. “I am not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means that at the right hour, I am everyone’s fool. And I allowed myself to fall into the arms of a city that was not my city but felt, in that moment, like it could be.”
This is a moment of ascension, as the book’s subtitle suggests: Michael Jordan hanging in the air as he jumps from the foul line in the 1985 NBA slam dunk contest; a Black man from Columbus named Lonnie Carmon taking to the skies in the 1920s in an airplane he built out of salvaged junk (Abdurraqib includes brief odes to Ohio aviators as section breaks); the city of Cleveland rising together at the Cavaliers’ NBA championship. The ascendance is but temporary, the return to terra firma preordained—where, as Abdurraqib notes, the true nature of things reasserts itself: “My god, the greatest lies are told in the name of sports.”
If There’s Always This Year reminds us of the seductive pull of our athletic heroes, how easy it is to freight them with a significance they can’t possibly sustain, Abdurraqib also spotlights the intensely personal nature of fandom. Because our experience of Federer Moments doesn’t unfold in a vacuum, but rather, is mediated through the context of our own personal backstories, our own station in life. If you came of age when Tiger Woods did; if you remember his first Masters victory in 1997, which signaled the start of some limitless new age, the entire world within your grasp; if you suffered through a period of profound depression in your 30s, spent years circling the abyss; if you have since started your gentle downward glide into middle age, your former potential buried in the wreckage of your past; then you grasped the full contours of the miracle that unfolded at Augusta in 2019, when Tiger won the Masters at age 43, a victory that stirred long-dormant corners of your soul, made you reconsider your own imagined trajectory.
As for Lebron: I never much liked him, not least because of “the Decision,” a public relations fiasco in which broke up with the Cleveland faithful on live TV—all but disemboweled them—and proclaimed that he was taking his “talents to South Beach.” But to read There’s Always This Year is to gain a begrudging appreciation for his cultural influence. If sports themselves are a hustle—anointing false gods, emptying our pockets, leaving us bereft; the glory fleeting, the storylines (and the players) sometimes juiced—then they are a beneficent hustle, one that offers glorious moments of ascendance, glimpses of hard-won truths, even if those truths confirm our flawed nature, our original sin.
The post Hometown Heroes appeared first on The American Scholar.
Reedies Against Racism’s protest of the Humanities 110 curriculum at Reed College reached a turning point in the 2017–2018 school year. After a year and a half of debate, dozens of faculty members voted on a revised syllabus, the second semester of which introduced brand new material from Mexico City and the Harlem Renaissance. But in September 2018, an entire department voted not to teach the spring syllabus—and as the years passed, discontent with the syllabus grew, among both faculty and students.
- Reed College Office for Institutional Diversity’s “2016–2017 Progress Report on Diversity, Inclusion, and Antiracism at Reed”
- Reedies Against Racism’s updated list of demands
Quest articles and op-eds about Hum 110:
- “Losing Faith”
- “Student Thoughts on HUM 110”
- “The Future is Now, White Man”
- “Race and HUM 110”
- “A Reflection on Humanities 110”
- “Lines Crossed”
- “Imperialism in HUM 110”
Reed magazine coverage of Hum 110:
- “Faculty Charts Bold New Course for Hum 110”
- “Gilgamesh Greets Class of ’22”
- “Hum 110 Turns Its Lens on Mexico City”
- “The Transformation of Hum 110: A Remembrance”
Headlines about Hum:
- The Washington Post, “Professors like me can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses;”
- The New York Times, “In a Volatile Climate on Campus, Professors Teach on Tenterhooks;”
- The Atlantic, “The Surprising Revolt at the Most Liberal College in the Country” and “Why Everyone Should Learn About Western Civilization;”
Featured voices in this episode: Addison Bates, Eden Daniel, Mary James, Libby Drumm, Roger Porter, Jan Mieszkowski, Pancho Savery, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Peter Steinberger, Nathalia King, Kritish Rajbhandari, Nigel Nicholson, and Albert Kerelis.
Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.
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Transcript:
We left off the 2016 timeline in November, when Reedies Against Racism occupied the admission office in Eliot Hall for a week, just as the Black Student Union had occupied the president’s office for a week in the fall of 1968. Neither the timing nor the tactic was a coincidence. Addison Bates was a junior at the time of the occupation.
ADDISON: It was at some point during this time I met with Ron Herndon, one of the activists in the Black Studies protest in the ’60s. One of the things that we talked about was that everything we ask for, it’s too much, it’s too fast … and that’s why it’s really important that when you ask for something, what you deserve is immediate attention. I remember specifically an administrator at the time telling us, um, look, you know, students, you, you guys are thinking on this like four-year, the short-term plan, but the institution thinks in this very long-term way. You guys only see like us moving at like a snail’s pace. But that’s just because you’re here for such a short amount of time. And while technically this is true, that’s also like a way that institutions, um, that’s a way that institutions undermine the voices of the students that flow through them.
The trees, as Steve Engel put it last episode, to the students’ breeze. For much of the 2016–2017 school year, things look much the same from the outside: protesters still sat silent at the front of Vollum lecture hall, professors continued to lecture. The Student Senate had sent a letter in support of the protesters’ demands in October—“Many feel that the content and the mandatory nature of [Hum 110] is alienating for underrepresented minorities and marginalized groups”—and I’m pretty sure this is the period when (full disclosure) I signed an alumni letter in support of the protesters. In spring, the Student Senate and a faculty committee passed an Anti-Racism Statement that would be adopted by the full faculty in the fall. Another faculty committee approved the creation of a new position in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, finally making concrete an interdisciplinary major that had first been proposed in 2013. Mary James, then Dean of Institutional Diversity, spent a lot of time behind the scenes talking to students, talking to professors, talking to the administration.
MARY JAMES: I was trying to bring down the temperature as best I could. The students were pretty united in their efforts. The faculty, there were almost as many different responses to the student activism as there were faculty members in the Hum program. So what I was thinking about all the time, whether or not I was able to accomplish it, was: this is all painful for everybody, but can we come out of this without the kind of scars that we came out with in the ’60s? Can we come out of this actually a better institution rather than a more divided institution?
Meanwhile, all through the spring, that small group of students and professors continued to meet weekly, or every other week, for much of the year, to hash out just what a new Hum curriculum might look like, though that number dwindled to four students and four professors—a four-by-four. Eden Daniel, then a freshman, was one of the students.
EDEN: Being in the four-by-four, we were like essentially consultants
and I did feel like we had a little bit more say in things, like they were open to hearing us, but at the same time, I didn’t really know how much of what we were telling them would actually be taken seriously. And then also I was taking a class, and so I felt a little bit like, okay, what is my role here? Because maybe I don’t have the knowledge of all of these texts. You know, I’m not an academic . I’m literally 18 years old, um, like, how can I contribute here?
All this time, Eden and her 300-odd classmates continued to meet, three times a week for lecture, two times a week for conference, in two dozen groups led by two dozen professors, to discuss Plato and the Book of Genesis, then turned with the seasons to Josephus and the rest of the Romans.
Libby Drumm is professor of Spanish and Humanities.
LIBBY: I mean, here was a group of students sitting in the lecture well, with signs with Zora Neale Hurston,
and taking notes, still at lecture, still doing the work. They were raising very good questions and asked us to consider them. It got our attention, and we certainly did. We sat there for a full year and a half and really worked through it and considered all sorts of different options.
That clock started in January 2017.
LIBBY: Lucky me. I was the chair of the course. And part of the issue is we really didn’t have a process in place for making a change like that. So in January, we had an all-day retreat scheduled for the Hum faculty. I ran into Hugh Porter on campus, and he said, so are you all set for this retreat? And I said, well,
, actually, there’s nothing planned. You know, I just stepped into this role kind of at the last minute. And so, uh, he goes, “Oh my goodness.” So he actually helped out, got us, hooked up with a consultant. … And it was incredibly helpful. So we had a retreat then in January, and we just started meeting and we worked through straw polls. How do we wanna proceed? And at the end of each meeting, the only thing I could think of was, you know, let’s just pause for a minute and this is what we’ll do next time. Are we all on the same page? And it, it worked pretty well until it didn’t. And then eventually, you know, you make a decision and some people are unhappy with the decision. So that was unfortunate.
In the first episode, we talked about how one of the things that makes Hum 110 unique is just how many senior faculty teach in the course. That also makes it extremely difficult to change anything about it—it took years to move the Hebrew Bible from the second to the first semester. Roger Porter told me about a meeting in the 1960s where they spent two hours debating whether to read Thucydides before Sophocles or after Sophocles.
ROGER PORTER: You can’t imagine, I mean, there are arguments both ways, perfectly legitimate arguments, but you can’t imagine the, the kind of drain that has. I mean, you could say, well, it’s, it’s intellectually exciting to debate that. But, you know, it was done with the sense that if you didn’t do it the right way, that would somehow—the course would crumble or the semester wouldn’t piece together in the right way. I mean, it was a kind of madness I felt.
The 2016-17 school year ended, but conversations about the fate of Hum 110 continued among the faculty. And then, in the fall of 2017, came a turning point. What had to this point been largely a local story—confined to the student newspaper, Reed’s alumni magazine and blog, and various alumni Facebook groups—hit the national news. The first day of class on August 29 began much as it had every fall since 2015—with an introduction of all the conference leaders, to be followed by a panel discussion from a handful of faculty orienting freshmen to the course. But after the faculty introduced themselves, three protesters approached the mic to introduce themselves, and explain their continued presence in the lecture well to freshmen who were seeing them for the first time.
PROFESSOR: … And I teach in the English department.
LIBBY: Thank you. Let’s start.
ADDISON: Hi, we’re Reedies Against Racism, and this is—
LIBBY: I’m sorry, this is a classroom space and this is not appropriate. So we have allowed—
ALEX BOYD: We’d like to introduce ourselves as well. We worked just as hard on the syllabus as you all have. So—
LIBBY: This is a classroom space—
ALEX: This is a failure to give us credit for our labor. We’re Reedies Against Racism and we’re protesting Hum 110 because of its Eurocentrism—
LIBBY: Okay, so we cannot have our class if we have students interrupting the speaking. So we’re going to call the lecture. You can all just meet with your conference leaders and they’ll explain what’s going on. Thank you. We’ll see you all Wednesday.
LUCÍA MARTÍNEZ VALDIVIA: Sorry you missed the chance to learn!
[PROFESSORS WALK OUT]
ADDISON: It was a two-minute introduction …
ALEX: This is an important part of your education about Hum 110. If you want to stay and learn about the events of the past year, regardless of whether you agree with us, we would appreciate if you would stick around.
ADDISON: We were going to give a two-minute introduction and we talked to Libby about that yesterday.
ALEX: So if you want to hear what we have to say, if you believe that student of colors deserve a voice in Hum 110, I would encourage you to stay.
ADDISON: We’re just going to give the two-minute introduction anyway and you guys can still follow them. Where did they say they were going? … All we were going to say is that we’re Reedies Against Racism and this is a Hum 110 protest. We’re an anti-racist organization that was founded last year to address the issues facing students of color, especially Black students at Reed. We believe that the first lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy by centering whiteness as the only required class at Reed. Because of us, Hum 110 is currently under review so that it can be reformed. This work is just as important as the work of the faculty, so we were going to introduce ourselves as well. My name is Addison Bates …
TIFFANY CHEN: My name is Tiffany Chen, I was a freshman last year …
FRESHMAN: They cut the mic.
The faculty did not give the lecture. It sounds to me like the three protesters were kind of dumbstruck that the faculty walked out. That’s Libby’s voice you hear calling the lecture. The other professor you hear in the sample above, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, published an op-ed in The Washington Post on October 27th with the headline, “Professors like me can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campus.” She went on, “The protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture. … The right to speak freely is not the same as the right to rob others of their voices.” Four days later, The New York Times mentioned the incident in an October story; The Atlantic followed a week later with not one but two stories about Reed.
LIBBY: My first day, you know, we had lecture, people were protesting in the lecture. I go into the conference room and there were three or four active protestors, signs and all, in my conference, and you should have seen their face when they saw me. Like, “Oh, great. My conference leader is the person in charge of this mess.” So it was hilarious. So we had conference, and then at the end it’s like, okay, now what are we going to do about this? And so we talked about it for a while and decided that we weren’t going to let the protests come into the conference, thank goodness. And that at the end of conference, though, if we wanted to stay and people had things they wanted to talk about, we could certainly do it then. And that worked pretty well. Well, people were pretty respectful. And I have to say, I’m thinking of one person in particular who was so forthright and such a great participant in the Hum conference. Such a leader, a strong voice, and then at the end would say something like, “But, pfft. That’s all dead white males. So who cares?”
It was, it just always made me laugh. . I was like, okay, so you can do both. … Oddly, it was one of my strongest Hum conferences I ever had.
The full arc of the 2017–2018 protests goes beyond the scope of this podcast. On the anniversary of the 2016 September boycott, Reedies Against Racism reiterated their demands, but shifted their focus to a Wells Fargo divestment campaign. But it seems clear that when it came to Hum 110 reform, things got off on the wrong foot in 2017, despite the four-by-four conferences, and despite the real changes Reed made in response to the 2016 demands. The administration would, in fact, threaten those three students who went to the front of the first Hum lecture with suspension or expulsion if they attended again, and also emailed out a reminder about the dissent policy. Reedies Against Racism wrote up a satirical response to the threats, which pointed out that they were still waiting for the “predominantly white faculty to magically discover the key to a post-racial Reed in the footnotes of Plato’s Republic” and noted what the students had won by violating the dissent policy: increased funding for anti-racism internships, new job postings for students and staff of color, new counselors of color in the health center, alcohol and drug policy reform, more transparency, and Reed’s new status as a sanctuary school for undocumented students. It was an odd thing for the school to do—and an easy headline to avoid—given too that the Office for Institutional Diversity would go on to publish a lengthy progress report on the demands in November, showing that most of the ones Reed could legally meet from 2016 had, in fact, been met.
Not Hum, though. Not yet. Not until April 2018.
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LIBBY: Eventually you have to decide. And if you’re doing straw polls then we’re still considering lots of things. But that’s a funnel. And eventually you have to come to a decision point. And I think there was some pressure to get to a decision point. … You know, after this decision, The Quest, the first article above the fold, as they say: “Hum 110 Crosses the Atlantic.” … Next week, The Quest, above the fold: “Hum 110 Enters the 20th Century.” And I thought, well, of course that makes perfect sense. Why not?
Jan Mieszkowski is Professor of German and Humanities.
JAN: Some people would tell you it was always changing. It would change a little, but the change would kind of reveal it wasn’t changing, you know,
Certainly in my lifetime at Reed, this was transformative that suddenly half of it would change.
Pancho Savery is Professor of English and Humanities.
PANCHO: So we went through many possible models of how to teach the course, and eventually it was decided to keep the first semester largely intact. So we did Gilgamesh and Homer and Persian material and Egyptian material. And the second semester, the decision was made to divide it into the first six weeks. We’re going to be on the history of Mexico City from right before the conquistadors arrived up until the 1960s and the emergence of Subcomandante Marcos. The second half, the decision was made to focus on the Harlem Renaissance. So we start in the late 1800s with what led up to the Harlem Renaissance, and then we end with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which looks back on many of the issues that arose during the Harlem Renaissance.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is Professor of Religion and Humanities:
KAMBIZ: There were all these protests that were going on, and then a president that was leaving, and he wanted Hum 110 to have changed by the time he leaves. People didn’t have that luxury of being able to do something that was more long-term. The pressure to say like, something needs to be produced a particular time. And the faculty actually asked for that. And we were told that, no, like, we want this change now, it’s been long enough. To the point that like the first semester was kept as the first semester ’cause there wasn’t enough time to change it, but there was enough time to change the second semester. So that’s what got focused on.
I heard about quite a number of alternate courses, though:
JAN: I proposed a transatlantic study syllabus for the whole year. Basically it would start in the 15th century. It would sort of be the dawn of the slave trade. But the first book you would read would be A History of Capitalism
. And I was told it was too political. And one of the historians said it’s too historical . It was intriguing. But it was designed precisely to not take any of those things for granted. Like capitalism—we know what that is. Do you? Let’s see. Slavery, you know, with the plantation system—we know what that was. Do we? Let’s see. It was really gonna introduce all those concepts in a very sort of systematic and historical way. It did not prevail.
Peter Steinberger is Professor of Political Science and Humanities:
PETER: I proposed a threefold model: one third on ancient Greece, one third on medieval Islam, and one third on Harlem. So the medieval Islam would start with the Quran. And then you would read materials originally written in Arabic—fabulous materials. Kambiz gave me an outline for how this might work. A lot of colleagues didn’t like it.
I really liked Libby’s idea, from way back in the 1990s when she first came to Reed:
LIBBY: Boy, I was a very junior faculty member, and I thought it would be a great idea if we changed the curriculum and taught—I don’t know if you know Al-Andalus, but it was a period in Spain where the Muslim people were basically in charge. They call it the Convivencia or the Living Together. They allowed for the Christian and Jewish communities to flourish for, you know, for a century. And so I thought we could do Al-Andalus, and then we would get the three cultures of the book. We would learn about Islam. We could do Averroes, it’s all this great material—the romance tradition … And I got shot down.
What ended up getting passed in 2018, though, has turned out to be a compromise that doesn’t wholly satisfy anyone, though they might like some parts of it.
PETER: I don’t like the second semester. I voted against it. I enjoy teaching it tremendously. The materials are great. We have wonderful conferences in there. Students profit tremendously from it. I don’t think it’s the best thing to do, but we’re doing it.
JAN: You know, the syllabus that passed, I mean, it passed. I think the vote was what, 60-40? Those 40% walked around then saying they’d been disenfranchised, which is not what the word means. I mean, they voted … how would you do it by not having a vote? Someone would have to decide. You’d have to empower some group of three, a troika or whatever, like have a little group of three people who run the chorus. I almost think that would be preferable in a way.
Nathalia King is professor of English and Humanities:
NATHALIA: In some sense, the weakness of the curriculum now has been a weakness in the course from the get-go, it’s a paradox at the heart of the course. And that is this constant tension between breadth and depth … the new syllabus,
has not resolved that problem any more than prior syllabi have resolved it.
Kritish Rajbhandari is assistant professor of English and Humanities, and actually graduated from Reed a year before me, in 2012. He’s been teaching in the course for four years now.
KRITISH: The Greek part, it’s still a major component of the syllabus, although it comes after Egypt, right? Sort of slightly decentering Greece in that way instead of starting with The Iliad. I enjoy teaching it. It is challenging, because one drawback of the current syllabus is it feels more scattered, right? Because the old was basically a classics syllabus. It was centered around an idea, although kind of maybe a problematic idea. The new one … I would say it’s a still a work in progress. The faculty are still trying to bring these various strands together as a course.
Nigel Nicholson, professor of Greece, Rome, and the Ancient Mediterranean, was Dean of the Faculty from 2013 to 2020, so he only taught the second semester once in that time, as a one-off. He’s now Chair of Hum, and this year marks his third run through the entire course.
NIGEL: I really like it. And, and I dunno how much of this is informed for me as a classist, but I really like the Greek stuff being part of a much larger kind of panoply of materials. I find each year more and more ways to kind of talk through similar conceptual issues in different ways, in different parts. … I think it helps students move away from thinking, “Well, what I’m learning about is Greek people.” So much as, “What I’m doing is I’m becoming a humanist. I’m becoming somebody who can think through human culture.” So I really like that. On a personal level, I feel like I’m much better educated. I feel like in an odd way, the old syllabus sort of deprived me of the kind of width that everyone else was getting by teaching somebody else’s stuff, right?
The Hum faculty received a $1 million grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation to support revamping the course in 2018, including hiring a new professor and running summer seminars with specialists in both the Harlem Renaissance and Mexican history. And a group of faculty visited Mexico City to see, in person, many of the artifacts and artworks that would be on the new syllabus.
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In September 2018, the first year that the new course was to be adopted, the Religion Department unanimously voted not to teach the spring syllabus of the course. In February, they’d released an official statement expressing concern that the way the modular curriculum was conceived “runs diametrically opposed to how religion works” as a discipline. This was a big deal: never before had a department voted not to teach in Hum 110—and given how faculty appointments to the Humanities program work, a tenured Religion faculty member was forced to leave Reed a few years later. Ken Brashier, then chair of the department, told The Quest in an interview: “If Hum 110 had focused on only the Mediterranean, Africa, or South America for an extended framework, religion would be fine with full participation.”
KAMBIZ: Before the faculty voted, I was there at the meeting, so I had said that if they vote for this four cities model, we wouldn’t be able to teach it. But the faculty voted for it anyway. And then, so afterwards we said, okay, so we said we can’t teach it. Can we introduce changes in that model that allows it? So we said, for example, and instead of having Greek in the first semester, Athens and Jerusalem, why don’t we look at the Persian Empire as this first sort of empire that connected these diverse regions of the world, focus rather than on borders and cities, on roads that connect the cities. But it got voted down, and at that point, I’m not sure it got voted down out of spite because it was coming out of the Religion Department, or whether people disagreed with it. I remember one, one faculty member saying that they thought it was too complicated for a first-year class to do something of that sort. But if we’re completely honest, it has to do with the fact that our faculty’s not trained that way.
It came out in the way that the other departments handled the Religion Department’s decision.
KAMBIZ: The thing we would often hear was like, we don’t understand what your problem is. Like you’re saying, like, you don’t know enough about Mexico City to teach it, but like, did you know about Rome? Why, why were you comfortable teaching about Rome? Well, I wasn’t teaching about Rome, and I was teaching about the Bible, and there’s also different stakes between teaching about Mexico City and teaching about the Bible! So we have like Catholic students—not many of them, but devout Catholic students— coming into the department complaining about the way in which the Catholic church is being represented as the hegemon that comes and, you know,
colonizes the Americas. And so I can’t see like how we could responsibly and ethically participate in those structures unless we are actually given some sort of level of platform to be able to introduce changes in them.
It’s absolutely true that other professors said they didn’t understand where the Religion Department was coming from. I asked every single professor I spoke with why the Religion Department left, and with one exception, they all told me they didn’t get it, or if they did get it, that the department’s criticisms didn’t hold water, or that they wouldn’t teach their own disciplines the way it’s taught in Hum, so why should Religion insist on the point?
KAMBIZ: I think the reason, the reason why the study of religion is a bit more radical in these regards, is because we have had to pay for the mistakes that we made. So like, going into other people’s religions and misreading them and misunderstanding, and misrepresenting them. And how dangerous that could be if you don’t have enough information, enough training in those fields to do that. So there was a lot of discomfort among a lot of our faculty who didn’t have that training to expand it to other traditions, right? And then the other thing is that we had developed ways of thinking relationally because of that. So while we could say that, like, scripture in Hinduism is not the same thing, we could also say pretty confidently that the idea of scripture in Hinduism changed after Europeans came and said, “Where’s your scripture?”
And so we have developed ways of thinking about comparison, not in terms of like, “Here’s a category, here’s a category. What are their similarities and differences?” But rather how it is that by talking to each other, people bring different concepts. And then those concepts change in relationship to one another, to give us new concepts.
In a lot of ways, it sounds to me like the way that anthropology—as conceived in the 19th and 20th centuries—has had to reckon with its own existential origins as an academic discipline, in a way that English, for example, has not. Sure, English has had its own post-colonialisms and structuralisms but it’s still entirely possible to look at literature in a vacuum (in fact some forms of literary theory demand it). Even a text like Edward Said’s Orientalism assumes a certain Eurocentric position, even as it critiques it. (Anthropology professors, not incidentally, do not teach Hum.) The danger of comparison, to Kambiz, comes out in the papers that each student has to write over the course of the year. Usually, a couple of different prompts are given, and students turn in papers of their choice to their individual conference leaders for feedback.
KAMBIZ: There was a prompt that was given for one of the essays that actually said, like, “Compare the way Athena talks to Odysseus in the Odyssey to the way Yahweh talks to Moses in Exodus.” And immediately I was like, I don’t want you writing on this. These aren’t the same things,
just because gods are talking, they’re not the same gods. They’re not saying conceptions of god, divine speech does not equate these things or make them commensurable in any way. So that those types of comparisons that seem like from a literary perspective to be totally fine, from a religious studies perspective are gonna lead to complete misunderstandings of the Bible, what’s happening in these places. …
Students made that criticism, too—in April 2022, three students co-wrote an op-ed in The Quest about an essay prompt from the third module. Students were asked to argue for or against the position that the Tira de la Peregrinación, from the Mexica people, is “finished” or not, using the imagery and one lecture and a handful of secondary sources. “It worries us,” the students write, “that Reed professors consider it appropriate to teach first-years that they can impose their interpretations upon other groups’ expressions of their own histories and identities without the careful interrogation of their own positionalities.” Another prompt asked students to compare mythologies—an Aztec origin myth to that of the Greek gods or Horus—“with attention to similarities and differences in how they treat competition and alliance among the gods.”
KAMBIZ: There was another incident where one of my students from that class was so excited about the paper she had written for the Harlem unit. It was a poet who had essentially written a sonnet about, God, why have you made a Black man into a poet, when Black people can’t speak. And the example that he gives is like, why did you make the mole and then make it blind? Why did you make your son and then sacrifice your son? Anyone who is familiar with Christianity would know that that’s a reference to Jesus. So the poet, by comparing himself to Jesus. The student had never read the New Testament or was not familiar with Christianity, but had read the Hebrew Bible ’cause that’s what is taught in Hum 110. And so she thought this is a reference to Adam. And so she came to write this paper that was beautifully written about what a self-loathing poet this person is who’s adopting a European model of the sonnet to talk about his experiences, which completely leads to a misunderstanding of what was going on, right?
. And that he’s actually drawing on the most valued redemptive suffering and existence in Western civilization to elevate his suffering, right? To show like, what could we learn from it? So I actually mentioned this to the Hum 110 faculty, and instead of rethinking the structure of the course, they just took out the poem .
Interestingly, Pancho had that same critique.
PANCHO: In the Harlem Renaissance section, we used to do Jean Toomer’s Cane, which I personally think is the most important text to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. People found it difficult to teach. And so after we did it for two years, maybe, they voted to cut it off the syllabus. And I was incredibly upset and I made that very clear. People made the decision not based on intellectual reasons, they made the decision based on their own comfort.
Pancho’s criticisms of the new course run even deeper, and they relate particularly to the way that the Harlem module is taught. Not the syllabus—he designed it.
PANCHO: And before we started teaching it, I led a seminar for faculty members that lasted for a week, at least four hours each day for an entire week. And I went over every single thing we were going to read and talked about how to teach it, what were the issues that were coming up, et cetera, et cetera. Very early on it became clear to me that there was a problem. At this point I was and had been the only Black faculty member in Hum 110 for the entire existence of the course, which goes back to the 1940s … And the conclusion that I came to was that the faculty was uptight about talking about race. And that manifested itself in various ways. Most prominently people would talk about form and not talk about content. And I was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt the first year because it was new material. I knew they were uptight about it. Second year, third year, fourth year, and basically nothing changed. I constantly asked my students to talk to their friends in other Hum conferences and find out what’s going in them. And my students universally reported to me that their friends were all very frustrated because faculty members were not really talking about race. I find it interesting that they don’t have any problem teaching the Mexico City material because it’s not as close to home.
Albert Kerelis is one of Pancho’s thesis students now, but they were also in his Hum conference.
ALBERT: I remember there was a lecture on W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness, and the lecturer was clearly far more into their European literary theory than they were their African-American studies. And they spent their whole lecture just talking about Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and like barely any time contextualizing it to the U.S. There was another one on like the series of paintings about the Great Migration and almost no discussion of the historical context of why the Great Migration happened. And there was a lecture that was certainly academically interesting about like color theory, but it didn’t really feel like it was contextualized to the politics that we were told these modules were built to address.
Albert isn’t the only student dissatisfied with Hum 110, nor—like some professors suggested to me—is it only students in Pancho’s conference.
EDEN: I took Hum twice. I took Hum again after taking a leave from school. And it was because my freshman year I wasn’t really able to manage taking the course
on top of activism, everything. So overall, I would say I had a positive experience. I think I was better able to engage with the text, um, especially knowing how much effort was put into thinking through what this course would look like. There were some things I was kind of disappointed in, in the way that the conference leader approached talking about it. Because I think there is this sense that we had to make these texts somehow relatable. Um, because it’s like, how do we get, you know, freshmen who may or may not have ever seen these texts before, to be able to relate to the text? And maybe that’s not even the necessary pedagogical approach. Yeah, the syllabus is technically a little bit more diverse, but being a Black student, oftentimes the only Black student in the room in conference, um, engaging in, you know, The Souls of Black Folk or reading Zora Neale Hurston—I mean, I don’t know. I think just, I just kind of felt a sense of, like, I had to engage with the text in a very particularly meaningful way. Um, I just felt like maybe sometimes it was hard to fully be a student. Like I felt like I had to also be a representative
In March 2021, when Albert was a freshman, they co-wrote an article with Mud Bentley that surveyed classmates about their views on Hum 110. You can’t really get more Reed than this article: it opens with a bunch of students suggesting better translations of the Iliad to read. But students continue with other critiques. Cleopatra Devalier-Vasquez said, “Almost no focus is put on understanding the culture, the original text, or how to read for bias in a translation.” Beau Crawford bemoaned the short role that Persia plays. Carver Buchanan said Egypt is “looked at in the same way as the classics, like it isn’t relevant anymore, when it really is.”
Albert and Mud followed up that article with a second, specifically on race and Hum 110, in April 2021—the third year of the revised syllabus. Vic Dudek-Tipton said: “It feels as though Reed is keeping race-based discussions in the shallow end of the pool for the comfort of their white students, not at all pushing for more critical conversations.” Kokoro Kageyama said professors tiptoe around race: “This kind of avoidance is not beneficial in any way, and it would just create another generation of people who are scared or frustrated and just not able to properly discuss race.”
This survey opened the floodgates. At the end of the month, Olivia Hicks asked, “What was the point?” “The content of the HUM 110 syllabus is so random that the cultural literacy that the original hum syllabus attempted to give is being lost,” Hicks wrote. “However, that by no means is an argument to bring back the original syllabus (which had a frankly racist and eurocentric tone). But tacking on Mexico and Harlem in the second semester is a duct-tape fix.”
ALBERT: Another complaint that I heard from a lot of students of color is that Hum classrooms were not always the safest feeling places to them. ’Cause you get a bunch of rich white kids and tell them that they should talk about race at their leisure. And we’re not always the best at doing that without insulting people or hurting people’s feelings. When some student would say something out of pocket, um, it would go unchecked by professors and a lot of students that I talked to expressed a desire for professors to step in a little bit more often, um, because it’s exhausting to have to stand up for your minority viewpoint in a group of people that don’t always appreciate that. There were classes where people would bring up problems with how either lectures or their conference leader handled issues of race and conference leaders would respond really negatively and defensively at times when students wanted to have a more open conversation about those sorts of things. I’ve heard that echoed by some professors as well, that they don’t know how to talk about issues of race in the classroom, or that they feel like they’re going to accidentally say something problematic and get canceled for it, so they’re scared to teach second-semester Hum.
KRITISH: Talking about race in general is challenging in a Reed classroom, partly because Reed is a predominantly white institution. So in my class, most students are white and there would be a few students of color, and that itself creates an atmosphere where talking about race becomes difficult, right? … And not everyone had a classroom or a school or community that’s diverse, right? And so a part of the challenge in teaching the course is also teaching the students how to talk about it thoughtfully. And students are afraid of making mistakes because of the sensitivity of the issue, and that also results in them not engaging.
In February 2022, Eva Goeke wrote in an op-ed of the second semester of Hum: “My family crossed the border from Guatemala to Mexico in the ’80s following the purposeful destruction of our indigenous village. … I have been expected to read texts about the systematic and intentional genocide of my ancestors and then come to conferences and discuss them as though these events are a thing of the past.. … Even the art used in the current curriculum was interpreted with a heavy western Christian lens which was not only culturally insensitive but had no academic backing for the assumptions made about our gods. Then there were lectures in which professors speaking with presumed authority mispronounced the few indigenous words included in the course and times when our art was called ‘scary’. …. Promoting non-western cultures through a western scope is not better than ignoring them.”
ALBERT: What I ran into a lot of in Hum was kind of trying to, um, abstract the humanities. To, to look at specific instances as examples of like, broader archetypes or ideas. And I think that’s kind of how a lot of professors will justify moving away from discussions of race when we get to Mexico City and the Harlem Renaissance is th at they have this belief that what’s most important isn’t the particular situation of the writers, but the kind of like broader human ideal they access, right? That’s the model that a lot of people have about the humanities.
I asked other professors whether they thought the Hum syllabus, or Hum conferences, were adequately discussing race.
NIGEL: You can probably find pretty much any position on Hum if you talk to, you know, a range of faculty members and a range of students. And what does “not adequately” mean? I guess all I can say is I, I think actually we do a pretty good job and we certainly do a much better job than we used to. And I would be surprised if there are many freshman programs out there that do as adequate a job. I think it’s really important that conversations around race and ethnicity are not just kind of hived off into kind of specialist subjects. Right, that, well, you might talk about race or ethnicity in sociology, right? It’s a central question in the humanities, it needs to be in there.
JAN: You know, people are aware it can look like a kind of token effort or something. That’s totally a possibility … And again, one doesn’t know what happens conference to conference. Maybe some of these things are avoided. Maybe these things aren’t explored. On the other hand, you know, sometimes things are happening where the students aren’t always aware that they’re happening.
I mean, I don’t know. I look at the syllabus, particularly the spring, and I’m like, I don’t know how you wouldn’t always be talking about race. Now, would the students think you were always talking about race—that’s a different question . NATHALIA: I think one of the real challenges here is what has always been the challenge of a Reed conference, is getting people to use conference as a space in which they engage in conversation with others in this sufficiently open-minded way to question their own preconceptions. You know, that seems to be a really, really crucial aspect of what the work of conference is.
Students are reading different content. But are they being taught to read that content any differently? One of the most glaring examples of this, to Kambiz, is how the course once again overlooked the contributions of Islam to the West. And no matter that it broadens the idea of “civilization” and finally includes Black writers on the syllabus; the new course reproduces the very erasures that Humanities 110 had engaged from the beginning.
KAMBIZ: Often we talk about Islam and the West, we do this much less now, but we used to do a lot more of it. It completely ignores the fact that there are Muslims who have lived in the West. And immediately when you look at that history, you come to realize how integrated that Atlantic Muslims were in that making up the Atlantic world. Like, so we study Harlem, but we don’t study Malcolm X in Harlem,
as central as that was. And to study Malcolm X in Harlem means to remember that a lot of the slaves that were being brought from West Africa were either under Muslim rule or were Muslims themselves. Similarly you know, to look at Mexico City is also to remember that Columbus was really trying to look for trade routes that could get around Muslim-controlled territories to regain Jerusalem from Muslims. So when the idea of Europe was being constructed from “Latin Christendom” to “the West,” that relationship was something that they had to erase. The places in which we see Islam is present doesn’t fit into the narrative that we are producing. The narrative in the past was the triumph of the West, narrative now is the horrible imperialistic, colonizing things that the West has done, but it’s ultimately about the West. And it’s ultimately about Europe.
In 2020, Kambiz ended up issuing possibly the greatest subtweet of all time, in the form of a course called Religion 227.
KAMBIZ: I went and developed a whole year-long course to talk about the erasure of Muslims in Western humanities. Not a single person has come to me to say, do you think Hum 110 is erasing Muslims
? How is it doing that? Which suggests that people are not really thinking about the larger pedagogical issues that they have the opportunities to think about the structural issues. When I teach that course, we look at some archival material from Hum 110, some sort of old syllabi and also some reviews of the curriculum. And already in the 1970s, there were critiques about how Eurocentric it is and how it was not representative of the advances being made in the humanities in the 1970s. And already then there was a critique about how it excludes Islam and how it includes excludes women’s voices. And Reed’s response to that was to change the syllabus to cover Greece and Rome as opposed to what it used to do, which was Greece all the way to the Middle Ages.
In a sense, Kambiz and Pancho have identified the same problem from different angles: structurally, in the syllabus, and pedagogically, in the execution, Hum 110 isn’t dealing with the original charges of the protests. And it’s a problem that I think has come in all kinds of ways at Reed since 2016—and even before, and even at other institutions. Making big changes, but changes that don’t address the underlying problems, or that only do so at a surface level. Changing the content, but not changing the lens through which you’re looking at it—or at yourself.
JAN: So Classicists will say, our discipline is so self-critical. We are challenging all these things, da da da. And then they’ll go and say something, which it’s like, it betrays that entirely in my eyes,
you know? To give you an interesting example, alright, the classics department at Reed renamed itself “Greek, Latin, and Mediterranean.” And when they were presenting this on the floor of the faculty, a colleague spoke up and said, “You know, you say you’re, you’re doing this for some progressive reason, but to me this almost seems regressive because now what you’re doing is you’re foregrounding Greek and Latin as if they were the only languages. That’s, those are the ones you teach. Sure. But you’re now making it seem as though they are hegemonic in the ancient Mediterranean. So you thought you were improving it on a sort of ideological level, but you aren’t.” KAMBIZ: Oh, we’re doing ancient Mediterranean, so are we gonna, are you gonna start teaching Hebrew and Arabic?
No one’s excited about teaching Hebrew and Arabic JAN: And the person from the classics department who was presenting this, I’ll not mention their name, um, sort of blinked and said, “Well, this is what we do.” I mean, I don’t know if they even understood the criticism. Again, this is a public event. This is not, you know, something behind closed doors. So, so anyway, that’s just to say like, everybody has a different standard of what is or isn’t self-critical. Um, sure. We have always made gestures, and I don’t mean gestures towards challenging the Greek miracle da da. But there’s a simple fact that by having a course that everybody has to take, that spends so much time on Greece, that you are privileging Greece, full stop. It does not matter if all you did was bash on Greece the whole time. You’re still telling every student who comes to Reed College ever in the history of the college, it’s worth our while to spend three months bashing these people. Wow. They must be really important.
So, is Hum 110 still all about the West? Can you talk about the Greeks for this long without putting them on a pedestal? Next week, we’ll talk to some self-critical classicists to figure it out.
T. H. M. GELLAR-GOAD: You can’t really understand the field of classics without understanding this history of its connections with white supremacy and its role in modern racial formation and some of the fascist and other eugenicist movements out there in the 19th and 20th centuries. … Teaching theoretical lenses, approaches, ways of understanding history, ways of understanding a text, is really vital. And I think that that necessarily points to discussions about what has been used historically to understand these cultures, these periods, these texts, and what are the shortfalls, what are the gaps that that’s left. If you’re just changing the content and you’re not changing the assumptions that you bring into the “why”—why teach these texts, why this culture over another, why this period over another—then you’re missing the point.
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This episode was produced by me, Stephanie Bastek, with original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper. Thank you to Addison Bates, Eden Daniel, Mary James, Libby Drumm, Roger Porter, Jan Mieszkowski, Pancho Savery, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Peter Steinberger, Nathalia King, Kritish Rajbhandari, Nigel Nicholson, and Albert Kerelis for speaking with me. Thanks also to the current students and very recent alumni who spoke to me on background about Hum 110, though tellingly, none of them wanted their names on the record. T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, the last voice we heard, is associate professor of classics at Wake Forest University. This series, like all of Smarty Pants, is sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society and published under the umbrella of The American Scholar magazine.
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As a Black woman, I could never relate to the alabaster cast of Sex and the City. I couldn’t see myself in the characters or the plotlines. And Just Like That… 20 years later, I could see myself in Sex and City’s world—but that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Sex and the City (SATC), which aired on HBO from 1998–2004 and spawned two feature films,focuses on four 30- and 40-something women living in New York City: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Sequel series And Just Like That… (AJLT) picks up with those characters—sans Samantha, except for a brief cameo—in 2021, and it introduces four characters of color. Nicole Ari Parker plays Lisa Todd Wexley, documentary filmmaker and Charlotte’s friend; Sara Ramirez plays Che Diaz, Miranda’s nonbinary sometimes-partner; Karen Pittman plays Dr. Nya Wallace, Miranda’s law professor and later roommate; and Sarita Choudhury plays Seema Patel, Carrie’s real-estate agent.
I was optimistic about the producers’ efforts to bring diversity to the new series. Yet, as soon as I began watching AJLT, I struggled with the plot. Initially, I couldn’t articulate why. Unlike in SATC, I could see some version of myself in this new show. The new characters are played by engaging actors, and they have storylines beyond the SATC quartet—we go to work with them; we go home with them; we meet their families. A few episodes in, though, I realized the main problem: AJLT might have provided some semblance of a mirror, but looking into it, I felt reduced to only a racial identity—a racial caricature. In AJLT, I only came to know the Black characters through issues specifically tied to their race.
To cite a few examples: In one episode, Lisa’s husband, Herbert (Christopher Jackson), struggles to hail a taxi, a stale storyline that perpetuates a tiresome racial stereotype; Charlotte reaches the age of 50 before realizing that her social circle is comprised solely of white individuals; Miranda initially mistakes professor Nya—who eventually becomes Miranda’s friend and roommate—for a student on the first day of classes at Columbia Law School; Lisa, who juggles motherhood while editing a docuseries, uncomfortably mirrors Charlotte in her commitments to traditional family values and social climbing. It’s as if Lisa and Charlotte are Black and white versions of one another. And it’s just creepy.
One particularly egregious scene takes place during a dinner party hosted by Lisa and Herbert. Tensions escalate when Lisa’s mother-in-law (Pat Bowie) begins criticizing Lisa and Herbert’s art collection, which includes works by renowned artists like Gordon Parks and Derrick Adams. Charlotte takes advantage of her background in the fine arts, and in trying to impress Lisa (whose friendship she covets) she launches into an impromptu lecture on the artworks’ cultural importance and monetary value. As a result, white audience members receive a Black history lesson—one delivered by a white woman to a Black woman, who would likely already know these artists and the value of their art (as would any Black person watching).
Scenes like this one dominate the storylines of the new characters. I was reminded of a famous quote by Toni Morrison: “I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old colored girl from Lorain, Ohio.” It was clear to me that AJLT was made for white people. Not for me.
AJLT’s new Black and Latina characters, touted as representatives of diversity, in fact represent a wider problem in Hollywood: actors of color are inserted into storylines that critical race theorists would call “race narratives,” or stories contingent on the existence of race. And though racial narratives in the media have the potential to challenge stereotypes and humanize individuals from marginalized communities—as in Issa Rae’s Insecure, also an HBO show—they can also perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce existing power dynamics.
Inserting race narratives into shows with majority-white casts can also come across as an attempt by showrunners to meet diversity quotas, a practice that dates back to the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When the law was enacted, a host of institutions responded with surface-level efforts at integration: simply adding enough “diverse” people to their numbers to get by without controversy. Those numbers are critical for cultural transformation, but on their own they’re not enough. We know this, because more than 20 years into the 21st century, we continue to experience the horrors that the Civil Rights movement attempted to thwart—horrors such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Floyd’s murder, committed by a police officer who did not care that he was being videotaped because he and his colleagues had behaved violently without impunity for decades, shocked many white Americans. Empathetic white people flocked in droves to read antiracist books, attend online workshops and lectures, participate in equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) trainings, and initiate awkward conversations with Black people in trying to unpack the riddle of race relations in our society. Hollywood was no exception—celebrities joined protests and posted black squares on their Instagram feeds to show solidarity with the movement; industry executives apologized for past missteps and pledged to change. In other words, the media landscape that AJLT entered was very different from the one that launched SATC—and surely the producers felt that pressure.
And Just Like That… has received mixed reviews from its inception. “This return might have felt more justified if it took a different approach,” writes NPR’s Aisha Harris, “like making Nya, Lisa, Seema and Che the main characters in their own series, with Carrie and the rest of the SATC gang popping in occasionally to gin up the nostalgia vibes and remind people this is a part of the SATC universe.” Instead, Harris writes, the four new characters are more like “Diversity Girlfriends” propping up the original group—and creating “a conundrum” for them. It’s as though the producers of AJLT set out to confront every diversity misstep they had ever witnessed or caused over the course of their entire lives.
The primary issue is that AJLT tackles “diversity” as if its absence were a singular problem when it’s really an intricate tapestry of people and experiences, each layered with complexities and nuances. Though I suspect that the producers intended to be sensitive to this tapestry by addressing various stereotypes, they ultimately fail to delve deeper into these stereotypes, fail to explore both cause and effect.
The idea that I could, in the time it takes to watch an episode of AJLT, explain the history of race and racism to any well-meaning person is ridiculous. The same way that I learned about the history of white people—not only from years of schooling but also via religious institutions, advertisements, entertainment, and personal relationships—is how one would need to learn about my life as a Black woman in America. I couldn’t possibly convey the depth of race’s entrenchment in my life experience in a few examples of indignity. And yet, that is exactly what AJLT tries to do. Watching the show’s efforts to tackle centuries’ worth of embedded racism feels as overburdensome to me as did inquiries from well-meaning white people about historical racism in my life after George Floyd’s murder.
So, then, what’s the answer? Harris’s proposal—just give the Diversity Girlfriends their own TV slot—might sound like the easiest solution to Hollywood’s racial conundrum. But even that sounds too much like a recycled version of pre-1970s American segregation. What if, instead, And Just Like That… kept its premise—the Sex and the City gang coming to terms with aging in a rapidly changing world—but took an anthropological approach? Rather than studying broad segments of a population, anthropologists delve deeply into the intricacies of a single community group or even a single family over extended periods. Similarly, instead of treating diversity and inclusion issues as checklist items in response to criticisms of SATC, AJLT could benefit from focusing on depth over breadth. Why not just present the new characters as women who happen to be Black or Latina, dealing with their own multifaceted lives, versus Black or Latina women dealing only with the legacies of white America? After all, people of color should not be brought into an environment to represent all people of color in the nation. This mindset doesn’t work in corporate America—and it doesn’t work on television.
HBO has announced that AJLT is coming back for a third season. Sara Ramirez and Karen Pittman have announced that they’re not coming back. And neither will I. Because though I can now find myself reflected in the world of SATC, it’s a distorted reflection—a caricature that I don’t particularly appreciate.
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“I don’t have a son,” said a man I know whose son had died several years earlier. He was not disavowing his son as a disappointed or offended father might, but stating his loss. “I have no friends” or “I have no future,” a person might lament, the implication being that what’s lacking is the most dependable of friends, or the bright prospect that counts as a future, not that no friend or no tomorrow exists. Likewise, though this father didn’t have a living son, he had the son from the past, alive in his memories. Hardly compensation for his loss, but I wonder why it isn’t. Why isn’t the wealth of past years with his son, to be revisited at leisure, not as satisfying as a living son, generating new memories? Why isn’t money in a savings account as gratifying as the job that continues to slowly produce money? Perhaps because the sum in savings, like the memories that fade, tends to lose value over time. You don’t buy as much today with yesterday’s salary as you hope to with tomorrow’s, and the son from the past cannot live up to the expectations you’d had for the son of the future.
Talking about the dead is not easy. “My wife,” said a new friend within minutes of our first meeting, before correcting himself: “my deceased wife.” She had died many years earlier, and he must have long since become used to being a widower, so it wasn’t the novelty that made him say one thing then amend it to another. It was, I think, a question of semantics. He wasn’t married, but his wife wasn’t an ex or a former wife either. I have had the same trouble talking about my father-in-law after I was divorced. Was this man still my father-in-law? I worried over how I should refer to him but soon decided on father-in-law because continuing with that identifier felt best for a man I cherished and would not purposefully distance. So he was my father-in-law while alive and continues to be that. “Oh,” I might exclaim in conversation, “my father-in-law did the same thing!” I can feel him near, perhaps sitting across the room, listening in and nodding. Often, too, when I am alone, I picture him standing beside me. This might be in the kitchen, he approving of my use of old bread to make garlic soup, as he nibbles on a dry hunk while he watches. On a different day, I imagine him bending over the bowl where I am mixing up bread pudding. What would he say about this concoction? At some point, I’m quite sure he’d interrupt my baking and break into a story. The stories he told—I should have no trouble hearing his words because he often told the same ones, or reported his musings on the same subjects over and over. But which story would he tell, and what would be the bridge he’d find from my bread pudding to old Roman coins, pieces of eight, or the etymology of the Asturian word chigre, all subjects he spoke about at length? I’ve heard it said that all our past is stored in our memory, so I must never have listened as well as I should have—as well as a good daughter-in-law or just a good person could have—or I’d still hear his exact words. I missed my chance. I remember thinking something similar in the wake of my father’s death—that I was with him for all of my childhood and lots of my adulthood, and yet, I’d hardly made it count. Why, I asked myself then, didn’t I attend to the experience better? How could I fix this waste now and bridge the distance? It seemed impossible. It was impossible. Maybe that is what the unhappy father meant: not that he had no son as much as he’d been no father. And the opportunity forever lost.
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Amanda Holmes reads Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Imaginary Iceberg.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Imaginary Iceberg” by Elizabeth Bishop appeared first on The American Scholar.
Bastienne Schmidt refuses to let her artistic practice be put in a box. “For me, it’s very important to have range,” she says. “I can go from doing something feminist, or even feminine, to something that’s considered very masculine—I have the aptitude to do whatever I choose to do.” Schmidt has produced award-winning art in various media, including photography, documentary filmmaking, painting, land art, installation art, and drawing, but for the past 10 years, she’s “been playing with the idea of geometry inspired by Bauhaus ideas, using everyday materials.” For her most recent project, a series called “Colored Grids,” Schmidt cuts pieces of painted canvas and stitches them into geometric arrangements, often with a grid-like pattern visible in the background.
- Colored Grids, 2020, Duck Cotton Canvas, sewn pigmented and painted, stretched over canvas, 36 x 48 inches.
- Colored Grids, 2019, Duck Cotton Canvas, sewn pigmented and painted, stretched over canvas, 30 x 40 inches.
- Colored Grids, 2020, Duck Cotton Canvas, sewn pigmented and painted, stretched over canvas, 28 x 34 inches.
Her work is also inspired by her international upbringing—Schmidt was born in Germany but grew up in Greece and Italy. Her father was an archaeologist, and “seeing him work,” she says, “putting different pieces of terracotta together as a mental puzzle, influenced my way of working.” She constructs each of her “Colored Grids” pieces as a sort of improvised Tetris game, intentionally juxtaposing rigid, mathematically precise shapes with natural, organic materials—allowing the viewer to reflect on structure and form, order and spontaneity. “It’s playing with ideas of yin and yang,” she says. “The end result is mostly a painting, but it’s done with all of these different materials.” She favors primary colors for the canvases; she began the series, she used only a deep cerulean blue pigment atop raw cotton canvas to evoke the water and skyline of her childhood in Greece, where textiles are commonly reused.
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This week, Smarty Pants host Stephanie Bastek revisits a conversation from 2023 that originally sparked her desire to return to the debate over Humanities 110 at Reed College. The idea of “Western civilization” looms large in the popular imagination, but it’s no longer taken seriously in academia. In her book The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney examines why the West won’t die and, in the process, dismantles ahistorical concepts like the “clash of civilizations” and the notion of a linear progression from Greek and Roman ideals to those of our present day—“from Plato to NATO.” Through biographical portraits of figures both well-known and forgotten—Herodotus and Francis Bacon, Livilla and Phyllis Wheatley, Tullia d’Aragona and Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi—Mac Sweeney assembles a history that resembles less of a grand narrative than a spiderweb of influence. Successive empires (whether Ottoman, Holy Roman, British, or American) built up self-mythologies in the service of their expansionist, patriarchal, or, later, racist ideologies. Mac Sweeney joins the podcast to talk about why the West has been such a dominant idea and on what values we might base a new vision of contemporary “western” identity.
Go beyond the episode:
- Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives
- In “Claiming the Classical,” Mac Sweeney and her co-authors examine how classical antiquity is used by 21st-century political actors
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Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Theme music by Nathan Prillaman. Exploding the Canon returns next week.
The post Interlude: The Idea of “The West” appeared first on The American Scholar.
Dennis Covington passed away on April 14, 2024. Between the fall of 2017 and the spring of 2018, he wrote 23 columns for this website. Here is his first, about the beauties of the West Texas desert he once called home.
I’m from Alabama, and I was bankrupt when I got a new teaching job in West Texas. After my younger daughter joined me there, and I could no longer pay the rent on our apartment, a student found us an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of a canyon, 50 miles from the university.
Our water pipes often froze, and we occasionally had rattlesnakes in the living room, scorpions that fell onto us from the ceiling while we slept, and propane leaks in the kitchen that could have blown us to smithereens.
These were adventures, to be sure, but every one of them was worth the silence.
We never heard traffic on the highway many miles away. We never heard train whistles or the clanging of machinery in an industrial plant. We occasionally heard a tractor or cotton stripper, but since most of the land around us was either mesquite thicket, pasture, or golden wheat, these sounds were only momentary distractions.
Sometimes it was so quiet we thought we could hear electricity coursing through the power line that ran alongside the dirt road. Otherwise, there was only wind, occasional thunder, the bellow of a distant bull, or the sound of birds.
There were plenty of birds. There were meadowlarks and killdeer in the morning, quail and scissor-tailed flycatchers at noon, gray hawks as the sun started to sink, and wild turkeys along the rivulet in the canyon almost any time of day. At sunset, we’d walk to the lip of the canyon to listen to the coyotes’ unearthly song. Then as dusk turned black, the nighthawks dove and ricocheted back into the sky, and the great horned owl would call from the old telegraph pole by the canyon to his mate far away in the dark.
As the seasons changed, among the migrating birds would be Mississippi kites, mountain bluebirds, red-tailed hawks, and the sand hill cranes that soared so high in February that we often couldn’t make them out, only know them by their gurgling call.
The mammals were more stay-at-home, of course—the prairie dogs, jackrabbits, gray foxes, and mule deer, which we’d see when we strode out on November mornings to take our first walk of the day. The deer would still have frost on their backs, and they would look at us as though we were the living statues instead of them.
Always, always, we watched the night sky with its wheeling constellations, and the Milky Way stretched out full-length and terrifying. When I was a child in Birmingham, I rarely even saw the night sky because of low-hung clouds or the haze from the steel mills.
But we got used to the sky on the Caprock. We became part of it. It was ours. Day or night, our home there was in the sky.
I’d always envisioned paradise as a place like San Jose de la Montaña in Costa Rica, where I’d holed up to clear my head during the Salvadoran civil war, or in a snug cabin after a fresh snowfall among the Owyhee Mountains in southwest Idaho, the place I’d wanted to retire.
I never would have believed I’d have to go bankrupt and find paradise with my daughter in an abandoned farmhouse on the flattest place on earth. West Texas. Who’d have picked that out of a tourist brochure?
It’s not that we found ourselves in paradise, though. It’s that paradise was where we found our selves.
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Many roads lead from Asturias south into the neighboring province of León, but only two are practical choices for traveling there from where I live in central Asturias: the old highway going over the Pajares pass, and the much faster, newer AP-66 expressway, a four-lane toll road that tunnels through the mountains instead of topping them and that is commonly called the Huerna for the river it follows. Bus lines and trucking companies favor the Huerna as the faster and safer alternative, as do businesspeople in a hurry to get somewhere and then get home again, or prudent people fearing the precipitous curves or steep grades of the old highway over the pass. That road, the N-630 highway, is the choice for anyone wanting the fantastic views from the heights, anyone who enjoys the thrill of the narrow twisting road, wants to avoid the toll, or is simply protesting a new way when you’ve got the good old way still in working order. That last reason is often why I prefer to take backroads, and it is my running partner’s too. At least from Asturias into León. It’s the way we drove one cold blustery weekend in late February, heading to a Sunday morning footrace in Valladolid. After two weeks of warm, sunny weather, a little wind and the chance of flurries were exciting, and we welcomed the snow that began to fall almost as soon as we took the exit for Pajares. My first snowfall of the year.
Snowplows and three cars were all the traffic we encountered. At the pass, the ground was white and the air was filled with fine, blowing snow. It was not a whiteout, but it was close enough to make my partner recall a trip a half century earlier when his mother and father, aunt and uncle, and he and his sister were returning from visiting relatives in Salamanca. Pajares is not the same road anymore: it’s wider, has pullouts when going up and ramps for runaway trucks when coming down. Nowadays, too, one knows what lies ahead on Pajares or at other places of interest because in addition to a weather report available on your phone, you can also tune in to any number of webcams situated at various points along your route. “Is it snowing or isn’t it?” you wonder, so you look at what lies ahead. What’s more, when conditions are bad, the highway patrol operates checkpoints at both ends of the road, turning travelers away if the road is impassable or if vehicles aren’t equipped with snow tires or chains. But 50 years ago, when you took a road, you were on your own. My partner recounted that on that particular trip over the pass in the dark of a winter evening, the mix of swirling snow and mist was so thick you could not see even three feet ahead. With deadly drop-offs and 17-percent grades, it wasn’t safe. My friend’s uncle got out of the car and walked just in front, one hand on the hood, providing an indication of where the road led. The trouble was that the snow already hid the outlines of the road and hillside, and not even advancing on foot guaranteed that you were on safe ground. It would be so easy to steer blindly over the precipice.
That did not happen. Instead, the uncle led the car down from the pass along the many kilometers of twisting, snowy road, climbing aboard again before they reached the village of Campomanes at the bottom. He must have walked nine of the 20 kilometers from the top. This was a hard-working family that wasn’t easily unnerved. Nothing soft about them. If six of you needed to fit in the car, then you squeezed in. If you had to get home so you could work the next day, then you did. If getting there required walking over the pass, then you walked. If it took all night, it took all night. Those were different times. I wonder, though, had they known the conditions on the pass that evening, would they have attempted the drive? Perhaps yes. To get anywhere in life, you had to take your chances. The family, it turned out, was to experience a good share of tragedy on the road in the years ahead. A cousin took a bull to market on a rainy day when an oncoming car crashed into him, cutting both his legs in half. He survived and even kept the use of his limbs, but was left with a decided limp on his patched-together legs. Such an accident was a terrible setback for the family, but worse was in store. Soon after, this man’s brother, having paused in the road to make a left-hand turn, was killed when he was rear-ended and knocked into the path of an oncoming car. Then their father, years after his two sons had suffered their accidents, was riding in a car whose driver nodded off and drove into a ditch, killing this passenger while hurting no one else. Another relative was run down at a crosswalk where an enemy, knowing his daily walk, waited for him. A godson suffocated from an asthma attack while driving. Who says lightning never strikes twice, let alone five times?
Car accidents, however, are not random events but can be predicted. Pajares is the most dangerous road in Asturias and the ninth most dangerous in the country, according to a study published in 2016. If you drive it enough, you will have an accident. If you travel by car, you will be in an accident.
Not even lightning strikes, for that matter, are random. Some areas get more than the usual share of electrical activity, as some people have more than the usual share of bad—or good—luck. That night, the family got home safely, as has my running partner all of the thousands of times he’s taken the pass, including when I was along. Getting home safely is what everyone counts on, despite statistics. Statistics tell us what to expect but not what will happen. For that information, we have no webcam into the future. We can only drive on, sometimes blindly. Something always happens. If you’re lucky enough to have a view while you’re finding out what it is, enjoy it!
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Amanda Holmes reads from Ennio Moltedo’s Las Cosas Nuevas. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post From Las Cosas Nuevas by Ennio Moltedo appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, along a narrow two-lane road that runs through the small town of Landers, a white dome glimmers amid the desolate landscape. From a distance, it seems like a trick of the eye. Up close, it resembles a small observatory or even one of those new glamping tents that have popped up recently around nearby Joshua Tree. In fact, the Integratron is something far more unconventional: a monument to one man’s otherworldly ambition.
His name was George W. Van Tassel, and starting in the late 1920s, he made his name in the California aviation industry, working for the Lockheed Corporation and the Douglas Aircraft Company, and as a test flight inspector for Howard Hughes. He was drawn to Landers by the allure of Giant Rock, a seven-story-tall boulder reputed to have mystical powers (Native Americans deemed it sacred), and he moved to the area in 1947. California’s UFO culture was then in its infancy, and when he wasn’t operating a private airstrip with his wife, he began hosting Interplanetary Spacecraft Conventions, drawing thousands of attendees—some of the first large-scale gatherings of UFO true believers.
Van Tassel claimed to have had numerous telepathic communications with extraterrestrials—and he even reported having a physical encounter. At two a.m. on August 24, 1953, as he recalled, Van Tassel was awakened by a being from Venus named Solgonda. The alien wore a one-piece gray bodysuit, spoke impeccable English, and otherwise resembled your average human man—if your average man is 700, looks no more than 28, and sports a killer tan. According to Van Tassel, Solgonda beamed him aboard a spacecraft and declared that the greatest problem restricting mankind was the propensity for early death: just as we acquire the wisdom to do something meaningful, it’s all over, finito. He bequeathed to Van Tassel a formula—F = 1/T, or frequency equals one over time—to enable the construction of an antigravity time machine that would liberate our species from its earthly constraints. For the next quarter century, reportedly with financial backing from Hughes, Van Tassel worked on constructing the Integratron, so called because of his belief that it could integrate the healing power of electrostatic energy into our cells, thus inhibiting aging. When he died in 1978, the contraption was still unfinished. As Solgonda might have said, I told you so.
What to make of this wildest of yarns, and the domed curiosity to which it gave rise? The Integratron has, much like Van Tassel himself, enjoyed an unexpected second act, thanks to the three sisters who purchased the site at the turn of the millennium. They got it listed in the National Register of Historic Places and transformed it into a tourist attraction, offering sound baths inside the dome—40-minute-long meditative sessions in which visitors are immersed in the vibrations produced by singing bowls. Trendy Hollywood types converged, in search of “sonic healing.” The English indie rock band Arctic Monkeys recorded part of the album Humbug here. And when the pandemic brought packs of fleeing Angelenos to the desert, the Integratron became a must-see. The eccentric fringe had gone mainstream.
Which is how I find myself driving through the main gates on a recent winter afternoon, Giant Rock rising in the distance. The sisters—Nancy, Patty, and Joanne Karl—have engineered a welcoming vibe, hanging hammocks and planting trees (eucalyptus, almond, apricot, and more) around a series of low-slung support buildings that house an office and other essentials. The Integratron itself, standing 33 feet tall, is corralled behind a log fence and framed by a pair of palm trees. A series of 64 red Dirod electrostatic generators—vital to Van Tassel’s negative-ion anti-aging scheme—rings the structure just below its midriff like a belt of rubies. The site exudes an unexpected, sacred power, like a roadside chapel for the supernaturally curious.
Sound bath check-in (tickets $55) takes place in the visitors center, which consists of two conjoined metal domes where you can buy T-shirts, mugs, magnets— all manner of Integratron merch. This afternoon, a gentleman with a shaved head and a gray goatee mans the front desk like a carnival barker, touting the Integratron’s acoustics. Van Tassel used not a single nail, screw, or piece of flashing in its construction, relying instead on glue, caulk, and paint to secure and weatherproof the structure. One likely source of inspiration was Hughes’s failed D-2 project, which involved a secret World War II fighter plane that was constructed using a glue-laminated technology called Duramold. But an encyclopedic array of 19th- and 20th-century pioneers also served as influences: the English engineer James Wimshurst and his eponymous high-voltage apparatus; the French engineer Georges Lakhovsky and his Multiple Wave Oscillator; the Hungarian-born astrophysicists Jeno and Madeleine Barnothy Farro and their study of biomagnetic healing; Nikola Tesla and his high-voltage electrotherapy experiments; and George Crile, the doctor who was responsible for the first direct blood transfusion and who believed that “electricity is the energy that drives the organism.”
The way Van Tassel envisioned it, people would enter the Integratron’s ground floor (which would serve as a negative electrostatic ion chamber), circle the interior in counterclockwise fashion, and then exit, their cells newly revitalized. The ritualized ceremony (the visitors all clad in white) was but a touchstone in a larger movement. Van Tassel founded the quasi-religious College of Universal Wisdom, published a newsletter, and gave wide-ranging lectures about God’s creation of the space people and the threat of atomic annihilation. Was he a communist? This was no idle question. He had originally learned of Giant Rock from a German prospector named Frank Critzer, who lived in a cave below the boulder and was killed when authorities, concerned that he might be a wartime spy, tossed in a tear-gas canister to flush him out but instead ignited some dynamite that was meant for mining. The FBI opened a file on Van Tassel—monitoring lectures, reviewing his newsletter, interviewing the man himself—but concluded that he posed no imminent threat: he was just another desert eccentric.
The outlandish history, as well as the dome’s acoustic possibilities, attracted the Karl sisters, who settled on the idea of sound baths. Inspired in part by Aboriginal Australians, who use the didgeridoo as a healing instrument, and Tibetan monks, who play metal singing bowls during spiritual ceremonies, sound baths are said to have stress-reducing and antidepressant properties and to help promote spiritual well-being. Supposedly, first-timers and those between 40 and 59 years old (coincidentally my demographic) have the most intense experiences—this according to a nonrandomized study with no control group published in the Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine. Never mind the fledgling science. I take my cues from a blissed-out woman in yoga gear who emerges from a sound bath session as I wait my turn: “It was peaceful, and then something else. I can’t even describe it. It was something.”
Part of the appeal, of course, is that the Integratron itself is a handsome thing, that Van Tassel’s flights of cosmic fancy produced such an alluring “resonant tabernacle,” as the sisters call it. Will the vibe be diminished by a new glamping project—at least six geodesic domes, each 24 feet in diameter—proposed for an undeveloped parcel between the structure and Giant Rock? The sisters and many locals believe so: a petition opposed to the development gathered 9,400 signatures on Change.org.
The sounds—eerie, evocative, haunting—envelop you in a mind-bending embrace, as if you were positioned inside the world’s largest cello, an endless succession of notes reverberating through every corner of your being.At long last, my appointed time arrives. About 25 of us are ushered into the ground floor of the Integratron, which has the feel of a rustic cabin. Two guides instruct us to remove our shoes, turn off our cell phones, and ready ourselves for Drayton, the “Led Zeppelin of the bowls”: “He’s going to rock your world.” One by one, we ascend a rudimentary wood stairway to the second floor, as the the dome’s Douglas-fir ribs come into view. Above, a concrete oculus; all around, the vast expanse of the desert visible through a series of rectangular windows. I assume my position on one of the supplied mats. Before I close my eyes, I see Drayton holding a mallet, surrounded by 22 crystal singing bowls of various sizes, like an array of exquisite planters at a luxury florist. He pronounces a hippie-ish homage to Mother Earth and to mothers in general. It’s those hard-charging, ego-driven men in the world, he says, who are “messing everything up. Let’s get the mothers in charge.”
And then he starts playing. The sounds—eerie, evocative, haunting—envelop you in a mind-bending embrace, as if you were positioned inside the world’s largest cello, an endless succession of notes reverberating through every corner of your being. Different notes reportedly target different chakras, or energy centers, but the particulars interest me little in my meditative repose. Pardon my own hippie-ish turn, but I find myself transported to some mystical free-flowing state, to some deeper communion with my unconscious.
A couple of things may happen during a sound bath. You may unlock repressed emotions and start bawling. Or you may doze off (we’re instructed to nudge snoring neighbors). Neither happens to me. The hour evaporates. I come to. Most everyone else starts chatting, swapping impressions, but I’d like the feeling to linger, and so I descend the stairs and make my way into the sun-streaked afternoon, feeling buoyant, like an untethered balloon. Solgonda makes no appearances, Van Tassel is no more, but oh what a bizarre, bewitching legacy he has left us here. I make plans to return.
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This week, Smarty Pants host and Scholar senior editor Stephanie Bastek delves into the history of Black Studies at her alma mater, Reed College, drawing connections between the fight for a Black Studies program in 1968 and the efforts of Reedies Against Racism to diversify the college’s mandatory freshman humanities course 48 years later. Speaking with former students and members of Reed’s Black Student Union, Bastek recounts the 1968 BSU occupation of Eliot Hall, one of the largest buildings on campus, as part of the campaign for a Black Studies program. The program was established, but not without backlash—and rifts among faculty members would threaten Reed’s foundation for decades to come.
- Read Martin White’s essay, “The Black Studies Controversy at Reed College, 1968–1970” in the Oregon Historical Quarterly
- In Memoriam: Linda Gordon Howard, Calvin Freeman, José Brown
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All images below taken by Stephen Robinson, and courtesy of the Reed College Library
Featured voices in this episode: Andre Wooten, Mary Frankie McFarland Forte, Martin White, Stephen Robinson, Roger Porter, George Brandon, Steve Engel, and Suzanne Snively. Ron Herndon oral history audio courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society. Archival recording of the October 28, 1968 BSU town hall featuring Cathy Allen and Ron Herndon courtesy of the Reed College Library.
Produced and hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Original music by Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting by Mickey Capper.
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Transcript:
The year 1968 is remembered as tumultuous for many reasons: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the wave of student demonstrations from Paris to Berlin, the My Lai massacre, and heightened anti-Vietnam War protests across the country, including college campuses.
1968 was a big year at Reed College, too: in its demand for a Black Studies Program, the Black Student Union took over one of the largest buildings on campus: Eliot Hall. Andre Wooten was a junior and the vice-president of the BSU:
ANDRE WOOTEN: I was one of the guys who locked themselves up in the building, seven of us really, we locked ourselves up in the president’s office and kept anybody from getting in there for a week.
Mary Frankie McFarland Forte was a sophomore and the secretary of the BSU.
MARY FRANKIE MCFARLAND FORTE: I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor with José Brown. He was in the next dorm; he would come over—“Mary, come on, let’s go down.” And we had our sleeping bags, and we slept. I do remember the floor being a little hard too.
Exploding the Canon examines the 2016-2017 struggle to change the mandatory freshman humanities course at Reed College, and how far that reckoning with racism and Eurocentrism really went. What does the fight for Black Studies in 1968 have to do with the struggles of Reedies Against Racism years later? Well, Reed College is a majority-white school in a majority-white city in a majority-white state. In fact, while Oregon was still a territory, it passed laws excluding Black people.
Until 1964, only two Black students had ever graduated from Reed. But starting in 1964, the school was one of seven private colleges to receive a $250,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to establish merit scholarships for Black students. Martin White, who graduated from Reed in 1969, published an extensive article in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in 2017 about the events of 1968:
MARTIN WHITE: The original grant was for three years, and then it was extended for another three years. So every year they were bringing in 10 or 15 Black, new Black freshmen.
By 1968, there were 35 Black students at Reed. But for scholarship students like Stephen Robinson, who came from a public high school in Newark, New Jersey …
STEPHEN ROBINSON: Oh, it was pitiful. It was extraordinarily non-diverse. In fact, I think at the time there may have been 1100 students total, and out of that there may have been 30 or 40 Black students.
Mary, who also went by her middle name Frankie in college, was another full scholarship recipient. She came from a public high school in Oakland, California.
MARY FRANKIE MCFARLAND FORTE: All those classes, I had to be the only Black in there. My freshman roommate, she was from Medford, Oregon. She had never met a Black person.
The Black Student Union had formed in 1967. Ron Herndon was a master’s student at the time. The Oregon Historical Society conducted a 1988 oral history with him:
RON HERNDON: I was looking forward to having a place where I could do nothing but learn. I came out here, to Reed College and found that it was just as racist as any institution I had encountered in my previous 23 years. No Black books, no Black classes. So I got involved with Black Student Union and we demanded that they set up a Black studies program. They balked.
In the fall of 1968, the Black Student Union had coalesced around that demand for a Black Studies program, with Black studies courses taught by Black professors. At that time, there was only one African-American professor—Michael Harper, who was poet in residence at nearby Lewis & Clark College and taught only part-time at Reed in the Literature department.
MARY FRANKIE MCFARLAND FORTE: It would’ve been nice to have a Black teacher that we could talk to. The only Black people that worked at the school at the time, they either were cooks in the commons or they were cleaning the dormitories. And other than that, you didn’t see Black people.
STEPHEN ROBINSON: I think it was Ronnie Herndon at the time who said, we’re not being given the tools to affect the kind of change that’s necessary in our communities when we return. You know, you could look at being trained to be a very efficient cog in a bigger machine, or are you going to be given the tools to dismantle the machine?
For a while, it seemed like the BSU was on a course to victory that fall. Martin found a lot of material in the archives for his article on the fight for Black Studies:
MARTIN WHITE: They began by presenting their demands to the faculty. And the faculty appointed a committee to help with the process of creating a Black Studies program. I think there was a period there in the fall of 1968 where things were moving along. And then after Thanksgiving break, the situation changed. And according to what both people on the faculty and Black students have said, some of the Black students went to Washington DC where they met with other Black students from other colleges. And as a result of those meetings in Washington DC, they came to the conclusion that control over hiring and firing faculty was essential, that they couldn’t just have a program and have the all-white faculty at Reed College controlling who was hired and fired.
The demands were typewritten and presented to the faculty on November 22. In all capitals, it read:
REED IS ACTIVELY RECRUITING BLACK STUDENTS. THEY BRING US HERE, FORCE US TO STUDY THE CULTURE OF OUR OPPRESSORS (EUROPE AND AMERICA), AND THEN NEGLECT OUR OWN CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATION.
Their demands were for a commitment from Reed to establish a Black Studies program in some form, for Reed to hire Black consultants to confer with the BSU on creating it, and for the faculty to cede absolute control of selection for this future Black faculty to the BSU. And, until enough Black professors were hired, the BSU wanted control of the curriculum, and veto power over any courses dealing with people of African descent—like the only two then currently being taught at Reed. Faculty minutes record the BSU’s reason for this demand:
STEPHEN ROBINSON: “Being black is an essential condition to understanding fully black people’s needs. You do not know how you are uneducated in this area and are thus not qualified to set up a program to educate yourselves or others.”
MARTIN WHITE: The first two demands just had to do with creating a program and bringing in consultants to help get it set up. And really there was pretty broad support among the faculty and the students. Had it just been the first two demands, it would’ve sailed through much more easily. But the last three demands were a sticking point and a lot of faculty members just could not get past those, even if they were favorably inclined towards Reed creating a Black Studies program.
The faculty responded three days later, completely ignoring the last three demands. Roger Porter was one of the Young Turks who supported the BSU:
ROGER PORTER: My gut feeling is that there was something insular about the faculty. The allegiance to Reed, the sense that Reed was such a special place, was so fragile and so delicate, and that the faculty had to be, uh, careful guardians of the traditions of the institution. And it made for what I thought was a kind of claustrophobic atmosphere. Uh, the word that kept being brooded about a lot was the mission of the college, which always made me feel that, if colleges have missions in that sense, it’s easy to assume there are heresies that the missions protect against.
The older, more conservative camp of faculty were those who had survived the McCarthy era. These faculty members were committed to maintaining a strong degree of academic freedom and control over hiring and firing.
MARTIN WHITE: The older faculty found that the younger faculty members were much more sympathetic to student demands about a whole array of things than they themselves were. And the younger faculty also did not have this institutional memory about the challenges that Reed had faced in the fifties, where the House Un-American Activities Committee targeted Reed College because they thought it was harboring communists. And so they sent a bunch of congressmen and staff members and held hearings and ran a bunch of faculty members over the fire. And it ended up that two faculty members were fired from the college for either belonging to the Communist Party or not revealing whether they did or not, and a staff member as well. So three people left, and as a result of that, the president of the college had to resign early and the faculty felt very strongly about any kind of invasion of their rights to hire and fire faculty members or set the curriculum.
The BSU got the sense that the faculty did not share their sense of urgency. Andre Wooten, who was its vice president, reflected on this later.
ANDRE WOOTEN: We didn’t feel that our requests and/or demands were being taken seriously. There was a definite faculty opposition because back in those days, even some of the history professors were saying, there is no serious reason to study African history. There’s nothing there. And it was all just because they were ignorant. They thought everybody else was ignorant and should continue to be ignorant. But if you begin digging up the books and the old rocks, you find that … British historians were writing that Egypt was the light of the world back in the early 1800s.
Something had to change.
ANDRE WOOTEN: We realized that a lot of historical movements have been taken by people taking direct action. And so it was determined that we would take over the admin building at starting about three o’clock one morning, and seven of us showed up and did that.
That was the morning of Wednesday, December 11, 1968. Linda Gordon Howard—whose name we heard earlier as the founder of Renn Fayre—had woken up early to slip small pieces of paper into every student mail box, reading simply, “The Black Student Union of Reed College has taken over the second floor of Eliot Hall.”
MARTIN WHITE: I was in a class and a group of Black students appeared in the hallway. They had waste baskets that they turned into drums, and they were banging on those and asking everybody to leave their classes to support the occupation, which they were beginning of Eliot Hall.
Four or five students had locked themselves into President Victor Rosenblum’s office on the second floor, armed only with a box of groceries. Everyone else stayed in the main hallway, where they blocked access to the admission office, registrar, and finance office—oh, and faculty mailboxes.
ANDRE WOOTEN: We wanted to make them a little more uncomfortable and kind of try to get them to understand how uncomfortable we felt in this bastion of privilege.
They sat and held their ground for the whole day. Then they pulled out their sleeping bags and stayed overnight into the next day. And the next day. George Brandon recalled a sense of exhilaration, but also the boredom:
GEORGE BRANDON: Once you’re there, it is just what are you going to do with your time? It wasn’t like there was any active attempt to really barge in and force us out. That didn’t happen. You get messages, people let you know what’s going on on the outside while you’re there. Most of the time you’re just sitting there. You’re just sitting there and you read something. You have some food, talk about who else is in there about the meaning of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and wondering what’s going on outside of the hall. But inside it was fairly peaceful actually.
The students occupied the building in shifts, and the BSU got a lot of support from white students on the outside, some of whom heeded the call for a boycott of classes. Steve Engel had been involved with protests against the Vietnam War on campus, and he was friends with a lot of the Black students in the union.
STEVE ENGEL: I thought that it was gutsy, and I thought that it was making a statement we could hardly make by going rah rah outside. And I knew they were taking chance. I knew they were putting themselves on the line, and I think that was a big piece of the motivation. All right, we’re not going to let them get cut off here, let’s do what we could. Bring food, make something of a to do so that it would be clear that it was not just Black students alone in the building.
Hand-written leaflets from the Reed Boycott Committee announced: “One week to White Christmas. No white studies until black studies! BOYCOTT … If you support the BSU, strike. Spend your time talking to your professors explaining why the BSU proposals must be accepted.” Martin White remembers a flurry of other publications, special editions of The Quest, pickets, rallies.
MARTIN WHITE: This was a week or 10 days before Christmas break, the whole rest of that term was given over to political action.
The business of the college was totally interrupted:
MARTIN WHITE: The college could no longer issue checks to faculty members or to student workers. So it was a very intense situation and it was hard to say how it was going to work out.
Meanwhile, the Black students inside Eliot Hall were getting nervous.
ANDRE WOOTEN: I swore I would never lock myself inside of anything ever again in my life. It was just crazy. It felt like a sitting duck. I mean, there were police cars driving around. They never came in and stormed us, but it was a very nervous time.
President Rosenblum never did call in the police, though a few faculty members desperately wanted him to. At 3 PM on the first day of the occupation, Rosenblum called for a closed meeting of the faculty, after which they released a resolution rejecting the demands for student control over the hiring and firing of Black Studies professors, but supporting “in principle” the creation of a Black Studies program.
MARTIN WHITE: President Rosenblum was, I think very skillful in managing, speaking to the Black students, speaking to the faculty, trying to get people together to talk. And the Black students also I think were very disciplined. There was no resort to police violence on the Reed campus, which was not a usual thing. These protests were going protests against the war, protests about the state of higher education. Students were in an uproar all over the country and in places like San Francisco where this process was going on at the same time at San Francisco State, there was a huge police action led by the president of the college who got a baton out and started whacking kids in the head. So very different at Reed, which was, I think everybody should be applauded for that.
Suzanne Snively, a white student who was good friends with Mary Frankie McFarland Forte, happened to be studying constitutional law with President Rosenblum:
SUZANNE SNIVELY: Of course, he gave me the impression that he was succeeding with the traditionalists, and I was impressed with his approach that he insisted on this being a Reed discussion and not bringing in the police, enabling the Black students to assert a bit of power in order to draw attention to their case.
On Thursday, the faculty held another meeting, this one open, and the contentiousness of the debate was as much of a disruption to the college as the occupation itself. As emeritus economics professor Carl Stevens, also from the Reed class of 1942, told Todd Schwartz for a 2003 edition of Reed Magazine: “I remember one colleague shouting about how he would take the college out of his will … I was astonished at how fragile some of my colleagues thought Reed was. That merely having a black studies center would somehow damage the entire education program.”
Further negotiations between a few BSU and faculty representatives resulted in a new proposal, brought to a December 17 meeting of the faculty by the BSU, for an autonomous Black Studies Center, whose director and faculty would only answer to the president and trustees—not the faculty. We only have print records of this, but I asked a colleague to re-enact them.
The Faculty supports in principle the establishment of an autonomous Black Studies Center under the auspices of the Reed Institute. It is understood that the Center would subscribe to the standards of academic freedom … It is understood that the Black Student Union and consultants will assist in naming the first director.
The Eliot Hall occupation was entering its sixth day. Meanwhile, Linda Gordon Howard had just been elected vice president of the student body—an election she’d totally forgotten about from inside her sleeping bag in Eliot Hall. She resolved to get the rest of the faculty on board with the compromise proposal as quickly as possible. Since her freshman year, she had spent a lot of her spare time in German professor Ottomar Rudolph’s office, listening to him gossip about his colleagues. This was her secret weapon: she knew where all the faculty fell along political lines. “All we have to do is manage these people,” she told me later, as she set up two-on-two conversations between BSU members and professors, beginning with the most sympathetic.
They worked their way, two-by-two, through all the faculty, until they hit 51% in support. It’s something she regrets, she told me: “What I did was vote-counting. My mistake was stopping at 51%. It wins an election but it’s not a mandate.”
In his article, Martin White points out that the faculty at the time “was not merely a white male patriarchy in theory but in actual fact.” There were no full-time Black professors, and only a handful of minority faculty . Just 12 percent—18 out of 146 people—were women.
Roger Porter remembers the vote that followed the night of Wednesday, December 18:
ROGER PORTER: The vote was enormously close. I think it passed by two or three votes. Uh, and the conservative—let’s called them conservative—faculty around that issue made sure that emeritus faculty came to the faculty meeting in which that decision was made. Normally, emeritus faculty never come to meetings. And I mean, there were people in wheelchairs. I think there was one guy in a stretcher. I mean, it was really a bizarre scene. And of course, they all voted conservatively, but it passed. And were people who wept at that meeting and said it’s the darkest day in the history of Reed College.
In the minutes, 22 faculty members insisted on going on the record in opposition, something only done in faculty meetings by request. Only four wanted to be on the record in favor, including Roger Porter. The resolution passed 53 to 50: there would be a Black Studies Center at Reed. The BSU rolled up their sleeping bags and left Eliot Hall. They’d been there a week.
While everyone was on winter break, the professors on the Faculty Advisory Committee, or FAC, a 10-member body chosen from the senior faculty, fired a bunch of their younger colleagues.
ROGER PORTER: I had just gotten tenure, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten tenure if I hadn’t already had it. Almost all the untenured faculty, certainly those in the humanities program, um, who had voted in favor of Black studies were let go. Between 1967 and 1971, 26 faculty members were hired into the Hum 110 program, and 25 did not get tenure, only one. So as it turned out, it was quite dangerous for the junior faculty to support the Black Studies program.
The “purge,” as it became known, prompted students to form the Student Advisory Committee, which then met with the FAC as a Committee of 8, to quote “advise the faculty on questions of student power.” Steve Engel was on the SAC:
STEVE ENGEL: Somehow or other, it came to a question of, all right, the students can elect four students to meet with four faculty. And that seemed like it was progress. It was actually a tar ball. And so they were very good at taking up the whole hour of meeting with maybe one person giving a discourse. It became clear to me, oh, these guys are vested in a way we can’t be. These guys were here when we got here. They’ll be here when we’re gone. They’re the trees and we’re just, the breeze blowing through the trees. We’re just passing through.
Over the course of the spring, as the final proposal for a Black Studies Center was hammered out, faculty votes continued to be razor thin—59 to 44 on a vote to put more people on the firing board of the FAC, 60 to 54 on the BSC proposal, etcetera. While the final proposal was ultimately accepted by the BSU in a unanimous vote, the resulting program was thin.
Faculty also continued to ignore the demands the BSU had made in the fall regarding courses about people of African descent—in a memo from April 30, the BSU urged students to boycott three proposed courses for the next year, including one called “Black Psychology,” which, like the other two courses, was proposed by a white professor. “We were not consulted as to the material and perspectives being used in these courses, and we feel that this is the epitome of white supremacy. We are discouraging all non-white peoples from taking these courses, and all white people who want a good education.”
In an interesting twist, George Brandon, who had been one of the BSU students who’d slept in Eliot Hall that week, ended up being hired by the president’s office for a summer job laying the groundwork for the new Center.
GEORGE BRANDON: In the sense we’d gone through this whole thing to get some Black Studies there and the Reed administration didn’t know anything about it. They asked me to make a summary of the structure and the nature of the courses that already existed on other colleges or universities. I felt that I was laying the structure for what would come later for whoever was going to read their report, then implement anything out of it, and also thought that maybe they would’ve asked me about what I had done, take the benefit of that. That really didn’t happen.
Reed ended up hiring as the director of Black Studies an African-American professor who was teaching part-time at the college that fall, Bill McClendon. A historian, McClendon had also been at the forefront of the civil rights movement in Portland since moving there in 1938 after graduate school. The Black Studies Center was also only allotted $30,000 total for its first year. As Calvin Freeman, the first president of the BSU, is quoted in the Reed oral history project Comrades of the Quest saying: “They didn’t invest in a Black Studies professor the way that they would invest in, say, a new economics professor, or even a new art professor. It was pretty much a slapdash recruitment. ‘Who can we get in here right away?’ Although I’m not sure how happy we would’ve been at the time with a slower process.”
MARTIN WHITE: There was the practical matter of since there was not a history of Black Studies in America … there were not teachers being trained to teach Black studies. So anybody who might be qualified to teach Black studies, there was a lot of competition. They would probably choose to go to an Ivy League school or to a historically Black university or college to teach a subject like that rather than Reed College. Reed College didn’t have a lot to attract that kind of talent.
GEORGE BRANDON: I wasn’t satisfied with the program that came out of it, and I certainly wasn’t satisfied with the director that they chose. No, it was for me, that was disappointing. That was disappointing. Of course, the other thing is there were people early on who looked at the director that was chosen and figured that he’s not going to be around that long. … but was we had nickname for him. We called him Popcorn. It was light and insubstantial.
The BSU had actually wanted Michael Harper, the poet and part-time literature professor, to be one of the co-directors of the program, along with someone else he’d recommended. Roger Porter points out some of the structural ways that the old guard undermined the new program before it even began:
ROGER PORTER: Michael Harper, who’s quite well known, um, said that he had seen the heart of darkness of the Reed faculty. What happened was that that program was quite short-lived. And it was short-lived, exactly because the faculty managed—I think it was the Educational Policies Committee—managed to withhold divisional or group credit for all the Black Studies courses. In other words, say a Black history course did not give you credit for having taken a course in the division of history and social sciences. So they were, they were in effect knee-capping the courses. And over the next couple of years, one after another of the Black students left the college and the courses died. So it was a really, an attenuation of the program completely.
GEORGE BRANDON: Those kinds of issues can persist for a long time, not just because of inertia, but also just because the right people are not there. You don’t have white students asking for Black Studies. You have Black students agitating for it.
Before President Victor Rosenblum left his post, he secured funding from a trustee for the BSC for its initial two years. But the college was running out of money. Ron Herndon reflected on this in the 1988 oral history:
RON HERNDON: They did not maintain the commitment to bring Black students. The commitment was that they had to match the Rockefeller money. Reed College never did. It was the only institution that got the money that never kept this commitment. So when the money ran out, they made no effort to replace it, nor bring in more Black students. For several years, Reed College had one Black student in the latter part of the seventies, early eighties, and now they may have seven Black students total.
And, even though the number of Black students at Reed had temporarily increased during the years of the Rockefeller scholarships, Black students were still dropping out at a worrying rate—just like they would in in the 2000s:
MARY FRANKIE MCFARLAND FORTE: It seemed like to me, most of the Black students—at least that I was friends that didn’t graduate—after two years, one year, two years, they just couldn’t take it anymore.
The peak of Black enrollment, when 35 students attended Reed from 1968 to 1970, wouldn’t be surpassed until 2007.
MARTIN WHITE: Reed was broke at the end of the sixties. There was no real endowment. They were just living from hand to mouth. And so when the Rockefeller grant ran out, they did not have special money to provide scholarships for Black students. And the student body became returned to its earlier status of being pretty white. It was kind of a death spiral, wasn’t support, there weren’t the Black students, there wasn’t funding. So eventually it just petered out.
MARY FRANKIE MCFARLAND FORTE: It says to me that maybe they didn’t really truly care. They just put something in place, a band-aid, tell us students that were involved, we kind of left. And then you don’t hear about it. They really didn’t mean it.
SUZANNE SNIVELY: I don’t think we realized just how determined they were to keep Reed on what was a more traditional vein. And it wasn’t until my 50th celebration with Frankie and others from Reed that we realized that the Black students were only there while the Rockefeller Foundation funded them. We, I guess in our minds imagined that that started a movement at Reed that would continue, and so that just shows what kind of echo chamber I was in. I was in this progressive imagination that Reed was going to grow and improve and become even better at teaching humanities.
The faculty remained pretty white, too, and pretty conservative about the curriculum—most of the more supportive younger faculty had left or been pushed out by this point. This sometimes came out in ugly ways.
ROGER PORTER: Soon after this, by a couple of years, there was an attempt or interest on the part of faculty—even though there were very few women on the faculty at that time—there was an attempt to introduce women’s studies. And while it never rose to that level of contention and mutual distrust, there was a great deal of resistance to that. And one of the prominent faculty members, who happened to be quite short in stature, in physical stature, when he was asked about the introduction of women’s studies said, “Well, what should there be next? Short men’s studies?” You know, just totally kind of grotesque misunderstanding and, you know, mocking of it.
To be fair, not all of the young faculty were radicals, and they weren’t only opposed to Black Studies:
ROGER PORTER: There was an attempt from time to time to have moratoria of classes because of a particular event, such as the shootings at Kent State, the mining of Haiphong Harbor, the bombing of Cambodia, a number of issues that were perpetrated by Kissinger and Nixon. And, uh, I think on the least four or five occasions, uh, students and faculty, uh, got together and asked for a moratorium, uh, which is to say a suspension of classes for a day to discuss issues about the war and its impact on education—obviously there were questions of drafting people in those days, and so on. And I’ll never forget, one faculty member, a young guy, um, who had been a Rhode Scholar, had graduated from Reed, uh, and came back and taught history here, I think he was no more than 25, 26, got up and said, on the floor of the faculty, one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard on the faculty floor. He said, “If I could stop the war in Vietnam, totally, by calling off my classes for even one day, I would not do it because too many other values in Western culture would go down the drain.” I’m quoting it absolutely verbatim, because I’ve never forgotten that statement. And that was not totally uncharacteristic of some faculty!
We’ve devoted this much time to the fight for Black Studies at Reed in 1968 not only because it was an inspiration to the students in Reedies Against Racism in 2016, but because in doing the interviews and research for this episode, the strongest feeling I had was déjà vu—and a sense of foreboding.
One of the townhalls that the BSU put on in the fall of 1968 happens to exist in a recording at the Reed College library. I remember so distinctly when I first listened to this tape because it was eerily similar to the arguments I’d heard in 2016 and 2017—and not just at Reed. This is a slightly abridged exchange between Cathy Allen and Ron Herndon:
CATHY ALLEN: Something else that I wanted to add on the importance of Black Studies for white students. Now some of you may think that that’s farfetched, but I want to know how are you going to get a full picture of how this country and the world has developed without knowing about all of the people in the world and you really haven’t gotten it … And even within America, you cannot paint a picture of how America came to be without taking into consideration slavery, without taking into consideration what Black people as well as Mexican-Americans and Indians and everybody else has donated to the culture.
RON HERNDON: It’s really strange now when you talk about any other course, a German literature, German history, old English history, there’s no problem. People don’t have to worry about, I wonder if they’re going to let me in there. I wonder if they’re going to let Black people in there. But the minute you say Black curriculum, everybody gets uptight or they’re going to let me in. How’s it going to be viewed?
CATHY ALLEN: Yeah, it’s kind of like people segregate themselves, I think.
RON HERNDON: That’s a good, you should check that out. You can learn a lot about what the word “Black” means to white people and the fear that it puts in them. That’s the first course in Black, in the Black curriculum taught tonight.
And something else Cathy Allen said reminded me of the arguments that were made about how Reed already had courses about other cultures and other canons, and that students were free to take those courses.
CATHY ALLEN: The difference there is you can escape Black Studies if you want to. You don’t have to take it, but to get through school, I have to take, pardon the expression, a lot of European crap. A lot of it.
In the fall of 1969, there was also a protest of Humanities 110—a boycott, in which the majority of entering Black freshmen refused to register. The chair of the course was an Assistant Professor of Literature named Sam McCracken. A leaked memo that he wrote to the Humanities staff clearly states his attitude toward the boycott:
While I believe the proposal at hand to be impractical in the extreme and positively undesirable were it practical, I hope you will all take the time to read it, and that we can arrange for the staff or a delegation therefrom to meet with the proposers. My own tolerance for student-generated twaddle is as low as any man’s but I believe that one of the burdens of authority is the obligation to give audience to the humble and oppressed, and that a corollary of our telling students who disrupt that they ought to have gone through channels, even when the process looks tedious and futile. Also, I suspect that as teachers we have some obligation to tell students who appear to be in the wrong just why they are in the wrong. There is finally the prudential argument that if we don’t give the proposal some serious attention, we may well hear about our dereliction later on.
Between 1976 and 2018, there was no way to major in Black or Ethnic Studies at Reed. It was only in March 2018, 50 years after the original Black Student Union protests, that the faculty approved, unanimously, the interdisciplinary Critical Race and Ethnicity Major.
CATHY ALLEN: If Black Studies is open at a university, this will attract more Black students and Black students of a high caliber to the particular college that’s offering it. On top of that, a lot of reasons why a lot of Black students don’t go to college is because they’ve gotten their full in high school of hearing all about the white power structure and why should I go on and hear more of this? If this is open to them, not only will it bring more students into college period, but it will attract more students to Reed.
And then, there’s the way that animosity amongst the faculty destroyed the Black Studies program.
A 1980s Reed report detailing the history of minority student recruitment on campus says of the 1968 takeover: “It seems to us that the wounds from this series of events are still raw. Many faculty with whom we have talked trace their antipathy to black studies courses to those events.”
Todd Schwartz ends his Reed Magazine article with a bunch of quotes from professors, some of whom didn’t even want to give their names in 2003! “This quite literally split the college in two. And the memories were painful even years later.”
By some accounts, the same thing nearly happened in the later fight over Hum 110.
CREDITS: I owe enormous thanks to Martin White, who spoke with me for several hours last summer and fall about his research and memories about the fight for Black Studies at Reed. His article for the Oregon Historical Quarterly, in addition to being the basis for this episode, is a goldmine. It goes into far more detail than I could and is linked in the episode notes. Stephen Robinson took all of the photographs you’ll find attached to this episode, and without him I wouldn’t have been able to connect with all of the BSU members and their allies featured here. He was also kind enough to be the voice of the BSU printed matter. Thank you to each and every one of the BSU members and their allies for digging into a painful but proud episode from more than 50 years ago: Mary Frankie McFarland Forte, Andre Wooten, George Brandon, Steve Engel, and Suzanne Sniveley. Thank you to Cheryl Woodruff and John Lonsbury for your conversation, though we weren’t able to record an interview. I could not have made this episode without you. A special thank you to Tracy Drake, the Director of Special Collections and Archives at the Reed College Library, for steering me to the incredible recording of the 1968 forum in the Student Union, and for all her assistance in the archives. Thank you to Roger Porter, one of the few unpurged Young Turks of the Reed faculty in the 1960s, for taking the time to talk to me. The Oregon Historical Society does incredible work, including the oral history with Ron Herndon sampled here.
Lastly, this episode is dedicated to the memory of Linda Gordon Howard, the first BSU member I spoke with and the founder of Reed College’s Renn Fayre celebration, who died on September 13, 2023.
Original music by the Rhae Royal. Audio storytelling consulting from Mickey Capper. Any mistakes are my own.
The post The Spirit of ’68 appeared first on The American Scholar.
Today’s biggest controversy in classical music is the Chicago Symphony’s appointment of Klaus Mäkelä, who will become music director in 2027. He will concurrently take over Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra—one of the half dozen most eminent European ensembles. He will be all of 32 years old.
No one can reasonably dispute Mäkelä’s precocious talent. He seems to have been born with a baton in his crib. From a tender age, he trained with a legendary Finnish pedagogue: Jorma Panula. His subsequent professional trajectory has been meteoric.
The attendant outcry takes three forms: that, beyond conducting concerts, Mäkelä will lack the maturity (let alone the time) to furnish institutional vision; that he will be conducting too many pieces for the first time under a glaring spotlight; that, given his youth, his interpretations will lack “ripeness.”
The third reservation is the slipperiest—and ultimately the most momentous. It’s long been conventional wisdom that symphonic conductors mature slowly—that age suits them better than, say, singers or dancers or instrumentalists, all of whom practice demanding physical skills. And many a famous conductor has been most eminent when most old. Think of Arturo Toscanini, whose reputation peaked when he was in his 80s. Or Otto Klemperer, who acquired a commanding eminence gris when he was in his 70s. But what, exactly, does musical “ripeness” connote? How is it manifest in performance? And is it imperiled by our ever-accelerating world of social media and AI?
I can think of an obvious example of exigent life experience transforming the recreative act. Wilhelm Furtwängler was, with Toscanini, the most celebrated symphonic conductor of the 20th century. Because Furtwängler was a performer who channeled the moment, his World War II broadcast performances from beleaguered Berlin attain an apocalyptic intensity. And his postwar performances, commensurately, are beleaguered by pain. His 1951 Radio Cairo broadcast of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony does not resemble other readings—including his own 1938 studio recording. The difference is the traumatic memory of war. The composer’s autobiographical heartache is transformed into a dire existential statement transcending the personal. The symphony’s most familiar melody—the first movement “love theme”—is taken so slowly that it changes meaning: it emanates a terminal Weltschmerz.
But I mainly find myself thinking of an artist I knew well, because I wrote a book about him. My Conversations with Arrau (1982) documents many eventful meetings with Claudio Arrau beginning in 1978, when he was already 75 years old. Arrau had acquired an elite reputation as a concert pianist prone to tortuous introspection. Earlier in his career, he had been a dazzling virtuoso—and by all accounts a voluble conversationist. When I knew him, he had withdrawn from language. I observed:
Arrau is an effortful speaker. Sometimes, before answering a question, he will draw a breath and look away. His sentences break down when a phrase or name will not come, and the ensuing silences can seem dangerous. …
It is really not farfetched to surmise that for Arrau words and music occupy distinct personal realms, and that the pronounced civility of the first moderates the instinctual abandon of the second. His gentle manners, his fastidious attire … the artifacts that embellish his work environment—these suggest a striving for order whose musical equivalent is his absolute fidelity to the text, and whose adversary is a substratum of fire and ice.
To witness Arrau performing the Liszt sonata is to know how thoroughly this substratum can obliterate his normal self-awareness. Even while asleep, the demons cast a trembling glow from behind his mildest public face. And they penetrate the timbre of his voice.
Arrau listens to his own recordings with visible discomfort; he perceives the clothes of civility being stripped away.
A humbling specimen of Arrau’s mature artistry is a 1976 recording of “Chasse neige,” the last of Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Études and, according to many, the most challenging to play. Liszt has fashioned a ruthless study in tremolo: the rapid-fire alternation of notes or chords. To this he adds gigantic skips, upward and downward, in both hands. The tremolos are pedaled—a smearing effect promoting ambience. At the same time, the more notes the ear discerns, the more exciting—the more harrowing—the étude becomes.
Arrau’s virtuosity is paradoxically mated with patience. Because even in the midst of chaos, he never rushes; the clarity of attack remains exceptional. And because he perfected a technical approach to the piano stressing arm and shoulder weight, his tone remains characteristically plush—not chipped, not shallow—regardless of the frantic demands placed upon his fingers. No other rendering of this music, in my experience, is as thick with incident.
But the coup de grâce occurs two and a half minutes into the piece, where Liszt—having unleashed a barrage of oscillating chords pulverizing the extremes of treble and bass—writes “calmato,” “accentuato ed espressivo,” and “mezzo piano.” Here the left-hand tremolos cease, replaced by rapid chromatic scales racing upward and down like dark breaths of wind. Under Arrau’s cushioned hands, the scales are streaked with pain. They momentarily sigh with exhaustion, and with an uncanny sadness of memory. They are the stilled human eye of an inhuman storm.
Arrau performed the music of Liszt throughout his long career. He studied with a distinguished Liszt pupil. He revered Liszt, identified with Liszt. He portrayed Liszt in a Mexican bio-pic. His earliest Liszt recordings date from the 1920s. But never before the 1960s will you hear anything like Arrau’s recording of “Chasse neige.” (Arrau himself once acknowledged to me: “Many people say I’m a ‘late developer.’”) The very keynote of this interpretation, clairvoyantly extrapolated by an artist already 73 years old, is retrospection. A famous 1840 painting of Liszt, by Josef Danhauser, situates him in a lushly appointed salon. George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Niccolò Paganini, and Gioachino Rossini are all in attendance. A large bust of Beethoven sits atop the piano. As a conjurer’s recollection of Liszt in his element, revered by his contemporaries, reverencing his great forebear, Arrau’s “Chasse neige” far trumps Danhauser’s painting. Liszt’s “snowstorm” resonates and expands; it jars open a bygone world of feeling and experience both conscious and subliminal. It exudes a veritable elixir of memory.
Could any young pianist or conductor accomplish such a feat? There are ways. Van Cliburn peaked at 23 when he won the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. Upon landing in Moscow, he had asked to be driven to the Church of St. Basil. Standing on snowy Red Square late at night, he thought his heart would stop. He identified the Moscow Conservatory, where the competition was held, with his hero Rachmaninoff, who had graduated from that institution with a gold medal in 1892. When he visited Tchaikovsky’s grave in Leningrad, he took some Russian earth to replant at Rachmaninoff’s grave in New York. He called the Russians “my people” and said, “I’ve never felt so at home anywhere in my life.” Living a dream, he moved with a clairvoyant assurance, touching outstretched hands, pledging friendship between nations. Performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, he built the first movement cadenza—the concerto’s central storm point, an upheaval of expanding force and sonority—with utter sureness: the tidal altitude and breath of its crest were dizzying. The leading Soviet pianists, on the competition jury, proclaimed him a genius. Cliburn’s filmed 1958 and 1960 Moscow performances of concertos by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, nestled on YouTube, document a young artist surrendering himself completely to the moment. Never again would Cliburn attain such heights of musical expression. And the Russia he knew, insulated from the West, still reliving its musical past, no longer exists.
In 1962, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was begun in Fort Worth. To date, its most esteemed gold medalist has been Radu Lupu—who won in 1966 at the age of 21. Born in Romania, he trained in Moscow. His earliest recordings already document an uncanny musical worldliness. As a peerless exponent of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, Lupu all his life inhabited a bygone world. He shunned 20th-century music. He kept his own counsel. In fact, to the surprise and consternation of the Cliburn Foundation, he had pocketed his first prize and returned to Russia, refusing to undertake the high-profile concert tour prepared for him. Suppose that Klaus Mäkelä had told his manager, Jasper Parrott: Thank you very much, but I am not prepared to take over two of the world’s most prominent orchestras. That was Radu Lupu.
The winner of the most recent Cliburn competition is a Korean: Yunchan Lim, now 20 years old. He has catapulted into a major international career. As it happens, one of his acclaimed competition performances was of Liszt’s “Chasse-neige.” You can see and hear it on YouTube. Lim has great fingers, and he has heart. His rendition is riveting—never glib, never superficial. But it would be vain to look for anything like the scope of Claudio Arrau’s reading. Arrau’s Liszt echoes and re-echoes through corridors of time, a performance for the ages. Lim’s, in juxtaposition, is one-dimensional, a species of intense and spectacular entertainment.
For that matter: Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Cairo Radio recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony revealingly juxtaposes with Klaus Mäkelä’s intensely entertaining Pathétique—I heard him conduct it with the New York Philharmonic in December 2022. The third movement march, in particular, memorably ignited. But it would be in vain to look for anything like the pain and tragedy of Furtwängler’s reading.
Will Mäkelä and Lim attain ripeness? Consider: Franz Liszt was born in 1811, Claudio Arrau in 1903—nine decades later. During the intervening century, many things changed. Nevertheless, Arrau was born (in Chillán, Chile) to a world without telephones, without airplanes or cars or radios. He would stay put in Berlin, immersed in the cultural efflorescence of Weimar Germany. As he later recalled,
I’m sure that the twenties in Berlin was one of the great blossomings of culture in history. The city offered so much in every field, and everything had a greater importance than in other places. … You see, there was a great misery. Many people were starving. There were no jobs. Such times are always fertile. Everything was so difficult that people sought a better life in culture.
And what if Arrau had been born, like Mäkelä, in 1996? That’s 94 years after 1903—about the same time gap that separated Arrau from Liszt. And yet, the century of change ending in 2000 documents an upheaval unprecedented and ongoing—what the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration.” Writing in 2013 (Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity), Rosa lists three “fundamental dimensions” of this phenomenon: technological, social, and “pace of life.” He predicts an “unbridled onward rush into an abyss,” possibly including nuclear or climatic catastrophes. He also predicts—accurately—“the diffusion at a furious pace of new diseases” and “new forms of political collapse.” Rosa does not highlight the arts. But socially accelerating atoms of human experience today undermine all previous understandings that art is necessarily appropriative; chaotically askew, they support the illusion that, locked in our disparate identities, we cannot know or speak for one another. What is more, a privatized, atomized lifestyle promotes neither arts patronage nor production. Rather, its diversion mode is the soundbite: particulate cultural matter; stranded arts particles.
A month ago, my own quest for anchorage inspired me to reread Buddenbrooks (1901). How can one absorb that Thomas Mann was in his mid-20s when he wrote this novel about a mercantile family history in northern Germany? It’s populated with men and women of all ages, from infancy to late infirmity. How could someone so young absorb so much experience? The only possible answer is that Buddenbrooks was written a very long time before social media and cell phones. No sooner did I share my bewilderment with colleagues and friends than I heard back from a prominent scholar who teaches at an eminent university. He had just shared Tristan und Isolde with his freshmen and encountered blank stares in response.
Currently, I’m working on a documentary film based on my book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War. So I am making my way through the nine-part Netflix series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. The archival footage is gripping. Otherwise, this film is an exercise in instant gratification catering to short attention spans. Though an army of scholars has been assembled, the barrage of 30-second soundbites from a multiplicity of sources preempts differing viewpoints. The story at hand becomes a centrist fable, implying a consensus of opinion where none exists: no questions, just answers. And the ubiquity of musical cliché—the soundtrack, which never stops to allow the viewer to reflect—turns it all into melodrama: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, and Kharkov right now.
Commensurately, cultural memory—for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act—risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception?
Gloucester, in King Lear, counsels: “Ripeness is all.” Never has Shakespeare’s observation more resounded as an admonition.
The post Ripeness Is All appeared first on The American Scholar.
Arroz tres delicias is a tantalizing name, three delights, for fried rice. Patatas con tres salsas is fried potatoes smothered in three sauces (blue cheese, garlic mayonnaise, and spicy tomato) and despite the enticing variety of flavors, it’s a simple dish and a common choice of bar food in Asturias, like chicken wings in the States. Postre de tres chocolates is, as the name informs, a dessert, either a pudding or a frozen pie, made with three kinds of chocolate—dark, milk, and white. And that is the trio of foods I can think of involving three of anything. None of them is fundamental to my diet. And none is bread, that most basic of foods.
In Spain, bread has been a staple since before the Romans. Besides bread on the table to accompany a meal, many dishes are made from bread, such as sopa de ajo, migas, and gazpacho, which are garlic soup, crumbled bread, and cold tomato soup. Torrejas, similar to French toast, is a dessert. I have even found a recipe for tortilla de patata, the ubiquitous Spanish omelet, but made with bread instead of fried potatoes.
The modern-day loaf, which you can pick up fresh at any bread shop and most grocery stores, is called a barra and is oblong, something like a stocky baguette. But this common item is at least three steps down from the traditional loaves, big round hunks with a thick crust that ensures that the bread keeps for days. In the northern regions of Spain, cereals that do well in the climate, such as rye and barley, are commonly used for bread baking. Two other flours are also used in Asturias: spelt and corn flour. Both make delicious bread. In Castile, the central area of the country, the typical bread is made from candeal, a variety of wheat that dates from before the Romans. On a recent trip south to Valladolid, I tried this bread. Candeal makes for a very white and compact loaf, quite different from the spongier breads of the north. You can buy a small circular loaf called a pan de cuadros, or a longer loaf with pointed ends, called a fabiola. And then there is the large, circular, flat loaf marked with a flower design, giving this loaf its name, lechuguino, which means “excessively primped,” or “all gussied up.” Lechuguino! What fun the name is! The word was new to me, just like the bread it names. Was this a pretentious loaf among the rougher, tougher breads of the north? I ate a hunk at a restaurant the day I arrived, picnicked on a loaf with cheese that evening, and breakfasted the next morning in the hotel bar on toast made from this bread. Three delicious experiences on a cold weekend: a front had swirled in with gusting winds, and the temperatures were nippy on the high plains compared to my temperate town near the coast. It was very breezy that morning, a steady wind blowing at 25 miles per hour and gusting at 50. The occasion for the trip was a footrace, but rather than run, I feared I would be blown along the racecourse. To fortify myself, I ate more bread.
My running partner and I both won in our age group and received a bottle of wine and a box of mini magdalenas called Melitones, made in the town where the race was held. We’d had the foresight that morning to buy a loaf of bread, pulled from the oven just as we’d entered the bread dispensary, but we had no cheese to go with it. It didn’t matter because that loaf of bread, as we found out when we cut into it, was even better than what we’d breakfasted on. So off we set, three hours to home, with no snow on the horizon, a healthy appetite, and for me the leisure to nibble on plenty of gussied-up bread.
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Amanda Holmes reads Louise Glück’s “Nostos.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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“I feel like art should be touched,” says Queens-based sculptor Lior Modan. “It’s just another form of transferring knowledge.” His vacuum-cast, velvet bas-reliefs depict ephemeral, dream-like interior scenes that are at once alluring and illusive. “All of my work is about the space between your eyes, your brain, your heart, and your memory,” he says. A dozen of these works were recently a part of CPM Gallery’s “Peer Capital” show in Baltimore. Modan watched several viewers spend time examining the physical qualities of each piece. “These works are a little bit like holograms—they keep shifting,” he says. “It’s really easy to get lost with them to some degree.”
- Chair Chasers, 2023, velvet, foam, epoxy putty, cardboard,in cast frame, 15 x 22 inches.
- Brush-Mummy, 2020, velvet, foam, sand, Sculpey, nitrile, epoxy putty in cast belt frame, 18 x 22 inches.
- Always lovers, Always stuck, 2023, velvet, foam, nitrile, cardboard, epoxy putty in cast belt frame, 18 x 22 inches.
Modan sculpts out of wood, sand, or epoxy before layering on hand-dyed velvet and vacuum-sealing each piece. “The works are basically monochromes,” he says. “They’re not sculptures. They’re not paintings. They’re not objects, yet they have ‘object-hood,’ and they’re very, very dark.” Modan finds inspiration from old books and everyday items around his house, but not all of his work is modeled from real life. He often relies on memory to create his fantastical objects. “They can be three different things at once,” he says. “It could be a fingernail, it could be a microscope, it could be a toilet bowl all in one. The images themselves are unstable, they keep changing.”
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George Balanchine left Russia in 1922, when he was 18. He didn’t go back for 40 years, until October 1962, when he returned for an eight-week tour with his dance company, the New York City Ballet. He lasted about a month before absenting himself from the tour for week-long breather at home in New York, […]
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Amanda Holmes reads Hafiz’s “I Want Both of Us,” rendered into English by Daniel Ladinsky. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the […]
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Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in Changing World by Theresa MacPhail; Penguin Random House, $28.99
If you’re the parent of an elementary-school-age child, September probably comes with your yearly reminder that food allergies are A Thing. Maybe a flyer gets sent home that lists the “Big Nine”: milk, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, wheat, soy, and sesame. Maybe you get a “Please do not pack” list, steering you away from using peanuts in your child’s lunches for the sake of their allergic classmates.
But if you’re the parent of that severely food-allergic child, the new school year means buying more epinephrine injectors, asking your kid to practice using one, begging them to consistently carry two, and filling out a Section 504 plan. You remind them that they can’t share snacks. You reiterate the places an allergen can hide, whether it’s almond flour in cookies or milk in liquid hand soap. You hope for the best and prepare for the worst, just as you do all 365 days a year. Every school lunch, birthday treat, holiday, team practice, field trip, and restaurant meal poses a threat to your child’s life. And foods aren’t the only allergy triggers—insects, animals, mold, dust, and plants all have the power to make us itch, wheeze, and swell.
In the prologue to Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in Changing World, Theresa MacPhail reveals the loss of her 47-year-old father to a fatal bee sting reaction in 1996. Much has changed since then: ambulances and school clinics stock injectable epinephrine, and funding for allergy research has surged. Yet much is still unknown. MacPhail, who holds a PhD in medical anthropology, displays a persuasive combination of global health interest, bioscientific expertise, and journalistic chops as she unpacks allergy’s mysteries and nuances in this important book.
Allergic begins with a primer on immune pathways, noting that our understanding of them has periodically shifted or even reversed since Clemens von Pirquet’s coining of the term allergy back in 1906. Today, scientists define allergy in terms of histamine release, which weaponizes our immune systems against us and, in its direst incarnation, leads to anaphylaxis, a catastrophic reaction across multiple vital systems. Whereas the immune system operates differently in other conditions (like Celiac disease), we colloquially associate allergies with a range of chronic issues and autoimmune disorders, from lactose intolerance to Eosinophilic Esophagitis.
MacPhail opens the book with her own experience of being tested for allergies, first with a standard skin-prick trial and then a serological test, to show the journey we take toward allergy diagnosis today. A clear diagnosis might result in the advice to carry epinephrine or, in the case of a respiratory allergy, an inhaler. Inconclusive results might lead to over-the-counter antihistamine pills or a nasal spray to ease sniffles and discomfort.
Both skin and blood tests can yield false positives, yet the next step of a gold standard of a double-blind, placebo-controlled oral food challenge is considered too risky. Thus many households drastically reorganize to avoid an allergen without knowing for certain the severity of a child’s diagnosis—better overzealous caution that than a tragic loss. As MacPhail documents, caregiver exhaustion is real, as is the nagging question of whether an early decision in an infant’s diet (to expose or not to expose?) may have contributed to allergy formation.
MacPhail goes into rich detail about the medical field’s struggle to measure all types of allergy prevalence, track non-hospitalized reactions, and agree on what comprises an “allergy,” which can become a heated debate when discussing asthma or eczema. Viewed through the lens of science history, the story is gripping. Viewed through the lens of data analysis, it’s slightly maddening. Not surprising, then, that MacPhail’s thesis is holistic: “Our collective allergy symptoms … are trying to tell us something important about the overall health of our immune systems in the twenty-first century, about how we live our lives, about how overwhelmed our cells often are by our environment.” In other words, we’re receiving an SOS distress signal in the Morse code of hives. What specifically is causing it? What should—or can—we do differently?
There are a variety of proposed causes for allergies, ranging from individual genetics to family history to climate change. The barrier hypothesis pins allergies on leaky skin. The hygiene hypothesis looks at a disproportionate climb in allergy rates among urban dwellers, perhaps traceable to a lack of exposure to microorganisms in early childhood, i.e., playing in mud puddles on the farm. Germ theory instead blames allergy formation on increased exposure to external agents, in turn placing scrutiny on those living or working in environments deemed “unclean.” This is a particularly juicy approach, since it most clearly engages issues of economic opportunity and racial disparity, which—as MacPhail acknowledges—are relevant at all stages of thinking about allergy but too often absent from open discussion.
Key studies have affirmed certain correlations, and Allergic explores how pollen, particulates, and pollution affect lung function and may contribute to increasing allergies. The book avoids the peril of American myopia by looking at places such as Chandigarh, India, and including statistics from populations in China, Uganda, and other parts of the globe. And MacPhail notes that allergies aren’t just rising among humans, but also among our pets, underscoring the argument that home environment is a key factor. What she can’t do, through no fault of her own, is settle on a definitive explanation; that is a Gordian knot that eludes untying.
“At this point, you may be hankering for more information about how we might be able to change our diets to help balance our gut microbiomes, and thus our immune system,” MacPhail writes. “And while I understand this desire, I have to disappoint you yet again.” Local honey doesn’t cure, nor does genetically modified corn spell doom. That said, several of the experts MacPhail interviews are adamant about the effects of chemical exposure. “All the things we’re putting on our skin, or the things we’re putting on our babies’ butts, are probably not good for our barriers,” says Robert Schleimer, professor emeritus of medicine at Northwestern. Laundry detergent’s job, after all, is to break things down.
Once an allergy is established, the patient must devise their own formula for “treatment.” Approaches focus on avoidance, real-time rescue, experiments at desensitization, or some combination of the three. MacPhail offers compelling anecdotes such as one mother’s efforts to procure allergy-friendly access under the government-funded Women, Infants, and Children pantry program, resulting in her founding the Food Equality Initiative, and Congress’s investigation of Mylan’s scandalous EpiPen price-jacking.
The conversation around new treatments, such as biologic drugs for asthma or oral immunotherapy (OIT) to condition children against food reaction, is thorny. These are practices short on longitudinal studies and long on anecdotal evidence. MacPhail is frank about the potential side effects of monoclonal antibody treatments, including conjunctivitis or elevated eosinophil levels. She is also refreshingly open about the arguable value of OIT, which costs time, money, and potentially one’s mental health—children made to ingest foods that they have been taught are “unsafe” report extreme anxiety, hating the food’s taste, or both—yet seems like the panacea based on social media posts by the (financially secure, usually) parents of allergic children.
“Disability” isn’t in Allergic’s comprehensive index. But allergies can be productively framed within disability’s social model, in which institutions and cultures are charged with lessening barriers to inclusion (that’s why Section 504 plans exist). Air quality can be filtered. A restaurant meal can be made safer. De-emphasizing a “cure” fosters conversations that match real life, in real time. Just ask someone allergic to cats, who has a cat.
Readers looking for help may be frustrated to find that allergy diagnoses are not absolute, theories remain unprovable, and treatments yield inconsistent results. But MacPhail offers something more poignant and enduring than a handbook. Allergic is a brilliantly researched, provocative, and humane exploration of the ways bodies stay in dialogue with the world around us—even when they’re picking a fight.
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A performance last March of Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, by Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, was very possibly the peak event of the New York season. And yet, when it ended, I discovered myself shouting my displeasure.
Bruckner’s Eighth lasts 80 minutes and is exhaled in a single breath. It invites—it demands—a pact with the audience. It is communal. It cannot be fairly experienced in a living room. On this occasion, Carnegie Hall had been sold out for weeks. The audience was a marvel—if not fully intergenerational (listeners under the age of 30 were scarce), at least strikingly international.
It took Thielemann barely a moment to secure perfect quiet: 2,790 souls in thrall. He navigated the great structure with monumental assurance. The last movement ends with a famous apocalyptic coda. Bruckner pauses for a long, capacious breath. Then he restarts his engines quietly, gradually, and with the unmistakable promise of a culminating paragraph. In a compositional tour de force both ingenious and inevitable, he proceeds to pile all the symphony’s themes atop one another. This achieved, he drives a refulgent final thrust. Thereafter, Thielemann and the musicians froze. And so did everybody else, save someone in the left balcony who broke the spell by bellowing “Bravo!” Thielemann reacted with visible consternation. But there was worse.
Not long after the performance began, the little lights had begun appearing, raised high. The hall’s ushers dutifully raced hither and yon, up and down aisles, gesturing frantically. And the cellphones were put away. Some clever listeners, however, realized that they could film the symphony’s iconic ending with impunity.
With the trembling onset of the coda, I had moved to the edge of my seat. I was in my preferred location—center balcony. As it happened, one of the offenders was seated directly in front of me. She held her phone high, blocking my field of vision with her bright miniature screen. The ovation was deafening, and that’s when a shouting match between us began. Reflecting on this experience, I discover that her behavior was less discourteous than it was selfish. As far as she was concerned, she was the only listener who mattered. The world of cellphones is both cause and effect of what some call “hyper-individualism.” I cannot think of a purer example than the woman who filmed Bruckner’s coda to take home as a memento.
When I posted my experience on my blog, the most interesting responses came from readers in London and Berlin. They said that an intrusion of this kind—not inadvertently failing to turn a cellphone off, but consciously flaunting it—was “unthinkable” in a British or German concert hall. And that is something to think about. It’s the same strain of personal entitlement that said “no” to Covid mask mandates. Its American lineage is potent.
And yet, my New York cellphone debacle came directly after an exemplary shared experience of music in live performance: two weeks’ worth of Dmitri Shostakovich in South Dakota, including the Leningrad Symphony in Sioux Falls and performances of the Eighth String Quartet at the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State. Perhaps all this manifested a benign Lutheran strain—a traditional receptivity to the arts that is respectful and communal. I’m certain it registered the sustained impact of Delta David Gier, the music director of the South Dakota Symphony, who in 2005 moved to Sioux Falls to raise a family there.
As is increasingly apparent, the arts in post-pandemic America are sharply declining. (I wrote about this crisis two years ago, in “Our Revels Now Are Ended,” published in these pages.) Diminishing audiences and funding resources will dictate fresh strategies. In these visits to Carnegie Hall and South Dakota, I learn twin lessons. One is about retaining contact with the cultural past—with traditions profoundly preserved and served. The other is about finding new ways to move forward, cognizant of changing times and circumstances. If classical music has a viable future in the United States, we will need to absorb both.
The present fraught American moment—an impasse that seems ever worse than before—is typically observed and discussed in terms of governmental and political dysfunction, of social decay, of religious decline. Barely mentioned, if at all, is that the arts are today in crisis in the United States—or that music, theater, literature, and the visual arts were once a binding factor, defining America and individual Americans.
So unnoticed are the American arts that a major American historian, Jill Lepore, can produce a wonderfully readable 900-page historical overview—These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)—without devoting so much as a sentence to the arts. No one could possibly dispute her emphasis on present-day issues and needs—the urgency of pondering American race relations and inequality. But it does not follow that there should be no consideration of Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson or William Faulkner, Charles Ives or George Gershwin, Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday. Classical music, opera, theater, jazz, and Hollywood are all absent. Could any history of Russia omit Tolstoy? Could a British historian overlook Shakespeare? Is there a Germany without Goethe?
Two years later, Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett published The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. It was accompanied by a new edition of Putnam’s best-selling Bowling Alone, subtitled The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The necessary topic at hand was the absence of “social capital” in today’s fragmented United States, as researched by a leading sociologist. To my amazement, Putnam did not invoke the arts as a potential source of social bonding and community. He did not even perceive the social significance of the arts during the Gilded Age, when New World institutions of culture enjoyed an astonishing early heyday.
In 1883, Mariana Van Rensselaer—America’s leading critic of architecture and a formidable arbiter of culture generally—wrote in Harper’s,
This our nineteenth century is commonly esteemed a prosaic, a material, an unimaginative age … blind to beauty and careless of ideals. … But leaving out of sight many minor facts which tell in the contrary direction, there is one great opposing fact of such importance that by itself alone it calls for at least a partial reversal of the verdict we pass upon ourselves as children of a nonartistic time. This fact is the place that music—most unpractical, most unprosaic, most ideal of the arts—has held in nineteenth-century [American] life.
In fact, the late Gilded Age charts the apex of classical music in America. Its central mission—which turned diffuse and subsidiary after World War I—was the creation of an American canon of symphonies, sonatas, and concertos. Its institutional embodiment was the concert orchestra—virtually an American invention, in contradistinction to the pit orchestras of the European opera house. Its prophet was the conductor Theodore Thomas, whose pioneering Thomas Orchestra plied the “Thomas Highway” north to south and coast to coast. Thomas preached: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.” Opera connoted theaters with balconies hosting rowdies and morally suspect companions. Orchestras connoted Beethoven: a moral lodestar. Thomas called his concerts “sermons in tones.” He became founding music director of the Chicago Orchestra—today the Chicago Symphony—in 1891.
Thomas is one of two individuals most responsible for implanting classical music in American soil. The other was Henry Higginson, the banker who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra beginning in 1881. Higginson was no Brahmin snob. As a music student in Vienna, he could not afford three meals a day. A trained musician, an impassioned music lover, he resolved to create a permanent orchestra for the city he had early made his home. He was practical, openhearted, widely experienced in many walks of life, rich in friendships, quickly susceptible to profound feeling. Of the slow variations capping the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, he wrote, “The gates of Heaven open, and we see the angels singing and reaching their hands to us with perfect welcome. No words are of any avail, and never does that passage of entire relief and joy come to me without tears—and I wait for it through life, and hear it, and wonder.”
The Boston Symphony’s first home was the drafty Music Hall. Higginson replaced it in 1900 with the acoustically superb Symphony Hall—the orchestra’s home to this day. Its functional New England plainness is democratic: there are no boxes. And Higginson from the start set aside 25-cent tickets for nonsubscribers. Symphony Hall’s sense of place, honoring Boston’s awareness of history and of its Puritan legacy, contributed to the fulfillment of Theodore Thomas’s credo: Boston’s symphony showed “the culture of the community.” It was—a distinction unknown today in the American arts—the city’s central, centralizing civic institution. Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Back Bay queen bee who was herself a reckonable force in the city’s musical life, sometimes turned up with a Boston Red Sox headband. Important local composers—George Whitefield Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Amy Beach—were Symphony Hall fixtures, both in the house and on the stage. When Artur Nikisch led Beethoven’s Fifth in a reading more flexibly Romantic than Bostonians were accustomed to, inflamed controversy in the daily press lasted nearly a month: Boston’s cultural pedigree was at stake.
Nikisch went on to become Germany’s preeminent symphonic conductor. During his four Boston seasons, he led 388 concerts. That is, he stayed put. Another Boston Symphony conductor who came and stayed put was Serge Koussevitzky, whose tenure lasted from 1924 to 1949. Rarely did anyone else lead the Boston Symphony during that quarter century. In Philadelphia, a world-famous orchestra emerged under the leadership of Leopold Stokowski, from 1912 to 1936. Like Koussevitzky, he was a civic fixture. He ceaselessly promoted new and unfamiliar works. He conducted everything, including young people’s concerts. Meanwhile, Koussevitzky realized his vision of a permanent American music center: the Tanglewood Festival, which he considered his most significant legacy.
Preponderantly, however, classical music in America was not about Stokowski’s relentless experimentation or Koussevitzky’s quest for the great American symphony. The defining American classical musician was the New York Philharmonic’s Arturo Toscanini, who recycled Germanic masterworks, retained Italian citizenship, and frequently shared his New York Philharmonic podium with guests. Notwithstanding fin-de-siècle expectations, notwithstanding the later efforts of Stokowski and Koussevitzky, classical music in the United States remained Eurocentric. Its New World roots remained stunted, nascent, predominantly shallow.
Today’s Boston Symphony music director is Andris Nelsons, who is also Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; during the 2023–24 season, he will conduct 34 of 66 subscription concerts in Boston and fewer than half of the orchestra’s summer concerts at Tanglewood. Today’s Philadelphia Orchestra music director is Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is also music director of the Metropolitan Opera. This factor alone cancels Thomas’s prophecy. As Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, once put it,
For a music director to carry off an ambitious project, you have to be there. You have to be on the scene, persuading people, interacting with them, listening to their ideas. Not just communicating your own. Building a sense of cooperation. You cannot do that as effectively if you’re flying in for two or three weeks, and another couple of weeks in the winter, and another two weeks in the spring. I find it a bit outrageous that music directors are so highly paid to begin with for one job—and then you find them holding a second or even a third position with exorbitant salaries in those places as well. This, of all things, is something the orchestra world should really be thinking about: drastically revising our idea of who a music director is, what their job entails.
Ross told me he had long considered visiting Sioux Falls to see for himself what Delta David Gier was up to—programming quantities of new music, regularly tackling big repertoire, linking to communities across the state. For Gustav Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, part of a complete symphony cycle dedicated to that composer, Gier had used a chorus from South Dakota State University packed with agriculture and engineering students. For Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (unabridged), Choir I was the South Dakota Symphony Chorus, Choir II the combined choruses of South Dakota State and the University of South Dakota—campuses an hour away from Sioux Falls in opposite directions. For Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, the choristers were Mennonites from Freeman (population 1,300—“a singing community,” Gier says). Gier has programmed six other complete operas. He has given Peer Gynt with Grieg’s complete incidental music and actors. (“Though they’re descendants of Norwegians, very few people around here had read Ibsen’s play.”) Finally, last April, a major world premiere—of John Luther Adams’s 45-minute An Atlas of Deep Time—impelled Ross to fly to Sioux Falls. He wound up naming the concert one of the 10 “most notable performances,” nationally, in 2022: “There’s just a tremendous amount of caution, a tremendous amount of groupthink, in the orchestra world. So to see an orchestra really out on its own, forging its own identity, and bringing its audience along with it is just extremely impressive—even more impressive than I anticipated.”
South Dakota’s may plausibly be considered the most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra in the United States. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged. Fulfilling Theodore Thomas’s credo, it “shows the culture of the community.”
Gier never intended to conduct in South Dakota. For many years, he was an associate conductor with the New York Philharmonic, handling young people’s concerts, covering for Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel. When he landed the Sioux Falls job in 2004, he waited a year before moving there. “I looked at it as a steppingstone, but it didn’t happen,” he says. He was already 44 years old. Though it’s well known that conductors ripen slowly, the market has for some time favored young (and green) conductors as marketing assets. Today, women and African Americans have a decided edge in landing music directorships and guest engagements. And yet, for Gier it all worked out. “South Dakota was a wonderful surprise,” he says. “I was able to ascertain what people wanted. I was able to really accomplish something. I just never could have imagined it all.”
Early in his tenure, Gier proposed that the South Dakota Symphony initiate an annual Martin Luther King concert. He was taken aside and informed that, in South Dakota, racial bias targeted Native Americans. He next hosted a lunch for Lakota and Dakota leaders. “I went into that with all kinds of ideas about how we could collaborate,” he recalls. “But I was met with distrust—which in retrospect is not surprising. ‘What’s in it for you?’ ‘Who’s making money?’ A litany. It was my first lesson in learning to listen. At the end of that lunch, a man introduced himself and said, ‘You’re crazy. But I’d like to try to help.’ That was Barry LeBeau, an actor and lobbyist. I spent a couple of years making intermittent trips around the state with Barry introducing me to tribal elders and leaders.”
Gier arrived in Sioux Falls with the notion that “an orchestra should serve its unique community uniquely.” He wasn’t sure what that would look like—but he knew he had never seen it happen. His core conviction was that cultures could better be bridged through music than through conversation and debate. He encountered skepticism on all sides. His own musicians questioned whether they should be “enforcing white culture on Native Americans.” The turning point, Gier says, was a snowy evening on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 2005:
It was basically a jam session between our string quartet and woodwind quintet and a drumming group, the New Porcupine Singers. Everyone was a little nervous. We started by just playing music for one another, and people talking about what the music meant to them. Then after an hour or so, the Keeper of the Drum for the Porcupine Singers, Melvin Young Bear, stood up and said, “We sing the old songs. We’re not a pow-wow group. We hope to pass on our traditions to the next generation.” And I thought, bingo, that’s exactly what we do. It was a mission we could share.
My own introduction to the Lakota Music Project came in 2016. As director of an NEH-funded concert initiative, Music Unwound, I found myself collaborating with Gier on one of many “Dvořák and America” festivals. Antonín Dvořák, who directed New York City’s National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895, had prophesied a future American classical music rooted in twin sources: Black America and Native America. He drew inspiration from his interactions with the Kickapoo Medicine Show—Native American entertainers who sang and danced—during a summer in Iowa. And he was riveted by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855)—in the 1890s still the most-read, best-known American literary work. I imagined that this story, retold in South Dakota with the participation of Native Americans, would prove fruitful. Gier agreed—but with a degree of foreknowledge I had barely glimpsed.
A crucial early ingredient in the Lakota Music Project was the permanent engagement of a prominent scholar of Lakota music and culture, Ronnie Thiesz. (A rare initiative: though museums have scholars on staff who initiate research, American orchestras have failed to intersect with the scholarly community.) Now retired, Thiesz is an Austrian who after earning a PhD in ethnomusicology at NYU took a job teaching at Black Hills State College in Spearfish—and never looked back. He also became the only non-Native member of the Porcupine Singers. And Thiesz, I was apprised by Gier, viewed Longfellow as a merchandizer of myth—that of the “noble savage”—who confused the Indian legends he repackaged. What is more, Thiesz mistrusted Dvořák’s efforts to adapt Native American sources. This impasse became my introduction to Gier’s methodology: three months of conversation and negotiation. I discovered in Ronnie Thiesz the same personal qualities I would discover in the musicians Emanuel Black Bear and Bryan Akipa: gravitas, deliberation, and patience.
Early on, Chris Eagle Hawk, an honored elder of the Oglala Lakota Tribe, took me aside to share an axiom. One should listen with one’s heart, he said, and only later process words with one’s brain. In the meantime, one’s mouth should remain shut. Though (as Chris had noticed) this is a lesson I have never learned, I shut my mouth sufficiently that a singular South Dakota Symphony Dvořák program emerged. The second half—something I have produced innumerable times—combined the New World Symphony with a “visual presentation” extrapolating its American accent: African-American and Native-American imagery, as well as iconic paintings of the American West. The 75-minute first half, unique to South Dakota, featured the Creekside Singers of the Pine Ridge Reservation in a symphonic composition by the Native American composer Brent Michael Davids. Thiesz contributed a mini-tutorial on the structure and vocal techniques of Lakota song. Chris Eagle Hawk eloquently described the role of music in Lakota culture and the sanctity of the Black Hills. Gier contrasted Longfellow’s “noble savage” trope with such 20th-century Indianist kitsch as Victor Herbert’s “Dagger Dance” (which I remember hearing as a child via cartoon commercials for Hamm’s beer).
Following two performances in Sioux Falls, we took the whole show to Sisseton; half of its 2,500 residents are Native Americans from the Sisseton Wahpeton Reservation. Sisseton produced the most eclectic audience I have ever encountered at a symphonic concert. Both the very young and the very old were well represented, as was the local Dakota population. Dvořák’s sadness of the prairie instantly evoked the wide horizons directly at hand. Not the least memorable aspect of this event, for me, was the three-hour bus ride. I had been on buses with orchestral musicians before; they were workers doing a job. But here, 50 members of the South Dakota Symphony were pursuing a mission.
The outstanding principal oboist of the South Dakota Symphony since 2003, Jeffrey Paul, also happens to be an outstanding composer. When he composed Wind on Clear Lake (2013), Paul began in a cabin on Clear Lake itself, listening to the wind through the cottonwoods. He discovered music there—a quasi-pentatonic strain he sensed he and his colleagues could share with the Lakota flutist Bryan Akipa. A core participant in the Lakota Music Project since 2013 and a National Heritage Fellow, Akipa is credited with reviving an ancestral Lakota musical tradition. He plays wooden flutes, with five or six holes, that he carves himself. The pungency of Wind on Clear Lake arises from the slight disparity between the wavering pitches of Akipa’s instrument and the notes being played by Western strings and winds. When I asked them how they experienced preparing this score together, Akipa and the South Dakota Symphony players all used the same adjective. They said they found it “humbling.”
Week-long “composition academies” are another component of the Lakota Music Project. Orchestra members visit Indian reservations to collaborate with grade-school students on chamber pieces embedding the students’ compositional suggestions. The South Dakota Symphony’s principal second violinist since 1998, Magdalena Modzelewska, performs the resulting music with the Dakota String Quartet. “It’s really stunning, what’s happening with those kids, the light that we see on their faces,” she says. “For quite a few, it’s changed their lives. They were on the verge of something awful—and it pulled them through. Some have gone on to college to study music—where it was not even a consideration before.”
Of the Lakota Music Project experience, Modzelewska says, “In Indian culture we’ve found such peace and goodwill. It’s truly remarkable how similar our musical goals are. We get to share something sublime.”
Dmitri Shostakovich in the early 1940s. In 1941, he bore witness to the Siege of Leningrad with his searing and defiant Seventh Symphony. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
In the seasons following “Dvořák and America,” the South Dakota Symphony mounted two more NEH-funded Music Unwound festivals. The central purpose of “Copland and Mexico” was to showcase not Aaron Copland (whose name sold tickets) but his Mexican contemporary Silvestre Revueltas, a galvanizing political artist whose concert works and film scores parallel the murals of Diego Rivera. The central purpose of “American Roots” was to showcase America’s preeminent symphonist, Charles Ives—with Dvořák and George Gershwin driving the box office. These were scripted, multimedia projects I had produced elsewhere. But only in South Dakota was the music director a proactive creative force. For “Copland and Mexico,” Gier interpolated—as an interruption with placards, stopping the concert in its tracks—a re-creation of Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy in May 1953, during the height of the Red Scare. For “American Roots,” Gier interpolated paintings by South Dakota’s foremost Native American artist, Oscar Howe. All this formed the backdrop for the Shostakovich performances last February and March (in which I again took part as an artistic consultant).
Mindful that “an orchestra serves its unique community uniquely,” Gier chose the Leningrad Symphony partly for its programmatic content. Shostakovich wrote symphonies musically more distinguished, but the story of the Seventh is unique. It is an exigent product of the Siege of Leningrad, when Hitler’s army surrounded a city of six million people for 872 days with the intention of starving its inhabitants while bombarding them from the air. One and a half million Russian soldiers and civilians lost their lives. The snowy streets were littered with corpses. Shostakovich, whose genius was to bear witness, composed a symphony for the city he called home. Miraculously, all 80 minutes of it were actually performed there, 11 months into the siege. Only 15 members of the Leningrad Radio Symphony were alive and able to play. Other instrumentalists were brought in from Soviet Army bands. Special rations were procured. The ovation was fervent and stoic—it was Leningrad applauding its own resilience. People left feeling strangely elated.
Gier’s fundamental consideration was how to maximize impact. He decided on a scripted preamble with musical examples. Early on, he shared the project with the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State. Both agreed to host lectures and an ancillary concert featuring the Dakota String Quartet in Shostakovich’s most autobiographical composition, his agonizing Eighth Quartet of 1960. Ultimately, the preamble took the form of a 40-minute “dramatic interlude” beginning with music from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk—the lascivious bedroom scene that in 1936 so aroused Stalin’s ire that the composer was denounced in Pravda. Gier narrated the subsequent vicissitudes of Shostakovich’s relationship with the state. He explored the ambiguous ending of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, an ostensible act of contrition that may also be read as a musical act of defiance. He evoked the siege of Leningrad. He explored the Seventh Symphony. He summarized:
Shostakovich learned three things. The first was that he could convey extra-musical messages in a wordless symphony. The second was that—because music is less explicit than words—these messages could actually be subversive, connecting with needs and beliefs that could not safely be spoken. The third was that he could become a true “people’s artist”—not by serving an autocratic state, but by serving more profound human needs, groping for a common humanity more fundamental than any ideology.
The quartet concerts at the two universities were also contextualized. Shostakovich composed the Eighth Quartet after joining the Communist Party. Though this painful decision was denounced even within the U.S.S.R., it enabled Shostakovich to exert more leverage in the artistic community—a complex tradeoff. And yet, he was reportedly suicidal. All of this, and more, was shared with rapt student audiences. David Reynolds, the director of the School of Performing Arts and professor of music at South Dakota State University, vigorously supports collaboration with the South Dakota Symphony—not least because it includes music and music appreciation students as well as global studies and political science students. He bused dozens of students to Sioux Falls for the Leningrad Symphony performance; many took part in an hour-long postconcert conversation there.
Reflecting on dropping enrollments in the humanities—at South Dakota State and just about everywhere else—Reynolds says,
I realize that in some high school curricula today the story of World War II may be only a week. I think that finding a way to use the performing arts to bring this kind of story to life is a wonderful opportunity to touch students who are growing up with social media and other nontraditional resources. Students in our music appreciation classes—those are the folks that one of these days will be bank presidents, school board presidents, and will decide the role of the arts in public and private schools. It’s very important for them to have experiences just like this one—Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad. To get them thinking that life would be incomplete without the arts being a part of it.
For Mark Bertrand, the pastor of the Grace Presbyterian Church in Sioux Falls, Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony evoked the resilience of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invading army in 2022–23. Bertrand also found himself thinking about the role of culture in a nation’s life:
It’s striking that as the symphony was being composed, Shostakovich was updating people in real time about his progress. They were looking forward to this happening. And it can’t be the case that this besieged population was just seeking some entertainment to get their thoughts off their everyday reality. I tried to imagine us today feeling a similar kind of anticipation for an artistic statement. We don’t value things the way they did. It really gets you thinking about how different their values must have been. You know, I would say that I’m a cynical person by nature. David [Gier] is constantly challenging that cynicism and renewing my confidence in the meaning of music, in the meaning of the arts. I feel that I’ve been elevated through this experience as much as anyone.
As Shostakovich’s symphony began its slow, inexorable ascent toward a final climax, Bertrand found himself thinking about words quoted earlier in the evening. The Russians not only broadcast the Leningrad Symphony throughout the Soviet Union. They managed to broadcast it via loudspeakers to the Nazi troops blockading Leningrad. After the war, a German soldier testified, “It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather—the will to remain human.”
All this preceded Bruckner’s Eighth at Carnegie Hall by a mere week. Notwithstanding the Carnegie cellphones (an accessory wholly absent in South Dakota), the South Dakota Symphony and Vienna Philharmonic in concert complemented more than contradicted each other. At the heart of both performances were musical experiences both communal and rooted. In Sioux Falls, the roots were American, nurtured for two decades by Delta David Gier. At Carnegie, the roots were Viennese, nurtured for more than two centuries starting with Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.
The Vienna Philharmonic premiered four of Bruckner’s nine symphonies. Bruckner’s occasional rusticity—his fond allusions to folk dance—is part of the orchestra’s bloodline. Bruckner’s organ sonorities align with the smooth, creamy textures that remain a Vienna Philharmonic signature. At Carnegie Hall, Thielemann’s encore was Music of the Spheres by Josef Strauss; the orchestra kicked the second beat of the waltz rhythms with singular authenticity.
A famous recording of Bruckner’s Eighth was made in live performance by Wilhelm Furtwängler on April 10, 1954. The orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic. Furtwängler’s version is very different from Thielemann’s today. From the start, the descending woodwind phrase responding to the strings’ main theme is streaked with pain. In the Adagio, which Bruckner asks be rendered “tenderly,” the presiding mood is one of heartbreak. It was Furtwängler’s genius—setting him apart from all other conductors of his generation—to channel the moment. In ways not so different from Shostakovich’s contemporaneous compositions, his wartime performances narrate calamitous tragedies—which his postwar performances (he died in 1954) profoundly remember.
Thielemann reveres Furtwängler but is too sophisticated to imitate. He finds scant Weltschmerz in Bruckner’s Eighth. But at Carnegie Hall, he did pull off a grand Furtwängler rubato—a species of climax virtually extinct today. A classic instance crowns Furtwängler’s 1954 Vienna Philharmonic recording of Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude. As I once wrote in Understanding Toscanini (1987), distinguishing Verdi’s (and Toscanini’s) accelerating climaxes from the Wagnerian school of interpretation Furtwängler perpetuated,
Furtwängler’s climaxes pre-empt repose and lead to exhaustion. Their slow, weighted pulse might be likened to that of a pendulum swinging with greater force as it spans ever longer arcs. Their visceral impact bears some relation to the Hollywood convention of shooting moments of crisis or ecstasy in slow motion. Inner turmoil produces a sensation of temporal dislocation. Time “slows down,” even “stands still.” In the Prelude to Lohengrin, Furtwängler’s slow-motion climax seems to exist outside time.
In Bruckner’s Eighth, the climax of the half-hour Adagio is punctuated by two cymbal crashes. Here, Furtwängler eschews a time-stopping deceleration. But Thielemann does not. On Thielemann’s recent Sony recording, the effect is labored. At Carnegie, the effect was tremendous. In fact, a climax this extreme is a risk. It cannot be precisely conducted. It must be felt by a hundred players, and the feeling is wholly interior. It relies on instinct and tradition.
Where all this leads, today, is an interesting question that connects to the American failure to produce an adequate classical music canon. The quintessential American orchestra was Leopold Stokowski’s in Philadelphia; it produced a seamless, kaleidoscopic, even cinematic New World sound that was sui generis, and that served sui generis New World readings of Old World masterworks. That many members of other major American orchestras retained German, French, or Italian musical roots was decisive. Here, the most striking example was the astounding Metropolitan Opera orchestra as heard on broadcasts from the 1930s and ’40s. The players were predominantly Italian. Some had played in the Met pit under Toscanini, even Mahler. They intimately knew the operas. Two conductors of genius presided: Ettore Panizza, leading the company’s Italian wing, and Artur Bodanzky, in charge of Wagner. Both invariably produced a powder-keg intensity of expression and commitment (try Otello from February 12, 1938; or Brunnhilde’s Awakening from Siegfried from January 30, 1937). Today’s Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in comparison, is uprooted: faceless and tame. And the Stokowski lava flow is not even a memory.
And so, South Dakota becomes a manifesto. I would never propose that the Vienna Philharmonic’s Bruckner performances add a 40-minute preamble. The Berlin Philharmonic performing Beethoven, the Mariinsky Orchestra’s peerless Shostakovich performances under Valery Gergiev are self-sufficient. But if you were to ask me whether the New York Philharmonic should perform the Leningrad Symphony sans commentary of any kind, I would certainly opine: those times are past.
At South Dakota State University, every student with whom I spoke about the Leningrad Symphony performance mentioned the 40-minute preamble as a crucial ingredient. Even in the case of undergraduate Austin Teas, whose “favorite symphony” was already Shostakovich’s Seventh, contextualization “elevated the experience.” He adds, “And that could be said about just about any symphonic work, in my opinion. Context is essential to reaching a broader audience.” A trombonist, Teas hopes to pursue music professionally. He follows the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project on social media. During his senior year of high school, he played in the South Dakota Symphony Youth Symphony—and joined the parent orchestra for a young people’s concert performance of excerpts from the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition. “It was a life-changing experience. I decided: I want to do this.”
At the University of South Dakota, Markus Klassen, who studies both piano and voice, considered an ancillary lecture on Shostakovich “as important” as hearing the Dakota Quartet perform the Eighth Quartet. “Being able to ask questions in real time made the performance come alive in a new way,” he told me. “I also think that contextualizing the quartet with commentary and musical examples actually influenced the performers. I think we should have a little bit of that at almost every concert … TikTok and social media, the inundation of easy music—it’s really damaged the attention span.” Klassen calls contextualizing the music a remedial strategy “hidden in plain sight.”
My own 26-year-old daughter watched the Leningrad Symphony performance via livestream. When it was over, she phoned me from New York to say how she wished that her friends could experience “concerts like that.” And there is another overdue responsibility. The standard narrative for American classical music—the one initiated and sustained in the postwar writings of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson—is defunct. Looking back, we can readily discern that it was a modernist narrative, prioritizing clarity and other “neoclassical” virtues, shunning the vernacular, cleansed of what Emerson memorably cherished as “mud and scum.” Accordingly, it denied the significance of music composed before World War I. This restriction squandered the Black musical mother lode once extolled by Dvořák and W. E. B. Du Bois. It marginalized our foremost classical music geniuses—Ives and Gershwin—as gifted dilettantes. It ignored the persistence of interwar Black classical music. In Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (2022), I propose a more inclusive “new paradigm” in which Ives and Gershwin are twin pillars. It is not enough to program Black composers in a rush to catch up. That effort, to date, has been scattershot. (The most formidable interwar symphony by a Black composer is surely the one by William Levi Dawson, not any of the four by the much-performed Florence Price.) It overlooks a story that deserves to be told in full.
Museums, privileging scholarship, diligently curate the American past. Here again the South Dakota Symphony shines a beacon light. Gier conducts Ives alongside Gershwin. Beyond the standard narrative, he has programmed pieces others overlook: Dvořák’s American Suite (a New World picture book postdating the New World Symphony), Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes (a landmark score for a film that was itself an iconic product of the Mexican Revolution), and Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto (arguably the most formidable concerto by an American). Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony is high on his to-do list.
Violinist Magdalena Modzelewska told me, “Ours is a very special orchestra—and I have felt this for a long time.” She recalls a Harvard University study of “job satisfaction” that ranked orchestral musicians on a bottom rung. “What we feel here is something different—gratitude and friendship.” The orchestra’s board includes musicians as voting members. Very unusually, the musicians are not unionized—and do not seem to identify as a sectarian institutional component. Gier adds, “We’re very focused on our musicians and their satisfaction. They need to know how much they’re valued. Including them on the board is a game changer—they see how hard our board members work to fund them.”
As of this writing, New York City’s Public Theatre has announced that it will lay off 19 percent of its staff. The Brooklyn Academy of Music will reduce its staff by 13 percent. We will be reading about similar arts cutbacks elsewhere. Cycles of “emergency” Covid arts funding by Congress have come and gone with nothing to take their place. The usual belt tightening will not suffice—and nowhere more than in the symphonic sector.
Quite obviously, mine are inconvenient opinions. You will not find them emphasized at meetings and workshops of the League of American Orchestras. They do not mesh with prevalent norms for administrative staffing. Orchestras lack resources to adequately scour and contextualize the American musical past. Conductors lack the skill, the time, or the interest to fashion the teaching tools deployed by Delta David Gier—or by Leonard Bernstein decades before him. For many of our larger orchestras, shrinking audiences will logically dictate fewer concerts. And new audiences, generally, will present new needs.
Five months ago, the NEH funded a fourth installment of Music Unwound, supporting thematic festivals curating the American musical experience. The concerts will elaborately contextualize the repertoire at hand. All six participating orchestras, including the South Dakota Symphony, will partner with universities. Unbeknownst to many in the American orchestral community, a new moment is upon us: new templates for format and repertoire, templates tangible yet mainly dormant. They have in fact been awaiting our attention for quite some time.
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“The struggle once again,” writes Martin Amis in a 2002 New Yorker review of a pair of books about the Queen of England, “was not to divulge emotion but to master it.” He is referring both to the queen’s general demeanor throughout her reign and specifically to her response to Princess Diana’s death. But he is also referring to the bearing of the princes, who at their mother’s funeral were to walk behind the gun carriage that held her coffin. They would be accompanied by their grandfather, Prince Philip. Mastering emotion does not mean hiding all evidence of it, but rather demonstrating that you are stronger than the emotion. In fact, you want it there, noble, beautiful, not like a trick pony that will perform on command but like a wild horse that comes cantering by, full of force, spectacular, but kept at arm’s length. The royal family in Spain has its share of displays of strong emotion. Consider the queen, Leticia, spurning Sofia, the queen mother. The king grasping Leticia’s arm to cut her short. Princess Leonor correcting a slight to her grandmother by pulling Sofia into the picture when she’d been left standing alone at the back of the stage. Not one wild horse, but a herd, ostensibly tamed but perhaps spoiled by the treats being offered.
Amis’s review was republished a year ago, in the August 29, 2022 issue of the magazine, an archival issue devoted to celebrity. Already, Prince Philip, who had offered his steadying presence to his grandsons, had died. The rest of the principals were still living. But the queen’s celebrity was soon to change: 10 days after the article reappeared, on September 8, 2022, the queen died. Martin Amis’s celebrity would also shift after another nine months, in May 2023. By the time I read the issue, nearly a year late, both writer and subject were no more. Reading an article by one dead person about another, recalling the occasion of a third person’s death, I am moved by how fragile existence is. I don’t mean any particular life, but more the fabric of a time: it is torn, then shredded. It doesn’t exist except in tatters. The year 2022 is gone, so is 2002, and so is 1996, when Princess Di’s car smashed into the cement walls of the Paris tunnel. As they say in the songs, the tears—those tears—have all been shed. I wonder at the notion of mastering any emotion. First because I find I am myself a ragbag of different ones, much more than a collection of attitudes or beliefs. Joy, sadness, excitement, thrill, fear, blinking on and off nearly randomly. Rather than dominating my emotions to show only the appropriate ones, according to my education, I am rocked by emotions that pop up, almost willy-nilly, like the heads of the rodents in the arcade game Whac-a-Mole. I cannot dominate them because there is no predicting them, and I have no chance to prepare.
In addition, the notion of mastering one’s emotions as a labor for life feels doomed. What emotion appears and lasts long enough to master? Can’t one just blink it away? Wrath, fear, exhilaration: their flare hardly lasts long enough to pay heed to. They gallop in with a shake of their shining manes and then dash away again. But you know they will return. Let us just assassinate emotions, all of them, for the tricksters they are, and live in peace.
Staring at the keyboard, wondering what I really feel about this particular situation of reading something about dead people by dead people, which seems to put them on equal footing, I note the author’s difference in attitude toward the departed and toward the living—the superiority of the living, how they matter. The subsequent deaths, however, make a mockery of that distinction. It’s as if death is already laughing at the rest of us. So I sit in a muddle. I find the letters of the keyboard beckoning. A code. QWERTY. What to make of the letters? Queen, Windsor, Elizabeth? All pertinent. Rather than the subject, though, it is my response that is in doubt. Queasy, wistful, and empathetic. But no—let’s kill off the emotions by ignoring them. Not regret but Reign, not tenderness but Tennyson. Tennyson? Yes: the poet laureate par excellence, the queen’s favorite—though not this queen’s but Victoria’s, another with a long tenure whose consort, like Philip, was a favorite and who also died before she did. Tennyson, who wrote of nature, “So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life.” And the Y? Yikes!
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Amanda Holmes reads Michelle Murphy’s “How to Remember Heat.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch
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This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity by Richard Deming; Viking, 336 pp., $29
It’s now official: America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. That’s not a metaphor—it is, according to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a major public health crisis. On May 3, Murthy formally announced a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connection” geared toward reducing the emotional isolation that is damaging our psyches and our bodies.
Public health experts have been warning for years about the toll loneliness can take. But the scope of the problem, as laid out by Murthy and others, is striking—not just how many people are lonely but how much damage that loneliness does. The lonely are at substantially elevated risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, addiction, and dementia; being lonely increases your overall risk of premature death by more than 60 percent. And the number of Americans afflicted by loneliness is not small: a recent survey found that more than 50 percent of us reported feeling lonely—and that was before the pandemic forced us to pioneer new frontiers in physical isolation, leading to rising rates of loneliness and concomitant increases in anxiety, depression, and addiction. Among young adults between 18 and 25, according to a recent Harvard study, an astonishing 61 percent reported experiencing “serious loneliness” in 2021. Perhaps even more ominously in this fraught moment for American democracy, an excess of loneliness can have political consequences: Hannah Arendt concluded her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism with a meditation on how when loneliness metastasizes into “an everyday experience” (as opposed to being something that afflicts just, say, the elderly), a large swath of the populace seeks to assuage its aloneness by submitting to a charismatic fascist—a precondition for the rise of tyranny.
Murthy’s national strategy seeks to combat loneliness as a public health scourge. But for some people, loneliness, whether due to temperament or life circumstances, seems to be an inescapable existential condition. They feel an unbridgeable apartness from other people, even when in crowds. (Feeling lonely among a group of people is, I can say from experience, a special kind of awfulness.) People don’t like to talk about this: loneliness, some clinical psychologists contend, is more stigmatized than depression because people fear that it bespeaks an emotional neediness that feels shameful to admit.
In this interesting and far-ranging book, Richard Deming, who directs the creative writing program at Yale, has undertaken not just to analyze the phenomenon of chronic loneliness but also to manage his own. Throughout his life he has sought out the work of writers and artists who themselves have worked to diminish the pain of their loneliness by spelunking into it and examining it, and then trying to create their way out of it. “Loneliness,” the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote, is “a process of self-poisoning, whose anti-toxins lie in the creative attitude.”
Deming has structured the book as a collection of literary portraits of six disparate figures who each struggled with loneliness, and depicted it through their work: Benjamin; the early Freudian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein; the anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston; the documentary photographer Walker Evans; the early modernist painter Egon Schiele; and the TV writer Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. Working in different eras, in different places, and in different media, each of these writers expressed alienation in ways that resonated with Deming, lending him comfort at crucial moments, their loneliness touching his own across the gaps of space and time, sparking small moments of connection and consolation.
But the book was catalyzed by another lonely person, the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose fatal drug overdose in 2014 chilled Deming, in part because Hoffman, like Deming, had clearly used drugs to medicate his loneliness. Hoffman—“the Marlon Brando of loneliness,” as Deming puts it—was known for his gifted portrayals of the lost and lonely, from Willy Loman to Truman Capote, but those roles, Deming writes, may have consumed him. Deming himself, who got sober in the early 1990s, writes that “the loneliness that I had wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse,” which subjected him to epic blackouts, jail time, and odd, desperate behaviors, like roaming the streets of Boston with a flask of Jack Daniels in his sleeve, asking random strangers what time it was, just for a fleeting moment of human interaction. Hoffman’s death, after what had been a reputed two decades of sobriety, prompted Deming to undertake an exploration of loneliness, seeking to better understand it so that it wouldn’t sneak up on him and take him down the way it did Hoffman.
“What can we do about loneliness?” he asks. “What can we do with loneliness? What can we make out of it?” Well, art for one thing; connection, for another. That’s an abiding irony of loneliness; the pain of isolation drives us to seek its balm in human connection. Deming argues that the pain of exclusion or isolation forges a sharpening of emotional self-awareness, which leads in turn to a deepening of a “transformative empathy” that can nurture connection with others. This is the “exquisite loneliness” of his book’s title.
Hoffman’s death prompted Deming to undertake an exploration of loneliness, seeking to understand it so that it wouldn’t sneak up on him as it did Hoffman.Deming mines the lives and the work of his subjects for their relevance to his theme. For instance, he is drawn to Melanie Klein’s notion that the early-childhood awakening of consciousness to our separateness from our mothers is our proverbial banishment from the Garden of Eden; our loss of “the paradise of being indistinguishably connected to another person” leaves us with a permanent feeling of (in Klein’s words) “irretrievable loss” and “a ubiquitous yearning” for that previous state of wholeness. When Deming first reads Zora Neale Hurston’s 1942 memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, he identifies with her feeling of being shadowed by what she calls a “cosmic loneliness” and is inspired by her work to try to develop “a cultural anthropology of loneliness.” From Walker Evans’s anonymous subway photographs, he gleans the universality of loneliness and the possibility of moving from narcissism to empathy. (The tragicomic denouement of Evans’s aborted threesome with his famous writerly collaborator James Agee and Agee’s wife, Alma—the whole episode is an object lesson in the perils of seeking connection through sex—alone makes this chapter worth reading.) From Egon Schiele, whom Deming discovered via David Bowie and Lou Reed, he starts to appreciate the value of offering up one’s rawest, ugliest, most vulnerable self (as Schiele did with his intense, naked self-portraits) and saying, “Accept me.” And from Rod Serling—well, I’ll just say I had no idea of the wartime horrors (among them, seeing his best friend decapitated at close range in the South Pacific) that infused his creative imagination. Beneath The Twilight Zone’s clever conceits and mind-bending twists runs a haunting undercurrent of loneliness. Compulsively watching episodes of the show while living apart from his wife in the lonely winter and spring of 2016, Deming comes to appreciate what he calls Serling’s “poetics of loneliness.”
Deming’s book is a message in a bottle to the tristes and isolatos and lonelyhearts of the world. With it, he is trying to write himself out of isolation.The artists Deming has selected make him perforce into a bard of lonely endings. At one time the belle of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston ended up friendless and out of literary favor, working as a maid and librarian and substitute teacher to support herself, dying not knowing that from the wasteland of obscurity she would attain posthumous canonical status with Their Eyes Were Watching God. A German-Jewish intellectual, Benjamin died by his own hand on September 26, 1940, taking an overdose of morphine in a small town on the French-Spanish border after the Nazis swarmed into his adopted home of France, his escape to Spain blocked by bureaucrats at the border. “It is in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must come to its end,” he wrote in a suicide note. Evans, not long before the stroke that took his life, quoted Dante before an intake evaluation at the New Haven psychiatric ward precipitated by his progressive alcoholism: “I crave oblivion.” Schiele endured the indignity of having his work burned in court for its “offense against public morals” and then watched his wife and unborn child get extinguished by the 1918 flu epidemic. He succumbed to the virus himself three days later. (This lonely man’s final interactions with visitors could be only via a reflection in a mirror in his sickroom doorway, set up so as to spare them exposure to the deadly infection.) In 1975, Serling died during open heart surgery necessitated by years of drinking, smoking, and overwork, his post–Twilight Zone output mostly forgettable.
Yet for all these forlorn endings, this is a warm and hopeful book. As Deming has drawn solace from these tristes (to borrow from Susan Sontag’s description of Benjamin), so can we draw solace from him. His book is a message in a bottle to the tristes and isolatos and lonelyhearts of the world. He is trying to write himself out of isolation, and in doing so, he is offering readers the gift of connection. “Human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings,” Serling wrote. “This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity’s sake.”
Only connect, as E. M. Forster put it. Easier said than done, of course. People are scary. “Hell is other people,” Sartre wrote, contra Forster. But with this brave and intelligent book, Richard Deming has made it a little bit less difficult for the rest of us.
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Anyone who sees Aher, Elisha ben Avuya, should be concerned about
calamity, as he strayed from the path of righteousness.
—Talmud Berakhot 57B:6
IAll these years later, everyone who knew Dr. Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum is still puzzled by his mysterious disappearance. How could this famous Mexican neurophysiologist have vanished without a trace? Grinberg was a few days shy of 48 when he was last seen, on December 8, 1994. Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate: that the CIA had kidnapped him; that he feared for his life to such a degree that for weeks, maybe months, he had slept in a van; that he had become so absorbed in his explorations of shamanism in Mexico that he lost his wits and simply faded through the fissures of reality.
No corpse was ever found, meaning there was no funeral, no seven-day shiva, no matzevah, or tombstone, to mark a gravesite. In Mexico, the tributes were many. The newspaper Reforma described Grinberg as “the Einstein of human consciousness,” a moniker that by any account is a stretch. Journalist Sam Quinones wrote a long profile of him. And one of Mexico’s top sleuths, Comandante Clemente Padilla, director of the Ministerio Público Especializado, conducted a thorough criminal investigation that was eventually called off under dubious circumstances—purportedly at the behest of someone linked to the nation’s president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo. The Mexican media declared Grinberg a desaparecido—a disappeared person, presumably killed or secretly imprisoned for political reasons—a nomenclature that remains confusing because, for most of his life, Grinberg was anything but political.
The author of more than 50 books, Grinberg was a trained psychologist, though his interests ranged from telepathy to paranormal activity, from Kabbalah to Hinduism. How to characterize his books La luz angelmática (The Angelic Light) and Los cristales de la galaxia (The Crystals of the Galaxy), which argue that humans are atavistic creatures imprisoned in their own epistemological squareness? Some of his work deviates into sci-fi terrain, à la Philip K. Dick. Other writings recall the work of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the philosopher-mystic who was part monk, part yogi, and part fakir. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the Grinberg affair would receive interest from unconventional quarters. I once heard from a person claiming to have seen Grinberg in January 1995 in western Mexico—boarding a spaceship made of three perfectly delineated spheres. And in 2020, El secreto del doctor Grinberg (The Secret of Dr. Grinberg), a documentary directed by Ida Cuéllar, made the rounds of several film festivals. It argued that Grinberg had come to learn things about the human mind that the rest of us shall never know.
Buried in all the overstatements, however, is the story of an ambitious scholar who had embarked on an honest, enlightening quest, one that pulled him in countless, at times incompatible, directions. My interest in the story is more wholesome than that of the lurid sensationalists, more grounded, and more personal: Dr. Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum was my relative, although not by blood. My aunt Hilda Elterman was his cousin. He is what in Mexican Spanish we call un pariente político, political family. Truth is, I rarely interacted with Grinberg, and over an extended period of time, I thoroughly disliked what he symbolized: the wacky, unreliable scientist. In my opinion, his use of neurobiological terminology to explain such phenomena as psychokinesis, telepathy, levitation, and retrocausality—as he did in the research papers published early in his career—was highly dubious. He experimented with children in ways that seem suspect, not to say frightening. And he surrounded himself with groupies who, instead of testing his ideas, bowed to his charismatic personality. Still, I have softened my perspective in recent years. Although Grinberg still strikes me as cuckoo, I find his intellectual odyssey admirable, not in what it produced but in how it sought to harmonize disparate fields of knowledge. He was, I believe, a heretical scientist on a mission.
IIWhen I was growing up in Mexico City, Grinberg was on the faculty at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the country’s top university, its campus located a mere two blocks from my house. Grinberg had a lab, the Instituto Nacional para el Estudio de la Conciencia—the National Institute for the Study of Consciousness—apparently staffed only by himself and his loyal assistant, Ruth Cerezo. One could well have believed it to be a large operation, however, given the kind of press that he received for his research on out-of-body experiences and the alternative channels of human consciousness.
I met him only twice, both times in passing. The first encounter was during a family gathering, when I was still in high school. The only thing I remember is my mentioning to him that I had read, not long before, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, about the use of peyote and other psychedelics among Yaqui shamans. He smiled and replied something to the effect of, “Beware of secret wisdom, for it may enwrap you.” Then, if memory serves me, I saw him in 1981, when I was 20. I don’t remember anything specific about that encounter, not even where it took place. But an impression of him lingers in my mind. Short, chubby, with a carefully manicured beard, he looked to me a near clone of Sancho Panza. I recall sitting in the car with my mother before the encounter as she told me about Grinberg’s teoría sintérgica, or “syntergic theory.” I didn’t know what syntergy meant. (I still don’t.) She said that Grinberg was interested in the capacity of the human brain to perceive aspects of reality beyond sensorial stimulation. My mother, who was also a psychologist, lauded him for being extraordinarily prolific. She also said he was petulant, stubborn, and temperamental.
Starting in 1987, Grinberg released his magnum opus, a six-volume study titled Los chamanes de México (The Shamans of Mexico). Before I emigrated from Mexico to New York, I tried to get my hands on these books, but they were hard to find. Then, Grinberg slipped out of my mind. More than a decade would pass before I thought of him again. One day, my mother phoned from Mexico to inform me that for months Grinberg had had no contact with anyone: not even with his daughter Estusha Grinberg, his two brothers, or Aunt Hilda, with whom he had been very close. Ruth Cerezo didn’t know where he was. Neither did his students or the chair of his department at UNAM.
Sometime later, I laid eyes on Los chamanes de México. In it Grinberg argued that Mexico exists in a state of subjugation to foreign colonial forces that have made it, over the centuries, lose its sense of self. Mexicans, he wrote, suffer from an inferiority complex, kneeling down to what appear to be more powerful systems of thought inherited from Western civilization—especially when it comes to a rational understanding of the self. But underlying the Mexican soul, he wrote, is a deeply rooted tradition of rebellion, thanks to which indigenous visions held by the Aztecs, Maya, Inca, and other pre-Hispanic civilizations remain intact. It is a matter of looking for them, which takes effort.
The style of Grinberg’s volumes is discombobulated and dense: imagine Martin Buber writing in a state of stupor. Repetition proliferates. Anecdotes mix with psychological theories without any proper context. There are typos everywhere and footnotes nowhere. The reader has the impression of being taken by the hand and guided by a Virgil who is at once hazy and prone to chaos. Every few pages, a black-and-white photo portrays shamans in action, but the poor quality of many of these images makes it impossible to say what’s going on. Indeed, the volumes seem not to have gone through any type of editorial process. This was makeshift publishing at its most audacious. Still, in terms of scope and determination, Grinberg’s study of Mexico’s shamans is unprecedented. Where the material lacks rigor, it abounds in vivid, direct experience.
IIIJacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum was born in Mexico City on December 12, 1946, during a period of rapid modernization in the country. President Lázaro Cárdenas, who had just finished his six-year term, was known as a strong leader who had helped lift the working class out of poverty and had recognized the plight of Mexico’s indigenous population, often forgotten by the ruling elite. Meanwhile, the Jewish state of Israel would soon be created (after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine), the first time such an entity would exist since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. These two realities—the resurgence of Mexico’s indigenous culture and the recognition that diaspora Jews could now opt to make Aliyah (ascendance) and become citizens of Israel—marked Grinberg’s education.
His family members were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Poland who had arrived in Mexico in the early years of the 20th century. Some were Orthodox. They had escaped pogroms in the so-called Pale of Settlement, the portion of the Russian Empire’s western region where Jews were allowed temporary residency. I have found little about Grinberg’s relationship with his father, but his mother was a significant figure in his life. (His parents were first cousins, a fact that worried the family when the couple announced the engagement.) Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1956, she died from a stroke two years later. Grinberg was 12 at the time, the oldest of three brothers. As one might expect, this period proved traumatic. Such was his early dependence on his mother that for the rest of his life, he was never able to deal with women. He would fall in love quickly and easily, but the relationships would not last. Aunt Hilda remembers that after the death of his mother, Grinberg became obsessed with otherworldly events. In most of the photographs of him taken after that time, she added, he is shown gazing upward or in a distracted state, “his attention wandering and wondering.”
In 1963, Grinberg went to Israel, where he lived for a year on a kibbutz near Gaza and fell in love with his first wife, Lizette Arditti. He was not yet 20. On the kibbutz, he met a British medium who organized séances using the Ouija board to communicate with the dead. The exercise fascinated him. Rather than seeing it as an entertaining game, he thought seriously about the possibility that the dead aren’t altogether gone but are instead in limbo and might one day contact the living. Arditti recollects his stating, for instance, that a spirit had advised him that at a certain hour of the day—say, six p.m.—Grinberg’s watch would stop. Indeed, his watch stopped at that precise moment. Whether this was coincidence or evidence of genuine contact with the dead didn’t matter. For Grinberg, an area of further discovery had materialized right in front of him.
It was also during his first trip to Israel—he would return there on many occasions—that he discovered the depth of Kabbalistic thought, visiting the city of Safed in the Galilee. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and especially during the 16th century, Safed became a magnet for Sephardic rabbis with a penchant for mysticism. It was there that Moshe Cordovero, Yosef Karo, and Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz composed their treatises, including the Shulhan ’arukh (1565), the most important compendium of Jewish law. And it was in Safed that Isaac Luria, known by the Hebrew acronym Ha’ARI, founded a school of followers who explored meditative practices as well as such concepts as tzimtzum (the idea that God underwent self-contraction, thus producing emanations of light), shevira ha-kelim (the shattering of the divine vessels, or sefirot), and gigul (the transmigration or reincarnation of the soul). These concepts, concerned with visions of ascent to heavenly places and the throne of God, inspired Grinberg. Throughout his career, he would look for strategies to integrate them into his academic investigations. Aunt Hilda told me that when their grandfather, an Orthodox Jew, died in Mexico, Grinberg specifically requested all of his prayer and religious books. “He always had them next to him,” she said. “They made him feel attached to his ancestry.” Years later, when he bought a small cabaña in the state of Morelos, some 55 miles from Mexico City, he named the place Safed.
Upon returning to Mexico, Grinberg enrolled at UNAM to study psychology. Then, as he fell under the influence of the 1960s counterculture, a personality shift took place. He left his first wife and moved to New York City, where his perspective on parascientific phenomena became more radical. He enrolled in a doctoral program in psychophysiology (a precursor of neurometrics, the science of understanding the electrical activity of the human brain) at the Brain Research Laboratory, founded by the renowned neuroscientist E. Roy John at NYU’s medical school. Grinberg focused on the electrophysiological effects on the brain of such stimuli as geometric shapes and colors. But scientific research felt too square for him. It didn’t account for alternative ways of knowing. In 1977, he returned to Mexico and began teaching at UNAM. A portion of his time was dedicated to making inquiries into memory, visual perception, and physiological psychology.
My recollection has altered in the past seven years. I remember a jungle environment, a corolla of trees, a hacienda surrounded by an expanse of land, an old brick oven around which most of us congregated in the cold.At his lab, Grinberg attempted to prove that children were able to communicate via means beyond language, especially through sight. He claimed that he could make children read the words on a page without their actually looking at them. But, in an inadvertent outcome, these supposedly psychic children began seeing cosas feas—ugly things, such as the spirits of dead people. When their parents pulled them out of the experiments, Grinberg became distressed. His colleagues, including E. Roy John, began to doubt his techniques and question his findings. “The kinds of tests to which such data should be subjected are well known,” John told Sam Quinones. “He certainly knew what those tests were and never applied them. I don’t think he had a dishonest bone in his body, but he certainly had a lot of wishful thinking.” Grinberg did have his defenders, such as the physicist Amit Goswami, then at the University of Oregon. More typical was the skepticism of Karl Pribram, one of the deans of American neuroscience. “If it’s true what he was finding,” Pribram said after twice visiting Grinberg’s lab at UNAM, “it could be very, very important. But I think that his work needs a lot of confirmation and testing in other laboratories.”
Grinberg was restless. He was attracted by rational thinking, but he also believed that reason was an impediment in epistemological endeavors involving human consciousness. His scientific research was entering new horizons. He began to explore shamanism, widely embraced in Mexico, as well as indigenous practices that had survived centuries of repression. He also studied the Zohar, the influential 13th-century text of Kabbalah, to which he felt drawn “like wood to fire.” Prone to mood swings, Grinberg often consulted curanderos—shaman healers. His students loved him. He was able to procure federal grants. Yet his peers, perplexed by his refusal to allow scholars to corroborate his findings—and by his refusal to allow the students who worked in his lab to speak to others—continued to find his investigations suspect.
IVMy opinion of Grinberg changed in 2016. I was on a lecture trip in Colombia when I reluctantly accepted an invitation to participate in a shamanic ceremony. Along with 12 others, I lived for three days at a location in the Amazon to which we were taken in the middle of the night. My recollection of the ceremony has altered in the past seven years. I remember a jungle environment, a corolla of trees, a hacienda surrounded by a large expanse of land, an old brick oven around which most of us congregated in the cold. I had always avoided shamanic experiences, considering them too tumultuous for my taste, and I kept telling myself beforehand: This isn’t for you, Ilan. Just ask to be driven back.
On day one, I ingested ayahuasca. My lifelong devotion to Judaism as well as my hyperrational nature were instantly put in question. Was I seeking a higher plane of spirituality through a hallucinogen? Why surrender my sense of control when, for most of my life, I had been convinced that the divine was an abstraction and that only through the mind, through intellectual elucidation, could we reach heightened levels of consciousness? Everyone around me also drank the potion, which was dark and gooey. Their behavior quickly became erratic. Some started jumping frantically, hitting themselves against the oven wall, lying down on the ground and pretending to be dead. Others started to vomit, screaming without end, their eyes rolling feverishly. It felt as if I had been transported into a lunatic asylum.
For a long while, the ayahuasca did not have an effect on me, but once it did, I was in another dimension. I underwent an anatomic metamorphosis. First, I lost my sight, as if someone had stolen my eyes. Then I became a jaguar. Still later, my body, ceasing to be a cohesive unit, became a cloud of atoms dancing to their own rhythms. I traveled through space, flying over the corolla of trees, unbound by gravity. I also traveled through time. Not so much to another historical era, but cosmically into the oven, in which an intense fire was consuming a pile of logs. Suddenly, I found myself in Auschwitz, where a number of my family members had perished. And I came tête-à-tête with figures from the Talmud, such as Rabbi Akiva and the canonical rabbis Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Joshua ben Hananiah, who exist in the text through their eternal opposition of views.
By the time I returned home to Massachusetts, I was a different man, starving for existential recalibration. I started to question, for example, the ways I had previously acquired knowledge. Processing what I learned in a strictly rational way now felt simplistic. I became aware of other sensory channels aside from sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. My teaching methods also changed: I learned how to listen and be humble, how to process insight not by reason but through every cell of my body. In general, I was more at peace.
Subsequently, I saw Aunt Hilda in Ohio. We talked about diverse things, including her sessions with Heriberto, a shaman who had guided and cleansed her, and from whom she had learned so much about herself. She talked to me now about Grinberg in much more detail. Although she loved him, she said, he had become irascible, unpredictable, an enigma. She didn’t know, furthermore, how to catalog his work. Toward the end of his life, he had stopped talking to her (because she had dedicated her master’s thesis to someone else), but she kept him in her heart. She told me about Sam Quinones and his investigation into Grinberg’s disappearance. As it happened, Quinones and I were long-time acquaintances. His profile of Grinberg, published in the July/August 1997 issue of New Age Journal, served as the backbone of Ida Cuéllar’s documentary. Quinones, who appeared on camera a number of times, said that although he found Grinberg intriguing, “the type of science he did—to put it charitably—had been diluted by his extreme beliefs.” For Quinones, Grinberg personified a volcanic mixture of deductive reasoning and an overinflated ego.
VGrinberg had been attracted to shamanism since his year-long stay in Israel in the early ’60s. Like Kabbalists, shamans are interested in a higher realm of consciousness and in connecting the earthly with the divine. Convinced that the mind was trapped in the human body, Grinberg sought to liberate the mind through meditation, hypnosis, and hallucinations. As he relates time and again in Los chamanes de México, he not only participated in these practices, he also led groups of initiated followers, often in proximity to an established curandero, his preferred approach, but not always. He describes eating mushrooms and using other entheogenic substances. These episodes, though frustratingly lacking in any scientific underpinning, are narrated in an unencumbered way. He specifies the number of participants, the visions they experience, who speaks at a particular time, what the shaman’s overall behavior is, and so on.
According to several talking heads in Cuéllar’s film, in 1975, Grinberg was suddenly invited to Los Pinos, the central building in Mexico City where the Mexican president and his administration operated. Margarita López Portillo—the sister of the nation’s leader, José López Portillo, and a woman known as a flamboyant supporter of indigenous cultures—wanted to get to know him. More important, she wanted him to meet Bárbara Guerrero, the curandera known as Doña Pachita, a cabaret singer and lottery ticket seller who had fought as a young girl in the Mexican Revolution alongside Pancho Villa. Volume three of Los chamanes de México is exclusively devoted to Doña Pachita, whom Grinberg describes as his mentor. Her rituals were nontraditional. Any time the government went after her “for practicing voodoo rites,” she went missing for extended periods of time, as if she had evaporated from the world. In his book, Grinberg accepts at face value Doña Pachita’s assertion that she was the niece of Moctezuma and the sister of Cuauhtémoc, the last of the Aztec emperors. She “was capable,” he writes, “of materializing and dematerializing objects, organs, and tissue.” And he suggests that “by means of the manipulation of organic structures,” Doña Pachita could diagnose and heal people without being physically present. She could even perform organ transplants at will. “She did this with colossal power and accuracy.” As Quinones puts it, Grinberg’s
experiences with Pachita also influenced his scientific thinking. Grinberg came to believe that the neuronal field he had postulated interacted with what he called an “informational matrix,” a complicated concept that his students still have trouble explaining. He believed that experience and perception were created as a result of this interaction, and that the curative powers of shamans and curanderas like Pachita came from their ability to gain access to the informational matrix and change it, thereby affecting reality.
Sometime later, Grinberg became a disciple of another luminary in Mexico’s shamanic constellation: María Sabina, an indigenous Mazatec woman who performed purification rituals using mushrooms. Sabina was from the Sierra Mazateca area in the state of Oaxaca. One humid night at her home, Grinberg ingested mushrooms, intending to chronicle his experiences. But his hallucinations blocked his rational thought. Sabina was near him, chanting, over and over again, San Pablo, San Pablo. At first, he was cold, agitated, uncomfortable. In his mind, he wandered along strange, undulating streets. He then left Sabina’s house in a panic and went onto the road. Soon he was imagining himself in the comfort of his living room, reading quietly on his sofa. Then he returned to Sabina’s side. The hallucinations stopped. He describes all of this in volume one of Los chamanes, thanking María Sabina “for having shown me one of my emotional refuges, my incapacity to live in the present and my tendency to escape reality to seek shelter in a structure of comfort.”
It was about this time that Grinberg drifted further into the realms of impossibility. Might he have suffered a mental breakdown? There is an indication that in the last period of his life, he was overwhelmed by intense paranoia.An outcome of these encounters was an experiment Grinberg devised in 1987. It involved two participants who were placed in the same room, with electrodes attached to their heads. Grinberg asked them to attempt telepathic communication. Then, after one of the participants was taken elsewhere, the other was stimulated with sounds and flashes. Grinberg, studying the brain waves of each, immediately recognized a simultaneous reaction in the distant participant. This he named “transferred potential.” Over the next few years, he often repeated the experiment, documenting transferred potential in a quarter of his subjects. As Quinones puts it, Grinberg believed that the results of his experiment “supported his theory of a neuronal field connecting all human minds.”
In several episodes devoted to shamanic followers, Grinberg reaches into Jewish history to make a particular point. There is a section in volume one of Los chamanes called “Los ‘hasidim’ de Morelos” (The Hasidim of Morelos), in which Grinberg describes a shamanic group that performed its mystical rituals just like the 18th-century followers of the Baal Shem Tov—Israel ben Eliezer, the founder and leader of the mystical Hasidic movement. A special class of Hasidic Jews are supposedly able to communicate with nonmaterial entities, which help them cure an assortment of human ailments, physiological and emotional.
Grinberg painted himself as a kind of Mexican Hasid. Aunt Hilda passed on to me one emblematic story. Just like every other observant Jew, Grinberg would fast on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. But rather than attending synagogue to seek a state of introspection, he would travel about 50 kilometers to the highlands north of Mexico City and the ancient archaeological complex of Teotihuacán. In the Nahuatl language, Teotihuacán means “the birthplace of the gods.” The Aztecs built the city from around 400 BCE to around 300 CE, and the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Pyramid of the Moon still rise proudly from its large esplanade. Every year, Grinberg climbed the steep staircase of the Pyramid of the Sun and sat for hours on the promenade at the top, entering a spiritual state. I can picture him now: possibly alone or accompanied by a friend or a student. In Kabbalistic literature, the most austere and inventive of prophets, Ezekiel, describes the revelation of the merkavah, the celestial chariot sent down for him so that he may achieve a mystical union:
I looked, and lo, a stormy wind came sweeping out of the north—a huge cloud and flashing fire, surrounded by a radiance; and in the center of it, in the center of the fire, a gleam as of amber. In the center of it were also the figures of four creatures. And this was their appearance: They had the figures of human beings. However, each had four faces, and each of them had four wings; the legs of each were [fused into] a single rigid leg, and the feet of each were like a single calf’s hoof; and their sparkle was like the luster of burnished bronze.
On Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, Grinberg felt that he was in direct dialogue with the divine. Then, as sunset approached, he returned to Aunt Hilda’s mother’s house in Mexico City, where, along with the rest of his family, he broke the fast.
VIMexico underwent a reckoning in 1994, the year Grinberg went missing. Carlos Salinas de Gortari was president at the time, and on January 1, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States went into effect. The agreement was sold to the public as the catalyst of a new age in which foreign investment in manufacturing would finally lift many out of poverty, with goods freely flowing across the three countries. But everything went haywire on that New Year’s Day, when the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN)—known as the Zapatistas, after Emiliano Zapata, the hero of the Mexican Revolution—stormed multiple locations in the southern state of Chiapas, demanding social, economic, and political rights for the indigenous population. Its leader, Subcomandante Marcos, a.k.a. Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, argued that this segment of Mexico’s society was once again being left behind, this time because of NAFTA.
Grinberg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Zapatistas. Throughout 1994, he joined marches in Mexico City, added his signature to public letters, and connected the Zapatista movement to his explorations of shamanic experiences and to alternative studies of the mind. It was about this time that Grinberg drifted further into the realms of impossibility. Might he have suffered a mental breakdown? There is an indication that in the last period of his life, he was overwhelmed by intense paranoia. He said, for example, that he was being followed, that his well-being was always in question. In his last interviews, Grinberg’s grandiose explanations of the mechanics of the universe descended into hyperbole. In his later writings, he depicted himself as a space traveler who wandered through galaxies using telepathic connections. And he offered a survey of different advanced civilizations—traces of which were invisible to the naked eye. He reported being overwhelmed by a supernatural type of love, which led him to the conviction that he had become a deity. He seemed unsettled, possessed by inner demons. Could the regular ingestion of hallucinogenic substances have further detached him from empirical reality? It is useless to speculate. His story is compelling precisely because its threads twist and turn at the end, making it ultimately indecipherable.
In the early ’90s, Grinberg befriended Carlos Castaneda, the Peruvian-born pseudo-ethnographer and author of The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), and many other bestselling New Age books about Don Juan Matus, a shaman in Arizona. (It was The Teachings of Don Juan that I had mentioned to Grinberg on first meeting him all those years ago.) In the past couple of decades, Castaneda’s work has been debunked as fictional, with Matus himself deemed to have been a concoction. Tony Karam, one of Castaneda’s former followers, said that Grinberg and his second wife, María Teresa Mendoza López—who went by Tere—visited Castaneda in 1991. Grinberg admired Castaneda’s studies of peyote and his accomplishments as a versatile chronicler for the New Age generation. Cuéllar’s documentary implies that Castaneda invited Grinberg to leave UNAM and join his fraternity. Grinberg wasn’t a true Castaneda junkie, though, and so he rejected the invitation. The relationship soured. Two years later, Castaneda was in Mexico City. According to Grinberg’s friends and family, he frequently called Castaneda “an egomaniac, more interested in power than truth.” They also recalled how Tere had encouraged Grinberg to reconsider joining Castaneda’s group. Quinones adds: “Students remember her speaking of her friendship with Florinda Donner, an associate of Castaneda’s.” Naturally, there is speculation—once again, quite sensationalist—that Castaneda’s entourage plotted Grinberg’s demise.
During what turned out to be his final days, Grinberg phoned his daughter Estusha to say that he was going to Kathmandu to participate in a series of meditations. If he had a ticket to Nepal, no airline has a record of his using it. Comandante
Clemente Padilla didn’t find any evidence confirming Grinberg’s departure from Mexico. No one saw him in Kathmandu. His siblings organized a birthday party for him on December 12 to which he didn’t show up. He had left voicemails for one of his siblings saying that Tere was persecuting him; the two would often fight as a result of jealousy. According to those I talked to, Tere suffered from bipolar disorder, and her own family didn’t know that she was wedded to Grinberg. Grinberg’s close circle—his brothers, his daughter, his first wife, Aunt Hilda—felt that Tere was an impostor who represented a physical threat, that she was part of a larger coterie with a vested interest in controlling him, for whatever reason. One of his brothers says that Grinberg feared he would be murdered—this was revealed during their final visit together. Quinones notes the argument made by Grinberg’s family and friends that Grinberg wouldn’t have left his job, or his daughter, whom he adored, of his own volition.
What we know from Padilla’s report is the following. After Grinberg’s disappearance, Tere cashed a check for $1,000 from her husband’s book distributor. She reportedly told the watchman at one of their houses in Morelos not to come back to work because her husband had flown to Guadalajara. But a few days later, she notified Grinberg’s stepmother that he was in the state of Campeche and that the couple intended to fly to Nepal when he came back. Telephone calls placed from various locations in Mexico and the United States linked her to a night watchman at a school, a man with a paramilitary background. She was also seen a couple of times with a blond woman, with whom she visited one of the Morelos homes so that she could retrieve her dog, some kitchen utensils, her clothes, and a table. Some months later, she was spotted on Rosarito Beach, south of Tijuana. On Mother’s Day, 1995, she called her mother. Then, María Teresa Mendoza López also disappeared—forever.
VIIIn Spanish, the word aparecido isn’t quite the opposite of desaparecido. It is used to refer to a ghost, an apparition. Ever since he dissolved into the ether, Grinberg has been precisely that: a specter people keep invoking for all kinds of reasons. For them, he is proof that death isn’t final, that somehow a person who vanishes hasn’t disappeared but is simply misplaced. He will come back, his followers believe, wiser, with a cure for the blunt rationalism of our age, which blinds us to the mysteries of the universe.
Aunt Hilda and others talk about him with deep affection. They say that a lesson can be learned from his courage. A legend in Jewish tradition suggests that each human generation depends on 36 righteous individuals—Lamed Vavniks—without whom the world would cease to exist. The Lamed Vavniks are unaware of their importance as the pillars of life. They can be ignorant, loquacious, even pretentious. Yet they enjoy mystical powers and embody the divine presence. Grinberg might have been one of them.
To me, he was the embodiment of a dissatisfaction with the status quo. In a Catholic country of more than 125 million people, the Mexican Jewish community is minuscule. To survive, it protects its insularity through a certain disdain for the outside world. Its members to this day choose to be different by connecting themselves to an ancestral culture that spans diasporas. Grinberg rebelled against the community by finding ways to bring together his Judaism with the shamanic teachings he observed in the indigenous communities that he studied. He wanted to believe that everything had a deeper meaning. He was also a dreamer whose dream ate itself up. In those last few months, there doesn’t seem to have been a method to his madness. He was right that reality is unforgiving and that it is full of mysteries. The secret is to know not only how to approach those mysteries but also how to turn them into believable narratives.
Not long ago, I contacted a cousin of mine who happens to be a necromancer. I asked him to find out whether Dr. Jacobo Grinberg Zylberbaum was still alive. Enthusiastic about the assignment, he told me he would need a couple of weeks. It took three, maybe four. When my cousin finally got back to me, he said that he and a group of spiritualists, having performed a series of séances and other rituals, had done everything in their power without success. “Dr. Grinberg is in bardo,” he said, “the Buddhist liminal state between death and rebirth.”
That’s exactly how he lived his life.
The post The Grinberg Affair appeared first on The American Scholar.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb; W. W. Norton, 384 pp., $30
There are the snowshoe hare years when the furred lumps of their bodies spot the roads where I live in Homer, Alaska, like some kind of terrible acne. Usually, all you can identify amid the hairy mess is a single hind foot—in life, a miracle of engineering with such propulsion, it lands in front of the forefoot after a leap. There are the porcupine seasons when the pavement is littered with their flattened bodies, a few quills rising like exclamation points on their demise. There are winters of moose kills, when friends get a call from the state troopers in the middle of the night, then groggily venture out to salvage the meat right off the road.
These deaths on pavement are windows into the wild world, telling of the years when the hare population booms, of the autumns when porkies hit the road to find mates, and of months when heavy snow accumulations push belly-deep moose onto the highway, where it’s far easier to hoof around. Roadkill, Ben Goldfarb writes in Crossings, is “an ethical crisis as well as a biological one.” This assessment neatly sums up the problem of our roads in toto. And with 15 million miles of new roads scheduled for construction across the planet in the coming years, now is the time for a more nuanced understanding of the harm our roads are causing and what we can do about it.
Roads, as Goldfarb explains, shape the lives of animals in many ways. Of course, countless animals are killed or maimed by vehicles. In New York State alone, Goldfarb recounts, a deer is hit by a car every eight minutes. Vehicle impacts are cruel, and they’re also a threat to the survival of species. Unlike predation, disease, and other natural causes of mortality that typically weed out the sick and the weak, roadkill plucks healthy animals out of a population, setting back generations to come. The relentless squashing of female salamanders under tires—before the amphibians have reached their prime breeding years—has led to a drop in the average size of their egg masses. Death by road is an overlooked contributor to the sixth major extinction, Goldfarb writes, when species are disappearing as much as a hundred times faster than at any point in Earth’s history.
But there are many other ways in which our transportation infrastructure collides with animal lives. Highways cleave habitats into constricted islands and act as “guillotines” to migrations, severing animals from the land and water they need to survive—an increasing problem as warming temperatures and wildly changing environmental conditions necessitate that animals be able to move in order to survive. Roads also ooze salty, oily pollution. And then there is the noise, so ubiquitous in this country that even our national parks echo with the din. The roar of roadways leads to a host of health consequences in people and animals alike.
Not surprisingly, the United States is bullish on roads. With four million miles, it is home to the world’s largest road network, about one-sixth of the planet’s total. The most infuriating example of our national love affair with roads might be the case of the U.S. Forest Service, an agency many of us think of as the caretaker of some of the most beautiful and wild lands in the country. But the Forest Service is likely the largest manager of roads on the planet, Goldfarb writes, overseeing some 370,000 miles within our public lands. Roads crisscross these landscapes, lying at the intersection of the angry (and often violent) debates over what public lands are for and who gets to decide.
Road ecology forces us to face other hard questions as well. Black and brown communities are disproportionately affected by road noise and pollution. Decades of redlining coincided with large-scale bulldozing of buildings in vibrant communities of color to make room for new roads. And globally, roadways have, from time immemorial, been instruments of empire, routes of rape, pillage, and plunder. Thankfully, road ecology demands that we seek to understand the effects our roads have on us and on the creatures with whom we share this planet, forcing us to stand in their shoes, hooves, paws, scales, and webbed feet to envision pavement from different points of view. Road ecology, Goldfarb writes, is “empathy manifested as science.”
And this science points us to solutions. Goldfarb explains the movement to construct wildlife passageways over and under highways to enable migration and act as “sutures of habitat” in a gashed-up world. He takes us to an ambitious wildlife road crossing, a highway overpass in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. A soaring span more than three stories above I-90, the hill-like bridge has concrete walls to block the view and clamor of the vehicles below and features landscaping to match the natural surroundings—wild rose, Douglas fir, scattered rock piles, and downed trees. The crossing is a conduit for elk and many smaller mammals, connecting prime habitat on either side of the interstate.
Goldfarb, author of the award-winning Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, travels to Costa Rica, Brazil, Tasmania, and across the United States to gather stories of people who rescue and rehabilitate road-injured animals, efforts to decommission and rewild roads, and the gentle armies that help small creatures cross to safety. For him, the work is important in large and small ways. When he volunteers with a nighttime effort in Portland, Oregon, to ferry frogs by bucket across a pavement deathtrap so that the amphibians can complete an ancient wetland-to-forest migration, he describes the work as “spiritually nourishing.”
Crossings is science writing at its best. Each page brings something interesting and new. Goldfarb’s writing is full of metaphor carefully crafted to help us understand our complicated world and the tricky tradeoffs inherent in conservation: Will an effort to plant milkweed along U.S. interstates help support the flagging monarch population or just lure them to their deaths? Ultimately, his book is a hopeful reminder of our responsibilities in the Anthropocene, our duty to clean up our messes and help other species survive. If we are to reduce the havoc we inflict on the planet and one another, we must look at our roads.
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On December 17, 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife euthanized P-22, the celebrated mountain lion “king” of Griffith Park, after he was struck by a car in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. P-22’s death inspired a public memorial concert attended by thousands, coverage in local and national news outlets, a eulogy from California Governor Gavin Newsom (whose father was a founder of the Mountain Lion Foundation), and several murals across Los Angeles. Previously, P-22 had been the subject of books, a documentary, and an Instagram account with more than 15,000 followers. He was arguably the most famous mountain lion of all time and, by some standards, one of LA’s most beloved celebrities.
He was born around 2010 in the western region of the Santa Monica Mountains, where he lived anonymously for the first years of his life before heading east to Griffith Park, somehow crossing the 405 and 101 freeways without being hit. In March 2012, scientists from the Friends of Griffith Park Wildlife Connectivity Study, which had installed cameras around the park to monitor wildlife, found him wandering across one of their screens. Soon afterward, he was caught, christened P-22 (since he was the 22nd puma in an ongoing study), and fitted with an e-collar, which he wore until his death.
Over the next 10 years, P-22’s movements were meticulously tracked, recorded, and publicized. In December 2013, he appeared in the pages of National Geographic, prowling in the darkness underneath the glowing white Hollywood sign. He became the new face of urban wildlife conservation efforts, helping to raise funds for one of the world’s largest wildlife bridges, currently being built over Highway 101. In 2014, he was captured for a routine collar change and treated for a serious case of rat poison ingestion. In 2015, he was discovered in the crawl space of a Los Feliz house. Despite the presence of helicopters and news cameras and numerous flying projectiles—officials shot rounds of beanbags and tennis balls in an effort to flush him out—P-22 refused to leave until the cover of night. In March 2016, the carcass of a koala was found at the Los Angeles Zoo, and though P-22 was captured on security footage roaming the grounds at night, no one could prove—or perhaps no one wanted to prove—that he was the perpetrator.
Despite living in LA for almost two years, I hadn’t heard of P-22 until his death last December. First I saw friends mourning him on social media. Then I noticed his picture in coffee shops. Strangers began striking up conversations with me about their grief. A horse owner in Griffith Park, whom I’d spoken to only in passing, told me in detail about two personal encounters with P-22, both times when she was out late at her barn. With a mystical look in her eyes, she described the feeling of being watched before she noticed the big cat’s golden gaze and slowly backed away.
The descriptions I heard were almost spiritual. It was as if P-22 had been an earthly manifestation of the divine, a sort of miracle, surviving as he did amid encroaching urbanization and highways and rat poison—an icon of hope, of our ability to live in harmony with nature. People called P-22 a hero, a symbol, an incarnation of all that is beautiful and mysterious about nature. But perhaps he was just an animal doing what he could to survive with what he was given. After reading the history of the last 10 years of his life, I kept wondering how wild he really was.
When I was growing up in Monterey, California, encounters with mountain lions often made local headlines. California, along with Colorado, is home to one of the largest mountain lion populations in the country—4,000 to 6,000 by some estimates—so this is no surprise. Occasionally, we would hear of sightings on a neighbor’s security camera or of a dog that had been attacked, but mostly, the big cats kept to themselves, living among us but in secret. As far as I knew, none of them had names.
I was also raised on a steady diet of Animal Planet and nature encyclopedias. By the time I was six, I was at peace watching a lion rip apart a zebra limb by limb. This was the way the world was: wild animals lived only by the rules of survival. It wasn’t good or bad; it was nature. My mother fondly recalls the time I consoled her about the death of a dog in a movie by saying, “That’s just the circle of life, Mom.”
Though I never saw a mountain lion, I encountered “wild” animals every day. The most dangerous of these seemed to be the mother deer—one of them chased my mom and dog all the way home when they were out walking one day. Coyotes also tracked my dog, but they usually kept their distance if humans were around. There were always raccoons, and I seem to remember an incident when one tried to attack one of our cats, but I’ve since learned that raccoons are not aggressive, so I wonder if another animal was to blame.
The less common the wild animal, the more mystical the encounter. Once, in Big Bend National Park in Texas, I was standing next to a clearing when I suddenly felt that I wasn’t alone. When I looked toward the clearing, I saw a black bear about 65 feet away, nosing the ground. I remember being struck with wonder rather than fear. I stayed quiet as the bear looked up at me before eventually shuffling away.
In urban spaces, most of the wild animals we know and love are not in their natural habitats. We see them at a zoo or on a screen, where they exist as celebrities with recognizable names, personalities, and quirks—just like us! They become recurring characters in our lives, and the degree to which they do so seems determined by their perceived cuteness. Vultures, not that cute. Snakes, not cute. But anything with fur, cute. Also cute: fish or amphibians that can be easily anthropomorphized into cuddly friends. Wild pigs enjoying mud rolls or foxes living like pet dogs have become objects of worship. Raccoons—or “trash pandas”—are meme celebrities. The axolotl, a salamander, has become a social media darling for its remarkably human smile. Our culture seems to say, “We love the wild!” Or at least we love our definition of it.
Killer whales, or orcas, are a prime example of an ontological dilemma surrounding our definition of wild animals. Are they killer whales, or are they orcas? Even their unstable name reflects our inability to capture their true nature—and they are among the deadliest predators of the sea. Sure, they can jump through hoops in a pool, but a pod can also take out a blue whale and up to 20 sharks in a day.
For years, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has been a staunch and vocal opponent of housing orcas in captivity. In 2022, the organization once again criticized SeaWorld, a company it had previously sued after a video of two whales “attacking” each other was released by a concerned patron. A SeaWorld spokesperson said that the behavior was known as “rake marking” (that is, when certain whales and dolphins rake their teeth against one another) and was normally seen in the wild. PETA said that the video was evidence of “horrific attacks.” The question of whether the incident was “normal” or “horrific” strikes me as particularly human in that we believe there is one right answer.
Even their unstable name reflects our inability to capture their true nature—and they are among the deadliest predators of the sea. Sure, they can jump through hoops in a pool, but a pod can also take out a blue whale and up to 20 sharks in a day.Recently, the Cancun-based Dolphin Company, which operates several aquatic parks, has considered releasing its prized orca, Lolita, from the Miami Seaquarium, where she has lived and performed for more than 50 years. The move could potentially cost millions of dollars and require a military transport plane, not to mention the crew required to help Lolita adapt to the wild. Despite these difficulties, Lolita’s potential release has been celebrated as a win for animal rights. The chief executive of the Dolphin Company, Eduardo Albor, said that she would become a “symbol,” and I don’t doubt that if she is released, this is exactly what she will be, watched and tracked until the day she dies. After all, there’s nothing for us to gain from a whale living her life anonymously in the sea.
P-22’s death also inspired a debate over the body of the animal. To whom did it belong? Scientists had already performed a necropsy and wanted to retain samples of his remains for further testing. Tribal leaders of the Chumash, Tataviam, and Gabrielino (Tongva) peoples, who regard mountain lions as relatives and teachers, wanted P-22 to be buried in his homeland, and as intact as possible. At the time of the burial, it remained unclear whether the groups had reached a compromise. I assume that the location of his burial was kept secret to dissuade pilgrimages to his grave.
The thousands who attended P-22’s memorial in early February saw performances and tributes by DJ and music producer Diplo and actor Rainn Wilson. Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, described his decision to euthanize P-22 as “gut-wrenching.” (After the car accident, wildlife biologists found that the puma had a fractured skull and diseased kidneys, among other serious ailments.) “P-22 was beautifully abstract,” Bonham said, “the essence of the wildness of wild things.”
Can you know a wild animal to death? What’s most interesting to me about P-22 is this paradox: our insistence on understanding the “essence” of wild animals seems to compromise their wildness. That we saved P-22 from death by rat poison only to kill him “humanely” years later is evidence of our irreconcilable presence in the wild, of our compulsion to mark it with our own values. Do animals suffer as we do? This is a bigger question than I can discuss here, but I think the short answer is that we don’t know. What we do know is nearly the entire life story of this mountain lion—from the moment he appeared on scientists’ radar to the time we decided that his injuries from a car crash were too severe for him to continue living. The possibility that he had suffered before the collision, because of what we as a civilization had done to interfere with his livelihood—this is almost too much to bear.
Tracking P-22 and turning him into a public icon have contributed greatly to scientific knowledge and public awareness of wildlife conservation efforts. I don’t doubt this. What I want to point out is how our obsession with documenting and projecting our ideas of wilderness onto animals defeats the very notion of the “wild.” I wonder whether the urge to deify P-22, to release all the orcas from captivity, and to make cute online memes of axolotls and raccoons is just a way to assuage our guilt. After all, we are the ones who have wreaked havoc on these animals’ lives. We are the ones who have destroyed or degraded so much of their habitat, and I think the fantasy of living in peaceful coexistence with wild animals in urban spaces is problematic, if not potentially dangerous. Do we love wild animals, or do we love the feeling we get when we do our part to save them?
Maybe it’s not just a sense of guilt that makes us grieve the loss of P-22. Maybe it’s a more primal urge, a reminder of the parts of us that remain wild, that are still untamed, that continue to fight for survival. But though it’s better to care about wild animals than to ignore their fate altogether, I wonder what life would have looked like for P-22 if he had lived his life nameless and unseen—living and dying not by our hands but by the rhythms of the natural world that was his.
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A decade and a half ago, I published This Republic of Suffering, a book about death and the American Civil War. I had been moved to write it after encountering the diaries and letters of southern women, whose voices rang clear and strong across the century and a half that separated us. What concerned them most about the conflict that their husbands, fathers, and brothers had launched was not southern independence or the future of slavery, subjects that have preoccupied historians for more than a century. Nor was it visions of honor and glory. What mattered most to them was death—the loss of relatives, neighbors, and friends. As the war ground on, an unanticipated and mounting death toll heightened their anxiety and made their fears realities. Death, its proximity and actuality, became the war’s most widely shared experience, and not just for the South’s slaveholding women, but for all Americans.
Since 2008, an outpouring of new scholarship has elaborated on my book’s findings and revised a few of its assumptions. Even our understanding of something as seemingly fundamental as the war’s death toll has significantly altered. The effort to capture the meaning of Civil War death by attaching it to a number has persisted since the time of the war itself, as if an accurate statistic could somehow grasp the complexity of otherwise unfathomable loss. Yet given the incompleteness of our sources, the irregularity of recordkeeping on both sides, and the destruction of documents, especially Confederate materials, in the chaos of war’s end, we will never have an exact count. The prevailing estimate 15 years ago was 620,000 combined Union and Confederate dead, although those of us who used this number customarily did so with caveats, recognizing it as at best an approximation. Until that time, historians had cobbled together military records such as muster-out rolls (registers of disbanded units) and made more or less educated guesses about the fatalities that might not have been counted.
In 2011, however, based on new research and more sophisticated tools of demographic analysis, University of Minnesota historian J. David Hacker published an article that took an entirely different approach. Using samples from 19th-century censuses recently released to the public, he compared male survival rates between the 1860 and 1870 enumerations with those in surrounding censuses. Hacker frankly acknowledged the shortcomings of his method—the unreliability of both the 1860 and the 1870 censuses, for example, and the inevitable inclusion in his tally of nonmilitary male deaths. Nonetheless, he pointed out why the traditional estimate of 258,000 Confederate dead—originally put forward in 1900 by a Union veteran–turned–amateur historian as little more than an educated guess—was not only based on incomplete records of battle casualties; it failed adequately to account for noncombat deaths from diseases or accidents. Hacker also noted that military enumerations on which the earlier totals had been based did not include northern or southern soldiers who died of wounds after the end of the conflict, losses he was able to assess through his use of the postwar census. Hacker’s careful consideration of available data led him to raise the estimated death toll by 20 percent: to 750,000, the equivalent of 7.5 million in terms of today’s population. The human cost of the Civil War was even greater and death more omnipresent than we previously knew. It was, Hacker concluded, “the greatest demographic shock in the nation’s history.”
Many of these new inquiries have focused not just on the years between 1861 and 1865 but on war’s aftermath, on the physical and emotional destruction that haunted its survivors, long after the guns went silent.Hacker focused on soldiers’ deaths, but deepened knowledge of war’s realities suggests that we should assume a higher death toll among civilians as well. In large part, this changed view arises from the expansion over the past three decades of historical interest in the social history of the war, in the lives and circumstances of the common soldiers doing the fighting, not just the generals and statesmen who had occupied the stage in earlier scholarship. And historians have also looked more closely at the home front, at the experiences of white women in both North and South and of enslaved African Americans, studying the variety of circumstances that damaged and ended lives beyond the reach of the battlefields on which Civil War history had so long focused. We will never know how many civilians died as a result of the war—the data is episodic and anecdotal, if not entirely absent—but recent research indicates that the number was likely far more substantial than we had imagined. Battle and home front became in many ways indistinguishable.
Guerrilla warfare brought the conflict home in a particularly devastating way. Michael Fellman first addressed these grim realities in Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (1989), and he continued to produce insightful work on unconventional warfare until his death in 2012. Fellman’s study of Missouri—“my book on Vietnam,” he once observed—rejected a triumphal Civil War master narrative of battlefield glory, nation building, and emancipation in favor of skepticism about what ends can ever balance the “indiscriminate slaughter” of war.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the unconventional combat that characterized our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did much to change historians’ perspectives on the Civil War’s guerrilla warfare. A number of scholars have drawn portraits of another kind of conflict, one of cruelty and unrestrained violence executed against men, women, and children alike. In border areas of the South, like Missouri, and regions that sheltered Unionist enclaves, like western North Carolina, historians have depicted a war within a war of hangings, torture, and executions. Irregular warfare, some recent work has even argued, played “the decisive role” in the conflict, subjecting civilians to untold cruelties and undermining men’s willingness to fight.
The foregrounding of terroristic, unconventional warfare has been one essential component of a broader “Dark Turn” in Civil War history. Authors of recent, revisionist studies have placed merciless violence and suffering at the center of their interpretations and have challenged idealized renderings of a “good war,” where violence is redeemed by the liberation of the enslaved and the salvation of the American nation as humanity’s “last best hope.”
“War is always about damage,” Stephen Berry declared in his introduction to Weirding the War (2011), a collection of essays on subjects such as ruins, starvation, atrocities, torture, amputations, persisting postwar trauma, and resulting suicides. Part I of the volume is titled “Death Becomes Us: The Civil War and the Appetite for Destruction.” The nation learned to define itself by death, the double entendre suggests—and, worse yet, seems to have come to like it. Several chapters in the collection have since become books and have been joined by a proliferation of other studies of brutality and loss, of human suffering and environmental devastation.
Many of these new inquiries have focused not just on the years between 1861 and 1865 but on war’s aftermath, on the physical and emotional destruction that haunted its survivors, long after the guns went silent. Examinations of afflicted veterans, the disabled, the widowed, and the orphaned extended war’s darkness well beyond its chronological limits. Even after it ended, the war remained terrible. The dead were gone yet remained as a powerful emotional, cultural, and political force. Historians have investigated the ways in which the slain were remembered in cemeteries and ceremonies, at once drawing from and enriching larger themes of Civil War memory that traced the emergence of a Lost Cause to celebrate the Confederacy and justify another century of racial oppression.
An earlier direction in Civil War writing, originating in the 1960s and influenced by the ideals of the civil rights movement, had foregrounded the war’s success in overturning slavery and heralded the agency of the enslaved in seizing their own freedom. During the Dark Turn, however, historians have published more detailed studies of what that freedom had cost and expressed disillusionment about what freedom came to mean. With the defeat of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow, how different from slavery did freedom actually turn out to be? Careful studies of the process of emancipation depicted frequently unchecked, retributive violence against those who remained on wartime plantations and widespread illness, misery, oppression, and destitution among those who fled from slavery into Union contraband camps. The conflict portrayed by the Dark Turn was one that exacted more human suffering and delivered less human betterment. Far from a “good” or noble war, or the nation’s vaunted defining moment, the conflict was, in the eyes of historian David Goldfield, “America’s greatest failure.”
This Republic of Suffering appeared near the outset of this new wave of scholarship. I wrote not knowing the directions these studies would ultimately take, unaware that my book would become part of a larger thrust of reinterpretation. After the book’s publication, I received questions about whether I had intended to argue that the war should not have been fought. It had not occurred to me that my work might be seen to make such a claim. As a historian, I have never liked counterfactual questions; I prefer to regard what happened as needing to be explained and understood rather than judged or second-guessed. I had not undertaken a study of death in order to assess the war’s value. But I did want to illuminate the war’s cost. Like Michael Fellman, I am of the Vietnam generation, and I was an active opponent of that war. But I am also the daughter of a World War II veteran and grew up imbued with a sense of the conflict as necessary and perhaps even good, though I have always struggled to countenance or justify violence.
I had hoped to remind readers that we must anticipate and understand what war costs when we ask soldiers to fight. I had watched as we fell into the quagmire of Vietnam one escalation at a time, without confronting the terrible price that Americans and especially the Vietnamese would be required to pay. And as our Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became all-but-forgotten and all-but-ignored conflicts waged by less than one percent of the population, we as a nation once again failed to accept accountability for what we ask of those who fight our battles. I hoped as well that This Republic of Suffering could remind us of the price our forebears had paid for a reunited nation committed to a new birth of freedom and our consequent obligation to make good on their sacrifice. It was a freedom long constrained and long delayed; it is a freedom still far from achieved. But unlike many historians writing today in the shadow of the Dark Turn, I have no doubt that freedom, even the eviscerated freedom of the late 19th and much of the 20th centuries, was far better than slavery. Yet I fully recognize what historians have in recent years so powerfully demonstrated: that emancipation involved violence, cruelty, suffering, and persisting racial oppression. Black freedom was not simply the shining, bright, and happy outcome of a destructive military conflict. It too was shrouded in war’s darkness.
From 9/11 to the wars begun in its aftermath to the Covid-19 pandemic—“there are lessons for our time in the experience of Civil War Americans.” (Wikimedia Commons)
During the past three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have found myself often thinking of the experiences of my Civil War subjects. Just as Civil War Americans had to embark on a new relationship with death, we too have been compelled to confront the bonds of our mortality under circumstances we could not have imagined. More Americans have died from coronavirus than in the four years of the United States’ most bloody war. The links between our time and theirs, moreover, have frequently astonished me—particularly as I have been confronted by what has not changed and what we have not learned. I began This Republic of Suffering with a quotation from an 1862 sermon by a Georgia bishop: “We all have our dead.” We are indeed all mortal. But I understand that differently now than when I first borrowed his words.
I was attracted to the questions surrounding war’s cruelties because of their timelessness, because of the underlying sameness of confronting death as a human being in any time and place in spite of the differences of belief and circumstance that separate us across centuries and geographies. Human beings inevitably die; Montaigne wrote that life is about learning how to do so. There could be no more interesting subject. But I did not expect these connections between the Civil War past and the 21st-century present to assert themselves as forcefully as they did in 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic represented an assault upon much of what we had taken for granted about our modern world, demonstrating how little control we actually have over our lives and destinies. We had felt almost smugly complacent when we compared ourselves to an earlier, less sophisticated, less technologically advanced world. We had come to believe that vaccines and antibiotics had conquered infectious disease, that the power of science had minimized our vulnerabilities. Even AIDS, which had challenged what medical historian Frank Snowden has called “an age of hubris,” seemed tractable once protease inhibitors emerged in the mid-1990s and changed the course of the disease. But with the scale and breadth and mystery of its deadly reach, SARS CoV-2 robbed us of our illusions of safety. Suddenly I recognized circumstances that seemed taken from my research, seemingly alien to the wealthy and modern society that I was confident had long since bypassed such suffering and inhumanity.
What do we do with the bodies? Civil War Americans had asked as they faced enormous and unanticipated numbers of casualties after Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. In the spring of 2020, New York City, the pandemic’s early U.S. epicenter, was confronting the same question as morgues filled, corpses were piled in refrigerated trailers, coffins became unavailable, funeral homes ran out of chemicals for embalming, crematoria could not keep up with demand, and the city began mass trench burials of the dead. The effort to ensure a “good death” that had animated so many Civil War soldiers returned as a matter of widespread concern when contagious patients, like so many of those soldiers, died away from family members desperate to share their last words and hours. And like soldiers who entrusted comrades or nurses with final messages to pass along to loved ones, or gazed at photographs of wives and children as they lay dying on the field, so too modern Americans improvised, saying goodbye to their kin not face-to-face but with iPads. In both eras, death’s customary and consoling rituals became impossible; the rupture of bereavement could not be countered with the affirmation of community and continuity.
Suddenly I recognized circumstances that seemed taken from my research, seemingly alien to the wealthy and modern society that I was confident had long since bypassed such suffering and inhumanity.Civil War soldiers and civilians alike worried that so much death and suffering would render them numb and unfeeling, demoralizing them in a literal 19th-century sense of the word—removing their moral compass. Indifference, they feared, would undermine their very humanity. “We have grown used to it,” nurse Cornelia Hancock ruefully observed of the suffering in a Union field hospital. Yet ultimately, Civil War Americans refused to grow inured to death, recognizing the ethical and emotional perils of numbness and committing themselves to public and private acts of memory and mourning that persist even into the present. Memorial Day, after all, is a Civil War invention. Yet today, as medical historian Richard Keller has observed about the pandemic, the United States is engaged in “an active process of forgetting.” “How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?” asked journalist Ed Yong in a March 2022 article in The Atlantic. We have not—at least not yet—confronted or processed the meaning and trauma of a million deaths.
We have been accustomed to a very different relationship with death than our 19th-century predecessors. Many of us in the United States had the luxury not to consider our mortality, to deny death and push it to the margins of consciousness, to postpone thinking about it until life’s very final days. Efficient and systematic, both medicine and the funeral industry whisked death’s evidences out of sight, aiding us in our desire to keep them out of mind. Nineteenth-century Americans, by contrast, believed that a consciousness of death enabled a more purposeful and intentional life. Constant awareness of its finitude made human existence more precious and gave each moment of life deeper meaning. Americans today seem to want little part of such awareness. In the summer of 2022, even as new Covid variants arose, we endeavored to deny not just death but disease itself, ending public health regulations and protocols, and insisting that life return to pre-pandemic “normal”—even as the virus continued to mutate, spread, and kill.
Epidemics and wars are very different phenomena. No one chooses a pandemic or expects it to have an uplifting purpose. By contrast, humans themselves create wars and seek to imbue them with redemptive meaning. The pandemic dead are victims, not heroes, no matter what courage they may have displayed as they faced their demise. But in spite of these contrasts, there are lessons for our time in the experience of Civil War Americans. Loss claims a presence; it remains insistent in the minds and lives of those who have been bereaved. The experience of profound and shocking vulnerability is not easily forgotten. Divisions amplified and underscored by crisis are not easily healed. We will live with the effects of this pandemic well into the future. It will have an aftermath no matter what efforts we may make at denial. Americans of the Civil War generation confronted mortality and tragedy in ways that can enlighten us still if we are willing to listen to their voices and seek to understand their lives. They solved what, in a poem called “The Armies of the Wilderness,” Herman Melville called “a riddle of death.” For us, it remains a puzzle.
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Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science by Catherine McNeur; Basic Books, 432 pp., $32.50
What drives the human impulse to collect and sort and categorize nature? In her new dual biography, Mischievous Creatures, Catherine McNeur explores this question as she traces the lives of entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris. The sisters, born at the very end of the 18th century, spent their adult lives collecting and observing and experimenting—lives that McNeur, an environmental historian, uses as the basis for her inquiry into American science in the early Republic, when professional societies were forming, and the lines dividing “amateur” enthusiasts and collectors from professional scientists were just being drawn.
Margaretta and Elizabeth grew up in Germantown, near Philadelphia, where they explored the nearby Wissahickon Creek, a tributary of the Schuylkill River, and were tutored by enthusiastic naturalists connected with the new Academy of Natural Sciences, founded in 1812 (with no female members). The sisters sorted and classified the plants and insects they found, and they formed their own networks as they corresponded and exchanged specimens with other naturalists. Out of their observations and explorations, they wrote and published scientific articles, as well as popular advice columns on how to apply science in domestic life, even on how women could modify their footwear so as to move unencumbered on a botanizing expedition.
Margaretta was interested specifically in agricultural pests. McNeur details a scientific controversy over the Hessian fly, which was devastating wheat crops. Margaretta observed the flies laying their eggs at the head of the wheat, where those eggs might therefore be preserved among the seeds. In 1840, her cousin Robert Hare presented her observations to the American Philosophical Society (again, no women). In the subsequent controversy over the validity of the findings, some critics dwelled on Margaretta’s gender. She responded to the attacks vigorously, eloquently, and publicly, defending her research.
McNeur interrogates each phase of the Morris sisters’ careers with the consideration of how scientific knowledge, supposedly so objective, is actually shaped by the question of who gets to participate, who gets credit, and who gets remembered—and how. Her approach is often enlightening, although at times the analysis becomes tangled. For example, Margaretta was delighted to receive a visit in 1849 from Louis Agassiz, the prominent Harvard zoologist. She had her gardener dig a trench around a fruit tree to demonstrate that the larvae of the 17-year cicadas, which would not emerge until 1851, were feeding on the tree’s roots. She convinced Agassiz that she was right, and one year later, he supported her for membership in the nascent American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his 1857 book, The Natural History of the United States of America, he referenced the life cycle of the cicada, “so fully traced by Miss M. H. Morris.”
Thus, Margaretta became one of the first two women elected to the Association. (The other was Maria Mitchell, an astronomer who discovered a comet in 1847.) But credit and memory are complicated. McNeur points out that although Agassiz was good to Margaretta, when we judge him by today’s standards, we remember him for his racist scientific theories. McNeur then applies a different and perhaps extreme standard in criticizing Margaretta’s failure to credit in her reports the gardener who dug the trench around the fruit tree. “Margaretta’s erasure of her gardener’s labor was not unique,” McNeur writes. “In stepping into the actively forming power structure of professional science, Margaretta intuited that she was expected to act like her peers in order to gain standing in their community. This meant knowing who was and was not supposed to get credit.” Credit preoccupies McNeur throughout her book—who got it and who didn’t, and what that pattern reveals about the forces that shaped 19th-century American science.
McNeur does a wonderful job of explicating the scientific jousts and disagreements in which Margaretta, particularly, took part. Along with her discovery that cicada larvae feed on tree roots, Margaretta noted that some larvae were much smaller than others. In her observations, she repeatedly posited that these smaller larvae belonged to a different species—one officially “described” in the literature, after the cicadas emerged in 1851, by two male scientists, who named it after themselves. “These two men, who certainly benefited from Margaretta’s close observations from a period of over three decades, have achieved a sort of scientific immortality as their names are repeated by cicada researchers and enthusiasts more than a century and a half later.” Thanks to McNeur’s detailed account of the cicada research in Scientific American in 2021, the species may now be renamed for its discoverer, finally bestowing on Margaretta the entomological immortality she earned.
This would be particularly fitting, since McNeur contends that as women, the sisters were “erased” from American natural history, cheated of the scientific prominence they deserved. They were not marginalized during their lives; their story includes appearances by many of the figures who defined 19th-century American natural science, from Agassiz to the prominent Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who corresponded extensively with Elizabeth and relied on her specimens. There is even a correspondence involving Charles Darwin. In 1855, fellow scientists solicited from Margaretta a letter in which she described her observation that water beetles can transport fish eggs from pond to pond. Darwin, who at the time was preoccupied with the study of species distribution, read Margaretta’s letter but rejected her observation, even though, as it turned out, she was correct. The two sisters were wealthy, white, and well connected, McNeur writes, but from the point of view of the historical record, and “they were practically invisible.”
Margaretta published under her own name in the scientific literature of the time, but Elizabeth, though she published prolifically, preferred the safety of pseudonyms. Writing as “E. S.” in the American Agriculturist, she offered recipes and food-handling advice and urged her readers to rise early in the morning. Margaretta also contributed to this publication, which was attempting to reach women, urging “that a basic understanding of insects and their life cycles could help housewives avoid a host of disasters.” Margaretta too sometimes employed a pseudonym, writing for the general public as “Old Lady.”
McNeur takes us through the sisters’ scientific careers but also through their lives, from the romantic poems they copied into their albums as young women to their increasing physical frailty as they lived together through their 60s. Most of all, she communicates their joy in the natural world. Readers will come away wishing that they could visit the sisters’ home and garden—a historic site that today, in keeping with McNeur’s theme of erasure, is marked by not so much as a plaque. At least Elizabeth has an alga species named for her—Cladophora morrisiae, named in her honor by a botanist at Trinity College in Dublin, William Henry Harvey, who like many other scientists received North American specimens from the well-networked and generous Miss Morris. And perhaps Margaretta will finally get her cicada.
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One evening in the early 1890s, after giving a concert in St. Louis, the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski asked his friend George Johns whether the city had “anything novel, anything out of the ordinary, a trifle bizarre” by way of nightlife. Johns hustled him over to the Castle Club, an opulent bordello run by Babe Connor. There, a dozen beauties danced “in little more than stockings” while a blind pianist played and a Black woman named Mammy Lou belted out bawdy songs. Paderewski was especially taken by one number, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” “He went to the piano and asked her to sing it again and again,” Johns’s son wrote in a memoir. “In a season or two the song, like many others that originated with Mammy Lou, got into vaudeville by way of some manager who visited Babe’s, and became a sensation.”
Johns’s timeline may be slightly off—“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” had already debuted on the vaudeville stage by the time Paderewski first visited St. Louis. But there’s no question that Mama Lou (as she is more commonly remembered) had been performing the song for years by then. Henry Sayers, who published “Ta-ra-ra” under his own name in 1891, talked openly of having first heard it at Babe’s.
If the history of American popular music were itself a song, the theft of Black melodies by white opportunists would be the refrain. But there may never have been an artist more serially or consequentially stolen from than Mama Lou. Many experts believe that she was the source not only of “Ta-ra-ra” but also of “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” a song so popular during the Spanish-American War that Europeans mistook it for the U.S. national anthem, as well as May Irwin’s “Bully Song” and several other ragtime-era smashes. And yet, Mama Lou remains a half-mythical figure—unrecorded, unphotographed, and only barely present in the documentary record. Until now, even those most invested in her story didn’t know that her real name was Louise Rogers.
When Babe Connor died in 1899, the St. Louis Republic devoted much of its obituary to her musical legacy, describing the Castle Club as a kind of unacknowledged hit factory. The author praised Connor for “sponsor[ing]” early versions of both “Ta-ra-ra” and “A Hot Time,” as well as “Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose,” “Mamie, Come Kiss Your Honey Boy,” and “I’m a Natural Born Gambler, and That Ain’t No Lie,” but he credited the performance of those songs only to “hired singers.” Mama Lou did earn a mention in a 1909 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, though she is described almost anonymously, in passives and the past tense, as though obscurity itself were her identity: “A negro woman, whose name is unknown to fame, is declared to have invented ragtime in St. Louis in 1888. … It soon became a fad with young men to visit the slums to hear ‘Mammy,’ as she was called, sing her new music.” This was laziness masquerading as reverence; Mama Lou was still alive and still singing at the time.
By the middle decades of the 20th century, the name Mama Lou had started appearing in popular histories of American music. But the belatedness and gauzy exoticism of these tributes did little to demythologize her. As David Ewen, the author of biographies of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, wrote, “She seemed to dig deep inside her entrails for the songs of her race that she emitted like some mighty lamentation.” At some point in the past 25 years, writers began introducing bits of biographical information about her, including a name: Mama Lou was now Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine, a Santo Domingo native with an improbable British accent. But that’s just more myth; there’s no trace of that name or anything like it in contemporaneous documents.
Mama Lou did leave a few genuine glimpses of herself in the archives. And now that those documents have been digitized and are keyword-searchable, she can at least be reunited with her real name.
For his 1942 book Lost Chords, Douglas Gilbert asked a veteran St. Louis journalist to compile a dossier of old-timers’ recollections of Mama Lou. From their narratives he described her as “short, fat,” “often belligerent, and always herself. … She wore a calico dress, gingham apron, and head bandanna, and nine tenths of her songs were obscene.” The old-timers recalled that Mama Lou eventually parted ways with Babe, opening “in direct opposition with a house in Lucas Avenue, establishing there what one might call the wellspring of the ’90s’ popular songs.” That passing reference to Lucas turns out to be an important clue. A 1912 article in the St. Louis Star describes a brothel at 2636 Lucas where the proprietor, “Mamma Lou, a colored woman,” sang for her customers. As far as I know, that’s the only time her professional name appeared in print while she was alive.
Mama Lou did leave a few genuine glimpses of herself in the archives. And now that those documents have been digitized and are keyword-searchable, she can at least be reunited with her real name.According to the 1910 federal census, 2636 Lucas was a “boarding house” operated by Louise Rodgers. Every city directory from 1908 to 1914 places her there as well, the only discrepancy being the spelling of her name (Louisa Rogers). A further search of the censuses for that name and its variants reveals that as early as 1900, Louisey/Louisa Rodgers was running a “lodging house” at 2312 Chestnut Street—with eight young, single women as tenants. That’s the piece of evidence that closes the case: in 1898, Babe Connor had moved her entire operation to “the Palace,” a double house at 2310 and 2312 Chestnut.
The picture that emerges is pretty clear. Newspaper searches for “Lou Rogers” find her present at the Castle Club as early as 1888. After the move to the Palace—and contrary to Gilbert’s account that Mama Lou competed with her former boss—the two remained business partners until Babe’s death in 1899. Mama Lou then continued running the Palace at the same location for seven more years. In the 1906 city directory, Louisa Rogers is still listed at 2312 Chestnut. A newspaper ad from that same year announced that all the contents of the “the elegantly furnished mansion of the late Madam Babe Connors”—including brass beds, crystal chandeliers, “25 Magnificent Mantel and Pier Mirrors,” and five pianos—would be auctioned off at the Chestnut address. Mama Lou didn’t open her own house on Lucas until about 1908, by which time it could hardly have been “the wellspring of the ’90s’ popular songs.” But, of course, she was still performing.
To be clear, no one is arguing that Mama Lou composed every song that has been attributed to her. She probably adapted much of her material from folk traditions—African-American, African, and others. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” specifically, appears to have European antecedents and may be centuries old. The argument is that Mama Lou was the proximate source, the inspiration; she supplied the infectious renditions that the Castle Club’s white patrons transcribed and took to the publishers, and to the bank.
In the case of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” that argument is a slam dunk. Elsewhere, a little circumspection is probably in order. An 1894 newspaper item asserting that “Mamie, Come Kiss Your Honey Boy” was “one of Babe Conner’s St. Louis plantation songs” may indeed be evidence that the vaudeville star May Irwin swiped it from Mama Lou. Or it may be evidence that the mythology was already at work—that any hit song of the early ragtime era might be attributed to “Babe’s place” in the same way that any clever quote might be attributed to Mark Twain. The United States in the 1890s had no shortage of Black saloons, Black piano thumpers, and aspiring song mongers. What are the odds that one St. Louis joint was “the wellspring”?
Of course, Mark Twain gets credit for things he didn’t say because of things he did say. The Castle Club wasn’t just any joint; it was famous, and bound to attract song hunters. St. Louis was also, at exactly Mama Lou’s moment, cultivating a syncopated sound that would change American music forever. Some historians believe that Tom Turpin, the first Black composer of a published “rag,” was one of Babe Connor’s house pianists, and it’s quite possible that he pulled shifts as Mama Lou’s accompanist.
Clearly, Mama Lou was brilliant and singular: she wouldn’t be so stubbornly, vividly present in narrated histories of the Gay Nineties if she hadn’t sung her way into people’s memories. Even if her only contribution to American culture was the introduction of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” she’d still be grossly underacknowledged. But I think she has a strong claim on “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” too. Theodore Metz, the original copyright holder, insisted that he’d written the music in 1886, then titled it when the train he was riding rolled past a bucket brigade that was trying to extinguish the flames consuming a log cabin. He also patronized the Castle Club, and some of his contemporaries—including the composer George M. Cohan and the legendary Sigmund Spaeth, whose ability to trace melodies to their sources earned him the title Tune Detective—suspected that he’d first heard it there. “Although there is much conflicting legend about ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,’ ” Alain Locke, the dean of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in 1936, “all the stories agree in at least one particular,—that it is a polished-up version of a less polite Negro cabaret song and dance from St. Louis.”
The Castle Club wasn’t just any joint; it was famous, and bound to attract song hunters. St. Louis was also, at exactly Mama Lou’s moment, cultivating a syncopated sound that would change American music forever.As far as Locke was concerned, there was more at stake in the debate over authorship than who deserved royalties. Metz’s claim was an erasure not only of Black creativity but also of an entire chapter in American musical history. “The importance of this is not merely to document the Negro source of a tune that after all is no musical gem,” Locke wrote, “but to show that ragtime, like its successor, jazz, is a child of the Mississippi bends and levees, and Memphis and St. Louis in particular.”
On a Saturday night in September 1891, a young man known as Sporting George stabbed 16-year-old Nellie Rogers in an alley in South St. Louis, just a couple of blocks from the Castle Club. She died five days later from her wounds. At the coroner’s inquest, her mother, Lou Rogers, said she’d first heard about the attack when Nellie’s sister “came running down to Babe’s after me, and says to come out, Nellie was cut.” It’s unfathomably sad that a few anguished sentences about her daughter’s murder—“she was nothing but a child”—are the only recorded words attributed to Mama Lou, other than song lyrics. But those are Mama Lou’s words. By linking herself to Babe’s place, she left no doubt about which Lou Rogers she was. And that, in turn, links Mama Lou to an extended family, various addresses, and a death certificate.
Louise Rogers was buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery on March 30, 1918. There are almost no markers in the “commons” area of section 30, where she lies in row four, grave 298; it’s a potter’s field, for the poor and indigent, who were interred west-to-east as they arrived. Her mother is buried right next to her, because they died only a few days apart.
I disagree with Alain Locke that “A Hot Time” is “no musical gem.” I find it irresistible. Part of my enthusiasm for it may be due to positive associations. I live in Lawrence, Kansas, about a mile from the KU football stadium, and on windless Saturdays in the fall, I can sit on my back porch and hear the team score touchdowns: there’s a roar, followed by some sounds from the PA announcer, followed by the strains of the marching band’s rendition of “A Hot Time in the Old Town.” If the point-after kick is successful, I hear it again in double-time. My brother, who played trumpet in the marching band 30 years ago, told me that he never knew the song’s name; the sheet music just said “Touchdown” and “Extra Point.”
In old books and newspapers, melodies are often called “airs,” and I’m sorry that usage has fallen out of favor. I can think of no better term for “A Hot Time” as it floats up the hill and into my back yard. It’s a beautiful air, a welcome change in the atmosphere. Mama Lou may have no copyrights to her name, no living descendants, not even a headstone, but on autumn afternoons when the Jayhawks are at home, I can hear her from a mile away.
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The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times by Wolfram Eilenberger; Penguin Press, 400 pp., $32
We tend to think of philosophers as solitary creatures. Whether it be Diogenes or Socrates, Spinoza or Rousseau, Thoreau or Nietzsche, the philosopher is by necessity a loner. Several recent books, however, remind us that philosophers can also travel in packs. Not the packs that wear lanyards at academic conferences, mind you, but those that form in spite (or defiance) of the academy. David Edmonds’s The Murder of Professor Schlick and Karl Sigmund’s Exact Thinking in Demented Times are sharp accounts of the Vienna Circle, the group of European thinkers who founded the club of logical positivism (one that their idol, Ludwig Wittgenstein, refused to join). Another pair of books—Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals and Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something—offer insightful and often moving portraits of Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Elizabeth Anscombe: four equally brilliant friends who, against the relativistic grain of their male Oxbridge colleagues, variously insisted on a universal foundation for morality.
A few years ago, writer and philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger enjoyed commercial and critical success for Time of the Magicians. The time in question was the decade following the end of the First World War; the magicians who dominated it were Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Cassirer. Ultimately, these four thinkers had little in common apart from the German language and the shared goal of rethinking the purpose of philosophy. Thanks to this foursome, as Eilenberger argued in his vibrant and often gripping account, the 1920s became “philosophy’s great decade.”
With his new book, Eilenberger offers a sequel of sorts, moving from the 1920s to the period between 1933 and 1943, from magicians to visionaries, and from men to women. This time around, the dramatis personae are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand, and Simone Weil. Eilenberger pivots expertly among the four storylines, and his writing shimmers with the same intelligence and insight, sense of drama, and urgency that he brought to Time of the Magicians. His four magi, emerging from the material, moral, social, and political wreckage wrought by the First World War, grasped that philosophy had to be utterly reimagined. Similarly, his four visionaries, pursuing their philosophical studies as the world lurched toward the Second World War, found themselves increasingly preoccupied with, well, the vision thing. As Eilenberger writes, all four women, despite their wildly different backgrounds, shared a common sensibility: “They simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been.”
With a deft hand, Eilenberger traces how the two Simones—equally accomplished and ambitious, and recent graduates of France’s elite universities—traveled to Germany to pursue radically different philosophical projects, while Arendt, the gifted student (and lover) of Heidegger, scrambled to flee that same country on the Nazi assumption of power. Meanwhile, Alisa Rosenbaum, following her history degree from Petrograd State University, quit communist Russia for capitalist America, where she took the name Ayn Rand and the bus to Hollywood for fame, fortune, and most important, intellectual influence.
Even Eilenberger, despite his even-handed interpretations, seems by turns impatient with and staggered by Rand’s potted version of the Nietzschean superman.From there, Eilenberger recounts what happened when history was unleashed on these four thinkers and how it shaped their thought. Arendt’s brutal transformation from a German citizen into a stateless person, indeed a pariah, laid the foundation for her landmark works on the human condition in an age of totalitarianism. Beauvoir, through her polyamorous (and paradoxically exclusive) relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as her experience in occupied France, crafted the fundamentals of existentialism that Sartre would later adopt and assume as his own. Weil, with her stints as a factory worker in Paris, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, a farmhand in southern France, and finally a member of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement in London, turned from the political to the mystical, her last writings toggling between proposing policies for postwar France and starving herself to death while a patient in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
In a way, Rand was the philosophical joker in this deck of remarkable individuals. No doubt she had as compelling a vision as did Arendt, Beauvoir, and Weil. But whereas their visions were many-faceted, Rand’s was as unwavering as it was unappealing. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, Rand had just one vision and it was the wrong one. Even Eilenberger, despite his even-handed interpretations, seems by turns impatient with and staggered by Rand’s potted version of the Nietzschean superman and will to power. “What might appear to common sense as a severe mental distortion, if not actual narcissistic personality disorder,” he writes with admirable restraint, “in Rand’s world represents the ideal state of every ego.”
Eilenberger rightly stresses the philosophical and ethical urgency that fired the writing of each of these thinkers, but the urgency he brings to his own prose at times leads to historical and biographical errors. To cite just a few: Jean Grenier was not a “publisher” but an essayist; the term existentialism was not “coined by the arts pages of a newspaper” but by the Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel; Beauvoir was enrolled not at the École normale supérieure but at the Sorbonne; Albert Camus attended not a general rehearsal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies but instead opening night (where he first introduced himself to Sartre). Bernard Lazare was not a sociologist but a literary critic, Dreyfus defender, and Zionist theorist (and a principal figure in Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism). Finally, the number of civilians caught up in the 1940 Exodus in France was more than twice the three million stated in the book.
The reader might also wonder why Eilenberger chose to bring together these four thinkers, especially Rand. After all, in the books on the Vienna Circle and Oxbridge thinkers, the main characters were friends, colleagues, or at least aware (and mostly wary) of one another. The “visionaries,” however, were largely strangers to one another. Although Eilenberger presents a famous and famously short encounter between Beauvoir and Weil, none of his subjects ever spent significant time in the physical or intellectual company of the others, with one important exception that Eilenberger fails to mention: in The Human Condition (1958), Arendt cited with great admiration Weil’s work on the condition of the working class.
But these hesitations soon recede as Eilenberger sweeps us up in his otherwise masterly account, which reminds us not only, as he writes, that “thought that merits the name … is a very lonely business,” but also that thinking is a devilishly difficult business, one that demands our attention.
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For more than two years, I have lived in the lower level of Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, which sits on a quiet residential block in downtown Savannah, Georgia. I had studied O’Connor’s life and work in graduate school, and it was my research that enabled me to recognize the gray façade of the author’s first residence during a routine Zillow search. This happened one morning in late September 2020, at the height of the pandemic. I was subletting an apartment in Savannah, spending my days scrolling through the same stock of dismal, overpriced rentals. Spotting the listing for the garden apartment on Lafayette Square, I imagined fate at play. A week later, I signed the lease.
Because the house functions as a museum devoted to her youth, I am continually reminded of O’Connor. Outside my front door stands an iron placard dating her time in the house (1925–1938) and detailing her major literary accomplishments (three O. Henry Awards and a posthumous National Book Award for her collected short stories). Occasionally, her admirers peer into my windows or ring my doorbell, mistakenly believing that the entrance to my apartment is the starting point for the weekend tours that run through the rest of the house. When they catch me coming or going, they ask questions that I have trouble answering succinctly, given my extensive knowledge of the writer. On the days when I encounter none of her fans directly, I hear the amplified voices of trolley-tour drivers saying her name as they wheel around Lafayette Square, which is also home to the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, where O’Connor was baptized and received her first communion. Once, I opened my mailbox to find junk mail addressed to Mr. Flannery O’Connor.
The narrow, three-story house was built in 1856. For the next century, the space I now rent was a dirt basement. Prior to Savannah’s liberation by General William T. Sherman’s troops in December 1864, the basement may have functioned as living quarters for enslaved people. A brick fireplace, sealed long ago, offers the only tangible clue to this history, though research indicates that enslaved people did reside in the lower levels of many Savannah townhouses. Newlyweds Edward and Regina O’Connor purchased the house in 1923, and in 1925, their only child, Flannery, was born. Though the family left Savannah in 1938, briefly staying in Atlanta before settling in the middle-Georgia town of Milledgeville, the house stayed under the ownership of a moneyed cousin, Katie Semmes, who lived next door and who helped the O’Connors financially. Upon her death in 1958, Semmes gave the house to the 33-year-old author, who opted to seize its investment potential and turn its floors into rental units. This is when my apartment came into being.
Real estate was not a foreign venture for O’Connor. Her father had worked in the business until his premature death from lupus (the same disease that afflicted her), and her mother began managing rental properties a short time later, likely out of financial necessity. I have read enough of O’Connor’s letters—published and unpublished—to determine that she probably deferred to her mother in matters of renovating and managing the rental units in her childhood home. Her lupus, diagnosed when she was 25, had progressed considerably by the late 1950s, relegating her to crutches. She devoted her limited store of energy to her fiction, her correspondence with friends, and her Catholic faith. Even so, when I stand amid the gold-flecked laminate countertops and retro cabinetry of my kitchen, I sometimes wonder which of the O’Connor women approved its design.
But this story is incomplete. Narrative accounts of the rear exterior of the O’Connor home omit the existence of a small brick dependency, a single-story carriage house that edged the southern property line.Mine is the only rental unit remaining from the home’s three-decade stint as an apartment building. In the early 1990s, the Flannery O’Connor Home Foundation, focused on preserving the writer’s legacy in Savannah, restored the residence to its Depression-era state, re-creating paint colors and room configurations that a young Flannery would have recognized and opening the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Museum. The basement was retained as an apartment to provide the foundation with an additional source of income. Because the low-level unit has its own street entrance, tenants could come and go quietly, without intruding into the museum’s affairs. According to Hugh Brown, the Armstrong State College professor who initiated the fundraising campaign to buy the house and establish it as a literary landmark, the apartment also held the least historical value to the foundation’s mission. “In the O’Connor days,” he wrote, “the basement was used for storage.”
The outdoor area at the rear of the house was a different matter. During O’Connor’s childhood, the walled space was part garden and part chicken yard. There was also a playhouse where Mary Flannery, as she was then called, is said to have convened audiences, entertained friends, and read her earliest stories aloud. Biographers and scholars have taken care to preserve the memory of this playhouse. Relying on recollections supplied by O’Connor’s childhood playmates, the biographer Brad Gooch has described the structure as “gazebo-like” and “fitted into a corner of the back yard.” But this story is incomplete. Narrative accounts of the rear exterior of the O’Connor home omit the existence of a small brick dependency, a single-story carriage house that edged the southern property line. Records preserved by the Georgia Historical Society, in downtown Savannah, indicate that this structure was built prior to 1888 and existed through at least 1955—and that for a portion of O’Connor’s early youth, this dwelling was occupied by a woman named Emma Jackson.
According to public records, Jackson was a domestic worker who was in her mid- to late-50s when she began her employment with the O’Connor family. She is listed as “nurse” and “maid” in the 1930 U.S. census and Savannah city directory, respectively, indicating that both childcare and housework fell among her duties. As a Black woman in the segregated South, she likely filled these roles for a meager weekly or monthly wage, a sum devised to strip any agency a domestic employee like Jackson might have had over the number of hours she worked each day. Such arrangements were not unusual at the time. By 1935 (the year Flannery O’Connor turned 10), 60 percent of urban, white southern families living above the poverty line employed at least one full-time domestic worker, and that position was typically held by a Black woman. That same year, the Social Security Act—its passage notably influenced by southern politicians—codified the exploitation of domestic laborers, as well as agricultural workers, by excluding them from the economic protections it promised. This led to the intended effect of barring Black southerners from achieving basic financial security—and intergenerational wealth—while granting many southern whites the possibility of increased class mobility. The implication of this history is that when Jackson was employed by the O’Connors and living on their property, she was most likely underpaid, overworked, and without many alternatives.
Biographical accounts of O’Connor’s childhood fail to include Jackson’s role with the family. Visitors to the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home do not learn her name. Until 2022, when the scholar Patricia Ann West became the first to surface records pertaining to Jackson’s employment with the O’Connors, scholarly interpretations of the author’s early proximity to Black servitude relied on supposition. Even now, many of the facts of Jackson’s life and her tenure as O’Connor’s caretaker remain unknown. Part of the problem has to do with records pertaining to Jackson’s presence and influence—poorly documented to begin with and unavailable for public discovery until the 2000s. Adhering to the 72-year rule, the National Archives did not release 1930 census records until 2002. Meanwhile, the only publicly available record of Jackson’s tenancy in the O’Connor home was in the hardbound tomes of the Savannah city directory; its separate listings for white and Black residents made it even more difficult to link Jackson with the O’Connor household. These circumstances, combined with the scattered and privately controlled nature of materials related to O’Connor’s life, meant that biographical study of the author was, for many years, limited to a carefully curated selection of the author’s letters and the recollections of her friends, family members, and colleagues. Which is another way of saying that white identities—the author’s and those of her editors and other close relations—have played a crucial role in shaping the popular narratives around O’Connor’s lived experience.
In 2014, Emory University acquired O’Connor’s private papers, blowing open the world of O’Connor scholarship and democratizing access to several documents referencing Jackson and her relationship to the family. That West is the only researcher to have included her in conversations about the author’s childhood—and so recently as 2022—is a testament to the vastness of the archive and its fragmentary store of material related to Jackson.
This is why tourists visit the childhood home: to be regaled with tales about the author’s first habits and affections, to trace the evolution of her talent and persona, to find Flannery O’Connor in the world of Mary Flannery.Whether or not O’Connor should be revered for her fictional portrayals of racism in the Jim Crow South has long been a point of contention among both scholars and readers. Some early critics of her work argued that her renderings of Black characters were ill-defined caricatures. Others applauded her emphasis on the moral failures of white southerners. Not until the 1979 publication of The Habit of Being, a collection of the author’s private letters, did the conversation about O’Connor’s fictional renderings of southern race relations shift to include her personal stance on the issue. The book, which was edited by O’Connor’s longtime friend Sally Fitzgerald, preserves the author’s casual use of the N-word, her routine jokes about the Black laborers on her mother’s farm, and, famously, her refusal to entertain the idea of welcoming James Baldwin into the living room of her rural Georgia home: “In New York it would be nice to meet him,” she wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, “here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair.” But for all the incriminating evidence that The Habit of Being introduces, the book represents only a portion of O’Connor’s writing on race and integration. Notably, it omits a substantial number of letters she wrote during her teens and early 20s, many of which became publicly accessible through the Emory archive. In 2022, a selection of these was finally published in Dear Regina: Flannery O’Connor’s Letters from Iowa, though many others remain discoverable only through in-person visits to Emory’s Rose Library. (O’Connor’s literary estate rarely affords publication rights from this store of material, which means that scholarly discussions about much of the author’s early correspondence relies on summation.)
In trying to reconcile the conflict between O’Connor’s racism and the moral aims of her fiction, most scholars argue that the writer was largely a product of her time and place. But only a few have explored the ways in which Savannah’s racial and class divides shaped those early years—despite the availability of new documents related to O’Connor’s youth. Instead, they focus on O’Connor’s adult response to the civil rights movement. During the early 1960s, she penned some of her most vitriolic commentary on race and integration in letters to friends, including this declaration, made in the last year of her life: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway.” This statement was published for the first time in 2020 in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor. And yet, other archival documents show that O’Connor’s deepest feelings on race in America were formed long before the spring and summer of 1963—long before the Birmingham uprising, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington. Indeed, O’Connor revealed her thoughts on integration as far back as the early 1940s, when she was a teenager visiting New York City. Writing to her mother, she remarked that after using the integrated restrooms, she might be in need of a physician’s assessment.
It has long been part of the O’Connor story to link the precocious creativity of her youth to the kind of woman and artist she became. This is why tourists visit the childhood home: to be regaled with tales about the author’s first habits and affections, to trace the evolution of her talent and persona, to find Flannery O’Connor in the world of Mary Flannery. In this context, it is disingenuous to overlook the forces that shaped her racial thinking during those formative years—and to ignore the part that Emma Jackson may have played in this story.
Along the western exterior wall of my neighbors’ two-story garage, I can see what looks like the faint outline of the carriage house that once stood in the O’Connors’ back yard. This is all that remains of Emma Jackson’s home. By the time the Flannery O’Connor Home Foundation was determining what to do with this space, there was no carriage house to consider refurbishing, no chicken coop to populate with new birds, no wooden playhouse to exhibit. Hugh Brown (of Armstrong State) had expressed a desire to re-create the playhouse, but the idea was scrapped in favor of a traditional Savannah garden, which is lush with shades of green and manicured to spotlight a small stone statue of Saint Francis.
The foundation does not employ a regular groundskeeper, so in my short time in residence, I have tended this garden. I have lined its circular pathway with river rocks, trimmed its overgrowth, cleared it of fallen leaves and the occasional limb dropped by an ancient dogwood tree—the only flowering thing on the grounds that dates to the author’s youth. I have filled bare patches of soil with jonquil bulbs and aucuba harvested from my grandmother’s yard. In empty pots, I have planted oleander and dipladenia. This outdoor refuge was created in honor of the author—the “Flannery O’Connor Garden,” reads a plaque that was buried by leafy ground cover when I first moved in—but when I am yanking weeds from the root-laced earth or cutting back the jasmine that wends along the southern wall, I like to imagine that this small patch of land belongs to me. Because the garden is not open to visitors, because it bears little resemblance to the back yard O’Connor knew, I think of the place as more private sanctuary than relic of the author’s youth. Though it is that, too.
Here is the story you are most likely to hear about this back yard: it was where O’Connor learned to raise chickens and where she realized her affection for them. (Her passion for fowl would culminate in her collecting at least 40 peacocks, which roamed the grounds of Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, where she lived for most of her life.) One of those chickens, a buff Cochin bantam, famously had the ability to walk backward. In 1931, when the author was six years old, Cousin Katie Semmes recruited Pathé News, a British producer of documentaries and newsreels, to visit Savannah and film the bird performing its trick. You can still see the short film, the bird walking forward and backward, at one point appearing beneath what looks like the wooden staircase that once led to the main house. The staircase that exists now is metal and rusting, and the space underneath would be no good for showing off animal tricks, occupied as it is by an air conditioning unit.
It has been erroneously reported that the talented chicken was of the frizzle variety, so named because its cowlicked feathers give it the appearance of having received an electric shock. Sally Fitzgerald seems to have initiated this fallacy in an endnote to the Library of America’s Collected Works, which she edited. Possibly Fitzgerald was perpetuating a myth that O’Connor had conjured on her own. Or maybe the author’s mother had recalled the story to Fitzgerald this way. In any case, the video evidence proves otherwise. The chicken’s feathers are smooth, gleaming in the sunshine that young Flannery squints toward as she holds the squirming bird. And yet, I have come to believe that whoever first mischaracterized the chicken in question was capturing an essential truth of O’Connor’s history.
She writes of her mother’s explanation for why the races don’t socialize in the South. Though she bemoans the loss of her afternoon chicken hunts with Emma, she concludes the piece by accepting her new reality.In the summer of 2018, I found myself in the manuscript library at Emory, the last and longest stop on a journey that had taken me all over Georgia, to various sites associated with the author. I was in the second year of my MFA program and had persuaded one of my professors, a biographer, to oversee my work as an independent study, the focus of which had begun to muddy and shift amid mountains of material. By the time I reached the primary archive, I had opened my research to anything, everything.
One day, I came across an early and unpublished manuscript titled “Frizzly Chicken,” a story that captures a sliver of Emma Jackson. In the piece, written from the perspective of the author as a child, O’Connor describes Emma as both playmate and nanny, the person who turns spoonfuls of grits into flying birds and, in later years, chaperones after-school adventures. One such adventure involves searching for a frizzle chicken. The two of them go looking every afternoon, usually at the home of Emma’s friend Belle Williames. O’Connor loves these visits and writes of the home’s wooden windows and the cracks in the floorboards that afford her a view of chickens nesting below. This is the kind of existence she desires for herself.
Soon, though, O’Connor’s hunt for a frizzle chicken ends. After she drinks some water from a well on Williames’s property, her mother chastises her, forbids her to return, and drags her to the doctor, who gives her a shot. Her mother tells her that she has begun to speak and behave like Emma and Belle and that she is too old now to be spending so much time with Black women.
Here, the piece becomes a child’s reflection on her newfound understanding of a racialized world. It is because of the Civil War, O’Connor says, that she can’t visit Belle anymore. She writes of being called a Yankee by an aunt after expressing her preference for eating in the kitchen with Emma. And she writes of her mother’s explanation for why the races don’t socialize in the South. Though she bemoans the loss of her afternoon chicken hunts with Emma, she concludes the piece by accepting her new reality and vowing to keep her place inside it.
“Frizzly Chicken” is a dark and devastating story of how whiteness establishes a dominant place in a child’s mind. And yet, it is as linguistically innocent as it is psychologically defining—an oddly pure articulation of the racism and racial intimacy that long characterized the South. The piece is undated, but it is filed alongside a series of high school and college assignments as well as several short stories written during O’Connor’s time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1945–1947). She would have been reading Eudora Welty by then. It is not unreasonable to imagine that the eight-page piece was her own exercise in the kind of first-person characterization and voice Welty made famous in her 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green. And yet, “Frizzly Chicken” is distinctly autobiographical, referencing not only Emma but also the family members who populated O’Connor’s youth—her veteran father and overprotective mother; her Milledgeville aunts, Katie and Mary, who irritated each other for sport; her aunt Margaret Hynes, who lived with Katie Semmes in the house next door. In this sense, the piece resembles the juvenilia collected in O’Connor’s archives and celebrated by her biographers—the clever critiques of her “Relitives,” for example, that her encouraging father often helped her type.
When I first read the story, I felt certain that it contained more fact than fiction. By that stage in my research, I had encountered the name Emma in other archival documents, in references that mirrored what O’Connor had written in “Frizzly Chicken.” The first of these appeared early in my review of the Emory materials, while I was immersed in Sally Fitzgerald’s notes. In the 1980s, Regina O’Connor authorized Fitzgerald to write a biography (never published) of her daughter and granted countless interviews. In one of these, documented by Fitzgerald on an index card, Regina discussed a servant named Emma who had cared for Flannery in her youth, even accompanying the O’Connors for a portion of their short stay in Atlanta, just before the family’s permanent move to Milledgeville. The recorded memory is brief. While Regina was undergoing a mastectomy, she sent Flannery to stay with her sisters in Milledgeville, where the girl was tended to by Emma. Regina instructed Emma not to allow Flannery to drink from a local spring and not to take her along when she visited with friends. Emma, Regina told Fitzgerald, did both. Fitzgerald recorded the memory without further remark—a departure from her custom of interpreting most everything Regina said—though it seemed clear to me that the anecdote had been told with a kind of bitter humor, with Emma the incorrigible servant at the butt of a white woman’s joke. I photographed the notecard, front and back, as was my habit, and moved on.
Days later, I came across the name again, this time while reading O’Connor’s letters to her mother. In one of these, sent from Iowa City in the spring of 1947, O’Connor wished her mother well on a trip to visit Cousin Katie in Savannah. She wrote, “Hope you get to see Loretta—also Emma. I would like to hear how Emma is—or if Emma is.” Reading this letter only solidified the question that had been forming in my mind: Who was this Emma who had cared for the author in her youth? “Frizzly Chicken” provided no clear answer—it is much less evocative of the woman than of the environment she navigated.
It is tempting to call “Frizzly Chicken” an essay, resonant as it is with Regina’s memories of similar events. But I am wary of such speculation and not blind to the blurring of time and place that appears to occur in the piece. O’Connor’s reference to Aunt Margaret, for example, implies that the woman has died. In actuality, Margaret Hynes died shortly after O’Connor’s 18th birthday, long after the era documented in the piece. Such incongruities have led me to consider “Frizzly Chicken” an autobiographical short story. More than her published work—though that, too, captures shades of O’Connor’s lived experience—the story is rooted in reality, littered with verifiable facts. And it is an origin story, as foretelling of the adult O’Connor as the sweeter, more palatable tales that make up her juvenile narratives.
People seem to know certain things about O’Connor, whether or not they have read her work. She was funny. She collected peacocks. She loved to write about “freaks.” Sometimes they know these things before they learn that she was Catholic. Her fiction is bold, never quiet. It leaves impressions on college students forced to read from anthologies. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the most common entry point to her canon of two novels and 31 short stories, and, despite what some seasoned scholars have told me, I don’t think it is a bad place to start. The story centers on a God-fearing, out-of-touch woman—my favorite of O’Connor’s archetypes—who has been loosed from the security of her home environment. It’s an enticing premise, and O’Connor’s great themes of sin and redemption, of race and class in the segregated South, show themselves variously and memorably.
The story goes like this: The woman, a grandmother, is accompanying her son and his family on a road trip to Florida, and an escaped criminal known as the Misfit is heading in the same direction. The family takes a detour at the grandmother’s request to look for an antebellum home she once admired. (Old white ladies hunting for vestiges of a bygone era are standard O’Connor fare.) But the search is fruitless because the house, the grandmother suddenly remembers, stood in Tennessee and not in Georgia. Her son crashes the car (also the fault of the grandmother), at which point the Misfit and his gang come upon the family and execute each of its members. He saves the grandmother for last, allowing her a moment of clarity—grace, O’Connor called it. After the grandmother is dead, the Misfit tells his criminal companions, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
I particularly loved reading about the women, who embodied a world untouched by moonlight and magnolias, who gossiped and abused and thumped their Bibles across the page like hardened anti-Scarletts.The South that O’Connor conjures in this story—its willfully ungrammatical dialect, its “Christ-haunted” ethos—is somewhat exaggerated for effect, but it is immediately recognizable. Orienting her readers in a concrete realm was, she believed, necessary to their understanding of her mystical themes. “When the physical fact is separated from the spiritual reality,” she wrote, “the dissolution of belief is eventually inevitable.” O’Connor’s idiom is bound to the Bible Belt—the Protestant South and all its social peculiarities as she observed them—but her ultimate concern is injecting this world, often violently, with a supernatural and decidedly Catholic attitude. This approach yields stories in which a child of late-night revelers baptizes himself by drowning in a muddy river, a woman is gored by a divine bull, and a traveling Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of an atheist farm girl.
My affection for O’Connor’s fiction began with her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), but it was her stories that made me a fan. When I first read them, toward the end of my 20s, I was stunned by their strangeness, by their wit and force and commitment to their own mystery. An O’Connor story, I realized, does not work to make itself understood. Occasionally, this meant that I, a person who wanted very badly to arrive at solid interpretations, felt stupid. But whatever difficulties I encountered in meaning were overshadowed by the thrill of discovering O’Connor’s characters. In all their eccentricities and primitive preoccupations, these people seemed plucked from her own milieu, and yet they were familiar to me, a southerner two generations removed. They took the shape of my paternal grandmother, who was so concerned with the manners of others that she seldom remembered her own, and the decorator in my hometown who, to spite his neighbors, cleared his front lawn of grass and replaced it with dirt mounds of bulwark proportions: never mind his own view when he could make theirs a little uglier. O’Connor’s characters were emphatically unlikable, possessing more pride than self-awareness, always stubbornly devoted to their own wrongheadedness. But I loved reading about them, particularly the women, who embodied a world untouched by moonlight and magnolias, who gossiped and abused and thumped their Bibles across the page like hardened anti-Scarletts. In these women, I saw O’Connor deconstructing conventional notions of gender. I saw her transforming the identity of whiteness—so prized in her society, so relentlessly reinforced by various systems—into an assortment of moral and spiritual failures. But I did not have to squint to see, alternatively, a southern writer too fluent in native ideologies to have escaped them.
I understand now that my expedition into O’Connor’s life and letters, my journey around Georgia in the summer of 2018, emerged from this recognition. My connection with the author and her work had intensified to the point that deeper questioning was necessary. This is what my independent study became: an interrogation into the facts of O’Connor’s worldview, into the realm of scholarship that seeks to explain (or explain away) that worldview, into the privileges that tend to facilitate the bonds between problematic artists and their fans. My relationship with the woman and her stories had been buoyed by what I believed we had in common—chronic illness and an interest in the inanities and complexities of southern manners, among other things. What did it mean to love, admire, identify with these parts of O’Connor’s work and persona without taking stock of the rest?
At the conclusion of my independent study, I submitted my obligatory essay, which documented my trek into all the questions I had resisted asking as a devoted reader of O’Connor’s fiction. In that piece, I wrote about my own southern upbringing. I wrote about how certain comportments and characters from my life appeared in O’Connor’s stories, how that had made me feel seen but not implicated in the problems of my society, how I had been missing the point. I wrote, too, about the fallible notion that art equals atonement, which is a mainstay in discussions—mostly among white scholars—of O’Connor’s racism. And I wrote about Emma, about “Frizzly Chicken,” and the truth that I believed the story revealed about the mundane origins of the author’s most profound failure. I earned an A for my work, a result that struck me as incongruous with the most personal of excavations, the kind of interpreting and reinterpreting that never finishes, or ought not to.
After I had moved into the basement apartment of O’Connor’s childhood home, after I had scrubbed years of mud from its lowest-lying windows and pruned the Asiatic jasmine that covered too much of the ground, after I had begun to feel at home, I continued to think about Emma. In my summer of steady research, I had not been able to determine her last name. That she had ever lived on the O’Connor property had not yet occurred to me, so I did not search the 1930 census—the only year that captured Flannery, then five years old, as a resident of Savannah. Instead I combed journal articles and biographies for references to Emma, hoping to verify her identity and relationship to O’Connor’s childhood with harder proof than what I had found in the archives. Patricia Ann West’s paper was not yet published, and my searching was going nowhere.
One of my mentors, a fiction writer, tells me that certain subjects grab hold of a writer and refuse to let go. I was sitting on my sofa one afternoon, doing nothing on the Internet, mentally scolding myself for wasting time, when I finally got the idea that had been eluding me. I paid for a subscription to Ancestry.com and began searching census records for the O’Connor family. That’s where I found her: Emma Jackson, 58 years old in 1930, born in Georgia to Georgia-born parents. She is listed as single but might have been widowed. She never attended school and could not read or write. When I followed these facts to the Georgia Historical Society, I copied her listing in the city directory: “Jackson, Emma, maid Mrs. E.F. O’Connor, r, 207 Charlton.” I asked the person at the front desk what r meant. “Rear,” she told me, transforming what I knew of the house’s back yard. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from 1888 through 1954 said more about the scale and construction of the carriage house, and when I returned home and stepped into the garden, I found what I guessed to be its shape marked on my neighbors’ two-story garage. This is all the evidence that remains of Jackson’s life at O’Connor’s childhood home—the faint outline of a small, single-story building that, at certain hours of the day, is hidden by shadows.
Those who influence and populate a famous life are often stripped of their own narratives, understood only in terms of their proximity to the subject deemed worthy of interest. That fact becomes an injustice when the person’s lived experience is also one of subordination. In 1930, the U.S. government, the City of Savannah, and the O’Connor family defined Emma Jackson by her subjugated status—servant, nurse, maid. In her lightly fictionalized recollection, Flannery O’Connor further debased Jackson’s memory by rendering her as a tool for her own racial (and racist) awakening. In the reminiscences of Regina O’Connor, recorded by Sally Fitzgerald, no effort was taken to preserve Emma’s surname. And in historical accounts of the author’s first residence, Jackson’s carriage house is absent, the space it once occupied reimagined as a childhood idyll. This is how Emma Jackson was erased from Flannery O’Connor’s story. Returning her from obscurity becomes an exercise in parsing untrustworthy or incomplete information—documents preserved by systems of government that cared little about Black lives and enduring stories that were first told through white perspectives. I can tell you the things “Frizzly Chicken” says about Jackson. She was a Baptist. She had a nephew, George, who built the chicken coop that stood in what I’ll call her front yard. Her brother-in-law lived in Alabama. She didn’t chew tobacco. I can’t promise that any of these details are true.
I like to hope that somewhere, maybe in Georgia, maybe even in Savannah, there is a grandchild or great-grandchild or other distant relation of Jackson’s who can recall the woman more fully, who might be willing to revive her history both in the context of the O’Connor family and outside it. I have tried to find such a person. Through public records, I have traced a number of Emma Jacksons and encountered the possibilities of the woman’s life. Probably she was born somewhere in middle Georgia. Probably she connected with the O’Connor family through Regina’s Milledgeville ties. In one version, she is widowed with two children—Joseph and Laila—both grown by the time she relocated to Savannah and to the carriage house. In another, she spent her final years in Florida, caring for her aging aunt. In yet another, her life ends in a Savannah nursing home. If she was never married or never took a man’s last name, her parents may have been Benjamin and Louise or Thomas and Eddie or Green and Ellen. I’ve tried to confirm these details for so long because Emma Jackson should be remembered to students of O’Connor’s biography, to those who visit her childhood home. She should be remembered for who she was beyond the author’s narrow rendering—a difficult task, given the paucity of public information surrounding her. And yet, I believe in memory despite an absence of hard facts. I believe that in all that we do not know of her, Emma Jackson’s story becomes her own.
The post Origin Stories appeared first on The American Scholar.
One brisk evening last fall, I took my 15-year-old daughter out for a driving lesson near our home in Portland, Oregon. We were in our old Ford pickup, and I was cheering her smooth downshifts and complimenting her feel for the clutch and gas when she made a left onto an unlit street. Suddenly, we were surrounded by tents, piles of garbage, grocery carts, old bicycles. A few figures sat in the shadows. Ahead and to the right, a man squatted in the dark, firing a blowtorch over something near the ground.
When a car approached from the other direction with no room to pass, my daughter braked, then stalled. The car stopped a few feet in front of us, headlights in our eyes. “Mom, Mom, I can’t reverse, and I can’t get around him,” my daughter whispered. The driver of the car in front of us leaned out his window. One of the figures on the street approached. They exchanged words, and something else.
I said to my daughter, “It’s okay. It’s fine. We’re fine.”
I am a physician who treats addiction for a living. Many of my patients sleep in cheap motels or shelters or live in tents on dark city streets. Some of them use blowtorches to vaporize and inhale their drugs. I wanted my daughter to know that the shadows hid men and women just trying to survive, and that just because the scene looked scary, it didn’t mean the people were. I wanted to be the kind of person who saw past the darkness, who could tell her we should love the man with the blowtorch like our brother.
But I didn’t love him. He was scary, and as we sat there in the cab of our old red Ford, my palms got sweaty. I felt small, unprepared. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to feel safe.
In his 2021 book, The Least of Us, journalist Sam Quinones documents the rise and spread of fentanyl, which is fueling our current crisis of opioid overdose, and “P2P meth,” a newer, cheaper, and more ubiquitous methamphetamine. Much of the book is brilliant. Quinones details the mass production of these drugs in China and Mexico and explains how our population has been made vulnerable to them in multiple ways—brains addicted to the pleasure hits of processed foods and sugar, a culture that values big houses and social media over personal connection and purpose, and entire communities dependent on opioids marketed as quick fixes for every form of pain:
We turned healthy self-reliance into a grim isolation. Then pain pills were marketed grotesquely and supplied beyond reason. They were overlaid on the mass marketing of legal, addictive substances. Beneath that lay reservoirs of childhood trauma, stress, depression, community destruction, and PTSD from fighting two wars using the same small minority of people while the rest of us got a tax cut.
I want to underline that passage, highlight it, and underline it again.
Then Quinones turns his attention to drug users, specifically those who use P2P methamphetamine. Though he offers no scientific evidence for it, he argues that the drug fundamentally changes users’ brains. They become “zombies,” “deprived of memory and personality,” “howling, hysterical, starving,” “deranged,” and “notoriously unwashed, with open sores, matted hair, and rotting teeth.” He describes horrific scenes of rape and abuse in Los Angeles tent cities where even a service dog is “repelled by Skid Row’s smell of urine, the screaming people, and the meth-tormented energy.” He suggests drug users should be forced into treatment, most efficiently through arrest and the threat of incarceration.
Portland has also experienced a rapid rise in the use of methamphetamine in the past decade along with the spread of communities clustered in tents or living in old cars and RVs patched up with duct tape and tarps. Residents and business owners complain of increased crime and trash. Some are relocating, or threatening to do so.
Quinones discussed his book on the radio and on CBS Saturday Morning. A long excerpt appeared in The Atlantic. His ideas were shared widely on my Twitter feed, where one user bemoaned the “cerebral catastrophe” caused by P2P and another wondered whether, as damaged as they are, users of P2P could ever be stably housed. One post on Nextdoor (the site where neighbors connect to neighbors to “cultivate a kinder world”) expressed a sense of relief: “This could help to explain what we are witnessing with a range of issues, from mental illness to violence.” Another post read, “With the new meth (P2P) running in our city for years now, we truly have vacant souls. The zombie apocalypse.”
Cerebral catastrophes, zombies, vacant souls. The story is terrifying.
Here is a different story: the morning after my daughter’s driving lesson, I went to work, where a line of men and women waited to be admitted. Our treatment center accepts Medicaid and has an indigent fund. Sometimes our patients sleep on nearby sidewalks so that they can be first in line when we open. Sometimes they are high, sometimes in active withdrawal. Most of them have methamphetamine in their systems, along with other drugs, and many live in tents or patched-up RVs. If we don’t have room to admit everyone—and we often don’t—it is wrenching. Too many times it’s the morning one patient finally had the bus money to get here, or the day another promised her mother/father/partner/child she would quit.
The Least of Us includes interviews with federal agents, drug runners, chemists, men and women in recovery, family members who have lost loved ones to addiction, and organizations doing hard, important work to address addiction and crime in their communities. But none of the stories Quinones tells comes from conversations with active drug users or with residents of tents or shelters.
My job is to talk to drug users—not just about quitting or cutting down, but also about why they want to. My patients tell me they want their kids back. Or that they want to make their parents proud again, to return to the job they loved, to go fishing. Twice in one week, sad, stooped men grinned as they described the joy of a boat, the water, a fishing pole in hand, the whole day in front of them.
I’m not saying that people don’t do destructive things when high or seeking a high. My patients have lost homes, jobs, and families because of using, and some have committed crimes—in certain cases, terrible crimes—along the way. I also know that many drug users don’t seek treatment. And some of my patients do come to us nearly out of their minds. One woman arrived clutching a backpack, pacing, seeing things no one else could see, sometimes crying, sometimes rocking. But she made it to our door and was able to focus on one moment, one tiny connection, at a time. She accepted a cup of water and was so sorry for spilling it. She thanked the nurse for the granola bar, then the shower, the bed. Even while having trouble tracking what was true in the world and what was true only in her mind, she wanted help. She wanted at least one night without using. One night of peace.
I admitted a man the other day, a kid really, not yet old enough to drink, wearing brown bedroom slippers in the rain. He was withdrawing from methamphetamine and fentanyl and said his shoes had been stolen. When I asked to examine his feet, he said no. Please, no. They were too dirty, the nails were too long, and there was an ugly rash between his toes. It would be the last straw, he said. Please. Just let me wash.
When I try to explain all of this to people outside of work, I’m often met with realities hard to refute. The woman in line at the grocery store, with one baby in a stroller and another on her hip, who says, “I can’t take my kids to the park anymore.” Or my hairdresser, who moved to Portland with her wife because she believed they would find a welcoming community in the city: “The last time I used the bike path, a dude chased me with a metal pipe. He was high, and I am so fucking mad. That’s a public space, and the public can’t use it.”
Plus, I have my own moments. The strip of grass just beyond our office parking lot is lined with makeshift shelters. When I go out for coffee or lunch, I take the long way around, avoiding tent openings and the men milling nearby. There is a distance between the people on the street who scare me and those who come for help, and I don’t know how to bridge it. I don’t even know how wide the gap is.
In December 2022, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler revealed his plan to crack down on unsanctioned camps. “Once you use this P2P meth,” Wheeler told city business leaders, “it very quickly scrambles your brain permanently—meaning some of the individuals who you see who are addicted to P2P meth, they will never be able to function on their own again. They will be institutionalized, or they will be relegated to the streets for the rest of their lives.” Again, no evidence exists to back this up. There is only a feeling, which is fear, and the need for a tidy explanation.
Of course, it is possible that research may eventually find that this form of methamphetamine is fundamentally different. It is also possible that this methamphetamine scourge is the reason I can’t take my daughter driving at night or let her stay out with friends in the park after dark. Maybe it is the reason I now check the locks every night and why my husband asked for outdoor security cameras for Christmas this year.
Maybe. But there is no question—no “maybe”—that this explosion of despair on the street is happening in a context of skyrocketing housing prices, widening income disparities, a devastating pandemic, and increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide. There is also no question that it is much easier for my patients to obtain cheap methamphetamine than it is to find a primary care doctor, a counselor, or—that true unicorn—a psychiatrist who accepts Medicaid. Finding drugs is certainly easier than obtaining housing, or even a shelter bed.
No question: there are only humans at the heart of this complicated mess. No zombie horde. Only fathers, mothers, brothers. Fishermen.
My colleague Jenny recently bought a house near work, close enough for her to walk. Unlike me, Jenny is not fearful, and she does not avoid the encampments near the parking lot. She walks straight through them every morning, sometimes bearing apple cakes, pear tarts, or oatmeal cookies.
The other day, Jenny told me that while cleaning out her shed, she found a pool cover amid the debris. She lugged it to the encampment, offering it up as a tarp alternative. I thought of Quinones’s tale of tent communities filled with howling drug users so saturated with the smell of urine that even a service dog avoided them. Jenny said that the man who took the tarp was friendly, not screaming. No scent of urine. He thanked her and said he thought he could find a use for it. When a freak April snowstorm hit a few days later, she was gratified to see that he had turned it into a kind of mega tarp, covering several tents in a row and tucked in at the sides “like a burrito.”
The driver in front of us last fall eventually rolled up his window, backed up, and drove away. My daughter got the truck started again, and we crawled our way toward home. We were mostly quiet. She didn’t ask me to explain the tents, the propane, the exchange. And if she had? I suppose I might have given an account of absurd housing prices, structural inequalities, inadequate health care. Or I could have told tales of burritos, baked goods, and fishermen. I could have told her any or all of that and still not gotten it right, because I do not have a story that explains life in a tent on a street near my house. Neither does Sam Quinones, or Nextdoor, or even sweet Jenny, Patron Saint of the Displaced and Discarded. Only the people on that street know the full truth of their stories.
But my daughter didn’t ask me to explain, and I was tired, so I didn’t bring it up. When we got home, I told her I was turning in. Then I locked the doors, all of them, and went to bed.
The post This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse appeared first on The American Scholar.
I might have been sleeping when her plane crashed. Or maybe I was awake, listening to heavy rain pound the roof of my family’s mobile home. I might have been under the covers, snuggling with my cat or plotting the last few days of summer vacation before the start of sixth grade. My last thought before drifting off to sleep might have been about the outfit I planned to wear on the first day of school, a lemon-yellow top with pink stripes and a flipped-up collar, a pair of round yellow earrings to match.
The next morning, when I heard on the news that Samantha Smith had died, I pictured her on the plane as it was going down. Her body tense as her seat violently shook. Her eyes stretching wide with fear and confusion. Her fists clutching the seat in front of her as the aircraft sliced through the forest, then exploded between the pines.
In my mind, she died wearing the same outfit I’d planned for the first day of school.
Samantha lived in Manchester, Maine, just 20 miles from my town. We were almost the same age, and we wore the same faded denim overalls, the same pastel polo shirts. We both had pierced ears. Her hair was brown and straight, whereas mine was blond and wavy, thanks to a home perm administered at the kitchen table. She seemed like a kid who’d be in my class or my Girl Scout troop, except she knew a lot more about the world than I did.
In 1983, when she was 10 years old, Samantha made national news after sending a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and asking him for peace between our countries. “I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war,” she wrote. “Why do you want to conquer the world or at least our country?” Andropov responded with his own letter, along with an invitation to visit Russia with her parents. For a while, Samantha was the most famous kid in the world. She was on the news in two nations. She was on The Today Show. She met Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson.
In the 1980s, talk of nuclear war was everywhere—on the news, on TV shows, in movies such as WarGames and Red Dawn. Politicians used phrases like nuclear winter, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and global thermonuclear war. I didn’t know exactly what those things meant, but they all sounded catastrophically bad. An attack seemed imminent, but when would it come? I pictured rockets flaming through an otherwise calm afternoon sky and people scrambling to find shelter from a nuclear blast. Our skin would burn. Our bodies would turn to ash. I wondered where my family would run, since we had no basement and no forest in which to hide. My dad must have wondered too. He put a gas mask under each of our beds, just in case. It was always there, behind my roller skates, next to my basketball shoes.
In 1985, the year Samantha died, I’d been helping my Aunt Marilyn teach English to a group of Cambodian refugees in our small town. Every Tuesday, we’d visit their dilapidated apartment by the Catholic church, sometimes with food, sometimes with clothes donated by the congregation. Marilyn sat at the kitchen table with the grownups, most of them women, showing them vocabulary words written on flash cards. Meanwhile, the children and I gathered on the porch with some loose-leaf paper and a box of crayons. We sat cross-legged on the floor drawing pictures and laughing, even though we couldn’t really understand what we were saying to one another. Lucky for us, pictures transcend language. We hung our drawings on the windows and watched as the afternoon sunlight shone through.
Were we safe from Russian bombs there on that front porch, with our crayons and our easy smiles? Of all the places Russia could attack, surely they would not choose this sleepy paper-mill town, where the air smelled of sulfur and the river ran foamy from chemicals. Is that why the Cambodian families had come here—because it was safe?
I didn’t even know where Cambodia was, never mind what was happening there. I didn’t hear about it on the news or on the shows we watched on TV. Marilyn never told me, if she even knew. Decades later, I’d come to understand what these women and their children had been through. I’d learn about the brutality and genocide inflicted by warring regimes. I’d learn that the Cambodian families in my town were led mostly by women because the men in their lives had been tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.
But back then, I only knew that the kids were friendly, they liked to color, and the moms were always happy to see us.
In the summer of 1983, Samantha flew to Russia with her parents for a two-week visit. She toured Moscow, Leningrad, and a Soviet youth camp called Artek, where she swam, learned Russian dances, and proudly wore youth camp regalia. At a press conference in Moscow, Samantha said that the people she met were friendly and warm, “almost just like Americans.” She suggested that the leaders of our rival nations exchange granddaughters every summer. How could the president of the United States or the Soviet premier drop the bomb knowing that their grandchildren were on the other side?
I spent that summer swimming, too—at my Aunt Marilyn’s camp on Long Pond, a short drive from the center of town but a world away from the stinky smokestacks and the rancid river. The cabin itself was small and simple, with no plumbing and no television, but the lake offered endless entertainment. Marilyn and I swam, caught tadpoles, and played Boggle on the dock. After lunch, we took long walks down the camp road to pick wild strawberries and teaberry leaves. We saw loons and deer and once even an eagle. At night, we played Battleship on the front porch and watched the sky go deep red as the sun set behind the pines.
There at camp, on the lake, nuclear war never once crossed my mind.
In August 1985, Samantha and her father, Arthur, were on their way home after filming a TV show in London when their Beechcraft 99 commuter plane crashed. Officials said that the pilot had failed to make the proper landing corrections on a rainy, foggy night. The accident occurred as the plane made its final descent, less than a mile from the runway at Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn Regional Airport. So maybe I had imagined things wrong. Maybe Samantha hadn’t been scared after all. Maybe she didn’t even recognize what was happening.
Only 13 when she died, Samantha knew so much about history and humanity. She’d already studied World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She knew what happened to the people of Japan, and she knew what would happen to us if ever there was a nuclear explosion. She also wasn’t afraid to speak out and ask for peace.
Eighteen years after her death, in March 2003, I interviewed Paul Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay and dropped that bomb on Hiroshima. I was 29 years old at the time, working as a newspaper reporter in Newport, Rhode Island. Tibbets was 88, the invited guest speaker at the Naval War College as the United States inched toward war in Iraq. On that day, a photographer and I made the short drive from the newsroom to the military base and met with Tibbets before his speech. He wore a dark suit and had hearing aids in both ears. His hair was thin and gray. I asked him the same question that everyone asked him, the question he’d been asked a hundred—if not a thousand—times. Did he have any regrets about dropping that bomb? He answered firmly and adamantly. No, none at all.
“When the bomb exploded,” he said, “I knew we hadn’t made any mistakes.” The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended the war. In Tibbets’s mind, he’d done what he needed to do for the sake of peace.
Tibbets described the black cloud of smoke and debris that rose over Hiroshima. He spoke of electrical flashes and shock waves that shook the Enola Gay as he and his crew flew away from the blast site. I pictured everything he described, recalling some of the images that haunted me back in the 1980s. What I couldn’t understand was how killing 200,000 people could be considered anything other than a mistake, but of course I hadn’t lived through World War II. My Aunt Marilyn had, though. Her husband, my uncle Phil, served as a litter bearer in the Army during the war. He was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held prisoner for five months at a war camp in Germany. The Soviet Red Army, our allies during World War II, liberated the camp in April 1945, just four months before Hiroshima.
As a kid, I was afraid of a war starting. What my uncle’s generation feared was a war that never ended.
What would Samantha have thought about the world we live in today? Surely she would have something to say about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, about North Korea’s nuclear posturing, or about the genocide of Muslim Rohingya by the junta in Myanmar. In 1991, the year she would have turned 19, the United States and Russia agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals—still the most significant arms control treaty ever signed. I was 17, a senior in high school. My day-to-day thoughts had turned away from nuclear war to getting into college, getting financial aid, finding a job, and saving money for textbooks and tuition. Despite our agreement with Russia, there are roughly 13,000 nuclear warheads in the world today. Perhaps I should still be afraid.
The post The Days After appeared first on The American Scholar.
In November 1938, Dorothea Lange snapped a black-and-white photograph at a gas station in Kern County, California. A couple of buildings and trees are visible in the background—vague signs of life. In the foreground we see an air machine, made of wood and resembling a bedroom wardrobe, its door swung open to reveal a tangle of black hose inside. A sign atop the machine reads, “AIR.” And on the inside of the door is a large, hand-painted message.
air
this is your
country dont
let the big
men take it
away
from you
Look at the picture long enough and the word “AIR” starts to seem odd. For me, the letters drift apart, and I’m suddenly unsure how to spell or even pronounce the word. Repetition and capitalization contribute to the disorienting effect.
On this early June day, as I sit at my desk writing about Dorothea Lange, the air is in fact odd. Wildfires in Canada have sent smoke over the northeastern United States, creating an ashen sky that smells like burning. Yesterday, windows in my studio cast rectangles of amber light on the floor even though the sky remained an acrid gray. For the first time, I can imagine some of the horror of the Dust Bowl experience that Lange photographed in the 1930s, the sun blocked out for days and the air deadly and thick. It’s funny in a way to have photographed an air machine at such a time, a machine intended for filling the deflated tires of cars carrying families fleeing west—a machine to keep you going. But when the sky itself is toxic, it takes on another meaning. “Air,” it pleads, like a patient awaiting a ventilator. “Air,” it shouts, like a curbside huckster. It’s all anyone wants: air. You can almost imagine another machine just outside the frame that says “water,” and perhaps others farther down the road offering “food” and “shelter”—vending machines for life. Insert a nickel and get everything you need. And yet, on closer inspection, the air hose in the machine Lange photographed doesn’t appear to attach to anything. Like everything else in the catastrophic collision of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, it seems to be broken.
“Dorothea Lange: Seeing People,” an exhibition that runs from early November through March 2024 at the National Gallery of Art, assembles some of the photographer’s best-known and most poetic images. Beginning in 1919, with Lange’s intimate portraits of wealthy clients and artists in San Francisco, the exhibition includes the years in which Lange turned away from her photography studio and found employment with her second husband, Paul Taylor, at the newly established Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA was first known as the Resettlement Administration, created by presidential order in 1935 with hopes of appeasing progressives upset by the Department of Agriculture’s failure to provide aid to poor, rural farmers. Its goals included resettling those farmers on better land, providing grants and loans for modernization, educating farmers on nutrition and hygiene, and providing medical care. Along with nine other photographers sent out across the United States, Lange was assigned to document rural poverty. The goal was to provoke sociopolitical change by bolstering support and funding for FDR’s New Deal programs.
- Eighty-year-old woman living in squatters’ camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. “If you lose your pluck you lose the most there is in you—all you’ve got to live with,” November 1936, gelatin silver print
- Near Coolidge, Arizona. Migratory cotton picker with his cotton sack slung over his shoulder rests at the scales before returning to work in the field, November 1940, printed c. 1965, gelatin silver print
- Migratory Pea Pickers, Nipomo, California, March 1936, gelatin silver print
- Migratory Field Worker Picking Cotton in San Joaquin Valley, California, November 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print
Lange embarked on a rugged, itinerant, often grueling life in some of the most desolate and hopeless places in the United States. She traveled mostly by car, pulling over to photograph things that caught her eye (landscapes, machines, signage, landmarks), milling about, hauling equipment, starting conversations. She seemed infatuated with the camera’s ability to dispassionately record the facts just as they were. Often, however, she would ask the people she met to pose for her, directing them, choreographing.
Everywhere she looked, Lange seemed to find repeating shapes, lending her pictures an ordered, geometric clarity and a striking modernist aesthetic. This is surprising given the disarray of the world she photographed, and it is part of what makes her pictures so unusual and strangely reassuring—as if she could see an ordered world subtending the world we actually inhabit, an invisible grid to which shapes snap. Whatever the condition of life (poverty, displacement, racism, despair, environmental disaster), Lange’s figures seem whole and not broken.
Different shapes have their own emotional tenor. Circles can be hopeful or maddening. Lange finds them in windows, tires, hats, heads, mouths, hunched figures, glasses, hands, and curled fingers. Rectangles seem blunt and reliable, if a little hard-edged. Conveying stability but also resignation, sadness, and gravity, rectangles appear in clothed bodies, feet, car doors, buildings, and signs. Triangles, emblems of angular hierarchy, indicate power and balance. But they also appear charged with passion, rage, or desire. In addition to capturing rooflines and oversize hats, Lange often highlights the way a body intersects with itself or something else, with triangles formed out of bent arms, tools, cotton sacks, or legs: shapes within shapes emerging from negative space.
Consider three photographs depicting women of various ages. The first is of an 80-year-old woman residing in a squatters’ camp near Bakersfield, California. In the second, we see Nettie Featherston, the wife of a migrant worker in Texas. And in the third, a young girl in Kern County pauses while picking and sacking potatoes. In each case, the figures shield their eyes, their raised arms creating the shape of a triangle (framing sky in two cases, the dark roof of a car in the other). These photographs have a way of accentuating and elongating the subjects’ arms, particularly the bare arms of Nettie Featherston, one hand on her forehead, the other clasping her neck, her downcast eyes pitted in shadow. The shape outlined by her arm in the air echoes that of the billowing white cloud behind her. Meanwhile, her bent arms together make a tilted W. She’s hot, tired. The sun makes it impossible to look directly at the camera. The tight line of her mouth arches ambiguously, so that even though her body conveys elemental exhaustion, it’s hard to know whether she is about to smile or cry. We know from Lange’s caption that Nettie Featherston and her family were near starvation, that they’d sold their car and burned beans for heat during a spring snow. “This country’s a hard country,” Lange notated. “They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.”
In another photograph, the hunched body and trailing sack of a fieldworker picking cotton in California’s San Joaquin Valley makes a lowercase h. Look at three other similar photographs—of a farm laborer in California, of a funeral carriage in the San Joaquin Valley, and of an impoverished Black child working on a farm—and suddenly there are letters everywhere: an O in the steering wheel of a car, a lowercase a made by the ornate metal curving around an oval window, an n in the crook of fingers clutching a hat, a Y in the arms and hoe of the child alone in a field. One almost wonders if the pictures could be arranged like an alphabet or aligned to spell out a message: W h O? a n Y.
Lange is famous for not only her portraits but also the captions she wrote for most of them. She was intent on providing details about her subjects—their location and date, plus snippets of conversation that convey a person’s idiosyncratic speech. (A glaring exception is Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, for which Lange provided no caption; its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, a woman of Cherokee descent, was not identified until 1978.) Though her captions were not used in the official publication of her government-commissioned photographs (over which she retained no artistic control), Lange continued to write them throughout her life. Pictures and words conjoined. Details and order, as if she could forestall the disintegration all around her by elegant framing and tidy notes.
Even in scenes of mind-numbing, backbreaking agricultural work, order nonetheless prevails—light and dark, lines and angles, rhythm and repetition. Lange famously insisted on showing the beauty of her subjects, their dignity and resilience. She thought it disrespectful, demoralizing, and cheap to photograph filth or despair. Instead, she seemed to view the world around her arranged in a parade of compelling shapes. It’s not hard to imagine Lange stopping her car to capture a group of men squatting in the dirt, their bodies folded in matching scale, making a compelling line of o’s between the vertical l’s of the porch beams.
Hard and soft. That might be one way to describe Lange and her pictures. She was known for being uncompromising, tenacious, and sometimes harsh (both professionally and—especially—in her private life as a mother). Her photographs are hard in their formalist adherence to structure as well as to shape and line. But they’re also soft in their sensibility for shadow, for the human expression conveyed by a hand or a posture, for her slightly blurred horizons and infinite midrange grays.
Horizon lines often cut across Lange’s photographs at an extreme—either higher or lower, flatter or more pitched, than one might expect. This gives the impression that the photographer could have been standing up high, pointing a camera sharply down on a scene (as in the pictures of farm workers in the fields) or lying flat on the ground aiming the camera up (as in the close-up faces and pictures of people in their cars). Either way, Lange seems to occupy a contorted, unnatural position relative to her subjects. Rarely is she at eye level. Instead, she becomes a bit of the landscape or natural world in which her subjects seem to live.
- Child of Impoverished Negro Tenant Family Working on Farm, Alabama, July 1936, gelatin silver print
- Once a Missouri farmer, now a Migratory Farm Laborer. San Joaquin Valley, California, February 1936, printed c. 1965, gelatin silver print
Many of Lange’s subjects are either working or not working. People plow and hoe fields, pick cotton, weigh peas, churn butter, nurse babies. They also squat in the dirt, lean against cars or buildings, stare into space. Machines, when they appear, mostly convey unreliability.
In Migratory Pea Pickers, Nipomo, California, a car with a couple seated on the running board, packed to the hilt, is not moving. Its front wheel seems off-kilter as it dips out of the frame. The windows, two squares and two rectangles, are covered with fabric and newspaper, or are blocked by belongings. When you notice that the roof of the car is hoisted partway in the air with old two-by-fours, you realize that they must be living here, in this makeshift vehicle (is it even a car?), dressed in their Sunday clothes as if sitting on a front porch in the middle of nowhere, the man’s mouth (mirroring his glasses, vest buttons, and the little circle formed by his thumb and pointer finger) pinched in a tight o.
This is the kind of dominant image of the Great Depression that we have inherited from Lange and her contemporaries—images famous for their “realism” as well as their romance and nostalgia. People forced to find new ways of working when work dries up. People forced to move or keep moving when fields dry up. Women forced to keep things reasonably clean in the midst of squalor. Lange documented human resourcefulness in wretched conditions, but also the exhaustion of so much idleness, waiting, hoping, and hungering. We see it in the delicately curled fingers of a man’s weathered hand, which grasps both a thin black cylinder (perhaps the end of a pipe) and a dirty hat. This man may have lost everything, but he still adheres to basic rules of decorum: he knows when it’s right to remove your hat.
Lange must have had a special fascination with hats—alongside her interest in hands and feet. It’s amazing how much a hat can convey, whether cocked to one side, pulled down tight over the whole face, or sitting squarely. A hat offers utilitarian protection against the sun, wind, rain, or cold. But a hat can also suggest status. It can denote culture or nationality. It can be camouflage, cover, or a way of blending in. In Lange’s pictures, it can also confuse or obscure race, a quality she may have relied on in photographing field workers of various ethnicities and races across the West and hoping that, back in Washington, D.C., her pictures of nonwhite migrant laborers might slip through for publication—despite the explicit effort of the FSA to document and highlight white American suffering.
- Hitch-hiking from Joplin, Missouri, to a sawmill job in Arizona. On U.S. 66 near Weatherford, western Oklahoma, August 12, 1938, printed c. 1960s, gelatin silver print
- Children of the Weill Public School Shown in a Flag Pledge Ceremony, San Francisco, California, April 1942, printed c. 1965, gelatin silver print
- Native of Indiana in a Migratory Labor Contractor’s Camp near Calipatria, California, February 1937, gelatin silver print
- “On the plains a hat is more than a covering,” 1938, printed c. 1965, gelatin silver print
- Nettie Featherston, Wife of a Migratory Laborer with Three Children, near Childress, Texas, June 1938, gelatin silver print
In a strange premonition of Andy Warhol, all of Lange’s subjects become stars in her portraits. It can make you uneasy to stare at them in their undone beauty. Their lives so harsh. The photographs so fair. There’s no way out of the bind, and Lange implicates her viewers in the problem.
In a 1942 photograph taken at the Weill Public School in San Francisco, a little Japanese-American girl pledges allegiance to the flag with her hand splayed across her plaid coat, her expression serious and strained. She didn’t ask for it, but in the photograph, she becomes the face of FDR’s Executive Order 9066, which, beginning in 1942, incarcerated people of Japanese descent in internment camps. The War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the camps, though she was prohibited from photographing armed guards, razor wire, or other markers of violence, and her photographs remained largely unknown until 2006.
Looking at Lange’s photographs in 2023, we know, of course, more than she did when taking them. We know the last Japanese internment camp closed in July 1946. We know the FSA failed in its mission to alleviate rural poverty or resist the corrosive effects of industrialized farming. We know migrant farm workers continue to pour into the United States to work in dangerous conditions with few, if any, protections. We know the air is changing for the worse. Yet something about the pictures keeps projecting hope. Human hands, tattered dresses, wheels, hats. An ambiguous new alphabet.
What is a face? What are we facing? These questions, raised by Lange’s photographs, continue to resonate today. The problems are basic, perennial. What is it like to live in a world that has left you behind? What does it mean to work? To be a child? To hope? Lange’s subjects have been pushed to the extremity of social and environmental conditions. The pictures direct us to look. Look at the skies and the shapes and the strange order of disorder. Look at how ordinary everything seems to be even as it is falling apart. Look at how still the world appears in its perpetual motion (the cars stalled, the air thick, the eyes unblinking). Look at repetition. Look at a woman looking.
Women looking. It’s an inversion of the long-standing subject position for women and girls—who are supposed to be seen (and not heard), looked at. Lange looked. Her work is remarkable just for that. The deadpan focus of a woman making a decision, making a frame. There’s a subtle but persistent heroism in the female figures she photographed. They seem thoughtful, tough, alert. The men, by contrast, appear tired or manic—almost wild. They’re losing it. Gripping their hats, crouched near the ground, worn down by labor and time.
Here is a touching fact about Lange. Late in her life, she taught photography courses and gave her students the assignment to photograph “where they live.” When one of her classes challenged her to do the same, she brought in a photograph of her own bare foot, twisted from childhood polio. In the same course, Lange assigned poetry and literature. She taught Wallace Stevens’s poem “Theory,” which begins: “I am what is around me. // Women understand this.”
Understanding cuts both ways. The order, the beauty, the grace. The filth, the depravity, the despair. It’s so easy to lose your place—to find yourself suddenly amid things you never expected, never planned. The razor-thin edge between one state and another. Lange’s pictures keep us balanced on that rim, looking at the repetitions we’re entangled in, facing what is around us.
It’s all connected: the past, the present, the future, the Great Depression, the cutting of native grasses across the Midwest that left the soil loose and exposed (a million acres of grass destroyed every year between 1923 and 1930), the tractoring of dirt, the damming of rivers and stealing of lands, the displacement of peoples, slavery, illness, internment, wars, drought, loss of homes, loss of jobs, loss of dignity, resilience, love, invention, cars, dreams, ideals, art, politics, collapse, revival, work, rest, boredom, hunger. It’s all connected. A woman taking pictures and a woman writing at her desk. The Dust Bowl and the opaque air streaming down from fires a thousand miles away. I can almost feel the heat, nearly hear the roar.
The exhibition Dorothea Lange: Seeing People will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,
from November 5, 2023, through March 31, 2024.
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American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman; Princeton University Press, 528 pp., $39.95
Nineteen-fifty-seven was the year when Edith Hamilton, a widely read translator of classical literature and ideas, finally achieved the status that had long eluded her—that of bona fide public intellectual. Her book The Echo of Greece not only sold out its first print run but also received favorable reviews from eminent scholars who had, she felt, previously snubbed her. More meaningful to her by far, the Greek government invited her to Athens that summer for a performance of her translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Onstage at the theater of Herodes Atticus, in the presence of the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Hamilton was made an honorary citizen of Athens by the city’s mayor. She gave a short speech, calling the occasion her proudest moment, to a standing ovation as camera bulbs flashed. The next night, Hamilton scrambled up the slope of the Acropolis to see the moonlit Parthenon one last time. She was three days shy of 90 years old.
Although Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) remains a much-loved compendium of Greek and Roman legends, its author at some point slipped into obscurity. American Classicist, the first full-length biography of Hamilton, attempts to pull her out of it. Victoria Houseman unspools a life that was both remarkably long and remarkable, full stop: Edith Hamilton became America’s foremost interpreter of the classical world despite her gender, her lack of a PhD, and her very late start (she published her first book in her 60s). She was also an accomplished educator and the long-term partner of another woman, Doris Fielding Reid, with whom she raised a son.
Born in 1867, Edith Hamilton grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her father was from a prominent local family that made its money through land and commercial ventures. But books interested him more, and he and his wife schooled Edith and her siblings at home. Edith, the eldest, began learning Latin around age 10, then Greek.
At 16, she went to Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut. Not long after that, her father’s grocery business, which he had pursued halfheartedly, foundered. Worries about money were to dog Edith’s early adulthood. She delayed college so that the family could afford to send her younger sisters to Miss Porter’s. It was during this period, as she read the Odyssey and taught Sunday school, that her ambition to earn a doctorate crystallized.
Hamilton arrived at Bryn Mawr College when she was 23. Although the curriculum was demanding and she had to study long hours, she still found the time to make friends. One of them was to become especially significant to her: Lucy Martin Donnelly. Hamilton was awed by Donnelly’s writing talent and high aesthetic standards, and in midlife they became extremely close, traveling overseas and nursing each other through periods of illness.
Hamilton realized early on that she was attracted to women. The culture at Bryn Mawr at the time was shaped by romantic same-sex friendships, emotionally intense partnerships that were sometimes but not always physical. The college’s president, M. Carey Thomas, shared her home on campus first with Mamie Gwinn, an English professor, and later with philanthropist and suffragist Mary Elizabeth Garrett. Houseman doesn’t try to shoehorn these “Boston marriages” into later categories of sexual identity, but she leaves mostly undiscussed the harsh social penalty for overt homosexuality at the time.
After beginning a doctoral dissertation—on the dreary topic of the use of the genitive case by Seneca the Younger—Hamilton received a scholarship to study in Europe. She was the first woman formally admitted to the University of Munich. But her lack of funds led her to give up her studies and accept a position as headmistress of Baltimore’s Bryn Mawr School, founded by leaders of the college.
Hamilton spent 26 years in Baltimore. She was an energetic leader who cemented Bryn Mawr’s evolution from a glorified finishing school into a rigorous college-prep academy—an arc that paralleled women’s advances during the Progressive Era. In the 1920s, her relationship with Thomas, who was chair of the academy’s board, began to sour, and things deteriorated further when Hamilton began living with a former student—Reid, who was 28 years her junior.
Unlike Lucy Donnelly, who seems to have rejected a physical relationship with Hamilton, Reid committed herself wholly to their life together. They were in some respects an odd couple, disparate not only in age but also in their interests: Reid was a concert pianist (she later switched to stockbroking) who liked fast cars. But the partnership, along with her departure from the Bryn Mawr School, was liberating for Hamilton, and she threw herself into studying Greek and writing.
The word Houseman uses repeatedly to describe Hamilton’s style is lucid. Hamilton bristled at any hint of mannerism—she dismissed Ovid as “frivolous”—and at avant-garde modernism, too, although that didn’t stop her from collaborating on translations with Ezra Pound when he lived in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. It was evident to her that the Greeks really believed in their myths, so a good retelling of them needed to have conviction. The prose in Mythology is vigorous and often memorable: “So the God of the Vine was born of fire and nursed by rain, the hard burning heat that ripens the grapes and the water that keeps the plant alive.” For Hamilton, ancient Greece was the apex of civilization, a culture in which the mental and the spiritual were perfectly fused. Fifth-century BCE Athens, in her view, did not emerge from the societies that preceded it but sprang up new and unbidden, like Athena from Zeus’s head. Greece was distinct from and superior to Egypt, Persia, and Rome, all of which channeled the “spirit of the East,” she wrote in The Greek Way (1930), a spirit that “never changes” and is “forever aloof from all that is modern.”
Needless to say, this is a reductive and chauvinistic argument. The idea that Greece stood loftily apart from any other culture it encountered has crumbled in the face of scholarship mapping extensive cross-cultural ties. The ancient world is currently seen as polycentric and interlinked, to the extent that many universities now offer majors not in classics but in ancient Mediterranean studies.
The idea that Greece stood loftily apart from any other culture it encountered has crumbled in the face of scholarship mapping extensive cross-cultural ties.The contrast between Hamilton and the leading classical popularizer so far of the 21st century—Mary Beard—is revealing. Hamilton never had much time for the Romans, despite her deep study of Latin and publishing The Roman Way in 1932. She saw Rome as being “far removed from the Greek spirit.” Beard, a Roman historian, rejects any such dichotomy (“The Greek city-states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment,” she writes). Beard stresses the diverse, polyglot nature of the Roman world while delving into its less admirable aspects and the lives of those on its margins. In a multicultural society alive to questions about race, class, and gender, it’s not surprising that her books are bestsellers.
Noting that it wasn’t uncommon for someone of Hamilton’s generation to look at the Greeks as the first moderns, Houseman tries to place her classicism in context. She was a devout Christian who found spiritual ballast in Plato as well as St. Paul. Her politics leaned center right, then libertarian. When she and Reid were living in Georgetown, they befriended Republican noninterventionists like Ohio Senator Robert Taft and worried about creeping totalitarianism.
“In her private life and in her public writing, Edith Hamilton was a strong advocate of individual freedom,” Houseman writes. What she saw of that freedom in the Greeks was perhaps what she cherished most about them and was undoubtedly intertwined with her anticommunism (she was also, Houseman notes, a pacifist and an opponent of both fascism and anti-Semitism).
Recent years have seen efforts to reclaim overlooked women classicists of the past, such as Betty Radice, who edited and translated Penguin Classics editions of ancient texts, and Kathleen Freeman, a scholar of Greek in early-20th-century Wales. Many of these women, like Hamilton, did not chart the usual course through the academy because of sexist barriers and were treated with condescension by their male peers. Edith Hamilton’s contribution is undeniable, and thanks to Houseman’s biography, her importance as a classicist and woman of letters has been restored.
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Lorna Goodison’s “Quicksilver” starts: “Lost at the halfway; you were in search of a sign.” This might be the opening of an anecdote about a tourist in a confusing foreign city—or it might be a free translation of the first line of Dante’s Commedia. The poem tacks between these two possibilities, relating a simple anecdote that is also a fable of spiritual quest.
The poet chooses “a side street,” not the main road, where she comes upon a craftsman. His “mud roof” suggests this city is not in Europe or anywhere else in the prosperous north. It’s an ordinary day, a Tuesday. He is at work as usual, as countless craftsmen before him have been, to judge from those steps “swaybacked from centuries of footfall.” With delicate artistry and the right amount of force (note that “rawhide mallet”), he creates a ring the poet will wear “till its metal slips back into flux.”
“I think I learnt a lot about writing poetry,” Goodison has said about her youth in Jamaica, “from watching people do manual labor, and from my mother sewing. I love watching people make things; that’s one of the old names for a poet: a maker.” Goodison’s silversmith is a maker. The ring he creates is the orienting “star” she sought: a shining bit of metal and a symbol of what she herself might aspire to make. At the same time, he teaches her something about the temporariness of all forms. The ring is really “quicksilver,” the antique name for mercury, the liquid solid. It tells her someday she herself will be washed down and changed back into the elements of which everything is made.
Although Goodison has spent much of her life in North America, she is very much a West Indian writer. “I don’t think it is an accident,” she says, “that I was born on the first of August,” when Emancipation Day is celebrated in Jamaica, “and I don’t think it was an accident that I was given the gift of poetry, so I take that to mean that I am to write about those people and their condition.”
But she is also a world poet interested in cultural exchange, as “For Wolfgang Binder” suggests. The poem recalls a friendship with a professor in Germany who studied Chicano and Caribbean culture. The poet and the professor visited Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s allegorical ceiling fresco in Würzburg, representing the coming of civilization as the imperial conquest of the Americas. The Jamaican and the German could not undo that history, of course, but their friendship was itself a form of repair. Poignantly, however, they have lost touch.
Goodison is in Germany again in “Mullein and Hare,” where she remembers the shock of visiting the Topography of Terror exhibition in Berlin, a museum of Nazi history built on the site of Gestapo headquarters. She turns to nature for consolation and sees a rabbit and a flower. The hare is a descendant of the one that Albrecht Dürer painted with exact art centuries ago. But the flower—what is it? She can’t remember the name until she asks a museum guard “in Jamaican” to tell her. The guard is worse than no help, but a “Woman with mop and bucket,” overhearing and understanding, provides the answer.
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“Now, after days of asking, she and her mother were finally minutes away from the cabin.”
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An elective visit to the plastic surgeon used to be a disgraceful thing, but now public perception has changed, and rather than seeming akin to cheating on an exam, a doctor’s help is like studying for it. You are preparing yourself for the test, when you turn your face or body to your fellows and […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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A journey through a region in search of itself
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A personal encounter with J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Simone Weil’s thoughts on the unmaking of the self
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Folixa is Asturian for party, and one of the biggest of the summer in Asturias is El Carmín, in La Pola de Siero. How big is it? Fifty thousand people usually attend, according to the town’s write up, coming principally for the romería, a big picnic in a big field, the culmination of five days […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Oglethorpe University’s time capsule was meant to last thousands of years, but will it?
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I had just settled onto the sofa with my morning cup of coffee and my tablet and some thoughts in my head for a short piece on animals, inspired by an upper intermediate student. The student was now 16, but I had met her four years earlier, at the beginning of the year, in the […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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When art becomes playtime
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Sometimes even a team of radiation oncologists and neurosurgeons can be mystified by the strange workings of the human brain
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A student at the language school taking private classes two years ago told me that he had no grandkids because both of his daughters were too self-centered to have children. Instead, they had cats. I was surprised, therefore, when he later mentioned a grandchild. A granddaughter, to be exact. “Really?” I said, interested but wary […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Julian Saporiti on mixing music with history as No-No Boy
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Cats enjoy birds, but they also like cream. It would be hard to test for a preference, one providing the challenge of the hunt and the other being a treat in a bowl within paw’s reach. But if I had to choose between the two as the most likely to figure, along with a cat, […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Decontextualized viewpoints
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Dana Thomas on how our hunger for new clothes damages the environment and exploits workers
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“I got a collar for the boy, a nice leather number with steel studs that made him look a touch mean and inspired me to get myself a steel-studded camera harness, and off we’d walk, miles a day between jobs.”
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Someone with annoying, persistent behavior, someone who goes on and on, is tiresome. A friend, for example, who won’t shut up about some silly exploit. Or a child whining for something, a sweet, a story, or just the answer to the question “How long till we get there?” Or a suitor who won’t take no […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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The future of men’s tennis is now
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Karen Pinchin on what tuna reveal about the fate of our oceans
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What we’re missing about the SCOTUS decision on race-conscious admissions
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There are 26 letters in the alphabet, so why did so many of the names in the article I was reading in The New Yorker begin with the same one, M? The article, “Trump’s Last General,” was about generals, Trump’s generals, the ones in the Trump administration or those carefully keeping out of it, though […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Colin Dickey on the enduring power of secret societies and conspiracy theories
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I was on my way to work, walking from the car, when I ran into a former student. He and his wife had been in my beginner-adult class during my first two years at the language school, all of us new there. Theirs was my favorite class. Ever since, I’ve hoped for another group as […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Timothy Winegard on how this irritating insect changed human history—for better and for worse
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Memories of a Midwestern childhood and the stories only pictures can tell
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In early June, Bob Dylan gave two concerts to open Madrid’s summer music series “Noches del Botánico,” held at the Royal Botanical Garden of Alfonso XIII, in the center of the city’s University Campus. “A wonder,” Pedro Calvo wrote of the June 8 performance in an online review the next day. I was there too […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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The beating heart of the borderland
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Jonathan Meiburg on the smartest bird you’ve never heard of
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Navigating the currents of midlife—and redefining home along the way
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The tallest house on the lane—the tallest of the seven structures that are houses, not barns converted into garages or workshops—is three stories. It sits with its back to the lane, a small faded green house huddled against it on one side and on the other side a freestanding old brick garage, a parking spot, […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Anya von Bremzen on what makes a “national dish”
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The affix en was the subject of the lesson. Only one student had shown up, a young woman, 23, with a sturdy, athletic body, long dark hair, and a round face, who brings to mind my best friend in fourth grade, a skinny girl whose hair was blond, not dark, and who had her mother’s […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Jamie Loftus on the wild American world of hot dogs
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John Prine wrote his song “Hello in There” at 22, when he was too young to have experienced the isolating effects of old age that he depicts with such sympathy. You know that old trees just grow stronger, And old rivers grow wilder every day. Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, […]
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Poems read aloud, beautifully
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Painting with a Palette Knife
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Naoíse Mac Sweeney on writing a different kind of “big history” book
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June 14 is flag day in the United States, and Old Glory will be hoisted far and wide across the land. Other flags too will surely flutter. How many newcomers to the States will honor the country of their birth on this day, and how many people will announce old loyalties by hoisting flags from […]
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Amanda Holmes reads James Still’s poem “Leap Minnows Leap.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Today probably marks the 300th birthday of Adam Smith. We don’t know exactly when the Scottish philosopher was born, but records indicate that he was baptized on June 5, 1723, in the town of Kirkcaldy, a town just north of Edinburgh. While many of us know Smith as the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), fewer are familiar with his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And even fewer know what Smith knew: that this book, published in 1759, is “a much superior work” to the later one that brought him fame.
Imagine that. No, seriously, imagine that. This is what Smith, after all, invites us to do in the book. The faculty of imagination is to Theory of Moral Sentiments as gravity is to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. For Smith, imagination is the activity that governs our social world no less surely than gravitation governs the physical one.
And so, let’s take a moment to celebrate Smith’s birthday by trying to imagine why he thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be the better book. Whereas he begins the work, in the provocative fashion that endeared him to his students, with a description of a man being tortured on a rack, we can instead begin with a man attending a club in Edinburgh. Not the sort of club given to drinking, though that certainly took place, but instead a club given to thinking.
Crucially, these clubs helped rebrand 18th-century Edinburgh. Long known as Auld Reekie—thanks to the stifling shroud of coal soot that rose from its forest of chimneys—the city became known as the Athens of the North. This was not a hollow claim. Though it boasted scarcely 40,000 residents, Edinburgh also boasted that it was, in the words of an observer, “crouded with men of genius” (Though as a walled city with tottering tenements packed together on wynds, or narrow streets, Edinburgh could hardly be anything but crouded.)
These men of genius, when not lecturing at universities like Smith, writing in their studies like David Hume, sermonizing from pulpits like Hugh Blair, or overseeing their estates like Lord Kames, met in clubs and societies to debate the great notions of that enlightened age. Between sips of claret and gulps of oysters (usually at the Oyster Club), they fearlessly prodded and poked one another (especially at the Poker Club) on the questions of human progress and the nature of being human. They weighed the gains and losses of technological, industrial, and commercial advances; they sought the sources of moral action and why we tend to be good when we could quite easily be bad.
The most select of these clubs was, inevitably, the Select Society. Conceived in 1754 by the portrait painter Allan Ramsay, it brought together the city’s best and brightest. Along with Hume and Kames, there was Blair, the Protestant minister who could “stop the hounds with his eloquenc”; Lord Monboddo, who wrote on the evolution of languages when not hearing cases as a judge; and that young “noddle-head,” as Hume called James Boswell. (“Bozzy” was admitted to the august society long before he published his biography of Samuel Johnson, who happened to think little of Scots and less of the Select Society).
Another founding member, also yet to become famous, was Smith. A professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow—he commuted on the daily coach to Edinburgh for these sessions—Smith was decidedly the most remarkable figure in this group of remarkable men. He never spoke—at least to others. “The most absent man in Company that I ever saw,” recalled his friend Alexander Carlyle Smith was always “Moving his Lips and talking to himself, and Smiling, in the midst of large Company’s.” Indeed, he was often incapable of taking part in everyday conversation, Stewart noted, a man “habitually inattentive to familiar objects, and to common occurrences.”
It’s not that he was inattentive to the men in his midst. What Smith understood, perhaps better than most of his colleagues at the club, was how futile it is to gain access to the minds of those we meet. We are all strangers to one another not just in the night, but in the day as well. As Smith remarks, “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel.” This is both an undeniable and unsettling observation. Yet it is resolved, Smith contends, by two capacities we all share: sympathy for another person’s pain or happiness (expressed in the form of pity or joy) and imagination. To Smith, imagination picks up where fellow feeling leaves off. As Smith declares at the start of the book, we can form no idea of how another person feels “but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”
Suddenly, imagination is no longer something we associate with children at play, but instead a faculty that all of use at every moment of our waking lives. In every encounter with a fellow human being, we call upon our imagination to try to know what they are feeling at a given moment. What we now call intersubjectivity is little more than the exercise of imagination with a dollop of fellow feeling. And perhaps another swig of claret.
But Smith has only begun to reveal how we become ourselves. His own remarkable imagination now careens in an unexpected direction: to the discovery that we employ our imagination not just to conceive of another’s feelings, but also to calibrate our appropriate response. When I encounter a fellow human being, my response to the individual’s conduct reflexively expresses my degree of approval or disapproval. In effect, I—or you, dear reader—weigh what Smith calls the “propriety” of the other’s behavior. As he writes, “I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.”
Of course, the person I am judging is at the same time busy judging me. Like me, the other will recoil if I show inconsolable grief; like the other, I will rejoice if that person displays an inspiring goodness. For Smith, morality rhymes with reciprocity: we gauge our behavior by “tuning up” and “tuning down” our emotions to achieve what Smith called the “pitch of moderation.” Here lies the mother vein of ethics: the degree of another’s compassion and caring is tied to my degree of the “awful virtues” like selflessness and restraint.
But what if the mirror offered by my fellow men and women is warped by instances of prejudice or ignorance? Do I then find myself abandoned with neither moral compass nor guide for my own actions? Not at all, Smith replies. When I cannot look to others, I can look to myself—or, more precisely, to what Smith calls the imaginary “man within the breast.” This “impartial spectator”—the compounding stock of my lived experiences with my fellow women and men—allows me to find a place, free of partiality, to properly gauge my actions. In a passage added near the end of his own life, Smith announces that “man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred.”
In a book chock-full of beautiful phrases, this is one of the most beautiful. But is it as convincing as it is inspiring? Three hundred years after Smith’s birth, we can only wonder. It is all too clear that our virtual world of information silos and social platforms threatens the credibility of an impartial spectator in the breast of each and every one. It is equally clear that ambitious individuals not only seek to instigate hatred, but also to invite it, and thrive not by exercising the awful virtues, but by acting in awful ways.
Yet, as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen argues, Smith nevertheless offers us an invaluable standard. In an age of intensifying global warming and increasing disparities in material well-being, Smith’s ethical framework reminds us of the “relevance of other people’s interests—far away from as well as near a given society.” No less important, it insists on the “pertinence of other people’s perspectives” to prevent us from considering our own as the only perspective worth having. More prosaically, Smith’s model of social harmony might help us the next time we encounter a fellow human being talking to themselves in a tavern or a train. This alone is reason enough to send Adam Smith our best wishes—or, perhaps, our deepest sympathies—on his birthday.
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In 1956, John Okada wrote the first Japanese-American novel, No-No Boy, a story about a Nisei draft-resister who returns home to Seattle after years in prison. It should have been a sensation: American literature had seen nothing like it before. But the book went out of print, Okada never published again, and the writer died in obscurity in 1971. That would have been the end of the story, were it not for a band of Asian-American writers in 1970s California who stumbled upon the landmark novel in a used bookshop. Frank Abe, one of the co-editors of a new book about Okada—and a friend to the “CARP boys” who discovered him—joins us to talk about the era in which No-No Boy was written and what the novel can teach us about our own moment in history. This episode originally aired in 2018.
Go beyond the episode:
- John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy
- No-No Boyby John Okada
- Watch Frank Abe’s film about the Japanese-American draft resisters, Conscience and the Constitution
- Read Julian Saporiti’s essay in our Summer 2023 issue, “Last Dance”
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The post No-No-Novel appeared first on The American Scholar.
Great works of literature are sly and powerful beasts that pounce on their readers, grabbing them by the neck and shaking them back and forth. The young Augustine looks like a typical victim of Vergil’s Aeneid. The schoolboy being brought up as a Christian in fourth-century CE North Africa found the first-century BCE epic poem of pagan Rome the most impressive thing in his cultural life to date. Tellingly, his reaction shows no interest in the poem’s theme of individual sacrifice in the name of imperial destiny; rather, into middle age, the great theologian and founder of institutional Catholic monasticism remembered weeping for Dido, who commits suicide after her lover, Aeneas, abandons her at the end of Book IV.
When we react as intensely to a work of literature as Augustine did, we may feel compelled to know what events in the author’s life could have informed his imagination. There has to be, we are convinced, something about the author himself that is vital to that thing called literary achievement, some reason he brought into being a work so communicative and congenial. The lack of detail concerning ancient lives has led biographers to make up what they cannot find in their research and to overinterpret what they do find. For Vergil, who lived from 70 to 19 BCE, the biographical tradition started to veer out of control from the first and never corrected itself. In the ancient world, rumor, folklore, prejudice, whimsy, and inference from fictional works were habitual sources for biographical “fact.” The Athenian tragedian Euripides, a legend states, was torn to pieces in the woods by hunting dogs belonging to his patron, the king of semiwild Macedonia. The literary inspiration for this story might be the dismemberment of Pentheus at the hands of feral women in Euripides’s Bacchae, or the death of Hippolytus, dragged by spooked horses in the play named for him, though Euripides’s unpopularity in his native Athens no doubt helped the story along. As for Vergil, we know a great deal less about him than about the second most important poet of his era, Horace; Vergil was a private man by preference, but he also seems to have been accorded—no doubt with the help of powerful imperial patronage—a most un-Roman respect for his privacy. Since then, Vergil’s distance and blurriness as a human being have enticed people to read his life and his thinking so as best to suit their own lives and their own thinking.
The consequent distortions go far beyond the political—many are distortions related not only to Vergil’s life but also to how his greatest poem, the Aeneid, can most basically be read and used. Through the long period of late antiquity and for centuries after, the Aeneid was a school text. The poem is ostensibly “about” the establishment, accomplished at high cost, of the Roman nation through the providential survival and triumph of the refugee Aeneas. (The first Roman emperor, Augustus, claimed Aeneas as an ancestor.) But for centuries, the epic was mined for oratorical fuel, even though the author was, by all evidence, the quintessential anti-orator, living and creating in intense inwardness. And the classroom presentation of Vergil’s work tended to be more moralistic than purely literary, setting up the complex, flawed hero Aeneas as a model for little boys and teenagers. As to language, Vergil’s Latin is inimitably beautiful but in some ways idiosyncratic. His style provoked attacks in his own time yet was later emulated.
Also in the classroom, the elements of natural science, geography, history, myth, and legend that blend so vividly and tellingly in the sweep of Vergil’s scene painting and narration were reduced to isolated facts for memorization and thereby leached of interest. But Vergil was anything but a dry scholar; he was an opportunistic borrower and probably an ebullient innovator, expanding a certain quantity of old material with great verve and inventing whatever else he felt he needed. I became a Vergil fan largely on my own, but if I had not, I would have absorbed from my instructors that both studying Vergil and worshipping him as an omniscient, godlike creator were chores. The thought of simply reading him, liking what he wrote, and wondering about his day-to-day life would not have occurred to me.
This first-century CE bust of Vergil depicts an idealized version of the Roman poet. (Wikimedia Commons)
In the ancient world, information about authors’ lives was sometimes added to texts of their work, as it is with modern introductions. Freestanding biographies, meanwhile, honored great men and illustrated political and moral principles, without coming anywhere near today’s standards of accuracy or balance. Suetonius, active in the late first and early second centuries CE, was the first extant Vergil biographer. His Life of Vergil (thought to depend on an account by Varius, who was a member of Vergil’s circle and had access to his documents) does not stand out sharply from the other authors’ lives that Suetonius wrote. True, Vergil is given a blessed birth, but it is typical for such mythologizing to creep into an account of an important man. By the fourth century, the Life appearing under the name Donatus, a scholar and teacher, has become a function of Vergil worship. Narrative influenced by the Bible has seeped in, and Vergil appears like Joseph to Pharaoh: a divinely gifted husbandman and prophetic counselor to the emperor Augustus. Later biography even wanders into verse, as if completing a circle back to Vergil’s own calling of fictive artistry.
Activist readings of Vergil presume coded protests that only people at a mammoth cultural, political, and linguistic distance from the author can decipher.An authoritative and yet almost oblivious mode of depicting Vergil thus took root, which was convenient for a variety of strange purposes. In the Inferno and the Purgatorio, Vergil is the guide for Dante’s persona, the Roman poet knowing everything that matters about the universe, human history, and the divine will. Though he doesn’t enter into paradise—his death having come before the advent of Christianity—his exemplary role in revered ancient Roman civilization, and what certain Christian thinkers of a later time styled “pagan virtue,” made him an ideal mentor for a Christian. Let me be completely clear, however: the living Vergil was an ordinary, functional pagan; the only alternative in his time and environment would have been conversion to Judaism.
The puppetlike nature of the Vergil persona lent itself to further nonsense in later eras. Vergil has been presented as a suitable apologist for empire in its modern Western style; he has also been touted as a sly anti-imperialist. But in Book V of the Aeneid (and there is a wealth of similar evidence), a young slave woman, a skilled weaver who is nursing twins, figures among the prizes in the pious and patriotic funeral games. Is she a war captive? Did her captor sire her children? How does she feel about her situation? What is her future? We care, we wonder, but the poet obviously does not; it is his story, with his themes, not ours. The same goes for the anti-totalitarian and anti–Vietnam War Vergils of a few decades ago and the queer Vergil of today. Such activist readings have to presume coded protests that only people at a mammoth cultural, political, and linguistic distance from the author can decipher. We need to make our own peace with our own histories and leave Vergil out of them.
The most important moments in most authors’ lives are those of quiet work, and the authors themselves may not even suspect the real mechanisms of their breakthroughs. Biographers tend to concentrate on relationships, those loud, visible moving parts of any life, and it took the generally insulting attitude exhibited in early biographies of Sylvia Plath (which tended to grade her performance as daughter, girlfriend, object of charity, friend, wife, mother, and hostess) to shake the genre into better sense: a writer—whether we are talking about Plath or Vergil—is first and foremost a writer.
Though much that Shakespeare—and Vergil, and other authors of equal éclat—experienced must have been stressful, little of it was unusual. The ways such writers processed their experiences through language were unusual, but they also included enough of the common touch that the words come across as emblematic. How does this happen? The actual “process,” that great object of audience curiosity, must amount to a powerful secret even in the case of far less secretive authors.
One trick to drawing a defensible life story from this secret is to concentrate on how the work may have shaped the life, rather than vice versa. Influential authors do influential literary work, obviously, but literary work is not only what these authors do but also who they are. Their subtlety and adaptability in respect to their work can be inferred from their pages as well as from their lives. Seemingly private things they seek or avoid (employment, marriage, children, travel, friendships, a certain kind of home or friends or clothes or manners) tend to be connected to their hope to impress the world permanently and publicly with their words. Writers game their lives out for literary purposes, or they are out of the game before we have a chance of knowing anything about them.
Vergil, with such conspicuous negatives for his time and class (no wife, no children, no settled home, extreme reserve, a chief patron he pushed to the edge of his tolerance for delay), looks very good at this gamesmanship. In that sense, he is the first truly modern author, an extraordinary individual whose work swallows up his identity. He was, at the very least, an unusual writerly persona in the ancient world, where civic and professional duty and public performance in an authoritative forum tended to define literary roles. Even stars such as Plato, Cicero, and Horace appear anxious to depict their own literary achievements as situated among or fostered by others. Vergil started as they did, on the evidence of the chummier Eclogues. But so different was his mature mood that on his deathbed, he defied the regime that had made him rich and famous: he demanded that the draft of the Aeneid be destroyed because he had not polished it to his satisfaction.
We are living in a golden age of literary biography. If the more careful, more balanced treatments of the most prominent authors’ lives reveal one thing, it is that these authors are dizzyingly different from us, but more knowable if we repress our envious condescension and concede that they knew what they were doing. Many things about Vergil’s life made more sense to me once I dared to grasp that this shy young man from nowhere, who struggled from line to line as he composed and revised, sensed in some part of his mind that if he tried hard enough, he could cause the world to welcome millions of copies of his work. It seems very wrong to ignore the real, living passion through which Vergil testified to the transcendence of the mind and spirit over material power.
The post Will the Real Vergil Please Stand Up? appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II by David Chrisinger; Penguin Press, 400 pp., $30
David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth is a road book suffused with a spirit of discovery and adventure. Perhaps no genre is better suited to its subject, the World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who could not stay home. Chrisinger asked himself what he might learn if he “roused the hibernating nomad buried deep inside me, and retraced Ernie’s steps through the war.” In the acknowledgments, he reveals his model: Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. Horwitz’s wonderful book is, as many readers will recall, an odyssey through the landscape of Civil War memory. It took root in its author’s childhood encounters with a book of war sketches owned by his great-grandfather and with The Photographic History of the Civil War, a multivolume pictorial extravaganza from which his father read to him each night. The elders’ fascination catalyzed the boy’s curiosity; Horwitz’s book marked the culmination of a lifelong obsession.
Chrisinger’s connection to Pyle seems a product less of destiny than of happy accident. Pyle’s name meant almost nothing to Chrisinger before a 2016 trip to Okinawa, where a tour guide invited him to make a tracing of the most famous name etched on the island’s Cornerstone of Peace memorial. The guide’s gesture prompted Chrisinger to pick up Brave Men, one of several collections of Pyle’s wartime columns. And here a great enthusiasm was born.
Pyle comes into his life just when Chrisinger, the executive director of the writing workshop at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and the author of two previous books, most needs someone to reveal to him, humbly and plainly, “the hell that war brings.” Chrisinger had traveled to Japan because of an agonizing family history shaped by his grandfather’s wartime service in the Pacific:
I know what it looks like when a man comes home from war and never finds that path that could lead him to a life of peace. I know about the alcohol and the rage, the depression, and the thoughts of suicide. I know what it feels like when trauma reverberates throughout the generations of a family. … I know about bitterness and hopelessness. I know about silence. And lies.
The need to understand his grandfather’s debilitating war experience spurs Chrisinger’s decision to trace Pyle’s footsteps: “to uncover the stories beneath the stories Ernie told his readers.” The ensuing narrative shuttles between Pyle’s life in war and the author’s tracking of his newfound oracle.
Footstep books often begin fortuitously, and they run on a delicate mechanism, demanding both plausible pretext and thoughtful planning. Freya Stark’s Alexander’s Path and Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between come readily to mind. In The Soldier’s Truth, two worthy narratives—the public story of the most influential war correspondent in American history and the private tale of a family damaged by war—don’t fully cohere. The narrative switches back and forth with what struck me as unnecessary abruptness. Unfortunately, it is the latter story that suffers most. The deep satisfaction Chrisinger derives from his pursuit of Pyle is evident—he describes himself as “giddy” at finding himself where the correspondent once stood—but the family tragedy resists illumination.
To what extent was Pyle a propagandist? What were the stakes of his unwillingness to grapple with the war’s political, ideological, and strategic dimensions?Chrisinger is at his best when discussing Pyle’s craft: on the subtlety of his celebrated piece “The Death of Captain Waskow,” for example, or on the tonal shift in the columnist’s work after the D-Day landings. Historian David Nichols has shown how Pyle developed the style that would characterize his war reporting in the columns he wrote while traveling across America in the 1930s, in which he carefully cultivated his authorial persona: “a Chaplinesque character forever beguiled by faulty zippers, lingering colds … and snake phobia … with an uncannily good ear for American idiom.” In counterpoint to this unmistakable public mode, Pyle’s uncensored private voice also finds its way into The Soldier’s Truth through Chrisinger’s excellent use of archival material.
Chrisinger draws on earlier studies of Pyle—including Nichols’s two collections of columns, Ernie’s America (1989) and Ernie’s War (1986); The Story of Ernie Pyle (1950), by Pyle’s editor, Lee G. Miller; and James Tobin’s more recent biography, Ernie Pyle’s War (1997)—in portraying his subject as a restless, hard-drinking hypochondriac who was burdened by the ongoing mental illness of his wife, Jerry, often depressed himself, and uncomfortable with a celebrity cemented by a war he found simultaneously repulsive and seductive. As Tobin writes in his conclusion, “In regarding him [Pyle] as a secular saint who only paid homage to the suffering soldiers, Americans misread his basic ambivalence.”
Chrisinger takes that ambivalence into account, yet his admiration abbreviates his consideration of the various professional and ethical cruxes Pyle’s career presents: To what extent was Pyle a propagandist? What were the stakes of his unwillingness (or inability) to grapple with the political, ideological, and strategic dimensions of the war? How did Pyle’s exclusive commitment to human-interest stories contribute to Americans’ selective and distorted remembrance of the war? Chrisinger focuses instead on the psychological injury done to Pyle by prolonged frontline reporting.
Ultimately, the book returns readers to the Pacific, where an exhausted Pyle spent the final months of his life as a guest of the Navy and where, after bearing witness to an inordinate amount of suffering and death, he was killed by a round from an enemy machine gun on the Okinawan island of Ie Shima in April 1945. Chrisinger quotes Pyle’s searing, elegiac, unsent last dispatch to great effect:
In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead. … Dead men by mass production in one country after another, month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer. Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.
In an admiring essay published during the Korean War, New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling praised the candor of Miller’s 1950 biography of Pyle: “It is better for Ernie to be remembered as a man than as a hick character in a movie.” Pyle endured, Liebling recognized, as “the most imitated writer in America.” Chrisinger’s new book reminds us that, whatever else he may have been, Pyle was a writer whose complex legacy continues to demand our attention.
The post Frontline Oracle appeared first on The American Scholar.
One night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife’s bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.” Using the candle to cast a pool of light in his dark study, he put a drop of the liquid into a tiny glass vial he had blown himself, attaching it to the back of a strange-looking device he had also constructed. Two rectangular brass plates, about three inches tall and one inch wide, had been riveted together and held a tiny glass orb between them. He lifted this object up into the light of the candle, closed one eye, and watched, for hours, until finally: a shiver of movement at the edge of his vision. Was it merely a mirage? Were his eyes too tired? He blinked, looked away from the light to rest them, and then resumed his careful observation. He was soon rewarded with the sight of a swarm of tiny eel-like creatures wriggling into view. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—who died 300 years ago, on August 26, 1723—had just discovered spermatozoa.
It was not the first time that he had made the invisible visible, nor would it be the last. Leeuwenhoek was a pioneer, discovering a whole realm of living creatures that included bacteria and other “germs”—“little animals,” he affectionately called them. By doing so, he made us aware that the world contains more than meets the eye, and his crucial contributions to the field of microbiology remain as relevant as ever.
During these past three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has caused at least seven million deaths worldwide (more than one million in the United States alone) and which, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has left one in 13 adults, or 19 million people in our country, with the disabling conditions caused by long Covid, my thoughts have returned often to Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries and what came after. As we carry on through these interminable Covid days (and ready ourselves for epidemics and pandemics to come), we should understand and celebrate the person who made it possible to discover the invisible causes of—and possible cures for—so many of the illnesses that plague us.
Baptized as Thonis—but always called Antonij or Antoni—he was born in Delft, Holland, in 1632, the same week as his neighbor Johannes Vermeer. His family took the surname “Leeuwenhoek” for the location of its home, “The Lion’s Corner.” Only after he had achieved worldwide fame in the 1680s did he add the aristocratic-sounding “van” to his name.
Leeuwenhoek was not an obvious candidate for upending the received view of the universe. The son of a basket weaver, he had no schooling beyond reading, writing, and some arithmetic, and he was expected to follow in his father’s profession—an important one in Delft, where a thriving export business required well-made baskets for overseas transport. But when his widowed mother remarried, he was sent to Amsterdam and eventually became apprenticed to a cloth merchant. In those days, a clever haberdasher, needing to determine the fineness of the fabric being offered to him, would use a magnifying glass to count the number of threads used in the weaving—the thread count, as we say today. This period was Leeuwenhoek’s apprenticeship in lenses as well as cloth.
If stronger lenses could be used to extend sight into the far reaches of the universe, could they not be used to enlarge the very small parts of it?When he returned to Delft after his six-year apprenticeship, Leeuwenhoek married Barbara de Meij, the daughter of a weaver, and in the front room of their house opened a successful shop that sold fabrics, buttons, lace, and other sewing supplies. Since the population of Delft numbered only about 20,000 people at the time—more than half of them women and children—a prosperous businessman was bound to become acquainted with other local grandees. His conversations with one of these, the physician Reinier de Graaf, generated his interest in science. De Graaf showed him that advances in how lenses were produced had created optical instruments with far stronger visual powers than the magnifying lens that Leeuwenhoek used for examining cloth.
Sometime around 1600, a Dutchman (not Galileo Galilei, as many believe) had made the first telescope by putting together two kinds of lenses on the opposite ends of a tube: a convex lens, fatter in the middle like a lentil (from which the word lens derives), and a concave lens, narrower in the center. This telescope was able to double the vision of the naked eye. Galileo quickly improved the device, producing a telescope that was 20 times stronger than natural vision. Turning it to the heavens, he grasped that the blotches we see on the moon’s surface are shadows made by mountains and craters, like those that exist on Earth. He later used his telescope to see that the planet Jupiter had its own moons. These observations supported Copernicus’s radical view that Earth is merely a planet like all the others, revolving around the sun. Because Galileo continued to write books asserting the truth of Copernicus’s theory after the Inquisition authorities in Italy had forbidden him from doing so, he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life under house arrest—in a comfortable villa staffed with servants.
After the invention of the telescope, natural philosophers (as scientists were then called) took note. If stronger lenses could be used to extend sight into the far reaches of the universe, could they not be used to enlarge the very small parts of it? The idea of microscopes was born. Though Galileo was not the inventor of the telescope, he may have constructed the first microscope: a small inverted telescope (with the objective lens on top, the eyepiece below) placed on a stand. He called it an occhialino, “little eye.”
British instrument makers promptly went to work creating and improving double-lens microscopes of this kind, not so different from the one I recall using in my high school biology class, bending over the eyepiece lens while moving the objective lens up and down to focus it on a specimen fixed on a glass slide or in a petri dish. In the Dutch Republic, however, natural philosophers preferred single-lens microscopes. These instruments could not only attain higher magnification, they also minimized the major optical problem with the double-lens microscopes of the day: chromatic aberration, an effect in which the viewed image is distorted by multicolored “fringes.” Not until 1672 did Isaac Newton explain why this happened, by showing that the surface of a lens, like a prism, disperses white light into its constituent colors. With two lenses, the problem was compounded, making it especially difficult to discern the smallest and most complex parts of a subject.
Unlike the double-lens microscope, the single-lens generally required you to look upward, with the specimen behind the lens, “as though you had a telescope and were trying to look at the stars in the sky,” Leeuwenhoek wrote. His method was to point his microscope at a beam of light streaming through a single hole in his closed shutters during the day, or at the light of a candle at night.
The tiny lens of this type of microscope could be made in several ways. Leeuwenhoek began with the simplest method. Since a candle’s flame is hot enough to melt glass, he would place a thin glass rod over the flame and allow glass droplets to fall onto a sheet of smooth metal. When cooled, some of these minuscule beads—those not scorched and blackened from the flame—could be slightly ground, polished, and placed between the brass or silver plates of his microscopes.
Another method Leeuwenhoek used was to grind and polish glass shards in a cup-shaped mold using a succession of finer abrasives to shape the glass, often finishing with a piece of soft leather or felt to polish the lens—a time-consuming and delicate process, especially for lenses only one to two millimeters in diameter. To speed up the process, Leeuwenhoek began to employ a pedal-powered lathe, similar to those used by jewelers. He may have learned this method from the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who was earning his living as a lens grinder after receiving a writ of herem, a kind of excommunication from his Jewish community for espousing “heretical” beliefs. In the summer of 1665, the two men were living only four miles apart and had mutual friends.
But though the single-lens microscope reduced chromatic aberration and was relatively easy to make, it was exceedingly difficult to use. Imagine holding up a small device the size, weight, and top-heaviness of a coffee spoon and staring into a tiny lens in its center through an aperture barely larger than the head of a pin, for hours at a time. Whether your specimen was a tiny vial of liquid or a solid object attached to a pin behind the lens, any motion—even from the quivering of your pulse—could move the subject out of view.
At first, microscopes were used like magnifying lenses, to enlarge parts of nature that were small but visible to the naked eye. Insects made obvious subjects because they were everywhere: bees, aphids, and slugs in gardens; fleas, lice, and bedbugs indoors. The first published study using a microscope was Francesco Stelluti’s meticulous 1625 examination of the different parts of a bee.
The early microscope users were fascinated by the eyes of creatures, in the belief that using this new “artificial eye” would yield special insight into sight itself. In 1644, Gioanbatista Hodierna published an elegantly precise study, L’Occhio della Mosca (The Eye of the Fly). Twenty-one years later, Robert Hooke brought out a thrillingly detailed illustration of the “Eyes and Head of a Grey drone-Fly” in his magisterial 1665 book, Micrographia.
Leeuwenhoek began to make and use microscopes sometime in the early 1660s, and he, too, was fascinated by sight. He studied the eyes of flies, lice, and dragonflies. He methodically examined the optic nerves of cows, obtaining the eyes from the local butcher at the Vleesmarkt, “not more than 100 feet” from his house. When he was 81 years old, he persuaded the captain of a Greenland whaling ship to bring back a giant whale’s eye pickled in brandy. As a bonus, he received the whale’s enormous penis—between eight and 10 feet long—so that he could study its sperm.
At that time, the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, was the main scientific society in the world, and natural philosophers from all over wrote in to have their discoveries officially recognized. The Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, was so besieged by letters that he requested some of his correspondents to address them to “Mr. Grubendol” to keep the authorities from noticing his contact with such a large number of foreigners. England, Spain, and the Dutch Republic had been at war with one another intermittently for decades, and spies abounded. Oldenburg later shuddered at the memory of the time in 1667 when, with Dutch ships thundering up the Thames, he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London under suspicion of “carrying on political correspondence with parties abroad.”
By the early 1670s, Leeuwenhoek was no longer a merchant but a civic leader and a licensed surveyor, spending much of his time making discoveries with his microscope. But he was ashamed that he knew no Latin, the lingua franca of the scientific world, and hesitated to write to the esteemed Royal Society. In the spring of 1673, Reinier de Graaf sent Oldenburg a sheaf of papers scribbled by Leeuwenhoek, along with a cover letter vouching for him. Oldenburg was a polyglot, fluent not only in his native German but also in English, Latin, French, Italian, and Dutch. As he casually leafed through these papers, not expecting to find much of interest, he quickly grasped that this unknown and untrained Dutchman had seen things that even Robert Hooke had not. Oldenburg had an inkling that the scientific world was about to change.
His growing confidence was exemplified by the change in the way he addressed members of the Royal Society—first as a humble supplicant and later as a man who expected respect.
In the summer and early fall of 2012, I spent nearly every day in the shadow of the Empire State Building at what used to be the Science, Industry, and Business branch of the New York Public Library, located in the former B. Altman and Company department store. The branch closed in 2016, its materials moved to the newly renovated Mid-Manhattan Library or to offsite storage, but in 2012, the 15 published bilingual volumes of Leeuwenhoek’s letters—an immense project begun in 1939 and not yet completed—were accessible to anyone with a library card.
On my first day there, none of the helpful staff members could find this set of books. No one even remembered seeing them, but a persistent search through the closed stacks turned up the first two hefty volumes: each 12 inches high, nine and a half inches deep, and at least 500 pages long. The books had been so hard to find because they had never been entered into the computer system; cards were still attached to the inside back covers where the date of use was stamped. The stamps indicated that no one had requested the books for decades.
It amazed me that these dusty tomes—in this case not merely a cliché but an accurate description, as my blackened clothing and worsened asthma attested at the end of each day—had been ignored for so long, given that the letters constitute the foundation of modern microbiology and medicine. Leeuwenhoek never wrote a scientific treatise. All he left us was his correspondence: more than 350 letters written over a period of 50 years, some 20 to 30 pages long, most of them addressed to the Royal Society, and nearly all of them translated and published in the Society’s journal, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. More than just detailing his scientific work, they are a window into the mind of a brilliant and obsessive man. I was entranced.
Reading all of them, I felt I got to know him and his daily habits. By the time he began to write to the Royal Society, Leeuwenhoek, then a widower, had married his second wife, Cornelia Swalmius, who came from an educated and distinguished family. She was eager for her husband to gain the respect of the Royal Society and gladly took part in his studies, not only by indulging his semen observations but also by carrying a small box filled with silkworm eggs “in her Bosom night and day,” as he reported, so that he could scrutinize the larvae the moment they emerged. His growing confidence was exemplified by the change in the way he addressed members of the Royal Society—first as a humble supplicant and later as a man who expected, and deserved, respect. I saw how he delighted in showing off what could be seen with his microscopes to all who knocked on his door, until he was so hounded by visitors that he could not work. He had to ask his only child, Maria, to turn away anyone without a letter of introduction. He did, however, make exceptions, consenting to see a tutor who turned up one day with an excited young charge. Perhaps the enthusiastic boy reminded Leeuwenhoek of his younger self and the glee he felt on seeing the invisible for the first time. And of course, being a vain man who would crow about the plaudits he received, he also made exceptions for royalty. Peter the Great chatted with Leeuwenhoek for hours (the Russian czar could speak Dutch) and inspected the circulation of blood in the tail of an eel. Leeuwenhoek also boasted of showing James the Duke of York (the future King James II) the sperm of a dog. If only Leeuwenhoek had been home when Queen Mary II (on her way to England with her husband, William III, to depose her father, James II) stopped by to see his wonders.
I could distinctly hear the voice of a man in a hurry, who couldn’t wait to put down his quill and pick up the microscope again. Leeuwenhoek often admitted that he had not ordered his thoughts but conveyed his results as he saw them, “unarranged promiscuously as put down during my observations.” It was as if Leeuwenhoek were excitedly describing his discoveries to a friend, and as I read on, I became that friend.
His first letter described the spores of mold, suggesting—before anyone else—that they contained seeds. He agreed with Hooke’s description of the “lowse” as having “a short tapering nose, with a hole in it, out of which … it thrusts its sting” to feed. Leeuwenhoek’s next letter described how he proved this: by “several times” putting a “hungry lowse upon my hand, to observe her drawing blood from thence.” As the louse sucked on his blood, he watched it with the microscope in his other hand, noticing how the blood first moved to the head of the louse and then was propelled to a sac at its back. I shivered to think of the kind of attention and scientific devotion it would take to sit still while observing a louse sate itself on my blood.
It was not long before Leeuwenhoek broke through to the invisible realm. In April 1674, he wrote to his friend Constantijn Huygens (the elder)—a diplomat, poet, art collector, and science enthusiast who always carried a microscope with him and took a great interest in Leeuwenhoek’s work. He told Huygens that he had pricked his thumb and drawn some of his blood into a tiny glass pipette. Observing it carefully, he found numerous “red globules” floating in what appeared to be a clear and crystalline fluid. He had discovered red blood cells. Although others had seen something in the blood, Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe that these cells were round, red, and gave blood its color. Soon he even measured them, finding that 100 red blood cells were the size of a coarse grain of sand measuring about 1/30th of an inch. That means he estimated each red blood cell to be 1/3000th of an inch, or 8.5 microns, in diameter, which is impressively close to the modern measurement of 7 to 8 microns. His most extraordinary discovery, though, was yet to come.
It happened at the Berkelse Lake, about a two-day’s journey from Delft. Passing by in the summer of 1674, Leeuwenhoek noticed that the water looked particularly murky. He took a clean vial from his pocket, knelt down, filled it with a sample of the liquid, and stoppered it tightly. Back home in his study, he closed all the shutters except part of one, through which the light of the sun beamed. He put a drop of the cloudy water into the glass tube affixed to the back of his microscope. Raising it to the light, he turned the specimen pin attached to the tube this way and that, to focus the view. When the initially blurry image became clear, what he saw startled him so much that he may have cried out, perhaps even spilled the water and had to try again.
Taking a deep breath and steadying his hand, Leeuwenhoek looked once more. Yes, it was true: the drop of water contained a multitude of tiny particles of different shapes, sizes, and colors. They were moving themselves by the use of minuscule legs and fins and hairs. Moving themselves! These particles were living beings!
I’ve always wondered why Leeuwenhoek used teacups rather than flasks. Did he occasionally sip from the cups to see whether certain tastes corresponded to the number of little animals he found in them?Some have argued that when Copernicus’s theory flung Earth from the center of the universe and took away its special status, making it just one of a number of planets, it resulted in the most radical transformation in our view of the world. I disagree. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery showed not merely that the universe had a different structure than had been thought before, but that it contained within it a hidden universe of diverse living creatures, a world within a world.
Leeuwenhoek verified his observations many times over the next three months. Finally, he was ready to make his world-altering announcement. He sharpened his quill, took a deep breath, and began to write to Oldenburg in September 1674.
Perhaps he was nervous: he did not come right out and announce his incredible discovery. Instead, Leeuwenhoek wrote, and wrote, and wrote: more than 20 pages about all sorts of experiments, ending with a bizarre passage on the difference between the chalk in English soil and the dark clay of Delft, and how Delft’s clay had to be mixed with Flemish dirt to make Delftware porcelain. Only then did he finally describe his visit to the lake and the “little animals” he had found in its water:
Some of [them] were roundish; those that were somewhat bigger than others, were of an Oval figure: On these latter I saw two legs near the head, and two little fins on the other end of their body. Others were somewhat larger than an Oval, and these were very slow in their motion, and few in number. These little animals had diverse colors, some being whitish, others pellucid; others had green and very shining little scales: others again were green in the Middle, and before and behind very white …
According to modern microbiologists, Leeuwenhoek had seen rotifers (strange parasites with body cavities filled with fluid), ciliates (including Paramecium species), and a type of protozoan called Euglena viridis.
The Royal Society’s reaction was as strange as the letter itself: there was no response at all. Apparently, that was fine with Leeuwenhoek. For the next two years, he continued to write, keeping the Society apprised of his work: further investigations into salt crystals, tiny vinegar eels (a type of nematode), the leg of a louse, the roe of a cod, blood serum, the veins of connective tissue between muscles, and more. He cut thin slices of a cow’s optic nerve with his shaving razor (his own red blood cells can be seen on them with a microscope even today), dried them, and sent them with one of his letters. These specimens remain at the Royal Society, among a set of frail little packets labeled by Leeuwenhoek more than 350 years ago. Under the careful eye of the Society’s librarian, I was allowed to examine the one on which Leeuwenhoek had written (in Dutch), “Pieces of the optic nerve of a cow and cut into transverse slices.” With trembling hands, afraid of damaging the treasures inside, I unfolded the packet to find 12 to 14 fawn-colored, hand-cut sections, slightly curled with age. They reminded me of desiccated slices of parmesan cheese.
Leeuwenhoek continued his observations of his little animals, sending his precise notes to the Royal Society. He found the animals everywhere: in rainwater, in his own well water, in saltwater, in melted snow, in water from Delft’s famously clean canals. He infused the water from these different sources with pepper, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg, labeling each concoction with the type of water, the spice, and the date when he combined them. He put these infusions in china teacups and stored them on shelves and tables all around his study, leaving little space for his dissections and observations. He checked the teacups periodically to see what little animals might appear, taking extensive notes each time.
I’ve always wondered why Leeuwenhoek used teacups rather than flasks or beakers. Did he occasionally sip from the cups to see whether certain tastes corresponded to the number of little animals he found in them?
In December 1675, now growing impatient, Leeuwenhoek reminded the Royal Society of his world-changing discovery. Still no answer. He shrugged and left for vacation in August. Leeuwenhoek had continued recording his observations of the little animals in the teacups right up until the moment of departure. He must have been thinking of them the entire time he was away, because one of the first things he did when he returned after eight days was rush to the teacups and observe how the little animals had fared in his absence. Now that he was back, he wrote, “it was pretty to behold the motion, quivering and trembling all the time.” These little animals had apparently taken the place of his beloved “little dog, which was much admired by everybody for its long and purely white hair.” His dog had died in 1674, right around the time Leeuwenhoek found his new pets.
He wrote again to the Royal Society, and again received no response. It was time to compose a letter that he knew would grab its members’ attention. In October 1676, Leeuwenhoek informed the Society that he had measured the little animals by comparing them to a grain of sand. The ones he found in the pepper-infused water were so astonishingly small, he estimated one million of them would not equal the dimension of a grain of sand. He had now seen bacteria.
Oldenburg and the members of the Royal Society could no longer ignore Leeuwenhoek’s claims. When they printed his letter in the Transactions, they prefaced it with a disclaimer that they could not give their approval to his findings without being informed of how he had made his observations. The Society demanded that Leeuwenhoek reveal his method of making microscopes, of observing with them, and of calculating size so that his results could be replicated by their own members.
Scientific conventions were starting to change. It had not previously been expected that a discovery be replicated in another laboratory for it to be accepted by the scientific community. But suddenly the Royal Society demanded that Leeuwenhoek do just that. And like many scientific innovators even now, Leeuwenhoek wanted to keep his trade secrets—he needed to earn a living selling his microscopes without other instrument makers copying them. Inevitably this led to conflict. Leeuwenhoek tried to appease the members by inviting them to Delft; after all, as the Royal Society’s own motto instructed: nullius in verba, “take nobody’s word for it.” It is unclear why they did not come to see the little animals for themselves, since England and the the Dutch Republic were not at war, and it was only 272 nautical miles (503 kilometers) from the port of London to Rotterdam and a further 15 kilometers to Delft. To verify such a world-changing discovery, surely several members could have spared a week or so.
After his invitation was refused, Leeuwenhoek sent to Oldenburg affidavits by such witnesses as the pastor of the English congregation in Delft, two Lutheran pastors, and a doctor of medicine at the University of Montpellier. Each attested that he had observed the little animals, that they moved on their own, and that, as one Englishman noted, when Leeuwenhoek added vinegar to the water, the animals stopped moving, “being killed by the vinegar.”
The Royal Society remained dissatisfied. The English, it seemed, would not believe Leeuwenhoek’s discovery until English eyes had seen the little animals on English soil in an experiment conducted by an English natural philosopher. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were upset that Leeuwenhoek—a Dutchman—had beaten their own compatriot Hooke to the discovery. Exasperated, Leeuwenhoek gave Hooke a few hints, and then, finally, on November 1, 1677—a full three and a half years after the first sighting—Hooke observed Leeuwenhoek’s little animals. Even that was not enough; Hooke had to show them to the Royal Society’s gentleman members. This he did on November 15. The next issue of the Transactions announced: “The [little animals] were observed to have all manner of motions to and fro in the water and by all who saw them they were verily believed to be animals.” Hooke stressed the attendance of “Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Hoskyns, Sir Jonas Moore … and divers others so that there was no longer any doubt of Mr. Leeuwenhoek’s discovery.”
Perhaps feeling abashed, the Royal Society named Leeuwenhoek a fellow, an honor usually reserved for British natural philosophers. He was so pleased that when his portrait was done around 1680, he made sure that the fellowship certificate with its distinctive red ribbon and the silver box in which it was sent were featured beside him in the painting. It was around this time that he added the “van” to his name.
He lived a long life, never ceasing his investigations. After his discovery of spermatozoa in his own semen, he went on to try to find the source of sperm. While dissecting a hare, he found the answer while observing sperm oozing from the vas deferens and testicles. He examined the sperm of 30 animals in all: rats, dogs, several kinds of fish, mussels, oysters, roosters, frogs, and insects of many kinds, including tiny aphids and gnats.
On his deathbed, in 1723, he dictated two letters to the Royal Society describing a histological study he had performed on cells of the diaphragms of a sheep and an ox, to disprove his doctor’s theory that he was dying of heart palpitations. He believed, rather, that he suffered from convulsions or spasms in the tendons of the diaphragm that made it difficult to breathe. He was correct, and this rare disorder is now called Van Leeuwenhoek’s Disease.
Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries did not immediately change medicine. “Germ theory”—the idea that microorganisms cause disease—did not become accepted until there was compelling evidence for it, which Leeuwenhoek lacked. One crucial step was made in the mid-1850s, when the work of Louis Pasteur provided evidence that wine and milk were being contaminated with—and spoiled by—microorganisms. In 1876, more than 150 years after Leeuwenhoek’s death, Robert Koch discovered the anthrax bacillus, proving that a particular bacterium does cause an associated disease. Neither discovery could have been made without the use of microscopes and the knowledge that microorganisms exist.
Leeuwenhoek believed that no one during his lifetime could see the invisible better than he could. Yet he suspected that even his own efforts had not penetrated to the very depths of the hidden universe. Writing to Huygens in 1679, he predicted that “all we have as yet discovered is but a trifle in comparison of what lies hidden in the great treasure of nature.”
A trifle indeed.
Viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, are about 1/100th the size of bacteria, much too small to be seen by microscopes that use light. They are “submicroscopic” and can be seen only with electron microscopes, which use beams of electrons rather than visible light photons as a source of illumination. This and other new technologies for seeing the invisible would have delighted Leeuwenhoek.
If the little animals were everywhere—in our drinking water, inside our bodies, even on healthy, clean teeth—how could they be dangerous?Whereas the first microorganisms took millennia to find, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was identified in a matter of days, thanks to the work of Leeuwenhoek and those who followed him. But we should also reflect on the relevance today of Leeuwenhoek’s belief that the little animals are not dangerous to humans, that they are instead our friends. Indeed, he resisted the suggestion of Hans Sloane of the Royal Society that little animals might be found in the pustules of smallpox victims. And even when Leeuwenhoek discovered some in his own feces while suffering an intestinal disorder, he refused to blame them for his illness.
In his 50s, at an age when most men had lost at least some of their teeth, he proudly described his own full, healthy set. The reason, he insisted, was because he scrubbed his teeth and gums each day with salt. After rinsing with water, he would take a clean, sharp quill and pick between his teeth, finishing up by rubbing his teeth with a muslin cloth.
One day, a beggar with rotting and missing teeth told Leeuwenhoek that he had never washed his teeth in his life. Going boldly where other investigators might have quailed, Leeuwenhoek scraped the man’s putrid teeth. He found so many little animals that they were in a tangle and could hardly move. He suggested that they were responsible for the man’s “stanching breath.” He even implied that they were responsible for the man’s decaying teeth.
And yet, when he found some plaque on the quill after picking his own healthy teeth, he mixed it with rainwater and some spittle and also found many little animals moving; some had “a strong and swift motion, and shot through the water like a pike,” while others “spun around like a top.” He realized with glee that “there are more living animals in the unclean matter in the teeth in one’s mouth than there are men in a whole Kingdom!” If the little animals were everywhere—in our drinking water, inside our bodies, even on healthy, clean teeth—how could they be dangerous?
He was, it turns out, partly correct. Scientists now recognize the importance of “the microbiome”: the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that reside on our skin and inside our gut. Studies have shown that the microbiome plays a critical role in our well-being. A healthy gut microbiome helps us digest our food and produce vitamins crucial to our health: B12, thiamine, riboflavin, and vitamin K (which helps clot the blood). Some studies have concluded that the specific microbiome with which we are born also helps shape our future life by making us more or less likely to develop autoimmune illnesses such as Crohn’s disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. Researchers are working on how we can manipulate the microbiome to prevent—and possibly even cure—these chronic and often debilitating diseases by introducing certain “good” bacteria to counteract the “bad.”
Using good bacteria to cure disease caused by bad bacteria is not merely a dream but a reality. Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) is a bacterium in the intestines that can cause life-threatening diarrheal infections. It is harmlessly present in many peoples’ microbiomes but can become virulent when antibiotics prescribed for another ailment kill off the bacteria that were keeping C. diff in check. When other antibiotics are then used to control C. diff, they often cause only temporary remission. The overuse of antibiotics has led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains. In 2005, the CDC warned of an emerging strain of C. diff with epidemic potential. But another treatment was found that did not rely on antibiotics.
This treatment, a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), filters the stool of a healthy person and transfers its good microbes, including fecal bacteria, into the patient’s lower intestine. FMT restores the bacteria that prevent C. diff from causing illness. This treatment has a high success rate with almost no relapses. Although it was already being used by doctors under what the FDA calls “discretionary enforcement” or as part of clinical trials (both of which limited its use), the FDA placed FMT under a “special guidance” rule in 2013, allowing all patients with C. diff who were unresponsive to antibiotics to receive it. In 2022 and earlier this year, the FDA approved two pharmaceutical products for the treatment. FMT is also being tested as a treatment for other gastrointestinal diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome and colitis. Research suggests that it may help patients with Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and additional neurological conditions. Leeuwenhoek’s “little friends” are already succeeding in curing serious, even deadly, illnesses, and in the future may cure more—perhaps even Covid-19.
Recent research at the National Institutes of Health, using both animal models and human subjects, has suggested that the SARS-CoV-2 virus disrupts the microbiome in such a way that bacterial infections can take over the gut and alter the gut lining—allowing pathogenic (or bad) bacteria to spread to the bloodstream and leading to the serious secondary infections that are often fatal to Covid-19 patients. And scientists at the University of Chicago found that an analysis of personal gut microbiomes can predict the outcomes of patients with severe Covid-19. Such discoveries raise the hope that someday we will be able to create personalized probiotics that can introduce good bacteria into a patient’s microbiome to limit the damage of the virus, perhaps even destroy it, and prevent the disabling sequelae that cause untold suffering even after an initial “recovery.” Research on how to use good bacteria to help Covid-19 patients continues.
Microorganisms make up about half of our total cell count. One of Leeuwenhoek’s contemporaries, the natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, wrote a poem called “Of Many Worlds in This World,” a paean to the new discovery of an invisible realm of “creatures.” It ends: “And if thus small, then ladies may well wear / A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.” It turns out that this world of worlds exists not merely on our earlobes but inside of us—acting as friends as well as foes.
The post A Kingdom of Little Animals appeared first on The American Scholar.
Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic by Emily Monosson; W. W. Norton, 272 pp., $28.95
Consider fungi. They are their own kingdom, more closely related to animal than to plant. They grow and search for food with threadlike hyphae. They feed by excreting digestive juices onto their dinner, living or dead, to help break down nutrients before ingesting. There are more species of fungi (as many as six million) than there are known animal species (about two million, mostly insects) or plant species (about 400,000 terrestrial species). Fungi (except yeast) reproduce by putting out spores. Chemists estimate that in any given year, 50 million tons of fungal spores are blowing about in the air.
Most fungi are harmless; some are essential for our survival. We savor the fruiting bodies of portobellos and other mushrooms. Yeast gives us bread and beer. Fungi live in our gut microbiome along with bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. In soil, mycorrhizal fungi colonize plant roots and break down nutrients, good for trees. Saprobes (fungal decomposers) consume dead matter that otherwise would pile up. Penicillin comes from a fungus (a mold).
So what’s the problem? Fungal pathogens. Collectively, writes Emily Monosson in this well-researched, revelatory book, “infectious fungi … are the most devastating disease agents known on the planet.” Fungal threats, she elaborates, “are big, continuing, diverse, and potentially catastrophic.”
Take Candida auris (C. auris), a yeast that first appeared on the radar of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016 and that is currently spreading around the world. It already has four genetically distinct populations and is evolving resistance to all three existing classes of antifungal drugs. In a New York hospital, after a patient died of it, the hospital’s president recounted the level of contamination: “Everything was positive—the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump. The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling.” To get rid of it, the hospital had to rip out floor and ceiling tiles from the patient’s room. Today, more than a thousand patients across the United States have it. At least 30 percent of them will die.
The threat of fungal pathogens is exploding. “Each year nearly a billion patients [worldwide] struggle with fungal infections,” Monosson writes. For “150 million it will be life threatening, and of those, more than 1.6 million people around the world will die.” This is practically the same number of deaths as from tuberculosis, and nearly three times as many as from malaria.
Fungal pathogens such as C. auris tend to kill people who are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed. This is no small club. It includes people with organ transplants (40,000 in the United States alone in 2021). It includes several million HIV-AIDS patients. It includes cancer patients. It includes some people who take high doses of steroids for conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It includes people hospitalized for Covid-19. It includes people whose immune systems are not what they used to be—people who are aging.
So far, we humans have been spared this level of pathogenic devastation. Will we be spared forever? Monosson’s answer is unequivocal: Get ready.Other pathogenic fungi infect people in perfect health. Such is the Coccidioides infection known as Valley fever. More than 20,000 cases were reported in the United States in 2019, and on average the infection kills two hundred people per year nationwide.
Why now? Fungi like it cold—and our very existence as a species likely came about because of this. Sixty-six million years ago, in the so-called Chicxulub Impact Event, an asteroid smashed into Earth, wiping out non-avian dinosaurs along with three-quarters of all other plant and animal species. Afterward, fungi began covering everything, feeding on the dying and the dead. Small mammals survived, eventually evolving into primates, eventually evolving into us. Why did they survive? Besides being small, which helped, they were warm-blooded. Fungi like it cold.
But Earth is warming. And fungi may be evolving to like it warmer.
Fungal pathogens also proliferate as we stir and remix nature on a grand scale, allowing them to be transported to novel places. Away from their native habitat, which had kept them in check, pathogens find new hosts and thrive. Every year, for example, 200 million captured animals are imported into the United States. These birds, fish, monkeys, reptiles, amphibians, and spiders find their way to restaurants, research labs, and especially pet stores. For most of these animals, no requirements exist for identifying or controlling pathogens. This legal traffic is a conveyer belt, some scientists say, loaded with viruses, bacteria, and fungi.
We humans have not yet experienced a fungal pandemic, but the same cannot be said of animals and plants. Monosson devotes several gruesome chapters to fungal infections that have devastated other species. The great frog die-off of the past 20 years saw several species (blue poison dart frogs, White’s tree frogs, green and black tree frogs, mountain yellow-legged frogs) decimated by the skin-eating chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. White pine blister rust (caused by Cronartium ribicola) has killed millions of pine trees. In the early 1900s, the American chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) reduced perhaps four billion majestic trees to stumps. And white-nose syndrome (Pseudogymnoascus destructans) has, since 2007, killed millions of bats (little brown, big brown, northern long-eared, tricolored, and Indiana).
So far, we humans have been spared this level of pathogenic fungal devastation. Will we be spared forever? Monosson’s answer is unequivocal: Get ready. Ways to do this include increasing crop and seed diversity, reversing the trend of breeding grains and other food plants for desirable qualities, in the process drastically reducing genetic diversity. More plant diversity would improve the likelihood that some individuals would be able to develop resistance to a pathogen, thus saving a species from extinction. Extensive inspections at border crossings and more effective testing and disease monitoring are also imperative. The Covid-19 pandemic made abundantly clear our vulnerabilities.
The good news is that scientists and others are working (struggling might be a better word) to put into place systems and policies to head off a new pandemic that could make Covid look like child’s play. In this terrifying book, Monosson gives us the opportunity to wise up and join their efforts.
The post We Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet appeared first on The American Scholar.
I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon.
As I refreshed my memory in the following days, I learned that although there was considerable controversy about the history and legitimacy of the painting, there was some general consensus, too. The Salvator Mundi—“Savior of the World”—was most likely completed at the turn of the 16th century. An oil painting rendered on a walnut panel, it depicts Jesus offering a blessing with his right hand while holding an orb that represents Earth with his left. Studies made in preparation for the painting had been authenticated as genuine Leonardos, and at least 30 copies were believed to have been produced by Leonardo’s disciples directly from the original. Records show that the painting was in the collections of various British aristocrats and royals, including King Charles I, but sometime at the end of the 18th century, it effectively disappeared. When the work turned up at a New Orleans estate sale in 2005—heavily damaged, poorly restored, and painted over in several places—two veteran art dealers, Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, thought it might be significant and purchased it for around $10,000. They hired Dianne Modestini, a scholar and master art restorer, to clear away the restorations and repairs that the painting had undergone over the centuries to produce a definitive version. What emerged was an artwork that some experts believed to be the genuine Salvator Mundi. Others were not convinced.
Beginning in November 2011, the restored painting was displayed as part of a large exhibition of Leonardo’s works at London’s National Gallery, which had authenticated the painting. In 2013, it sold for about $80 million in a brokered deal that saw it resold the following day for $127.5 million. In 2017, it went up for auction again, this time selling for more than $450 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art—to an unknown bidder who turned out to be a Saudi prince reportedly acting as a proxy for Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The work was supposed to be part of a landmark 2019 exhibition at the Louvre commemorating the 500th death anniversary of Leonardo, but the painting never went on display, the reasons for its exclusion never made public. And though scientific examinations done by the museum had confirmed that the painting was genuine (at least according to a secret book prepared, but never published, by the Louvre), questions about its authenticity have lingered. The entire saga of the painting’s travails through the contemporary worlds of art, wealth, and politics was traced in the 2021 documentary The Lost Leonardo, which portrayed how the superrich are able to hide their wealth in the form of high-end art.
I was surprised that so many discussions of the painting had focused more on these financial aspects, and the controversial nature of how it changed hands, than they did on aesthetics. To me, the bigger question was whether this artwork had the effect of a Leonardo. And when I looked at an image of the restored painting, I could not be sure. I saw a hint of the master before me, but something seemed to be missing.
I was curious about the kind of project Yanai had undertaken. His efforts lay mainly in the realm of contemporary art, which he usually exhibited in large-scale installations. He had studied academic drawing as a teenager and then visual art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He was a founding member and curator of the Barbur Gallery, a collective art space that has hosted both local and international artists since 2005, and has worked as an illustrator and a designer, creating everything from animated videos to children’s books. His studio, which I’d visited regularly over the years, was full of large-scale abstract paintings and conceptual sculptures made of such materials as hand-mixed concrete and Styrofoam. But there were often small oil paintings, too, scattered around, many of them still lifes of flowers. For as long as I’ve known him, Yanai has investigated the tension between figurative and abstract art, combining 20th-century modernist patterns with a contemporary aesthetic language. I had never known him to take an interest in the work of the Old Masters.
When I asked Yanai about his project, he told me that he had come across two images of the Salvator Mundi—the restored version that the world had come to know and an earlier, damaged iteration, with many of the original artist’s brushstrokes still visible. Wondering if a digital restoration would yield a different result, he decided to draw on his many years of computer experience and attempt to restore the painting himself. He had accomplished a great deal, he said, and though he wasn’t yet done, he sensed that his work might provide a clearer view of the artist’s original vision.
When I saw a photo of the damaged Salvator Mundi, I had an immediate idea of what had inspired Yanai. Looking at the half-tattered canvas, with the figure of Jesus bearing a haunting expression, I experienced an emotional reaction that had been absent when I’d seen an image of the physically restored version. Although I was not sure whether a digital restoration could be called legitimate, I was curious whether the emotion of the original—which, to me, was missing in the physical restoration—could be better captured using digital means. If so, it would raise a whole new set of questions about the painting and its authorship. When Yanai invited me to his studio in Tel Aviv to see the work in progress, I told him that I’d be there in a couple of days.
The Salvator Mundi in its damaged state—cleaned but not yet restored (Wikimedia Commons)
I got on the train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on a hot July afternoon. When I arrived at Yanai’s studio, he made me a cup of strong black coffee, sat me down in a chair, and opened up a laptop, revealing an image of a half-restored Salvator Mundi. This was nothing like the painting that was famous the world over. This one had more gravitas, more power. It had the kind of arresting presence I associated with Leonardo.
Yanai began to explain to me how he had performed his restoration. With extremely close-up zooms into a photograph of the damaged original, he was able to pick up pixel-resolution pigment traces adjacent to the damaged areas. Whereas a typical art restorer would, at this point, add new pigments to the painting, Yanai used digital impressions of the surviving work to fill in the missing sections. He looked at images of every known copy of the Salvator Mundi to determine what might have been on the original walnut panel. He constantly zoomed in and out, looking at the overall image, then going back in to fill in the pixels, watching as, step by step, a new version of the painting emerged.
I thought Yanai had a powerful image on his hands, and I asked him to tell me more about how the project came into being. He shrugged and said it was sort of by accident. During the pandemic, he began listening to podcasts while working on illustrations and book covers. One of those podcasts was about the Salvator Mundi. Intrigued, he searched for the painting online and came upon the image of the damaged work. It moved him. It was totally ruined, he said, but really like gazing at a figure behind a beaded curtain. If he could just reach out and move the curtain, he said, he could see what lay behind. He’d never attempted anything like a digital restoration of a painting, but the idea stayed with him. It wouldn’t leave him alone.
Yanai did a preliminary test, and the result turned out better than he’d imagined. It didn’t look like an artwork yet, but slowly he could see a new version of the painting appearing on the screen. As I looked at the image he had created, something about it tapped into a deep emotional well in me. Sure, the physical restoration had been historically researched. It had material integrity, dutifully bringing back to an optimal state a painting that had been badly damaged and inexpertly conserved over the centuries. I also understood that the motivation of the restorer was different: to preserve a physical object that could later be sold at auction. But for me, that object lacked feeling. And no matter how many times it was—or wasn’t—attributed to Leonardo, it could never be a legitimate Leonardo if it didn’t also have emotional force. It could be a Leonardo painting, but not a Leonardo artwork.
Yanai was heartened by my response, but he was still concerned about the significance of his undertaking—in particular, how it related to the ongoing debate about the physically restored painting. He was also wary of the fine line between the project of re-creating an image by Leonardo and the possibility of its being seen as an artwork of his own. He was not invested, he said, in creating a Yanai original. He was pursuing a vision that squarely belonged to Leonardo. But he couldn’t totally take himself out of the equation, either. Which left him with a lot of questions.
Still, he said, the project had become a compulsion. He’d sit down to create an illustration or design a book cover, feel compelled to take a quick look at the Leonardo, and then end up working on the restoration for hours. His initial aim had been to fill in the missing sections using information gleaned from the damaged original. Once he took this as far as it would go, however, he saw that some areas lacked sufficient data for him to finish the painting using simple digital deduction. In those sections, he explained, he had to think like an artist and re-create the missing areas in accordance with what he believed Leonardo might have intended. He was no longer fixing a painting, he said, but working on an interpolation. It was hard to move into this space, and that was why he’d stopped. He was looking to get some perspective on the project as it stood.
Yanai asked what I thought about his restored version so far. I told him the truth. That I didn’t quite know yet what to make of it, and that I needed to think some more. Since he was only half done, it was hard to make any final judgment. All I could say was that his version felt closer to what might have been the original. We agreed that I’d return once he’d worked on it some more. And I repeated that the main issue, for me, was the emotional element—there was something uncanny about the damaged painting that was missing from the physical restoration, something that seemed better preserved in Yanai’s image.
The Salvator Mundi after the restoration performed by Dianne Modestini. Although experts at the Louvre authenticated the restoration as a genuine Leonardo, questions about its authenticity remain. (Wikimedia Commons)
On the train ride home, I began to reflect on some questions that had been on my mind since Yanai first told me about his project—for reasons that had nothing to do with him or the Salvator Mundi. A decade earlier, during a trip to Paris, I had met a retired-businessman-turned-philosopher named Hervé Le Baut. I had been seeking information on the life of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of France’s foremost philosophers in the period after World War II. Merleau-Ponty had been a close friend and colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who all together founded Le Temps modernes, one of the best-known postwar journals. In the early 1950s, not long after Albert Camus’s falling-out with Sartre over their political differences, Merleau-Ponty also cut ties with Sartre. Researching any direct links between Camus and Merleau-Ponty, I had sought out Le Baut, who had written a book on the French philosopher. When we met at his home, Le Baut said he knew little of Merleau-Ponty’s connection with Camus, but he then revealed to me something that was common knowledge to people with an interest in Beauvoir but was mostly unknown to everyone else. It was a story of legitimacy.
The story appears in Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), in which she describes the death, nearly 30 years before, of her beloved friend Zaza, who, she reports, died after being spurned by a man named in the book as Jean Pradelle. In reality, this man was Merleau-Ponty. What Beauvoir didn’t know—and what she learned from Zaza’s sister only after her memoir was published—was that Merleau-Ponty had turned Zaza away for the simple reason that her parents, who’d hired a detective to look into his family’s past, had discovered that he was an illegitimate child. They told him to either halt his pursuit of Zaza or be publicly exposed. And so he ended the relationship. Zaza died not long after the breakup. Zaza’s sister supposedly showed Beauvoir letters suggesting that Zaza herself knew of the whole debacle—that the tragedy had indeed been fatal to her, killing her first in spirit and then in body.
Merleau-Ponty would have been 21 when this took place and seemingly hadn’t known of his own illegitimacy before it was revealed to him by Zaza’s family. It’s chilling to think of how he learned of his provenance, from people who were hardly more than strangers, crushing not only his love for his fiancée and his plans for the future but also his entire understanding of his own past. The moment was powerful and deeply traumatic, and perhaps that’s why, years later, sitting down to write an essay on Paul Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty found himself veering into the personal history of Leonardo—one of the most famous illegitimate children of all time.
As soon as I got home, I reread “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Merleau-Ponty first raises the matter of Leonardo’s illegitimacy as part of an argument about the relationship between childhood and adulthood—between the powerful feeling that our lives are determined by our births and the similarly powerful feeling that we can determine our future by our actions. And though the argument is first built on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty makes a sudden pivot, referencing Sigmund Freud’s book on Leonardo and refocusing his discussion on one of the only times Leonardo ever mentioned his childhood: when he described the memory of a vulture coming to him in the cradle and striking him on the mouth with its tail. With this sleight of hand, Merleau-Ponty turns an essay ostensibly about the role of doubt in creativity into a meditation on origins—in this case, the origins of arguably the greatest master of all time.
Continuing to lean on Freud, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that Leonardo “was the illegitimate son of a rich notary who married the noble Donna Albiera the very year Leonardo was born. Having no children by her, he took Leonardo into his home when the boy was five”—the same age when Merleau-Ponty experienced the death of the man he thought was his father. Merleau-Ponty then adds, in a tone that takes on a subtle lyricism, that Leonardo “was a child without a father” and that “he got to know the world in the sole company of that unhappy mother who seemed to have miraculously created him.”
Those lines changed how I read Merleau-Ponty’s essay. When he writes about Leonardo’s “basic attachment” to his mother, “which he had to give up when he was recalled to his father’s home, and into which he had poured all his resources of love and all his power of abandon,” I imagined Merleau-Ponty refracting his own attachment to his mother through the Renaissance artist. When he later writes that Leonardo’s “spirit of investigation was a way for him to escape from life, as if he had invested all his power of assent in the first years of his life and had remained true to his childhood right to the end,” Merleau-Ponty seems to be mirroring his own sense of curiosity and wonder as a thinker. Elsewhere, when he writes that Leonardo “paid no heed to authority and trusted only nature and his own judgment in matters of knowledge,” I couldn’t help but think of Merleau-Ponty reflecting on his own moment of truth—when he discovered his illegitimate origins and, still young and insecure, succumbed to the social pressures exerted on him. He is writing about Leonardo, but he could well be writing about himself.
I was curious about the source of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on Leonardo, so I turned to Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. “In the first three or four years of life,” writes Freud, “impressions are fixed and modes of reactions are formed towards the outer world which can never be robbed of their importance by any later experiences.” The impression that Leonardo would have had of himself as a fatherless child would have likely haunted him throughout his life. And, it occurred to me all at once, his circumstances would also have helped him identify with the most famous of “fatherless” boys—Jesus.
And that’s when it all came together. What better way to create an everlasting emblem of your most consequential childhood impression than to paint yourself as the Salvator Mundi—the savior of the world? What could be more audacious than to turn your illegitimacy into one of the most powerful religious symbols ever created?
It wasn’t a totally wild idea. Lillian Schwartz, a visual artist working with digital media since the 1960s, had made a claim back in 1987 that the Mona Lisa was a self-portrait of Leonardo. But it was one thing to turn yourself into a woman, and quite another to paint Christ in your own image. It took Leonardo’s penchant for games and riddles into the realm of blasphemy. Yet on another level, it was also a simple and perfect way to expose something about yourself that was otherwise difficult to address—to get an emotion across without having to identify the emotion itself. Merleau-Ponty, writing about Leonardo, had done the same thing. He had told his personal story through a figure so grand that no one had ever guessed he might have been talking about himself. He had done to Leonardo what Leonardo had done to Jesus.
I was tempted to call up Yanai and tell him about my hypothesis. But I realized that he first had to complete his image without knowing of my thought experiment. Then, once it was done, I could put his Salvator Mundi next to other portraits of Leonardo—and compare.
Yanai Segal’s digital restoration of the painting believed to be Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (Yanai Segal)
Six months passed. It was a busy time—a new coronavirus variant was rampant, and obligations ballooned. I seemed unable to catch up with anything. By the time I talked to Yanai about his project again, he told me that he had gone as far as he could with the image. Finally, in early winter, I found a moment to visit him again at his studio. As we settled into our chairs and he reached for his laptop, I sensed that I was sitting next to a changed person. He hadn’t just stopped work on the digital restoration. He’d come to some sort of understanding.
Yanai opened his laptop and revealed the image. I was struck by how final it looked. I still had the damaged painting in mind, with its haunting rips and scratches, and it was somewhat jarring to see the apparent magic trick that Yanai had performed—as if he’d resurrected the original image. The digital process he’d used had evolved during those months. At some point, he thought he had finished, but the image had looked too smooth, too new, lacking any of the mystique or allure of a 500-year-old painting. The damaged work, he said, gives you a mental image that’s difficult to unsee. It has a kind of fuzziness, a softness around the eyes and face, from all of the scratches and erasures. He realized that to restore the image properly, he also had to preserve the damage it had suffered over the centuries. So he removed the most recent layer altogether and started putting the painting back piece by piece. Many of the sections he thought he’d “fixed,” he said, had turned from interpolations into interpretations, so that, slowly, the painting had also become his, which had never been his intention. Having fully restored the image, he began scaling back his work—but this time with the knowledge and experience of having examined every single pixel and pigment. He stopped “fixing” the painting and started reclaiming the parts that were lost. And as he did, he discovered that the sections that looked “lost” were not lost at all. They just needed a little push to make them more clearly visible.
I asked Yanai what he made of his effort, and he said it was hard to say what it was all about. It wasn’t just about the methodology of digitally restoring the painting, though he had invested a great deal of time in that, and it wasn’t just about satisfying his curiosity about what such a restoration might look like, though that was also a part of the story. It also wasn’t about putting his own mark on a Leonardo, as Marcel Duchamp had done when he famously added a mustache to the Mona Lisa in a 1919 print. Whatever Yanai had done, its meaning was somewhere at the crossroads of these things, though it was also about the painting itself. The digital restoration, Yanai said, brings us closer to the original. In the middle of the process, as he became intimate with its every corner, its every color and texture, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the painting had also become his own. Now, at the end, he no longer saw himself in the process. When he looked at the painting, what he saw was a contemporary artwork—a representation of all humanity holding a fragile world in his hands. It’s a beautiful image, he said. People had been so busy talking about its authenticity that they had missed this essential aspect of the painting.
In the end, he said, had he known the road he’d need to take to arrive at this point, he wasn’t sure he would have started. He likened the whole process to standing at a chasm with only enough raw material to build a bridge halfway across. You start building and get to the middle, but then you have to take the bridge you’ve built, while suspended in midair, and use the same raw material to build the second half. Then, having reached the other side, you have to build the bridge again in the opposite direction to get as close as possible back to the original.
All other matters aside, I asked, had the experience given him any new insights about himself as an artist? He chuckled and said that it had actually reconnected him with his roots. He’d gone back to his old notebooks, to the drawings he’d done as a teenager when first starting to paint, and found copies he’d made of Leonardo’s drawings. He pulled a few of these out to show me, and I recognized one image at once—the head of an old man believed to be a self-portrait. It felt like a sign. I finally shared with him my own thoughts about Leonardo and the possibility that the Salvator Mundi was also a portrait of the artist.
I suggested we put his final image next to images that were believed to be portraits of Leonardo—including the drawing he had copied as a teenager. He opened some tabs up on his computer. It was hard not to be moved. The sharp nose. The penetrating eyes. The delicate eyebrows. The unique curve of the mouth. Even a split beard. It was uncanny. It was all there. It was, without a doubt, Leonardo.
I cannot overstate the power of the moment. The symbolism of the painting disappeared, and I saw before me a person all too aware of the fragility of the world in which he lived and from which, unlike the immortal figure in his painting, he would one day have to depart.
I looked over at Yanai, who had given years of his own life to resurrecting the dead, and had another thought. If Leonardo painting Jesus was really Leonardo painting himself, and Merleau-Ponty writing about Leonardo was in reality Merleau-Ponty writing about himself, was it possible that Yanai’s restoration of the Salvator Mundi was in reality Yanai’s restoration of himself? Perhaps. But Leonardo had also painted Jesus, and Merleau-Ponty had also written about Leonardo, and Yanai had, regardless of anything else, also restored the Salvator Mundi—endowing it once again with the most important element lost along the way, something that could never be reproduced by technical means alone. Emotion.
The post The Whole World in His Hands appeared first on The American Scholar.
The way my mother told the story, my birth was a miracle. Diagnosed with terminal cancer six months into the pregnancy, she was not expected to live to the end of the nine-month term. Doctors told her that if she were to have an abortion, she might live an additional 18 months. She declined, and the doctors sent her home to die, unable to do anything further.
My mother called for her pastor to come and lay hands on her in a prayer of healing. The following Sunday, she entered the little white church across the street from our house, where, she said, the Holy Spirit told her to play the piano. My mother was a classical pianist before joining the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, where the music was fast, uninhibited, and sensational. She had never quite learned to play it—the music was not written down—but on that day, the church needed a musician and Momma was there, so at the urging of the Holy Spirit, she made her way to the piano. A woman began singing one of the fastest songs in the church’s repertoire, a call-and-response number that can be never-ending. God’s not dead, the song leader calls out. He’s yet alive, the audience responds.
As the story goes, my mother then lifted her hands—her arms leaden, her muscles weak, her body wracked with pain—and began to play that old piano, for 10 minutes, 20, maybe more. And somewhere in the middle of that service, my mother, who had barely been able to walk, suddenly rose from the bench and began to run around the circumference of the small church in ecstatic praise, as was customary among the congregants imbued with the spirit. The following week, my mother returned to the doctors and learned that her cancer was in remission. She would live another 24 years.
Whatever the truth behind her recovery, my mother’s story is the kind of experience common to that distinct American institution known as the Black church. For enslaved people and their descendants, the Black church became a substitute for the cultural, spiritual, and religious institutions that had anchored West African communities for thousands of years. The Black church is intimately connected to family and to one’s identity, providing a strong centering mechanism for a people historically deprived of justice and well-being. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, African Americans took the religion of their “masters” and “made it their own through a flowering of denominations that [ran] the gamut from the AME Church to the Church of God in Christ to so many storefront sanctuaries that remain a key refuge for many in hard times.” It isn’t surprising that the civil rights movement, one of the most important episodes in American history, was born in the Black church.
But the evolution of this institution, from the smallest houses of worship to the megachurches of the present, has come with its share of hypocrisy and scandal. Take Eddie Lee Long, who in the 2000s faced allegations of sexual misconduct and financial impropriety during his tenure as senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in DeKalb County, Georgia. I was thinking of Long (who died in 2017) as well as my mother’s story of healing as I watched the 2022 comedy Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. Jordan Peele is an executive producer of this daring film, which stars Sterling K. Brown as Lee-Curtis Childs and Regina Hall as Trinitie Childs, the pastor and first lady of a Black megachurch that sees most of its congregation flee after the pastor’s sexual liaisons with several young men come to light—the film is indeed based on the story of Eddie Lee Long.
Honk for Jesus is an important film—the first of its kind. And only now, at a time when Black filmmakers are finally able to tell a range of stories about Black Americans, could a film exploring such a subject have been made. That Jordan Peele’s name is attached to the project doesn’t hurt. With his ability to mingle elements of different genres (he’s as comfortable with horror as he is with comedy), Peele has the audacity to question everything associated with the establishment. Adamma Ebo, who wrote and directed Honk for Jesus, and her sister, Adanne, who produced it, skillfully examine the self-delusion of people who feel compelled—and in their minds, divinely inspired—to rise to seemingly untouchable positions of leadership. They depict what some people responsible for the spiritual well-being of thousands of others will do to stay in power and justify their calling. This, then, is the conundrum: the Black church—as a cultural icon of uncritical devotion—must survive if it is to continue to be the safe harbor it has always been. Somewhere along the way, however, the job of leading a congregation becomes soured by devastating hypocrisy, and a Sunday morning service turns into showtime, a word that Lee-Curtis uses before every service.
That doesn’t mean that Honk for Jesus isn’t sympathetic to the Black megachurch—far from it. “A lot of the times when this subject is approached,” Adamma Ebo has said, the treatment is “judgmental and demonizing. … The reality for a lot of people, including myself [is]: you hear some of these folks speak and you’re like, ‘This means something to me, this moves me.’ And I feel like that sort of perspective hasn’t really been shown, how lovely it is and can be.”
How do we protect the legacy of an institution that continues to perform necessary civil rights work while also exposing the harm it has inflicted on its members? This is the essential question that the film largely ignores.The style of the film is mockumentary, and within the first 15 minutes, Lee-Curtis and Trinitie are introducing us to the people they call “our real followers … they stuck by us even with all the awfulness.” Cut to a portrait of four adults and one child sitting in a huge edifice meant to hold more than 20,000 people—a moment at once heartbreaking and hilarious. The scene that follows only intensifies those conflicting emotions. A caption on screen reads, “Wednesday Church Service,” and we see those same five church members, with Lee-Curtis laying hands on the youngest among them, Aria Devaughn (brilliantly played by Selah Kimbro Jones), the spirit supposedly channeling through him. Aria responds by falling backward, the spirit now supposedly coursing through her. Cut abruptly to Aria talking to the mockumentary filmmakers. “I love the theater!” she exclaims.
Scenes such as this one offer a brilliant critique of the performative aspects of the Black church, but it falls short in one crucial way: it doesn’t provide any understanding of why these theatrical aspects have been so much a part of Sunday service. Without helping the viewer understand certain aspects of the Black church’s iconography and cultural significance, humor and satire can easily fall flat. How do we protect the legacy of an institution that continues to perform necessary civil rights work while also exposing the harm it has inflicted on its members? This is the essential question that the film largely ignores.
The church to which my mother attributed my miraculous birth is also the church that refused to ordain her (or any woman) as a minister. Its members were coerced into making the church paramount in their lives, even at the expense of their families and households—many of our neighbors couldn’t pay their utility bills because they gave their money to the church. When my mother spoke up and refused to accept these traditions, she was kicked out.
There is a scene in Honk for Jesus that epitomizes the pain that can come out of such coercion. Lee-Curtis is shown persuading Trinitie to put on whiteface makeup and perform a mime dance on the street—to get cars to honk for Jesus, which she does because that’s what she’s supposed to do as the pastor’s wife. The film cuts to Trinitie telling the filmmakers how humiliating it is for her, the first lady of the church, to don that mask and dance, all to save face for her husband, while he is perfectly willing to see her reputation and self-esteem put at risk. Trinitie and her mother (Avis-Marie Barnes) represent real women in the church tradition, women who have often had to accept what was dictated to them by men, without question or compromise.
I once worked as a consultant, helping top-level executives at nonprofit and governmental agencies sort through various crises. One organization, a housing corporation that sought to help Houston’s homeless population, was founded by the church to which I belonged. Because I was offering advice to the man who was also my pastor, I initially did not charge a fee. But the work evolved into an extensive two-year project, and during that time, I drew from my bank account to help reconcile the organization’s debts—I took neither a salary nor benefits with the understanding that I’d be reimbursed later. I never was, in full. Of course, the church is hardly the only American institution capable of taking advantage. But my deep spiritual connection to the church—a connection that pre-dates my birth, stemming from the story of my mother’s miracle—had allowed me to enter into a decidedly bad relationship. After that experience, I left the church, though I am no less interested in its enduring influence in people’s lives.
As an anthropologist, I am able to place the church’s flaws in context. Some people might witness a congregant running in ecstatic circles, moved by the Holy Spirit, and wonder why in the world any intelligent, thinking person would participate in such a farce. I know, however, that these rituals evolved from Yoruba practices brought to the Americas by enslaved West Africans. I am acutely aware of the Black church’s connection to my past—the spiritual, cultural, and historical gravity of what it represents. This is ultimately what’s lacking in Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, despite its laugh-out-loud moments of comedic genius. Without the perspective of what the Black church has meant over the centuries, all we have is empty farce.
The post False Prophets appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30
It’s almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin’s most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that—over the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s—grew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike.
But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, “It’s easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father like that.” Another’s mother is referred to as “that old womb with a built-in tomb.” The latter quotation comes from painter Jackson Pollock, who’s among a small parade of notables who wander like oddballs through this strange milieu. (Others include art critic Clement Greenberg, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Richard Price.)
Dishy as it is, however, Stille’s book is hardly an exercise in name dropping. The true heroes and villains in this story—most individuals, children excepted, take turns being both—are everyday people whose dramas are sometimes darkly amusing but more often heartbreaking. These are real members of nontheoretical families who found themselves at once the victims and willing enforcers of disastrous social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily. Through all phases of the story, from the kinky, free-love eccentricity of the early years to the insularity, paranoia, and criminality of the later years, Stille maintains an admirable, almost tenacious sympathy for his subjects—a sympathy some of those subjects, in retrospect, aren’t sure they deserve. But as the cognitive dissonance grows, so too does the tension, making the book an improbable thriller, propelling us from chapter to chapter to see how these unfortunates will extricate themselves (if they can) from a Gordian knot of their own creation. Will anyone make it out emotionally intact, reasonably functional? Will they be reunited with their own blood, whom they’ve been conditioned to regard with indifference if not hostility?
One cavil: Stille places the origin of his story in a typically caricatured version of 1950s America, an unsophisticated place marked by little more than stifling convention (Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), but with a hint of rebellion on the horizon (Rebel Without a Cause, On the Road). The implication being that the Sullivan Institute was part of that incipient rebellion, a harbinger of the revolutions to come in the ensuing decade. This is misleading on two fronts.
The members of nontheoretical families found themselves at once the victims and enforcers of social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily.First, 1950s America was not some sheltered national virgin whose inaugural orgasm awaited in the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising ’60s. The conventionality we associate with the ’50s was partly a return to normal after the 1940s, a decade that—owing to war-related domestic upheavals—saw myriad social and sexual pathologies rise, some drastically. (Jack Kerouac’s dionysian On the Road, it should be remembered, was a chronicle of journeys taken mostly in the late ’40s, though the book wasn’t published for another decade.) Given this recent anomie, the return to conventionality in the 1950s was akin to what Stille observed among former Sullivanians, who left behind the commune’s deliberate parental chaos and loveless promiscuity to find shelter in the old-fashioned romantic and family structures the commune had forbidden.
Second, the ideas that animated the Sullivan Institute weren’t born in reaction to 1950s American convention. They were a proactive (if kooky) extension of theories that had emerged partly from the Frankfurt School in the prewar years. One of the Sullivan Institute’s founders claimed to have learned at the feet of, among others, the social psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself had participated with a Frankfurt School colleague, philosopher Max Horkheimer, on Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). That publication is a heady mix of Freudianism and Marxism that placed the family—its dynamics, dysfunctions, sublimations, and pathologies—firmly within a web of larger social and historical forces that acted on it. Those forces chiefly related to capitalism, under which fathers were seen to enact a kind of small-scale ownership and exploitation of their own families. If the surrounding society could be made more just and egalitarian, it might, in Horkheimer’s words, “replace the individualistic motive as the dominant bond in relationships,” giving rise to “a new community of spouses and children,” in which children “will not be raised as future heirs and will therefore not be regarded, in the old way, as ‘one’s own.’ ”
That’s a pretty fair approximation of what the Sullivanians fancied themselves pursuing. How did it go? “There was a feeling of pressure,” said one cult member, “that was really unpleasant, of having to conform in a certain way to unconformity.” Women endeavoring to get pregnant were required to sleep with multiple men while ovulating, to obscure paternity, which—said one male Sullivanian remorsefully—made it “easier to dissociate from the possible offspring.” Maternal bonds were broken as well, as children were taken from their mothers and raised in other parts of the commune by groups of men or women, with biological mothers being granted ruthlessly limited interactions with their offspring—and those offspring ultimately being denied knowledge of their origins. Per Horkheimer, children were not, in the old way, one’s own. Many of the children themselves came to regard their parents as “insane,” “basically a bunch of zombies.” In the long aftermath, one remarked, “I’ve thought three different men were my father in the past three years. I’m exhausted by having to relive the mistakes of my parents.” Another felt that he had been treated like an “experimental subject”—his childhood and his tender, developing psyche deformed by others’ commitment to validating a theory.
The Sullivan Institute insisted that every family—categorically—was a source of Larkinesque psychological damage. Then the institute became a scaled-up version of one and proved it.
The post Family Tatters appeared first on The American Scholar.
Welcome to Freud Airlines. Your psyche is our highest priority.
Do not accept any personal baggage from someone you don’t know. If anyone tries to give you an unsolicited diagnosis, please alert the gate attendant. Be advised that frequent-flyer miles from Air Jung are no longer accepted at Freud Airlines.
We will be boarding our five-star analysands first, the order determined by the number of years spent in psychoanalysis. Any unaccompanied inner children should get in line now. We will next board our paranoid passengers. (We know who you are.) If you have multiple personalities, you may now all board together.
A list of upgraded passengers can be found on the monitor. If your name is not listed, you will have to tolerate your envy or find a more adaptive defense, like sublimation or dark humor. Sarcasm toward the gate therapist will be recognized as transference, and will therefore be analyzed ad infinitum. Narcissists seated in the main cabin may not use the first-class cabin, even if you think you belong there. Superegos too large to fit in the overhead bin will need to be gate-checked before boarding and may be claimed upon arrival.
Please wait until we are at our snoozing altitude and the seatbelt sign has been turned off before stretching out on your couch. If you happen to fall sleep, feel free to press the service call button upon waking so that a steward with a notepad and illegible handwriting can interpret your dream. The cabin attendants will be serving sacher torte and cocaine shortly after takeoff.
Passengers are requested not to let their particular phobias disturb other passengers. Smoking and other solitary vices are not permitted anywhere on the plane. Fantasies are allowed, as are fetishes, although anything violent or creepy—like the desire to have sex with your mother and murder your father—should remain carefully stowed in the unconscious, now located in the compartment above you. Be aware that contents may shift during the flight.
Our journey will last precisely 50 minutes. Make sure that your seatbelt is properly fastened and snug around your waist. If you happen to be obsessive-compulsive, you may want to check it again. And again. And again.
We are anticipating some unsettled weather. In case of turbulence, be sure to take your Xanax pill yourself before offering pharmaceutical assistance to those sitting near you.
We will be landing in Vienna shortly. Raise your egos to their full uptight position. Please check the seat pocket for any personal defenses you might need. The stewards will do one final run-through to collect all remaining neuroses, compulsions, and inadvertent slips of the tongue.
Upon arrival, please head to the baggage claim area, where your guilt, fears, and complexes will be waiting for you at Carousel Sechs. Be careful to identify and retrieve yours, because many cases look alike.
Thank you for flying Freud Airlines. We know you have the illusion of free will when it comes to choosing a carrier. And a final, friendly note from your cabin crew: some may find the notion of a sleek aircraft jetting through virgin space as symbolic. But before you get too worked up about this, recall the insight of our illustrious father figure: “Sometimes a plane is just a plane.”
The post Freud Airlines appeared first on The American Scholar.
For American farmers, life changed dramatically in 1937. That year, electricity began flowing to hundreds of thousands of rural households, including some 12,000 in Wisconsin. The Rural Electrification Act (REA), which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed into law the previous year, provided stimulus for utilities to install poles and wires where, until then, it hadn’t been economical to do so. Most farmers were thrilled. One who lived near Janesville, Wisconsin, said of the power company crew, “I thought sometimes that they weren’t ever goin’ to get here. The organizers told us we’d have juice by spring. But we finally did get it, and, by golly, I’m goin’ to shoot the works.” He showed a city reporter every electric light in his barn. His newspaper profile reads like REA propaganda, and it might have been. To persuade skeptical farmers—who were still feeling the effects of the Great Depression and balked at the prospect of a monthly electric bill—REA advocates mounted a forceful public relations campaign. Agents traveled across the country demonstrating electric appliances. Theaters presented a popular film, Power and the Land, which touted the benefits of electricity for agricultural operations and concluded with the line, “Things will be easier now.” Part of the campaign focused on convincing women. Electricity would give them lights, refrigerators, ovens, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and irons they could plug into an outlet. It would end their drudgery, the government promised.
But Jennie Harebo, a 64-year-old woman from central Wisconsin, wasn’t having it. After her town’s rural electric cooperative set eight poles and lines on her property, she sawed down one of the poles and parked her coupe on the downed wires. She stationed herself in the car, armed with a shotgun and a hoe. Newsmen called it a “sitdown strike,” a “vigil,” a “blockade.” Her husband, an “invalid,” brought her food. At dusk, she gathered blankets around her shoulders and lap and cradled the shotgun. One night, two nights, three nights she stayed. A sign on the windshield read, NOTICE: NO TRESPASSING. Harebo allowed no negotiating, entertained no tit-for-tat. Months earlier, she and her husband had won a case in the state’s supreme court that saved a riparian corner of their property from being seized by men who wanted to build a dam. The government’s lawyer must have suspected that his client’s case was doomed.
I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers—the wonderment, the wisdom, the privileged views. Maybe she was simply cantankerous in the original sense of the word, which is rooted in the notion of “holding fast.”
What could she have seen in her three nights’ vigil? North Star, both dippers, crescent moon’s shine on the pump handle—the fixtures of haiku masters. Also, quotidian country lurkers and skulkers. Her night vision undefiled by electric shine, she surely saw scavenging raccoons, ambling possums, scuffling skunks. Maybe a lynx’s glassy gaze. She heard more, too, than her city relatives in their wired homes with their humming lights and fans and blathering radios. She could have made out the lawyer’s Pontiac approaching from a distance of 10 miles. She had plenty of time to aim her Remington out the driver’s side window.
Eighty years after Harebo’s stand, I took up wandering my rural Wisconsin property after nightfall. I longed for whatever sights diurnal living denied me. Trail cams mounted in the forest or by the creek had offered only glimpses: beavers adding branches to their dams, stock-still deer staring straight into the lens. The cameras, I was sure, didn’t reveal a fraction of the night’s secrets.
On clear nights, I stood under the Milky Way’s sprawling, splotchy canopy. I saw planets, constellations, comets, and once, a meteor afire and dying as it plummeted to Earth. The darkness of my rural township, an hour’s drive from the Harebos’ farm, was rare for modern times. In 2005, our town board passed a dark sky ordinance (whereas, whereas, whereas … and so, lights must be shielded, directed downward, calibrated, kept modest). Nevertheless, a yard light down the road, a sign at the corner bar, and the glow of a distant city interfered.
I sought deeper darkness. I found it at the nature preserve halfway between my place and the Harebos’ farm. One night, a self-made astronomer and his telescope met me and others at the preserve for a moonlit hike. Inside the visitors center, I discovered my friend Liz in the crowd, and we sat together. The occasion was a penumbral lunar eclipse. The astronomer began his program with canned, corny jokes. He introduced his two assistants, women who knew the trails and would guide us on the night hike. He must have mentioned the alignment of heavenly bodies, how Earth’s shadow would fall on February’s full moon, the snow moon, once it rose. But I’ve never retained stargazing facts. I’m slow to make out asterisms. I can’t recall which planets appear where and when or what temperaments the ancient Greeks assigned them. I merely love to bask under them.
We were all traipsing outside into the snow when, unexpectedly, the astronomer announced that hiking would be too dangerous because of ice. Instead, he would talk to us during the half hour before the moon rose. The group groaned, and Liz and I looked at each other. Like the astronomer’s assistants, we knew the preserve’s trails, at least the main ones. We backed away from the others and stole into the darkness.
We padded slowly and quietly over the glazed snow, keeping our eyes on the ground, gathering scant reflected light from unknown sources. The woodland trail was icy only on rocks or railroad ties. In those spots we braced ourselves and reached out to steady each other. Soon we joined the wider trail, formerly the old state highway. There, the snow was ridged from snowmobiles’ belts. As we walked on the crusted ridges, Liz told me about living in Dharamshala a few years earlier. I pictured her humid quarters in the mountains of northern India, the buildings’ bright colors, the Buddhist pilgrims surrounding her. I sensed the peace she had felt there and nowhere else. I shared her desire to return to Dharamshala, although I’d never been there. While visualizing that faraway place, I kept my eyes on my surroundings. Moving in the dark was a balancing art. I felt most adept when I looked out with a broad, allowing awareness, when I didn’t fix on fine details or make assumptions about the terrain. Liz and I arrived at the path’s apogee precisely when the clouds parted, the full moon rose orange, and as if cued by the shifting light, coyotes began howling.
I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers.
What I have seen by the light of celestial bodies: rabbit prints as lavender shadows in the snow; bare, black elm branches waving; the red glow of varmints’ eyes at the compost heap; stars in puddles and brooks; my lover’s silhouette moving beside mine.
What I have not seen in the night and been surprised by: knee-deep muck; a snorting, thundering herd of deer; a frog on a door handle that I smashed under my palm as I hurried to get indoors during a rainstorm; a pickup truck without headlights barreling down the road—and the drunk young man at the wheel who, after nearly running me over, reversed and asked, “Are you okay? Geez, are you okay?” in a tone that told me his real question was, What are you doing walking out here after dark?
To be moon-eyed is to keep your eyes wide open and to be awed. But to be moony is to be absent-minded, loony, or at least naïve. With better night vision, I thought, I could steer my life toward more moon-eyed moments than moony ones. Maybe I could take in more good surprises than bad and live with heightened awareness, less delusion. Seeing what I’d been missing all along might grant me new, original insights.
Humans are born with the ability to see in low light. But compared with that of other animals, our night vision is feeble. We lack the nocturnals’ giant pupils (think doe-eyed) and their tapetum lucidum, a structure at the back of the eyeball that acts as a mirror, amplifying starlight into floodlight and reflecting it back onto the retina. Our natural night vision can be eased into—it takes a while for our sight to adjust to dimness—but in general, it can’t be enhanced. Using lubricating eye drops or eating more beta carotene, for most well-nourished Americans, won’t improve it. Other habits, such as staring at computer screens or the sun, can degrade it. Unfortunately for Harebo and me and others past their physical prime, night vision also diminishes with age.
To compensate for human deficiencies, engineers developed night vision goggles during World War II. Now every optics store sells them. Some years ago, craving a clear view of the outdoors after sunset, I bought a pair. I stood on our deck, held the goggles to my face, and scanned the horizon. Deer in the field glowed an unnatural phosphor green. Nothing more. No portal opened to a secret world. No mysteries were revealed. In the years following my purchase, I rarely picked up the goggles when I set out in the dark. What I really wanted was something innate and unencumbered, a better version of what I was born with.
Scientists have researched ways of improving human night vision. A chlorophyll derivative called chlorin e6 has shown promise in mice. In 2015, Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbets, self-styled biohackers with a group called Science for the Masses, gained notoriety for trying the substance. A solution of chlorin e6 was dropped into Licina’s eyes. Two hours later, he and others, acting as controls, were taken to a place where “trees and brush were used for ‘blending’ ”—presumably, an attempt to create a uniform backdrop for all participants. Licina and the control subjects were asked to identify letters, numbers, and other symbols on signs. The experiment appeared to have been successful. Controls correctly identified the objects a third of the time, while Licina did so 100 percent of the time. Afterward, he acknowledged to a journalist that the experiment was “kind of crap science.” Without knowing the potentially harmful effects of chlorin e6, the biohacker had been willing to risk his everyday vision for the possibility of gaining night vision, if only for a few hours (the drops’ effects wore off by sunrise). But Science for the Masses lacked sufficient funding to conduct the sort of extensive, ethical trials that more esteemed researchers require.
In photographs from that night, Licina stares at the camera like some mad alien, his eyes watery and opaque with their larger-than-life black irises—a consequence not of the chlorin e6 but of the oversize light-dimming contact lenses he wore. His creepy appearance and the report’s description of him roving in a dark wood made me think that the young men had especially enjoyed the homemade horror-film aspect of their experiment. Maybe they lusted after superpowers that would allow them to recognize and slay the dark’s monsters. After all, night vision is one superhuman capability that’s nearly achievable. Unlike time travel or leaping tall buildings, it’s only just beyond our grasp.
“Darkness, pitch black and impenetrable, was the realm of the hobgoblin, the sprite, the will-o’-the-wisp, the boggle, the kelpie, the boggart and the troll. Witches, obviously, were ‘abroad,’ ” journalist Jon Henley wrote of life before artificial lighting in a 2009 article in The Guardian. Real monsters coexisted with the fantastical. In the London, Munich, and Paris of the early 19th century, thieves, rapists, and murderous gangs roamed freely. According to Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, humans were never more afraid of the night than in the era just before gaslights illuminated the cities’ streets. Murder rates then were five to 10 times higher than they are today. And yet, Erkich adds, “large numbers of people came up for air when the sun went down. It afforded them the privacy they did not have during the day. They could no longer be overseen by their superiors.”
Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. Past sunset, oppressors needed artificial light to point out their symbols of country and religion, to run factories and enforce conforming behaviors. For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom.
Jennie Harebo’s vigil attracted reporters and photographers from across the state, their cars lining the roads near her farm. The visitors, she said, treated her courteously. A deputy sheriff persuaded her to put down the shotgun. And the REA’s lawyer finally relented, having decided to circumvent the Harebo farm after neighbors agreed to accept the poles and lines on their properties. The utility paid Harebo $25 for her trouble and removed the eight poles that it had installed on her land. “With nothing left to fight for,” a newsman wrote, Harebo ended her vigil after about 96 hours. “Storing her formidable hoe in the woodshed, [she] claimed victory today.” She abandoned her coupe, “her husky frame sagging a little with weariness.” The crowd that had gathered to watch the three-day standoff dispersed. “Ultimately,” another reporter mocked, the family’s “need for kerosene lamps continued.”
In opposing electricity, Harebo was a rare exception. Some farmers didn’t even wait for the REA. Two decades before her blockade, men who once lived along the road between my home and the nature preserve were so eager to have electricity that they collected their own poles and wire. They used tractors, shovels, and muscle to run lines from the nearest village. Theirs was the nation’s first farmer-led electrical cooperative. It functioned independently for 20 years, disbanding only in the early 1930s, when the state butted in and began interfering in its operations.
Although she opposed lines on her own property, I imagined that Harebo would have admired the farmers’ refusal to comply with state regulations. As one farmer remarked on the public service commission’s successful attempt to set his cooperative’s prices, it “was a good example of the chair-bottom warmers’ insatiable desire to run everything.” In the years since I learned about Harebo’s vigil, she’d become a minor heroine in my eyes. Here was a tough woman who had fended off the establishment. She had battled for her rights—to the darkness and the freedoms it brought her, to the preservation of her night vision—even if she was weary and sagging.
Standing on the groomed snowmobile route, Liz and I watched the full moon fade to yellow and shrink behind clouds. Then we left for the narrow forest trail. We picked over rocks and logs and a trickling, perennial creek. Farther on, we listened to our breathing and footfalls, nothing more. We found the meadow next to the parking lot of the visitors center. Ahead, clustered around the telescope, stood the astronomer and part of the group we’d started with.
The clouds disappeared again. I looked up to watch the space station dash a diagonal across the sky. The astronomer invited me to view the moon in the telescope. “Lean into the eyepiece,” he told me. “Don’t touch anything.”
Singled out in close-up, the moon nearly blinded me. The penumbral eclipse, a subtle shading on the moon’s surface, was too faint for me to detect. I kept my eye to the telescope only long enough to assure the astronomer that I’d made an effort. I didn’t like the way the instrument isolated the moon. Without its complement of stars and planets, it was a flattened, vapid object. I felt as if I were ogling it but not really seeing it.
Liz took a brief turn at the eyepiece, too. Then we walked to our cars, agreeing to meet again for more nighttime hikes.
We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed policies. But it changed me.People soon will be able to choose better night vision like they can choose to eliminate forehead wrinkles. Professional scientists—not only biohackers—are working on it. In 2019, Gang Han and his fellow researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced that they had enabled mice to detect near-infrared light by injecting nanoparticles into their eyes. After the injection, the mice could see phosphor-green shapes in the dark, as if they were wearing night vision goggles.
Not surprisingly, safety and security, national or personal, are often cited as reasons for such research and its funding. What if soldiers, for example, could see enemies after dark without the hassle and weight of equipment? In one article, Han suggested testing the eye-injected nanoparticles on dogs next. “If we had a ‘super-dog’ that could see NIR [near-infrared] light,” he told a reporter, “we could project a pattern onto a lawbreaker’s body from a distance, and the dog could catch them without disturbing other people.” As if criminals wouldn’t dodge behind obstacles; as if police with their natural night vision could make out the perpetrators well enough to project shapes onto them; as if dogs wouldn’t be distracted by all the marvels their new night vision revealed and dash away from their handlers.
The delivery method—an injection into the eye—also makes this night vision technique impractical. Recently, though, when I spoke with Han, he told me that his lab might soon begin testing a wearable device, such as a patch or contact lens, on humans. He imagined an application in which a security agent wearing a night vision patch could see details in facial recognition software that others could not. But for this, more funding would be required. Of the lab’s many projects, night vision research has received the most attention in the media. But not from industry or government. People at the big granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, Han told me, “can’t recognize its importance in daily life.”
Months after fixing Jennie Harebo’s image in my mind, I found an article about her that I hadn’t seen before. It included a photograph, likely taken after she ended her vigil. She looked nothing like the newsmen’s descriptions. Although the image was dim from age and poor scanning, I could tell that her hair was curled and styled. She wore a buttoned-up overcoat with a contrasting collar, maybe fur. She struck a movie star’s pose beside the coupe—jaw set, chin lifted, face turned slightly, gaze fixed on the middle distance. She was beautiful. Her frame was upright, not sagging. She showed no sign of weariness after 96 hours in the car. Shotgun held at her side, she looked ecstatic and carefree. Seeing the photograph chastened me. I had allowed the newsmen’s descriptions of Harebo to deceive me. I’d been willing to accept that she was crabby and exhausted from her ordeal. But the word vigil, after all, is rooted in “lively” and “strong.” Maybe she didn’t consider it an ordeal at all. Maybe she relished the standoff.
Harebo’s proud posture reminded me of when I lived in Lansing, Michigan, during college and joined friends to march down the middle of the street. We held posters or candles and shouted, “Women unite, take back the night!” We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed any policies. But it changed me. Marching to reclaim the dark brought me a sense of solidarity among women that school, work, and family had not. Even so, I thought as I studied Harebo’s photograph, my efforts hadn’t gone far enough. I hadn’t fully imagined what we would do with our freedom after we won the night.
During the summer after our first moonlit hike, Liz and I took more late-night excursions to the middle of nowhere. What I saw with my natural, flawed night vision: shooting stars, swooping bats, slumbering farm machinery, and the lift and dip of a rare, blue-glowing firefly. What I felt, as I listened and shared more stories with my friend: a keener attunement, an ease among shadows, and the assurance of being fully seen—so much of what daylight’s glare had been hiding.
The post Night Vision appeared first on The American Scholar.
All that is not given is lost.
—Indian proverb
“We lost Bryan,” my father says into the phone, his voice breaking in the cavernous space between each word. He is talking to an old friend of his, someone I knew as a child, one who also lost his adult son. Sitting at a wooden table carried across the prairie in a wagon, my father cradles the phone with one hand and his head with the other. His elbows rest on wood seeped in dailiness and grief. Silence fills my parents’ kitchen as my father either weeps or receives condolence. I don’t remain to find out. I do not stay to learn what can be said next.
Upstairs, I close the door to the guest bedroom. The walls have been so recently repainted in Breezy Beach that the pictures have not been rehung. They remain stacked against the baseboards. That feels right to me. Tracts of emptiness. It is 10 in the morning on the second day after my 46-year-old brother died alone in his bed. We are all new to the language of death. I have heard my parents tell others that their son has died, or has passed away, but this is the first time I hear my father say that we have lost my brother. Like a sock or a wallet. He is not dead, only missing.
I had just handed the passports to the Delta agent when my other brother, Scott, called. My husband, Michael, our two teenage children, and I were on our way to Costa Rica for 10 days. For a moment, I considered not answering the phone, but Scott is often in the mountains and out of service, so I took the call. Pragmatic and a lawyer, Scott did not tell me to sit down. He did not lead with reassurance and love. He did not tell me everything would be okay. “Bryan is dead,” he said. Three words.
In the middle of the recently renovated Salt Lake City airport, where benches double as artwork and an iridescent glass sculpture cascades from the ceiling, I went to the floor. I just wanted to be near the ground, as if a tornado were in the area, or lightning on a mountain ridge, a grizzly on the trail—make yourself small, bring yourself low.
The black granite was cold, hard against my knees.
“Stop checking in,” I sobbed to Michael. “Bryan’s dead.” The agent held our passports in her hand, suspended. The line of passengers pulsed to move forward, roller bags leaning hungrily against legs level with my eyes. I wanted out. This would become a familiar feeling over the next two weeks, the desire to step outside of my life, shed it like a jacket, leave it behind. But grief has no edges; it is only center. Surrounded by strangers all eager to be somewhere other than where they were, I stood up, the phone still to my ear, and threaded between bodies in search of an outside I would never find.
The line pulsed to move forward. I wanted out. This would become a familiar feeling over the next two weeks, the desire to step outside of my life, shed it like a jacket, leave it behind. But grief has no edges; it is only center.“I’m driving to Texas,” Scott told me. He would be at our parents’ house in 48 hours. The phone line was interrupted, and my mother’s name appeared. Hold and Accept. End and Accept. Accept. Accept. Accept.
“Mom,” I cried. “Mom, what’s happened?”
My parents were stuck in traffic between Southlake and Denton, trying to get to their son to confirm he was dead. They sat gridlocked. I could hear my father in the background saying there shouldn’t be traffic at this time of night. This was not right, made no sense, was not supposed to be. The friend who had found my brother—curled on his side, hand beneath chin, like a baby, Death, a mother rocking him to sleep, or was that a lie, wishful thinking, for we would never know, we would never see his body again, maybe contorted in pain, arms flung, legs bent, hand reaching for the phone, for help, for a way out—thought he was dead but wasn’t sure.
Maybe he wasn’t dead.
Maybe he would be found.
The first time we lost Bryan was at his birth. I was six but felt like 60 when my father, then a lieutenant commander in the Navy, called from the hospital to tell me that my baby brother wouldn’t be coming home. I had never heard my father cry before. It’s a sound a child does not want to hear, the sound that marks, like a hatchet fall, the end of childhood. A negligent nurse, a human being who made a mistake, the worst mistake, the kind that alters another’s life forever, had placed Bryan, minutes old, in a bassinet so that she could bathe him and then accidentally pressed the pedal for scalding water before leaving the room. Dear Lieutenant Commander Sinor, I am writing to offer my sincere apologies for the most unfortunate accident that occurred at this Medical Center in which your son was injured. … After learning … I directed a new bathing routine for newborn infants … immediately … facts … evaluated … investigating … perhaps … provide relief … such an event will not recur … very much regret … sincere concern. … Rear Admiral Earl Brown. Bryan arrived in this world in a cauldron of boiling water. Perhaps that is when he slipped from us, before I had ever held him. I realize now that I never knew his original face. Only my parents, the doctor, and the negligent nurse saw Bryan whole and perfect before he was burned. For his first several winters, Bryan’s tiny feet would turn blue in the cold, the vessels unable to regulate the blood flow, or maybe his skin was afraid of warmth. If flame is what greets you as you enter the world, the smell of your own body singed, how do you learn to trust?
The following day, I returned to the Salt Lake airport, alone. Bryan was dead. The police had roped his home like a crime scene and never allowed my parents to see him. Perhaps, a gift. As I made my way to the plane, I wondered who grieved alongside me. That man holding his phone to his chest like an oath? That woman yelling at her children to keep up? Or maybe that man in front of me on the escalator, muscled calves, wearing Nikes in pink? At first I felt angry at all those rushing along the concourse to make their planes to Bali or Disney or their lake house in the mountains. How dare they be happy? But then I realized I was wearing the same clothing I had worn the day before—before the call, before the news, before my knees knew granite. Dressed for Costa Rica or dressed for death, I looked the same. Tiny wheeled suitcases trundled behind everyone in the terminal, holding what was important enough to carry on. What could not be left behind.
At the moment of hearing that Bryan was dead, what I could not carry was the knowledge that he had died by his own hand. Standing with my children, Aidan and Kellen, as Michael remained at the Delta counter trying to cancel our tickets, I begged the ceiling—face up, palms offered, out loud—that his death not have been by suicide, a possibility that had stalked him since his teens. Strangers avoided our tiny island of luggage, some of them checking in, some of them headed for security, some of them making sure they had their sweater or boarding pass or water bottle emptied, while I implored the ceiling, Please, God, don’t let it be suicide. Please, God. Please don’t let it be suicide. Perhaps another mother would have reassured her children that everything was okay. Perhaps another human would have contained that pain and saved it for later. But somehow, within seconds of hearing of Bryan’s death, I realized that there were degrees of loss, and some versions would break us more than others. It was a strange kind of bargaining: I can accept this loss but not that loss.
But maybe lost is lost.
When we walk out of the Texas sun and into the thin air conditioning of Bryan’s mobile home, two days after he has died, we arrive to a mess. The floor and the counters are covered with the remnants of his life.
The second time we lost Bryan, it was not to fire but to water. Unwatched for a moment, he fell from the deck of our back-yard pool and sank. Not yet two, barely talking, he lay face up at the bottom of the pool, just as I remembered seeing him for the first time in his crib, arms above his head, blond curls haloing his face. I hadn’t even seen him fall. My mother was inside the house answering the telephone while Scott herded inner tubes toward me. I had been standing on the wooden deck, preparing to jump through that stack of inner tubes, when I saw Bryan’s tiny body shimmering in a forest of sunlight on the floor of the pool. He wore only a diaper.
I had not known he was missing.
Were the crows in the oaks so loud that I could not hear the splash when he fell? Or was I too consumed with play to notice the residual waves lap at my feet following his descent? At the age of eight, I could stitch a sit-upon in Brownies, make my own cereal in the morning without spilling the milk, read books devoid of illustration, but I had not known he was gone.
Bryan died sometime before his friend found him, possibly up to two days before. He left the world, and I did not register his absence. I went to yoga. I ate a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. I slept in the June sun. Waves of loss met my body, but I failed to notice. Was he lost to me in those two days? Or only the moment I found out? Did my brother die the moment Scott called, or did he die two days earlier, alone in his bed, his dogs whining to be let out?
He was dead when my mother pulled him from the water. It never occurred to me to dive down and save him. Perhaps I recognized the limits of my reach. Or maybe I knew I couldn’t carry him to the surface. There are moments in your life that are ambered, so ancient, that you are no longer sure that they happened to the same person. I stood on the ground and watched my mother, clad in shorts and a T-shirt that ran wet with chlorinated water, as she begged God to save her baby. She offered my brother like a sacrifice, his limp body resting on her forearms, her head thrown back, the sounds coming from her mouth not words but sorrow made manifest, serrated and raw. The terror of the moment was complete. I could not move.
She placed Bryan on the deck and began to suck the water from his lungs. His lips would have been cold but probably still soft. Baby smell replaced by chemicals. Would his eyes have been open or closed? Were they closed when his friend found him alone in bed?
I want them to be closed.
I did not see his original face.
I did not see his final face.
I ran to the neighbors for help because that is what she kept yelling for me to do every time she came up from Bryan’s mouth to inhale.
When I returned, Bryan was alive.
I have always held that memory as one of horror and trauma, and I have always felt alone in the experience. Scott was too young to remember, and my mother carries a version all her own. What I have never considered, until this moment, is the joy and relief my mother must have felt when Bryan began to breathe again. I have long thought that the happiest my mother has ever looked was when I came home from school and she told me that my scalded baby brother had come home from the hospital. That was the first time I saw Bryan, the first night he slept outside an incubator. Her smile that afternoon has forever remained with me because it revealed the cloud of grief she had lived under for those many months. The initial days of waiting for him to die, followed by the months of driving to the hospital every day to touch her baby through plastic. I imagine that if I had been there at the moment she brought Bryan back from the dead, the relief would have pulsed through the humid air. Instead, the second time we lost Bryan remains tangled in sorrow and silence. It feels like a story not of resurrection but rather of the frost of the future. My mother waited until my father came home from work to tell him what had happened that day in our back yard. I remember that he brought brand-new mask and snorkel sets for Scott and me and handed them to us before he went with my mother to the kitchen, where I heard her cry once again. The gift crumpled my stomach.
Although we lost Bryan, he never lost anything. He might not have been able to find things right away, but they were never lost. As a child, his room was always a disaster, Legos and books and clothes piled everywhere. By the time he reached high school, my mother had given up and asked only that he keep the door closed. Which means that when we walk out of the Texas sun and into the thin air conditioning of Bryan’s mobile home, two days after he has died, we arrive to a mess. The floor and the counters are covered with the remnants of his life. There is an entire room devoted solely to boxes inside boxes inside boxes inside boxes. Every piece of junk mail he has ever received, every single receipt, every bill, every matchbook, every card anyone has ever sent him, every letter, every present, every photograph, every school paper, every textbook, every movie ticket stub, every free gift from McDonald’s, from Coca-Cola, from Home Depot, every plastic grocery sack, every empty Amy’s burrito box, every pen, pencil, screwdriver, nail, every key to an unknown lock—all of it remains.
“Everyone take a room,” Scott says, handing black contractor bags to each of us. The house smells of dogs, urine, and pot.
“Just decide what to keep, what to toss, what to give to Goodwill,” he continues. “Use your best judgment. The dumpster will be here in a few hours.” The concern is that Bryan’s place will be looted if we don’t clear it now. He lives in the north Texas countryside. Word travels fast. The following day a guy named Larry will stop by with his pickup and say he’s heard that you can come here and take whatever you want. Worried about time, we set to work.
I stand on the dirty tile of the kitchen, the overhead light dimmed by grime. My brother was a private person. He never traveled, he never brought a girlfriend to my parents’ house, he did not go to the dentist or the doctor, he had guns and knew how to use them. His dogs and his music and his cars made him happy. I do not want to go through his drawers.
The house stands as he left it before going to bed on whatever night it was that he went to bed and never woke up. This is only the second time I have been in his house since he graduated from high school. Before we are finished, I will know the brand of condoms he preferred as well as the greatest regret in his life, but the first time I open his cabinets with the contractor bag yawning at my feet, I can only whisper, “Please forgive me, Bryan.” This becomes my mantra.
The third time we lost Bryan, it was to the earth. He was maybe 13 years old—it was the summer we flew from Hawaii, where my father was stationed, to Colorado for our first backpacking trip. My uncle Jerry planned to take us into the Mount Zirkel Wilderness, though if he had known how unprepared we were for such a trip, he probably would have suggested car camping instead. Although we would come to embrace backpacking every summer as a family and learn to travel with lightness and economy, that August we might as well have been toting canned tuna and portable radios.
I wore blue jeans. Heavy denim with rivets that dug into my hip bones and grew 10 pounds heavier every afternoon when the thunderstorms rolled through. We all carried neon-orange backpacks that had been salvaged from Goodwill, with belts that left our jeans-covered hips raw and cracked. None of us had waterproof hiking boots. We barely had hats. And it rained. Every day it rained. Some days the lightning sent us running for our tents.
But what hurt us the most was something we couldn’t see: altitude sickness. Bryan threw up first, out the car window as we drove to the trailhead. He also threw up second and third. By the time we had loaded ourselves with weight, his face had lost its color. We all had headaches that stabbed the backs of our eyes. My throat was dry, and no amount of water could wet it. We no longer peed. Instead, we climbed the trail, dizzy with effort, cotton tube socks chafing our heels.
For whatever reason, Bryan was the sickest. Within a mile or so, he was sitting down on the trail. My uncle Jerry and cousin Shara, well acquainted with the rigors of backpacking, took weight from him. Soon my dad and Scott helped as well, so that Bryan carried an empty pack. Still, he kept stopping. Sometimes to throw up, more often to cry. He wanted to go home.
We trudged on. My uncle had probably chosen a short and easy trail for us, but it felt like climbing Everest. Our party of eight stretched along the mountainside, no one talking. My head throbbed in rhythm with my step. I slid my hands beneath my hip belt to protect my skin, but soon the backs of my hands were red and sore.
At some point, we realized we had lost Bryan. He had simply disappeared.
Taking our packs off, we called his name. A faraway hawk answered, then the wind, but not Bryan.
“What about the fork in the trail?” my dad asked.
“Did he take it?”
“Did anyone see him take it?”
“Who was hiking with him?”
“Bryan! Bryan!”
We made a plan. Some would go back on the trail and look for him; others would fan out into the alpine meadows to look amid the paintbrush and columbine, penstemon and yellow cinquefoil the color of the sun. Released from the weight of my pack, my legs seemed to float above the ground as I walked. Sweat soaked my shirt and made the denim grab my knees and thighs. It was late in the day. Thunderheads gathered overhead. The Mount Zirkel Wilderness stretches 160,000 acres.
I walked the meadows calling for my brother. Pikas chirped from rock piles, and vultures circled the trees. At the time, my ignorance protected me. I knew nothing of exposure or dehydration or lightning strikes. Still, I also understood that losing Bryan in the mountains was not the same as losing him at Safeway. I only had to look around at the glacially carved peaks and the seemingly endless swath of firs to know that the only ones who could find Bryan were the ones right here calling his name.
I don’t remember who found him, my father maybe. Bryan had passed out in a meadow not unlike the one I had been searching. His body had been hidden by the tall grasses, so my father discovered him only when he came upon his sleeping form. Altitude sickness, for the most part, is a temporary condition. Your body acclimates. By the following morning, we were all feeling much better. By the end of the week, we were ready to do it all again. And we would return every summer for the next 10 years to backpack as a family. Except for Bryan. He would remain home, where oxygen is not scarce and you can keep more than what you can carry.
By Sunday, my father is angry. On his way to Bryan’s house, he calls from the road to tell us that we are to stop and do nothing until he arrives. Scott and I are sitting in the parking lot of Home Depot, two more giant boxes of contractor bags in the trunk, when we get the call. I can hear my father’s anger from my place in the back seat. The car vibrates.
As does my father’s body, a half hour later, when he arrives at Bryan’s house. It is the kind of anger that consumed him when I was a child but has dimmed with age. I immediately become 10 again, scared and full of shame. My father’s anger has always been physical. Like fire, it takes the air from the room and sears what remains.
“Get in the house,” he orders as he storms past my brother and me. At 10 in the morning, it is already 100 degrees. Crickets saw in the scrub nearby, the sound electric and grating. Sweat soaks the waistband of my shorts, runs in drops down the sides of my face.
We gather in the room just off the kitchen, where the strongest air conditioner wraps cool tendrils around our sweaty bodies. My mom sits across from my father on a drum stool, my aunt on the floor, Scott and I in office chairs with blown-out backs, and my father in a ratty armchair.
“I have been talking with my brothers and sister,” my father begins. His voice is quieter already. Something about being inside Bryan’s house, or the cool, or the fact that we all did exactly what he said. Or maybe he’s just so very tired that even his anger craves rest. “They all say we shouldn’t be throwing anything away. We should have an auction. There is someone out there who is missing an old issue of Workbench magazine and will want it. We can’t just throw it away.”
I was in charge of the shelves containing the magazines. He is speaking directly to me.
“I have Bryan’s voice in my head,” he continues. Now his words mix with tears. “Why are you letting them do this? Why are you letting them do this? Why don’t you care?”
“But Dad—” I start.
He holds up his hand. “Every time we throw something away, we are throwing away a piece of your brother. Every. Single. Time.”
The day before, I had cleared shelves and shelves of Golf Digest, Forbes, National Geographic, Playboy, Workbench, Mother Earth News, motocross magazines, dirt bike magazines, Mustang magazines, random car part catalogs, a Sunset guide to building a deck, another guide to building a tennis court, one dedicated to repairing quartz watches, Spanish textbooks, chemistry textbooks, pamphlets on succeeding as a student with ADHD, University of North Texas course catalogs from the early ’90s, a McDonald’s training manual. None of the magazines were addressed to Bryan except for a series on motorbiking. They were addressed to subscribers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana. Bought, I would assume, in auction lots. Soon, Scott and I would discover that the most recent lots Bryan purchased were still wrapped in plastic in his giant workshop. It was so full that we could not get through the door. I had filled bag after bag with these heavy magazines and carried them to the dumpster. Tree to paper to earth, I said.
“You are throwing Bryan away,” my father now says.
“Dad,” I try again, this time kneeling in front of him on the floor, crying. “You have to move Bryan from your head to your heart.”
I could be speaking Spanish. Auction has become the life preserver that my father will cling to amid the tsunami of grief. Auction will transmute Bryan’s hoarding into treasure. Redeem him.
Bryan retreated. Into the house. Into his body. Away from the world. He refused to have his picture taken. He walked with his head down and grew his hair long to curtain his scars. He assumed everyone was looking at him.From that moment on, we decide that everything will pass through my father before being discarded. We designate “auction rooms.” My father stands at the front of the dumpster. Very little gets past. I haul out torch lamps with broken bases and am told a screw is all that is required. A chair that sinks into itself just needs wood glue and clamps. After a few attempts, I take everything to the auction rooms. My father is right: the chair probably could be repaired and reupholstered. But we are doing triage, not plastic surgery, and there is simply no way we are going to find the one person on the planet who is seeking the June 1980 issue of Workbench in order to complete a set.
My dad suffers from the same illness that my brother did, a fear of losing, a fear that this AutoZone receipt from 2005 must be saved because bad things will happen if it is lost. A baby might get burned. A tiny body might plunge into the water, unwitnessed.
You cannot know what you might need in a world that is untrustworthy. Save everything. Save it all. Save it all. Save it all, save it, save it, saveit, saveit, saveit, savesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesave. We are going down.
Air took my brother the fourth time we lost him. Sixteen years old, Bryan was hanging out with a friend in Hawaii Kai while my parents worked downtown. Bored on a summer day, the two of them had decided to make Drano bombs and then throw them from the lava rock pier. Drano bombs require simple household items, specifically Drano, foil, and a container. Once trapped, the hydrogen chloride in the fluid mixes with the aluminum foil to create hydrogen gas. Quickly, often within seconds, the pressure builds to a point where the container bursts, throwing lye everywhere.
Most Drano bombs are made in plastic bottles.
My brother and his friend chose glass.
The second before the bomb exploded in Bryan’s hands, he realized the danger. That flit of understanding saved his life because he was in the midst of hurtling the bomb into the ocean when the Gallo wine jug exploded. The shrapnel entered the left side of his face, neck, shoulder, and chest. If he had held the container, it would have found his heart. When my father arrived at the ER, he says, he knew Bryan was dead. The blood alone was too much. Bryan’s cheek flapped open. The tendons in his neck shone white amid the red. Bryan was not conscious, did not move, and my father began to mourn the death of his son once again.
By the time I saw Bryan a few weeks later, having flown home from college, his skin was starting to heal. Reconstructive surgery on his face would repair much of the damage, but angry red welts would populate his body for the rest of his life. For months, shards of glass worked their way to the surface, a strange kind of birth, where his skin would be pierced from within.
At the age of 16, Bryan retreated. Into the house. Into his body. Away from the world. He refused to have his picture taken. He walked with his head down and grew his hair long to curtain his scars. He assumed everyone was looking at him, mocking him, pointing to his disfigurement. Rather than trust another with his pain, he became a recluse. Held onto every piece of paper. Chose dogs for family because they never withheld their love.
It was like he vanished.
The night before my brother’s back-yard memorial, I sit with my father under the setting of the solstice sun. The longest day of the year, the longest day of my life. Ends that come too quickly or never come at all. He slumps in his chair, gazing at his hands in the growing darkness. For the first time in the day, being outside does not mean being sunburned. Winds play in the field behind my parents’ house; airplanes, like far-off fireflies, make ready to land at DFW, their path across the sky reassuring in purpose.
“I’m so tired,” my father says. These are words I have never heard him utter. He does not mean he needs to go to bed. He means he is tired of being alive.
“I thought he was dead,” he continues, “when I came to the hospital. He was so bloody and pale. I didn’t think there was any way he could be alive. I thought we lost him then.”
“I know,” I say, “that’s why this is so hard. I think we all thought we had made it through.”
“I worry about what the coroner’s report will say. Maybe he was murdered?”
“No, Dad.” I reach out for his hand. “It was a heart attack. Just a massive heart attack. There was nothing we could do.”
The silence settles, and the summer sky darkens on the day we move toward fall.
“I love you so much,” my father says. His voice is thready and thin.
“I know,” I say. “And Bryan knew that, too.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
We look across the field, empty of cows, empty of horses, full, though, of life we cannot see. Tomorrow a white tent will be erected, and we will set out 50 chairs. But that won’t be enough. Because a hundred people will come to honor Bryan. Most of them I will not know. Other than my extended family, I will never have met any of the dozens who show up. I will open the door again and again to strangers who will say how much they loved my brother, how my brother would stop whatever he was doing to help them. They will speak of his generosity, his kindness, his love. “He helped me lift a door.” “He fixed my car.” “He fed my animals.” They will stand up and bear witness to my brother’s enormous heart. Many will cry. Poetry will be read, “Amazing Grace” sung. All under a sun that will beat down with a ferocity that most of us only want to flee. But we will remain, feeling a sun that never withholds.
The fifth time we lost Bryan it was to the ether, the space between the atoms. It might have been a Monday night, or possibly the Tuesday of June’s full moon. Maybe his final moments were painful and scary. Possibly he knew that Death was coming for him. Or maybe he never woke from the dream he was having, a dream about my father driving the old Porsche Bryan bought for him, its engine finally rebuilt, every single part lovingly restored. Maybe he was sitting next to my father as they raced along a freeway unfamiliar with traffic. Nothing to stop them. Perhaps his last two dogs sat in the tiny back seat or maybe all six of his dogs gathered there, and Bryan could feel their hot breath as they panted over his shoulder, unwilling to miss a single second of the ride. The car speeds down the road, and Bryan looks over to my father with a smile that shows no teeth but lights his eyes, the hazel eyes he shares with my father, and with me. And they ride the road like they used to ride the waves at the beach, joyful in the moment, sun warming their skin, nothing in their hands. Carried.
The post The Lives of Bryan appeared first on The American Scholar.
In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems by Giorgio Parisi; Penguin Press, 144 pp., $24
As unlikely as it sounds, we’ve entered the age of the physics beach read—a breezy stroll through some branch of the science, with alternating touches of profundity and whimsy. Recent exemplars include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. The latest aspirant is In a Flight of Starlings, a slender, uneven collection of essays by Giorgio Parisi about his life in physics, from his student days in Rome to the work that won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics.
The title refers to Parisi’s research on the eerily amorphous flocks that starlings form each night at dusk, flocks that twist and shape-shift like something conjured by a wizard. Parisi wanted to understand why starlings form these flocks, called murmurations, and what rules govern their behavior. He took inspiration from work in statistical physics that involves scaling up from simple atoms and molecules to complex collective phenomena like boiling, melting, and superconductivity. Part of the title essay focuses on the technical struggles involved with tracking thousands of individual birds, especially in three dimensions. Computing power also hindered him. Although the project was conceived in 1990, his team had to wait until 2005 to start because cameras simply weren’t able to capture high-resolution digital images.
Parisi concluded that starlings form murmurations both to signal other starlings that they’ve found a warm roosting spot for the night (starlings are sensitive to cold and often drop dead overnight if not protected) and to help the birds protect themselves against hawks and other predators (it’s much easier to pick off stray starlings than to snatch one out of a jumbled mass).
Alas, aside from the obligatory declarations of wonder, Parisi doesn’t get very lyrical in describing the beauty of flocks of starlings. And this lack of a poetic register hobbles other essays, too. It’s not that Parisi cannot escape the mindset of a scientist—he offers several sharp, everyday analogies throughout the book. (My favorite involves how the simplified models of reality that scientists build can nevertheless reveal profound truths about nature, in much the same way that playing Monopoly can illustrate certain truths about capitalist economies—that it takes money to make money.) It’s more that Parisi’s prose never soars. I never got a sense of awe or wonder—no wows.
It’s refreshing to see a scientist discuss the fuzzy side of scientific thinking, and not just during the early, groping stages but in the technical phases of a project, too.Even when writing about the work that won him the Nobel Prize—on so-called spin glasses, a complicated magnetization state in metals—Parisi doesn’t really explore why the topic grabbed him, beyond noting that it was “interesting.” Moreover, he won the Nobel in part because the underlying principles that explain spin glasses can be broadened to illuminate the behavior of any system in which disordered individual agents interact in complex ways. Possible applications, Parisi writes, include analyzing “websites, financial traders, stocks and shares, people, animals, components of ecosystems, and so on.” I suddenly perked up, hoping he’d expound on the deep connections between all these disparate things. Instead, he simply drops the topic and starts talking about another “very interesting problem,” one that involved packing different-sized spheres into a box. It made me hungry to see what, say, physics writer Alan Lightman might have done with these subjects.
As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets done. Parisi raises a related complaint—that scientific papers omit all sense of intuition. Indeed, the best sections of the book explore the role of intuition in scientific thinking. He quotes a friend who says that “a good mathematician understands immediately which mathematical statements are true and which are false, whereas a bad mathematician has to try to prove them in order to know.” The same applies to science: the early stages of any project are chaotic, and the data can be confusing and even contradictory. Scientists need intuition to cut through the mess and focus on the most promising explanations.
Much of this intuition is unconscious and, while still grounded in physical brain processes, remains murky and hard to reconstruct. And for whatever reason, that vagueness makes scientists uncomfortable. “In almost all texts written by scientists,” Parisi notes, “these themes are taboo.” So it’s refreshing to see a scientist, especially one of Parisi’s stature, honestly discuss the fuzzy side of scientific thinking, and not just during the early, groping stages but in the technical phases of a project, too. “The physicist sometimes uses mathematics ungrammatically,” he admits, “a license that we grant to poets” as well.
In the last pages, Parisi compares writing his book to translating Chinese poetry. In Chinese poems, especially older ones, the words are both words and pictures—poetry and painting fused. As a result, attempts to translate those poems into another language inevitably lose something. But in a good translation, we can still glimpse the underlying lyricism, however imperfectly. Parisi says that writing for a popular audience about physics is something like that. He has to omit the mathematics and other technical aspects that give the work its aesthetic pleasure and power. But in good translations, laypeople can still catch a glimpse of the underlying wonder. Flight of Starlings, Parisi writes, “is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science.” Does he succeed? At times, yes. But the book ends up stranded between different genres—not quite a beach read, not quite a memoir, not quite a pop-science primer on modern physics. Perhaps it’s not unlike the hodgepodge of science itself, then—or even a shifting, amorphous murmuration of starlings.
The post Don’t Forget Intuition appeared first on The American Scholar.
One afternoon 40 years ago, soon after beginning graduate work in history at the University of Virginia, I was sitting at a study carrel with a pile of books and a stack of index cards. The latter, I had learned, was one of the historian’s most important tools—so important, in fact, that a renowned professor whose specialty was the Austro-Hungarian army devoted an entire class to telling us how to fill one in correctly. Now this strikes me as comical, but back then it struck me as comforting: having studied philosophy as an undergrad, I yearned for the kind of clarity custom-made for a three-by-five card. Whereas philosophical questions led only to more questions, historical questions led to the archives, where answers waited to be unearthed. Deep down, I believed what my professor believed—that we could know the past as it really was and depict it accurately in our writing.
Yet my unquestioned faith in history began to erode that day in the library. Among the books I had stacked in the carrel was Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. If I really wanted to be a historian, White’s book suggested, I needed to care less about facts (though they remained important) and care more about fiction. It was time to put down the index cards and pick up, well, novels. In doing so, White promised, I would discover that fiction is the writing of history by other means—the best means.
This year, Metahistory turns half a century old. Its appearance was hailed as revolutionary, at least in certain quarters. In an early review, the philosopher of history Louis Mink anointed it the “book around which all reflective historians must reorganize their thoughts about” the subject. More recently, Brian Fay, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, declared that the book “marked a decisive turn in philosophical thinking about history.” Meanwhile, academic historians hardly gave it a glance. They continued to do what I was learning to do: assemble, analyze, and arrange their source material into a causal narrative that captured the truth of past events. As for the author of Metahistory, he was shunned—in the words of Allan Megill, a historian at UVA, as a bête noire, less a historian than a literary critic.
White was not some outsider crashing into the historians’ guild without the proper credentials. He was a practicing, if relatively obscure, medievalist, and his background proved apt. In effect, White cast his fellow historians as modern-day alchemists who thought they could transform the dross of ancient documents into the gold of historical reality. Instead, he argued, there is no reality to be made or found. Reality goes no further or deeper than the stories we shape about the past. “The differences between a history and a fictional account of reality,” White announced in one of his many essays, “are matters of degree rather than of kind.”
After all, when historians write history, they deploy the tropes of the novelist: metonymy, irony, and what White called, rather clunkily, “emplotments”—that is, the arrangement of past events into organized structures that come in a variety of flavors: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. Without such tricks, historians could never make their accounts take flight from the page. For White, Jules Michelet’s account of the French Revolution rivaled Victor Hugo for its romantic rhetoric, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s rendering of that same event was a tragedy worthy of Racine. “Neither the reality nor the meaning of history is ‘out there’ in the form of a story,” White declared. Instead, history “is a work of construction rather than of discovery.”
The enrollment drought scorching the groves of academe risks turning history departments into dust bowls, while our endless culture wars have turned the teaching of history into a struggle over competing meanings of our common past.If this assertion carries the whiff of existentialism, there is good reason. In the early postwar years, as he himself often mentioned in later interviews, White was conquered by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. In one interview he gave soon after turning 80, he observed that Sartre “was one of my intellectual heroes.” And just as for Sartre, for whom there was no universal or transcendental basis for the moral choices we must make, so too for White: though we have no objective basis for preferring one vision of the past over another, it remains for each of us to choose and commit to one. As White wrote in his 1966 essay “The Burden of History,” we “choose our past in the same way that we choose our future.” Indeed, each individual must determine “how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from present to future.” Historians who instead insist that the past should be studied for its own sake are not innocent of bias but instead guilty of bad faith, “fleeing from the problems of the present into a purely personal past.”
But what happens if such an expansive and seemingly relativist conception of history leads a scholar into dangerous terrain? What if, for example, historians of the future sift through the events leading to January 6, 2021, and end up questioning whether the Capitol insurrection took place? Where do we find the epistemological footing to resist such a reading? For one thing, White insisted that moral relativism tends to lead to tolerance rather than totalitarianism, a conviction that strikes me as dubious. Nevertheless, White would have warned us about the dangers of assuming that the facts are always on our side. Yes, we have the facts—mountains of them—but they are a wobbly rampart to the powerful and persistent currents of denialism. Like his friend Richard Rorty on moral truths, White argued that no one person or group has dibs on historical truths. To frame any claim about the past as neutral or objective is, as Sartre would say, an act of mauvaise foi, or bad faith, that prevents us from assuming responsibility for our ethical choices.
More important, though, White’s writings have much to say about some of the problems confronting academic historians today. The enrollment drought scorching the groves of academe risks turning history departments into dust bowls, while our endless culture wars have turned the teaching of history into a struggle over competing meanings of our common past. The reflex of most academic historians is to fall back on roundtable discussions at professional conferences, where young PhDs present papers that are often as uninspiring as their job prospects.
What, then, are professional historians to do? White’s answer is blunt: write better histories, ones that offer compelling stories—fictions, in a word—based on facts, of course: “The best counter to a narrative that is supposed to have misused historical memory is a better narrative, by which I mean a narrative, not with more historical facts, but a narrative with greater artistic integrity and poetic force of meaning.” This is the reason why Jill Lepore, an academic historian who writes wickedly well, recently blasted the January 6 Committee’s report on the insurrection. It is, Lepore notes, full of important facts. But that hardly matters, she concluded, because they are larded into a plotless narrative so leaden as to make for “miserable reading.”
Most young people today no doubt find equally miserable many of the history texts they are assigned to read. There are, of course, many reasons for this response, ranging from shrinking attention spans and deepening engagement with visual media to the growing unfamiliarity with the act of reading and an unwillingness to make the effort. But some of the responsibility must fall with us, the storytellers. We need to be willing to make the effort to turn our mounds of research into gripping stories. How many graduate programs in history require classes that teach students how to write well?
To read White is to remind ourselves that history, like literature, provides insight into the great questions that we all face: love and loss, life and death, meaning and purpose. These existential questions should concern historians no less than novelists. But a more pressing existential matter is the fate of the discipline itself. Unless we fight for our profession by writing for those outside our profession, our profession will itself become history.
The post Putting the Story Back in History appeared first on The American Scholar.
Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War by Charles Glass; Penguin Press, 352 pp., $29
Always, in wars, there are the things we don’t see coming. World War I had a lot of them: airplanes, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, flamethrowers, and super-high-explosive artillery shells—the blooming, booming fruit of 19th-century scientific progress. So much had progressed except, alas, the nervous systems of the soldiers, many of whom met the challenge of the new, improved warfighting with nightmares, paralysis, trembling, mutism, hallucinations, terror, stammering, and blindness. Shell shock. What we now call posttraumatic stress disorder. This, too, no one saw coming. By December 1914, only five months into the war, Britain’s frontline army had lost 10 percent of its officers and four percent of its enlisted men to “nervous and mental shock.”
They went mad.
The title of long-time war correspondent Charles Glass’s new book, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, is an ironic line from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. Along with another lieutenant, Wilfred Owen, Sassoon is one of a number of Britain’s poet-soldiers whom Glass describes. Sassoon was a product of Cambridge with passions for poetry and cricket, as well as a decorated and wounded war hero nicknamed “Mad Jack” for his daring. When he issued a public statement against the conduct of the war, the military dodged the outrage of court-martialing a winner of the Military Cross by declaring him insane and committing him to Craiglockhart, an aristocratic health spa near Edinburgh that was taken over by the military for the treatment of shell-shocked officers. From there he wrote verse about his comrades: “I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, / And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain …” He also campaigned to return to them in combat. In 1918, he succeeded and was wounded again.
Owen was a middle-class shell-shocked hero and a poet with a gift for Keatsian surprise. When on leave from Craiglockhart, Sassoon introduced him to the wonders of upper-class bohemian social life in Edinburgh and edited his poems—the ones that made Owen famous were written in just over a year. They included this description of a gassed soldier hauled away in a wagon:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Latin is from Horace, meaning, “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”
At Craiglockhart, the battered officers met with psychiatrists and struggled through a jumble of therapies. One psychiatrist, a classicist, based his practice on a drawing of Hercules wrestling Antaeus. He prescribed cold swims and work. Another shared Freud’s theory that dreams were wish fulfillment—until he heard the recurring horrors of shell-shock nightmares. The patients also raised vegetables, played golf and cricket, developed photographs, and published a journal. Evenings, they put on plays and concerts. After lights out, the hallways rang with screams from their nightmares.
One theory held that the severity of the psychological damage these officers sustained was a side effect of war in the trenches—positions where soldiers felt trapped. Even when on leave in Edinburgh, they still felt trapped enough to dive for cover when buses backfired, and a signal cannon every day at one p.m. was a particular terror until Craiglockhart had it silenced. The reward for successful recovery was a return to the trenches. Craiglockhart excelled at this, returning 42 percent of its officers to combat, compared with 7.1 percent of soldiers treated at Royal Victoria Hospital on England’s south coast. One of the successes was Owen, who was returned to combat and killed a week before the war ended.
Glass eschews easy ironies, but in so doing he heightens the reader’s awareness of them. The casual assembly of copious research seems at odds with the horrible chronology that unfolds. There’s a passivity here. Psychiatric regimens get mentions rather than analyses, and Glass seems not at all exhilarated by the wonderful and moving poetry these soldiers left behind. He lets the history speak for itself. “Many of the ‘cured’ officers from Craiglockhart suffered trauma for the rest of their lives,” he writes in an epilogue. “One, Captain John ‘Harry’ Burns of the Cheshire Greys Regiment, trembled so much that he could barely hold a cup of tea.” His daughter recalled: “I will always remember horrific shouting and screaming in the night and my mother trying to calm him down.”
Ultimately, tragically, ironically, the war succeeded only in provoking World War II, where even more people would die, maybe too many for poetry to make the same mark.
The post Shell Shock and Awe appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1969, I was living in London, paying $40 a month for a flat near Notting Hill Gate, wearing a secondhand pea coat against the damp, and trying to write my first novel. To earn some money, I was dashing off profiles of aging movie stars for United Artists. The studio used these pieces to promote its European films in the United States. I hated the profile business and was in the process of renouncing it when, as sometimes happens to a writer, along came an offer I couldn’t refuse: to write a series of articles about François Truffaut’s latest film, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Truffaut had been a hero of mine since I saw The 400 Blows as a freshman in college. That lyrical study of a boy’s evasions of the conventional adult world and his doomed sprint for freedom had a literary flavor, and my admiration for it had been inspired by my own impatience to get life going. Truffaut’s new film, the preposterously named Mississippi Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississipi—with one p), would be shot on location in Nice, Aix-en-Provence, and the Alps. Some filming had already been done on Réunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean.
Writing for United Artists had been pitched to me as a quasi-journalistic enterprise, but the work was both crass and commercial. The idea of watching Truffaut put together a film and then writing about it, however, was exciting, full of possibility. My pieces would be placed in American newspapers, and my approach was to be “intellectual.” Truffaut, a former journalist himself and a respected film critic, was known as a man of ideas. He had high standards, disliked publicity, and barely spoke any English. My French was minimal and only slightly improved by a week with Berlitz in London, paid for by United Artists, but no matter, I thought. Jean-Paul Belmondo didn’t speak English either, but his constant traveling companion, the actress Ursula Andress, spoke it well, and so did Catherine Deneuve.
Mississippi Mermaid had been adapted from Cornell Woolrich’s 1947 novel Waltz Into Darkness, about a coffee merchant and his mail-order bride who get involved in murder and fraud. Truffaut’s weakness for suspense and poetic criminality was reflected in his adulation of Alfred Hitchcock, and he had said that Mermaid would be about “love and adventure” but would also be “a study in degradation—how a man goes to pieces under a woman’s enigmatic influence.”
I met Truffaut in Nice, just after Christmas, in the lobby of the Hotel Negresco. The film’s publicist, Christine Brierre, introduced us. The director was shorter than I’d imagined and looked younger than his 37 years, suntanned from filming on Réunion (the substitute for the Gulf Coast of Woolrich’s novel). Black button eyes, flared trousers, a tailored topcoat, and a yellow silk cravat. I had half expected a disheveled director with newspapers under his arm and nicotine stains, à la Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut’s friend and fellow founder of the French New Wave.
Truffaut made it plain that I was not welcome and that I was to limit myself to the role of observer. So instead of joining an intimate French film unit, I was cast as the de facto Philistine. I would still be working, but Truffaut had seemingly invested me with everything he resented about the press, United Artists’ financing of his new film, and Americans in general. It all seemed rather petty.
Then Brierre explained that Truffaut was displeased with the relationship between stars Belmondo and Deneuve. On Réunion, there had been no “fire” passing between them, largely because Ursula Andress was always on the sidelines. “In this film,” Brierre said unhappily, “it is very important for the hero and the heroine to be in love.” Then she wept a bit, tacit acknowledgment that this wasn’t going to happen.
I was cast as the de facto Philistine. I would still be working, but Truffaut had seemingly invested me with everything he resented about the press, United Artists’ financing of his new film, and Americans in general. It all seemed rather petty.On New Year’s Eve, Truffaut threw a party for the cast and crew at a small restaurant near the port. After much champagne was consumed, tables were pushed against the walls and people danced. Belmondo and Andress weren’t there, but Deneuve was. She seemed to be enjoying herself. I didn’t talk to her then, but I had a chance to do so a few hours later. Around two in the morning, I went into the hotel bar for water and found Deneuve drinking coffee. “I’ve always wanted to work with François,” she told me, with little prompting. “It will be a beautiful film, and Jean-Paul is very competent.”
She was unpretentious and willing to engage but, she said, habitually withdrew from inquisitive people. A samba record went onto the spindle, and she asked, “Do you dance to this?”
I didn’t, but I tried. Eventually she drifted off to dance with her hairdresser, and I went to bed.
The next day, Brierre said, “François and Catherine,” and held up two fingers side by side. “Haven’t you noticed?”
She said that when Deneuve and Truffaut had looked at some contact-sheet photos taken during filming, the actress had “censored all those of herself and Belmondo embracing. I have never known it to happen so quickly with François.”
In a letter, Truffaut had referred to Deneuve as “the blonde siren whose song would have inspired [Jean] Giraudoux.” She had a glacial prettiness and a mysterious aura. When the unit moved to its next location, Aix-en-Provence, an American writer came down from Paris to do a story about her for Cosmopolitan. After two days of following the actress around, he was utterly frustrated. “I ask how she felt when her sister was killed, and she says she was sad,” he told me. “I ask her about her childhood, and she says it was happy. How can I make a story out of that? If only she was bitchy. Then I could carve her up.”
As I wrote my stories for UA, scrounging for insights, I was reminded again how boring filmmaking could be, even with a renowned director and seasoned actors. There were constant difficulties with lighting—in Provence! Truffaut refused to use a studio, so bars, cafés, and pavements had to be prepared. “I’m always forced to sacrifice something,” he complained. “I don’t know why we go through all this.” Directors were supposed to be modern-day Leonardos with scripts, but Truffaut did not work from one. Every night, he wrote his stars’ lines on bits of paper. Final scenes were shot when the “script” was still incomplete, which meant more fragmentation.
The imagined Belmondo-Deneuve relationship still lacked fire, so Truffaut announced that the film would now be based on sex and would have scenes of great intimacy, something he had never before tried. It was a sign, I thought, of desperation. He was not being a “sensationalist,” he added, but a “realist. I want the spectators to realize how much they resemble the people on the screen.” He didn’t consider himself an intellectual, he now insisted, but a lover of “police films and films of passion.” As silly as all this sounded, at least it provided something to write about.
My nonexistent relationship with Truffaut got worse. He thought that since I wasn’t providing him with copies of the pieces I was sending to United Artists, they had to be scurrilous. I would have handed them over had he asked. But Truffaut never asked for anything. He started referring to me as l’Américain. Then, in Lyon, we became further estranged.
One of the journalists fainted while walking back from the loo but saved face by getting up and blaming jet lag. I got them all over to the filming location, where they sat on their briefcases and promptly fell asleep. Truffaut was not amused.The United Artists office in Paris had called and asked me to intercede on the part of three journalists from Tokyo wanting to visit the set. To my surprise, Truffaut agreed. They would be allowed to watch the shooting of a night scene because Truffaut was popular in Japan.
The three men flew down from London with matching metal briefcases. I played host, though I spoke no Japanese; they spoke neither French nor English. Through the consulate I found a French-speaking Japanese diplomat who was willing to come along. This was a comedy in the making. We had dinner in one of the best restaurants in Lyon, a city famous for them, and drank too much Bordeaux Supérieur. One of the journalists fainted while walking back from the loo but saved face by getting up, blaming jet lag, and drinking some more. I got them all over to the filming location, where they sat on their briefcases and promptly fell asleep. Truffaut was not amused.
The next location was the mountain town of Le Sappey-en-Chartreuse, outside Grenoble. No one had prepared for the snow, and the pine woods surrounding the location were suddenly full of visitors snapping photos. Deneuve and Belmondo stalked around in city clothes, he in a houndstooth suit and she in a feathered coat. Andress, meanwhile, sat unperturbed on the sidelines in her red fox hat and scarlet ski suit, upstaging Deneuve.
One night, the crew gave a birthday party for Truffaut at the hotel. Deneuve danced with a woman friend down from Paris, as well as with the girlfriends of crew members and camp followers, but never with Truffaut, who sat morosely in a corner. He did get up to blow out the candles on his cake.
Belmondo danced with Andress, her feet dangling above the floor, then insisted on blowing out some candles of his own. A photographer hired by United Artists later sold a photo depicting the moment to the news magazine Jours de France, and Belmondo threatened to sue the studio because the photo was unflattering (distended cheeks). Belmondo’s chauffeur said that the actor was also unhappy with the close relationship between Truffaut and Deneuve, calling it “unprofessional.” A pall had settled over the unit. Soon, everybody decamped for Paris, the final location, knowing that the film was a mess. Truffaut’s apparent inability to write a script was being cited as the culprit when in fact the whole affair had been a disaster.
On the final day of filming, I rode out to the Paris suburbs to say goodbye to the crew, the actors, and Truffaut. He didn’t offer to shake my hand. Because I had danced with Deneuve? Because the Japanese journalists had fallen asleep? Or was it because he knew that the film itself was so bad? (Mississippi Mermaid would run in New York for only a couple of weeks.) Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. The experience had been interesting, lucrative, and even great fun.
The post Dancing With Deneuve appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 2012, I decided to retire from touring as an indie rock musician and enter a graduate program in American Studies at the University of Wyoming. I’d been living in my hometown of Nashville and, having been to Wyoming only once—on a day trip to Yellowstone many years before—I imagined my new home to be a large and empty place. The idea of emptiness appealed to me. Wyoming was a blank page, and I pictured myself reading books and climbing mountains, engaging in a scholarly pursuit of knowledge in a tranquil natural setting.
After settling in Laramie, I realized, of course, that even a place as sparsely populated and expansive as Wyoming is hardly blank and empty. Wherever my boots trod, they fell upon many deep layers of overlapping histories. I immersed myself in my studies, doing archival research and oral history work. I continued to play gigs, and I took every opportunity to embark on outdoor adventures. For three charmed years, I came to know the state well. I marveled at its geology, animals, and plants. I heard old hunting tales, stories from the rez, stories of homesteaders, settlers, and outlaws. Most revelatory were the stories I heard of people who looked like me: that is to say, with origins on the Asian continent.
When one of my professors heard that I was trekking around every weekend, he told me to check out a place called Heart Mountain in the northwestern part of the state. During World War II, he told me, Heart Mountain was home to one of 10 concentration camps established in the United States following the attack on Pearl Harbor. A total of 120,000 Japanese Americans—most of them U.S. citizens—were removed from their homes on the West Coast and held without regard to their constitutional rights. There were no trials, no juries, just an atmosphere of wartime hysteria that followed a history of anti-Asian economic jealousy and prejudice dating back to the 1800s. Heart Mountain had 14,000 prisoners; if it had been a city or a town, it would have been the third largest in the state.
Growing up in Tennessee in the ’90s, I had never heard about Japanese-American incarceration, or Japanese internment, as it’s more frequently called. In fact, I’d never learned any Asian-American history in schools. I wish I had, because as an Asian American (my mom is Vietnamese), I always felt a bit like I was on an island. I often joke that Wyoming, one of the whitest states in America, is where I actually became “Asian American,” but it’s true. Out west, I visited the largely forgotten sites of former Chinatowns and joss houses (another term for Chinese temples). I saw where massacres once took place. I learned the histories of Chinese miners and rail workers and read about the Asian sailors and slaves who had come to this country as early as the 1500s. My travels became the basis of my scholarly work, and my trips to Heart Mountain played perhaps the biggest role of all.
Getting to Heart Mountain is easy enough. It’s between the towns of Cody and Powell, and a simple turn off Highway 14 brings you to the sparse ruins of the camp. Where once stood a square mile of hastily constructed tar-paper barracks, you now find a single original barracks, a replica guard tower, and a few interpretive signs tucked into sprawling fields of farmland. For a while, the farmer who took over the surrounding land grew sunflowers in the summer, a stark, beautiful sight against Heart Mountain itself, which cuts its silhouette into the expansive blue sky.
The grounds also house a small museum that attempts to tell the complicated story of what life was like for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. You learn who the prisoners were and what they did, as well as how they endured harsh weather in so desolate a setting, in quarters surrounded by barbed wire, surveillance spotlights, and guards wielding machine guns. The stories of their endurance still haunt this landscape, and if you listen carefully enough, you just might hear them whispered through the sage. Other stories, however, are more easily discerned, if only you know where to look.
One day, I stumbled across a photograph of the George Igawa Orchestra, a jazz band consisting of a dozen or so Japanese-American guys playing horns, drums, bass, the works. I had gone to a music college, a jazz college at that, but I had never learned of any Asian-American popular musicians. I certainly hadn’t heard of George Igawa. Intrigued, I pored over archives and old government maps, filled notebooks with my research, and began to stitch together the story of this band, even interviewing its last living members—one of whom, vocalist Joy Teraoka, now 97 years old, has become like family to me. It turns out that the George Igawa Orchestra, made up of prisoners at Heart Mountain, was not only the best swing band in Wyoming, it was also the only swing band in Wyoming at that time. The ensemble performed both inside the camp and outside it, at war bond rallies and community events throughout Wyoming. How could I have never heard of this band before?
As a scholar of music and sound, I find that history tends to leave out certain auditory details. We can read the words of the Gettysburg Address, but what were the tone and timbre of Lincoln’s voice on that November day in 1863? How did it sound to a soldier 10 rows back? Did the wind kick up at any point? Did a bird call in the distance? If so, what kind of bird? A musician’s ear, perhaps, is more attuned to the silences in our history books. So when I felt ready to tell the story of George Igawa and his band, I knew that I had to do more than simply write a paper that I could present at an academic conference. I wanted to share it with more people, especially my fellow Wyomingites, many of whom had never learned about the concentration camp in their state. The best way I knew how to do that was through music—and so my folk song “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming” was born.
Under starlight they danced behind barbed wire
Under the mountain, it meant something to sing
Stuck between two countries in a fire
The best god damn band in Wyoming …
Ten years after my first visit to Heart Mountain, the song has been heard by thousands of people around the world.
While in Wyoming, I started writing other songs about hidden Asian-American histories, and that work has evolved into a hybrid scholarly and musical practice, further developed during my PhD work in American Studies at Brown University and culminating in a dissertation that pushed beyond the typical boundaries of academic writing. The last chapter of that dissertation, in fact, is a vinyl record called 1975, on which “The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming” appears. The album was commercially released through Smithsonian Folkways in 2021. I have also told the story of George Igawa’s band through other media: documentary film, podcasts, and an immersive multimedia concert project called No-No Boy, named for those internees who dared respond no to two questions on the “loyalty questionnaire” demanding their allegiance to the U.S. government.
To get there, though, we must first go back in time.
Our setting is Heart Mountain in the spring of 1944. The war rages on. It’s dusty and cold. There is a lot of shame experienced by those incarcerated in camp, a lot of boredom. Life, for most, has never been grimmer. And yet it goes on. Farmers till the land, teachers teach, students learn, sports are played, music is made—and at the center of all that music-making is George Igawa.
Igawa was born in Los Angeles in 1908. Prior to his arrival at Heart Mountain in 1942, he had established himself as a tenor saxophonist in a Los Angeles swing band called the Sho Tokyans, which played up and down the West Coast and even had a brief residency in Japan. After being forced from his home and detained in Pomona, California, where he awaited news of where he’d be incarcerated, Igawa sought other instrument-carrying detainees and formed a band called the Pomonans. At Heart Mountain, they added several more musicians to their ranks, transforming into the George Igawa Orchestra and rapidly growing in popularity throughout the region. Igawa did an admirable job of transforming a group of novices—including untrained high schoolers, such as Joy Teraoka and trumpet player Yone Fukui—into a formidable big band. Between relocations and work leaves, high personnel turnover routinely shifted the ensemble’s lineups, but by the end of his time in Wyoming, Igawa had delighted dancers with dozens of performances and given many young people what felt like the musical opportunity of a lifetime.
For its first two years there, the band developed a repertoire of popular big band songs, performing often at dances held at the camp. But in 1944, Igawa guided his young musical disciples through an innovative and challenging program of transpacific musical fusion, consisting of swing arrangements of traditional Japanese tunes. This took them into a new musical space, and not just by the standards of the camp—no band in America was exploring this artistic terrain.
As an older nisei (second-gen Japanese American) with a deep cultural connection to both Japan and the issei (first-gen), Igawa made these arrangements not only to do something artistically interesting but also to appeal to those in the older generation who did not attend the dances held at camp. He bolstered his ranks with issei singers and instrumentalists who performed on traditional instruments such as shamisen (akin to a banjo), koto (plucked zither), and shakuhachi (wooden flute). He also added traditional Japanese dancers and incorporated his frequent collaborators, Al Tanaka’s Surf Riders, who had performed popular Hawaiian music during intermissions at most of the Igawa Orchestra’s concerts since the fall of ’42.
It was common for young folks to hold jam sessions in the recreation or mess halls. The teenagers would often sprinkle Cream of Wheat on the floor to facilitate sliding and jitterbugging.This musical revue, which had six performances, mustered all of Igawa’s musical skill and drew on his background performing jazz on the West Coast and from his time touring Japan with the Sho Tokyans. Japanese musicians had been putting their spin on American jazz since the early 20th century, but before this revue, no American popular musician had seriously considered arranging traditional Japanese songs—the music many issei would have connected with—for a swing orchestra. This was not a commercially driven novelty performance, like many of the pop hits released by the Japanese divisions of the Columbia and Victor recording companies in the ’20s and ’30s, nor was it akin to earlier American minstrel performances that took up “oriental” music and subjects for comedy. Igawa wanted to create a show that combined the distinct but overlapping cultural influences of his Japanese-American identity while providing joy and escape for several generations of people locked inside a concentration camp. It is one of the most extraordinary American musical performances that almost no one knows about.
By April 1944, Igawa had secured work leave in Chicago. (After 1942, the U.S. government encouraged Japanese Americans to resettle in the Midwest, a lukewarm attempt to right the wrong of incarcerating so many innocent people.) And so, the George Igawa Orchestra’s last official gig took place at 7:30 p.m. on April 22, 1944, at a sports awards dance held at the Heart Mountain high school gym. The school was in the center of the project, occupying an area of two blocks. It had been completed the previous year to provide education for the 1,500 high school students in the camp, and the gymnasium, to the envy of some Wyomingites, was one of the nicest facilities in the state.
At least 16 musicians would have participated in the performance that evening, and one can only imagine how excited they must have been. I love to think of young Tets Bessho, one of the high school musicians Igawa had shepherded from Pomona to Wyoming, now Heart Mountain’s most talented musician. The young clarinetist and sax player had blossomed in these difficult circumstances, performing at multiple social events each week. I can picture that April evening, a crowd of 400 expected at the high school, and Tets making his way from the barracks in the northeast section of camp, walking the half mile with his sax in one hand and his clarinet in the other, probably missing dinner in the mess hall to set up and soundcheck with the band before the gig.
Laverne Kurahara dances the jitterbug with Tubbie Kunimatsu, who sang with Igawa’s band. (Hikaru Iwasaki)
This performance was not an East-meets-West musical revue, but rather a straight-ahead swing music affair, the kind of performance Igawa’s young band members—and the hundreds of teenagers gathered at the high school—adored. Indeed, the big band music of Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Glenn Miller, and others was hugely popular with the nisei. Teraoka said that hearing the pop hits of the day in camp “was the thrill of a lifetime.” It was common for young folks to hold jam sessions in the recreation or mess halls, where they would play recordings of the day’s most popular songs on a phonograph borrowed from the recreation department. The teenagers would often sprinkle Cream of Wheat on the floor to facilitate sliding and jitterbugging. Like trumpet player Walt Hayami, who blared Gene Krupa on the radio in his family’s cramped quarters, many younger nisei, especially those in Igawa’s dance band, dived deep into swing music.
No full set lists survive from any of the Igawa gigs in camp, but we have a good idea of the band’s repertoire from newspaper clippings, interviews with former members, and the work of musician-historian George Yoshida. From these various sources, I have been able to reconstruct what likely took place on that boisterous and momentous spring evening.
When the George Igawa Orchestra took the stage for the last time, to rapturous applause, the band probably began with its theme song, “Moonlight Serenade,” a down-tempo number whose famous opening strains evoke an ethereal, almost haunting romance. Igawa had deftly altered stock sheet music to replicate Glenn Miller’s standard-bearing arrangement, familiar to the audience from recordings and radios played around camp. Bessho would have brought forth the choice clarinet lines as the dancers took to the floor, easing into the evening with a slow dance.
The band then would have picked up the tempo with a number like “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” and jitterbugging would have ensued, at least among the L.A. kids familiar with the music of the Black and Mexican communities—sweat beads forming, young women spinning out, brave but less coordinated attendees stumbling and losing track of their steps, ace dancers enjoying athletic, physical catharsis and impressing those on the sidelines. During the fast numbers, the strictly slow-dance crowd would join the wallflowers on the edges of the gymnasium, perhaps munching on meager refreshments and providing a bed of chatter underneath the band’s performance. Feet tapping, shoes sliding, an out-of-tune note or missed entrance here or there, laughter, smiles creasing faces, sexual anxiety, off-color comments, zoot-suited posturing: this was the vibe, as the grim reality of concentration camp life remained well outside the gymnasium’s double doors. After an hour or so, the band finished the first set and left the stage for intermission.
During the intermission, while sports awards were handed out to the camp’s best basketball teams and outstanding individual players, some of the band members probably grabbed a cigarette and some gossip outside. The young ballers accepted their awards to the applause of the crowd, and community activities supervisor Marlin T. Kurtz would have closed the intermission with some uplifting words about the merits of athletic pursuit, or some other such boilerplate, before reintroducing Igawa and his band. Once again, the musicians took their places behind their stands and a few RCA microphones, and the music resumed.
As the evening wore on, feet grew sore. Four hundred different energies mingled together and synced up to the rhythm of drummer Jimmie Akiya as the big band echoed through the cavernous auditorium. Favorites such as “In the Mood” and “At Last” were likely performed, providing opportunities for frivolity, romance, and connection. Standout trumpeter Yone Fukui took a few solos. Bessho switched between sax and clarinet as needed. Igawa improvised a bit over the sounds of his musical wards. The music, though nowhere near perfect, did its job and carried the night.
And then it was over. The attendees applauded. Igawa smiled his picture-perfect smile and took one last bow. The crowd lingered and then filed out into the cool spring night. The dance was done. That was it.
The voices gradually dissipated. The soft ripping of tape and the crinkling of crepe paper could be heard as dance chairman Mas Morioka and members of the athletic department tore down the decorative streamers and put away the refreshment tables. Onstage, the trumpet and trombone players blew swift bursts of air through slightly numb lips to remove spit from their horns. Bessho took apart his sax and clarinet, packed them away, and latched his cases shut. The custom “GI” music stands that camp carpenters had made were carried off the stage.
The temperature outside had dipped down into the 40s by the time the band left the gym. Bessho shuffled along the dirt roads back toward Block 24. What would he do next? Was he thinking about the fact that his mentor, George Igawa, the musical engine of the camp, was slated to leave him and his bandmates not long after? Did Bessho feel that typical mix of gratitude and betrayal so many musicians have experienced when a band ends? There would be no more daily rehearsals. Igawa would spend the next weeks making arrangements for his relocation to Chicago and for his wife, Kimiko, to eventually join him there.
High from the gig, Bessho probably didn’t reckon with any of these anxieties. It’s doubtful he registered the bittersweetness of the moment. He probably didn’t even go back to the apartment where his parents were likely sleeping. No, the way I imagine things, the members of the band would have kept the good times going, roaming Heart Mountain’s dirt roads in the moonlight, swigging some contraband whiskey that’d been snuck in through the barbed wire. Jimmie, Yone, Tets, and the crew stirring things up, squeezing as much life from the desolate northern Wyoming landscape as they could, dancing in the glow of the searchlights.
For the next nine months, dances at the camp were accompanied by recordings played through tinny PA systems, a thin substitute for Igawa’s irreplaceable blend of horns, piano, live drums, and thumping bass. Before his departure, Igawa had handed over leadership of the band to Bessho. The young clarinetist made a bold attempt to reform the big band, but the task proved too tall. Small groups entertained at socials, but the big band dances were done, and gone were the improvisations, the mistakes, the thrilling dynamics and tempo pushes. In their place? Records that always sounded the same, spinning around and around on a phonograph.
Igawa’s departure left a gaping hole in the sonic landscape emanating from below Heart Mountain, and one of the greatest musical acts in Wyoming history would disappear from the record—except for one black-and-white photo in a small museum.
Heart Mountain looms behind F Street, the main thoroughfare cutting through the camp. (Tom Parker)
In the years after finishing my initial research on the George Igawa Orchestra, I started the No-No Boy project, an immersive multimedia concert work blending original folk songs, storytelling, and archival images, all in the service of illuminating hidden American histories. When I perform live, I project curated archival images that sync up with folk songs I write about those stories. Many of these songs are inspired by my own family’s history during the Vietnam War, the experiences of Asian Americans who lived through the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese-American incarceration, and our present-day refugee crises. My goal is to use multimedia art to reach large audiences, to connect with a public increasingly skeptical of “experts” and “facts.” I think of my performances primarily as ways to engage diverse audiences with difficult conversations through deceptively simple songs. Whether performing at Lincoln Center or for rural high school kids in Oregon, I approach each gig the same, using music and moving images to invite audiences to sit with the mess of history. Additionally, by turning my research into art, I can regularly revisit and revise my work. A book represents a kind of finality, whereas each of my concerts is a chance to defend and reconsider what I’ve learned.
The story of George Igawa and his Asian-American musicians remains at the heart of my project. In an era of scholarship obsessed with the traumas of American history, I’ve found it important to provide a fuller picture of dark times, to bring a higher fidelity to what has typically been a mono record. This I can do by celebrating the joy cultivated amid tragedy and injustice.
The last time I hiked up Heart Mountain and looked out at where the camp used to be, there was—as with many vistas in Wyoming—a whole lot of nothing below. But I closed my eyes and listened deeply. I thought back over the archives I’d searched and the oral histories I’d collected, summoned forth in my mind the barracks and the barbed wire, tried to feel the exhilaration and the pain and the erasure of the past. I heard thousands of faint overlapping histories. I heard George Igawa saying “Thank you” for the last time. I heard the strains of “Moonlight Serenade” swelling in the distance. No place is empty.
The post Last Dance appeared first on The American Scholar.
Labor Day in Spain is celebrated on May 1. It’s a national holiday, and it’s called día del trabajador. Everyone who can, takes a break. On that day my running partner and I went south to a village called Burganes de Valverde in the province of Zamora, where a footrace was being held. We left at 10 a.m. The two-hour drive took us nearly three hours, plus stops, because we chose a scenic route and then visited several towns on the way to wander the markets, admire the architecture, and enjoy our freedom. We arrived in Burganes about three p.m. We still had three hours before the start of the race. What did we do? Wander the streets, admire the architecture, and enjoy our freedom.
Huge carved wooden doors, old stone monasteries, stone plaques carved with a coat of arms, old churches—these are what I remember from that excursion, all in the plural, as if I had feasted my eyes on untold specimens. This composite memory is what I usually end up with after sightseeing. Even when I visit only one monastery or one church, I feel as if I’ve seen a dozen, and the particulars from one trip meld with those of other trips in a savory soup of details. But the individual sights? I cannot reconstruct even a single façade from memory, so thoroughly do I jumble one monument with another, one day with the next. In the end, I’m left with less an image than a feeling, and were I to go in search of a particular place, I doubt I would be able to find it. In Burganes, I saw the old stone church. But I had seen a similar old stone church down the road in Villarrín de Campos, where I ran a race in September. Same still town, same ancient wooden doors on same decrepit buildings in empty streets, same red-earth tone to the dry land, same hot sun. So the church in Burganes does not stand out in my memory. But I can picture the narrow stairs half circling the tower up to the belfry where two bells hung. We climbed those stairs to the top. There, in a narrow, walled balcony, we were within reach of the bells. We read the inscription. A rope was attached, and my partner very gently pulled the rope to make the faintest of dings when the clapper touched the side of the bell. My turn. I did the same, but my touch must not be so fine, because though the sound was no deep clang, it was far louder than I’d intended. We both put our hands on the bell to muffle the peal, but no muffling was achieved. Novices at both ringing and muffling!
We descended the steep, narrow stairs, hands on the stones of the edifice. Safely on the ground again, we glanced back at the top, to the two bells in the triangular belfry, and a third smaller bell that we now saw was housed above the others. Beautiful, charming, lovely. Above the belfry, crowning the tower, was a large stork’s nest with the stork in residence, standing in the nest. What a place to build one’s home! Not only is the height dizzying but the exposure to the elements is worrying, and so is the precariousness of the exact site, the nest impossibly balanced on the pinnacle of the tower. The stork looked around from on high. Occasionally the wing of a nestling flashed into view, showing why the parent stood there in the hot sun. How many weeks, I wondered, before the young are grown? How many seasons will the nest last? How many the stork?
Later, after changing into our running clothes and picking up our race bibs, we set out to see the race route. My partner likes to scope out the course for strategic reasons. Which side of a dirt track is smoother? Where are the potholes to avoid? How many rises must be anticipated, how many sudden turns? That kind of calculation fills his mind. Not mine. So few women my age participate that I am practically guaranteed a trophy. Sometimes I am the only one in my category, and to arrive first, all I have to do is finish the race. I always remind myself of this, but I always then ignore my own urging to take it easy, and run as hard as I can.
So it was that day. No need to exert myself, especially today, I whispered as the runners assembled in the street beside the church, and then set off at the starting signal. But run hard I did, with a dry throat even before I began. The race was a short 6K on trails through the fields and hills around the village. By the end, I was very hot and thirsty. I summoned a last bit of energy for a sprint in the homestretch, but I was tired, and after crossing the finish line, I leaned against the first bit of wall I found to recover. First in my category, the only one. I won some chorizo and cheese, a bag of local lentils, a carton of chocolate milk, and a commemorative tin cup. Everyone clapped. I beamed. Then my moment was over, and my partner and I left the churchyard where the ceremony was still going on. It was still light out, but it was late, and we had a long drive.
As we walked to the car, I looked again at the church steeple. There was the stork, in her place, watching over the nest. Bigger than my effort was that of this bird, standing guard the whole time we were in the village, some six hours, with her back to the sun, shading her nestlings from the hot rays. We had seen the male fly in twice with food for the young, and then fly off again. As far as I could tell, the female got no relief at all, no water, no food herself. The male had also appeared and joined his mate at one point to drive off another couple of circling storks, apparently in search of a nice nest. The two parents together in the nest had made quite a racket, clattering their bills and flapping their wings when the other storks flew too close for comfort. And there she stood, still guarding her nest, exactly where she’d kept vigil all afternoon and probably all day too. There would be no need to stand guard now, no need to block the sun, which was low in the sky. But she was still at it, doing her thing. Laboring.
The post Laboring appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Edward Taylor’s poem “Huswifery.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Huswifery” by Edward Taylor appeared first on The American Scholar.
Siblings Ruthie and Nathan Prillaman are classically trained musicians who have put their knowledge of counterpoint and unusual time signatures to use in their medieval-inspired folk band, Small Fools. Renaissance madrigal meets contemporary queer meme in songs like “Crying in My Subaru” (also the title of their debut EP) and “Horseradish,” inspired by the words on a pickle jar. Such strange musical pairings—the marriage of Gregorian chant with lighthearted lyrics about gnomes, for example—might sound gimmicky, but in the siblings’ hands, they somehow achieve transcendence. The Prillamans join the podcast this week to talk about Small Fools, big ideas, and which 16th-century mystics they find most inspiring.
Go beyond the episode:
- Listen to Small Fools on Spotify or Apple Music
- We dare you not to hum the hook in “Horseradish”
- Check out the Small Fools TikTok
- Read more about the lives of anchoresses in this article by Mary Wellesley, cohost of The London Review of Books’s Medieval Beginnings podcast (and a one-time guest on this podcast)
- Polymath Hildegard of Bingen, one of the first named composers, is still one of the most famous female composers
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!
The post Music to Have Revelations To appeared first on The American Scholar.
Philadelphia-based artist Louis Ardine has worked primarily in abstract forms, producing elaborate drawings with micron pens. But in 2021, after he and his brother completed a cross-country charity walk, from the New Jersey coast to San Francisco, he began to gravitate toward landscape pieces, rendered on canvas in oils and watercolor. “I’m trying to think of narrative more in my work, and I think landscape is a way to entertain the subject of narrative,” he says.
- Bubbles, 2023, water soluble oil paint on wooden panel board, 8 x 8 x 1/2 inches.
- Night Time Boogie, 2022, watercolor and gauche on paper, 9 x 12 inches.
Ardine works spontaneously, perhaps beginning with a doodle that eventually develops into a more intricate piece resembling a scene from his travels. “I’ll do a painting, and in a way it’s a landscape, but it’s also not a landscape. I’ll have a little chuckle to myself like, ‘Oh this makes me think of this day when the sky was a certain way,’” he says. The vast wonder and joy Ardine beholds in certain American landscapes are evoked, for example, in Red Sky, one of the first oil paintings he has attempted in years. “Visual art has this wonderful ability to stop us in our tracks,” he says. “I, as an artist, seek to exploit that in the viewer, to make them stop.”
The post Louis Ardine appeared first on The American Scholar.
W. E. B. Du Bois is best known for his seminal collection of essays on the African-American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, and his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, which reframed the story of freed slaves in the Civil War and the brief window of political promise that followed. Du Bois is less remembered for his support for America’s entry into the First World War, an endorsement that surprised many of his Black and radical allies. Moreover, he pushed for African Americans to join the ranks, in the hopes of accelerating the fight for freedom at home. He would soon regret his decision, and he spent the next two decades of his life grappling with the complex legacy of the war, and African-Americans’ experience of it. As the historian Chad Williams puts it, this manuscript—called The Black Man and the Wounded World—was “Du Bois’s most significant work to never reach the public,” and the struggle to write it would irrevocably shape his politics. Williams, a professor of history and African-American studies at Brandeis University, joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War.
Go beyond the episode:
- Chad Williams’s The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War
- Read Williams’s reflection on the centenary of Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
- “War is organized murder, and nothing else,” Harry Patch maintained; the last surviving British soldier in World War I died in 2009 at the age of 111. He once told Tony Blair: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.”
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post The Pacifist and the Battlefield appeared first on The American Scholar.
I first saw the Palacio de la Torre de Celles on a summer’s day, and quite by chance. The building was not easily visible from any of the lanes crisscrossing the hilly countryside near the town of Pola de Siero, where the manor is situated, and I saw it only because my running partner and I stopped to stare at a bit of stone tower emerging from a great tangle of briar. “What’s that?” I asked. My friend didn’t know. So we investigated.
No sign told us to keep out, and no fence stopped us. On an empty country lane with no houses in sight, no cars or walkers, we stepped across the invisible boundary onto the grounds of whatever ruin was mostly hidden in the wild growth, and ducking around and then through the tangles of briar, we were soon well hidden ourselves. We pushed on, following a track that was overgrown with stinging nettle. Then we saw a wall, evidently the back of the grand building, and it was crumbling. Windows were minus their casements and the doorway we found was minus its door. When we stepped over the threshold into the gloomy interior, we could make out a lot of rubble from fallen stones and timbers, but not much else in the darkness. This was not the first abandoned building I’d poked my nose into. Had someone come along and asked gruffly what I thought I was doing, I’d have felt like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. But aren’t cookies to be eaten? Aren’t abandoned buildings to be explored?
Besides the rubble, we found some old artifacts, such as a chain, no dog attached, a cooking pot, some moldy blankets, and several heaps of plastic trash, colors faded. I’d have liked to return with a flashlight to investigate the inner reaches of the building, which though in a sorry state did not seem in danger of falling. Instead, at home I looked up the building and found it was protected as a monument, meaning it could not be torn down. What’s more, restoration would be according to strict official rules. In 2013, the owner, a descendent of the original owners, had petitioned to have the building declared a ruin—to escape the responsibility of restoration and upkeep—and the Internet revealed bits of the history of the legal back-and-forth. Negotiations were ongoing. And then I forgot about the place.
But another outing this winter took me down the same lane, where to my surprise I saw the denuded walls of the building, and all around the property a temporary chain link fence such as you find at construction sites to keep out intruders. A sign warned that no one except workers for the company was allowed in. Evidently the suits and countersuits had been satisfactorily resolved. The society for the preservation of the patrimony had presumably prevailed after many years, and the manor has been bought. Thank goodness. Every reference I saw to the building marveled at the majesty of its façade and described the building as the best example of baroque architecture in Asturias, or even Spain.
So, the new owners have begun the work of saving it. The enticing glimpses of stone wall and tile roof we caught are impossible now because all the vegetation has been cleared away. The manor stands free. It looks unprotected, abashed. The expansive, much-lauded south façade is visible, no peeking or prying necessary. Yet one quiet Friday afternoon, when construction workers do not work, I slipped behind the fence, gawked at the enormous pile of oak and chestnut beams in the yard, admired the careful stacking of the ancient roof tiles, marveled at the precautionary bracing in all the windows and doorways to keep everything from tumbling down. Then, through the main portal, I entered the manor. Nothing had been restored or rebuilt, but it had been cleared, and the 12 carved stone columns in the courtyard that had supported the balconies of the second floor were beautifully in evidence. And there I saw the great arched entrance to the wide stone stairs ascending to the upper floor. All the floors themselves were missing—nothing on the second floor and only dirt on the ground floor. It was quiet, sunny, and peaceful, but I did not linger. I patted a pillar as I might the leg of some enormous tired mammoth, brought back from the dead, and I left.
Who has the money for this restoration and for what purpose? A Madrid company is the new owner, I read. An events center is the future of the manor. An events center. For weddings or parties. Won’t that be pretty—the grand manor, the best example of baroque architecture in Asturias or possibly all of Spain, festooned and glorious. A palace for the rich, once again.
The post Palacio de la Torre de Celles appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Serhiy Zhadan’s poem “Take Only What Is Most Important.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Take Only What Is Most Important” by Serhiy Zhadan appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the 1860s, Chinese immigrants built vast stretches of railroad in the American West. But two decades later, they found themselves the targets of the first federal law restricting immigration by race and nationality: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained on the books until 1943. One of writer Ava Chin’s forefathers worked on the railroad, and much of her family suffered from the consequences of the Exclusion Act. The violence it enabled pushed both sides of her family east, to New York City. Chin, raised by her mother’s relatives in Queens, had grown up without meeting her father or his family—until years of research led her to a building on Mott Street where, she soon learned, both sides of her family spent decades living, squabbling, and loving. Chin’s new book, Mott Street, is the result of painstaking research across continents and oceans, into oral and written records, to trace five generations of Chinese-American history.
Go beyond the episode:
- Ava Chin’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
- Read her reflections on her railworker great-great-grandfather and contemporary immigration control
- Her columns as the Urban Forager for The New York Times grew into Eating Wildly, her 2015 book
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A selection of family photographs:
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The Chin brothers: Lung, Hong, and Jack, 1929 (Courtesy of Ava Chin)
- Chun and his daughters, flanked by Elva and Dek, 1926 (Courtesy of Alison Ho)
- Rose, Ava’s grandmother at age nine, 1926 (Courtesy of Ava Chin)
- Stanley Chin, Ava’s father, 1931 (Courtesy of Ava Chin)
- Ava Chin, 1990s (Courtesy of Ava Chin)
- Ava Chin today (Tommy Kha)
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post A Home in Chinatown appeared first on The American Scholar.
My mom must have held me more than once when I was a baby, but I only know of the one time. The photos fit in the first three pages of the baby album, blotches of brown stretching across them like lichen. In one, my mom is in the hospital bed, her mouth a flat line. I am lying on her chest, swollen and red, my face as wrinkled as an old witch. In another, my mother faces away, all curly brown hair, and my dad poses for the camera, two peace signs up. He wears a mask and a ridiculous hair net, and all I can see of his face are his eyes magnified by thick glasses.
Lulu is in all the other photos, wearing variations of the same dress.
Lulu holds me in her arms, sitting on the chair in the nursery. The light from the window hits her from behind, and if our skin were the same color, and if she were not wearing her green maid’s dress, she could be my mother the way she looks at me, the way my tiny head fits in the nook of her elbow.
Lulu pushes my stroller, dressed in pink now, through Parque del Este, smiling at the camera. My dad took this one—he takes all the photos. My mom is in the frame, distracted, staring up at macaws perched on a chaguaramo palm.
In another, my cousins and I are at a birthday party. I don’t know if it’s my birthday or maybe my cousin Camila’s because we are both wearing paper princess crowns. We did everything together then, hating and adoring each other, jealousy and love all impossibly knotted up. We look up at a clown twisting a balloon. Behind us, leaning against a wall, stand five maids like a row of pastel colors. Lulu in the middle wearing baby blue, the prettiest of all of them, the youngest by half a decade at least. She was also a child when she took care of me.
There are a few other photos, but not many. The final one is pasted onto an otherwise empty page. Lulu and I are in the kitchen, she’s teaching me how to make arepas, my chubby hands squeeze the dough. In this one, my mom is already dead. Lulu looks down at me, and there I see it, the bump under Lulu’s dress. It’s small, but it’s there.
This is the story Lulu told me when I was little, since before my mom died. There’s a man. He’s very sick. He has long thin arms and long thin legs and long thin fingers. He carries a sack. The sack is big enough to fit a child. When girls misbehave, when they don’t do as they’re told, that man comes and takes them. “Does he eat them?” I ask her, terrified. “No,” she says, and not knowing what he does to them scares me even more.
After my mother dies, Lulu comes in the room and gets in bed with me most nights, pulls the cover over us both. Sometimes I’m angry, and sometimes I’m sad. Lulu’s always the big spoon. She hums a song. She smells of coconut and grease. “Tranquila, mi vida. Tranquila.” Then I sleep.
Sometimes I hear my dad walk to the door. I peek through eyelids, and I see his thin shadow leaning on the door frame. And Lulu gets out of bed and kisses me. And her shadow joins my father’s and they walk together into the soft light of the hallway and they are gone.
Whenever I don’t eat my food, whenever I don’t want to do my homework, whenever I don’t pick up the mess in my room, Lulu reminds me of the man with the sack. Those fingers of his prod me to action.
It works until it doesn’t.
What happens to a threat when you stop believing it? But I still see the man whenever I do something wrong. His face, which I’ve sculpted in my imagination: the heavy brow; the aquiline nose with hair sprouting from the nostrils; the jaw, slightly unhinged; a mole close to his right ear, which is swollen like a cauliflower.
I think about the man the first time my cousin Camila and I kiss. We are both eight and are playing house at my tía’s place. “I’m the wife, and you’re the husband,” Camila says. So we go through our day of married bliss. She cooks an imaginary dinner of imaginary carne mechada, arroz blanco, and plátanos.
“I burned the plantains,” Camila says. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I say.
“No. That’s not how you play,” my cousin says, annoyed. “Here, you’re the wife now, and I’ll be the husband.” She hands me the imaginary plate. I can feel the smooth porcelain, can see the gold stripe on its rim.
“I work all day,” Camila says. “I work all day, and all I ask is that I have warm food.”
“I’m sorry,” I say and look down at my feet. My hands still hold the plate, the glistening shredded beef, the perfect pilaf of white rice, small pieces of red ají dulce poking through the grain. The plantains are black, curled on themselves, making everything else on the plate ugly.
“Sorry is not enough!” Camila stands up from our mahogany table. She slaps at my outstretched hands, and I can see the plate shattering on the wood floor, food spilling everywhere. “Look at what you made me do,” my husband says to me. “Look at this mess.” And I kneel on the floor and pick up the make-believe shards, until one cuts my thumb.
“Okay. That’s good.” She’s my cousin again, with her long, straight, brown hair and her red cheeks. “I like being the husband better. Now let’s pretend we’re in our room, okay?
She pulls my hand and takes me to her bed. I jump up on the pink comforter and lie down. On the ceiling there are fluorescent stars, but now, in the light of the afternoon, they don’t shine; they look like pieces of snot.
“It’s been a long day,” Camila says. She takes off her imaginary coat. “I built two houses today. It was hard work.”
I don’t want to say something wrong, so I don’t say anything.
Camila lies next to me in bed. We both look up at the ceiling. I can feel the soft hairs on the back of my arm stand, electric—I reach for her hand and it feels warm and clammy, like my own.
She turns over on her side. Looks at me.
“I’m going to kiss you now, okay?” I’m not sure who she is at this moment. Camila my cousin? Camila my husband?
“Yes.”
We play marriage in her house and in mine. “Yours is better because you have no mom,” Camila tells me. And it’s true. Only Lulu is at my house in the afternoons, and she lets us play, never interrupts. Not like my tía Silvia or Camila’s maid, Rosario, whom we need to listen for, especially after I cook Camila make-believe dinner.
I’m never the husband again, always the wife. Camila likes to practice the kisses she sees on TV, in the novelas Lulu watches after lunch. I wait patiently for that moment after the fight. When Camila holds my hand and takes me to bed. It’s okay that I see the man with the sack after Camila gets up from the bed and wipes her face with her sleeve, both our mouths raw. It’s okay he’s in the corner, half in shadows, looking into his bag. It’s worth it.
Five months later, we are too big to play house. That’s what Camila tells me. “Do you want to watch a movie instead?”
I say yes, but everything inside me burns. I want to cry, I want to hit her, but I also feel my limbs relax, like they belong to me for the first time since that first kiss. Like I’ve gotten away with something.
We sit in my aunt’s living room, sink into the black leather couch, and watch The Lion King. I reach out for Camila’s hand, and she moves it away, doesn’t take her eyes off the screen. When Simba almost gets trampled by the wildebeests, she hides her face in her arms. I go to the bathroom and puke.
I haven’t cried since the months after my mom died, but later that night, at home, Lulu hears me sob and comes to bed. Our tent under the sheets smells like Lulu. “Tranquila, mi vida. Tranquila.”
After Camila, I stop seeing the man with the sack. I don’t see him when I smoke my first cigarette with Federico in the alley behind school. I don’t see him when, three weeks later, on my 12th birthday, I let Federico put his hand up my shirt and squeeze my breast. I don’t see him when I tell my dad that Alma has invited me to her house for a sleepover but I really go to Federico’s house. His parents are away. He lights candles and plays reggae music and slides inside me. He thrashes for two minutes and then offers me a cigarette, which I smoke in bed. No man with the sack, but I do see Camila’s face as I take a long drag of the Belmont Light. I avoid Federico in school. He’s three years older than me, so it’s not hard. We never sleep together again.
I don’t see the man with the sack when I start skipping school and going to Playa Pantaleta with Alex and Catire. Alex’s girlfriend, Adriana, is gorgeous. She likes to drink Malibu rum with blue curaçao and pineapple juice. It’s sweet, and I can barely taste the alcohol, but by sunset, as we’re driving back into the city, we need to pull over so that I can puke by the side of the road. Adriana has my head in her lap the rest of the ride home, and as she strokes my hair, I feel like I’m on a roller coaster ride. I don’t see the man with the sack when I hold her hand, or when I bring it to my mouth and kiss her fingertips. She doesn’t move her hand away. Alex and Catire are talking baseball while I kiss Adriana’s index finger, and then her middle finger, and then her ring finger, and then her pinky.
“You’re 14 years old!” my dad yells at the kitchen table while Lulu cleans dishes. “You’re not going to Margarita Island for Carnaval.”
I scream at my dad almost every night. I slam the door of my bedroom so hard, the door handle snaps off. Lulu comes in that night, and I’m still red hot.
“I don’t want to talk.” I hug my knees to my chest, my back against the wall, the Bob Marley poster above my head.
“You don’t have to,” Lulu says. She sits next to me and puts her hand on my hand. It’s rough. Calloused. She suddenly seems older. Not as pretty as she’s always been. I can see some of her curls are starting to gray, not much, but starting. She has bags under her eyes. She’s tired. What is she, 30? I put my head on her shoulder.
“Why don’t you have your own family, Lulu?” I ask.
“You are my family, mi vida,” she says.
“Yeah, but have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
She thinks about it. “No, not really.”
“Oh c’mon, Lulu! Do you like someone?”
She takes a pillow and and pushes it into my face. “Why are you asking all these questions? You’re so nosy!” And laughs.
“I don’t know, I think I like someone.”
“Bea! What’s his name? Tell me all about him!”
I think about telling her that it’s not a him. I feel the words hot in my stomach wanting to come out. But I tell her about Catire. About how good a surfer he is. I tell her that he always opens the door for me when I get into his car.
After she leaves, I dream of Adriana’s hand in my mouth. I wake up throbbing and dry-mouthed. I go get some water. Light is coming from Lulu’s bedroom, past the laundry room. I go to it. I freeze by the washing machine. There’s a rhythmic squeak. I take another step and see my father’s socked feet on top of Lulu’s.
My father remarries when I’m 16. Karla is a 33-year-old “lawyer.” She went to law school but doesn’t practice. She rides her father’s horses at Izcaragua Country Club and says, “I told you” to my dad when I come home one day with a stud in my nose. She’s beautiful and ugly at the same time, and the perfect excuse to spend less and less time at home. Lulu calls me over to her bedroom, behind the laundry room, and we lie on her bed and watch a movie that’s playing on TV. I laugh at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice, dubbed into Spanish by a voice actor who probably weighs the same as one of Arnold’s legs. It’s the movie where he pretends to be a kindergarten teacher. Lulu is laughing so hard at the scene with the ferret, and I reach for her hand. She squeezes it but doesn’t stop looking at the screen, snorting in air as she laughs.
“Ay niña,” she says, catching her breath after the scene ends. “I can’t, it’s too much!”
I snuggle into her. I look at the troll doll collection Lulu keeps all around her small TV set. Blue hair and red hair and orange hair, green and white and purple.
Tomorrow I’ll be taking off to Higuerote beach with a group of friends. My dad seems relieved that I’ll get out of Karla’s hair for a few days. Lulu is the only one who cares when I call three days into my beach trip and extend it to a week.
My first year of college, my cousin Camila invites me to La Sabana, to the beach house of one of her friends. The house sits on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean. Its beams are exposed tree trunks, each one uniquely curved and branched. The carpentry on the swinging doors and venetian blinds is exquisite. The floors are layered with beach rock forming intricate patterns. There’s modernist furniture everywhere, with chairs and lounges and benches that melt and twist and are, frankly, ugly. But it doesn’t matter. When all the doors are open, the house seems to have no walls. It welcomes the ocean breeze in, and there’s no place to stand that does not have a view of the calm blue of the sea.
It’s me, Camila, her boyfriend Luca, and Tony, whose parents own the house. Another couple’s coming later.
“I hope you don’t mind us rooming together,” Tony says. “There’s only one bedroom with separate beds, and I’m giving the other two rooms to the couples.”
“That’s okay,” I say as I put my backpack on the twin-size bed. Tony sits on the other bed, just a few feet from mine.
“Just let me know if you need some privacy. We’ll barely be in here anyway.”
Tony is good-looking in the way Camila’s friends all are. He’s preppy, always wearing some golf shirt. His hair swoops to the right, and every few minutes his hand runs through it, rides that blond wave.
“Do you mind if I get a few minutes to change?” I say.
When I’m ready, I step outside. My bare feet feel good on the pebbled mosaic floor, warm and bumpy, a massage in every step.
A car pulls in, Tony’s other friends. The guy and Tony embrace in that way Caracas boys do, like they are posturing at being men. Their voices become an octave deeper for just those first hellos.
And then Adriana is there, the first time I’ve seen her since that time at the beach, puking out my insides on the way home from Playa Pantaleta. She walks out of the car in a yellow summer dress and something fat lodges in my throat and I have to swallow it down before I say hi to her.
“We know each other, right?” I say. Remembering perfectly well how my head felt in her lap. “Adriana?”
“Yes! You’re Alex’s friend, right? It’s been forever!” She hugs me, kisses me on the cheek. It feels like a punch. “I didn’t know you were friends with Tony!” She smells like peaches.
“We just met. I’m Camila’s cousin,” I say.
Camila runs up behind me and yelps when she sees Adriana. They embrace and hop as they do. Two excited puppies sniffing each other’s butts.
“Wait, you two know each other?” Camila points at me.
We both say “yeah” at the same time.
“We met—” Again we speak over each other, and she laughs. I’d forgotten about her teeth. She has big canines. They kind of stick out a bit, but I love them. It’s the sort of imperfection that makes someone more beautiful.
“You go,” she says.
“We met a few years ago, at the beach,” I say.
“When I dated Alex,” Adriana says.
“Oh that guy was the worst!” my cousin says. “The wannabe surfer?”
“He was a sweetheart!” Adriana says, and I hate that this is what we’re talking about now. Boys. How quickly it always comes to this and how boring it is. But I have to nod and grin and pretend as Camila and Adriana revisit memories that I’m not a part of.
That afternoon, Tony drives us to a nearby village. “I’m going to take you somewhere so cool, just you wait,” he says as we all load up in his SUV. “You want to come up front with me?” he asks, and I go, but I envy Camila, who must sit half on Luca’s lap, half on Adriana’s as everyone squeezes together in the back seat. It’s a dirt road and Tony plays Soda Stereo so loud and we are all singing along to “Persiana Americana” as we bump through the tropical forest: moriche palms, banana plants, tall ceibas choked by vines and peppered by orchids and bromeliads. Tony parks the car by a river, just past a couple of small houses with mud walls and frond roofs.
“Up here,” he says, and we follow him upriver. Luca and Adriana’s boyfriend both carry a small cooler. Camila and Adriana chat behind them as they try their best not to slip on the river rocks. I bring up the rear. The river water is cold, but in the tropical heat, it is a balm for my feet and calves. We hike for 10 minutes past a river bend, and then we start hearing it, the sound of falling water. One more bend, and then we see it. The waterfall is wide and at least 30 feet high; the jungle encroaches on all sides, framing it in deep green. The water lands in a swimming hole wide enough to swallow a house. There’s a communal gasp as we enter this miraculous space; columns of light descend through the canopy, and it takes me a minute to hear the choir of toads and insects behind the sound of the water splashing.
Luca and the boyfriend drop the cooler on the nearest flat rock. Tony takes pleasure in looking at our dumb faces. “Welcome to Pozo del Cura,” he says, opening his arms. As if this place was his. As if it could belong to anyone. Then he jumps in and wades to the middle of the hole.
Adriana and I share a rock under a patch of sunlight. We share a sandwich, too. Camila and the boys are playing in the hole, Luca is teasing her about something, and the others laugh. Adriana’s curls are heavy and wet, and she chews so softly, so carefully. She takes the tiniest bites I’ve seen anyone take. She catches me staring at her. Blushes.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re cute,” I say. I’m afraid the second it comes out, like I’ve been caught doing something wrong. She looks down, her cheeks getting even redder.
“I’m fat,” she says.
I’m at the edge of a cliff. I jump: “You’re perfect.”
She looks at me, frozen. And then a small smile.
“Shut up,” she whispers and moves a curl from her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then she places the rest of her sandwich on the rock and runs to the water. She stops before reaching it and looks back at me. I’m a living heartbeat. “You coming?” she says.
“Yes. In a minute.”
I see her run and jump on her boyfriend’s back. He turns and tosses her high, her legs bicycling in the air before the splash.
That night, after the boys grill and we all eat choripanes, I invite Adriana to go for a walk. The guys and Camila play dominoes, and I go to my bag and grab my joint, and Adriana and I walk down the path that goes from the house to the beach. The night is a little cloudy, but there are patches here and there where the stars shine through. We hear reggaeton coming from La Sabana, the next beach over. We walk together toward the sound. Like it calls us.
I light the joint, take a drag, and offer.
“I’ve never had weed before,” she says.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“What does it feel like?”
“I don’t know. Lighter? Like everything becomes easier, I guess.”
“That sounds nice,” she says. But she doesn’t reach for it. “I don’t know.”
“It’s okay,” I say. And take another hit, small.
She stops and looks out to the ocean.
“Did you mean it? When you said I was beautiful?” she asks.
“I didn’t say that,” I say. She turns sad, which makes my insides jump. “I said you were perfect.”
She looks at me again, and we are so close. She grabs my hand. I think she’s going to kiss me, but she speaks.
“Remember this?” she asks.
She takes my hand and brings it up to her mouth. She kisses my index finger. And then my middle finger. And then she moves my hand out of the way, and I pull her close.
It’s the first time I’ve really kissed someone since the last time Camila and I played house. All those boys in between are just bad air.
The next day, it’s as if nothing happened. We get our things together, stuff our damp bathing suits in plastic bags, carry our backpacks to the back of Tony’s car. Adriana and her boyfriend kiss by their SUV, and I feel like the green spot in the middle of a bruise.
They say goodbye, she kisses my cheek, and I feel like I need to hold on to that second of closeness, need to squeeze every fraction of it, live inside that goodbye for as long as I can. And then they are gone.
I get home. I’ve got that sticky feeling of a weekend at the beach, the satisfying sizzle on my skin. I leave sand tracks on the floor. Mostly I’m thinking of Adriana. Yeah, she’s got a boyfriend. But she kissed me. I know what that meant. I know that it can’t be the last time that I see her or feel her. Or feel this. This thing in my stomach and in my head that makes me as happy as I’ve ever been, and also as afraid.
There’s no one in the house. It’s Sunday, Lulu’s only day off, so she’s gone home. As if a place you only spend one night a week can be considered home. As if this isn’t her home. My dad is with Karla at El Country. He plays golf in the afternoon, and then they stay at the club with their friends.
I go to Lulu’s room, like I do when she’s gone. I get in her bed and bury my head in her pillow, breathe in the smell of the coconut lotion she works into her hair after every shower. Then I sit up against the headboard. Her collection of dolls is gone. The stack of gossip magazines she always has on her side table, too. I go to her tiny bathroom and open the mirror cabinet—nothing there. I run to the sliding door of her closet. Also empty.
I rummage through my bag and find my cellphone, but of course it’s dead. It’s been buried in there since we left for La Sabana three days ago. I don’t know Lulu’s number by heart. Why would I? She was always here.
I take Karla’s car and drive to the club. It’s only a few minutes away. I park in front of the clubhouse, blocking a black Mercedes. When the valet greets me, I just hand him the key and keep moving. No one stops me when I storm through the lobby and the bar. The hostess at the restaurant is about to say something, maybe about my shorts or my flip-flops, but she doesn’t have the time. I blow right past her. I’m a missile.
My dad is laughing, holding Karla’s hand. His business partner, Gustavo, holds a whiskey in his hand. His wife plays with her grilled salmon. Gustavo notices me.
“Beatriz is here!” It’s a joyous announcement, rolling from deep in his ample belly. But he must see my demeanor, because his face changes and before I can reach them, he says, “Is everything okay?”
I ignore him. I ignore everyone who’s not my father.
“Where is she?” I ask. I feel my nails dig into my palms.
“Honey, not here,” my dad says and moves the cloth napkin from his lap to the table.
“Where is Lulu!” I hit the table with my open hand.
Everyone in the club is looking at us. My father’s face goes pale. Karla makes herself smaller, sinks into her chair as if trying to camouflage.
“Bea,” he says. “Come, let’s talk about it.” He stands up and puts a hand on my shoulder, moving me to the exit.
“Don’t touch me!” I slap his hand away.
He grabs my wrist, no longer playing nice, and pulls me out of the restaurant, through the lobby, and out of the clubhouse.
“Flaco!” he yells, and the valet runs to get his car.
“Why did she leave?” I ask. I’m crying now.
The car pulls up, and my dad pushes me in. My limbs feel soft now, all the anger replaced by a weakness, a sadness, that disgusts me. My dad pulls away from the club and starts driving us home.
“How could you do it? How could you let her leave?”
“It was no longer working out, Bea,” he says. “You know Karla didn’t like her, and then they got into a fight this week—”
“But how could you! She’s Lulu!”
“She’s a maid, Bea. She worked for us. She wasn’t—”
“What? Family? She wasn’t my mom? Is that what you’re trying to say?” I feel the anger returning, working itself from my feet up. My dad looks ahead into the street. I feel nothing from him. He’s as flat as a board. “How could you fire her?”
“I didn’t. We didn’t fire her. She left.”
It hurts. It hurts more than when Adriana kissed her boyfriend right in front of me. More than when my mom died.
“That’s not true. Karla fought with her, you said.”
“Yeah, they fought and then she said she was going and took her stuff.”
“No! Karla fired her! You made her go!”
“I didn’t, Bea. I didn’t.”
“You fucked her,” I say.
“Careful,” my dad says. He looks at me now, and I see rage. But I feel the same rage in me too.
“You used her. She was a kid when she started working for us. Younger than me!”
“Don’t say anything else, Bea. Don’t.”
“You got her pregnant.”
He slaps me with the back of his right hand, his left still on the steering wheel. The car is so steady.
I push him hard, with both my arms. The car swerves, is about to hit a lamppost, but he regains control. He screams at me to be careful, and then I see my hand around the wheel and it’s like someone else is living inside me and pulling, hard.
The world is all screech and crash. It is all pavement and metal and glass. It is all bruise and blood and teeth.
The night flashes red and blue and white. A woman puts a blanket over my shoulders and is saying something, but the sirens, they mess with my head. I can’t concentrate. I look out, past the cops and firefighters, past the bent metal and patches of shards, and I see a man sitting down by an ambulance. He’s wearing my father’s clothes, but I don’t recognize his face. His nose, broken, belongs to a bird, his ear is swollen like a cauliflower. The headlights of a police car hit the man’s back, and his shadow is long: a long neck, long arms, long fingers bent at crooked angles. An EMT brings him something, a plastic bag, is showing him the contents. “Yes,” he mouths. “Thank you.” I stand up, and when the woman tries to stop me, I scream at her. The sound is so horrible, so animal, that she lets go. I run to the man and push him with all my strength.
“You’re not real!” I scream. “You’re not real!”
I feel them pulling me away from him. All goes dark. Darker than when I buried my face in Lulu’s body as a kid, under the covers, and she told me that she loved me and that she would always be with me.
The post Under Covers appeared first on The American Scholar.
“Down beside where the waters flow,” confesses the speaker about the place where he murdered his sweetheart, “down by the banks of the Ohio.” He explains why he did it—she wouldn’t marry him and promise to be only his—and I presume he laments his act. But he doesn’t say so, so the song would not do for my class of adolescents, who were studying the third conditional and the use of wish for regrets.
I had also considered another song on the same Joan Baez album, a folk song called “Lonesome Road.” In this song, unlike “Banks of the Ohio,” the singer does regret what he’s done. What was his crime? He never says, though presumably he is in prison, where the food is so unappetizing that he wishes he’d never been born. That phrase about wishing to have never been born was the one I wanted because I thought it would strike a true note for my students, all 15- or 16-year-olds. I recall my own teen years as a time of turbulent emotions, and I would wager that I often thought and even said in anger to whomever I was seething at that I wished I’d never been born. And that even without having to endure the cold corn bread and salty gravy that the speaker describes.
But I rejected that song, too. It had meaning for me, just as the other did, because I had listened to these songs and others like them all through my youth and adulthood. But the songs meant nothing to my students. I could imagine their faces like reflecting glass, showing nothing of what was going on behind the smooth front.
So I settled on a song they might know, by Queen. A movie about Freddie Mercury and his band came out a few years ago, and I was counting on the students having heard of it or even seen it. “Do you know who Freddie Mercury is?” I asked, wondering even as I spoke if the past tense or present was a better choice. Several knew the name and one identified him with his band. So far, so good. I told them I was going to play a song. “It’s called ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ just like the movie about Freddie Mercury.” Had any of them seen it? I looked around. No one said yes, no one said no. No evidence, even, of students searching their memory for the title. This was par for the course with this class, from whom getting a reaction was like pulling teeth. “Okay. Listen,” I said, and played the opening on my tablet.
The opening words make no sense to me, and even less if you only catch half the words, as might be true for the students. But the tune might set off bells. “Have you heard this song before?” One student almost nodded, but then ducked his head.
“What did you hear?” I asked the others. “Any words?”
Fantasy, someone said. Landslide, someone else said. So far so good. I played the next couple of lines after a false start I apologized for. “As you can tell, I don’t do this that often,” I said to excuse my bumbling.
Still only one of the students recognized the song. I explained that the speaker tells what bad thing he did and then has a lament, a rather ordinary one, and I asked them to listen for those two pieces of information—what he did, and what he wishes. “Listen.” I pushed play again. “There!” I said, triumphantly. I paused the song. “First you heard the act and then the wish. What does he say?”
Instead of the students repeating what they’d just heard and me congratulating them on their good ears, a student gave a snigger. Another did too. “Listen again,” I instructed and backtracked before hitting the play button. “Sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all,” sang Freddie Mercury.
I don’t know if they heard the words or if hearing would have done them any good. I don’t even know if they were listening. I was going through my paces, and they were too, keeping everything in, behind their masks. Not the kind they had to wear in class for two years during the pandemic but the kind they had learned as adolescents to put on. But something was getting out. The snigger was now a couple of giggles. I looked up. A girl was hunched over, a boy was wiping his eyes. He couldn’t be crying, could he? I didn’t think so. Which left laughter as the explanation.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked, looking around. Six students, one smiling knowingly, one avoiding my gaze as he got his face back under control, one looking at me innocently, one girl looking down, one shaking her head and exchanging a look with another, and one birdlike in her sudden movements, bright eyed, brows raised, looking straight at me.
“Are you laughing at the lyrics?” I asked. “Have you ever said those words? I wish I’d never been born? Maybe when you are reproaching a parent. Kids do that. I did.”
Guffaws now. “What’s so funny?” I asked, half laughing myself just because they were. But no one told me. I was not invited into the joke. Perhaps I was the joke, and they were laughing at me. “Go ahead and laugh,” I said, “it’s good for you.” When something good finally happens, you go with it. So we didn’t make use of the language for speculation that had been the content of an earlier lesson, and I didn’t ask the students to remember a time when they had reproached someone with such a dramatic, game changing wish. Instead, they quietly sniggered until the song concluded and I dismissed class. It was a happy sound. I wasn’t bewildered because I had quit trying to understand. When something nice happens, you go with it.
The post Where the Waters Flow appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Bluebird.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski appeared first on The American Scholar.
Hangama Amiri migrated with her family from their native Afghanistan to Canada after the Taliban seized power in the mid-1990s. Two years ago, as the Taliban was gaining ground once again, Amiri was asked to create works for a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She dedicated it to the past, present, and future of women’s lives in the country of her birth. “It reflects my childhood and also my present memories of being in Afghanistan,” she says, “really focusing on women’s participation in society and their entrepreneurship and the shorter phase of the peace that was in Afghanistan—how much fragile progress they had made in the past 20 years.” These works are now a part of the exhibition A Homage to Home, which runs through June 9.
- Installation Views of A Homage to Home at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Photo Credit: Jason Mandella.
- Aziz, Tailor Shop, 2022, muslin, cotton, leather, suede, clear plastic, polyester, silk, velvet, faux leather, wool, iridescent fabric, and found fabric – 113" x 107.5". Photo Credit: Chris Gardner.
- Mah Chehra, Beauty Parlor, 2022, muslin, cotton, chiffon, polyester, suede, iridescent paper, iridescent fabric, silk, and found fabric – 74.5’’ x 57’’. Photo Credit: Chris Gardner.
Amiri sketches each of her compositions with colored pencils before cutting and transferring fabric (sourced from countries she’s been to, including Afghanistan) onto brown paper with pins. She then sews it all together. Her works depict Afghan women in public spaces like salons and fabric shops, and private spaces, such as in their homes, and as migrants. The exhibition draws attention to the obstacles young girls face in today’s Afghanistan, particularly with regard to education. Still, despite the Taliban’s resurgence, Amiri wants viewers of her work to “see a glimpse of hope, a glimpse of something that really was happening in Afghanistan,” when girls could go to school and women could vote.
The post Hangama Amiri appeared first on The American Scholar.
There are mass graves all over Latin America, but the concentration of dead and disappeared in Guatemala and Argentina is staggering: more than 200,000 killed by the state in Guatemala’s 36-year conflict, known simply as “La Violencia;” up to 30,000 disappeared by the Argentine military dictatorship over the course of its reign of terror in the 1970s and ’80s. How does a country reckon with crimes against humanity? How do the families of the missing find the truth? “Forensic exhumation is practiced at the crossroads of two ways of thinking about the body,” anthropologist Alexa Hagerty writes, “as a scientific object to be analyzed for evidence of crimes against humanity, and as a subject, an individual, someone loved and mourned.” In her new book, Still Life with Bones, Hagerty documents her training with forensic teams in Guatemala and Argentina, where members have devoted their lives to unearthing the bones of the disappeared, reconstructing not only their skeletons but the stories of their lives.
Go beyond the episode:
- Alexa Hagerty’s Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains
- Her latest on human rights and surveillance: “In Ukraine, Identifying the Dead Comes at a Human Rights Cost”
- If in Buenos Aires, take a day to visit the Museum and Site of Memory ESMA
- Guatemala’s dictator Efraín Ríos Montt slithered out of an 80-year conviction for genocide; Jayro Bustamante’s incredible film La Llorona imagines a different kind of justice for his fictional analogue
- In the experimental film Los Rubios, Albertina Carri investigates what happened to her parents during the Argentine dictatorship
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Listening to the Dead appeared first on The American Scholar.
When I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas, I lived in a rented farmhouse and owned a horse. I knew people enrolled in the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program, a curriculum based on classical Greek and Roman texts. Some students, inspired by their readings of Theocritus and Virgil, decided to spend a semester at a farm in Marysville, Kansas, where they would live close to the land. They also thought they should farm with horses—genuine horsepower. I boarded a horse for my friend Eva Tarnower, who was part of the humanities program, and another for John McDonald, who later founded Boulevard Brewery. The three of us agreed to loan our horses to the program for a semester. We weren’t sure they would return better educated, but they’d certainly be well used.
We chose the traditional way to transport the horses 150 miles to the farm: we’d ride. So, in the late summer of 1973, we set out with bedrolls, my guitar, a small amount of cash, and a couple changes of clothes each: Eva on her horse Flower, her friend Roger Williams riding John’s mare Jo, and I on my little Morgan/Shetland horse Cuck. We were relying on the kindness of strangers for pasture, food, and barns to sleep in. And rural Kansans were generous: we were well-fed and slept mostly in beds; our horses were given grain and shelter. We didn’t need to spend our cash. As Roger speculated about those Kansans, “They were people who may have been startled to see three riders on horseback, one with a guitar, appear in their barnyards out of the heat on a late August afternoon, but they did not feel like aliens had just arrived. Because horses and music were things they grew up with, or their parents did.”
The trip took five days. Our singing helped us through the long hours. We entertained one another, and, since we’d vowed never to repeat a song, covered plenty of musical terrain: songs from our childhoods, church hymns from three denominations, Boy and Girl Scout songs, camp songs, along with folk songs, blues, ballads, and shanties. We learned about our respective musical traditions, and even more about one another.
Several songs I offered were by Robert Burns. “Auld Lang Syne,” of course: most everyone has the chorus and a couple of verses by heart. But also “A Red, Red Rose,” and what in our family was its companion, “The Henpecked Husband.” My brother and I had written music for both, since we didn’t know that Burns composed them as songs, and I still like our compositions, even after I have become intimately acquainted with Burns’s affinity for music. Scotland’s Bard spent the first half of his life as a poet who also wrote songs and the second half as a collector and writer of songs who also sometimes wrote poetry. Burns was part of our family culture, as was music. The Carsons, my grandmother’s family, sailed from Dalbeattie to Massachusetts, where she was born in 1890, then to Vermont, to California (where my father was born in 1924), and finally to Kansas. When I sang Burns songs on that 150-mile horse trip, I did not know that he himself recited and composed on horseback, whole songs like “Saw Ye Bonnie Lesley” taking shape in a several-hour journey. But even his poems are rooted in motion, in music. Burns’s first poem, “O Once I Lov’d,” or “Handsome Nell,” was inspired by music that was beloved by his beloved. He was around 15 years old, enamored of Nelly Blair (some say that her name was Nelly Kirkpatrick), a year his junior. She was paired with him in the harvest fields; most likely he cut the barley with a sickle, and she tied it into sheaves. “Among her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly,” he wrote in a letter, “and ’twas her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.”
Portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, 1787, Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Burns grew up with a mother who sang to him, as my father did, and as I did. (My grandmother sang Burns to my father when he was a boy, playing “Tam O’ Shanter” for him on the piano.) Burns lived in a rich oral tradition, albeit one under threat. The British were clearing the Highlands, enacting laws against clans, prohibiting the wearing of tartans and the playing of bagpipes and exorbitantly taxing the sale of whisky. There was pressure to speak “proper” English, and Burns was admonished not to write his poems in the Lowland Scottish Dialect natural to him. But his stubborn attachment to Scots language and culture is revealed in the title of his first published book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the Kilmarnock Edition of 1786).
The book won him immediate fame in Edinburgh, where he stayed for a time, working on an expanded Edinburgh Edition. There, he met James Johnson, who was preserving the nation’s traditional tunes and songs in The Scots Musical Museum. By May 1787, Burns was contributing songs. One biographer notes that some of the traditional songs, without his sympathetic touch, “would probably have been lost.” Beyond collecting them and often tweaking lines, he also wrote his own lyrics, creating songs so artful that the tunes would become part of Scotland’s legacy. Burns collected avidly during 1787, when he set out on three tours of Scotland, to learn its history, hear its legends, and behold its natural beauty.
In all, Burns contributed around 177 songs to the Musical Museum. Of the process, the Canadian scholar of Scottish literature G. Ross Roy writes,
The craftsman in Burns refurbished a good deal of what he came across in the oral tradition, rounding out a line, supplying a better line, sometimes using only a fragment of the original to be incorporated in a complete song. In this sense Burns was a creator, not a conservationist—his concern was to leave the world a work of art.
Burns was, according to Gerard Carruthers of the University of Glasgow, “on a national mission to foreground the song traditions of his nation at a time when there were fears this tradition was dying out and might be forgotten.” Burns was like John and Alan Lomax—who traveled the South collecting folk songs, blues, and ballads—but without recording devices.
Burns contributed to another gathering of Scottish music, George Thomson’s Select Scottish Airs, sending Thomson at least 114 songs between 1792 and 1796. He’d promised more, but the poet was sickly by then, and in April of 1796, a few months before his death from bacterial endocarditis, a complication of rheumatic fever, he wrote to Thomson: Alas! … I fear it will be some time ere I tune my lyre again!
My parents thought no home should be without a piano, and they insisted we four children take lessons. I dropped piano early and took up the trumpet, which I duly dropped for the guitar in college. My father, though he did not have a stunning bass voice, sang in the church choir. My mother, a music enthusiast who lacked strong vocal skills, participated in the Bell Choir. Years later, I think of their commitment to enacted, communal music. As Burns writes in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” they were hymning together their creator’s praise, my father chanting his artless tones in simple guise, my mother, bell raised, ringing out the heavenward flame.
In the 1980s, I followed my father in learning to play the Great Highland Bagpipes, which we played together in his band, the Pipers of the Plains. Mastering the pipes and the music was not easy, if master it I ever did. All tunes must be memorized; some pipers have a thousand stored in their brains. At my peak, I had perhaps a hundred.
Some tunes, though I didn’t know it at the time, were those used by Burns as the melodies for his songs. “Auld Lang Syne”—Old Long Since—is one of the oldest, and every piper must know it for Hogmanay, the Scots celebration of the last day of the old year. The first tune any piper learns is now called “Scots Wha Hae,” but it’s a traditional Scots air, “Hey Tuttie, Tatie,” a tune reputed to be the one pipers played as they went into battle under the command of Robert the Bruce. Burns titled his song “Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn,” an imagining of the impassioned address Bruce made to his troops before that victorious battle of 1314:
Lay the proud usurpers low!Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow!—Let us do, or die!
My father and a friend had originally formed the Pipers of the Plains hoping to march in Topeka’s 1976 St. Patrick’s Day parade. They succeeded, and my father played in that parade until 1996, the year he died. After his death, I wrote a pipe tune for him, “The Stuart Averill.” I have continued to write tunes for family and friends, some three dozen so far.
The Scots Musical Museum and Select Scottish Airs preserve Burns’s work, with lyrics and music in print. But songs spread as much through performance and memory as by notation and text. Songs are perhaps the most portable poetry, easily carried from place to place. In the popular mind, Burns was known as much for song as poem. According to Ferenc Morton Szasz, in Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns, “the poet reached countless early-nineteenth-century Americans largely through the power of his songs.” They were so well-known that they were used to propagate political and social ideas. African-American poet and abolitionist William Wells Brown rewrote Burns’s “A Man’s A Man For A’ That” as “The Slave’s A Man, For A’ That”:
Though stripped of all the dearest rightsWhich nature claims and a’ that,
There’s that which in the slave unites
To make the man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Though dark his skin, and a’ that,
We cannot rob him of his kind,
The slave’s a man, for a’ that.
This and other adaptations of Burns’s songs, one by Henry Lloyd Garrison, were included in Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings.
At the same time that the work of the Lomaxes jump-started folk music revivals in America, a similar revival was happening in the UK. In 1964, the Scottish folk singer Jean Redpath came to the United States with $11 in her pocket and began performing in San Francisco. She built her reputation singing 400-plus songs she’d learned through tapes and discs collected by the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. She later met Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village and became a fixture in the folk music scene.
In 1976, Redpath set a goal to record all of Burns’s songs in a 22-volume set—another musical museum. But that project ended after seven volumes, with the death of her musical collaborator, Serge Hovey, in 1989. Redpath later created four more volumes, singing Burns a capella. The 75 Hovey arrangements range from the sentimental (“A Red, Red Rose”), to the political (“A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation”) to the lamentation for lost love (“Banks O’ Doon”) to the celebration of love and lasses (“Green Grow the Rashes, O”) to the bawdy (“Nine Inch Will Please a Lady”). Each is rendered true, Redpath’s powerful voice full of whatever emotion is called for: reverence, chastisement, sadness, playfulness, lust, friendship. I’ve committed all but the raunchy “Nine Inch” to memory, along with several others that Redpath sings so movingly. And, of course, that song of global New Years tradition: “Auld Lang Syne.” Burns knew of its origins in an anonymous poem from the 15th century.
As he wrote to George Thomson:
One song more, and I have done, Auld lang syne. The air is but mediocre; but the following song—the old song of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing—is enough to recommend any air.
Other Scottish writers, including Allan Ramsay, had worked with this same material. But once published by Thomson, and then by James Johnson in his Scots Musical Museum, Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” would not be changed. In his copy of The Scots Musical Museum, Burns wrote in the margins :
The chorus of this is old; the rest of it is mine. … Here, once for all, let me apologize for many silly compositions of mine in this work. Many beautiful airs wanted words; in the hurry of other avocations, if I could string a parcel of rhymes together anything near tolerable, I was fain to let them pass. He must be an excellent poet indeed, whose every performance is excellent.
Despite Burns’s self-effacement, his song is elegant, touching, and tugs at our desire to reunite in the music that brings us thegither. It is written almost exclusively with one-syllable words, powerful in their repetition. In his efforts to save Scottish music, Burns wrote artful verse that embraced not only all of himself, but all of Scotland, too.
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I didn’t smell the smoke until I stepped onto my patio two mornings after the fires had started. I’d noticed an unusual haze the previous evening, driving home from work in Gijón, but even so, the smell of smoke didn’t make me think forest fire. Forest fires are a summer problem, and though we’d had an atypically warm March and a few really surprising days, the weather was not yet summery
But shortly after going back inside that morning, I got a call from a friend to report that a hundred fires were burning across Asturias and hundreds and hundreds of acres were ablaze. The mountains in the west near Luarca had the worst fires, but just outside the capital of Oviedo, Monte Naranco was burning, and in the east were more fires. Only 10 kilometers away from my home, a fire threatened a military barracks in a neighboring town. That, my friend suggested, was what I was smelling. His source was the radio, but the newspapers already had a story in the day’s edition, and at the end of that hazy, windy Friday, I sat down to read about the fires. Who started them and why? The title of one of the stories was “Burning or Being Burned?”
It was two days before Palm Sunday, and Easter festivities were getting underway in many communities, including mine. Already, the Sunday before, various groups of performers from neighboring provinces and even from as far as Portugal had enacted scenes in the town plaza at noon. The weather was fine and people were out, taking children to the park or meeting friends for a late breakfast at a café or having a drink before lunch. On their way, people stopped to watch the singing and dancing or to enjoy the skits. Some performers, dressed like bears, pretended to maul inattentive children, who would retreat amidst laughter to hide behind a parent. Other performers wearing cow costumes, complete with horns and huge cowbells around their necks, appeared even more dangerous than the bears. Now, a week later, various carnival rides were set up about the town. They were due to open for business that evening, and as I sat down with the newspaper, I heard the music that suggested the attractions were running. It gusted louder then more distant, with the wind. As parents watched children go round and round, the topic of conversation would also revolve, with the fires at the center and the question of who really was to blame. Was it arsonists who set them, as the president of Asturias angrily insisted, calling the responsible parties terrorists, or was it the dry hot weather, both everyone’s fault and nobody’s? Or was it the fault of the government itself, first for the limitations imposed on using and caring for public lands, with no plan for the future or precautions for the present, and for a slow response to emergency calls? In the past, villagers recounted, people understood that the forests had to be taken care of, and country folk cut and cleared in the winter to prevent the summer fires. But that wasn’t possible anymore because so few people were left in the villages to do the job. Plus nowadays, people were constrained by one prohibition or another as to what could be cut and when, what burned and when. Permits were required for everything. Over and over, villagers said, they had warned that the necessary maintenance wasn’t being done, but the government ignored them. That, perhaps, is why someone would set a fire—to get the government’s attention. Meanwhile, the president of Asturias proclaimed that Asturias was not simply on fire; it was being burned.
After reading the six pages in the paper covering the fires, I knew that they had started on Wednesday; that on Thursday, the throughway that runs the length of Asturias had been cut because of fires burning on the fringes; that motorists had been stranded; that almost two dozen villages had been threatened and some 400 inhabitants evacuated; that houses and barns and hórreos had burned; that the relentless wind from the south, gusting at 50 and 60 miles per hour, meant that the fires were worse the second day despite the 600 firefighters; that the flames had reached the coast; and that rain was predicted, but only scattered showers in the east rather than the downpour needed in the west. Thursday at midday, 87 fires were burning. The detail that stuck with me was a man lamenting the loss of the acres of pine that he’d been about to sell. He had worked for 14 years alongside his father and grandfather to secure his future. Like him, many others. “The efforts of our grandparents have been erased in minutes,” he said. Others said it was everything they’d worked for all their lives that was lost.
I put the paper down. Last report I’d heard was of 119 fires still burning. No rain so far despite the desperate hopes. A wind that blew all day. Would Saturday be worse?
When I stepped outside the next morning, I saw the pavement was damp. By 11 a.m., there was a fine rain. By afternoon all but two fires had been contained. The wind started up again, but it brought more rain. It was a wet, chilly evening. No standing outside with a cup of tea, as I had the night before, watching for the helicopter I’d heard. I had also watered my flower garden, parched after the day of relentless wind. My neighbor was out too. “Quite a breeze,” I had said by way of greeting. He’d agreed. Maybe it would bring rain, he added. I thought we would share a word of dismay about the fires, but he said he needed the rain for his vegetable garden. “And for the fires,” I added. “And for the fires,” he echoed.
So we got the rain, he for his vegetables, I for my flowers, and the firefighters for the flames. They were essentially out by afternoon. But the chilly wind and intermittent rain kept on into the evening. They made you want to scurry back inside, safe from the elements with four walls and a roof. By the end of the day, not only four walls appealed but a crackling fire on the hearth. Unless perhaps you’d just survived one.
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Amanda Holmes reads Edgar Lee Masters’s poem “Seth Compton.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Seth Compton” by Edgar Lee Masters appeared first on The American Scholar.
A visit from Aunt Flo, being on the rag, riding the crimson wave, girl flu, even the red wedding … menstruation is something that half of the world’s population experiences for a week at a time, for years on end, and yet we struggle to talk about it directly. But the uterus is capable of incredible things, as anthropologist Kate Clancy explains in her new book, Period: The Real Story of Menstruation: menstrual fluid contains chemicals that repair tissue, the cervix contains crypts for storing sperm for later use, and periods might even be the body’s way of improving its inner architecture. But shockingly, doctors viewed periods as useless—even toxic—well into the 20th century, and some still believe that it’s unsafe to swim with a tampon in (it’s not). Clancy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joins the podcast to challenge uterine myths, expose the eugenic roots of gynecology, and bring a feminist perspective to that special time of the month.
Go beyond the episode:
- Kate Clancy’s Period: The Real Story of Menstruation
- Read Emily Martin’s paper “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”
- Anatomy is amazing: the cervix contains crypts to store sperm for later usage
- A new generation of artists is making art with menstrual blood, The Guardian reports
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post That Time of the Month appeared first on The American Scholar.
John Dos Passos was the author of the U.S.A. trilogy, Manhattan Transfer, and Three Soldiers, among many other books, for which, in 1957, he was awarded the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He was also my grandfather. I never met him—he died 13 years before I was born—but I have been able to get a sense of his formidable spirit from old family photographs. In one of my favorites, taken when he was in his 60s, he is in a boat on the Potomac River near Dos Passos Farm in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The river is wide there, near where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, and my grandfather is holding up a pufferfish, inflated in full glory before the camera. His smile swings for the fences and reminds me of something he wrote in a 1918 letter to a friend: “While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket.”
In the beloved mythology of America’s Lost Generation writers, the pastime of fishing seems wholly owned by Ernest Hemingway. As Jack Hemingway, Ernest’s oldest son, wrote in the foreword to a collection of his father’s writing about the sport, “In our family not only fly fishing but all sporting forms of fishing were a sort of religion.” Hemingway first learned to fish as a boy, during the summers he spent at his family’s property on Walloon Lake in Michigan. Fishing fed his appetite for adventure and, after he became famous, his public image. Among other places, Key West became a central location in Hemingway lore, but it wasn’t until 1928, on my grandfather’s recommendation, that he first visited the place. The good fishing and easygoing culture there suited him perfectly. He was on his second marriage by then, to Pauline Pfeiffer, whose uncle bought the couple a house in Key West in 1931. Hemingway loved to share the grit and spectacle of sportfishing with friends. He even took Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, out on the Gulf Stream, a warm, fast-moving Atlantic current that Dos Passos once described as a “magnificent and mysterious phenomenon, always changing and always present like a range of mountains.” In the spring of 1930, Hemingway, Perkins, and a few other friends spent two weeks in the Dry Tortugas, a small island chain about 70 miles west of Key West. There they slept in a shed, subsisted on liquor, canned goods, and Bermuda onions, and spent their days fishing and shooting birds. The straight-laced Perkins, accustomed to wearing a suit and fedora, grew a beard and, said his fellow adventurers, looked like a “rebel cavalry captain.” A few years later, Hemingway bought the Pilar, a 38-foot motorboat designed for saltwater fishing, aboard which he stowed a Thompson submachine gun and other firearms for killing sharks. (He once managed to shoot himself in both legs with a .22 Colt pistol when his bullet hit the Pilar’s brass rail and ricocheted in pieces. The shark escaped.) When later in life Hemingway’s writing hit a slump, it was the ocean that gave voice to one of his most highly regarded books. The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952, received specific praise from the committee that awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature two years later.
Dos Passos loved and extolled the sea every bit as much as his friend Hemingway. From 1928 to 1935, before their friendship frayed under the strain of the Spanish civil war, the two men often fished the waters near Key West together, catching tarpon, sailfish, marlin, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and tuna. The tropics were also the doctor’s prescription for Dos Passos’s recurring bouts of rheumatic fever. They usually brought along a couple of bottles of champagne, but by custom these remained untouched until the first fish was caught. Everyone on Hemingway’s boat received a nickname: “Dos” or “Muttonfish” for Dos Passos, “Hem” or the “Old Master” for Hemingway, “Old Bread” for the boat’s engineer, and “Saca Ham” for the cook. Conversation on these expeditions remained light. “It was a delight to be able to chatter amiably on all sorts of topics without tripping over that damn Party line,” wrote Dos Passos in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times. Hemingway was as competitive at fishing as he was with everything, but nobody got too sore. “Hem was the greatest fellow in the world to go around with when everything went right,” Dos Passos wrote. Hemingway once invited Arnold Gingrich, the editor and cofounder of Esquire, to go fishing with the gang. “The man was in a trance,” Dos Passos remembered. “It was a world he’d never dreamed of. He was mosquito bitten, half seasick, scorched with sunburn, astonished, half scared, half pleased. It was as much fun to see Ernest play an editor as to see him play a marlin.”
Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” Likewise when it came to fishing, Hemingway and Dos Passos had different motives. Dos Passos fished “for the pot”—to catch lunch or dinner. For that reason, he disliked fishing for tarpon, which figured among Hemingway’s favorite quarry, no matter the theatrics involved in fighting them. “I hated to see the great silver monsters lying in the dust on the wharf,” he wrote. “They aren’t fit to eat. About the only use is for mounting. Some people make knicknacks out of the dried scales. Sheer vanity catching tarpon.” Dos Passos looked to the sea as a salve for his spirit. It was in 1924, during a break from writing one of his best novels, Manhattan Transfer, that he discovered Key West. He understood that islands in general—and by extension, the sea—tended to refill his cup of inspiration. He called his happy affliction “islomania.”
Maritime heritage runs deep in the Dos Passos line, which began on the small Portuguese island of Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean, due west of Morocco. My great-great-grandfather Manoel Joaquim dos Passos was born there in 1812, at the edge of sea trails cut by Portuguese explorers. He emigrated to America in 1830. My great-grandfather John Randolph Dos Passos was mad about the sea. He bought a 100-foot steam yacht after he earned a fortune as a lawyer. He named it the Gaivota—Portuguese for “sea gull.” The Gaivota had three staterooms below deck, quarters for a crew of four, as well as a sitting room, library, galley, and dining room. For many years, he sailed it from its berth in Washington, D.C., to the family farm in Westmoreland County, a seven-hour journey. John Randolph “liked to talk of being descended from a mythical Portuguese pirate,” according to my grandfather. Once aboard the Gaivota, among family and friends, he donned his yachting cap and assumed a swashbuckling, carefree personality, “the Commodore.” He called his young son “Monsieur Singe,” or “Mr. Monkey.” He called his wife, Lucy, the “Princess.” The Commodore danced to records on deck. Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore was his favorite. “Once we got past Indian Head everything pleased him,” my grandfather wrote. “He knew and loved every creek and every sand tipped point of pines on the Potomac River. He delighted in catching or not catching fish when we went out with handlines in the dinghy.”
John Randolph carefully supervised my grandfather’s education and passed on his affinity for things nautical—for example, Captain Frederick Marryat’s Mr. Midshipman Easy, an 1836 naval novel set during the Napoleonic Wars. Dos Passos, then age eight, read the book repeatedly, and any other sea story he could find. He devoured R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Herman Melville’s Typee, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. An antique, 17-volume collection of Captain Marryat’s adventures, in the author’s limited edition, still occupies a shelf in the library at Dos Passos Farm.
My grandfather spent much of his childhood at that farm, steeped in the maritime culture of the rural Virginia peninsula known as the Northern Neck. He and his father swam in the Potomac, even in the icy winter months. When he was a boy, one could still buy oysters at two dollars a barrel from the decks of the fishing schooners docked in Washington. Aboard the steamboats that, at the time, still cruised the Potomac, galleys served up plates of steak, Virginia ham, fish, crab, oysters, Maryland terrapin stew, planked shad, and biscuits. According to Dos Passos’s nonfiction collection State of the Nation, published in 1944, the inside of the old Three Rivers steamer smelled of “old paint and musty old settees upholstered in red velvet and of crabshells and oysterbarrels and fertilizer, and steam and grease from the huge slow engines; and with it came the memory of how the river freshness came in the window after you left Alexandria.” He listened to the oystermen, crabbers, and fishermen of the Northern Neck tell their stories “on some rickety porch after the dishes had been cleared off the supper table on a hot August night when the dry-flies shrilled.” Typically, the storyteller “didn’t explain who the people were he was telling about. You were supposed to know that.”
For a time, my grandfather so loved the sea that he even considered pursuing an appointment to the Naval Academy. He abandoned the idea after learning that his nearsightedness disqualified him. But his immersion in seafaring culture continued during the 18 years that he lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. My grandfather and his first wife, Katy, settled there in 1929, at 571 Commercial Street, right on the harbor. Their home was once a ship chandler’s shop; the basement stored fishing nets and other gear. During storms, they felt the clenched fist of the Atlantic knock on their doors and windows. “There’s a fierce gale blowing and a terrific sea smashing against the bulkhead,” Katy once wrote, “and rain pouring down, and the whole house shakes with the waves.”
Katy Dos Passos, née Katharine Foster Smith, met my grandfather through Hemingway, whom she and her brother Bill had known since they were children frequenting the same summer resort in northern Michigan. Katy and John fell in love in spring 1928, reveling with Hem’s Key West mob. “From the first moment I couldn’t think of anything but her green eyes,” Dos Passos wrote in his memoirs. Katy made her living writing for magazines, and she and my grandfather bonded over writing, art, culture, and travel. They formed a love language all their own. She fondly called him “Muttonfish” and “ape.” He called her “Possum.” When he was lonely during long travels away from Katy, he signed letters to her, “Desolape.” When he was frustrated, he signed, “Desperape.”
Katy shared my grandfather’s luminous sense of wonder at the world, which lives in her many letters. In summer 1935, she wrote to American expatriate painter Gerald Murphy, applying her exuberant wit to a recent trip to the Bahamian island of Bimini: “It’s a fantastic place—a crazy mixture of luxury, indigence, good liquor, bad food, heat, flies, land apathy and sea magnificence, social snoot, money, sport, big fish, big fishermen, and competitive passion.” In the same letter, she wrote, “The big fishermen work over catching the big fish like Russians on a subway—they’ve got it all charted and organized and they’re all out for records, and madly jealous of each other.” The sharks, she noted, “come like express trains and hit the fish like a planing mill—shearing off twenty-five and thirty pounds at a bite.” John and Katy married in August 1929 and soon afterward moved into 571 Commercial Street.
He listened to the oystermen, crabbers, and fishermen of the Northern Neck tell their stories “on some rickety porch after the dishes had been cleared off the supper table on a hot August night when the dry-flies shrilled.”The newlyweds were already well acquainted with Provincetown culture. Katy had lived in various other houses there since 1924 with her brother and old friends Edith Foley and Stella Roof. Foley later married bookseller Frank Shay and took his last name. The foursome, who called themselves “The Smooleys” in a play on their surnames, wrote for magazines and lived well. Bill regularly made his own popular liquor, which he called “The Boy.” “Tis only a boy,” explained Edith, “but it has the strength of a man.” Painter Eben Given, a neighbor and friend of the Smooleys, recalled: “Ring a bell or whisper ‘party’ and a hundred people sprang up like dragon’s teeth out of the ground.” My grandfather’s first visit to Provincetown was even earlier, in 1916, on a walking tour of Cape Cod shortly before he graduated from Harvard. Charmed by the place, he returned in spring 1926, seeking a brief seclusion for writing. “I’ve taken enormous walks and lived on rice and codfish tongues and I feel like a new man,” he wrote to a friend.
John and Katy thrived among Provincetown’s seaside artists and writers. The Great Depression made little difference to them, since life in Provincetown was always cheap. “I used to tell people,” my grandfather wrote in his memoirs, “I had been just as broke before the stockmarket crash as after it. My books could hardly have sold less anyway.” John sailed his dinghy, swam, gardened, and worked on his U.S.A. trilogy, the first volume of which, The 42nd Parallel, appeared in 1930, earning him popular and critical acclaim. Katy cowrote two books, Down the Cape: The Complete Guide to Cape Cod (1936) and The Private Adventure of Captain Shaw (1945), with Edith Shay. Sometimes my grandfather traveled alone, giving Katy and Edith the time to research and write their books. Edmund Wilson and his young daughter Rosalind spent summers in nearby Wellfleet on the Cape and joined the Dos Passos circle of close friends. Most friends called Edmund “Bunny,” his nickname since boarding school, but John and Katy, who had an irreverent rapport with Wilson, also warmly called him “Antichrist.” Rosalind frequently visited the Dos Passoses “if things got complicated at home,” she wrote in her memoirs, and considered the house on Commercial Street to be a “surrogate home.” The couple “had a very happy marriage and gave other people happiness and laughter through it.”
Dos Passos, circa 1960, holding a fully inflated pufferfish, on the Potomac River near his family’s farm in Westmoreland County, Virginia (Courtesy of the author)
My grandfather maintained a close bond with the Portuguese fishing community. His own heritage “was evident in his looks and put his relationship to the Portuguese in Provincetown on a different level than the other later arrivals of the writing set,” Rosalind wrote. Today, Provincetown is clean, polished, and ready for boatloads of summer tourists. Its gardens teem with daylilies, lavender, and hydrangeas. But in my grandfather’s time, the town often reeked of fish guts. Provincetown fishermen, many of Portuguese descent like Dos Passos, landed mackerel, whiting, haddock, cod, and flounder. Starving artists could go to the wharf and pick out dinner from a bucket of throwaway fish. Edmund Wilson later described rowing out to check fish traps in Provincetown harbor one night in 1930: “We visited a series of four traps—the laborious pulling up of the nets: the butterfish, great flapping silver flakes … a big goosefish: the old Portuguese fisherman held him up for us to see his great gullet with the limp slimy squids drooling out of it, brutally grasping him with his thumb and finger in the fish’s dull eyes, then flung him overboard.”
The seamen in Provincetown, like those Dos Passos had known as a boy in the Northern Neck, cultivated a rich oral tradition. One salty tale, from Jeremiah Digges’s 1937 book Cape Cod Pilot, tells of Captain John Santos, a
feller that had his leg et off by a shark on the Western Banks. But I can remember him, back when I was a boy, and how proud he was of the new jury-leg they rigged him up with. It was a sight, I tell you, to watch him dance a chamarita [a style of Portuguese folk dance] with that leg and not nick the floor once. Carried around furniture polish just like the doctor carries iodine, in case of a cut or scratch, and one time he copper-bottomed her to make sure the worms wouldn’t get to him before his time.
My grandfather developed a reputation in town as a fine seafood chef, which may have helped him win credibility among the Portuguese. One dish, which he called Arroz Valenciana, consisted of young chicken, lobster, crab, clams, mussels, green peas, rice, garlic, saffron, bay leaf, and olive oil. He also made Spanish mussel soup with saffron. He gathered the mussels himself. Like many of the Portuguese, he prized garlic in cooking and applied it generously. He claimed that garlic had “every vitamin known to man.” One Provincetown cookbook, published in 1947, lists “Lobster a la Dos Passos,” which involves baking a lobster stuffed with pieces of Portuguese bread mixed with melted butter, lots of chopped chives, lemon juice, a pinch of cayenne, marjoram, and some Worcestershire sauce. The same book includes my grandfather’s recipes for “Zucchini with Herbs” and “Green Peppers Saute.”
In the Portuguese community, my grandfather befriended one of Provincetown’s classic characters, John J. Gaspar (1884–1961), a clam digger and shellfish warden from Pico, one of the nine islands of the Azores. But probably the finest fisherman my grandfather ever knew was Charles “Charlie” Atkins Mayo Jr. (1909–1994), a champion tuna angler, conservationist, and Provincetown selectman. Mayo was the ultimate all-weather mariner. He possessed highly accurate instincts for navigation, earned from decades in Cape Cod fog and other hazardous conditions. Mayo spent summers in Provincetown, but when the hard New England winters arrived, he sailed for Florida and the Bahamas. During his more than 70 round trips, he committed that territory to memory—every sandbar, reef, and buoy. He created the sport of fishing for tuna by rod and reel and dominated it completely. He won the annual Governor’s Cup award eight times, for having caught the largest tuna in Massachusetts waters. Probably the biggest tuna landed on one of his vessels, caught in 1948, weighed 751 pounds, and Mayo’s charters were always in high demand. Many a fisherman followed him, trying to ape his technique and replicate his bait. Sports Illustrated reported that so many boats chased Mayo’s to the tuna grounds that the scene “resembled the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary.”
How and when Mayo met my grandfather is unknown, but it was probably in the 1930s after Mayo’s graduation from Dartmouth. They must have become instant friends. The two men shared an interest in politics, writing, and fishing, and both were of Portuguese ancestry. (Mayo’s mother came from the island of Faial in the Azores.) One of the few preserved records of their friendship is their two-week cruise to the Bahamas with family and friends in the spring of 1959. By this time, Katy had died, and Dos Passos had married his second wife, Elizabeth. Aboard the 52-foot chartered powerboat Joanne II were Charlie Mayo, captain; his wife, Isabel “Ing” Stahl; their teenage son Charles Atkins Mayo III, known as “Stormy,” who served as first mate; John Dos Passos and Elizabeth; their eight-year-old daughter, Lucy; their teenage stepson Christopher Holdridge and his friend Bill Orrick; my grandfather’s friend Eben Given Sr.; Eben’s wife, writer Phyllis Duganne; and their son Eben Given Jr.
In those days, the most isolated parts of the Out Islands of the Bahamas—such as Bimini, Andros, and Cat Island—were uncharted. Mayo was one of the few captains who knew how to navigate them. He knew all the fishing holes, too, and where to find the underwater cave systems, which my grandfather later painted in brilliant watercolors. Painting, like writing, was for him a lifelong passion. He occasionally exhibited his work in the 1920s and ’30s but rarely sold a painting. Most of his canvases now belong to his literary estate. My grandfather often depicted scenes from his travels and by the time he died had completed some 350 paintings, most of them watercolors, and 330 sketches in pencil or charcoal. Bimini, an island he knew well from earlier visits with Katy and Hemingway, must have been a particularly special experience for my grandfather. Of the island, he wrote in his memoirs, “We never tired of walking on the beach and watching the high slung land crabs shuttle like harness racers among the fallen coconuts.” My mother, Lucy, remembers approaching Bimini in the Joanne II. The island “looks like a shimmering mirage from a distance,” she said, “until you get closer and notice its palm trees.”
My grandfather struggled with guilt from the accident, as he had been driving when it happened. The setting sun had blinded him, and he drove the car into a parked cranberry truck. He lost an eye. Katy died instantly.Mayo shared with my grandfather an affection for the Bahamians living on the Out Islands. He had many friends among the Black islanders, who greeted him upon his arrival in port and helped him find fresh bread and conch chowder. Mayo insisted that they join him for dinner on his ship and at his table—an uncommon hospitality in those times. Mayo and my grandfather enjoyed the Bahamians’ lighthearted folk songs, such as “My Mama don’t want no peas no rice / no coconut oil / All she wants is handy brandy and / champagne.”
Mayo and my grandfather would sit and talk late into the night in the Joanne II ’s aft lounge. According to Stormy, they would sip glasses of Drambuie and argue politics. By 1959, Dos Passos had shifted to the right politically, and Mayo always argued from the left, but their friendship never wavered. Further evidence of the cruisers’ good humor was Dos Passos’s prank call to Wilson. On April Fools’ Day, he raised Wilson in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, using the ship-to-shore radio and pretended to be Fidel Castro. According to Dos Passos biographer Townsend Ludington, “Wilson was not amused by the joke and hung up. Dos Passos called again to clear the air, but Wilson hung up on him once more.” Dos Passos seemed to have had a habit of ribbing Wilson about leftist politics. In his book The Thirties, Wilson recalled a similar moment with Dos Passos in 1936. “Rosalind and I had taken the rowboat out and had had a terrible time with it,” he wrote. “I asked Dos what the mysterious force was which, no matter how you rowed, kept bringing the boat back to shore—in spite of the fact that the current was going in the other direction. He said, You don’t think it could be Trotsky, do you?”
Mayo and Dos Passos were more than just fellow adventurers. Mayo supported my grandfather through one of the worst tragedies of his life—Katy’s death in a car accident in 1947. For Wilson, the event marked the end of a golden era for the community of writers living in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet—a community that once included dramatists Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and the painter Edward Hopper. “Everybody seemed much older, both from strain and from losing Katy,” wrote Wilson, “who had always remained so young. We had all been getting old together, and it was already, I say, a whole life behind us, with many things that we could never have again.” My grandfather struggled with guilt for the accident, as he had been driving when it happened. The setting sun had blinded him, and he drove the car into a parked cranberry truck. He lost an eye. Katy died instantly. My grandfather poured his sorrow into a letter to Wilson:
I’ve thought a great deal about your letter. The thing that has struck me most is the fact that I had been able to live fifty two years without really envisaging the existence of these archipelagos of remorse and boundless continents of grief. I had thought myself fairly well versed in the miseries of life. Suddenly I find I had been completely ignorant of all these things. It makes you wonder how much else there is that you don’t know about.
Wilson visited my grandfather as he recovered from his eye removal and other wounds at Massachusetts General Hospital. “The physical discomfort,” Dos Passos told him, “is rather a good thing—because it keeps my mind off the other thing.” Mayo drove to the site of the accident in Wareham, Massachusetts, to try to re-create the circumstances of the tragedy. Hoping to comfort his friend, he told Dos Passos that he would have hit the truck, too. Mayo also told Dos Passos, “I want you to know my boat is yours if you’ll just let me take you out in it for a day.” So the pair went fishing, hoping to abate a measure of grief. Mayo described the outing, which Mayo’s father joined:
Everywhere Dos looked, he was reminded of Katy—the harbor, the lighthouse, the beach they had walked, the dunes, the weir traps, the smell of the sea. We dragged rigs, but Dos’s arm was still in a splint so he couldn’t really fish. He had a patch on his eye still. We left the boat and came ashore in a dory after being out for several hours. We didn’t talk much, but as my father and I walked behind him away from the water, I was deeply impressed. There was something about the way Dos carried himself and the way he looked at me that made me know he would leave the Cape and never return to live among us.
My grandfather did return to the Cape multiple times to visit friends. He fished more with Charlie Mayo and visited F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie. But everywhere there were bittersweet landmarks of his years with Katy. Reading this elegiac passage, I am left wishing that Mayo had written more about the sea and its capacity to reveal character. But I am grateful that my grandfather had a friend who, like him, found battles but also peace at the end of a fishing line. There is more to Dos Passos than his books and paintings. There is the spirit behind the letter and the brushstroke—a spirit that found connection, healing, and renewal at sea.
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“Which countries would you like to visit?” I asked the students in my upper-intermediate high school class, in preparation for a reading about Mongolia.
“Can we choose more than one?” a girl asked, and I said of course, choose a couple. Why make life harder than it has to be?
The class consists of four students—three 16-year-old girls and one 14-year-old boy, who stands out not only because of his sex and age, but also because he is the best student of the group. After a minute of deliberation, the students named a few expected countries and a few surprising ones. No one wanted to visit any country in Africa besides Egypt, and no country in South America. New Zealand was named by two of the students. Mongolia was not named at all.
In fact, only the 14-year-old even knew where Mongolia was. He said he’d learned about it from a YouTube video. “Can you tell your classmates,” I asked him, “what you know about Mongolia?”
The student twisted in his seat to point out the country’s whereabouts on the wall map above their heads. “Eastern Asia,” he said, squinting behind his glasses. “There,” he said, pointing. He said the country had big open spaces called Steppes, was full of herders who lived in yurts, and had once been a great empire under the rule of Genghis Khan, who had united the area’s tribes and conquered territory as far west as Europe. One of the girls said that she’d never heard of Genghis Khan, and the other two agreed that they did not know the name. “You’ve never heard of him?” I asked, and they shook their heads. I asked the boy to tell us what he knew about Genghis Khan. He would probably know more than I did.
He was ready, and immediately volunteered the theory that had Genghis Khan’s marauding armies not slaughtered so many people, we’d be much worse off today.
Of course—more room for us without all those millions upon millions of descendants from the millions of people massacred by the armies of Genghis Khan. Is that what you mean? No, the student said—it was that current carbon dioxide levels in the world would be much higher if all those people hadn’t been killed. I had not heard this. Genghis Khan lowered greenhouse gases? Yes, the boy said, because he left so much land depopulated, where vast forests grew.
“So we’re lucky those people got slaughtered,” another student said. She had long black hair and a nose ring.
The boy gave his characteristic surprised giggle, as if to say I didn’t say it, you did! He then pointed out that our current problems weren’t exactly of our making. Everyone had contributed to them by existing or diminished them by dying young, without descendants. Later, looking up the statistic the student had cited about carbon dioxide levels, I found several articles claiming that the 200 years of the Mongolian wars had given reforestation a chance to remove a huge amount of carbon from the atmosphere—about 700 million tons. The Black Death, responsible for about 25 million deaths in Europe in just seven years, had not helped nearly as much.
I thought about those millions of people wiped out in the Mongolian wars, and about their potential descendants, and the descendants of the descendants never born. How many by now? I pictured steel balls lined up in the trough of a pinball machine, waiting to be fired into the game with a resounding clang before they go zinging around the surface, crashing into one obstacle or another, a noisy spectacle, ending when the ball falls into a hole. For the player, noise and spectacle mean points. For the equipment, a lot of use is wear and tear. And for the balls?
They all look the same, those balls, but might not one be different? Had my student considered whether, among all those lives that never were, there might have been one that, instead of swelling the problems facing humanity today, would have shrunk them? A person bringing some invention or some insight unknown to us so far? Whose contribution would more than offset any environmental benefit of nonexistence? Someone to inspire us to see our situation as deadly serious and to act faster? From among the villagers cut down, was there not one who would have been the ancestor of someone who might have already saved us? I like to imagine so. Someone to make four students and their English teacher, sitting in a classroom on a cold gray afternoon with the streetlights just coming on, who were more concerned about a grammar lesson than about the war in Ukraine, Arctic blasts across the United States, rising sea temperatures and widening gulfs between rich and poor, a devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and all the rest of the world’s troubles deepening outside the classroom—someone to make us less ludicrous by shrinking the predicament we hardly believe in, though we could talk about it. But since we are ludicrous, let us at least appreciate the joke of Genghis Khan riding to the rescue, lopping off heads and burning villages. His intervention hangs in the balance—his gift grows with every unborn generation but shrinks with every unborn savior.
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Amanda Holmes reads Muhammed Ali Chamseddine’s poem “A Hand Not Ready for Birds,” translated from the Arabic by Mansour Ajami. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “A Hand Not Ready for Birds” by Muhammed Ali Chamseddine appeared first on The American Scholar.
Back in Key West for the first time since June 2020, when my husband and I were finally able to fly out, I saw on my shelves some books by my late friend Alison Lurie, took them down, and perused them again. Random House had brought out her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize, but these books were all published by small presses. We’d heard her read from one of them at the local Books & Books a few years ago.
In the early days of Covid, I had to cancel a long-standing lunch invitation from Alison. She was aghast. Either she disbelieved the frantic reports about Covid’s circulation, or she just didn’t want to acknowledge them, even though she was getting groceries delivered (she was particularly incensed that every time she ordered butter, she got, instead, a product called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, which was not butter). It was difficult for me to insist that getting together for lunch was unsafe, and while she didn’t wear me down, I wore myself down: Well, why not one last lunch? In fact, it was the last one we ever had together. My husband and I soon left the island; she and her husband, Edward Hower, left a few days later.
We didn’t talk much about Covid at lunch. Alison had prepared a great quantity of food, as if afterward we might hibernate for the winter. Maybe the aroma got Edward out of his writing room, but in any case, he joined us for much of the time. On the wide deck that stretched between their house and their guest house, where others would have put in a gigantic pool, was a large leaning tree. Of course, Alison wouldn’t have a lavish swimming pool. Instead, she liked to sneak into one of the pools at the Casa Marina hotel to swim laps, already wearing her sensible one-piece black bathing suit, goggles in hand. I’m not kidding: I think Alison believed that this was a constructive solution to boredom, the same way she thought the expense of maintaining a pool was unnecessary and impractical, considering the alternatives.
One of the most generous people I’ve ever known—spontaneously generous—Alison herself was nothing if not practical. But within that practicality, she appreciated provocateurs. Nothing would please her more than hearing about something mischievous someone had done. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell whether she was motivated by her own impish spirit, or simply eccentric. At the Thirsty Mermaid, a restaurant well known for its seafood, she once asked about the day’s oyster selection and decided on (let’s say) the Apalachicola. She ordered one. It was served centered on a mountain of shaved ice, in which were sunk two small condiment dishes, as well as a slice of lemon. Obviously, it took me a lot longer to finish my lunch than it took Alison. She offered me her slice of lemon, in case I wanted more in my iced tea.
What we mostly talked about, though, was books; when we parted, she often headed off to her home away from home, the Key West library. Every book she told me to read, I got. I didn’t always agree with her recommendations, but our reading tastes weren’t very divergent. She was the one who introduced me to so many English writers. She had a flat in London and enjoyed a much greater reputation in the U.K. than she did in the U.S., once the excitement of winning the Pulitzer—the excitement of others, I mean—wore off. She told me to read more David Lodge than the one book I knew. She recommended the Irish writer John Banville long before his work was well known here. She enthused, in her understated yet emphatic way, about Jon McGregor’s amazing Reservoir 13 and brought it to me the next morning. She loved the writing of Louise Erdrich and Lorrie Moore (a former student), and wished that her former Cornell colleague A. R. (“Archie”) Ammons would win a significant prize, because “it would make him so happy.”
While visiting, she often knitted. I have more than one knitted hot pad made by Alison. In her will, she left me a painting. I’d never seen it before, but Edward tells me they had more than one painting by the artist, and I’ve decided that she gave it to me because she knew I loved flowers (as she did, though supermarket bouquets were all you’d find in her house, those times it wasn’t simply a plucked branch or two of bougainvillea, which is the psychedelic ivy of Key West.)
Alison loved Key West. There’s “old Key West” and, of course, the new. She knew both better than most, because she walked (or attempted to walk) the entire island. But there’s also the old Key West captured in photographs in which she’s usually the only (or almost the only) woman present. James Merrill was her great friend—she wrote a fascinating memoir, called (punningly) Familiar Spirits, much devoted to Merrill and David Jackson and their summoning of the otherworldly on the Ouija board. There was a time when Key West was known for its male writers and Elizabeth Bishop was one of the very few exceptions—I don’t think she and Alison overlapped. Then, as Rust Hills, former fiction editor at Esquire, once said, in his abrupt way of categorizing what he assumed was obvious: “Now it’s all the women.” (Annie Dillard; Nancy Friday; Phyllis Rose; Joy Williams, who was married to Rust; Barbara Ehrenreich; Judy Blume; Alison herself.)
Alison was always so happy to return to Key West for the winter. She’d put on her straw sunhat, take out her sandals, put on a frumpy-chic, light cotton dress, and head off for the day’s adventures. The town’s craziness suited her, but as a watcher, rather than a participant. She did not (to my knowledge) jet ski or ride on the back of motorcycles or—this I can attest to—go to “bottomless mimosa” brunches. Those things are the tourist’s experience. Hers was the practical person’s Key West: grocery shopping on the highway (where she bought the right butter); walking miles, unnoticed, when Edward was at the gym; inviting family and friends to escape winter.
She had a way of blurting out one explosive “Aah!” when hearing about some writer’s foibles or wild eccentricities, though never as a value judgment. I think she assumed that many writers were needy, some unfairly neglected, others foolish in their decisions. She enjoyed being taken aback, but only for a second, and it did not affect her view of anyone’s work or purported maturity. She recognized the human fallibility in others. She also had a great sense of humor that often came at you double pronged: a stunningly astute observation that was inherently, sometimes wickedly funny, delivered with no expression but—on rare occasions—an “mmm” added to the end of a sentence: Alison agreeing with herself.
Often, reading her work, I conjure up that “mmm.” Did anything slip past her? She was so judicious in what she said, though; no one thought of her as a big talker, let alone a raconteur. She was rarely dying to tell you what absurdity or atrocity she’d seen while out walking (few friends knew about her walking project); she didn’t complain (well: maybe sometimes in her fiction, which critics liked to categorize as “satirical.”) Here’s a passage from her book Reading for Fun—which comes from a talk she’d given earlier at the Anthony Powell Society meeting in 2009: “Many writers of fiction practice a kind of housekeeping that is rare in life; they follow what might be called the Law of Economy of Persons. In the real world, more than half of one’s current acquaintances are of little or no significance. Not only are they not destined to become close friends, enemies, rivals or relatives—they do not even exemplify a type.” By contrast, Alison continues, in 19th- and early-20th century fiction, “everyone the hero or heroine meets is significant.” She includes Powell (not yet famous) as working in this tradition, which leads her to observe, about his characters, that “no one is ever wholly lost.”
From the brief passage I’ve quoted, you sense Alison’s wry eye, her direct approach. This “Law of the Economy of Persons” might put some readers on guard, but it’s delivered tongue-in-cheek. Is it just because I knew Alison that I smile when I read another tossed-off assumption that more than half of our acquaintances don’t really matter much? I mean, we might think that, but how often would we admit it? Yet probably many would agree, though it can’t make us comfortable to consider all the unimportant people in our lives. Still, what I immediately sense in her essays is the writer’s confidence, her wish to be thought both commonsensical (delivering information ne’er so well expressed, I’d say) but also casual, meaning unthreatening.
Now I’m back in Key West without Alison, who died in 2020 at 94. No more oysters atop a mound of ice made more mysterious by the bivalve mollusk’s odd presence, plunked down as if it had fallen from the sky, not emerged from the sea. No more New York rendezvous, no more easy, quickly recited recipes she thought I’d enjoy preparing. I’ll always be thankful for her brilliant coaching on how to be more likely to get my way in committee meetings. Every time I reread Alison’s work, I’m amazed all over again at the breadth of her knowledge, and impressed by how smoothly, in her fiction, she presented dichotomies, conundrums, and absurdities, so that they came to take on a kind of grace. I think all those curves and reversals came together perfectly under the guidance of her pen. Yup, no kidding: everything was handwritten first, before she typed the manuscript into her computer. If she’d been an ice skater rather than a swimmer, she’d have looped through a perfect figure 8, just like the symbol for infinity.
In her New York Times obituary, she was called “an anthropologist of contemporary absurdity.” That’s not at all wrong—in fact, it’s right—but it makes me think that absurdity was only her jumping-off point, and that by presenting her characters’ vanities and contradictions, their neuroses, their misperceptions and foibles, she insisted upon confronting messy reality at the same time she found a way to present what she understood without exasperation or world weariness, but as someone who delighted in extremes and found flicks of humor in tragedy. In her nonfiction books, such as Reading for Fun, Words and Worlds, The Language of Clothes, and The Language of Houses (the publication of which was aided by her friend Edmund White), she was drawn to what was apparent, yet—to state the obvious—it was only apparent to her. Her x-ray vision permeated façades, though it was her sense of humor that made her erect them again, just a little more fancifully.
The post Remembering Alison appeared first on The American Scholar.
On March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, and shortly thereafter, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad became an accidental journalist. Originally trained as an architect, he fell in as a translator with a group of foreign journalists, then as a photographer and war reporter for The Guardian and The Washington Post. In his new book, A Stranger in Your Own City, Abdul-Ahad documents the devastation of Baghdad, from the sanctions of the 1990s to the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s fall. Punctuating his account are revealing interviews with his fellow Iraqis—Sunni commanders, schoolteachers, old high school friends, insurgents of every stripe—about the war and its effects, which continue to shape life in the region years after the American withdrawal.
Go beyond the episode:
- Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
- Read the anniversary piece Abdul-Ahad wrote for The Guardian: “Guns, cash, and frozen chicken: the militia boss doling out aid in Baghdad”
- Roughly 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, twenty years after the invasion
Some of Abdul-Ahad’s illustrations from the book:
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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The post Twenty Years of War appeared first on The American Scholar.
Palm Sunday behind us, Passover today, Good Friday coming up, Easter after that. A handful of special days, each with its designation, its tradition, its significance, bunched together as Holy Week, Semana Santa in Spanish. Easter might be the apex in Spain, with chocolate bunnies for children and solemn processions all over the country for the devout, the ardent, and the curious. Then the celebrations are over. Unless you live as I do in Pola de Siero and still have the fiesta of the painted eggs to look forward to, huevos pintos in Spanish and güevos pintos in Asturian. The festival is held the Tuesday after Easter. Not famous the world round, but on the lists of important cultural celebrations hereabouts and much attended. It’s a last, colorful burst of fun before the Easter celebrations are over.
This is my second Easter in La Pola, but last year I was newly arrived and still buried under a pile of boxes, unable to squirm out to partake in the festivities. When I did wriggle free, it was to appear at the town’s notary office to sign the papers for the purchase of the house that I was already living in. I remember sitting in the notary’s office across a big table from the marquesa and her family’s consigliere, who was easing both of us through the process. I was surprised that she seemed nervous—half the town had belonged to her family once, my little house being just a crumb of the cake the family had feasted on for ages. The notary appeared, confirmed our identities, gave us the document of sale, and then disappeared, allowing us time to read what we would shortly sign.
As soon as he was out of the room, the agent commented that the notary’s absenting himself from the room was routine: it was an old habit of notaries to protect themselves from implication in any irregularities in the deal, such as partial payment under the table to save on taxes. The marquesa and I listened. Then the notary reappeared to read the document aloud, ask if we had any questions, verify the payment (which was the receipt for a bank transfer I had already made), explain that we’d get a copy eventually of the papers, and remind me of the costs still to be assessed—the taxes, the registration costs, and the notary fees, together amounting to about 10 percent of the sale price. And that was it. I owned a house, all my own, my first ever. I wanted to get back to it. I wasn’t even conscious of the town’s festivities.
This year is different. My world has expanded beyond the walls of my house. I will go down to the town’s main park in the late morning, wander through the line of stalls where artisans and merchants display their goods, principally the painted eggs. No reader of this post needs reminding what colored, dyed, or painted eggs are. But until you’ve seen dozens of them beautifully painted in scenes of astonishing detail, you can’t imagine the intricate care and great talent used to create such fragile artifacts. The tradition of painted eggs stems, I read, from the accumulation of eggs during Lent, when no meat or dairy was consumed. Afterward, one could both celebrate and eat, and so it was.
I first visited the painted eggs celebration about 10 years ago. A collection of beautifully decorated eggs I could imagine, but hundreds to admire? Originally the eggs were cooked in the old kitchens and colored with soot from the fire, and the first color they had was simply dark. Or they were boiled with chestnuts and acquired a reddish tone. Later, new dyes and tools came into use. India ink was used, paints and washes. Brushes and calligraphy pens replaced twigs dipped in wax. The eggs were decorated with traditional scenes on one side, often with pithy counsel on the other. Nowadays you can see tiny renditions of Las Meninas or Guernica, or characters from children’s cartoons.
I expect to see people thronging the market when I go. I will view all kinds of baked and fried pastries, many savory dishes, cider opened and poured, bars with tables set out serving wine, beer, and plates of one specialty or another. The day is a holiday in La Pola. Children will still be on their Easter break. I will watch the people, who will come and go all afternoon and into the evening, and I will join them for a while. Later, back at home, I will hear the happy sounds of the verbena, the big outdoor party with food and music, dance and drink, that will not conclude until the day, like so many good days, runs over into the next. And so life goes on, one day running into the next, one year into the following, one decade merging with another. Sometimes we stand midpoint, looking ahead and back. This year, last, next. With luck, something unexpected, a reprieve, joyous and bright, around the bend, before it’s all over.
The post Huevos Pintos appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “The Flower-School.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Flower-School” by Rabindranath Tagore appeared first on The American Scholar.
Viki Eagle began taking photographs of her Native American friends when she was an undergraduate at the University of Denver. “Being one of the very few Native people on campus, I wanted to tell our story from our perspective,” she says. A member of the Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta tribe, Eagle (who is also half-Japanese) has dealt with racism firsthand. “When I was growing up in the early ’90s, people really believed that Native Americans didn’t exist,” she says, “or if we did exist, we were still living in teepees or wearing buckskin. Our history erases us.” After completing her series of images of her friends, Real Life Indian, Eagle decided to go even further toward dispelling Native stereotypes by photographing heavy metal bands on reservations. This series, Re(Mapping) a Rez Metal Sonic ReZistance, is now her year-long focus as the Denver Art Museum’s 2023 Native Arts Artist-in-Residence.
- (Sample photo taken by Viki Eagle)
- (Sample photo taken by Viki Eagle)
- (Sample photo taken by Viki Eagle)
- (Sample photo taken by Viki Eagle)
Eagle’s interest in heavy metal stems from its ability to push back—“in the most extreme way”—against whitewashed ideas of what Native music is. Her photographs span several genres—documentary, portrait, landscape, and still-life. Eagle would like for her images of musicians and their audiences to demonstrate heavy metal’s popularity on reservations, and in the process, open viewers’ minds to the diversity of contemporary Native life. “I hope that people take away the creativity,” she says. “As contemporary Native people, expressing ourselves, our message and our story is still within that music.”
The post Viki Eagle appeared first on The American Scholar.
Hanging out. All of us could probably stand to do more of it, especially if it doesn’t come with a calendar invite. In her new book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Sheila Liming writes that she’s found herself “an accidental witness to a growing crisis: people struggling to hang out, or else voicing concern and anxiety about how to hang out.” The coronavirus may have heightened this struggle, but its root causes—our increased obsession with our phones, the shrinking of public spaces, widening income inequality, American individualism—predate the pandemic. Liming, a professor of communications at Champlain College, joins us on the podcast to discuss both what we have to lose by not spending unstructured time together and how we can get it back.
Go beyond the episode:
- Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time
- Liming learned a lot about the art of the hang through her time playing in the Catamount Pipe Band and the jam band The Armadillos
- Ray Oldenburg celebrated all the “third places” where people hang out in The Great Good Place
- You know what would make hanging out a lot easier? The 15-minute city
- Practice doing nothing much with one of these great hangout films
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post The Art of Doing Nothing Much, Together appeared first on The American Scholar.
The new student in the advanced English class, a 16-year-old, was a large, soft-looking young man with a round face, barely defined jaw, and floppy brown hair almost to his shoulders. Plumped in his seat, he reminded me of an oversize stuffed animal, a peluche. I expected him to be slow and quiet, perhaps bumbling, but instead he was an interesting combination of assertiveness and diffidence, full of opinions given without embarrassment—The view from this corner into the street is very nice! The lights in the street are pretty!—though in answering a question, he often paused in search of the right word, then expressed doubt that he had found it. His voice was loud and clear, and I liked him as soon as he spoke, and the feeling increased steadily, notching up every time I looked his way or he gave his opinion. At the end of the first class, he stood up and turned to the other two students, who were pulling on their coats, and said, “You know, these chairs are really comfortable!”
The chairs were old and battered desk chairs, not chairs for desks but ones that incorporated a writing surface and substituted for a desk. They were surprisingly durable and had lasted many years, but the Formica surfaces were nicked, the plastic strips on the rims of the seats and backs were peeling, and the glint of metal showed through the chipped black paint on the legs. I laughed and said, “That’s the first nice thing anyone has said about these chairs in a long time.”
“Really very comfortable,” he repeated.
He did not make the remark in passing but as if he’d discovered something of interest to everyone. I found him disarming. “I don’t know if you understand me,” he had said several times during class, squinching up his face in worry. He couldn’t be only 16, I thought. No 16-year-old could be so free of self-consciousness, so open. His demeanor suggested someone who had advanced beyond fear of what others thought. “I don’t know!” It wasn’t a disavowal but an appeal. In another class of 16-year-olds, the students routinely shrugged when they didn’t have the answer, and had I asked those students to elaborate, I feel sure they would have said, “Who cares?” Not this student. He cared enough to ask for help—help in choosing his words and shaping his sentences, not as in I can’t do it, you do it but as in Does this work? Communication appeared to be a team task. I was captivated.
So when on the second day he said that he believed high school students often questioned their purpose in life, I didn’t blink, though I had just minutes earlier suggested the opposite—that high school students generally don’t think about a purpose to their lives or wonder why they are here. They don’t think in terms of the meaning or point of their existence. At best, I believe, they think about the meaning or the point of a particular action or particular moment, but the trajectory they don’t question. They seem on the whole to be fairly confident that enjoyment is the point of life. To have a comfortable life, have friends to socialize with, a family, a job with a good salary, time for hobbies—this is what the high school students usually tell me they want from life. However, when I had asked the new student to select a statement that he agreed with from among the 10 we’d been looking at in the class book, he’d chosen the statement that said it is normal to start questioning your purpose in life when you’re young. “You agree with that?” I asked, to make sure.
“Yes.”
“Do you know many people your age who do that? Or do you?”
“Yes,” he said and began to talk about what he wanted to do, and where he’d like to be, and what choices he might make. He often wondered, he said, about all of this. It occurred to me, looking at his very earnest, open face, that he was talking about what track to follow to reach his goals, but not about whether his goal was good, or whether any goal might exist beyond satisfying his own desires.
“Are you sure it’s purpose you’re talking about?” I asked. “I think it’s something a bit different.”
“Okay,” he said, cocking his head. He waited with an air of willing expectancy.
“Maybe it’s not a purpose you’re describing but a path.”
“Yes!” he said. He raised his fist as if in exaltation. “That’s exactly right. That’s the right word.” He smiled at me. “You got it!”
The post Teamwork appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens appeared first on The American Scholar.
Mind in Nature: John Dewey, Cognitive Science, and a Naturalistic Philosophy for Living by Mark Johnson and Jay Schulkin; The MIT Press, 288 pp., $60.00
There is a passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature—published in 1836—that has, until recently, always puzzled me. Emerson writes that his age would witness a strange philosophical transition, namely that, the “ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.” But after I read Mark Johnson and Jay Shulkin’s Mind in Nature, a new volume on philosophy and cognitive science, Emerson began to make a bit more sense.
In 1858, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, suggesting that who we are—as human beings—connects directly to our biological origins. Coming to terms with this biology, Darwin thought, was crucial to our ability to understand ourselves. Then in 1925, the American pragmatist John Dewey completed Experience and Nature, a work that Johnson and Schulkin see as “one of the greatest philosophical works ever written.” Why? Because Dewey explained, perhaps for the first time, with scientific rigor and philosophical sophistication, how humans like us make meaning and develop our minds by interacting with the natural world.
Dewey suggests that we look as closely as we can at the structure of experience. When we do that, we will notice that meaning, far from being merely abstract, linguistic, and conceptual, is, from top to bottom, emotional, aesthetic, and embodied. We are, to use the Deweyan expression, “live creatures” who feel, grow, act, laugh, thrive, cry, die, make love, dance, and create. Although not necessarily in that order. If all of that sounds anti-philosophical or conceptually boring, that is only because the history of Western philosophy has been built on the philosopher’s fallacy of confusing our living, breathing realities with concepts that try, and fail, to explain these realities. Life and embodied meaning are richer and more complex and confusing than any mind-as-machine model that might threaten to overtake our present day. This is at least one of the primary lessons of Mind in Nature.
Johnson, the Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, and Schulkin, a research professor at the University of Washington’s College of Medicine, have made two very long, very distinguished careers of defending this position. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), written with John Lakoff, Johnson points out that our conventional conceptual metaphors, which underpin everyday language, involve sensory, motor, and affective aspects of our experience. For example, there is a dominant conceptual metaphor ‘Understanding Is Seeing,’ in which we conceptualize abstract thinking as a process of seeing. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we might recruit our basic bodily (sensory-motor-affective-social) experience to think and reason about some abstract domain, such as mind, thought, will, knowledge, and reasoning. Today, Metaphors We Live By is a classic that has sold more than a million copies. And during his more than 40-year career, Schulkin has produced some 700 articles and presentations, and his work is so respected that is has been cited by other researchers 24,000 times.
Why do these biographies matter? Because these two scholars, both in the twilight of their careers, still seem to believe that Dewey and a naturalized way of seeing the world needs a viable defense. In Mind and Nature, they set out Deweyan naturalism in simple, yet powerful terms:
By a naturalistic philosophy, we mean the view that everything that exists is part of nature, which thereby encompasses all of the natural processes by which things and events come into, persist for a time through, and pass out of existence. A naturalistic philosophy employs empirical methods of inquiry and explanation that have no need to postulate supernatural or transcendent agents, entities, causes, or forces.
This is a fairly accurate thumbnail of the metaphysical and epistemological commitments expressed in Experience and Nature, but also a thumbnail that explains, in large part, why Dewey’s philosophy has had trouble gaining traction in a polarized and ideologically fraught world. Many people believe in science and eschew dogma, but these selfsame people have a nagging desire to believe in transcendent agents, entities, causes, and forces. And then, of course, there are those who dismiss science and embrace dogma.
But our present moment may be the right time to bring Dewey fully back to life. As Johnson and Schulkin observe, the demand for a clear-eyed assessment of our deeply human (and, I will add, tragic) condition, seems well fitted to a time besieged by the plague and compounded by political and social strife. Transcendental pixy dust might sound appealing at first, a quick fix for a broken world, but it doesn’t seem to be working particularly well. Our culture remains painfully broken, in no small part because we remain committed to different and mutually exclusive forms of pixy dust.
The Deweyan account, by contrast, seems honest to the facts of the natural world and to the facts of human nature: we are all living creatures struggling, not necessarily for survival, but for a survival that matters, for knowledge that will guide our choices and actions, for selves that cohere and thrive, for lives of deep feeling and sensitivity, and for a realistic sense of expectation and hope. And for a natural life that doesn’t seem like a complete waste of time when it unceremoniously ends. The Deweyan account of human flourishing gives us something like this, but it also teeters on the brink of nihilism (which is why the two brave authors gird us against it)—a philosophy that threatens our sense of meaning by insisting that any existential significance is of our own all-too-human making.
If this strikes you as dismal or uninspiring—it shouldn’t. What exactly do you think you are entitled to in this life? At least Dewey’s pragmatism, offers a sense that things matter because we have a hand in our destiny, that our will and receptive capacities matter more—rather than less—precisely because there is no Divine Overseer making sure that we pay our dues and fulfill our callings. We are not in charge of the universe, or our world, or even our meagerly small communities, but we are still charged with measuring things out, both morally and empirically as best we can, day after day. This doesn’t seem fair, or particularly gentle, but it is undoubtedly true.
Much of Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy, developed in the first half of the 20th century, is descriptive—meaning that it tries to give an account of what human nature is like, where meaning comes from, how we grow and adapt in our natural settings. It dispels all the standard-yet-misguided ideas about what is most important about being human—our detached cognitive capacities, our mysterious sense of ourselves, our desire for the transcendent. Dewey explained how all of these seemingly special aspects of being human arose naturally from our evolutionary history, from our unique embodiment, from our environmental context. Much of the Mind in Nature extends and bolsters this description by incorporating cognitive neuroscience. The authors convincingly argue that the biological processes of homeostasis and allostasis (an organism’s ability to respond to stressors in order to return to homeostasis) form the basis of higher forms of human cognition, and they do a nice job of explaining the neural basis of core consciousness and pervasive unifying qualities. Simply put, over the course of human evolution, creatures like us have developed powers of abstract conceptualization, but these powers have emerged from, and are supported by, basic modes of survival and adaptation. Our minds are embodied all the way down.
Yet there is a problem with Dewey. One can accept his naturalistic description of the human organism, accept the evidence that human experience and the natural world come hand in hand, accept that Experience and Nature cannot be torn asunder—and still be left with a sense that Dewey’s philosophy is unsatisfying. It might have to do with the lingering confusion about what to do, or how to actually live. It is as if Dewey bears witness to the death of God, the brushing away of all the divine pixy dust of being human, and then refuses to give guidance about what to do next. Of course, Dewey’s social and political philosophy as well as his extensive writings on education and democracy attempt to provide this guidance and have shaped the way that (some) educators and (a few) politicians approach things. But Dewey failed to give us something that, nearly a century later, Johnson and Schulkin finally offer at the end of Mind in Nature—namely a succinct account of how to live with a naturalized philosophy, in bite-sized sections titled “What Can I Know?”; “What Ought I To Do?”; and “What May I Hope?”
What can I know? In the words of Johnson and Schulkin:
Because all of our methods of inquiry and our conceptual systems are based on criticizable values, we have to give up any notion of absolute knowledge. Despite our pretensions to ultimate truths, we cannot be know-it-alls, but we can have confidence in the possibility of knowledge adequate to our current situation. … The replacement for allegedly fixed and completed knowledge must be constant vigilance; that is, continued criticism of our systems of valuation (including belief values), with openness to both supportive and falsifying evidence.
This requires a lot of work. A naturalistic philosophy entails a commitment to the scientific method, a process of inquiry that is ongoing and arduous, open to tentative success and inevitable error, the findings of which are practical yet provisional.
And what ought I to do? Johnson and Schulkin’s answer is closely related to Dewey’s method of inquiry:
Ethics naturalized is a “morality for humans.” It disabuses us of any pretention to ultimates or absolutes. It humbles us, but at the same time gives us a realistic means of moral problem solving. The results of such a process will never be final, though they may be the best we have for the moment. Present good is not the final endpoint of our reflections, but rather a temporary resting place from which to take on new challenges, in pursuit of what is better. That search for the better is a never-ending strenuous journey. It is hard to uncover and examine our deepest prejudices. It is hard to consider the experiences of all of those whose well-being is affected by your decisions and actions. It is hard to imagine creative and lasting resolutions of conflict. The conscientious inquirer will be prepared to reconsider prior deliberations in the face of new circumstances, which is one important indicator of moral growth.
Again, this is not easy. But our expectation that a moral life should be, is misplaced. We should remember that many of the most meaningful moments of life are, or can be, difficult, that persisting through difficulty is one of those truly special characteristics of being human that we maintain even and especially in our darkest hours.
And what may I hope for? This is different than what can I hope for. I can hope for any number of things. I can hope that a friendly blue woolly mammoth will save me from by problems, that I will be delivered to a perfect Dairy Queen after my death, that the world will work itself out without my effort or intervention. I can also be a very disappointed idiot. What may I hope for, according to a naturalized philosopher? To be modest, realistic, and existentially honest. I may hope that I am strong enough to face life as it actually is and not how I would imagine it to be. I may hope for the insight and sensitivity to face hardship with something like grace. And I may hope that the world is made just a little bit better by my life and efforts. And I may hope that this is enough.
The post Our Pragmatic Present appeared first on The American Scholar.
Wild, blossoming cherries are native to many diverse lands, from the British Isles and Norway to Morocco and Tunisia. But they’re most associated with Japan, where the sakura is the national flower. These days, though, you’ll find blossoming cherries everywhere, on practically every continent. For that, we must thank a lot of dedicated botanists, who braved world wars and long sea voyages—and endured repeated failures—to spread the sakura around the world. But there’s one naturalist in particular we can thank: Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram. Journalist Naoko Abe joins us on the podcast to share how this English eccentric saved some of Japan’s most iconic cherry blossoms—from the spectacular Great White Cherry to the pink Hokusai—from extinction. This episode originally aired in 2019.
Go beyond the episode:
- Naoko Abe’s The Sakura Obsession
- If you’re in Washington, D.C., you need not visit the crowded tidal basin to view the cherries—here is a map trees blossoming all over the city
- The National Park Service created a guide to the cherry blossom varieties in the city
- Smithsonian’s list of the best places to see cherry blossoms around the world
Cherry varieties discussed:
- Taihaku / Prunus serrulata taihaku / Great white cherry
- Somei-yoshino / Prunus x yedoensis / Tokyo cherry
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Cherry Blossom Bonanza appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1948, long before I was born, my father, Edward Alperowitsch, boarded a German train, expecting to testify at the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. He was 22 years old, a Jewish refugee from Latvia with a torrent of eyewitness memories that he wanted to share. He and his mother were the only two survivors of what had once been an extended family of more than 20 relatives in the seaport town of Liepaja. During the first brutal months of the Nazi invasion of 1941, Edward had watched as German military trucks rounded up Jews who were never seen again. He had glimpsed identification tags revealing which units were involved. The American prosecutors at Nuremberg wanted careful, precise witnesses like Edward. But in the chaotic conditions after World War II’s end, connecting with scattered refugee communities across Europe wasn’t easy. Even when the Americans found Edward—who at the time was pursuing chemistry studies in a makeshift Munich refugee university—it took months before senior prosecutors were ready to call him to the witness stand.
To Ed’s everlasting chagrin, his Nuremberg moment came too late. The war crimes trial’s final case was about to wrap up, and it wasn’t possible for new testimony to be admitted. My father was momentarily sworn in as a witness—yet within minutes, lawyers for the Nazi defendants successfully moved for him to be disqualified on procedural grounds.
For decades to come, my father spoke very sparingly about his Nuremberg attempt. When he did, his remarks were tinged with frustration and a sense of failure. He had wanted to bear witness. He had wanted to fight for justice on behalf of all his family members who had died at the hands of Nazi Germany. But things hadn’t worked out.
A few years ago, this Nuremberg moment began to scratch at my sense of unfinished business, too. My father had become a widower in early 2019, at age 92, and his need for companionship was great. He was living in a seniors’ home in Northern California, just a few miles from my house. We met often for meals, and our conversations increasingly focused on his younger years. My favorite moments included hearing about his arrival in the United States as a cash-strapped refugee in 1949, as well as his academic career at the University of Chicago, analyzing lunar samples brought back by the Apollo spacecraft.
All the while, Ed kept gravitating toward the Holocaust. The bench scientist of my childhood was still at it in his 90s, determined to build a piece-by-piece history of what had happened to Latvia’s Jewish community during World War II.
On some visits, I’d hear about his work maintaining a database of the (mostly tragic) fates of all 7,000 Jewish residents in his birth city of Liepaja. On other occasions, he would discuss his support for a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Latvia. Ed even embarked on talks with Israeli filmmakers, hoping they could dramatize the story of how a dozen Latvian Jews outlasted the Nazis by spending 19 months hidden in a cellar.
No matter how much Ed did, fresh projects needed his attention. Something about his full mission as a Holocaust survivor seemed incomplete. And that got me thinking about Nuremberg. As my familiarity with his projects grew, I wrote to the National Archives’ press office in the autumn of 2019 to see if any records of my father’s appearance at the war crimes trial might exist. Soon I was emailing with Greg Bradsher, the Archives’ Holocaust records expert, who unearthed a remarkable trove of microfilmed court records.
The trial transcript was as brief and frustrating as my father remembered. “New facts cannot be admitted at this stage,” a Nazi defense lawyer argued on the morning of August 2, 1948, just as my father started testifying during the final rebuttal section of Trial XII. (In this trial, Nazi Germany’s top generals were prosecuted for their role in the Holocaust.) Everything stopped while the court went into recess. Despite fierce arguments from U.S. prosecutors, the effort to keep Edouard on the stand failed.
Fortunately, Bradsher knew how to dig deeper. Nuremberg’s prosecutors had met with Ed three times before the trial, he told me, quizzing this young Latvian exile about every aspect of his wartime experience. If I was willing to complete the paperwork necessary to become an accredited researcher, I could gain access to the Archives’ microfilm library outside the nation’s capital, in College Park, Maryland. Once inside, I could read every word of these long-forgotten transcripts. Elated by this news, I booked a cross-country flight from California, ready to start an eerie, immersive exercise in time travel.
Inside the microfilm room in College Park, I suddenly met a very different version of my father. This young man communicated only in German, the native language of his childhood. Everything that he described was incredibly vivid, as if it had happened only days ago. Nazis forcing Jews in his hometown of Liepaja to desecrate their own synagogues. The murder of a cousin on the first day of the Nazi invasion; the shooting of Ed’s grandfather a few weeks later. At war’s end, my dad was the only male survivor in his family. Reaching Nuremberg, he carried the burden of trying to speak for all the relatives whose voices had been forever silenced.
In the transcripts, everyone’s German was simple enough that I could follow 90 percent of the text. There were a few terms I’d never encountered in high-school German, however, including die Leichen. It kept showing up, page after page. Pulling out my phone, I used Google translate to discover—to my horror—that the word means “corpses.”
No matter how harrowing the details, Ed was both steady and precise. I couldn’t help but think: He had waited seven years for this moment. There would be other days to grieve, or to turn the conversation to cheerier topics. But not now. I started to get teary, sensing how this 22-year-old refugee kept holding it together in such a high-stakes setting.
At one point, a member of the U.S. prosecution team asked Ed: “Did you know from German radio or newspapers which Army corps or divisions had seized Liepaja?”
“No,” my father replied. “The designations were kept very secret. But I found out the regiment numbers anyway, because I visited the German soldiers’ cemetery later and saw graves that carried specific numbers sequentially.”
A couple pages later, some rare banter brought an inadvertent smile. When the prosecutors asked Ed to comment on a scenario, he shot back: Nein, es war nicht genau so. (No, that’s not exactly how it was.) Indeed. No matter what decade—or language—it’s a sure bet that if others get sloppy about the details, my father will blast out some version of that rebuke. He cannot stop himself. Ever.
By sunset, I had filled my Dropbox account with Ed’s pretrial testimony. As I wrapped up, I let my father know via email that I would be returning to California with a rich new record of his entire time at Nuremberg.
Over the next few weeks, Ed and I met repeatedly at his apartment, working through the three interview transcripts together. Suddenly we were back in Liepaja in late June 1941, as the German military overwhelmed that small Baltic port city.
I listened quietly as Ed scrolled through the transcripts. “Yes,” he’d say periodically. “I remember that.” And then, occasionally: “Hmmn! I’d forgotten that.” We spent time chatting about one moment in the earliest days of the Nazi invasion, where 15-year-old Ed was roaming on his own near Liepaja’s shipyard. He observed German military trucks in the distance hauling corpses of recently killed Jews. A soldier wandered by and remarked, to no one in particular: “You Jews will all get cold feet.”
“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.
Everything was so chaotic then, Ed replied. No one quite knew—or believed—how genocidal the Nazis would be. Only when he got home and relayed what he had seen did his entire family realize how perilous everything had become.
We also talked a lot about the final Nuremberg interview, just three days before Ed’s scheduled trial appearance. It was conducted by senior prosecutor Walter Rapp, and the questions focused much more tightly on a single point of testimony: Could Ed conclusively state that he saw regular German army forces—not any of the specific Holocaust death squads—engaged in killing Jews? Yes, Ed could. He saw the soldiers’ uniform colors as well as logos on vehicles marking the Wehrmacht, or main army.
Reading through that passage, I turned to Ed and said: “You would have made a very powerful witness.” He didn’t say anything, but it looked as if he raised his head a little higher.
Eventually, we took up the gentler topic of what it was like to be at Nuremberg for this history-making moment. That was on my initiative, and I can’t help it. I’m a journalist and author by trade. It’s in my nature to invite people to open up not just about their deeds, but also their feelings.
“Everything was at the so-called Palace of Justice,” Ed recalled. His memory of the physical setting was vague, but his impressions of the American-led prosecution team were indelible. The people who quizzed him were friendly—even “jovial.” They treated him decently and in a low-stress way. This was his first encounter with the can-do, optimistic dimension of American culture—and he liked it.
Each time we spoke, Ed recalled more of the kindness shown to him by the American prosecutors. At one point, Rapp gazed at Ed’s shabby refugee clothes and told him: “You look like you could use a new suit. I’ve got an extra one. Come back tomorrow and you can have it.” Rapp’s suit wasn’t quite Ed’s size, but it was close enough.
As I think about all this now, I realize that Nuremberg wasn’t just a point of closure for my father’s World War II experience. It was the beginning of a safer, cheerier chapter of Ed’s life. Within a year of his trial date, he boarded a troopship to Boston, ready to start over in America. I don’t have a photo of that moment, but if one exists, I think it would show Ed wearing Walter Rapp’s suit.
It’s been nearly 75 years since my father traveled to Nuremberg, and there are times when he still regrets the legal fastidiousness that barred him from the witness stand. He wishes he could have testified, believing that some German generals’ complicity in the Holocaust would have earned much harsher punishment. Yet on a different level, Ed appreciates the Allies’ scrupulous adherence to the highest legal standards. Even today, Nuremberg is upheld as the model of how to run a war crimes trial. And the strength of the U.S. legal system—even when buffeted by the most odious pressures—is one of the things he cherishes as a naturalized American.
There’s vindication for Ed, too, in discovering that during the Nuremberg proceedings, president Judge John C. Young declared in court that this young Latvian refugee’s testimony “would have been perfectly good evidence when you put on your case.” Procedural tangle aside, Ed really did have something vital to contribute. He is often in contact with Holocaust historians, and since 2019, he has been proud to share his Nuremberg testimony with them. Ed is prouder still to see it referenced in new scholarly works. Berkeley scholar Linda Kinstler, in her book Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, devotes the better part of two chapters to Ed’s Nuremberg appearance and subsequent Holocaust work, observing that he “recalled the details of this period with scientific specificity.”
My father is 96 now, and fatigue is stalking him every day. Mortality is thinning the world’s community of Holocaust survivors every week, and I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to press ahead. But the eternal truths of his story are secure. And I’ll always be grateful for the chance to see the courage and dignity of his Nuremberg moment emerge from its hiding place at last.
The post On the Record, At Last appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Río Manzanares passes through Madrid on its way from its headwaters in the Sierra de Guadarrama to the end of its course, where after 92 kilometers it meets and merges into the Tajo. Francisco de Goya, who lived for five years on a farm on the banks of the Manzanares, depicts the river in some of his best-known paintings. Poets too make mention of it. But who tells the stories of the Río Nora, which passes by my town of Pola de Siero on its 62 kilometer course from its headwaters to where it joins the Nalón? No songs I know of, no stories or famous paintings commemorate life along its banks, though here, as in rivers all over the country, water was fetched, the washing was done, and in the shade of trees along its banks, people picnicked and bathed. Some must have paused too just to admire the vistas. Near its mouth, the Nora cuts back and forth in large loops and bends, called meanders in English and practically the same in Spanish, meandros. The meanders on the Nora are especially beautiful and are designated a national natural monument, protected since 2012.
Not protected and presumably not as remarkable are the bends in the Nora where it runs past La Pola, in the bottomland below the town. An asphalted river path winds beside the river. Five times in two kilometers, bridges span the water, and the path passes from one bank of the river to the opposite, as if to gain a better foothold on the far side. Rather than one following the other, the two paths seem intertwined, the path of the river and the man-made path beside it. One cold January morning, after two days of storms across Asturias, with rain near the coast, snow in the mountains, and hail mixed with sleet in La Pola, the rain ceased, and I left my house to walk down to the river to see what was happening.
The access road down from the town was streaming with water, practically a river itself, and the river beyond was swollen and muddy. When I reached the river path near the old Roman bridge, I was amazed to see that the river seemed on the point of overflowing its banks on both sides, swirling close to the river path on the near side and inundating a field on the far one.
I followed the river from the open meadows into a wooded stretch where trees grow so close to the water that they stick out from the steep banks and lean over the river, practically part of it. That day was different. The chocolate-colored water filled the narrow channel, sweeping along, bouncing off the banks where the river course curved, hurrying on, under the bridges, around the bends, past the trees stretching toward it with splayed, finger-like twigs.
The wet black trunks, the chocolate water, the bony grasping fingers. Despite the rushing river, there was a stillness to the day.
The rain was holding off but seemed likely to start again at any moment. Ahead, at a bend, the trees were even thicker. They clustered on the bank, and a few stood knee-deep in eddies just below. They gave the impression they were bracing not against the river’s push but against the call of something they might not resist: the tumbling water, the gray sky. One or two seemed to have waded halfway in. I looked up and then down the river. All around me, I could see the trees in congregation, some dipping their toes, some deep in the water, some watching. A whole arboreal landscape had come to life, and the community stood in the balance between the steadying tug of their roots as they leaned toward the water and the tug of the water itself. The trees along the bank were easing into the current, the trees on the hillside above the path shifting ever so slightly nearer. The river surged and rolled. Trees, I wondered, what do you feel? What do you hear in the voice of the river? Foolish questions on a cold, wet morning. But not one bit foolish the words of Victoria Chang in her poem “In a Clearing”: “My whole life, I thought to / mourn leaves falling. Now I / marvel at all the splitting.”
How marvelous to be among the trees at riverside on that wet cold morning, drops still falling from dark lifted branches, the scene splitting into its components of gray asphalt, wet bark, spindly bare branches, churning chocolatey water, and whole trees on the verge of parting to join the river.
Just a day later, when I returned, I saw toppled trees split and broken at the river’s edge. They lay as they had fallen, half in and half out of the water. Others had retreated from the verge. The river too had withdrawn and was again but another element of the unified picture of the landscape after a storm.
The post River’s Edge appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Grace Cavalieri’s poem “Three O’Clock 1942.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Three O’Clock 1942” by Grace Cavalieri appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Viewing, Summer 1909, ConstantinopleMy grandfather walks down the long corridor to the room where Maria and the other two girls he has purchased are waiting to be viewed. Maria has not seen the other girls before; they are both 15, like she is. They have been brought from across the border in Batum, and like her, they have each been sequestered in a separate room for a week before this final viewing that will decide their fates.
Despite the warm afternoon, my grandfather is in formal attire, a monocle that glints in the light, and white gloves fine enough for his rings to fit over the fingers. He is both a modern Ottoman and a conservative Muslim, so he considers the choosing of girls for his household a solemn occasion. It is now to be seen whether the girls will please him enough to stay on as concubines, please him only mildly and stay on as servants, or please him not at all and be sent away to be sold to other households. By the time my grandmother Maria entered his home, my grandfather had been purchasing girls for over 30 years, and during this time a fixed protocol had evolved. He and his first wife, Grandmother Zekiyé, whom he married when he was 20 and she was 16, review the girls together, each with a different set of priorities. Grandfather looks for beauty, grace, European features, a lean-but-busty line, a natural demureness, and what he calls a many-pronged wit—once a girl is accepted into his household as a concubine, she is there to stay, and within a decade her wit might be her only recourse against the fading of her charms. Grandmother Zekiyé views the purchased girls through a narrower prism: her eye probes torsos and thighs in search of imperfections a man might not immediately notice. If a girl is to be resold, it will have to be before Grandfather takes her virginity, so Zekiyé looks for any flaws that might dampen his interest after his initial excitement pales. She also has a knack for evaluating the durability of a teenage breast, chin, or hip. Slim at 13 does not mean slim at 18; one chin can turn into three. A girl might be prone to pimples, which is acceptable, even charming, but only if the pimples are not the kind that leave blemishes.
An equally important purpose of Zekiyé’s inspection is to determine if a girl will fit into the inflexible hierarchy of the household. Is the newcomer a quick learner, clever enough to acquire elegant Turkish? Will she be good at taking direction? Will she manage to keep a pleasing individuality but still bow to the senior women of the harem? In the three decades that Grandmother Zekiyé has been running grandfather’s household, no wives, concubines, or maidservants have entered the harem without her approval. But her choices have always been right, and Grandfather has always been pleased with them. Many of Grandfather’s peers have found life at home a strain, their peace soured by ill-tempered wives and warring concubines. There is a growing trend in Constantinople and the larger towns of the Ottoman Empire for even the wealthiest men to turn their backs on the Islamic dispensation that allows them four wives and as many concubines as they can afford to keep, and instead to limit themselves to one wife and perhaps one or two women outside the house, women they keep in private villas and visit secretly. Zekiyé prefers the old ways that allow her to keep an eye on things. A well-run house can make its master’s life pleasant, and Grandfather has found himself able to avoid the drabness of marital monotony through the occasional introduction of fresh faces into his home.
The drawing-room door opens, and Grandfather enters. Zekiyé puts down the book she has been reading and hurries over to him. She, too, is dressed formally, in a floor-length evening gown. She holds her ostrich fan to her cheek, whispers something to Grandfather in French, and then points at the three girls, who are standing by the large window that opens out onto one of the harem gardens. Grandfather smiles and whispers something in reply, at which she pouts playfully and taps him on the shoulder with her fan. She hangs her arm in his, and they walk across the drawing room toward the frightened girls.
The girls, though unveiled, are dressed in long silk jackets that reach to the floor. Their first appearance before Grandfather is to be in the guise of modest Turkish maidens, the kind with which an Ottoman gentleman might wish to fill his household.
“They are an attractive assortment,” Grandmother Zekiyé says in French.
“That they are,” Grandfather replies.
“I am particularly pleased with the green-eyed one,” Zekiyé continues, pointing her fan at my grandmother Maria. “Shall we view her first?”
They walk up to Maria, who looks directly into Grandfather’s eyes and then slowly lowers her gaze, as Zekiyé told her to do when she prepared the girls for the viewing. Your future master will want to see your eyes, Zekiyé said, but only for an instant; a girl must not stare into a man’s eyes for too long, even if he is to be her master.
“She speaks a pretty Turkish,” Zekiyé says. “It’s strange, and un peu tartare, but it is pretty.”
“Greetings. I am Mehmet,” Grandfather says to Maria.
“Greetings. I am Maria,” Maria answers, looking up again, though she is not sure whether she is supposed to. His monocle catches her eye, and she is amazed that the round piece of glass can remain in place. He is older than she expected. There is silver in his hair. She had thought her future husband would perhaps be her brothers’ age, but now realizes how foolish that thought was: a great man, a grandee, would be one who has done many things in his life, not a boy. Still, Mr. Mehmet is too distinguished to be a bridegroom, she thinks, surmising that he must be her master’s father, the head of the household, who has come to view the girls who are to be the brides of his sons. This morning Zekiyé did not introduce herself to the girls—she just assembled them in a small chamber and with gestures and simple Turkish phrases told them what to do. So Maria believes Zekiyé might be her master’s mother. What if they don’t like me and send me away, she suddenly wonders in fear.
“Greetings, Maria,” Grandfather says, pronouncing her name in a strange and foreign way.
“Greetings. I am Maria,” she says, and then smiles, realizing she has just repeated herself. Grandfather smiles too.
“She has a pleasant voice,” he says to Zekiyé. “She does not mind looking me in the eye. Très vivace.”
With her fan, Zekiyé motions Maria to lower her eyes. Maria lowers them. There is gold everywhere in the room. Large vases stand in all the corners and on the tables; they are old, perhaps even ancient, but they look so clean and polished they might be new. Maria wants to raise her head and look around but knows that she must not. She rests her eyes on the lowest shelf of books lining the wall before her. She has never seen so many books. In her Greek village back in the Caucasus, the priest had a Bible and two thin volumes of Byzantine chants, and Black Melpo the Medicine Mixer had the piles of yellowed penny novels written in Pontic Greek. But Maria has never seen beautifully bound volumes like these, their spines covered with strange gold letters.
“She is thin, but in a good way,” Zekiyé says in Turkish. “Her thinness has not affected her breasts. And her hips will widen when the time is right.” She taps Maria’s hip. “She might well bear you some boys.”
Maria looks up. She has understood Zekiyé’s words about bearing boys, and realizes that Mr. Mehmet is not her master’s father, but her master. She is so startled by this that she cannot tell if she is pleased or dismayed. Zekiyé does not notice that Maria has raised her eyes again. Grandfather steps back a few paces to view her from a distance. He smiles. She breathes in carefully so he will not think she is flustered. She looks at his face, then lowers her eyes again. So this is the face of the man who is to be her husband. He is clearly a good man, a kind man, she thinks, even if his eyes are difficult to read. He has smiled at her, which probably means that he is pleased; he has saved her family and all the others by sending them so many gold coins before even having met her. She doesn’t dare raise her head again but thinks she can feel his cool eyes on her. His eyes are a bright hazel and were the first thing she noticed about him when he entered the room. They are unusual eyes, she thinks.
Outside, in the harem garden, two little girls in frilly white dresses are chasing a boy of about 10 who is wearing a sailor suit and hat. Maria watches them out of the corner of her eye. The boy shouts shrilly as the taller of the two girls catches him and pushes him to the ground. Zekiyé opens the French doors that lead onto a terrace and waves her fan at the children. “You naughty things!” she calls out. “You are disturbing your Papa! Papa cannot hear himself think!”
The children run down the path past a pond and disappear among the trees beyond it.
Zekiyé closes the French doors and smiles apologetically at Grandfather, even though the children are not hers, but his third wife’s. She goes over to a large oil painting of a young shepherdess in a white and pink dress, stares up at it, and then glances at Grandfather, who is looking at Maria with thoughtful eyes. Maria looks at the painting, knowing she is expected to avoid his gaze. She notices that the shepherdess is holding a stringed instrument, its precious lacquered wood gleaming; there is a diadem of blossoms in her hair—a princess perhaps, dressed up as a shepherdess, Maria thinks, but then sees that the subject of the painting is undoubtedly Madame Zekiyé as she must have looked many years ago. Madame Zekiyé quickly walks toward Maria. “Pretty eyes, pretty complexion, good breasts, mon cher,” she says to Grandfather, reaching out and touching Maria’s chest with her forefinger. Maria steps back in alarm, holding her hand over her breasts. Zekiyé smiles and wags a finger at her, and Maria smiles back at her nervously.
Four Months Earlier, Spring 1909, in a Greek Settlement in the CaucasusAs they flee, the tea plantation below the village is burning. The great lady of the house, a Russian noblewoman, has been slaughtered along with her daughters and servants and all the guards. The village elder, who tried to hide in her stables, is murdered as well. The priest runs barefoot and sobbing through the muddy field, his cassock hitched above his knees, thorns and stones cutting his feet, but the men catch him at the line of trees at the end of the field, the tall ash trees blocking his escape. Their machetes hack at his hands and feet, and he tumbles into the mud, his blood pouring onto his murderers as he tries to crawl away. Platoons of marauders are dragging the wounded and dying out onto the burning field where the dead priest lies, tearing off their victims’ smocks and trousers and defiling them in unspeakable ways, guffawing and firing their rifles. They torch the grand house and its granaries and barns, throwing into the flames boxes of flaring cartridges, walls of fire stretching down into the valley beyond the plantation. The massacring horde comes swarming up toward the village, and with the church bells ringing, the villagers flee, dragging the old and the sick with them toward the forests. Maria’s father opens the sheds and the sheep pen under the house to let the animals escape; he slits grain sacks and tears open cupboards, cursing and shouting profanities. His fields and goods, Maria’s dowry, everything is lost, and his wife Heraclea runs at him, shrieking, beating his back with her fists, “We must go, we must go! They will cut our throats!” As she throws woolen smocks, shirts, and pantaloons into a bundle, he tries to set fire to the house so the marauders will find nothing, and Heraclea pulls him away, ripping his shirt in her frenzy. She grabs Maria by the hand and drags her out of the house, ready to abandon her husband to his fate, but he follows them, crying like a boy, holding his rifle and the bundle of clothes that Heraclea has thrown into an empty flour sack. “I will shoot anyone who comes here, I will shoot them all,” he weeps. There is a shelf above the door with a row of large round loaves of bread, and Maria, too short to reach it, throws her bundle at it, the loaves toppling onto the floor. “Run! Run!” her mother screams, her flailing hand hitting Maria across the cheek, but Maria snatches up two loaves, one falling and rolling into the ditch as she runs out of the house.
A swarm of refugees is descending from the raided Greek mountain villages of the Caucasus, trudging through the forests and over narrow mountain paths toward the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. Fifteen-year-old Maria is among a group of villagers who have gathered from various burned-down settlements. More and more people join Maria and her parents as they make their way toward the border river. Some have been marching for two weeks, some for three, sleeping in the open, their campfires keeping forest dogs and wolves away. They are all hard people, having lived like their ancestors through generations of disaster, upheaval, and plague. The land once belonged to Colchis, to which Medea had brought shame and destruction; it has not been Greek for a thousand years, and although they continue to live there, their numbers are dwindling as the raids grow fiercer, the plagues more frequent.
The refugees cross over the fast-flowing river and into Ottoman territory in leaky boats and climb up a winding mud trail in the rain, toward a place where, they have been told, there are some abandoned barracks. Maria’s father, Kostis, is leading the way, climbing over brambles and fallen branches. His rifle is slung over his shoulder, and on his back he is carrying the large flour sack filled with clothes and blankets, now wet and heavy in the rain. He beats at weeds and bushes with a stick to clear the way for the others. Camels graze among the trees by the side of the path, gaunt and skeletal animals that have barely survived the winter and are not worth shooting for a few strips of meat. A scent of eucalyptus and putrefaction hangs in the air. Since railway lines now cross Anatolia, the great caravans have been disbanded and the camels released to die in the wilderness. Kostis sees a deer and tries to take a shot at it, but the primer in his rifle is wet from the rain. They could have strung up the deer on a tree, out of the reach of the jackals and wolves, he says, and then come back for it once they had found the barracks. “No point wasting bullets now,” Heraclea tells him in a low voice, so that the others won’t hear her talking down to her husband.
Kostis turns and looks back at Maria, then looks away again. Her mother is walking some distance behind him, her feet slipping in the mud, a bundle in her arms as large as his but heavier, for as they fled, she scooped up a tin bowl that had been part of her dowry many years before, as well as three boxes of cartridges. Kostis in his confusion and rage was about to take the rifle with a single cartridge in it; had Heraclea’s mind not been as nimble as it was, he’d now be carrying a whole rifle for nothing, with just a single shot. The barracks to which they are heading, she knows, are in the middle of nowhere; the nearest settlement, the people at the river said, lies a day’s ride north. Heraclea has 10 rubles hidden in the hem of her skirt, but none of that must go for cartridges. She stares at the path in front of her feet, her lips moving as she counts every stone larger than her shoe; if someone were to give her a kopeck coin for every 10 stones, she might have a whole ruble by the time they reach the barracks, maybe more, and she imagines all the things she could buy. Maria knows it is best not to disturb her mother during these counting games in which she gathers imaginary coins for things she sees, people who cross her path, or the number of birdcalls she hears. Heraclea would get angry if she lost count. Maria walks sullenly behind her mother in the rain, careful where she steps because she is wearing the shoes she has previously worn only on Sundays and at church feasts, the pair in which she was to have been married and buried. Village girls like her spend their lives barefoot in summer and wearing straw sandals wrapped in fur in winter, but Maria had the foresight to snatch up these shoes as they fled their burning village. She wears them now, knowing that even a small cut on a sharp stone can fester into a gangrenous wound in these dangerous valleys.
“I see trouble ahead, lots of trouble,” Heraclea mutters.
Maria looks at her.
“What are we going to eat?” Heraclea says, wiping her wet sleeve across her face, her voice low enough that only Maria can hear. “Those dried-up camels that look more dead than alive? Nothing but mud and brambles since we crossed the river. We’ll starve before the week’s out.”
Maria looks at the junipers and oaks and alders just beyond the mud trail, the trees gathering into a dense forest deeper in the valley. There is much more than mud and brambles here, she thinks.
“We’ll starve before the week’s out,” Heraclea says again. “I’m hungry already.”
Maria says nothing. She knows her mother is not interested in a reply or an opinion. Her mother can’t be hungry: her father bought lamb shanks from a tribesman by the river yesterday; they ate some of the meat last night, half raw and bloody, and the rest this morning. The tribesman had demanded 15 kopecks. “If you want it, you buy it. If you don’t want it, you don’t buy it,” he had said. Kostis had managed to buy the meat for nine kopecks, pressing the battered coins into the man’s hand, but Heraclea saw the expensive transaction as a symbol of calamities to come. “It’s a harsh land,” Heraclea says. “Who’d think crossing a river you’d be in another world, just like that? You’d think both sides of a river would be the same. I wouldn’t have come here for 50 rubles if I’d had a choice, nor 60 neither.”
Kostis glances back, thinking Heraclea is speaking to him, but looks ahead again.
The post The Purchased Bride appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Greek poet Sappho’s reputation looks something like a parabola: at the height of her powers, her lyrics were so beloved that grammarians quoted them as exemplars of the Greek language; Plato called her the “Tenth Muse.” Then, after a thousand years of exaltation, she tumbled from the pantheon. Today, we know very little of her life and precious few of her works remain, most of them recovered from ancient garbage heaps in the 19th century. The surviving 306 fragments of her verse—dozens of them but a single word or phrase—are compiled in a new and updated translation by classicist Diane J. Rayor, simply titled Sappho, out this month from Cambridge University Press. Rayor, Professor Emerita of Classics at Grand Valley State University, joins us on the podcast to discuss the difficulties—and joys—of rediscovering Sappho and translating her verse into English.
Go beyond the episode:
- Diane J. Rayor’s Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, with an introduction by André Lardinois
- Cambridge University Press has made professional recordings of all of the fragments available for free, performed by Kate Reading
- Read more about the murky provenance of the newest Sappho papyri unearthed in 2014
- The music used in this episode is the song “Seikilos Epitaph,” performed by Lina Palera on the Lyre of Apollo, a recreation of the ancient instrument by the Lyre 2.0 Project
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Spotify • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Filling in the Fragments appeared first on The American Scholar.
Down to the playground in the park I went on the first Saturday in February, in search of my friend and his granddaughter. The day was a cold but sunny one after a spate of winter storms, and people were out. Did they seem particularly friendly? I thought they did; they looked open, happy. I wandered among the glad children and their minders—the caretakers, I noticed, seemed mostly to be men—but I did not find my friend and his young charge. On I went to run an errand, passing a group of protesters in the corner of the park, in front of the city hall. I stopped to watch. Ten people held two large banners among them. Besides a reporter taking pictures, I was the only onlooker, and I had paused for just a moment, wondering what the protest was for.
“Siero es contra les violencias machistas” was handprinted in white marker on a sheer purple cloth banner. Siero is against gender-based violence. A similar message was on another, dark purple banner. Both were in Asturian, a language practically signaling protest. I see it employed on the often-defaced road signs announcing a town, the Spanish name scratched out and the Asturian painted in. These 10 people, however, despite their solemn message, looked cheery, like everyone else I saw. The lightweight banners, the two shades of purple, the clean printing—it made a pretty sight. But why protest gender-based violence today? Because the first month of the new year had ended with a shocking toll—seven women murdered at the hands of men they loved or had loved, men who presumably had felt the same. But there it seemed the sameness ended, the men feeling and giving into rage, the women feeling fear. Rage and fear—who doesn’t feel both, at some time? An even greater number of men and women made the news in December—11 deaths from gender-based violence.
Later, at home, I looked up both statistics on the internet, finding sites that include detailed reports of every case of a woman murdered by a man, keeping count of how many women were victims of current or former partners. Lawmakers are considering how to protect women by allowing them access to any record of accusations of gender-based violence made against their partners. Other help is ever more accessible, such as hotlines and other numbers to report abuse or seek urgent help. Plus public awareness campaigns. But in the confusion of terminology—femincidios, violencia de género, violencia machista—one thing was clear to me: no one wins these fights, and men’s groups ought to be looking into hotlines to report feelings of overwhelming ire, boiling rage. Men and women are not both guilty when one attacks the other, but both may be victims.
The post The First Month appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Audre Lorde’s poem “Black Mother Woman.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Black Mother Woman” by Audre Lorde appeared first on The American Scholar.
Painter and sculptor Loren Erdrich began mixing mediums on large canvases after a friend brought back vials of natural pigments from Morocco. “They did these crazy things on the paper that I was working with,” she says, such as swirling together and blooming into bursts of patterns. “When those ran out, I ended up finding dye that had similar characteristics—my work is very materials forward.” Erdrich now uses a combination of dye, powdered pigment mixed with water, and acrylic paint on canvas, letting the materials guide the final composition. “The dye is part of the fabric,” she says. “It soaks in and colors the actual fabric. I may occasionally have marks of other materials that sit on top of the canvas but really what you’re looking at is a large piece of fabric, the color of which has been changed.” Her most recent works are included in a solo exhibition, In a Certain Light, currently on display at Shrine Gallery in New York.
- As A Tree,, 2022, water, raw pigment, dye, acrylic, colored pencil and water-soluble pastel on muslin, 56 x 52 inches.
- Old Gods Try Hard, 2022, water, raw pigment, dye, acrylic, colored pencil and water-soluble pastel on muslin, 72 x 66 inches.
- Saving-Face, 2021, water, raw pigment, dye, acrylic, colored pencil and water-soluble pastel on muslin, 56 x 52 inches.
Erdrich’s images center on ethereal beings. These gauzy, amorphic figures are not portraits of anyone or anything in particular. “I’ve always been interested in that crossover point between inside and outside, what is seen and what can’t be seen,” she says. “That place where you have one foot in the world that you can see and one foot in the invisible world—it’s always been about giving light to everything else around us.” Erdrich says that when she creates these figures, she’s challenging the viewer to imagine what it would be like to live a life of unlimited existence, where dualities aren’t divided and opposites can appear together. “We live in this world that really wants these clear categories and borders,” she says. “But I’ve always seen the world as many things at once. How do I get everything? How do I talk about all of it that isn’t just the actual physical thing I see in front of me?”
The post Loren Erdrich appeared first on The American Scholar.
America in the 1830s was stranger than we might think: cities were made of wood, primeval forests towered above East and West coasts alike, and the Great Dismal Swamp still swallowed more than a million acres of Virginia. Alexander Nemerov, an art historian at Stanford University, brings this unruly and uncanny world to life in his new book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. Neither history nor fiction, the book offers dozens of gem-like stories of man’s last real encounters with these ancient forests: Nat Turner’s woodland hiding place, the inscription of the Cherokee language both in trail trees and on paper, Harriet Tubman’s view of the Pleiades, the painter Thomas Cole’s top hat of felted beaver fur. Nemerov joins us on the podcast to discuss what his unusual approach reveals about this turning point between civilization and the wild.
Go beyond the episode:
- Alexander Nemerov’s The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s
- Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a luminous work of historical imagination
- You can walk along Chicago’s lone wooden block alley, a remnant of the world that went up in smoke in the Great Fire of 1871
-
The Great Dismal Swamp may have shrunk, but it’s still there
-
Wilderness (1860), Sanford Robinson Gifford (Wikimedia Commons)
- The Artist Sketching at Mount Desert, Maine (1864–65), Sanford Robinson Gifford (Wikimedia Commons)
- A Coming Storm (1860), Sanford Robinson Gifford (Wikimedia Commons)
- Haverstraw Bay (1868), Sanford Robinson Gifford (Wikimedia Commons)
- Twilight in the Catskill (1861), Sanford Robinson Gifford (Wikimedia Commons)
- Sunrise in the Catskills (1826), Thomas Cole (Wikimedia Commons)
- View on Lake Winnipiseogee (1828), Thomas Cole (Wikimedia Commons)
- View near the Village of Catskill (1827), Thomas Cole (Wikimedia Commons)
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Spotify • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Reading the Trail Trees appeared first on The American Scholar.
“If one could run without getting tired,” writes C. S. Lewis in The Last Battle, “I don’t think one would often want to do anything else.” Yes, C. S. Lewis, curmudgeonly mathematician, extols running. He’s right—nothing else is like it. So when my physical therapist told me running was out for me, I recoiled. “Wait,” I thought. “What? No more running?”
It was my spine, the therapist explained.
I had gone to him after two months of persistent back pain. Curiously, almost as soon as I made the appointment, I found that the pain began to let up, and so I went with a sense of optimism. I expected the physical therapist would suggest some back exercises, advise me to buy new running shoes, and tell me to beware of bending to pick up a box, but basically congratulate me on a good start to full recovery. Then I would resume running just like before, because nothing was really wrong, or I wouldn’t already be seeing improvement. A little scoliosis, okay, I know that’s true. Some bone spurs, revealed by an x-ray. Discs that are not exactly what or where they should be. All of that I could understand. Even that, because of my makeup, I absorb the impact of running unequally, aggravating my spine with each foot strike. So I’d run a little slower, I’d stay off mountainsides. But give up running? Altogether? That was impossible. I told the therapist I was signed up for a race in three days.
The therapist said he understood how I was feeling. But I couldn’t run the race. I didn’t want to risk a fracture and find myself in a wheelchair, did I?
I had no words. Running was everything. I felt as if he’d told me I needed to quit breathing to not die.
“Look,” he told me, as he stepped away a few feet, turned sideways, then hunched his back and slumped one shoulder while twisting and raising the other at the same time. He seemed to have shrunk six inches. His neck stuck forward, his back curved, his pelvis protruded. The transformation was from an upright 45-year-old into an ageless little gnome. He turned to face me. “I’m exaggerating a little,” he said, “but this is you.” I gulped. “Running,” he repeated, “is out.”
Did he really mean that? Not only that I was risking a spinal injury, but that I was misshapen? The shame. Had he said, “This will be you,” I’d have been more likely to listen to his advice. But his message was that it was already too late to save myself. Why sacrifice to save instead that twisted shrunken being? I could see no sense in that. I’m sure I blushed, sitting in my underclothes.
Worse than the shame, though, was the thought of telling my running partner that he would be on his own from now on. Running can be done alone, but it’s a great deal easier in company.
The good news, my therapist went on, was that there was something to replace running. La marcha nórdica, Nordic walking. It was a new sport, lots of people were doing it. It would be ideal for me.
That good news didn’t seem so good to me. It seemed irrelevant. But when I relayed my therapist’s suggestion to my running partner, he was enraged. Twenty years ago, he reminded me, he had gone to the doctor because of a back injury at work. The doctor confirmed that his back was a mess. Three herniated discs. No more running. Gardening, too, was out. Nothing more strenuous than slow walking. “I can’t run, I can’t work in the garden,” he echoed to his doctor. “That’s right,” the doctor said. “Can I work?” asked my friend. A doctor forbidding work for a work-related injury would mean sick leave. If he couldn’t return, it would mean early retirement at full salary, plus compensation. The doctor looked up. “Oh yes, you can work.” My friend repeated to me what he hadn’t bothered to tell the doctor: if he could work, he could run. Had he instead followed the doctor’s advice, he added, he would by now be in a wheelchair. Then he named a friend of ours who had been a great runner, winning countless races and setting regional records. “Twenty-five years ago, doctors told her to quit or she’d end up paraplegic. Instead, she’s still running.”
“Well,” I said.
My partner and I had scheduled a run for after my appointment that afternoon. I hated to disappoint. I put on my running clothes and then ran as slowly as I ever have, barely faster than a walk. It was laughable, though neither of us was laughing.
If you want to change your habits, change your friends. I couldn’t do that—to either of us. I ran the race three days later and finished second in my category, ran another two the following weekend. I am still running. The physical therapist had told me not to tell him if I continued to run, so didn’t: I canceled the follow-up appointment because I hate to disappoint. Plus, I would be too busy, running. Trying to outrun my bad back.
The post The Last Battle appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Hart Crane’s poem “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad
The post “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” by Hart Crane appeared first on The American Scholar.
I once tried to jump out of a plane. High above the Atlantic Ocean, on a commercial airliner headed to Germany in 1999, I made my way to the back exit and attempted to open the door. A flight attendant swiftly intercepted me, grabbing my hand and asking what I was doing.
“I just need to get out,” I told her.
Within seconds, I was on the floor and heard an announcement requesting a physician on board. Within minutes, I was injected with valium. Within hours, I was in an ambulance.
Mercifully, this was before 9/11, so I wasn’t immediately pegged as a prospective terrorist. Just an ethnically ambiguous madwoman in need of help. Years later, airport security would pull me aside absent any such commotion. All to ask where I was born, where my parents were born, where their parents were born, as well as their names and the names of all my grandfathers back five generations. Seething inside, I would respond softly: Chicago, Tehran, Shiraz, Jazbi, Ahmad, Muhammad, Ali, and, I don’t know, probably a lot more Muhammads and Alis before that.
But 1999 was a different millennium. So instead of being questioned, arrested, or detained, I was simply taken to the nearest emergency room after landing.
“Panic attack,” the doctor in Düsseldorf told me and my boyfriend. Being young, in a rush, and wildly in love, we required no further explanation before returning to the airport and continuing on to Rome. By some miracle of Allah or Aesculapius, the rest of our trip went off without a hitch. And to this day, I remember it fondly.
Only years later, after a bipolar diagnosis and florid psychosis, was I able to identify that alleged “panic attack” as my first serious break from reality. Because it wasn’t panic that led me to the back of that aircraft; it was delusion. I truly believed that there was nothing remotely odd about my opening an exit door midflight. I truly believed that doing so would have zero negative consequences for anyone aboard. And I truly believed that I could float out effortlessly into the ether, catch a bit of fresh air, and easily reboard without incident.
That was how delusion first eclipsed reality for me, turning an average I-just-need-to-get-out sensation into an alarming just-a-slight-pinch-now injection. Like a pebble striking a windshield, that brief delusion left an imperceptible crack. For more than a decade, it spread silently across every inch of my psyche, bit by bit, and then all at once, shattering my entire sense of self and truth. Like its milder prelude at 30,000 feet, this break also began up in the air: 20 stories high. Yet again, I was convinced I could fly. But this time, the delusion morphed and multiplied into full-blown psychosis, persuading me not only that I could float off a 20th-floor balcony, but also that I was a prophet, that my death was imminent, and that I’d just won the lottery despite never having purchased a ticket.
Tranquilizers and tiramisu couldn’t fix this. I needed Haldol and a hospital. Lucky for me, I got both—and luckier still, they worked. Or more precisely, they helped, rendering me eternally grateful. For though no cure exists for bipolar disorder at present, there are effective medications and therapies without which I’d be dead by now. That said, I’m equally grateful that my delusions have left me with a hard-won insight in their wake: reality is a gift—and it’s highly underrated.
When I say this out loud, however, I often face backlash via some version of the following: “The world is full of death, poverty, hatred, disease, and disaster. Reality is depressing and hopeless. How could you even think, let alone say, such a thing?”
My reply is consistent: “How could I not?” I know where delusion can lead us, and I promise, it’s not a place we want to go. For this terrain is toxic. The waterways are pure poison. And the air is polluted with lethal lies, divisions, and conspiracy theories. In other words, this entire ecosystem is essentially uninhabitable—and yes, it is our present day.
We are already living in a post-reality world, full of alternative facts and virtual traps. Indeed, delusion is now so rampant that many of us have unwittingly confused it for reality. Not because of clinical psychosis, but because of cyber hypnosis.
With more than four billion people now active on social media platforms, our virtual lives are beginning to devour our actual ones. As we grow more attached to corporately constructed online realities over scientifically substantiated actual ones, the truths that once united us are morphing into delusions that keep dividing us. In effect, we’re all crazy now—and we’re getting crazier.
Having lost touch with reality on several occasions, I know better than to romanticize madness. And though I acknowledge the difference between virtual reality and actual insanity, I suspect that the more time we spend in the former, the closer we’ll find ourselves to the latter. For in the absence of a shared reality, we all begin to fall apart. Physically, mentally, and spiritually, we distance ourselves from one another as we commit ever more deeply to our own varied virtual worlds. Yet being human, we still crave community. So we turn to social media because it’s easy and popular, like junk food that satiates without nourishing us.
Though not as quick or automatic, there is a healthier alternative: a shared reality too vast and sacred to fit on any screen. Just follow the soft hum of a bumblebee or the sweet pull of an ocean breeze, and you will find it. Keep going, and it will lead you to the most pristine places on our planet. Places that can inspire, heal, and resurrect us despite our hellbent impulse to destroy them. Places like northwestern Montana, where I spent a summer two decades ago, soaking in the most spectacular wilderness I’ve ever beheld. Even after a spate of devastating recent wildfires, its majestic mountains persist, propping up dazzling, albeit dwindling, glaciers that still melt into stunning waterfalls, lakes, rivers, and streams.
This is where reality can take us. To stay, however, we must resist the modern instinct to pull out our phones, to snap five or 50 photos, to crop and filter them, and to share them on Instagram. Because the minute we enter that screen, caught up in the need to project the perfect image of ourselves online, we lose track of what’s around us, and delusions can quickly creep back in. Don’t believe me? Worldwide, roughly one person a week now dies by selfie. Add distracted driving, online bullying, mass marketing, and suicide into the mix, and it’s clear that selfie-induced deaths are only the beginning.
But there’s a larger issue at play here, one that threatens entire families, communities, and even countries. When we dissolve en masse into our screens, detaching from the world around us, we don’t just endanger life and limb. We also endanger the same essential instinct that led us to social media in the first place: the human longing to connect—with one another, with nature, with love. Often, in our well-meaning attempts to casually connect with acquaintances online, we end up failing to connect with the people, places, and pursuits we cherish most. Surely, plenty of positive connections exist on social media. But deeper connection requires focused time, presence, and attention—all of which such platforms tend to disrupt.
That said, many of us have legitimate reasons to stay on social media, which allows people to easily keep up with faraway friends and family, maintain professional networks and get jobs, find lost pets, connect with blood and organ donors, stay informed about local events, and much more. I, however, have no good reasons left to stay, which is why—after more than 15 years on these platforms, carefully cultivating digital avatars I thought mattered and could help me make a difference in the world—I finally deleted all of my social media accounts at the end of last year. Not for a week or a month or a year, but for good.
In the end, I scrapped these services because they no longer served me. Although, looking back, I’m not sure they ever did. The only reason I stuck with them for so long was because I truly believed that the benefits outweighed the harms. I was wrong in so many ways.
First and foremost, I naïvely believed that social media could facilitate the functioning of global democracy. Hence, my use of it—Twitter especially—skyrocketed during Iran’s 2009 Green Movement and the ensuing Arab Spring. As an Iranian, a Muslim, a woman, an activist, and a resident of this planet, I had high hopes for those movements. But few panned out. Still, I kept faith in the positive power of social media.
So when the massive, women-led protests in Iran began last September—sparked by the death of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, while in police custody for allegedly wearing her hijab “improperly”—I again turned to social media. Not just to follow and shine a light on events in Iran, but also to show support for Iranians on the ground.
Nevertheless, the regime has continued to beat, detain, rape, torture, and execute its own citizens simply for demanding their basic human rights. Certainly, social media can be a powerful tool in helping dissidents disseminate facts and footage from the ground, assuming Internet access even exists. Still, these corporate platforms are not replacements for skilled journalism, as they carry an unconscionably high risk (and documented history) of misinformation and disinformation alike. Worse yet, their profit-driven business models tend to prioritize engagement over decency.
Facebook’s own leaked internal research, from a 2018 presentation, found that the its algorithms “exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and warned that “unchecked,” they would promote “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” This has serious consequences for a world increasingly susceptible to polarization and nationalization. Considering the devastating contemporary conflicts in the United States, Myanmar, India, the Central African Republic, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and beyond, it seems that social media companies are tearing us apart at least as much as they’re bringing us together.
So understandably, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have not freed Iran, and they never will. Only Iranians inside Iran can do that. And they need more than posts or tweets. They need solid reporting, Internet access, and funding to organize and survive. This means that the United States must maintain sanctions on the brutal Iranian regime while ending the convoluted sanctions that effectively make it impossible for many of us in the diaspora and beyond to transfer funds to those on the frontlines of the fight for a free Iran. It also means that Western countries ought to welcome Iranian refugees with the same urgency and empathy they’ve extended to Ukrainian ones.
But social media companies can’t lift sanctions or grant asylum or outlaw discrimination against non-European refugees. Only governments can do that. Americans can help by contacting our representatives directly and respectfully, as well as by running for office ourselves. As cathartic as it may feel, insulting government officials on Twitter isn’t civic engagement. It isn’t activism or even slacktivism. It’s performative outrage, virtue signaling, and a waste of precious time and energy. Yet we keep falling for it. Because social media companies have brilliantly engineered their platforms to deliver addictive, intermittent dopamine hits that allow us to confuse followers for friends, retweets for recognition, and likes for love.
This brings me to the most embarrassing reason I stayed on social media for so long: ego. I genuinely believed that my posts, tweets, likes, and retweets and the blue check mark on my account actually meant something, that all the followers I’d amassed proved that I was worthy and important. I also embraced the delusion that social media was vital to my personal and professional success as a writer and activist. Without it, I was sure I’d miss out on parties, protests, and publishing contracts. Yet an honest accounting forced me to admit that my ability to party, protest, and publish has been far more enfeebled than enabled by social media. In short, I haven’t built my career on posts, tweets, and feeds. I’ve built it on books, essays, and speeches. And I haven’t built my strongest communities on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I’ve built them on porches, around firepits, and under the stars.
Still, when a publicist at a publishing house pressured me to join Instagram and Pinterest several years ago, I caved. I figured that if she thought it was important, then she must know something I didn’t. But even massive social media followings don’t necessarily translate into book sales. And there’s no clear-cut evidence that social media actually drives them.
Ultimately, my Instagram and Pinterest presence did far less to boost sales of my latest book than a single essay I wrote for The New York Times or a single message I sent out to my mailing list. But my publisher’s marketing and publicity team was so busy ordering interns to craft tiny squares of digital clip art for both platforms that they neither leveraged that mailing list nor helped place that essay. I did both on my own. Because for me, succeeding as a writer has had nothing to do with Instagram or Pinterest and everything to do with, well, writing.
To be fair, surviving has also played a big part, given my brain’s propensity to turn on me. As someone living with a bipolar diagnosis who has spent more than a decade writing and speaking about mental health, I’ve learned firsthand how social media can impair it. And I’m not alone. Researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Leuven in Belgium have found that Facebook use predicts diminished subjective well-being among young adults. More recently, economists at MIT, Tel Aviv University, and Bocconi University in Milan found that the introduction of Facebook at 775 American colleges, between 2004 and 2006, resulted in significant detrimental effects on student mental health. In fact, we’ve known about the varied negative health outcomes associated with social media use for years now.
Regardless of our psychological baselines, these platforms are built to mess with our heads. Even so, this emerging evidence, horrifying and compelling as it was, didn’t convince me to quit social media. I’m not nearly that rational. In the end, it took something far less scientific and far more prosaic to come to my senses: a single encounter IRL, sort of.
On a recent transcontinental flight, I sat next to a digital native with whom I exchanged zero words. To my left sat the same man who’d joined me on that foreboding flight to Düsseldorf, my then-boyfriend and now-husband of more than 20 years.
Just after takeoff, he nudged me from the aisle, tilting his head toward our seatmate at the window. “Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock …” he whispered at a frenzied pace as we watched this teenage girl scroll through her TikTok feed faster than our Xennial minds could interpret anything coherent.
She couldn’t have been more than 16, and she spent that entire five-hour flight in a trance. She refused soda and snacks and didn’t once get up or even change position (legs-crossed, head bent over her phone). She certainly didn’t lunge toward the literal exits like I had done nearly a quarter-century before. No doctors were called. No valium was dispensed. No ambulances were summoned.
By all accounts, this child was the modern picture of sanity—and that, it turns out, was the final straw for me. Not the sum total of all of the aforementioned research and realizations, but this total stranger.
“Remember how our parents told us that television would rot our brains?” I asked my husband without waiting for an answer. “This must be a million times worse. How can this not be rotting her brain? I can barely stand to watch for more than a few seconds. How is this entertaining for her?”
“It’s a different generation,” he responded, looking up from his copy of The Three-Body Problem. “Their brains can take it. Our brains didn’t rot on television. Hers won’t rot on TikTok.”
But I wasn’t convinced. I was sure my brain had rotted at least a little on account of all the bad television I’d viewed in my 43 years on earth. And something about what was happening right next to me felt even more insidious. So much so that instead of finishing Judith Grisel’s Never Enough, as I’d anticipated upon boarding, I spent the entire flight pondering what this scene portended for the future of our species. When we landed, I held no answers. I had, however, made a decision: I was done with social media.
When I deleted my Facebook account soon after that flight, I had hundreds of unread messages and unanswered friend requests. They’d been there for years, haunting me daily, because as a vocal mental health advocate, I knew that dozens of those messages were likely from strangers who should’ve been contacting a psychiatrist, not a bipolar memoirist. Nonetheless, I answered a lot of those messages over the years, offering words of support and lists of resources that were readily available—no doubt, in more articulate renderings—within books and essays I’d already published. Because I’m a writer, not a therapist or a professional pen pal. And in the long run, I am most useful to myself and my readers when I am writing for all of us.
What’s more, I’m not serving anyone by reading the countless bigoted missives I’ve grown so accustomed to receiving on social media. No one has ever threatened to rape or kill me in person, or even via phone or snail mail for that matter. But several unscrupulous souls (or bots, for all I know) have readily done so online. In all, I’ve never faced even a tiny fraction of the hostility in real life that I’ve faced on social media simply for being a woman, let alone a Muslim or an Iranian. I don’t think this is because people are kinder IRL than URL; I think it’s because they’re better. Our virtual selves may be the most filtered and photoshopped versions of our physical forms, but let’s face it, they can also reflect the most repugnant and revolting versions of our spiritual ones. So while choosing reality over delusion may make us seem more homely and humdrum, it can also make us more honest and humane. Or at least that’s what I hope.
Whatever the case, reality is still out here, free for everyone to reclaim and enjoy. But we must be willing to part with delusion first. I don’t say this as some luddite or technophobe. Having grown up in the ’80s and ’90s, I belong to the last generation of digital immigrants born before the Internet. Despite lacking access to it as children, we came of age right alongside it. I am still in awe of its power. I still love what it can do for us. I still delight in using it nearly every day. But I refuse to let its social media platforms hijack any more of my time, attention, or sanity.
Given that these apps are designed to be addictive, deleting my accounts felt understandably disconcerting at first—especially as most services made me wait at least 30 days until I could fully abandon them. Meanwhile, they constantly tried to lure me back, even nudging me to log into countless other sites through theirs during these mandatory waiting periods. Of course, if I fell for it, I’d have been forced to start all over, deleting the accounts again and entering a whole new waiting period. If anything, this barrage of enticement just strengthened my resolve to quit by confirming what I suspected all along: I’d been performing free labor for these corporations from the start. Upon realizing this, my initial discomfort and anxiety (dare I say, withdrawal) evolved into a strong sense of relief and serenity. I began to better attend to the needs of myself and the world around me. I took my first extended vacation in three years, engaged more with my friends and family, connected more with members of my community, explored the outdoors more. I walked more, prayed more, rested more, read more, wrote more, loved more, lived more.
If we truly want to thrive in a state of wonder, devotion, and joy, then we must not escape the world. We must reenter and reclaim it for ourselves. Such a mass reunion with reality won’t demand the demise of social media as much as it will require the rise of social awareness.
Because these platforms aren’t just distracting us; they’re dividing us. With outrage, hostility, and polarization driving higher user engagement, retention, and revenue, the attention economy has little incentive to factor humanity into its algorithms.
So it’s up to us to decide who we interact with social media, taking our own values, strengths, and vulnerabilities into account. Personally, I no longer trust my brain under the influence of these algorithms. Steadier minds may do perfectly fine under their spell, easily returning to reality without quitting social media entirely. Just not me. I needed to get out.
The post Deleting Delusions appeared first on The American Scholar.
Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict by Oren Kessler; Rowan & Littlefield, 334 pp., $26.95
The broad outline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is well known: with the collapse of the Ottoman empire after the First World War, the new League of Nations granted Britain a mandate to govern Palestine, and to implement the 1917 Balfour Declaration’s call for the creation “of a national home for the Jewish people.” The Holocaust, in turn, led to founding of the state of Israel in 1947, followed two decades later by the Six-Day War, which ended with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and a cycle of violence that continues today. But according to former Jerusalem Post and Haaretz journalist Oren Kessler’s refreshingly unbiased and captivating new book, Palestine 1936, a crucial episode is missing from this narrative: the Great Arab Revolt, described by as “Palestine’s first Arab rebellion, a seminal, three-year uprising a decade before Israel’s birth that cast the mold for the Jewish-Arab encounter ever since.”
It began with a gentrification problem.
The Jewish presence in Palestine during the five-century Ottoman occupation was comprised mostly of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle-East; only a small number were Ashkenazi, or European Jews. Yet beginning in the late 19th century, as anti-Semitic pogroms and policies gripped Europe, Ashkenazim began trickling into Palestine. After the British mandate began, the trickle became a flow. These mostly German and Eastern European Jews bought property from the elite landowning Palestinian families and began “making the desert bloom,” as the saying goes, developing productive agricultural, economic, and educational systems previously absent from the area.
Meanwhile, many Muslim Palestinians looked around at the growing and thriving Jewish population and realized that if the trend continued, they would become a marginalized minority in their own land. After all, weren’t they, too, promised self-determination and independence by the British? And so, understandably frustrated with a lack of options, Muslim Palestinians rebelled.
The Great Revolt itself didn’t begin until 1936, but Kessler details earlier incidences of Arab violence against Jewish Palestinians. There were mob-fueled riots in 1920, 1921, and again in 1929, when, on a single day, 67 Jews were killed in Hebron alone. But it was not until April 19, 1936, known as “The Bloody Day in Jaffa,” that the British realized that the problem was getting out of control. Desperate, they produced the Peel Report, which first presented the idea of partition, better known as the two-state solution. Soon after, an irrigation expert named Douglas Gordon Harris took a green marker to a map and divided Mandate Palestine in two. Most leaders around the world did not like this idea of partition but acknowledged that it had the best chance of stopping the cycle of violence. Some foresaw the disaster it would bring: as British diplomat George Rendel wrote at the time, “Are we not, then, by creating this little Jewish state, simply placing on the coast of Asia a kind of time-bomb, which must inevitably explode?”
Muslim Palestinians, furious at the idea of an independent Jewish state, launched a general strike in protest. Under the guidance of exiled Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, they boycotted any negotiations with the British, much less Jewish leaders, and assassinated any “traitors” who dissented. The strike and boycotts were accompanied by regular attacks on Jewish civilians and British police, as well as spontaneous riots. In response, the British imprisoned hundreds of Palestinians and razed dozens of Palestinian homes. As historian Matthew Hughes points out Britain’s Pacification of Palestine (2019), Israel’s present-day practices in the West Bank are simply inherited from Britain’s “systematic, systemic, officially sanctioned policy of destruction, punishment, reprisal, and brutality that fractured and impoverished the Palestinian population.”
Despite such punishments, Muslim Palestinians kept up their revolt for three years. Granted, the unrest persuaded Britain to promise lower Jewish immigration numbers, but the violence destroyed the Palestinians’ economy and gave them a reputation for being incapable of political negotiation. As British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain noted: “I see no light. The Jews as far as I can judge are behaving admirably [and] most reasonably & pathetically patient in the face of brutal realities. The Arabs on the other hand are intransigent, unfair, prejudiced and unreliable.”
Kessler’s account of the Great Revolt’s cycle of violence reads like doomscrolling, with one atrocious event following another. What’s clear from his book is that most Muslim Palestinians did not understand that, for the Jews, the conflict was existential. That Europeans were persecuting Jewish people, moreover, wasn’t the fault of the Arabs. And although the Jews understood that the Arabs would not happily give up their land, they likewise felt that they had no choice but to carve a Jewish sovereign state out of Palestine, even if that meant suffering continued attacks. On the eve of the Great Revolt, David Ben-Gurion—the socialist leader of the Yishuv, the nascent Jewish nation—told George Antonius (whom Kessler calls “Arab Palestine’s most gifted man”) that “if the choice were between pogroms in Poland and Germany and pogroms in the Land of Israel, he would choose the latter.”
In the 1920s and ’30s, Ben-Gurion promoted a policy of havlagah, or self-restraint in response to attacks, which earned respect abroad. As a result, the British allowed the Yishuv to form the Haganah, or defensive forces, though it remained one of the community’s least developed institutions. But as the violence of the Great Revolt dragged on, the British facilitated the training and arming of Jews on a large scale, and the Haganah “transformed from a loose confederation of local night-watchmen to a unified, mobile, countrywide Jewish paramilitary, and one increasingly willing to pursue the enemy.” By 1938, the Haganah had 25,000 members. Combined with the creation of the Irgun, the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Yishuv began fighting back—and the country plunged into chaos.
By mid-1939, Franco had conquered Spain, and Hitler was about to invade Poland. Out of a strategic cynicism, Britain determined it needed to appease the Arab nations, for fear they might side with the fascists. Thus, in what the Jewish Agency, an organization dedicated to bringing European Jewry to Palestine, considered a “surrender to Arab terrorism,” London issued the MacDonald White Paper, which essentially closed Jewish immigration to Palestine, rescinded the Balfour Declaration, and abandoned the two-state solution.
The Great Revolt, it seemed, had paid off.
Six nightmare years later, however, the systematic murder of six million Jews necessitated the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. On November 29, 1947, after Palestinian Jews had launched their own revolt, the United Nations partitioned Palestine into two states, according to Harris’s Green Line. Immediately, British-backed Muslim Palestinians and five neighboring Arab states attacked Israel. Incredibly, Israeli forces fought off the siege and secured the newborn state’s existence. Yet Kessler asserts that this outcome was inevitable. As he writes, the reality was “that the Arabs of Palestine had effectively already lost the war, and with it most of the country, a decade in advance.” This is what has been overlooked by the countless books about the 1947–1949 war. The Great Revolt, writes Kessler,
had left Palestine’s Arabs mortally wounded for the decisive contest with Zionism that awaited after peace. Tens of thousands were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. The political, business, and landed elite were profoundly divided; internecine feuding had riven virtually every town and village. The economy was in ruins, but worse, so too was national morale.
Moreover, the Israeli army was able to plow through the Arab forces only because of the fighting experience it gained during the Great Revolt.
These insights aren’t necessarily unique to Kessler; he refers to Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi’s conclusion that the Great Revolt made the Nakba (Catastrophe) “a foregone conclusion.” Even so, Palestine 1936 provides a revealing understanding of the origin of today’s Israel-Palestine conflict—it also makes the situation seem all the more impossible to untangle.
The post From Mandate to Nation State appeared first on The American Scholar.
We first spoke to Marion Turner, an English professor at Oxford University, in 2019, about her award-winning biography of Geoffrey Chaucer. In her latest book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography, Turner paints an unconventional portrait of Chaucer’s most famous—and clearly favorite—character: a bawdy, middle-aged, middle-class woman of multiple marriages. Alison of Bath is but one of the pilgrims Chaucer gathers around the table in his Canterbury Tales, but she is the only one to have inspired everyone from Shakespeare to James Joyce to Zadie Smith—and an equal number of misogynist critics, whether they were writing on vellum or in a 20th-century academic journal. Turner joins us on the podcast to discuss the Wife of Bath in her time and beyond, and why her voice still rings out with such force today.
Go beyond the episode:
- Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: A Biography
- Listen to our previous interview with Turner about Geoffrey Chaucer’s life
- Watch Jean “Binta” Breeze perform her adaptation of Chaucer’s tale, “The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market”
- Read Zadie Smith’s play, The Wife of Willesden (which you can see performed this month with its original star if you happen to find yourself in Cambridge, Massachusetts)
- Read Patience Agbabi’s poem “The Wife of Bafa” or watch her perform it at the modern version of the Tabard Inn—a brewery
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
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In January 2020, in a remote, arid corner of southwestern Rajasthan, I was squeezed in the back seat of a Toyota SUV with my five-year-old son and Prachi and Prince Ranawat, a sister and brother, ages 23 and 18, from a dot of a town called Parsad. On a motorcycle, their father, Gajeraj Ranawat, followed. The driver propelled us along a parched roadway overgrown with candelabra cactus and bougainvillea, its pink and white flowers covered with dust. Sprays of yellow oleander spilled onto our path, and the screeches of langur monkeys echoed in the distance.
The family was leading me to a temple complex that once sheltered the so-called Tanesar sculptures, a set of 12 or more stone figures dating to the sixth century. Naturalistic, slender, luminously jadelike, and around two feet high, most of the sculptures depict mother goddesses (matrikas), with some holding a small child. Attendant male deities were also part of the set. According to art historians, the Tanesar figures were sculpted by an itinerant artisan guild as a form of patronage to local rulers. The sculptures were associated with fertility, but they were also linked with terrifying aspects of the all-encompassing mother goddess Devi in her manifestations as Kali and others—dangerous, destructive yoginis whose power eclipsed that of all the male Hindu gods combined. Over time, fearful villagers buried the sculptures in a field, hoping to contain their energy. But later, when the sculptures were feared no more, they were dug up and dragged to a small shrine to Shiva. There they were given pride of place in an enclosure to the side of the structure. At some point in their history, the figures became focal points for tantric prayer, with worshippers seeking a disintegration of the physical self to meld into universal consciousness.
For many years, the Tanesar sculptures remained an integral part of local religious life—unknown to anyone else. But around 1957, a prominent archaeologist in Rajasthan discovered the figures and then published an article about them in an Indian art history journal, making an inner circle of Indian and Western art historians aware of their existence. What followed was a story all too familiar in the world of art and antiquities: sometime around 1961, most of the Tanesar sculptures were stolen. From what I’ve been able to piece together, they were smuggled across the countryside, down to what was then Bombay, across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic—to Liverpool and then New York. The American art dealer Doris Wiener, who ran a gallery on Madison Avenue, had a hand in the export of several of them. Another landed at the British Museum through a separate channel.
Very soon, the mid-century art world became enchanted with the sculptures. Art dealers, collectors, and museum directors eyed their potential worth. In 1967 and after, Wiener sold six or more sculptures from the set, for the equivalent of $80,000 each in today’s dollars, to curators and collectors who had more than an inkling of the dubious circumstances of the objects’ traffic. She sold one to Blanchette and John D. Rockefeller III and another to the Cleveland Museum of Art. The others passed from hand to hand before arriving at the world’s most revered collections of South Asian art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Mother Goddess (Matrika), previously on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seized in the fall of 2022 by the office of the Manhattan DA. (Courtesy of the author)
On August 30, 2022, the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, issued a search warrant for one of the sculptures, called Mother Goddess (Matrika). At the time, it stood on a pedestal in the coolly lit gallery 236 of the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing at the Met. The sculpture was seized, part of a sweeping sting targeting works acquired by Wiener as long as 60 years ago. Over the past decade, more than 4,500 allegedly trafficked antiquities have been confiscated by the office of the Manhattan DA. Instrumental in this work has been Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine colonel who led a government investigation into the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003. Of those antiquities recovered by the Manhattan DA, nearly half have been returned to 24 countries of origin, with India receiving the largest share.
So many sculptures seized and sent home, each with its own story. It can be hard to see why any one of those stories matters in the particular. The repatriated artifacts are not as well known as the Benin Bronzes, for example, plundered from West Africa by British colonists, or the Parthenon marbles, removed by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s and now on display at the British Museum. They are not symbols of empire, nor are they the spoils of war. Rather, they are emblems of something more banal and arguably more pernicious—the practice of mid-century antiquities looting that took place on such a scale that it infected nearly every gallery of Asian art in the West.
The way forward is neither clear nor simple. In the fall of 2022, Mother Goddess (Matrika) lay in a crate in the Manhattan DA’s overstuffed storage facility while the search continued for each of the Tanesar sculptures sold through Wiener’s gallery in the late 1960s. Mother Goddess (Matrika) and at least four more deities from the set remain in legal limbo as lawyers for the Met and other American museums raise questions about who owned the sculptures at the time they were acquired by Wiener, and whether they really did belong to the temple at the time of their theft.
One of the Tanesar figures, the sculpture purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, is still on display there. Others remain, for the moment, in the custody of LACMA and the Allen Museum at Oberlin College. Beyond the purview of the U.S. legal apparatus, the Tanesar goddess at the British Museum currently resides among the dutifully cataloged collection of nearly eight million objects not on view because of space limitations.
The sculptures may languish in this liminal state—crated, underground, or imprisoned in storage—but then, the liminal is where the Tanesar goddesses have existed for many years.
In 2020, I was a Fulbright scholar living in the city of Ahmedabad. I’d been researching the story of the Tanesar sculptures, having chosen the case because it involved one of the few thefts where published photographs linked looted artifacts housed in Western museums to a specific origin site. I was drawn to the beatific, yet unfussy artworks—though it was only later, as I traveled across three continents to see seven of the sculptures in person, that I fell in love with them.
Serendipitously, I received a text that same morning from my friend Abhi Sangani, an art historian in Ahmedabad, who’d gotten a tip from his cigarette vendor with the approximate location of the temple.In art history texts, the village of Tanesar was said to lie in the steep hillsides between the cities of Dungarpur and Udaipur, along the border of southern Rajasthan and Gujarat state. No map showed a place called Tanesar or, as it sometimes appeared in museum catalogs, Tanesara Mahadeva. News articles were of little help. A few articles in the Indian press and a 2007 piece in The New Yorker mentioned Tanesar, but only as a footnote in a seemingly unrelated story—that of the smuggler Vaman Ghiya and his arrest. As far as I could tell, no journalist or academic researcher had visited the site since the middle of the last century.
The place to start was Dungarpur. On the taxi ride from Ahmedabad, my son and I encountered a landscape where algae-rich stripes of sedimentary stone—black, charcoal, green, and blue—shone in the roadcuts. The stone industry continues to thrive in this part of northwestern India, the source of building materials, sculptures, and architectural decorations. Quarry shops sold the blue-green schist known locally as pareva, and trucks rumbled by, carrying cubes of marblelike stone.
The next morning, at a hotel in Dungarpur, the concierge told me that his in-laws happened to worship at the temple I was looking for. He put me in touch with his brother-in-law Gajeraj Ranawat. Serendipitously, I received a text that same morning from my friend Abhi Sangani, an art historian in Ahmedabad, who’d gotten a tip from his cigarette vendor with the approximate location of the temple.
This is how we ended up in the back seat of that Toyota SUV. And it was during that journey with the Ranawat family that I finally understood why finding the temple site had been so difficult. As I traced the turns of the road on my phone’s maps app, the coordinates for a temple came into view. I zoomed in. Taneeshwar Madahav Tample, the map read in English, a clumsy transliteration of the Hindi phrase beneath it: Taneshwar Mahadev Mandir. The photograph linked to the map showed the temple entryway, with its name in Devanagari script visible in blue lettering—Taneshwar Mahadev. Having studied Sanskrit and yoga philosophy, I knew that Taneshwar (or, given the conventions of Hindi and Sanskrit, Tanesvar, Tanesvara, or Taneshwara) means “Shiva” and that the phrase Taneshwar Mahadev translates to “the lord Shiva, Shiva who is the greatest god.”
Therein lay the answer to the first mystery of this tale: Tanesar was a temple, not a village. Imagine if someone had named New York City “Beth El” because of the synagogue on East 86th Street. No wonder journalists never reported firsthand from the Taneshwar Mahadev temple. If they’d been looking, they would have been searching for a village that did not exist. It’s quite possible, of course, that no other outsider had ever tried to find “Tanesar” village. After all, asking exactly how a smuggled object reached an esteemed gallery in a Western museum was not common practice until recently.
Now, after parking off the jagged road, we passed a row of stalls selling items for worship—coconuts, incense, matches, squares of metal foil, rectangles of red nylon mesh trimmed with gold thread—and followed a grand stairway up to a temple plaza. Revelers in brightly colored saris danced in a circle while men played drums and long-necked, stringed gourds. Incense and oils released a sticky, noisome odor. Smoke filled the air, and langur monkeys leapt between temple structures, with the Shisha mountain rising behind them. A priest in a white tunic and flowing dhoti pants chanted in Sanskrit and led the worshippers in a fire ceremony meant to bring auspicious energies from the planets.
Ratna Chandra Agrawala devoted his life to the study of Indian art and artifacts. In the 1950s, he came across the Tanesar matrikas during an exploration of southwestern Rajasthan. (From Ratna-Chandrika: Panorama of Oriental Studies)
As several villagers gathered around us, my son went off to play, jumping from the retaining walls separating the plaza and the stalls and poking a stick into a warm spring that trickled down from the mountainside to the plaza. Then, with Prachi Ranawat translating, the villagers began telling me about the statues’ theft. Everyone, it seemed, knew a version of the story, which had been passed down from parents and grandparents. According to one account, a temple guard awoke one morning to discover that most of the sculptures had been spirited away in the deep of night. Alternatively, a white car arrived in the dark and took the sculptures away. Or a madman came and stole the sculptures. Or a man known to villagers by the nickname Kadva Baba came and spoke to the priest in private; money was exchanged, and shortly afterward, the sculptures were taken away. The oral history of the temple may have recorded many possible scenarios, but certain facts remained constant. Temple lootings were common in the area at the time. And although villagers often reported the thefts, police rarely recovered the loot.
I heard a great deal that day about how important the sculptures were to local life. “If someone didn’t have a child,” one person said, “they worshipped the goddesses so they could have one. If someone was suffering from a disease, they also worshipped the goddesses.” Another offered that worshipping the goddesses could bring a male child. The temple itself had been the site of a famous miracle, others said, a legend I heard about in greater detail on one of my later visits. A priest would tell me a version of the famous story of Surabhi, a cow that would wander off from its home every day and come home dry. Surabhi’s owner, angry that someone was apparently stealing his milk, secretly followed the cow to the temple, where he watched as its teats released a flood of milk onto the ground. This it had been doing every day, he learned. Later, a statue materialized on that very spot, an emanation of Lord Shiva. “That was how everyone knew that the temple was magical,” the priest explained. And in the same storytelling voice, he said, “Thirty-five years ago, a goddess statue was stolen from here. Now, the government is going to send her back.”
One thing was certain: the temple community would settle for no compensation, monetary or otherwise, in lieu of the sculptures’ return.
In the middle of the 20th century, Ratna Chandra Agrawala was the foremost archaeologist in the state of Rajasthan. He was the author of more than 400 essays and articles, many punctilious in their detail. His life’s work as a scholar and as director of museums and archaeology for the state led him to register art objects, preserve many of them in two regional government museums that he founded and managed, and argue for their importance in Indian and international arts journals. There was nothing shoddy about his work.
Born in 1926, Agrawala trained as an archaeologist in pre-independence India. In 1946, he worked on the dig that uncovered parts of the Indus Valley site of Harappa, in what is now Pakistan. Art historians who knew Agrawala during the following decades remember his utter devotion to Indian art history and his palpable joy when asked to discuss this subject, still underappreciated in the 1960s and ’70s. In one photograph, Agrawala appears in the garb of India’s educated elite of the era, wearing a Nehru jacket and thick-framed glasses and sporting a trim, narrow mustache. His thinness accentuates an intent expression in his eyes, in which I imagine—perhaps because I’ve researched his background—a hint of both pain and triumph.
Around 1957, during what Agrawala described as “exploratory tours in the regions of Udaipur and Dungarpur,” he encountered the Tanesar sculptures. For Agrawala, the artworks possessed a pleasing dissonance, with their classical proportions, indigenous features, and the sparest of religious accoutrements. They immediately won his adoration. In 1959, he described what he had found in the Indian journal Lalit Kala. In 1961, Agrawala published a second article in Lalit Kala discussing the sculptures’ art historical importance. Included were photographs of 10 of the sculptures snapped outdoors near the temple. Leaning on rocks, the gods and goddesses resemble crime victims. They are encrusted with dirt and an unguent mix of substances related to worship, which likely included milk, ghee, vermilion, and ash. Agrawala stated that the sculptures were currently being used for worship (“under worship” was the phrase he used). He went on to lament that the sculptures “remain completely besmeared with red lead and oil. It is therefore not possible to clean them for study.”
A third article appeared in the French journal Arts Asiatiques in 1965. Here, Agrawala published photos of an additional sculpture and more fully described the artworks and their material, the luminous blue-green schist. One of the pieces, he wrote, “presents a lady with her head bent in a graceful pose. This is unique in Indian Art. She puts on the typical sārī and the scarf is appearing on her right arm. The facial expression here is extremely elegant and so also is the case with round ear-lobes, single beaded necklace, broad face, robust breasts, etc.” He declared the sculpture to be “a piece of superb workmanship,” adding, as an aside, “the hair decoration is equally charming therein.”
The 1959 article identified the temple as Tanesara-Mahādeva and its location as being near the village of “Parsada,” a Sanskritized version of Parsad. Agrawala didn’t mention Parsada in his 1961 article, though he did cite his first article in the footnotes. But by the time the sculptures had arrived in the West, it was the 1961 article, not the original publication, that was the standard source on the subject, the primary bibliographic reference for authors of museum catalogs. This is how Parsada got dropped from the record, replaced by the fictional Tanesar.
But why didn’t Western museums track down Agrawala’s primary source material? One day, I arrayed before myself, in chronological order, each bibliographic reference to the Tanesar artworks from 1959 through the 1980s, hoping to understand how this scholarly laziness had occurred. The first mention of the sculptures in an American publication appeared in a 1971 issue of the Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin of Oberlin College. That issue was devoted to an exhibition of works belonging to a prominent collector and Oberlin alum, Paul F. Walter. Among the artworks that Walter had recently donated to the Allen Museum was Deva, a Tanesar sculpture featuring a lithe young man with a serene, transported expression, carved from the blue schist.
One of the essays in the Bulletin, written by the art historian Pratapaditya Pal, curator of Indian art at LACMA, described five sculptures from the Tanesar set that Wiener had acquired and then sold to prominent American curators and collectors. This included images of an additional sculpture, bringing the total number documented in photographs to 12. The essay, a tour de force in interpretive writing, marked the sculptures’ entrée, like debutantes, into a larger art historical conversation beyond the limited audience of India’s rarefied Lalit Kala.
Pal’s elegiac descriptions explored theories regarding the identities of the gods and goddesses, their art historical connection to other artworks from nearby sites and distant centers of artmaking during the fourth- to-sixth-century Gupta Empire, and the trope of the mother in South Asian art. “Each of the pieces magically seems to have captured, as in a candid snapshot, a fleeting moment of joy and playfulness,” he wrote. The matrika in the Cleveland Museum of Art “appears to be smiling as she tries to restrain her child. This sense of radiant motherhood is more explicitly expressed in these matrikas from Tanesara than in any other Indian sculptures.” Deva had “the physical properties of a human being,” and its face evoked “supra-human serenity and compassion.”
The Taneshwar Mahadev temple complex, where the sculptures had been housed. Local residents tell several versions of the story of how the figures were stolen. (Courtesy of the author)
The problem was, for all the flourishes of Pal’s lushly detailed and celebratory narrative style, the essay was also riddled with mistakes. It incorrectly identified the “Tanesara-Mahadeva” temple as a village (with a footnote erroneously ascribing that detail to Agrawala’s 1961 article). The name of the famous regional rock was changed from pareva to pavena. And the name of a sister site that Agrawala had also explored morphed within the article from Kalyanpura to Kotyarka. These mistakes and others subsequently appeared in later works of scholarship.
It seemed odd that the editors didn’t catch these lapses. But when I read the introduction to that issue of the Bulletin, I realized that a general romantic sensibility had prevailed over the mundane requirements of scholarly fidelity. “To Western ears,” wrote Richard Spear, the Allen Museum director, “Bhagavata Purana, Ramayana and Ragamala are strange sounds, as remote as Malwa, Hyderabad and Jaipur.” “Tanesar” was not a place where people lived and worshipped but a fanciful, fairy-tale locale. Further embroidering this theme of exotic-domestic interplay, Spear described Walter, the collector and donor, as someone who was “as likely to be met in the studio of a young artist in lower Manhattan or a London auction of Whistler etchings as in the Doris Wiener Gallery of Indian Art.” The relationships between dealer, collector, and museum curator were cozy enough to completely subsume any question of how the artworks were attained.
The fairy-tale atmosphere also created an illusion of buyer innocence. It was all too common in mid-century America to deflect blame from those who acquired artworks that had been purloined by shady dealers. A charade of not knowing the specifics of any origin site insulated those at the top of the antiquities trafficking chain—the Rockefellers, respected collectors, and museum curators who had purchased or accepted the sculptures as donations. Even today, this false ignorance prevails, in spite of its illogic. “If you didn’t legitimately acquire the property in the first place, you can’t pass on title,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Bogdanos told me. “A stolen object never reacquires goodness. Once stolen, always stolen.”
Clockwise from top left: Tanesar matrikas in the collections of the British Museum, the National Museum in New Delhi, Oberlin College, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Courtesy of the author)
By drawing attention to the Tanesar artworks, Ratna Chandra Agrawala—no matter how noble his motives—ended up contributing to their theft. He was part of a nationalistic movement, just a decade after Indian independence, to increase global recognition for indigenous statuary. This mission was shared by the editors of the Bombay-based journal Marg, which in 1959 cited Agrawala among the Western and Indian art historians and archaeologists who inspired the “intelligentsia” and “men and women of culture” to appreciate “the remarkable tradition of carving which has miraculously survived in Rajasthan.” The editors also “earnestly appeal[ed] to the archaeologists” to “accord proper display” and facilitate “direct contact with the unknown masterpieces.” Agrawala did this, in part, by relocating two of the Tanesar sculptures to his government museum in Udaipur.
Today, these remain in the Indian government’s custody, displayed in underwhelming circumstances that would surely rankle Agrawala’s ghost. One is easy to miss, in a busy section of hallway at the National Museum in New Delhi, crowded between a potted plant and an exit sign. The day I visited, crowds of chattering secondary students in government school uniforms raced past, oblivious of the goddess. The other matrika, more dispiritingly, resides at an Udaipur government gallery, in a desolate room that is often closed to the public. When I finally managed to get in, the lights didn’t work, and chipmunks were scampering along the rafters. The matrika stood behind a case so rarely dusted that I could barely read the identifying label through the glass. But when I was able to make it out, I saw that the label had been swapped with that of a nearby sculpture from a different site. If Agrawala might have frowned at this sad scene, he also may have worn a small smile, knowing that the sculptures had been kept safe from looters all these years. Here the matrikas rested, ready for future generations—perhaps even those scores of secondary students in New Delhi—to embrace the appreciation of Indian art that he and his cohort had worked so hard to instill during the 1950s and ’60s.
Agrawala, at the time, surely knew that the nationalist push for art appreciation was indirectly encouraging the activities of looters, and the 1960s would indeed witness a frenzied black market targeting the newly recognized statuary. “There was a sense that if you got it into a museum, at least you were protecting it from some of the thieves,” said Padma Kaimal, Batza Family Chair in Art History at Colgate University and author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis, about a set of sculptures exported from southern India in the late 1920s. “The atmosphere was Wild West, help yourself. It was really difficult to protect the art.” Agrawala, she speculated, probably “saw these amazing pieces, really admired them, and knew how vulnerable they were.”
By the time my son and I were traveling in India in 2020, evidence of that rapacious mid-century market, of pillage, was everywhere. Whether touring little-known ruins or UNESCO World Heritage sites, my son got in the habit of playing a fun scavenger hunt game. He ran from niche to niche pointing out places where sublime figures of gods and goddesses were no longer extant. “Missing!” he declared to the local day-trippers. They were nonplussed. It had been decades, after all, since India had suffered a wholesale theft of its heritage.
Starting in the late 1950s, police began to find dust-covered, sumptuous artworks on the dirt floors of godowns. This Indo-Portuguese borrowing from the 16th-century spice trade refers to warehouses and the objects bound for export within. The objects discovered in a Gujarati cache in 1959 lay “in pitiable disarray,” one art historian reported. In 1968, police confiscated seven museum-quality stone sculptures from a godown in Bombay. Officials were able to arrest a driver and his accomplice, but the vandals jumped bail. After spending several months trying to locate the sculptures’ origins, authorities gave up and released them to the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay. The museum’s announcement of the acquisition reported on a larger scene in which certain areas of the country were “dacoit-infested” ( dacoits are armed bandits), with outlaws “acting in cooperation with some art dealers.”
In December 1969, Robert McCormick Adams Jr., an archaeologist who went on to become Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, published a letter to the editor in The New York Times. The letter responded to an early draft of UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Signed by an additional six archaeologists, the letter noted a lack of “effective measures to curb the trade … by the museums and art galleries that are among its principal beneficiaries.” The letter also pointed out that federal laws (which provide tax exemptions for museums) “in fact sanction looting.”
Those museums began to receive sleeves in the mail from museum directors in India containing photos of hot artworks and requests to keep an eye out. One arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art from the archaeological curator of the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, by certified air mail. The curator, B. V. Shetti, wrote, “I am enclosing herewith 14 black and white photographs out of the 23 [Indus Valley] seals which were stolen from our Museum on 27th February, 1970. … Kindly keep us informed if you happen to know anything in this matter.”
Sherman E. Lee, chief curator of Oriental art and director at the Cleveland Museum of Art at the time, had just then acquired two nearly identical, unprovenanced seals from William H. Wolff, who once discussed with The New York Times his “clandestine” and “illegal” export of antiquities from Asia. After determining that the Cleveland seals were not from Bombay, Lee wrote a letter to Shetti:
We have examined the photographs and lists and hasten to report that we are not aware of any of these objects being on the market at the present time. You may rest assured that if they do appear in any way, we will immediately inform you.
May I add that it would be most helpful for museums with significant Oriental collections in this country if you and the other professionals in India would keep us informed of thefts of works of art. We are as anxious as you are to prevent this activity and to restore the works to the proper owners. The more information we get, the better we can cooperate.
By the time he sent this letter, Lee had already purchased one Tanesar mother from Wiener, knowing full well the likelihood it had been “stolen” or “illegally acquired.” I learned this by studying correspondence, located in the archives of the Cleveland Museum of Art, between Lee, Wiener, and others.
This museum has taken a leadership role in investigating questionable acquisitions in its collection and exploring how present-day curators can right the transgressions committed by those who came before. The museum’s curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, Sonya Rhie Mace, devoted two years to research into the provenance of a 10th-century stone sculpture of the god Hanuman that resulted in its transfer to the Kingdom of Cambodia in 2015. More recently, Mace worked closely with the National Museum of Cambodia to curate a multimedia presentation featuring a larger-than-life stone sculpture of Krishna that had survived only in fragments.
“There needs to be a well-considered conversation about what can happen in the future, because so much happened in the past that cannot be changed,” Mace told me. “How do we understand a troubled past so it doesn’t happen again? I tried to do this with the Krishna exhibition, to show how complex and ambivalent the history of a single object can be. For the works that are in our care, let’s look at them one by one, tell their stories, and try to reach out to countries of origin. We need an open approach to talking about what’s best for the sculptures.”
In 2021, Nancy Wiener accepted a plea bargain in exchange for providing information about smuggling networks engaged by herself and her mother. This information, in turn, led to the seizure of Mother Goddess (Matrika).In the months before the Manhattan DA’s office began its investigation, Oberlin College’s Asian art curator, Kevin Greenwood, and museum director, Andria Derstine, consented to meet with me concerning my research into the Tanesar sculptures. (Derstine later declined to speak, once the investigation commenced.) Other institutions have been less forthcoming. Officials at LACMA and the Met ignored or rejected my multiple attempts to discuss the Tanesar sculptures in their collections. The Met, moreover, left up erroneous website content concerning the sculptures even after I brought up published sources that could have helped correct the mistakes.
By 1967, at least six of the original Tanesar artworks had traveled across two oceans and reached Wiener’s New York gallery. Wiener sometimes called them “black stone matrikas.” In March 1968, she wrote to Lee, “Mr. & Mrs. Rockefeller came to see the Matrika stones, and will be in touch with me or you, regarding their choice. At that time, as per our conversation, we will send the other to you.”
Doris Wiener died in 2011. In 2016, she was posthumously named in a Manhattan criminal court complaint for conspiracy to “buy, smuggle, launder, and sell millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities stolen from Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, India, Pakistan, and Thailand.” The complaint stated that she and her daughter, Nancy Wiener, along with others, had “trafficked in illegal antiquities for decades.” In 2021, Nancy Wiener accepted a plea bargain in exchange for providing information about smuggling networks engaged by herself and her mother. This information, in turn, contributed to the DA’s investigation of the Tanesar sculptures that led to the seizure of Mother Goddess (Matrika) at the Met in the fall of 2022.
The complaint and plea bargain named two smuggling rings operating in India supported by the Wiener family business and run by dealers named Om Sharma and Sharod Singh. And although the DA’s office would not confirm the name, a known middleman had to have connected the dacoits who looted the Tanesar temple in the early 1960s to Doris Wiener.
Less a focus of the DA’s complaint were the fluid social ties connecting the Wiener family with the world of museum directors and benefactors. “I have recently returned from an extended trip to India,” Wiener wrote chummily to Lee in May 1967. “My activities there, besides listening to tremendous amounts of gossip and shop-talk, was to acquire a fine collection of Indian miniature paintings and a very fine Persian manuscript which just arrived. I would be pleased to see you again when you come to New York.”
Over time, Wiener’s gallery moved to Fifth Avenue, in a building facing the steps of the Met. A business-meets-pleasure lack of boundaries characterized the industry. “As usual, the dealer knows more than the curator,” Lee wrote to the collector Robert H. Ellsworth in 1966.
Lee had become aware of the Tanesar sculptures’ existence as early as November 1961. That’s when Ratna Chandra Agrawala mailed Lee a dossier containing a dozen of his own recent articles that more than likely included the two in Lalit Kala discussing the sculptures. “It is hoped,” Agrawala wrote, “that [the papers] will be of some interest to you. … I shall also look forward to your visit to Rajasthan in the near future.” Whether or not the 1959 and 1961 articles were included in the batch, Lee had the 1961 article in his possession while discussing with Wiener the sale of one or more of the sculptures.
In September 1967, Lee wrote to a consultant, Vinod P. Dwivedi, at the National Museum of Delhi about a conflict. He was seriously considering the purchase of a Tanesar matrika on offer from Wiener:
One thing in particular has come up which I must ask you about and rely upon your confidence and discretion. I do not wish to be involved in any way in the acquisition of any material which has been ‘illegally acquired.’ Please note, I don’t say ‘illegally exported,’ but ‘illegally acquired.’
In the No. 10 issue of Lalite Kala, October, 1961, pages 31-33, there is an article by R. C. Agrawala which includes illustrations of nine sculptures from Tavesara, described as ‘Under Worship.’
I am informed that these pieces are now in the United States, in the hands of a dealer. Has there been any report or information about these pieces being stolen or in any other way illegally acquired? Did the village sell the pieces?
Dwivedi, after speaking to Agrawala, responded that there was no report of a theft from “Tavesara” but that “the villagers never sell any image under worship.”
In May 1968, when the sale was close to final, Lee finally asked Wiener about the matter directly: The “only question is whether the piece was originally sold from the village or whether it was stolen. What kind of guarantee of title can you provide … ?”
By 1970, Lee had acquired the Tanesar sculpture for his museum’s collection, paying $10,500. (It’s possible that more sculptures were offered and considered.) Soon after, the Cleveland museum mailed an 8-by-10 glossy of the acquisition to Oberlin College for publication in its Bulletin. That Lee knew the sculpture’s origin story is evident from the photo, which bears the label “from Tamesara-Mahdeva, (ca. 30 miles from Vdaipur).”
How did Wiener succeed in placing the sculptures with curators and collectors at the highest echelon of American society? Most of the collectors had close connections to Pratapaditya Pal, author of the 1971 article in the Allen Museum Bulletin. Born in East Bengal and raised in Calcutta, Pal is now 87. His scholarly works are extensive, and he has served as curator of South Asian art at some of the finest museums in America—in Chicago and Boston, as well as Los Angeles. He also knew everyone in the art world, and he did much of his work in an age of schmoozing and long lunches at French restaurants.
The matrika at the British Museum was retrieved from storage, allowing the author to feel its “extraordinary leadlike heft.” (Courtesy of the author)
In his writings, Pal mentions his friendships with not only Wiener but also Paul Walter and Nasli Heeramaneck, then a respected collector in New York. Heeramaneck owned three Tanesar sculptures at one time or another. Another close friend, and one of Pal’s advisees, was Christian Humann, a prolific collector who passed away in 1981. The first blockbuster touring exhibit of Asian statuary—“Sensuous Immortals,” curated by Pal—was made up of Humann’s bronze and stone artworks. Among the treasures of the show was Mother Goddess (Matrika)—the Tanesar goddess seized from the Met last year. “Sensuous Immortals” traveled to five North American cities between 1977 and 1979, often crossing paths with another blockbuster touring museum exhibition, one that defied all previous expectations for art world profitability and bore the taint of theft—the “Treasures of Tutankhamun.” The American museum as an institution had entered a new era of commercialism. If precisely naming the origin site of a set of highly valued artworks would have cast doubt on good title, and therefore undercut profitability, it’s no wonder that such a detail would have been left off, that certain errors in a journal article would go uncorrected. In art world circles, the imprimatur of having once been displayed in “Sensuous Immortals” often stands in for an object’s respectability. And yet, Mother Goddess (Matrika) is not the only sculpture from the show, or from Humann’s “Pan-Asian collection,” to have been tainted by questions of provenance. Another is the 10th-century stone Hanuman transferred to Cambodia from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015. Yet a third is the 11th-century Celestial Woman Beneath a Mango Tree, which was on view at the Denver Art Museum from 1965 until 2019. This figure was matched to photos taken at a temple in central Rajasthan in 1960 and published on the website Plundered Past. After being confronted with the information, the Denver museum quietly returned the sculpture to India—without any public mention of the transfer. A fourth is the bronze Hanuman Conversing from the 11th century, currently on view at the Met. Just this past December, researchers in Puducherry, India, linked it to a theft sometime around 1960, using photographs archived at the city’s French Institute.
Connecting an object to its original site is important for two reasons. Doing so preserves the integrity of its art historical record, and illuminates and evaluates the legality and morality of its removal. Neither of these concerns seems to have preoccupied Pal. “Fortunately,” Pal wrote in 2021 in a fond reminiscence of “Sensuous Immortals,” “in the 1970s, there were no ‘provenance issues’ that would become such a headache for museum professionals and collectors by the last decade of the century.”
This, however, is another fairy tale. “Sensuous Immortals,” after all, concluded just one year before the publication of Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, the British journalist and historian Peter Hopkirk’s exposé on the pillaging of Central Asian Buddhist art by explorers working for colonial powers at the turn of the 20th century. He describes a case in which the British-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein, exploring Buddhist sites in the Taklamakan Desert in the early 1900s, “used a saw, carefully inserted behind the frescoes,” and had paintings “cut into pieces, later to be carefully reunited after their long and arduous journey home by camel, pony, yak or other means.” The bulk of this cache is now in storage at the British Museum. Hopkirk asked his readers to judge for themselves “the morality of depriving a people permanently of their heritage.”
Two years after the publication of Hopkirk’s book, in 1982, the art historian Joanna Gottfried Williams declined to include Indian sculptures held in American museums or collections for her landmark history The Art of Gupta India: Empire and Province. Although her argument centered on the need for art historical context, her comments bore the whiff of condemnation. She fingered a text by Pal specifically for its “deliberate inclusion of works without the unimpeachable credentials of those recorded in situ in India.”
This hybrid figure currently resides at the Taneshwar temple—the sculpture’s torso is ancient, but its head dates to a later period. (Courtesy of the author)
Not long ago, I reached Pal on the phone, though he did not have much to say about the Tanesar artworks beyond what he has previously written. “If this is another question of repatriation and all this, I don’t have time to discuss it right now,” he said, suggesting that I write to him about the matter. He did, however, say that in his view, the sales of the artworks should be considered in the context of the ratification date of the UNESCO convention to curtail international black marketeering in antiquities. “If works were acquired before 1970,” he told me, “as far as I’m concerned, those sales are perfectly kosher.” He didn’t want to speak about the larger subject of the Tanesar sculptures’ export, which is a shame, because the story he could tell about the world of 20th-century collecting and museums would be illuminating, to say the least.
Today, the shortsightedness of the past is often invoked to contextualize the open secret of museum-bound loot in the 1960s and ’70s. Nancy Wiener, in her 2021 plea bargain, described “a market where buying and selling antiquities with vague or even no provenance was the norm. Obfuscation and silence were accepted responses to questions concerning the source from which an object had been obtained. In short, it was a conspiracy of the willing.” Wiener’s passive language nicely insulates museum directors from participation in that conspiracy.
This world of make-believe and false facts, where the notion that no one would notice or care if the name of a town was wrong, reminded me of the condescending practice of sculpture replacement. This is a trick used by temple looters. They steal a valuable devotional sculpture and then deposit a cheap fake or a newer, less valuable object in its place. Then, worshippers have something to propitiate, and the looters—and others—get rich.
At the Taneshwar temple on my first visit, villagers showed me a statue that some worshippers believed to be a replacement. Its body was covered in red mesh fabric bordered with gold. Foil, ash, and vermilion stained its exposed limbs and face. Only the head was visible. On a later visit, though, I saw that the sculpture’s torso was indeed ancient. The newer head had been balanced, off kilter, on top of the body. This goddess was a beautiful Frankenstein. Embodying old and new, the figure had become an object of worship on its own terms.
There was a strange, raw power in this indigenous, living artwork. I’d felt something similar in my pilgrimage across three continents—North America, Europe, and Asia—to lay eyes on or even touch as many sculptures from the set as possible. I was able to feel the extraordinary leadlike heft of the goddess at the British Museum. After I submitted a research request, an attendant retrieved this matrika from storage, bringing her to me in a wooden cart labeled oriental. At the Allen Museum at Oberlin, after a similar research request, the curator brought Deva out of storage and rotated him on a lazy Susan–style pedestal. We watched, enraptured, as the beautiful blue-green stone caught the light in different ways while the figure spun. And at the Met and in Cleveland, I saw the sculptures under precisely arranged decorator’s bulbs, which showed off their sublime, otherworldly features, but also their maternal air of knowledge and contentment.
The day I saw the old-new goddess, I was similarly moved. I stood in the alcove and imagined how this place might vibrate should the spirits of the original Taneshwar goddesses join this modern, vernacular goddess. Sublime art celebrates and simulates the richness and density of life, and all of these goddesses have done just that. The past was unrecoverable, but perhaps something more powerful would soon come to be. I wondered what it would be like to feel the energies of the goddesses coalesce in one place as they hadn’t in more than 60 years. I envisioned a land where gods and goddesses were returned home in spite of the mammoth forces of commerce, prestige, and power. I wondered if my fantasy might one day become real.
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Before arriving in Pamplona, in the Basque region of northern Spain, I had imagined the San Fermín festival as Ernest Hemingway describes it in The Sun Also Rises—as a picturesque Spanish town’s quaint celebration of its annual bullfight. In the novel, Jake Barnes introduces us to tavern keepers, local aficionados, and bullfighters, taking endless pleasure in revealing the intimate details of what was, in the 1920s, a little-known regional tradition. I understood, of course, that in the decades since, the festival has evolved into a wildly popular tourist attraction, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw this past summer, when more than a million people from all over the world descended on Pamplona for the fiesta, the running of the bulls, and the corrida (the bullfight). The narrow cobblestone streets were packed. Almost everyone was dressed in the traditional garb of San Fermín festivalgoers: white shirt and red bandana. Moving with the crowd on the third afternoon of the fiesta, I felt like I was inside an unhinged version of Where’s Waldo. A marching band plowed its way past me, the tuba player spinning with his unwieldy instrument. The restaurants sold overpriced pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), and the storefronts hawked T-shirts and plush bull toys, some of them stuck with miniature spears. In the Plaza de Toros, somebody had placed a red fedora and a string of Mardi Gras beads on the statue of Hemingway.
When I bought my ticket to the corrida from a round-faced Basque scalper, I had my hesitations. For the first 22 years of my life, I had been a staunch vegetarian. When I was 12, my father (who was not a vegetarian) gave me a copy of Animal Liberation, the seminal work by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, and for a time, the book was my bible. More recently, I’ve started eating meat occasionally, opting for cuts that are, I make sure to learn, “responsibly raised” by local farmers. I told myself that I was attending the bullfight as a journalist—I’d chosen not to wear the white shirt and red bandana—but I was far from sure I’d be able to stomach sitting in a cheering crowd while a bull was tortured to death.
The corrida began with the matadors and their teams paying their respects to the crowd and the presiding dignitaries. The fighters dressed in colorful traditional costumes, looking a bit like rhinestone cowboys, in their slim-fitting suits that sparkled glamorously in the afternoon sun. The head matador, or torero, was the most extravagantly dressed, his green suit laced with gold. My seat was about halfway down the stands, in the shady half of the arena, where the serious aficionados tend to sit. On the other side, in the unrelenting sun, the peñas—local social clubs—were already going wild, singing, waving flags, sharing wine, and now and then whipping pastries at one another.
Without more fanfare, the first bull charged out through a trap door. He was much larger and stronger than any bull you’ve seen in a roadside pasture. I had expected him to behave aggressively from the moment of his entrance, but this was not the case. At first, he seemed mostly confused, running from one side of the arena to the other, testing the boundaries of the enclosure. I would later learn that before they are brought to the corrida, the animals are kept together in large pastures away from human beings. Until this moment, the bull had probably never seen more than a few people. Now, here were 20,000. The noise was deafening.
After a few moments, four mounted men—the picadors—cantered into the arena. The bull started toward one of the horses at a jog. He lowered his head as he neared the horse, its rider using a long spear to stab him in his prominent neck muscles. The bull still managed to make contact with the horse’s flank, which was protected with quilted armor. The crowd booed the picador ferociously, apparently for his failure to keep the bull away from his mount. In the early 20th century, before armor was required, more horses than bulls died in the arena. Today, they often suffer broken ribs, bruised organs, and internal bleeding, injuries that sometimes prove fatal.
By this point, less than two minutes into the fight, I found myself in a strange state, both disgusted and transfixed. Blood covered both of the bull’s flanks. The picadors were soon replaced by banderilleros, men holding the short, colorfully decorated lances known as banderillas. They ran straight and fast at the bull, who also began to charge, and with acrobatic flourish sank the barbed tips of the lances beneath the animal’s skin, so that the lances hung against his flank and neck. After these wounds were inflicted, the bull held his head much lower than he had when he first entered the arena. This is the object of a corrida. In order for the torero to kill the bull without running too great a risk of being gored, the animal must not be holding his head high.
I now found myself unpleasantly jittery—probably due to an overload of adrenaline as well as concern for both the bull and the men. Still, I couldn’t look away. The banderilleros retreated, and the torero entered the arena. He unfurled a red cape, behind which he held a long, thin blade. For a few moments, the bull watched the cloth and the man, seeming at once furious and perplexed. The crowd went quiet, and you could hear the heaviness of the bull’s breathing, made loud by the saliva and blood in his mouth and nose. Then, he charged, lowering his horns at the cape and the man hidden behind it, the decorated lances thwacking against his ribs. At the last possible moment, the torero stood tall and spun, allowing the tips of the horns to pass just under his arm as he swept the cape over the animal’s head.
In 1975, Peter Singer predicted that a new push for animal rights was on its way. The civil rights movement had fought for basic rights for Black people in the United States. More recently, women and LGBT people had begun to fight for equal treatment under the law. Singer thought that the energy of these movements might soon grow to include other oppressed beings—namely, exploited animals.
In Animal Liberation, Singer argues that racism and sexism and what he calls “speciesism” all rely on arbitrary distinctions. In most Western nations, a person who raises dogs mouth-to-tail in small enclosures would be quickly condemned and would probably face prosecution. And yet, Singer points out, industrial pig farmers do exactly this with equally intelligent, sensitive animals, and they often receive government subsidies for their trouble. Similarly arbitrary distinctions were essential to a slaveholding society, he goes on, and remain so in a society with entrenched systemic racism. It’s important to note that Singer doesn’t assert that slavery and animal captivity are moral equivalents. Instead, he argues that one can help us understand the other. We are biased against certain animals because it is convenient, profitable, or pleasurable for us to exploit them, just as it was convenient, profitable, and pleasurable for plantation owners to exploit the human beings they held in bondage. He contends that in a few short decades, when the next generation (or the next) looks back on our treatment of animals, the practice may well be viewed in much the same way that we now view slavery—as despicable and inexcusable, an expression of extreme cruelty and selfishness.
The protesters swarmed through the narrow streets toward the Plaza de Toros. They continued chanting in their bulky costumes. Diners turned to see what the commotion was about, and then went back to their meals.Singer was wrong about at least one thing. No broad shift in our understanding of animal rights has taken place since the publication of Animal Liberation. There have been some small-scale developments. Vegetarianism and veganism are more common and more socially acceptable than ever before. More people are speaking out in support of at-risk “charismatic megafauna”— creatures like elephants and manatees. There is a growing awareness of the beef industry’s contribution to climate change. But in most ways, things are worse than ever for captive animals. Worldwide, we kill about three times more pigs in industrial slaughterhouses than we did in the 1970s. In the United States, animal welfare laws lag behind those of European countries, including Spain. Species everywhere are suffering from habitat destruction.
If Singer’s arguments held any sway in the culture at large, the recent outcries against entrenched racism, sexual harassment, and homophobia might well have led to another outcry—one against the abysmal treatment of industrially raised farm animals. Instead, fast-food chains that profit enormously from the suffering of animals make shows of embracing social justice, filling their TV ads with diverse casts, pledges of support to various causes, and rainbow banners—all in hopes of turning a bigger profit. Organizations such as PETA are disparaged by members of all political stripes. The “radical actions” of animal rights protesters are rarely covered or even acknowledged by the mainstream media. In academia, the arguments and papers of “animal studies” scholars are so extreme and filled with jargon that they seem to be begging for irrelevance.
How did things end up this way? During a time when so many people seem willing to speak out against injustice, why has the cause of animals remained so decidedly on the fringes?
There are a few obvious answers to this question. For one thing, an ever-growing number of problems today make claims on our attention. Can one be faulted for using one’s limited time and energy to speak out against racial injustice or climate change instead of animal rights? And then there’s the intractable difficulty of habit and convenience. In his essay “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace admits defeat in “working out any sort of personal ethical system in which [eating animals] is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.” And yet, he eats them anyway. Most of us do things every day without moral justification. Sure, Animal Liberation contains a well-reasoned moral argument. When has that ever changed anyone’s mind?
And yet, the day before the bullfight, I’d been to an event that suggested that the “movement” is suffering from deeper problems.
In the center of Pamplona’s Plaza Consistorial, journalists crowded around Yasmina Martín, one of the organizers of the annual protest against the San Fermín bullfights. In answer to the salvo of questions about her organization, AnimaNaturalis, Martín calmly delivered just what you’d expect. She said that the corrida is a form of torture. That bulls have a developed central nervous system. That they feel pain as intensely as any human. That traditions don’t have to be violent in order to be meaningful.
In short order, a few hundred curious onlookers had joined the journalists. Pamplona’s city hall made for a stately background, adorned with Baroque columns and steel railings and statues of Heracles and Themis, the Greek goddess of justice. A man in a dark button-up stepped past the microphones and started arguing a point with Martín. I caught the word tradicion, just as several dozen people in extravagant dinosaur costumes appeared from behind the building, singing and chanting and waving signs, many of which read, “Bullfights are prehistoric.”
The protesters swarmed through the narrow streets toward the Plaza de Toros and the bullfighting arena. They continued chanting, moving clumsily in their bulky costumes. Diners sitting in front of pintxos restaurants turned to see what the commotion was about, and then went back to their meals. The dinosaurs swarmed onward. La tauromaquia es prehistórica, they chanted.
The protest disbanded about half an hour later, and I found myself disheartened. It wasn’t just the few people in attendance relative to the crowd that had arrived in Pamplona for the festivities. After all, the “Sin Tauromaquia” march is one of the most covered animal rights protests in the world, and dozens of news outlets were there. But I couldn’t help feeling that the T. rex suits were silly, that the protesters had taken a serious issue and unintentionally made it ridiculous. Their slogans were hackneyed, their arguments predictable and uninspiring. The afternoon seemed to me emblematic of the absolute staleness of animal rights activism. And so, my question remained: Where did things go wrong?
When the bull finally fell into a slick of his own blood, the hilt of the torero’s blade buried between his shoulders, the crowd began swaying back and forth and belting out the mariachi number “El Rey”: Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar (cry and cry, cry and cry).
Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon returns over and over to the idea of emotion in bullfighting. Bullfighting isn’t a sport, Hemingway insists. It’s a tragedy reminiscent of Greek theater. The point of it all is to stir up emotion—sometimes intense emotion—in the audience through, above all, an honest performance. That is, a performance in which the torero takes real risks with the bull, and does so with skill rather than cheap tricks or false bravado. Without having seen the real thing, I’d never have believed that bullfighting might meaningfully be compared to sculpture or theater, as Hemingway does. Now, I almost do.
Even so, I remain certain that the corrida is a form of animal torture. Despite arguments to the contrary, recent studies have shown that bulls suffer extreme physiological and psychological pain during the course of a fight—Yasmina Martín was right, of course. This confirms what must have always been apparent to anyone who knows anything about animals or the signs they give under duress. You can see the bull’s pain in the way he breathes heavily when he stands still after the banderillas are stuck under his skin, and by the way he hesitates slightly after slipping to his knees as he follows the torero’s cape in too sharp a turn. By the end of the fight, the bull is so exhausted and punctured that the matador has to goad him into even a cursory charge, jerking the cape almost under his nose. If adrenaline took the bull through the first minutes of the fight, it is now gone, and he is no doubt feeling his every wound.
And so, it’s difficult for me to admit the truth: when the crowd began singing, I felt intensely alive. I’m still at a loss to say where exactly that feeling came from, but the sensation somewhat resembled that morbid fascination inspired by a particularly gripping horror movie. Spaniards who enjoy the bullfights are fond of pointing out that Americans like to keep their violence toward animals hidden safely away, behind the bland walls of industrial slaughterhouses. They’re not wrong. The corrida was also an electrifying blow to my cultural sensibilities. I was disgusted and enthralled both by the violence and by the audience’s willingness to celebrate it with such gusto. And in the midst of my disgust, I wondered if there might be something worthy and hearty about the Spaniards’ comfort with death. Perhaps, I felt, they knew a thing or two about mortality that I’d missed during the course of my relatively sheltered life.
There was something else, too. As the bull stumbled, still upright but with his aorta punctured by the tip of the sword, the torero held his right hand out to the animal, as if ushering him from life to death. He seemed to be saying, We are all waiting for the end. Throughout the fight, I’d felt (alongside all those other feelings) a loitering sense of my own health and wholeness—the fact of being free from excruciating pain. When the torero made that gesture to the bull, this feeling intensified until it was almost pleasurable. That’s the only way I can describe it. My awareness of my own aliveness was sharpened by my proximity to the opposite—pain and death.
The Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona is no longer the quaint local spectacle that it was in Hemingway’s time. (Eric Nathan/Alamy)
When Martín spoke to the reporters about a bull’s nervous system and the bovine capacity for both mental suffering and physical pain, she was drawing on the work of my childhood hero, Singer, who puts these neurological functions at the center of his philosophy. Rather than erecting arbitrary lines between those species we feel comfortable exploiting and those we do not, Singer wants us to remember our own vested interest in avoiding sensations of pain, and to extend that consideration to members of other species.
This argument is part of a long tradition of animal rights activism. In ancient Greece, the philosopher and scientist Theophrastus railed against his teacher Aristotle’s callousness toward animals. Men and animals, he wrote, “do not differ, above all in sensations.” In 19th-century Britain, an Irish lawyer named Colonel Richard Martin prosecuted a street salesman for beating his donkey by bringing the animal to court as the sole witness, showing the judges her injuries and asking them to imagine sustaining similar ones. A few decades prior, the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham had written, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” In the late 19th century, the feminist and doctor Anna Kingford argued vehemently against the practice of vivisection. “Pain is pain,” she wrote, “and injustice is injustice, whoever the victim.” Today, academics interested in “animal studies” tend to have complicated feelings about Singer. They critique his unbending allegiance to utilitarianism and his failure, in their view, to properly interrogate his own biases as a white man. But, as far as I know, nobody has meaningfully questioned his argument that the shared capacity for suffering is the best basis for changing the way we relate to animals.
The pain argument has long defined the animal rights movement, and continues to do so. And yet, during the bullfight, witnessing an animal in obvious pain, I felt something much more complicated than revulsion. Why didn’t the corrida inspire straightforward outrage at the suffering on show, even in somebody like myself, who (like many others) is disposed toward sympathy—if not always perfect compassion—for the plight of captive animals? This question, it seems to me, is closely related to the question of why the animal rights movement has not yet lived up to its potential.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain puts forward an alternative understanding of pain, one that helps explain why sympathy and revulsion weren’t the only emotions I felt at the bullfight. The book isn’t all that well known outside academia, but it has helped reshape the way many scholars and historians understand torture—not only how torture affects victims, but also how it changes perpetrators and witnesses. It’s an impressionistic work, far from scientific, and at times frustratingly opaque. It mixes history and literature and philosophy, along with a healthy dash of Scarry’s boisterous imagination. And yet for all that, it is perhaps richer and more evocative than anything else written on the subject of suffering.
In 1986, Singer reviewed The Body in Pain in The New York Review of Books. “The book is cavalier in its disregard for the hard work of providing either factual evidence or serious philosophical argument for what it says,” he wrote. He objected to Scarry’s application of terms such as materialism and her freewheeling account of the history of torture. One senses in Singer’s quibbles and dismissals that his disagreement with Scarry ran deeper than he was admitting. If this was innovative work, he concluded, with uncharacteristic harshness, “I will do without innovation every time.”
When people are in extreme pain, they become less like themselves. Our preferences and peculiarities, habits of speech and gesture, even our most deeply held beliefs are likely to be forgotten in the face of torture.I think Singer must have felt Scarry prodding at one of the central assumptions of Animal Liberation: that the shared capacity for pain might be the basis for a revised relationship between humans and animals. Among other things, she contends that pain tends to separate—rather than unite—those who experience it from those who don’t. “For the person whose pain it is,” she writes, “it is ‘effortlessly’ grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is ‘effortless’ is not grasping it.” Said somewhat more plainly: a bystander never actually feels a sufferer’s pain, no matter how earnest the attempt to do so. If you have been in proximity to someone in extreme pain, you know how disconcerting the experience can be—the pain, all-consuming within the sufferer’s body, is nothing within your own. You might begin to feel hopelessly alienated from the sufferer, despite any physical closeness. Scarry says that torture exaggerates this dynamic. Cries for help, she writes, which ought to occasion attention and assistance, can almost serve to discredit the pain.
This line of argument helps explain why undercover videos of animal abuse in feedlots and slaughterhouses—released by organizations such as PETA—haven’t exactly proved to be effective propaganda. The feelings these sights inspire in their audiences are complex. As I walked out of the bullring, the guard at the gate expressed surprise that I was leaving so soon. “It’s not for me,” I told him. But that wasn’t quite true. I wanted my feelings about the fight to be straightforward, and I felt a bit guilty that they weren’t—guilty that part of me had even enjoyed the experience. It would have been easier to forget the whole thing, just as I find it easier not to think too hard about a PETA-produced video of an industrial hog slaughterhouse that I saw years ago.
Scarry has more to say on these fronts. Pain not only distances sufferers from those around them, it also distances sufferers from themselves. That is, when people are in extreme pain, they become less like themselves. Our preferences and peculiarities, habits of speech and gesture, even our most deeply held beliefs are likely to be forgotten, or even permanently obliterated, in the face of torture. That’s part of why torture is used by authoritarian regimes (and a few democratic ones, too). It’s not first and foremost a means of collecting information that would otherwise remain inaccessible. More important is its power to break the strength and idealism necessary for resistance.
Since animals feel pain, we might consider the probability that they also suffer some version of the process that Scarry describes. For example, wouldn’t the preferences that make a pig a pig (the desire to root or the ability to use more than 20 distinct vocalizations to communicate with members of its species) be degraded by suffering? The bull I saw that afternoon in the arena, ready to charge anything that moved, was not quite representative of its species. Bullfight aficionados talk about the picadors’ lances “focusing” the animal. Before this first pain is inflicted, the bull is often more intent on finding a way to escape the arena than on charging the toreros. As the fight goes on, the increasing damage to the bull’s body seems to resign him to his fate. Thinking back to the first corrida he attended, Hemingway writes that the bull became “an altogether different animal when the banderillas went in, and I resented the loss of the free wild quality he brought with him into the ring.”
The bull behaves as many cornered, Injured animals (IIing human beings) will behave, albeit with significantly more strength and gusto. He attacks his tormentors relentlessly. His apparent willingness to participate in the fight then becomes a means by which the audience justifies his torture. Look, he wants to fight. This process resembles one of the insidious mechanisms of institutions such as slavery. The more certain people are made to suffer, the easier it is to dehumanize them, to view them as stupid, unworthy of serious moral consideration, even deserving of exploitative treatment—as willing participants in their own subjugation.
The very thing that Singer believes will bring the masses over to his side can therefore have the opposite effect. When people read about or watch animals in pain, they witness these beings in a reduced state, a state that does not accurately represent the creatures’ normal habits and abilities. Most people who see a PETA-sponsored video will feel guilt of some kind. But they may also be left with a lingering sense that the animals they have seen aren’t worthy of much more than cursory moral consideration.
None of this is to say that it is impossible (or even all that rare) for humans to meaningfully identify with nonhuman creatures. Rather, it means that we don’t do it readily when we encounter them incapacitated by suffering. In this sense, the animal rights movement took a wrong turn with Theophrastus, the first to articulate the pain theory. Singer writes powerfully of the parallels among racism and sexism and “speciesism.” But—fixated on pain as the basis of his call to action—he fails to remember that the civil rights movement did not gain momentum because white people pitied the suffering of Black people. Rather, the voices of Black artists, musicians, thinkers, and protesters became too powerful to ignore. The same was true of the gay pride and the women’s liberation movements. History suggests that human beings are likelier to treat other humans with dignity when forced to consider their potential, rather than simply their suffering.
A few years ago, my wife and I were in the kitchen of our farmhouse in rural Virginia when an interview with the naturalist E. O. Wilson came on the radio show Science Friday. Every summer, we’d battled ants that lived under the stove and in the coping behind the counter, mostly by wiping them away with a sponge whenever they crossed the counter too boldly. So we both perked up when Wilson said that people often ask him what they should do about ants in their house. His practiced response? Watch your step, he says, give the ants a dab of whipped cream, and try to look at them as creatures from another planet. By the time Wilson was done talking, I was pretty sure that I’d be letting the ants make their forays without reaching for the sponge (though I’ve yet to go the whipped cream route). And yet, all he’d done was offer a series of observations about ants: that they communicate and coordinate with one another through chemical secretions; that some species of ants domesticate aphids to harvest their sugary secretions; that the total weight of all ants on Earth probably equals the weight of all human beings.
People need to see animals at their best before they will care about saving them from the worst. Instead of treating them as things to be pitied, we should try to think of them as if they came from another planet.Of course, not everyone is going to put away the boric acid traps after learning something new about an insect often considered a pest. But what about Craig Foster’s documentary film My Octopus Teacher ? If you have friends who have seen it, ask them if they still eat octopus, and you might be surprised by how many couldn’t anymore, or didn’t want to. I’m in this camp. The movie produced in me an unexpectedly—to borrow a phrase from Hemingway—intense degree of emotion. When the octopus emerges from her lair after the long labor of regrowing her arm, and when she wrangles with and then escapes the tiger shark, I experienced a sense of victory that rivaled the momentary aliveness I felt at the bullfight. And when she passed away at the end of the film, I felt I’d learned more about mortality than I had from reading Death in the Afternoon. For the first time in many years, I found myself tearing up in front of a screen.
The animal rights movement could be a movement founded on animal potential, and the powerful emotion that stories and facts about animals can inspire in human beings. The difficult work is already being done by scientists, videographers, and naturalists, who every day are discovering and documenting new ways that animals process and interact with the world. Increasingly, philosophers and journalists are also part of this puzzle. David M. Peña-Guzmán’s recent book on animal dreaming is exemplary, linking the philosophic puzzle of consciousness—and the question of whether animals have it—with new evidence of their capacity to dream. For example, he reexamines data from a 2000 study, published in the journal Science, that analyzed the neural activity of sleeping zebra finches. Research on birdsong, Peña-Guzmán writes,
has historically focused on what these animals do while awake to imitate and memorize their song, but [biologists Amish] Dave and [Daniel] Margoliash wondered whether sleep might also play a role in song acquisition. Could sleep help juvenile finches internalize the acoustic patterns they hear from their family members and commit them to long-term memory? Could these birds learn their song at least in part by rehearsing it in their minds while asleep?
Dave and Margoliash concluded that although zebra finches do rehearse songs while dreaming, they do so without effectively experiencing the sounds. Peña-Guzmán argues that this conclusion says more about the scientists’ implicit biases than about the actual behavior of the birds. He points to evidence that the researchers overlooked, suggesting that the finches could well “hear” songs that exist only in their sleeping minds. “They [hear] it silently,” he writes, “much like we hear the clamoring soundscapes of our own dreams—the voice of a lover, the rustling in the trees, the sound of a church bell in the distance.” For Peña-Guzmán, dreaming becomes a point of connection between humans and animals, a shared potential that closes the gap between species.
It’s important that the abysmal conditions in industrial farms and slaughterhouses continue to be well publicized. We can’t simply wish away the pain that is the day-to-day reality of too many animals. But because of human beings’ complex relationship with suffering, this information should be generously balanced by concrete evidence of animal potential. Rather than parading around in dinosaur costumes or harassing customers at neighborhood butcher shops, organizations such as PETA and AnimaNaturalis might devote a hefty portion of their resources to broadcasting and promoting the newest research on the behavioral and mental capabilities of animals. They also might work to encourage people to form relationships with a greater variety of animal species in sanctuaries and other places where humans can safely view wild animals. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people go to Florida’s springs to interact with the manatees. They come away with a sense of the animals’ calm majesty. Some rank the experience as one of the most memorable of their lives. As a consequence, there has been, to date, overwhelming public support for projects aimed at rehabilitating the state’s coastal seagrass, the disappearance of which due to water pollution is causing an unprecedented decline in manatee populations. This kind of collective energy (though it may ultimately prove no match for human-caused ecological degradation) is at least a start, and it might serve as a model for other at-risk species. Rights organizations could also connect people with farms where animals that provide humans with nonmeat products are treated with dignity and lead fulfilling lives. People need to see animals at their best before they will care about saving them from the worst.
Instead of treating animals as things to be pitied, we should follow E. O. Wilson’s lead and try to think of them as if they came from another planet. Animals can show us new and radical ways of understanding and interacting with the world, if we give them the space to do so. When we advocate for their dignity and well-being, the question should not be, “Are they ever subject to pain?” but rather, “Do they have the space and habitat and social contact necessary to live up to their potential?”
Something I noticed during the corrida: few people brought their children to the fight. But the day before the festival, an enormous line had formed outside a lot where several local breeders were displaying their prized bulls. Parents pushed strollers and held their kids’ hands as they waited to see the animals. Inside a corral, many of the bulls stood with steers. I heard a boy ask his father about them, and the man explained that the steers were there to keep the bulls calm during transport to an unfamiliar place. It occurred to me then that the relationship between humans and other species isn’t going to change overnight. After all, we were gawking at a bull that would soon be killed in the arena. And yet, there also seemed something hopeful in the moment—emissaries of the next generation admiring the calm of an immensely strong and sensitive animal. l
The post The Pain Principle appeared first on The American Scholar.
Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses by Ashley Ward; Basic Books, 320 pp., $30
As an ambitious young scientist at Cambridge University, Isaac Newton famously trained a glass prism on a narrow beam of sunlight to divvy the white light into its constituents, a dazzling rainbow of colors. There were no demarcations between one component color and the next, no clear way to count just how many basic hues were on view, but Newton was a systematizer with an appreciation for the number seven. After all, seven was synonymous with luck, and it showed up everywhere in Western culture: there were seven days in a week, seven notes in the musical scale, seven wonders of the world, seven virtues, and seven vices. Why not seven colors in the rainbow? And so, Newton specified as the primary ingredients of white light the septet captured by the old childhood mnemonic ROY G BIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Some insist that the list should lose the penultimate letter. “It has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color,” Isaac Asimov wrote. But even the electromagnetic spectrum cannot be decoupled from culture, precedent, and the imprimatur of one of history’s greatest geniuses. Roy’s surname remains intact, and many insist they can see the indigo band just fine.
As Ashley Ward elucidates in his jaunty, reader-friendly tour of the senses, the pathway from an external stimulus to our interpretation of that stimulus is long, loopy, and seeded with booby traps. Our senses are brilliant. Our senses contradict one another. Our senses are easily fooled. The old line, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” is supposed to be funny, the pitch of a con artist. But eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin do lie and are lied to in turn.
Consider a few examples. When people watch a video of somebody mouthing the words “ba ba ba” while the accompanying soundtrack says “da da da,” viewers will swear they heard “ba ba ba.” Take two glasses of good white wine and secretly add a few drops of red food coloring to one of them, and serious oenophiles will ascribe to an undoctored glass conventional white winey virtues like “crisp,” “floral,” and “lemon” while finding in the dyed wine “intense” notes of “cherry” and “raspberry”—terms normally reserved for bold reds. Place your index and ring fingers on two coins that have just spent 15 minutes in the freezer and then let your middle finger slowly descend onto a room temperature coin, and all three fingers will conclude they are touching circles of ice. In 1965, when BBC programmers prankishly told television viewers they had figured out a way to transmit through the airwaves aromas like a “pleasant, country smell” or the odor of an onion being chopped, viewers called in to complain of hay fever or teary eyes.
Our reflexive faith in the prowess of our senses can have more serious consequences. In the courtroom, eyewitness testimony has proved disturbingly unreliable, with studies revealing that the wrong people are identified anywhere from 25 to 73 percent of the time. Yet the quirks and mistakes of our sensory systems reveal a fundamental truth about the nature of perception: from moment to moment, we are surrounded by such a vast amount of sensory information that we have no choice but to ignore most of it, and to take shortcuts and fill-in-the-blanks with the rest. “[H]ow does the brain manage to keep up with it all? The answer is that it doesn’t. It filters and winnows the information in its perpetual quest for what’s important,” Ward writes, in particular “novelty and change.” The feeling of your clothes lying smoothly against your skin is normal and thus safely disregarded; the feeling of a loose thread quivering against your leg is not normal and must be attended to, lest it prove to be not an unraveling seam but something with legs of its own.
In the case of the cold coin trick, it’s normal for the fingers of your hand to sense heat or cold as a unit, so if two fingers have already touched something cold, the brain preemptively decides the third digit will, too. “Signals from the outside world are interpreted and layered with biases, prior expectations and emotions,” Ward writes. “[T]he convincing perception of reality that we each enjoy is actually a complex but brilliant illusion.”
Ward, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Sydney, defines a sense as “a faculty that detects a specific stimulus by means of a receptor dedicated to that stimulus.” He presents the senses in a fairly standard sequence, from the primacy of vision, which “consumes more of the brain’s resources than all the rest of our senses combined,” through the other skull-based sensory systems of hearing, smell, and taste, and on to touch, our most distributed sense. He considers each sense physiologically, evolutionarily, historically, linguistically, emotionally. At times he drifts into the speculative realms of evolutionary psychology, emphasizing minor sex differences in sensory acuity and wondering why “we’re suckers for a pretty face.” Could it have something to do with facial symmetry as a signifier of good genes? Maybe. Or maybe it’s an incidental byproduct of our “sensory skew towards sight.”
As diurnal apes, we have far better color vision than most mammals, whose eyes remain better suited for the nightlife they adopted to sidestep the dinosaurs.The eye is a magnificent organ, starting with the black pupil in the middle, a kind of camera shutter named for the way it reflects to viewers a tiny image of themselves—pupilla is Latin for “little doll.” The pupils expand and contract in response to ambient light. They also dilate when we’re excited or aroused, which is why poker players wear sunglasses to hide how they feel about their cards. Through the joint efforts of the cornea, which sits atop the eye, and the lens, stationed just beneath the iris, incoming light is bent and focused onto the all-important retina, a delicate half-dollar-size disk of tissue at the back of each eye. In the retina, tens of millions of rod cells and three types of cone cells translate light into electrical signals fit for the brain. The rods are simple yes-no light detectors, while the cones put color in our world, each type tuned to a different segment of visible light and their signals mixed and matched to convey a sense of red, blue, yellow, green, maybe a million colors or more. As diurnal apes, we have far better color vision than most mammals, whose eyes remain better suited for the nightlife they adopted to sidestep the dinosaurs. But our color sense pales in comparison with that of birds, who have four cone types to our three, or the mantis shrimp, a carnivorous crustacean whose retinas, for reasons unknown, are stocked with at least a dozen varieties of cone receptors.
Other species claim astonishing auditory powers, too. The giant head of the sperm whale, for example, serves as an acoustic lens, a component of the echolocation system that allows the whale to detect and focus bounce-back signals and thus to map out every feature of its surroundings. Recent research suggests that plants, too, have the equivalent of ears. Pea plants will grow toward the sound of running water even in the absence of added moisture in the soil, while evening primroses can distinguish between the sound of a bee, its preferred pollinator, and that of other flying insects, and will sweeten its nectar only when cued by a buzz. Yet human hearing remains impressive. Compared with other species, Ward says, “we can detect a massive spectrum of sound,” and we’re geniuses at detecting and decoding sounds of 1 to 6 kHz, the frequencies associated with the human voice. The tiny ossicle bones in the middle ear, the pea-size spiraling cochlea of the inner ear, and the hair cells that transform pressure waves into electric signals, all are optimized to make the most of human conversation.
Even the evolutionarily ancient sense of touch, through which primordial cells mapped out their boundaries, advanced, and retreated, has been finessed to magnificence in the form of the human hand. The tips of our fingers hold a dense weave of specialized cells and corpuscles so sensitive, they can detect bumps and notches a micron wide—the size of a bacterium. There are receptors for pain, receptors for pressure, receptors for hot and cold. All nerve fibers considered, the skin at our fingertips is some 27 times more sensitive than the skin of our torso. “Nowhere on our bodies gets anywhere near the sensory richness of the hand,” Ward writes. And the more we put our fingers to use, the more attention the brain pays and the greater grows the neural real estate devoted to keeping track of our every move. In brain scans of professional violinists, the cortical representation of the left hand, which controls the notes played, is significantly larger than that of a nonmusician.
Similar changes are showing up in brain images of young people addicted to their cellphones. In this case, it’s not a matter of left hand or right. From the look of their scans, the kids are all thumbs.
The post Doors of Perception appeared first on The American Scholar.
She stands where she was instructed to wait, a bouquet of iris wrapped in butcher paper in one arm, tape recorder bulking up her backpack, as he comes (surely this is the man who had answered her letters) down the overgrown cow path.
Three cows mooching along, heads lowered, as he weaves around them to get past. On his neat, smallish head, a stiff straw boater. Is there a ribbon? Faded black grosgrain, yes.
But her nerves! Butterflies beating within—the two letters between them having been their only link until this moment, and she in no way a professional, never mind the tape recorder. He threads his way past the lethargic cows, she waiting by the sagging wooden bench that serves as the bus stop. He might have stepped out of an Edwardian country weekend novel, in his boater and cream linen suit. Trim dark mustache. Everything about him trim, as his two letters had been precise, briskly instructive.
Did I say this is England? Somewhere in the New Forest. A train from Waterloo, transferring at Salisbury into a lumbering bus to—that place is lost. She had waited, wherever that was, for another conveyance, a kind of jitney (his instructions had been exact—only the one stop Sundays, do not move from the spot, trust it will arrive). She was finally deposited at this place, as his letter had said. But it seems—what with the cows, the overgrown path, the end-of-the-line look of the place—like no place at all.
Yet he has appeared as promised, calling her name in a voice she will come to treasure for its amused fussiness, its covert kindness, a question mark lifting at the end—Patricia? Patricia?
Me, yes.
But there is no remembering so much of this. The fiction writing of the recording mind has stripped away many details (what I wore—dress? slacks?), while time has giantized others (iris, tape recorder).
In any case, the tidy man was only meant to be a bridge figure, his purpose to lead me to the mysterious LM, as I’d learned to call her from the memoir she had written. But even she was not the point of all my effort.
She too was a link, though a precious one, the only living connection to the ghost I stalked. Katherine Mansfield. The romantic renegade writer, older by five years at her death at 34 in January 1923 than I was/am on this June day in 1975.
My first “trip abroad” (a phrase then still common, oddly antique now). The journey from home in St. Paul had been made for this encounter, to interview Mansfield’s best friend, possibly a one-time lover, it was said—would the girl burdened with flowers and tape recorder nerve up to inquire about that ?
LM was the ancient leftover not only of their relationship, but of their world. She, Leslie Moore, had been coaxed into writing a memoir—Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM—by the man wearing the stiff boater. And now she had agreed to let “a young American” who had read her book meet its author for an interview.
I had a commission from Ms. magazine (all the feminist rage back then) to do a piece on this friendship. I held pridefully to that commission: this might be my first trip to Europe (to anywhere), but I was no tourist. I was all business.
The interview had been arranged by the man in the linen suit—Peter Day, he said smartly as he approached, the name as tidy as himself. He pivoted immediately and began retracing his steps up the flinty cow path. Come along, he called back to me, come along. That bracing Brit carry-on voice. And I, eager to heel, trooped close behind with my gear.
What a measured, ceremonial dance it was, then, to make connections with strangers before the frantic blur of the Internet, the mosh pit of email and social media. Hi (or even Hey) Patricia! people I have never met chummily greet me online today. Gone, the crisp Dear Miss Hampl of yore, that salutation reading now like an endearment, not a formal address.
My friends in those years were taken up with Virginia Woolf, whose letters and diaries were beginning to appear. But my crush was Mansfield, where the pickings were considerably slimmer. I had my much-marked copy of A Room of One’s Own, but I didn’t quite trust Woolf. She might be a genius, but my Midwestern insecurity was miffed by her snobbery. But then, there is no hauteur stiffer than that of a thin-skinned provincial.
Woolf’s diary report after first meeting Katherine (as I already thought of her, chummy myself all those years ago) ignited this mistrust. She wrote that she (and her husband, Leonard) could only wish that [one’s] first impression of K. M. was not that she stinks like a … civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap.
Then, reversing field, she allows, However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship. … We discussed Henry James, and K. M. was illuminating I thought.
Too late! Woolf’s reversal seemed to annoy me more than her initial repugnance—a touchiness, no doubt, on behalf of a fellow provincial, a New Zealand colonial–Midwestern flyover sisterhood.
Mansfield wrote her own post-meeting take on Woolf: I do like her tremendously. … I felt then for the first time the strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind … she seemed to me to be one of those Dostoievsky women whose “innocence” has been hurt.
A keen, almost psychic reading, impersonal, not as judgmental as Woolf’s, and all the more penetrating for that.
After reading LM’s memoir, I devoured a book by a Mansfield scholar (maybe the Mansfield scholar), Sylvia Berkman, who had also written the foreword to LM’s memoir. The bio note below Berkman’s author photo says she taught at Wellesley. But wait, I have the book before me now: there is no author photo. Pixie memory at work again: I seem to have snapped one inwardly because when she comes to mind, there she is—string of pearls, steady hooded gaze. Her book, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study, was published in 1951, so a dated book in 1975. But so what? All Mansfield intel was a news flash to me. Her introduction to LM’s memoir was her bona fide. She must actually know LM.
I would give a lot to see the letter I wrote to Sylvia Berkman, sent no doubt to her publisher (Yale University Press). Did I trumpet the Ms. magazine commission? Maybe not. But wait again. Did I actually have a commission from Ms.? I know I had written a letter to the editors asking if they would be interested in a piece about the friendship between Mansfield and LM. Did I get a response? Never mind, I considered myself “on assignment,” even if no one else did.
Most likely, I was canny enough to gauge that an ardent amateur, young enough to be taken for an enterprising student, would fare better at getting an address for LM.
Berkman did not disappoint. In less than a week, in came a blue envelope, unfaded in memory. Within, a single sheet. That is lost, of course. But I was confirmed in my shrewd choice of presenting myself as an acolyte, not a magazine writer on the job. I remember, I think accurately, one part of her brief reply: I will trust you with Leslie’s address. You sound like a nice person.
I suppose I sent a thank-you note.
I wrote to Leslie Moore. And again within a week, a response, though not from LM. This one came on letterhead from Michael Joseph Ltd., London, signed Peter Day, Senior Editor. Miss Moore would see me. I should send my travel dates. June, wasn’t it? He gave me two possible Sundays in June, Sunday being the only possibility. He would be at the bus stop to meet me.
One more exchange between us, me with the Sunday date, him with the precise instructions leading me from Waterloo station to the cow path. It would not have occurred to me—or to him—to exchange telephone numbers. After our transatlantic airmails, trust alone linked us. This Peter Day, Senior Editor, would show up, and I, nice person from St. Paul, Minnesota, would somehow make my way to the assigned spot.
This decorous volley was how it was done in 1975.
First lunch, Peter Day said as I trailed behind him. Then he would wash up, and I would go with Leslie (as he called her) into the sitting room and have my interview. She’s stone deaf, he said. I would have to bellow. And almost completely blind. Oh dear.
Once off the cow path, we walked a long way, through a meadow, a lot of green. Then suddenly, as if conjured, a thatched cottage rose up, a magical toadstool house sprouting in the deep green of wherever we had arrived. A casement window had been thrown open. In its frame an elderly female figure sat in profile. She did not turn, did not move. She gazed ahead into the room, not out the window. A stately head, formal, the nose prominent, as if in a sustained act of sniffing the air. The hair a flattened floss of white. It was a head resigned from beauty, beyond questions of attraction, held fast in selfless dignity.
Impossible to know if she had ever been a beauty—or not. For some reason, I flashed on the portrait of Whistler’s mother. Not because this parchment-skin woman had the same features, but because she bore a similar hieratic calm. It was not just an old face. It was a face in waiting—as if waiting were the real point of life. Waiting for the next thing that was now the final thing.
As we came closer and this profiled figure made no move, a shot of social embarrassment amounting to shame pierced me—I had no business staring at this unguarded being who surely had no idea she was on display in the window, no right to poke around in her memories. Her face held the impersonal calm of a death mask.
The improbable thatched cottage (I’d seen only one in fairy-tale books from childhood) no doubt added to the spooky sensation of intruding on this almost unreal stranger framed in the casement. Still, she did not move. She took no notice of anything, certainly not of our approach. Yet her attention seemed fixed.
Peter Day banged his way into the house, calling out—Leslie, Leslie, here we are! I’ve brought back the American girl. It was the same theatrical voice telling me to Come along, come along as he led the way up the cow path. A commanding voice, but comic, self-satirizing, masking that closeted kindliness I had sensed right away. Did I realize from the start how unfailingly generous he would be, would always be?
The table was already set in the woody room, the room with the open casement window. A square table of dark oak, polished to a dull sheen, linen placemats and crisp napkins that I admired (serviettes, dearie—napkins are what you call diapers, Peter Day briskly correcting, no condescension, just copy editing, part of the job). He pottered around in the kitchen, barking out cheery remarks to Miss Moore, as I decided to call her—somehow I couldn’t call her LM to her face, and to say Leslie was unthinkable.
I have no recollection of being introduced to her. I was relieved of my iris, which reappeared in a stone pitcher, though perhaps never actually seen by LM in her virtual blindness. Gone as well what we said, what we ate, though a soup plate has appeared, and Peter Day is holding a big-bellied ladle. The kitchen, offstage, eventually was the source of coffee and a cake out of a white bakery box. Peter (as by now he had instructed me to call him, waving away my Mr. Day) had brought “the pudding,” he said, from an excellent shop near his flat in London. I was baffled. Pudding? This was cake. Was there to be some kind of custard after the cake? Or with it? Don’t ask.
I was preoccupied with worries about the tape recorder—would it work? Worse, would my elderly prey be put on alert and refuse to divulge any of the delicious “material” I hoped for? Peter shooed me into the adjoining room, smaller, darker, but cozy. I set up the recorder on a low table, and spoke softly into it as to a trusted confidante, played it back—yes, works! Then Peter guided LM into the room. She was taller than I expected, now that she was up, out of her Whistler’s mother pose.
Patricia is going to ask you about Katherine, Leslie. She has come all the way from America to speak to you about Katherine. A brief encouraging nod to me, and back he went to the kitchen to clean up.
Alone at last. But in fact, I desperately wanted Peter to return, his bright voice, his easy command of this giving-nothing statuesque figure. I remembered to bellow: Would it be all right to record our conversation?
Why? It was the first word she spoke to me. Before I could find an answer, Peter boomed from the kitchen, Just answer her questions, Leslie. The mask of a face scowled slightly, settled back.
Where do you live? Asked peevishly. She was interviewing me, apparently.
St. Paul, Minnesota.
No jot of recognition. I was from nowhere.
I expressed my admiration for her memoir.
Peter brought it together, she said, dismissing authorship. I moved on to my love of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, especially the New Zealand ones “At the Bay” and “Prelude.” The Letters and the Journal meant a great deal to me too, I offered.
No response.
It was alarming to be hollering this ardent testimony, as if to a large audience in a great hall.
Then, remembering Ms. magazine, I launched into business, bawling, What did you and Katherine Mansfield think of the early feminist movement?
A brief caesura, then her low growl. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t think about it.
So much for any possible tweezing out of romantic disclosures. A dread silence fell between us, or maybe had been there all along.
I heard myself asking idiotically, frantically, Well, I mean, what did you talk about?
Her swift, furious reply: The flowers, what was coming up that day. About dinner, what we would have for dinner.
Peter stomped in, a dish towel in his hands. Leslie, stop that right now! Be nice. This girl has come all the way from America to speak to you. A satisfied look on the weathered, chalky face. She had the attention of the one who mattered.
Surely there was more to the interview in the dark room, the two of us seated on either side of the softly whirring cassette recorder on the coffee table, I crouched low, she regal, aloof. For how long? I cannot report. Even the cassette tape disappeared at some point. It’s all gone, except the misery. It was gone even as I sat there, a nice person all the way from Minnesota, a person who didn’t even know what a pudding was.
Peter and I were to take the same train back to London. I was glad of the companionship, even though he’d been witness to my humiliation. The train from Salisbury was crowded. He sat across from me, slumped in his seat, long legs stuck out, the straw boater pulled down: taking a nap. I sat up straight, dry-eyed in my gloom, glad the boater protected me from his gaze.
I was returning to my dirt-cheap Bloomsbury B&B that smelled of kippers, kippers I would be served in the lower-level breakfast room the next morning, along with a slick sausage, two eggs, the whites cruelly fried, as if electrocuted, sizzled brown. Potatoes, gluey in some kind of motor oil. Yet more weirdly, a puddle of rust-colored beans leaking into it all. Cold toast scraped with hard, resistant butter. A mug of tea so black and sludgy, no amount of milk could tame the tannin. My stomach roiled all day.
I had to eat this meal, the Cheerios and skim milk of my native place a world away. The breakfast came with the cost of the room, the second B of the B&B, and I could only afford one other meal a day. I had to tank up every morning, the gassy petroleum belches of the big red buses coming in the lower-level windows open to the street, the reek of exhaust joining the kippers and egginess, creating a tincture more repellent than any civet cat.
The misery of the LM fiasco was morphing, as I sat in the train, into this fret about the upcoming breakfast. Not only did the gorge rise in anticipation of the kippers. Worse, I was afraid of the B&B owner, who stood guard over the crowded tables. This older woman (everyone was older then, just as now, everyone is younger), with her steel hair in a tight bun, expected me not only to clean my plate but to enjoy it. To be grateful, even. She was proud that her house offered a full English breakfast. Not like some with their “continental” breakfasts, mind you.
It was the beginning of my understanding that I was not actually a nice person, but an aggrieved people-pleaser, a concept whose label I had not yet learned. I had no weight in social interactions. Inwardly, I was wringing my hands at every encounter. I could not pry disclosures from LM, too fearful to finesse her crabbiness, not sly enough to charm her into confiding in me. Apparently, I was prepared to be nauseated every day rather than disappoint the breakfast room matron with her cellblock visage.
I glanced up. Peter was looking at me, the straw boater pushed back. He was smiling, an amused smile. What had I revealed of myself, staring off, unguarded in my various miseries? Whatever I had radiated of my unhappiness, he had made a decision.
How would you like to come to a literary dinner at my flat Tuesday evening? Just a few other writers. Come early, I’ll show you around. Shepherd’s Bush.
A few other writers? As in, including you. Yes, please.
I arrived a half hour before the other “literary” guests. God help me, with yet another bunch of iris. Well, my father was a florist. At least no tape recorder.
The flat was crowded with chintz-covered chairs, several of which had been pulled up to a table set for dinner in the living room (sitting room, dearie—the copy-editing voice). On the shelves not only books but also an astonishing array of ceramic pitchers and cachepots, figurines (dogs, horses), and assorted pieces of beflowered china sets. Every Saturday morning early to Portobello Road, Peter said. I’ll take you. So many treasures.
I was told to leave my jacket on the wooden coat tree in the entry. There, perched at a jaunty angle on the knob at the top, was the straw boater. Old friend.
The other guests—just two—were women perhaps 10 years older than me. A curator at a museum on her way to becoming an influential art critic, the other with a second novel coming out in the next season’s list. We settled in with drinks, Peter, aproned and busy about the meal, coming and going. I was asked about my work. Peter called from the kitchen, She has interviewed Leslie, and is working on a piece about Katherine for Ms. magazine. And a book of poems soon, yes?
I was accounted for. I too was literary.
Peter retailed LM’s bad behavior. Suddenly it was all amusing, the other two women hooting. Not a shame, but a story. Leslie was impossible, completely impossible. The way she can be. The two women laughed again and agreed. I laughed along with them, easily disloyal to my heartache. Everyone agreed LM was impossible, knowing her from earlier stories Peter had told. It turned out he went down to the thatched cottage almost every Sunday to be sure LM was all right. A faithful proto-son.
During dinner, the conversation turned to class distinctions, how accents and certain locutions in Britain revealed all and permanently classified each person. I, for instance, am … And Ann is … To this, Ann, the higher-born woman, gave a self-deprecating aristo wave of the hand. More laughter.
The mysterious pudding was revealed as a tangle of upper class–lower class gamesmanship. Pudding was—or had been—the lower-class word, supplanted by the more haute dessert. But when the lower classes began to adopt dessert in an effort to rise, at least linguistically, the toffs (another new word) had cruelly changed the rules, reverting to pudding like the old boys they were. It was all based on public school folkways. (More secret lingo, public school meaning a private school). Pudding, once lowborn, had risen, if its original speakers had not.
It was explained that, as an American, I was out of the running of all this. You could be anything.
Trying to join the game, I offered that I was middle class, maybe lower middle class, Midwestern. No, no—that didn’t compute at all, made no mark. I was an American. Full stop. Sorted. Slotted.
What about me? Peter asked, evidently charmed. Where do I fit?
Oh Peter, but you’re unclassifiable. Your accent is pure homosexual. It completely cuts through all distinctions.
This struck them all as hysterical. Much shrieking. My own smile was wan—I was startled by the frank word. I had understood Peter was “different,” as we said deferentially about some of the floral designers at my father’s shop. They were, like Peter, somehow uniquely gifted. To be respected. But you didn’t say it, certainly not to their face. In fact, not at all. There was, along with the respect for their otherness, a faint aura of disability that it was only polite to ignore. The word gay (or, more provocatively, queer) was not yet heard in St. Paul, and not apparently in London among these literary savants. Peter was delighted, but I felt strangely protective of him—who proved in no need of protection.
I date a slow-dawning liberation from this moment, this glee in teasing a beloved pal who adored the teasing. He, a homosexual, and I, an American, were free of it all. Whatever “it all” was.
Oh class, dearie, he said later, when I stayed to help with the dishes. It’s all about class here. He and I didn’t figure in it, he said, and that was freedom.
There was no profile for Ms. magazine—obviously. In Peter’s sitting room at the literary dinner, my failure with LM was a hoot. But alas, it was only a tale to dine out on. There was no magazine “piece.” The girl with the bunch of iris and the bulky tape recorder brought back only unusable broken bits. And a full measure of embarrassment—I had failed.
Home I went a week later, with a small faience pitcher in milky pink and brown from Portobello Road (Peter nodding approval) that I wrapped carefully in a bright spangly scarf, also found for a song the Saturday we went early to the market. Peter frowned at the scarf, but sighed. There were treasures to be found. He was showing me—history was in objects, if you had a sharp eye. And then there was disposable junk. I was taking home an example of each. I was keen for the bright scarf and thought, but didn’t say, that I would pass along to my mother the fussy little pitcher.
I had scored a wonderfully cheap roundtrip ticket with an ingenious itinerary, from Gatwick to Winnipeg, where I would make a connection home on Northwest Airlines to Minneapolis–St. Paul. I had $1.35 in my jacket pocket as I boarded the plane. No pounds sterling, just this American money. My thin sheaf of traveler’s checks was gone. I was not in possession of a credit card.
No worries, I would be fed on the plane, and then I’d be on the connecting flight home. Clockwork. I don’t recall any anxiety about being virtually penniless and entirely alone half a world away. I wedged myself into my sardine-can middle seat, second-to-last row, surrounded by smokers hazing up the place, scent of the toilet wafting now and again. The way it was.
The London plane was late departing, very late. The connecting flight to Minneapolis, the last flight of the day, had left Winnipeg long before we landed. Everyone else seemed to melt away as we emerged from the plane. I was given a revised ticket for a flight the next morning, and I settled into a plastic seat behind a large pillar in the almost empty Winnipeg airport.
The American dollar was worth more, wasn’t it, than the Canadian? I could get something to eat or at least drink. But no, everything was closed. Everything. No vending machines even, though American money probably didn’t work in them anyway. But was I really hungry? Sort of, but once you fall asleep, you forget that, right?
An hour or so later, an older man in a uniform lumbered up to me. I had to leave the building, he said, not unkindly. The building was closing. Actually, it was already closed, he said, but he had just discovered me behind my pillar. He pointed to a van idling beyond the large window, the free transfer to a nearby hotel. Take that.
The hotel struck me as a comfortable place, not impersonal and motel-cold, gray carpeting with a twirling rose floral pattern. An old-fashioned reception desk curved around a whole corner of the lobby. A man about my father’s age stood behind it, attending to some papers, his glasses down his nose. He had the look of a seasoned high school teacher grading exams. He regarded me above the glasses as I passed by, a neutral look (good), and returned to his papers.
The hotel diner, behind glass swing doors, was open, though the only person inside was a middle-aged waitress behind the Formica counter, smoking a cigarette. I saw from the menu taped to the window that there was nothing I could afford except coffee. But who wanted coffee in the dark night of the soul?
I made my way to an upholstered banquette set around a large pillar. The safety of pillars. It was unfortunately within view of the man behind the reception counter. I determined not to look at him because not looking at him made me invisible.
But the eye has a mind of its own. I looked up. And there he was, the glasses still lowered, his gaze fixed on me. Then the hand up, finger curled, motioning me to come forward.
Where was I staying for the night?
I explained about the plane, and that if it was all right—the people-pleasing ingratiation rolling off me—I thought I would just sit in the lobby. It occurred to me then that I had no plan for getting back to the airport. I didn’t mention this, intent only on securing my place for the night on the banquette by the pillar.
He didn’t seem to be looking at me anymore or attending to how I answered. That was a little concerning. I tried to be winning, radiating harmlessness and rectitude. But he was having none of it, busy writing something on a small piece of paper. Then something else. He reached under the counter—could he have pushed a button to alert security? I was a vagrant, after all. Well, maybe the police would take me back to the airport. Also, I’d heard of backpackers being allowed to sleep in jail cells overnight. That would be an experience.
Have you had dinner?—the dark eyes now up and on my face, the frameless glasses little guard windows. Before I could answer, he was handing me the small paper—a ticket for the diner—and then another, this one for the airport van. (If anyone asks you in the morning, just say you’re a stewardess, though surely we both knew I was an unlikely flight attendant, streaming hippie hair, worn bell bottoms.) Then a key for a room on the third floor. Get some sleep. Be sure to lock the door. I would get a wake-up call early in the morning.
It was only as my mass of troubles disappeared in his kindness that I felt how frightened I’d been. I began to blubber a bit. What was the cost of the room and the meals? What was his name and the address here? I would send him a check, promise. I may even have held up my hand, Scout’s honor. Yes, I did that.
The eyes closed for a tired moment, the soft pallor of his indoor face, the sagging gray suit and the maroon tie. That won’t be necessary.
Sometime in the future, he said, dark expressionless eyes back on me, I might be in a position to help someone myself. He pointed to the diner, which was closing soon. The chit he had given me, he said, was good for something in the morning, as well.
At the diner door I turned, intending to smile, give him a friendly wave to show how grateful I was. But the glasses were down the nose, eyes turned again to his papers where, I had seen, there were no words, only rows of numbers.
Peter liked to say, as our correspondence over the years moved from typed letters on letterhead to cards and handwritten notes, and finally to the astonishing immediacy of email, that the only thing worse than someone who failed to answer a letter was a person (himself) who answered instantly, thus sending the shuttlecock of communication back into the other person’s court.
I gave as good as I got: we wrote and wrote to each other, serving and returning serve across the transatlantic net. Occasionally I visited London, and once—amazingly—he visited St. Paul after I married. I had the impression he was checking out this husband who seemed to pass muster, who knew a great deal about the poetry of John Donne and had the right sense of humor and an ability to be irreverent— even as they both had a strong Anglican gene, which I did not share, both of them loving the language of the Book of Common Prayer.
At some point, Peter became heavily involved with the English PEN Centre and took an active role in International PEN, which put him in touch with writers across the globe. Like all naturally generous people, he was a fabulous gossip. He gassed on about “names,” allowing himself to be outraged in particular by Susan Sontag, who in the late 1980s was essentially his PEN America counterpart—total phony, terrible person. I was all ears.
Peter continued to aid and abet my efforts. When I had a commission (a real one) to write a piece about Venice in winter, he put me in touch with a Dallas heiress he knew from her donations to PEN. She has a place on the Grand Canal—you can describe it. He had written to her, asking (requiring) her to befriend me. I got my invitation to the palatial residence and was given a detail useful for my travel piece: from her balcony overlooking the Canal, she watched to see when the people standing in the gondolas were outnumbered by those sitting: that meant more tourists than locals—time to go back to the ranch.
Peter reported, without much ado, that LM died in 1978. She made it to 90.
A new Mansfield biography by Claire Tomalin appeared in 1988, subtitled A Secret Life. It was the third major biography of this “minor” writer with her slim shelf of books, dead at 34, handicapped by illness since her early wild-thing 20s. She was seriously ill her entire writing career.
Tomalin’s biography was a revelation, outing Mansfield as a kind of sexual liberation martyr and clearing the mists about her illnesses—not simply tuberculosis (which did indeed kill her), but also gonorrhea, which she contracted after a pileup of what my mother would have called “bad choices.”
She had become pregnant soon after her arrival in London from Wellington, then madly married another man she knew casually to cover this indiscretion, and bolted from him within hours of the wedding, never apparently consummating the union, but now “a married woman”—and pregnant.
Her father was a prominent Wellington man—chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and eventually knighted. In a photograph in Tomalin’s biography, the mother is striking, even imperial, a wide velvet choker around her elegant neck, aloof face offering mild disdain. The look conveyed not snobbery but implacability.
Hearing from her London relatives the state of affairs, this eminence came steaming over from New Zealand and took the unruly daughter off to a spa in Germany. Having deposited her daughter in the care of others, the mother sailed back to Wellington, where she cut the daughter out of her will upon arrival. Katherine was alone when she miscarried the baby that had occasioned both her marriage and her mother’s alarm.
Katherine stayed in Germany alone, recovering, writing the stories that would form her first book, In a German Pension, published in 1911. She also got herself into the brief, infected liaison that led from gonorrhea to tuberculosis to her death.
Tomalin’s reconstruction of it all includes the misbegotten surgery that followed the discovery of her infection but that did not cure her, instead releasing the bacteria into her system, rendering her not only sterile but subject to increasing pain, which she took to calling her “rheumatiz.”
The shame was profound, bound up in a virtual omertà she kept about her condition. Nor did she really comprehend what had happened to her or how catastrophic it was.
In 1991, Tomalin returned to Mansfield as a subject, writing a play, The Winter Wife, that was produced in London. It was about the relationship between Mansfield and LM, a friendship that began in girlhood at their London boarding school and endured until Mansfield’s death in France, surely becoming more essential to Mansfield as she became a virtual invalid, needing care.
There was no lesbian love between them, as I had hoped to ferret out when I visited the New Forest cottage, but love there was. And dependence. The love was unconditional—LM’s. The dependence, sometimes the infuriated helplessness of an invalid, was Mansfield’s.
They shared a mystical belief in friendship that they both felt was as sacred as marriage. And given Mansfield’s disappointing marriage to the literary critic John Middleton Murry, who was only relieved to have someone else take over for him as caregiver, their friendship was profound for both of them, if more soulful on LM’s side.
Peter went to the play’s opening. An early scene, he reported, had the two women on a train headed to the south of France. LM spoke to the porter in comically cracked French as she tried to arrange things, ineptly, for the ailing Katherine. The audience, loving the slapstick, erupted in laughter. Peter was enraged—Leslie’s French was perfect, he wrote me. She spoke the language far better than Mansfield. How he knew this wasn’t clear.
He rose from his seat and called out as if he too were onstage, This is a lie, a complete lie! And stomped out of the theater, clambering over the people in his row, nicely disrupting opening night. He seemed, in the telling, quite pleased with his own performance.
I relayed this episode to a close English friend, a writer fierce about accuracy, committed to truth telling. I thought she would relish the tale. She was appalled. That just isn’t done.
Deep rooted in my loyalty, I only wished I’d been there to stalk out with Peter.
Things began to fall apart. Or Peter did. He’d been a brilliant editor, a reader with a pitch-perfect ear, able to pluck a gem from the flotsam and jetsam of the slush piles he went through at warp speed. With this spectacular talent, he was advanced from editor to publisher at a new firm. But being a great reader does not automatically make a winning publisher. Peter’s idea of the bottom line was a great final chapter.
He lost that job, perhaps without regret. Then came a series of “little” strokes. Money became something of a problem for a man who never paid attention to money. Even his “treasures” from Portobello Road were of the teacup variety, and that nice tweed jacket is from Oxfam, thank you very much.
A group of his (many) admirers got him on the list to be housed at Charterhouse, a distinctly English establishment, a kind of grand almshouse for aged single men (called the Brothers) who had performed service, often cultural, to the nation and were in need of housing, though still able to care for themselves. Peter became one of them, moving himself and his books and some of the Portobello treasures into a snug apartment, taking his meals in a grand hall with his fellow Brothers, swanning around the property in the dual spirit of baron and manorial retainer.
He invited my husband and me to visit. Tart instructions: we could stay two nights, no longer. Guests room in a separate wing. Meals with him. Tour of the grounds, the chapel, the works. He was in his element, manuscripts piled by his easy chair (he had become a reader for Little, Brown), chipper with the Brothers as we dined with them or passed them on the lovely grounds, an opera singer, a landscape gardener, a dancer—all “former” versions, as Peter was a former publisher. He had signed on to offer tours of the ancient site, dating from 1348, when it was used as a burial ground during the Black Plague. It served as a Carthusian monastery until the dissolution of the monasteries, when it became a house for wealthy noblemen. The first Elizabeth met the Privy Council there before her coronation.
Peter loved rolling out the history, occasionally embellishing it (in time this tendency relieved him of his tour guiding). He especially loved arriving at 1611 (Shakespeare still alive, the year of the first performance of The Tempest, Peter’s favorite), when Thomas Sutton bought the Charterhouse. Sutton established a foundation to provide a home for up to 80 Brothers, “either decrepit or old captaynes either at sea or at land, maimed or disabled soldiers, merchants fallen on hard times, those ruined by shipwreck or other calamity.” Peter’s people, though no dancers or opera singers in that early roll call.
In addition to all his friends from his publishing days, he claimed as family a young British diplomat I never met, a married man with small children, his virtual son who watched over all the practicalities of life for him. Peter was always on the prowl for comic gifts for the children. The diplomat was posted to Sri Lanka. To my surprise, about a year after our visit to the Charterhouse, I received a postcard from Colombo: Peter was spending several months there with the family—his family, as he put it.
Then, suddenly it seemed, the emails between us dwindled, became rare. Peter wrote that he could no longer manage the computer or even the typewriter. Apparently there were more “little brain episodes.” My husband was ill as well, heart and lungs. It seems impossible, but the trail we had trod all the years since 1975 in the New Forest went cold. Yes, I blame myself. But what is such guilt but self-promotion?
A year or so after my husband’s death, I suddenly thought—Peter! And was determined to get back in touch. But something—reality, no doubt—sent me first to Google. And there he was in the remembrances of those who, like me, had been beneficiaries of an insight that always led to kindness. And to loyalty, prudent or not—his naughty cri de coeur at the play whose opening night he managed to mar.
I didn’t even have anyone to write to, no condolence note to the adopted son diplomat whose name I didn’t know. My connection now, shockingly, seemed fragile, hardly worthy of grief. I was, after all, one of a number, at the end of a long line. I had lost the connection. Peter didn’t lose it—he had been too impaired at the end to keep it. I was the one who allowed the shuttlecock we had kept lofting across the distance of time and space to drop.
I wanted to tell someone how it had been all those years ago, not out of sentiment, not even out of loyalty, but as testament to the astonishment that age brings to the past—I was that person? I was? The past was coming back not as memory but as impossibility.
What I most wanted to revisit—to relive—was that night, after the “literary dinner,” when Peter told me that he and I, outside the confines of class, were free. We stood in the little foyer after finishing the dishes to say farewell. And I did feel free somehow, free to keep going on my hardly begun life, the “literary” life I was trying to snag in my grasping hands, no matter my failure in the thatched cottage.
I took my jacket off the peg of the wooden clothes tree. And there, still perched on top, was the straw boater.
I love that hat, I told Peter. What I meant was that I loved this life I was embarking on, this life he assured me I was free to pursue. And I loved him, him as he had first appeared, jigging down the cow path in the cream linen suit, the boater atop his small, neat head.
Try it on, he said.
But unlike his, my head was not small, not neat. The boater sat atop my mass of springy hair like one of those old-fashioned nurse’s caps, a kind of upside-down cupcake mold. Ridiculous. We were both laughing, looking at my absurdly hatted head in the wall mirror.
Ah, too bad, Peter said, suddenly sorry. His face, usually so animated, ready to be amused, was still, almost grave.
Too bad, he repeated. If it had fitted, I was going to give it to you. It was Katherine’s hat.
The post I’ll Be Seeing You appeared first on The American Scholar.
Who is the G.O.A.T., the greatest of all time? Tennis fans and pundits alike will consider that question anew now that Roger Federer has retired and Serena Williams has decided to “evolve” away from the sport. Chances are, if you’re a tennis fan, you already have strong opinions on the matter. Perhaps you believe that Federer, who elevated the game to a quasi-mystical level (David Foster Wallace famously likened watching him play to a religious experience), and Williams, who transformed the sport in her own way, are indeed the G.O.A.T.s.
Maybe you harbor strong opinions about the G.O.A.T.s in other sports, too: Michael or LeBron, Tiger or Jack, Marta or Mia Hamm, Brady or Montana, Taurasi or Swoopes. How would LeBron James have fared in Michael Jordan’s bare-knuckle NBA? Would Tiger have vanquished Nicklaus’s rivals—Gary Player, Tom Watson—golfers who didn’t fade into oblivion on the Sunday of a major? Did Lionel Messi, in delivering World Cup glory to Argentina, rise above Maradona and Pelé? These debates can make for a nostalgic trip into the sporting past, giving talking heads an excuse for ratings-driven histrionics. Witness the latest TV sparring over the newly retired Tom Brady.
But I’d contend that we’ve grown overly infatuated with bestowing G.O.A.T. status on our sporting heroes, and that this obsession has become a hollow sideshow, a lot of empty sound bites, signifying (almost) nothing. Forget that in its annual tongue-in-cheek Banished Word List, Lake Superior State University just called out “G.O.A.T.” as the most egregious for its “overuse, misuse, and uselessness.” The point is, there’s no way to compare players from different eras without resorting to wild speculation, and in most cases, a recency bias plagues these discussions—it’s almost always a player from this generation who wears the crown. When did we become so obsessed with this reductionist ritual, this anointing of the chosen one?
By nearly every account, we can trace things back to Muhammad Ali, who had no qualms about telling the world where he stood in boxing’s pantheon of champions. More specifically, according to Patricia O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman, authors of the Grammarphobia blog, we can pinpoint the debut of the acronym to September 1992, when Ali’s fourth wife, Lonnie, used the term “G.O.A.T. Inc.” to license her husband’s intellectual property. Rap and hip-hop circles were quick to catch on. “G.O.A.T.” appears in De La Soul’s 1993 track “Lovely How I Let My Mind Float,” and it arguably entered the mainstream in 2000, when L. L. Cool J dropped his album G.O.A.T.
On the sporting front, the first online use of G.O.A.T. occurred in 1996 on an Orlando Magic forum, as reported by Merriam-Webster, which added the term to the dictionary in 2018. “Penny [Hardaway] is the GOAT” is what history records. With all due respect to Hardaway, the former Magic point guard, this is but evidence that the moniker was meaningless from the beginning. G.O.A.T. mania spiked in February 2017, according to Google Trends, undoubtedly inspired by Tom Brady and the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl comeback against the Atlanta Falcons. It continues to infect nearly every corner of the sporting world: even Simone Biles donned a leotard with a bejeweled image of a goat on its sleeve. And after Serena Williams gave birth to her first child, her husband designed four billboards near Palm Springs advertising his wife as the G.M.O.A.T.: the greatest momma of all time.
Pull up old footage of Wimbledon and watch Laver serve and volley with his wood racquet, his game predicated on touch and angles and placement, and be reminded that he was practically playing a different sport: nothing resembles today’s game.As for the pundits now elevating Serena and Roger to G.O.A.T.-dom, how many of them saw Steffi Graf or Martina Navratilova play on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, let alone Rod Laver or Björn Borg? Pull up old YouTube footage of Wimbledon and watch Laver serve and volley with his wood racquet, his game predicated on touch and angles and placement, and be reminded that he was practically playing a different sport: no polyester strings, no outrageous topspin or bulging biceps, no access to contemporary training methods or nutrition, nothing resembling the intense physicality of today’s game. Rather, his matches have a garden-party feel to them, as if a couple of club pros were battling for bragging rights, before retiring to the pub for a pint.
Laver dominated his era, winning two Grand Slams and 11 majors. This, even though he effectively lost five years of his career because, after turning professional, he was shut out from the majors, which permitted only amateur players until 1968. How can one compare eras, draw meaningful conclusions about how, say, a time-traveling Laver—his physique newly buff, his racquet graphite—would fare against Federer at Wimbledon? The truth, of course, is that each successive tennis generation built on the accomplishments of the previous one, a kind of evolutionary cycle that continues, to this day, to reveal unimagined levels of the game—witness the recent arrival of a 19-year-old Spaniard named Carlos Alcaraz, who, having become the youngest world number one in ATP history, embodies the future of the sport. After Laver came Borg’s reign of dominance, which forced John McEnroe to dig deep to break through; and then McEnroe inspired Ivan Lendl to get superhumanly fit and usher in the modern power game, a magical era in which baseliners and serve-and-volleyers still coexisted: Pete Sampras and Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg pushing forward at Wimbledon, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier and Mats Wilander hanging back.
One finds a similar progression in the women’s game: Navratilova elevating the sport with her powerful athleticism at net, the intensity of her rivalry with Chris Evert foreshadowing the one between Monica Seles and Graf. Never mind Graf’s forehand; it was the German’s mental fortitude, says Serena, that inspired her as she reshaped the game into what we know today. In remembering the players of eras past who had a profound and transformative effect on the sport, who helped remake it in their image, an abiding fact emerges: none of them won majors much past their early 30s. Borg retired at 26 with 11 slams; Laver and Sampras won their last at 31; Graf was 29, Navratilova 33. Compare that with the current era. Serena won her final major at 35, Federer at 36. Novak Djokovic (at 35) and Rafael Nadal (at 36) seem poised to add to their total. Much of the apparent statistical dominance exhibited by players today, therefore, is based on their longevity, which in turn is based on the advances made in fitness and nutrition—yet another reminder that it’s all but impossible to compare generations without resorting to fuzzy math and biases born of recency (or nostalgia).
One finds a similar progression in the women’s game: Navratilova elevating the sport with her powerful athleticism at net, the intensity of her rivalry with Chris Evert foreshadowing the one between Monica Seles and Steffi Graf.Before the arrival of the acronym, “greatest of all time” was, according to a search of historical newspapers, applied to all manner of athletes in the prewar era, but unfailingly with an extra word thrown in: among the greatest of all time. A caveat. A qualifier. Which may offend someone with the sensibilities of baseball’s Ted Williams, who was never coy about his desire to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, but which otherwise seems to be enough of a rarefied designation to make the need for further classification seem, well, a bit Type A American. As for Muhammad Ali, much of his “greatest of all time” banter was shtick—part personal motivation, part psychological warfare, part business strategy: “I like to be the villain,” he once told the Irish journalist Cathal O’Shannon. The allure of G.O.A.T. is the pleasing clarity, the idea that one player is the undisputed best, the finest manifestation of sporting greatness, with a certain tribalism infecting the debates—you’re either team Federer or team Nadal, for instance. But of course, as in life, there’s no real clarity, no reassurance that your best years are still to come, or aren’t already behind you.
If you remain intent on ranking athletes, I will grant you this: the rubric should be framed around not who is the greatest of all time, but who is the greatest of a particular generation, which doesn’t much lend itself to the acronymic tidiness of G.O.A.T.—or the title of a rap album. But it’s a more reasonable lens through which to view the current debate over, say, Roger, Rafa, and Novak. Does Rafa’s claim hinge too much on his dominance on clay (14 French Opens)? Will Novak’s Covid vaccine stance, which caused him to miss two majors last year (but didn’t prevent him from winning this year’s Australian Open), hurt his numerical case? Did Roger get tight and choke away a couple finals, undermining his claim? Have at it.
But also remember that even this debate doesn’t adequately explain why the recent golden era of tennis mattered so much—not only to the fans but also to the players themselves. Here’s Federer, back in 2012, after winning Wimbledon, on the possibility that Nadal might one day surpass his slam total: “If he does beat my record, it almost doesn’t matter. Because I did things he can never do. He did things that I can never do. It’s the moments that live and the memories that are with me that are most important.”
In his final match, at the Laver Cup last fall, Federer lobbied to play not singles but doubles with Nadal, a symbolic gesture that emphasized how their rivalry, one that had pushed them both to extremes on the court they could never have achieved alone, had also created a lasting friendship. They held a match point before losing to Jack Sock and Francis Tiafoe, but the result in the end mattered little. In classic Federer style, he had orchestrated a celebration of the game itself. On hand were Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, Jim Courier, and Novak Djokovic. Nadal, meanwhile, appeared to shed as many tears as Federer himself when it was all over. Never mind our G.O.A.T. infatuation: this spectacle was a reminder of how each generation has built on the previous one, and how in this most individual of games, it is your opponent across the net who makes everything possible. Federer stepped into the spotlight one last time, and then retired into the shade, to wait for the next generation to assume the crown.
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Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint; W. W. Norton, 320 pp., $30
I first heard of Bruno Schulz as a high school student in Ostróda in northern Poland, when the well-known literary critic, writer, and translator Artur Sandauer visited the literature club I belonged to. He spoke of writers I was familiar with and then, at the end, mentioned Schulz. Sandauer told us that Schulz had been born in Drohobych, now in Ukraine, and died there in 1942. Yet he failed to mention that both he and Schulz were Jewish—and with good reason. It was the spring of 1969, in the aftermath of a brutal anti-Semitic campaign, sponsored by the Communist Party, that ultimately led to the exodus from Poland of some 20,000 Jews. Sandauer, I learned later, had grown up in Sambor, a town close to Drohobych, and he and Schulz had been friends. Sandauer managed to flee from the ghetto and survived. Schulz, although in possession of forged Aryan papers from his Warsaw friends, lacked the resolve to use them and never made it out.
Schulz’s work met with disapproval after the war, shunned by Polish critics in thrall to socialist realism. After Stalin’s death, Sandauer helped revive interest in his friend by writing an introduction to Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), published together in the first postwar Polish edition in 1957. But it was writer and translator Jerzy Ficowski who uncovered many of Schulz’s lost letters, articles, and reviews, as well as his drawings and graphics. Those materials formed the basis of his 1967 book, Regions of the Great Heresy, the first reconstruction of Schulz’s life. Published in an English edition in 2003, in a translation by Theodosia Robertson, Ficowski’s book stood for decades as the only available biography of Schulz. Now, with the release of Benjamin Balint’s Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History, English speakers will gain access to an important new account that sheds light on many previously unknown aspects of Schulz’s life and posthumous existence.
Schulz’s work has acquired a cult following and continues to inspire writers, visual artists, filmmakers, theater directors, composers, and musicians.Balint begins his narrative with a visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem, where he examines fragments of murals painted by Schulz. German documentary filmmakers Christian and Benjamin Geissler discovered the murals in February 2001, in a house in Drohobych that once belonged to SS officer Felix Landau, a ruthless killer who was in charge of Jewish labor. Landau also fancied himself an arts patron. After seeing Schulz’s drawings, he decided to grant him the status of “necessary Jew.” As Landau’s “slave,” Schulz painted murals in several SS buildings and was ordered to decorate with frescoes the walls of the children’s room in his “protector’s” villa. The murals depicted scenes from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Landau had given Schulz a special armband that was supposed to exempt him from Nazi roundups and keep him safe. It didn’t: Schulz was gunned down, along with about 200 other Jews, during an SS killing spree on November 19, 1942. Landau later bragged about the number of Jews he shot on that “Black Thursday.” Of the many differing explanations for Schulz’s murder, Balint presents five, starting with the best-known and most likely scenario: that Schulz was killed in reprisal for Landau’s shooting of a Jewish dentist who happened to be the slave of a rival Nazi officer.
After the war, Landau’s villa was divided into apartments. Schulz’s murals lay hidden under layers of paint in one resident’s pantry until the Geisslers found them. Balint carefully recounts the story of the murals’ discovery, their stealthy removal a few months later by the agents of Yad Vashem, and the international uproar that followed. Debate raged over whether the Israeli operation was a rescue or a theft. Yad Vashem asserted its “moral right” to Schulz’s work. The Polish government, together with the country’s literary community, emphasized that Schulz spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew, wrote in Polish, and thought of himself as part of the Polish literary tradition. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials insisted that the artwork belonged to the town of Drohobych. Balint’s evenhanded account of the dispute—which includes the bribery of local Ukrainian functionaries and the suspected involvement of upper echelons of Israeli officials in what Balint calls “a Holocaust heist”—reads like investigative journalism.
The discovery of the murals and their seizure made international headlines. For many people, it was the first time they’d heard the name Bruno Schulz, but the extent to which they were prompted to reach for a volume of his stories is anyone’s guess. Fame owing to a politically motivated controversy wasn’t the kind Schulz ever would have sought or desired. During his short life, he made several attempts at winning broader recognition for his work, but none panned out. One of his stories, “Die Heimkehr” (“Homecoming”), he wrote in German and sent to Thomas Mann, hoping it would help him find non-Polish readers. It didn’t. Schulz likewise traveled to Paris in 1938, taking with him a hundred of his drawings. Encouraged by his many friends, he hoped to make contacts in artistic circles and arrange an exhibition of his work. Having failed, he returned to Drohobych and wrote to a friend that the trip had helped “rid [himself] of certain delusions concerning an international career.”
Schulz’s haunting stories brought him international recognition only later, after they were translated into numerous languages. The first English translation of The Street of Crocodiles, by Celina Wieniewska, came out in London in 1963, but only in 1977—when, at the behest of guest editor Philip Roth, Penguin published that translation—did Schulz’s work reach wider readership and receive the critical attention it deserved. Many American writers, among them John Updike and Cynthia Ozick, wrote rave reviews of Schulz’s work. Over time, Schulz has acquired a cult following and continues to inspire not just other writers and visual artists but also filmmakers, theater directors, composers, and musicians. In 2019, his Collected Stories appeared in a new translation by Madeleine G. Levine.
Schulz’s afterlife has indeed been long, and interest in the writer continues to grow. The search for his lost art and literary works is still unearthing new materials. In 2019, the Ukrainian researcher Lesya Khomych found a story titled “Undula,” which Schulz published in 1922 under the pseudonym of Marceli Weron, in an oil industry journal. The discovery corrects the misconception that Schulz’s first publication dates to 1934 and that his art preceded his literary output. It also strengthens the belief of those who haven’t given up hope that the lost manuscript of Schulz’s novel Messiah will one day be found. Schulz began working on it in 1934 and, before moving to the Drohobych ghetto, handed it off for safekeeping.
Bruno Schulz is a welcome addition to our fund of information about a remarkable European master. In it, Balint invites the reader to follow him through “a portal into the haunted life of this virtuoso of language and image.” Those who enter will leave with a better understanding of Schulz’s life and his literary and artistic legacy.
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Some years ago, I found myself standing beside the famed luthier Dana Bourgeois while he prepared the top of a Brazilian rosewood dreadnought guitar that he was building in his Lewiston, Maine, shop. Bourgeois is one of the most respected contemporary acoustic guitar builders, with dealers all over the world, and the list of musicians who have played his instruments includes the likes of Doc Watson, Bryan Sutton, Luke Bryan, and Natalie Maines. I had read a good bit about Bourgeois before I met him, and I already owned and loved one of his guitars and wanted to learn what made them sound so special.
One of the things he’s known for is personally voicing the top of each instrument before it is joined to the back and the sides. To accomplish this task, he uses a method called tap tuning. To the underside of an acoustic guitar’s top he glues several narrow strips of wood called braces. The “luthier’s dilemma,” as Bourgeois puts it, is that if the top, which acts as a soundboard, is too thick or the braces are too strong, the instrument will not vibrate properly, and the guitar will lack resonance and sound dead. If, however, the top is too thin or the braces are too weak, the guitar, which is subjected to as much as 200 pounds of string tension, will literally pull itself to pieces.
While I watched, he held the braced side of the top—two joined pieces of Adirondack spruce—near his left ear. With his free hand, he started thumping the other side, his fingers moving from one spot to another, tapping it some 15 or 20 times. He stepped back over to his workbench, laid the top down, and began to shave minuscule curls of wood off the braces. Then he lifted it beside his ear and repeated the tuning process, after which he returned to the bench and shaved a bit more off the braces, then took a small sheet of sandpaper and sanded a bit of wood off the treble side of the top. Once again, he repeated the tapping process. Finally, he smiled and laid the top down on his workbench. “I think our friend here,” he said, pointing at the top, “is pretty much done.”
- Odetta, 1958, Otto Hagel, Gelatin silver print (Hansel Mieth/Otto Hagel Archive ©Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation)
- Charlotte Davis Wylie, 1853, Thomas Cantwell Healy, Oil on canvas (Collection of Charlotte Boehmer Fraisse, Ocean Springs, Mississippi. From the Estate of Mary Swords Boehmer)
- Woody Guthrie,Half Length Portrait, Facing Slightly Left, Holding Guitar, 1943, Al Aumuller, Gelatin silver print (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
- Home Ranch, 1892, Thomas Eakins, Oil on canvas (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and Miss Mary Adeline Williams)
I started playing guitar in early September 1965—I can date this beginning so precisely because the lessons were a present from my father when I turned nine at the end of August. The man who taught me was named Harry Trammell, and he worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi. If the name of the town sounds familiar, it is most likely because Indianola is also the hometown of the great blues guitarist B. B. King. In addition, countless other great bluesmen were born close by, among them Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Skip James, and John Lee Hooker. Though I had grown up being exposed to country music and bluegrass, I had not been impervious to “the British invasion,” which I knew had its roots in the Delta blues, and I was motivated to learn to play by my desire to start a rock band. I eventually did that, but only after playing between the ages of 10 and 12 in a country combo with Mr. Trammell himself and a local football coach.
Though it seems preposterous today, I’d wanted to play guitar in those days not just because I loved the sounds emanating from it but also because I’d bought into the notion that it might do for me what it had done for the great bluesmen: deliver me from a life in the cotton field. I had watched my tenant-farmer parents and grandparents work from dawn till dusk for very little, and I knew I did not want their lives. I first looked to the guitar as a means of escape, but fortunately I had enough sense to figure out by high school that true musicians had some skill that I lacked, so I turned to my other love—literature, specifically the novel—and found a voice and a life in words. Ironically, that life has afforded me enough income and enough leisure time to take music lessons from some first-rate guitarists and to own and play some first-rate instruments, including quite a few vintage Martins and Gibsons and a number of guitars built by Dana Bourgeois. Every one of them is different from all the others.
The first thing I do each day is pull one of the seven guitars I currently own out of its case. I place it on a stand in my study and play it off and on all day. My study is next to our bedroom, and I nearly always go to bed a couple of hours after my wife. I can’t play late at night without waking her, so I’m usually just sitting there reading. Even so, I leave the instrument out until the last moment. My wife once asked me why I don’t put it away sooner, and without having to think, I said, “I like its company.”
Personality attaches itself to acoustic guitars just as easily as it resists attachment to, say, coffee tables. Nearly all examples of both are made of wood. There the similarities cease. The coffee table, no matter how attractive or valuable, is in the end merely functional. You set your coffee cup on it, you stand your wine glass there, you lay the morning paper there. About the only time it might seem endowed with personality is when you bang your shin on it in the dark and call it a name casting doubt on its lineage. The guitar, meanwhile, has a voice and a personality of its own, which are the result of numerous factors, chief among them the woods out of which it was built and the craftmanship put into constructing it. The voice and temperament of the guitar are subject to radical changes depending on the environment in which it finds itself. If its surroundings are too humid, the top will swell, throwing it out of tune. If they are too arid, the top will shrink, which lowers the action and causes fret buzz and other problems, including cracks. An acoustic guitar will punish you for neglect. You have to respect it in order for it to respect you and grant you the use of its voice.
- The Music Lives After The Instruments Is Destroyed, 1984, Lonnie Holley, Burned musical instruments, artificial flowers, wire (Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta. ©2022 Lonnie Holley/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio)
- Person with Guitar (Blue), 2005, John Baldessari, Color screenprint on Sintra board with hand painting (Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, ©John Baldessari 2005. Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Image: Aaron Wessling Photography)
- Three Folk Musicians, 1967 Romare Bearden Collage of various papers with paint and graphite on canvas (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Margaret Glasgow Endowment. ©Romare Bearden Foundation/ licensed by Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)
“Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art”—an exhibition, currently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, that’s moving in late May to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville—frequently depicts the symbiotic relationship between the guitar and the player. Working musicians display a wide array of attitudes toward their instruments. Some think of them in the most personal terms, as they might a loved one. No other guitar but that guitar will do. The iconic folksinger Odetta might fall into this camp. Trained as an opera singer but convinced that her race would prove a constant stumbling block, she taught herself to play guitar and became one of the most prominent figures of the ’50s and ’60s folk revival. Bob Dylan, after hearing her for the first time, got rid of his electric guitar and bought a Gibson acoustic like hers. In Otto Hagel’s 1958 portrait, included in the show, she appears to regard the instrument with nothing less than reverence, clutching it to her heart and holding it close to her face while she plays, her gaze trained on the fingers of her left hand as they fret the strings. Odetta was a large, powerfully built woman, and looking at Hagel’s photograph, one gets the feeling that prying the guitar away from her would not be an easy task.
At the opposite extreme are musicians like Woody Guthrie, photographed in 1943 by Al Aumuller, shown wearing a flannel shirt and mariner’s cap, in his hands a Gibson L-00 with a message taped to the top: this machine kills fascists. It’s open to question whether Guthrie would have been able to tell you what specific model Gibson he was playing. He owned and played hundreds of guitars over the course of his career. Most of them were Martins, typically small bodied like Guthrie himself. Some he lost; others he reportedly gave away. Many fine musicians whom I’ve known are thoroughly unsentimental about the instruments they play, regarding them as tools, much as I might regard the keyboard on which I’m typing these words. Guthrie took things a step further, viewing the guitar in mechanistic terms, seeing it as a political weapon.
Two of the oil paintings in this immensely rewarding exhibition speak to me in an almost haunting manner: Charles White’s 1952 work Goodnight Irene and Robert Gwathmey’s Girl with Guitar from 1965. White, associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Chicago, but his mother was born in Mississippi. The painting depicts a barefoot Black man playing acoustic guitar in what appears to be a cabin while a woman stands behind him, eyes closed, head resting on his broad shoulders. The song “Goodnight Irene,” originally recorded by the bluesman Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter in 1933, is likely to be recognized by almost everyone, and that familiarity, coupled with the images in the painting, will surely suggest the Delta blues to anyone acquainted with the blues tradition. But it’s worth noting that Lead Belly was from Louisiana and a very eclectic musician who played not only guitar but also violin, mandolin, and accordion, drawing from a variety of musical genres. In Gwathmey’s Girl with Guitar, we see a young Black woman alone on her porch with a guitar, her eyes shut tight, the long, slim fingers of her left hand forming a chord on the fretboard while her right hand is draped across the guitar body, dangling uselessly. She can put it to no good use because the guitar lacks both strings and a bridge. I was previously unfamiliar with Gwathmey’s work, but I have learned that he was considered a social realist, and it’s hard not to see a message in the painting: the woman has an instrument, she has the long fingers of Robert Johnson (and appears to be forming the same chord we see in the ubiquitous 1936 studio portrait of Johnson that has adorned so many records and CDs), but until she can afford to get the guitar outfitted with a bridge and strings, she has no voice.
- Julie, 2006, Sue Hudelson, Digital print (Courtesy of the artist)
- Coachella Valley Mexican Laborers Around Camp, 1935, Dorothea Lange, Photonegative print (©The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor)
These two images together took me back to a day in the spring of 1971 when I stood on the porch at my grandmother’s house, my shiny new Fender Coronado II suspended from my shoulders. The guitar was plugged into the small Sears amp I’d received the previous Christmas. By then I was leading my own rock band, and I was working on some blues riffs when a pickup truck pulled into the yard, turned around, and backed up to the porch. In the truck bed was a couch that my grandmother had just purchased from a furniture store in nearby Leland. Two Black men got out of the truck, the driver in his mid-40s, I would have guessed, the other man considerably younger. While I kept right on playing, my grandmother came out and held the door open, and the two men let down the tailgate, lifted the couch out, carried it up the steps and into the house. I noticed the older man glance at me as he went by.
When they came back out, he started toward the steps, then stopped and turned around. “Excuse me,” he said. “Sounds like you must’ve been listening to B. B.”
In 1971, racial passions were running high in the Mississippi Delta. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had determined in Brown v. Board of Education, back in 1954, that the “separate but equal” approach to public schooling was unconstitutional, Delta whites had by and large ignored the ruling until the federal courts finally forced the integration of the public schools, prompting a mass exodus of whites to segregation academies. I only mention this to explain why I was surprised that the delivery man had spoken to a white teenager who was a complete stranger. I was even more surprised when I heard myself say, “Yes, sir,” which I had been trained since the cradle not to do when speaking to a Black man.
“You know where B. B. got that lick you just played?” he asked.
I hoped my grandmother would remain inside, fussing with her new couch. “No, sir,” I said.
“Got it from T-Bone Walker. You ever listened to him?”
I hadn’t listened to him, though I’d read about him in the liner notes on rock albums where he was cited as an important influence. “No, sir,” I said.
“B. B.’s got a little different touch, plays it a little smoother. Want me to show you how T-Bone played it?”
I don’t know if I spoke at all. I just know I lifted the strap over my head and handed him the guitar. I tried to hand him my pick, too, but he said he didn’t need it. Rather than strap on the instrument, he knelt on one knee and balanced my Fender on the other. “B. B. plays it like this,” he said. Using his thumbnail, he ripped off the passage that for the past week or so I’d been mangling. It sounded just like it did when B. B. played it on his album Indianola Mississippi Seeds. “And then T-Bone,” he said, “he played it like this.” Nothing like the sound that burst from my little Sears amp had ever come out of it before or ever would again. It was raw, ghostly, unforgettable. I still hear it more than half a century later. “Without listening to T-Bone,” he said, rising and handing me back my guitar, “B. B. wouldn’t be B. B.” He smiled, revealing a couple of gaps between his teeth. “Maybe one day folks’ll say you’re you because you listened to B. B. That’s kinda how things work.”
As he turned to leave, I asked his name.
Again that smile. “I’m James Thomas,” he said, “but most folks just call me Son.”
During the next quarter of a century, until his death from a stroke in 1993, James “Son” Thomas, who made a living digging graves, would become famous for appearing in several films about the blues. He would perform and record all over the world. He was also a sculptor who used unfired clay that he’d dug out of the Yazoo River, and he saw his work displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. While there, he was introduced to an admirer named Nancy Reagan. According to his New York Times obituary, Son Thomas was fond of saying, “Black and white people have to stick together, because we’re all going to the same place: down in the clay.”
I have little doubt that Son Thomas, were he alive today, would find much to admire in “The Guitar in American Art,” in which one work after another so aptly conveys the charm, the mystery, and the transformative power of these instruments fashioned from the most ordinary materials. Until someone plays them, they’re nothing but wires and wood.
- Goodnight Irene, 1952, Charles White, Oil on canvas (Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, 2014. ©The Charles White Archives)
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Death is not only the ultimate dissolution of identity, as all the physical, psychological, and social ligatures that tether it in place are severed; death is also that in the face of which we make our identity. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T. S. Eliot put it in The Waste Land. Habits, interests, love, the hourly, the daily, and all the busyness of life. Above all, art.
It was the philosopher Bernard Williams who argued, in an essay on Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case—about a woman gifted, or rather cursed, with immortality—that life makes sense only in the face of its finitude. We are “lucky in having the chance to die,” Williams concluded. This does not require that death itself be desirable: death can destroy meaning while, at the same time, the prospect of mortality creates the very meaning that death destroys. That, at least, is one reading of Williams’s long and complex argument.
It is somehow appropriate that Williams’s discussion centers on an opera. This is not just because Janáček’s Makropulos Case is about a 16th-century court physician’s daughter who, having taken an elixir of life, is now 342 years old and, consequently, in “a state of boredom, indifference and coldness.” Music is expressive without being denotative. It is material and precise but at the same time metaphysically suggestive, the closest thing this side of revelation to a glimpse of the divine. It is in music that this paradox of Williams’s can be contained and engaged with; that which creates meaning also destroys it. Music helps us to deal with death, with its inevitability, its incomprehensibility, its necessity. In certain pieces of music, we face death within a sound world that is resolutely alive even as it is transitory, fleeting, and always decaying. Music has, in Shakespeare’s words, a dying fall.
Music helps us to deal with the inevitability of death. In certain pieces of music, we face death within a sound world that is resolutely alive even as it is transitory, fleeting, and always decaying. Music has, in Shakespeare’s words, a dying fall.Silence is the ultimate symbol of death in terms of sound, but “until we die,” as John Cage (composer of the notoriously silent 4’33”) supposedly had it, “there will be sounds.” Utter soundlessness, true silence, is not available to the living subject.
Gestures toward silence, however, are part of our cultural encounter, while we remain alive, with the nothingness of death—with our own horror vacui (the fear of that sense of emptiness and loss that we feel in the face of others’ deaths) or the peace and calm that silence seems to offer.
This relative silence, this imagined silence, can be an evocation of things that are inexpressible. There is that organized and audible silence with which many societies mourn their dead: the silence at a funeral, the two-minute silence in memory of the war dead that has been observed in the United Kingdom since the end of the First World War. These silences encourage us to think of the departed, to memorialize them, but they also necessarily and inevitably ask us to think about our own mortality. They bind together the living and the dead in a contemplation of a common end.
Silence is essential to music, the rests as important as the notes. But beyond that, in classical music’s engagement with finality, with death, there are especially significant silences that gesture toward nothingness. I think especially of Winterreise, Schubert’s great cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano written in 1827 and 1828. This work was composed in the face of impending death. Schubert had likely contracted syphilis in 1822, and although his death in 1828 came unexpectedly, possibly from typhoid fever, he spent the last six years of his life under the shadow of an early demise, producing works in his last 18 months that speak to a sense of mortality. Winterreise is a journey into the snow, white blankness, a journey away from a failed love affair in which the journeyer looks deeply into himself and, plumbing the depths of loneliness and isolation, finds metaphysical despair. He learns a lesson that Samuel Beckett (who loved the cycle) took up in the 20th century. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—this is how Beckett’s novel The Unnamable ends.
The wanderer reacts with an expression of grim satisfaction: he is one step closer to the end of his journey, the journey that we all take toward death. Then the frost melts, and our hero is a young man again—“How far it is still to the grave!”In the 14th song in Winterreise, “Der greise Kopf,” the wanderer discovers that the frost has turned his hair white. The music in the piano expresses a sort of horror at this transformation, with a leap of an augmented fourth, that unholy interval that late medieval musicians christened the diabolus in musica. The wanderer reacts with an expression of grim satisfaction: he is one step closer to the end of his journey, the journey that we all take toward death. Then the frost melts, and our hero is a young man again—“How far it is still to the grave!” (Wie weit noch bis zur Bahre!) Schubert’s repetition of this statement at a lower pitch, barely harmonized, is followed by a pause that, when I perform the cycle, always seems to demand a longer than usual duration, an extended, unnatural, almost unmusical silence in which Schubert, the musicians, and the audience look into the abyss. And if we want to understand this biographically—which is to say, to understand it as the expression of a suffering human being, Franz Schubert, rather than a creator-genius—it is as if Schubert is repeating the phrase not to underline our distance from dissolution but so that we may grasp its inevitability and contemplate our own mortality. Silence points deathward here.
Schubert had a particular gift for what we might call deathly music even before his illness. One unfinished early song is called “Leichenfantasie” (“Corpse Fantasy”); another song, a miraculous setting of a poem by Goethe, “Wandrers Nachtlied II,” is a paradoxical evocation of stillness through a particular sort of quiet music:
Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
… Balde
Ruhest du auch.Over every mountaintop is quiet,
In each and every treetop you can
hardly feel a breath.
The birds are silent in the woods …
Soon you too will be quiet[translation mine]
The instrumental music that Schubert wrote in the last years of his life is not all drenched in contemplation of mortality—there’s a lot of dance music for piano, for example, an excellent distraction, surely, from morbid thoughts. But many of the late works, though anything but morbid, seem to speak to the listener as intimations and explorations of the evanescence of human life and the ever-present defining limit that is death. Here is the critic and philosopher George Steiner, in his book Real Presences, struggling to express these ideas, which are so hard to get a handle on:
What we can say, a saying both exceeding and falling short of responsible knowledge, is that there is music which conveys both the grave constancy, the finality of death and a certain refusal of that very finality. This dual motion, instinctual to humanity but scandalous to reason, is evident, it is made transparent to spiritual, intellectual and physical notice, in Schubert’s C-major Quintet. Listen to the slow movement.
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I’ve had tinnitus—a constant ringing in my ears—throughout all my knowing life, my inner ear conducting its own private symphonies in the bony amphitheater of my skull. I hear a constant hissing-swishing sound like water dissolving an antacid tablet, a noise that can progress to trilling, beeping, or shrieking as loud as microphone feedback, depending on tiredness or viruses or the whims of the ear gods. These sounds are not just annoying to listen to; they block out the real-world sounds around me. They have been so much a part of me that until I was a teenager, I presumed that everyone had such busy ears.
When I was five, an audiologist came to my school to carry out hearing tests. The beeps and squeaks from the audiometer sounded so like my own ear-clamor that I came to believe that the noises in my ears were in some way linked to this contraption, that wires or rods had been accidentally left in my ears and had burrowed their way inside my head. When I was six, I was scheduled for an operation to fit grommets in my ears, but my parents decided not to risk general anesthesia on such a small brain and canceled the surgery. Instead, I was made to blow balloons to open up my blocked ears: blowing, letting the air out, and blowing again. I’m not sure this achieved anything. I link my early bookishness to having poor hearing. Trying to keep up with other people’s spoken words could be tiring, but total immersion in a book was like being coated in polystyrene packaging. I could reread words I didn’t catch the first time and tune out rather than attempt to decipher the smudgy sounds around me. As a child, I wasn’t aware of what I couldn’t hear, so my tinnitus was only a problem for the person I was ignoring. A public health nurse who visited our home queried whether I was autistic; I was so engrossed in a book that I hadn’t responded to repeated shouts of my name.
When I talk loudly in places with lots of background noise, my words crackle and echo in my ears like a bad phone connection. In large group conversations, I struggle to keep up, never mind join in. It can be isolating to miss nuances and subtleties, nudges and whispers. Jokes fall flat unless they’re said loud enough. Under-the-breath comments are wasted on me. There are only so many times I can say, “What?” before the moment is lost. I dread conversations with the masked and the mumbling. Differences between p’s and b’s, s’s and f’s are indecipherable if the mouth isn’t visible.
Missing the first few words of any conversation means that I spend the rest of it trying to catch up, and the puzzle increases exponentially. I often assume what a server or retail assistant will say next because these conversations usually follow a set pattern, but when they veer off course, my guessed response can be daftly irrelevant. I pick out key words in a question to piece together meaning, and predict the probability of being asked certain questions in a certain order. It’s the same technique that I use for conversing in an unfamiliar foreign language. Years ago, when I lived in Japan, the first question from a Japanese person would often start with doko—“where”—so I would answer with the Japanese word for Ireland. The second question would start with itsu—“when”—so I would answer with the Japanese word for March, the month I had arrived there. This gave me a reputation for having more Japanese than I had, in the same way that most people don’t know how bad my hearing is because of my constant compensatory efforts. Before a recent hearing test, an audiologist reassured me during a brief conversation that my hearing seemed fine. After the test, she expressed her shock at how poor it actually was.
Tinnitus means I hear things that don’t exist. The sounds are real to me, they exist in my subjective reality, but they cannot be heard by others. I have never experienced auditory hallucinations in the form of voices, but my wordless noises feel so real, I can understand how someone might hear words and believe them to be an objective reality. In The Rag and Bone Shop (2021), Veronica O’Keane, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, describes how postpartum women experiencing psychosis
hear voices that are not audible to others, may smell odours—usually unpleasant—that are not coming from the outside world. … Such auditory [and] olfactory … hallucinations are referred to as psychotic symptoms. The first principle that we need to establish is that what are called symptoms are real sensory experiences. Hearing a sound, a human voice, is a subjective experience, whether the voice originates in the outside world or is generated in the brain by pathological neuronal firing. The experience of hearing the voice is similar in both cases: the origin of the sensation is a separate consideration.
There is a dignity to this approach that I like. It must be difficult enough to deal with the fact that your reality does not exist for other people, but to feel that it is relevant and that your experience is credible is reassuring. If only people experiencing chronic pain or chronic fatigue with no visible symptoms could get the same acknowledgment from the experts.
My hearing is so poor at high frequencies that I can’t even hear when my children are whispering in my ear, never mind what it is they’re actually whispering. Soft voices at low levels are unavailable to me. And yet, after my first child was born, I began to interpret anything at a certain high pitch as the sound of my baby’s cries. The noises were real and external, but their source was not as I imagined. Seagulls shrieking, cats mewling, car brakes squealing, even the scraw of metal on metal can be heard as a baby if that’s where your brain is. For years, my physical response was to leap up and rush toward the noise, but I learned to tell my brain that it wasn’t a baby, in the same way I now automatically discount internal shrieks and hisses and beeps and know them as tinnitus. The problem with this conscious reinterpretation of what I hear is that occasionally there are real, external beeps and hisses that I assume are my own private noises.
In childhood, my eyesight was below par, but as with my hearing, I learned to compensate. When I was 12, a nurse visited the school to test the students’ eyesight. We were brought in groups to the staff room, where an eye chart had been placed at the end of a long table. I angled myself into last place so that I could listen to the full-sighted children before me reel off the letters. In this way, I was able to memorize the last few lines of the chart. I got away with it—but what did I get away with? I managed to avoid a prescription for the glasses I objected to. But this meant that the rest of my schooldays were spent peering at a blur of chalk shapes on the blackboard. I learned to guess at the meaning of a sentence from the few words I could squintily decipher, in the same way that I guessed at what words had been spoken from the few words I could catch.
I got so used to living in a blur that when I got laser eye surgery in my 30s, I was perplexed by the amount of detail that had presumably always been in my surroundings. The day after the procedure, I looked out the car window and saw, for the first time from such a distance, individual leaves on trees. I had only ever seen blurry lollipop tree shapes from a child’s drawings, and suddenly here was high-definition detail that had been right there all along. That night, I looked out the window and saw stars actually twinkling: so this was what the nursery rhyme had been on about!
Watching a film in the cinema was now an exercise in overstimulation. I found it hard to unfocus from the details and couldn’t keep up with chase scenes in action movies because I would home in on the wrong things. I used to be swept along by a vague rush of movement, but now I wanted to pause and examine the details. Perfect vision brought self-consciousness, however. Seeing imperfectly means you assume that others see what you see, which allows you to exist in a mythical, nonjudgmental world, unseen. Walking up a busy shopping street for the first time postsurgery, I was intimidated by how close the other people were and how much eye contact they made. I preferred to think that people saw as little of me as I did of them. The ground felt too close. It seemed to rise up to my knees, and I found myself taking exaggerated steps, as if I were walking up a flight of stairs. Being naked in the public baths and hot springs of Japan had been fine presurgery. Feeling so unseen was both comfortable and liberating, and because this was a time before phones had cameras, I wasn’t screen-seen either.
Similar to tinnitus, laser eye surgery added impediments to my vision by introducing things that existed only in my head. A too-bright halo now appeared around lights; looking in the general vicinity of a light meant I couldn’t see around it. If I tried to flag down a bus in the darkness, I struggled to see the number of the bus if it was near the newly haloed streetlights. Also, the surgery seemed to introduce dark maggot-size shapes in the periphery of my vision. Switching from near sight to far sight brought on a bout of the maggots, which were hard to ignore at first, but I learned to forget about them. If I’d had this surgery as a child, I probably would have explained the maggot shapes by assuming the scalpel had implanted them in my eyes.
All of this made me think of Morgellons disease, described by Leslie Jamison in her 2014 essay collection, The Empathy Exams. The Mayo Clinic website defines Morgellons disease as “a condition characterized by a belief that parasites or fibers are emerging from the skin.” How quietly devastating that it is the belief that constitutes the disease, rather than the physical skin condition. I have never gone to a doctor about my tinnitus or the maggoty shapes in my vision because I don’t want to be seen as a person whose subjective, unmeasurable complaints might be questioned as symptoms of a mental illness or an appeal for attention. I need to reserve my credibility for ailments that matter.
When I thought I had recovered from my first bout of prevaccine Covid, I woke one morning to find my sniffers were defunct. For almost a month, I smelled and tasted absolutely nothing, not even my own breath. Then, as my olfactory neurons started pinging back to life like a phone hopping back onto Wi-Fi, neurons misfired and certain smells were swapped (apples for blood, for example, chocolate for metal, tea for flowery grass). One night, I caught a sudden terrible smell, and I ran upstairs not quite sure what I’d find or where I’d find it. I thought perhaps the toilet had overflowed or foul water was leaking from a pipe or drain. I couldn’t locate the source of the stench, an evil mixture of sewage, rotten egg, and stagnant floodwater that was without form or name. That was the start of the phantom smells, or phantosmia. Phantosmia was a sign of my olfactory neurons beginning to recover, but this imaginary vile smell was blocking my chances of experiencing real and potentially pleasant smells.
I like that the word phantom is used. There are ghosts in my ears, spooks in my nose, tiny wraiths in my eyes. There is something Halloweenish about these things that don’t exist and yet are very real to me.Around this time, I had an uneasy dream about a creaky old house with several stories of rotting, reeking floorboards. The stink in my nostrils persisted for hours after I woke—I couldn’t shake off the dream. It was the first smell-dream I can remember, where the smell was the main feature of the dream and carried over into my waking life.
A common feature of phantosmia is that sufferers (phantosmics?) are unable to identify the specific smell, or the smell may be one that they have not encountered before. This was true for me: I couldn’t put it into words, only that it was really dreadful, the worst combination of the worst smells I could imagine. I don’t think an adequate vocabulary exists for smells. Could there be another way besides language, which is ineffectual, to describe smells? Could you describe a smell with touch, for example, or with images?
My nose hasn’t yet fully recovered. Certain aromas have muted themselves, and some tastes are still off. My new, dulled sense of smell is like the padded silence of hearing loss that accompanies a bad cold or sinus infection, as if snow has packed tight around my head. I currently have 60 percent hearing loss at high frequencies, the frequencies at which my tinnitus operates, and what my ears lack in the perception of real sounds, they make up for in creating imaginary ones. A couple of bouts of Covid have intensified my tinnitus: the constant hiss and swish is tolerable, the fridge-motor hum is bearable, but the sudden unexpected switch of frequencies to a frantic wheeeeeeeeee is harsh. Some nights it feels like an ensemble of amateur tin whistle players is tuning up in my head.
Increased ear drama combined with decreased nose action can make me feel withdrawn from the world, in a bubble of my own with my own personal sounds and smells. This leads to overcompensating, looking for things that might be there and trying to ignore things that aren’t there but sound like they are. In my complete-smell-loss days, I couldn’t detect the smoke of a tea towel burning on the toaster and realized there was a fire in my kitchen only when I saw the flames. Since then, even though my nose has mostly recovered, I look closely at foggy or denser patches of air. The knowledge of my decreased awareness informs so much of my life: I know to obsessively check for cars when I cross the road because I’m used to bockety hearing, but I can forget and assume my smell is reliable. It takes work to engage with a world that is not fully available to you, and humility to acknowledge your reality is not the reality of others.
I see phantosmia as the olfactory equivalent of tinnitus, hearing things that don’t exist and not hearing things that do exist, smelling smells that are not real and not smelling smells that are real—to phantom up sounds and smells and either believe them to be real or know that they’re not real and yet still have to smell them and hear them and deal with them as some form of reality. I like that the word phantom is used in a medical context to describe these illusions or delusions. There are ghosts in my ears, spooks in my nose, tiny wraiths in my eyes. There is something Halloweenish about these things that don’t exist and yet are very real to me.
I have a notion that I read and wrote as a child, or that writing came to me, because of my deficient senses. I can’t know otherwise, but I don’t see how it couldn’t add to an inner life. When I set out to write this piece, I thought I would be able to delve into the implications of living with phantoms and explore how exactly this has affected my imagination, but it’s only in the writing that I realize I have no other way of being for comparison. I have a fantasy about taking a magic pill that would allow me to live other people’s experiences from the inside out, to feel their sensations and pain and view the world from their perspectives, to compare this experience with my own. I would like to know what perfect hearing is like, to be in complete tune with my environment, to smell what is actually there. But I cannot remember myself back into my pre–laser eye surgery days or pre-Covid sniffer days or imagine myself into full hearing. I can only know myself as I am now, slightly off-kilter with the rest of the world.
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On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock; Knopf, 320 pp., $32.50
In his essay “Of Cannibals” (c. 1580), Montaigne talks of meeting, in Rouen in 1562, three indigenous men from Tupinambá, Brazil. They had been brought to entertain King Charles IX, who at the time was just 12 years old. Traveling through Europe, these foreigners were viewed not only as outsiders but also as representatives of “barbaric” civilizations. Of all the things they had seen, the French locals wanted to know what they found most admirable. “In the first place,” Montaigne states,
they thought it very strange that so many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well armed, who were about the king ( ’tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should submit to obey a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves to command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to call men the half of one another), that they had observed that there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.
What mesmerizes Montaigne is the judgment by the Tupinambá on economic injustice. How was it that on a continent so plentiful, a small number of people were obscenely rich while a considerable portion of the population lived in poverty? He concludes that “every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live.”
This extraordinary insight highlights the power that outsiders have, forcing us to see ourselves from an altogether different perspective. The spectacle of the Tupinambá men in the French court, as described by Montaigne, could be said to be an instance of “reverse colonization,” a phenomenon in which those who embarked in a colonial endeavor suddenly see themselves as colonized and must face their own limitations.
Caroline Dodds Pennock, a historian at the University of Sheffield, amasses a vast quantity of more or less similar examples in her new book, On Savage Shores. Her laudable objective is to follow the path of dozens among the tens of thousands of indigenous people who, in the aftermath of Columbus’s first voyage, journeyed to Europe in a variety of roles: as slaves, as kin to conquistadors and missionaries, as diplomats, as commodities, and as oddities performing any kind of cultural spectacle, mostly for the well-off. We have obsessed, and rightly so, about the destruction caused by Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, the English, the Dutch, and other Europeans in the Americas, following, in historical time, their countless misdeeds. The experience of indigenous newcomers who traveled eastward through the Atlantic, however, has been largely ignored.
This isn’t unexpected. In most cases, the path these visitors took was expunged: either their hosts failed to record, in detail, the extent of their impressions or the travelers themselves lacked the education, financial means, audience, or wherewithal to articulate their stories. Pennock’s sources, then, are necessarily obscure, partial, and embedded in all sorts of materials, from diaries and correspondence to regal and domestic chronicles and material culture. Yet the volume resists being a cabinet of curiosities, instead presenting itself as a manifesto against erasure.
Since their uprootedness often ended in tragedy, the leitmotifs of these narratives, not surprisingly, are loneliness, bafflement, and alienation.The reader is handsomely rewarded with a plethora of accounts. Those providing them include Coastal Algonquin like Manteo and Wanchese, who translated for Walter Raleigh and codified an orthography of the Ossomocomuck Algonquian language in London, as well as a group of Totonacs taken by conquistadors Francisco de Montejo and Alonso Fernández Puertocarrero from Mexico to Spain in 1519, along with exotic items like jewels, shields, and metals. Others are Taínos from the Caribbean, Maya from the Yucatán Peninsula, and Inkans from the Andes. They are described as explorers, “pioneers, pathfinders for their people—and ambassadors to a foreign emperor.”
The quest isn’t only to follow, when possible, their European itineraries, internal and external: how they conceived of “home,” what they witnessed, where they ended up. Although a few traveled, alone or in small groups, on their own accord, most were taken involuntarily, in dehumanized fashion. With few exceptions, they didn’t know the local languages. Since their uprootedness often ended in tragedy, the leitmotifs of these narratives, not surprisingly, are loneliness, bafflement, and alienation. Yet these were treks of resilience, too, as people learned, in a short span of time, the skills—physical, social, legal, and rhetorical—required to survive.
Pennock is an efficient writer but unfortunately not an elegant one. Hers is an accusatory, vengeful voice that mostly seeks to ridicule Europeans for failing to understand the inhumanity they embraced. With few exceptions, the portrait she offers of pre-Columbian civilizations is idyllic, whereas Europeans are consistently seen as vicious. Yet the Aztec-Mexican empire was itself ruthlessly stratified, shaped as a ranked system that featured nobles ( pipiltin), commoners (macehualtin), and slaves ( tlacotin), aside from serfs and prisoners of wars. The Maya civilization, quite hierarchical as well, had already peaked by the time the Europeans arrived, its metropolises abandoned. The Totonacs in eastern Mexico partnered with the Spanish to assert their own political power. In other words, even as the Americas were imagined by Europeans as a preternatural landscape, the landscape was far from utopian (the Greek word utopia means “no place”). Inadvisably, Pennock, even after quoting Montaigne, resists Walter Benjamin’s dictum, in his essay “On the Concept of History” (1942), that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
To be sure, she builds her argument as if walking on eggshells. She frets at length about what to call her subjects, navigating a minefield of terminology: indio (Indian), indígena (indigenous), Native American, First Nations, and so on. This hypersensitivity paralyzes her. The corollary is that historians cannot, in the end, avoid appropriating what isn’t theirs. This, to me, turns political correctness into self-immolation. The truth is that historians have a precious impartiality that endows them with the capacity to reflect on human behavior. To waste it in guilt-ridden disquisitions is a shame.
What I mostly wanted from Pennock—herein my biggest qualm with On Savage Shores—was a more ambitious meditation on reverse colonization. Along with the fascinating sketches of indigenous travel to Europe, how did the Americas reshape Europe as a whole? The thesis offered is that given the low number of indigenous visitors overall from across the Atlantic, the effect is comparatively small, not to say anecdotal. Yet when seen in toto, it is substantial. Beyond these forgotten guests, other arrivals changed the continent’s course. For starters, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, pineapples, squashes, guavas, and chili peppers were introduced in the diet. Animals like muskrats, squirrels, and raccoons found new habitats abroad. The collective identity was transformed as religions adapted themselves, as is the case of Spanish Catholicism after it was exposed to different types of American polytheistic rituals.
And there’s language. While reading, I was reminded of a benchmark moment in the shaping of Spanish as a tongue. Also in 1492, Antonio de Nebrija, a Salamanca philologist, published an influential Spanish grammar. The word he used for boat was barco. A few years later, in a revised edition, he replaced it with canoa, from the Arawak Indian word kanawa. Just like this one, countless other words—Caliban, Shakespeare’s impetuous character in The Tempest, is, according to some, an anagram of the Spanish word canibal—infiltrated European languages, subverting them from the inside. This is also an indispensable part of how indigenous Americans “discovered” Europe.
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On a wet, gray afternoon in February 2007, the rain turning to snow as the light faded and the temperature dropped, my wife delivered our second child: a boy, like our first, and, like our first, a surprise. We’d learned of the pregnancy only a few weeks before we moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where I was to begin teaching at a small liberal arts college. It had been a taxing fall and winter: Wisconsin was darker and colder than any place my wife or I had ever lived, we knew no one in our town, and early ultrasounds of the fetus had shown signs of a lethal genetic anomaly, requiring a series of expensive and invasive tests. The results, thankfully, had come back negative, but on New Year’s Eve, my wife started bleeding, and we rushed to the hospital, fearing premature labor. The obstetrician scheduled an induction for a week before our son’s due date. Despite the difficult road we’d traveled, the doctor assured us, the baby was healthy, and everything would be fine.
When the nurse handed him to us, wrapped in a blanket, rosy and warm, he did seem fine. But when she opened the blanket on the warming table to measure his temperature, weight, and length, she saw that his chest had turned gray, his lips a dull lavender. His five-minute Apgar score, which assesses vital signs, was lower than his one-minute. His skin was pale; his arms and legs had gone floppy, unresponsive to stimulus; and his breathing was shallow. My mother-in-law, a veteran pediatric nurse in a major children’s hospital, stood over her grandson with her lips pursed. She cooed gently to him and reassured the delivery nurses that they were doing a good job, but her face gave away her concern.
Chest x-rays revealed fluid in his lungs. Later tests would warn of an enlarged heart. The snow was falling harder, sticking to the windows and whiting out the cars in the parking lot. The labor and delivery nurses were growing anxious. My wife, who had worked as a medical social worker in the same children’s hospital as her mother, recognized the nurses’ anxiety for what it meant: the baby was too sick to stay in the regional hospital. That evening, a specialized nurse in a blue jumpsuit threaded an intubation tube between our son’s vocal cords, connected his lungs to a ventilator, and handed him off to two mustachioed paramedics, who loaded him into a portable incubator and wheeled him through the empty hospital corridors to an ambulance waiting outside. They drove him a half-hour south to a hospital with a NICU—a neonatal intensive care unit. My wife and I followed behind. The windshield wipers struggled to stay ahead of the blizzarding snow, and I lost sight of the ambulance halfway through what felt like an interminable journey. I drove in silence while my wife, one day postpartum, cradled her stomach and tried not to cry. I’d never been so scared in my life.
After 10 days, our son’s lungs had recovered enough for him to come home. The heart issue, too, had resolved as his lungs responded to the medication. The day of his discharge, the neonatologist posed for a picture with him before the nurses helped us secure his carrier into the back seat of our car. I was sure I’d feel calmer once we got him home—I’d been fantasizing about his homecoming since the night of his birth.
Instead, I had trouble sleeping. I lay in the dark and listened to his faint exhalations, worried that he would spontaneously stop breathing. As the days moved forward and winter melted into spring, the minute-by-minute ticktock playing in my mind of my son’s birth, decline, and hurried admission to the NICU began to collapse into a nebulous dread, one that subsumed even the initial happy memories of his arrival. I felt as if I were watching a city recede in my rearview mirror, all the buildings and parks and freeways merging into a hazy skyline in which the NICU remained the only recognizable structure.
In a stroke of either dumb luck or divine providence, two weeks after our son’s discharge from the hospital, my wife accepted a position as a social worker at the NICU in St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton—a different hospital from the one where our son was treated, though it was similar in size, capacity, and level of care, and it served the same northeastern Wisconsin community. This meant that my wife essentially returned each day to the site of what had been our worst nightmare: the same assembly of ventilators, incubators, monitors, IV pumps, and bilirubin lights that had surrounded our infant son. The prospect of working in such an environment terrified me, but my wife welcomed it. She felt she better understood the agonized worry of the parents in the NICU now that she had endured the same worry herself, and she felt a special bond with the fragile newborns, some weighing barely more than a pound.
It was my wife’s responsibility as the unit’s sole social worker to ensure that babies would be discharged to safe home environments. She screened parents for postpartum depression and housing insecurity and helped them apply for Medicaid. Most of the babies in her unit—a Level III NICU—survived, which meant that their parents’ experiences largely echoed ours: a frightful beginning gradually giving way to a return to normal life. The most acute cases, those requiring surgical interventions, were transferred to Level IV NICUs in Madison or Milwaukee. Rarely, though, a baby would be born too early or too sick to save. On those nights—and the worst tragedies often seemed to occur in the dead of night—my wife would go the distance with the families, talking the parents through the decision to withdraw treatment, then staying in the room while they held their children for the first and final time. Each evening, when she arrived home from work, I plied her with questions. I wanted to know everything she’d seen, everything that had happened. I could envision these stories so clearly, as though they were happening not to strangers but to me.
In June, we attended the wedding of one of my wife’s coworkers, a neonatologist. After the ceremony, we accompanied other members of the NICU staff to a local brewpub. I happened to sit beside a nurse who had recently started working in the NICU at the Minnesota children’s hospital where a young couple had given birth a few weeks earlier to sextuplets. They’d been conceived with the help of the fertility drug Follistim, which had caused the mother’s ovaries to release multiple eggs in one ovulation cycle. The couple’s doctors had urged them to “reduce” the number of fetuses, but the parents, both deeply religious, had refused.
The sextuplets were born at 20 weeks of gestation, a full month shy of their third trimester and only halfway to full term. The heaviest of the six weighed a whopping 19 ounces, the smallest only 11. They were among the smallest human beings ever to be born alive, and by the time I sat beside the nurse that day, three of the babies had died. Two more would perish by the end of July, leaving only one survivor: a boy. The birth of the sextuplets, followed by the seemingly endless cascade of losses, had made national news. I watched the reports obsessively, recalling my own terrified days and nights in the NICU when I stood over my son, watching his chest retract and counting his breaths. Some in the media had likened the parents to fanatical crackpots who’d landed in a mess of their own making. But I couldn’t do that, not after what my wife and I had been through. That would have felt like a denial, or worse, a betrayal.
The thought of witnessing my son’s death, which had once seemed so near, could still make me cry. The idea of watching five children perish one by one was too much to comprehend. When I asked the nurse what it had been like, being in the NICU with the family, her eyes welled up. Along with the parents and the other members of the staff, she’d had no choice but to stare down into death’s abyss and fathom its depth. Our own abyss had been shallower, and we’d forestalled going over the edge—my son was now four months old, smiling and lifting his head when laid on his belly—but still, I felt I could relate. I’d yet to entertain the possibility of one day writing about the NICU, but at the brewpub that afternoon, I felt I needed to listen, to bear witness to the things the nurse had seen.
The nurse seemed eager to talk, as though she’d been waiting for someone to ask her about the sextuplets. I leaned on my elbow, nursed my beer, and hung on her every word.
My wife had worked in the NICU for five years by the time I started working on a novel set in the unit. We’d attended holiday parties, retirement sendoffs, bowling nights, and summer cookouts, and several members of the staff—including the doctor whose wedding we’d attended—had become close friends. In all that time, I’d never stopped thinking about the family of the sextuplets. They’d started a website at the time of the pregnancy and occasionally posted updates. The baby who’d survived was nearly the same age as my own son. He had some mild cerebral palsy and retinopathy, both resulting from his extreme prematurity, but he seemed pretty healthy otherwise. In photographs, he could be seen playing and smiling beside his parents and two younger sisters. I couldn’t say whether they were happy, but they seemed to have charted a path forward. “People think that being in here is the end of the world,” a NICU nurse had told me as we’d stood together beside my son’s bed. “They don’t understand that there’s a place in the world for sick babies.”
The novel I’d begun borrowed a page from the sextuplets’ story, though the mother in my story becomes pregnant with four babies instead of six. Given the option to reduce the pregnancies, she demurs, and when she goes into labor after just 23 weeks, she and her husband find themselves plunged into the NICU’s arcane world of flashing alarms and hissing ventilators, roller-coastering through hope and loss until they can hardly tell one from the other. The parents’ story entwines a second narrative, of a long-time nurse struggling to care for her troubled teenage son, himself a former preemie. I wanted to take my characters—whom I imagined as fiercely loving and spurred by good intentions—past their breaking points, not to wallow in their misery but to see if I could bring them to a place of redemption. I also felt an obligation to testify, in the most honest terms possible, to the whipsawing intensities of the NICU, the messy lives of the medical staff, and the anguish of the mothers and fathers holding vigil beside their imperiled children.
To aid in my writing process, I compiled a reading list of every NICU-related book I could find. There weren’t many: a smattering of memoirs published over the course of two decades and practically no novels. Desperate to learn more, I contacted the volunteer coordinator at my wife’s hospital and offered to do any task, no matter how menial, so long as it was in the unit. I took a brief orientation class, pledged not to release any medical information relating to the babies or their parents, and was given a name badge and a blue vest to wear over my shirt.
For six months, I folded laundry, restocked supply carts, and answered phones. I sanitized equipment and got reacquainted with the noises and smells of the unit, albeit this time without the panic brought on by every blinking light and honking sound. Some weeks, there would be a frenetic rush of admissions, the doctors working around the clock for several days in a row, and a week or two later, the unit would empty and the staff would spend the morning gossiping at the nurse’s station. During the slower spells, I reorganized the medical supply closet and assembled brochures into admission packets, which my wife would give to incoming families.
When things really slowed down, I’d duck into a corner and scribble in my notebook.
Revealing my dark secrets and listening while my friends offered up their own injuries and mistakes, I could feel us drawing closer together. For all their purgations of pity and fear, tragedies are ultimately love stories.I watched so many parents—from partnered couples to single moms, Volvo-driving yuppies to teenagers from impoverished farming towns—fidget beside their infants’ beds, feverishly bouncing their knees while they stared at the clock on the wall. Other parents tried to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, perhaps hoping that if they acted normally and practiced some magical thinking, they could will a happy outcome into existence. I started to see the NICU as occupying a kind of vortex within the larger hospital. The unit was adjacent to labor and delivery, the one hospital wing where people routinely went not in sickness but in health, expecting only good things to happen: that babies would tumble into the world, healthy and vernix-coated, attended by video cameras and balloons. The NICU, in contrast, lay behind a nondescript locked door that most visitors, patients, and even hospital employees breezed by, without bothering—or daring—to look inside. To have a baby rushed from the delivery room to such a place was to be yanked rudely away from the happy fantasy, like a fish plucked from a stream.
When I talked about the novel, even in broad terms, people often winced. Babies in peril—babies dying—were the stuff of tasteless jokes and sentimental charity commercials. More than one person told me that the book sounded, in a word, dark. Once, over dinner, a fellow writer and English professor began to cry after hearing about my research. When I told my agent I’d found very few books, and hardly any novels, set in the NICU, a fact I believed would be a mark in my favor, she replied, “Well, there could be a reason for that. Bleak stories are hard to sell.”
For the record, I’m not by nature a dark person. I can’t handle violent thrillers, slasher flicks, or zombie movies, nor am I drawn to such commercialized literary genres as “misery lit” or “trauma porn,” which aim to titillate readers through gratuitous depictions of suffering and pain—and risk dehumanizing and exploiting the very people they depict. I envisioned my novel to be something deeper: not trauma porn, not just a sad story, but a tragedy.
Aristotle’s definition of a tragedy—“an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”—says as much about the genre’s formal specifications as its content. A tragedy must be organized around a reversal of fortune ( peripeteia in Greek) in which a persecuted hero is restored to nobility. Or, more commonly, the protagonist is brought low by his flawed choices and the stirrings of fate and chance. Although tragedies don’t have to end with the entire House of Denmark lying dead on the floor of Elsinore, pain and agony still reside at the core of the genre. It’s by witnessing the suffering of another human being (and we shouldn’t forget that for most of history, tragedies have been performed live and in person) that an audience moves toward anagnorisis, recognition, and from there to catharsis, the “purgation of pity and fear.”
Because pity and fear frequently travel together, they can be mistaken for synonyms. In truth, however, the emotions oppose each other. Fear is an emotion of inferiority: the perception that someone, be it a human or a god, can harm us and those we love. Pity stems from the belief that another’s suffering is somehow beneath us; we’re superior to them. Fear aggrandizes our enemies; pity aggrandizes us. It’s hard to pity those we fear, and hard to fear the pitiful, though that’s exactly tragedy’s aim: to elicit both emotions simultaneously and in equal amounts. Audience members are forced to see themselves reflected in the characters’ self-destructive mistakes. “Ah, that is he,” Aristotle writes, by which he means, He is me. Tragedies leave us drained, purged—catharized, Aristotle would say—but also humbled and a little wiser, at once tougher and a little softer, a little less gullible and a little more human. “You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies,” writes Howard Barker in Arguments for a Theatre. “After the musical, you’re anybody’s fool.”
Even more than fostering resilience, tragedy generates sympathy—a quality I find in short supply during these troubled, divisive times. Pop intellectuals such as Brené Brown have rendered sympathy the ugly stepsister of empathy: Brown describes empathy as “feeling with” and denigrates sympathy as “put[ting] a silver lining” around another’s pain. The Greek roots of “sympathy,” however, sym and pathos, more accurately denote “feeling with,” whereas empathy connotes an excess of emotion projected toward another (and in modern Greek, empátheia even means malice or malevolence). Empathy, moreover, did not enter the English language until the 20th century, whereas sympathy is far older, used by both David Hume and Adam Smith to describe the process by which a person may vicariously experience the emotions of another. In recent years, sympathy has also come to mean something like concern for the people with whom we already identify, reserved for the righteous and denied to the sinful. Yet according to George Eliot, sympathy requires the recognition of one’s personal limitations and the effort to reach beyond those limits—a “deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man,” she writes. The characters in her novels who stand the best chance of escaping isolation are those who, like Silas Marner, develop a “consciousness of dependence” on others. Rebecca Solnit echoes this sentiment precisely in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster:
A friend tells me, as I write, of someone we know who has joined a support group for his grim disease; these groups create communities of sufferers so that one feels neither alone nor marked out uniquely for suffering. The religious contemplation of suffering and work with the sick, the poor, and the dying likewise serve to develop compassion and subvert tendencies to self-pity and its twin, self-aggrandizement.
Unlike trauma porn, then, which invites gawking from a safe distance, tragedy asks us to see life close up. If trauma porn dehumanizes its subject, tragedy rehumanizes. Tragedy joins us together. It reminds us that we are our brothers’ keepers after all.
I came to understand this on a more personal level when, around the same time I began working on the NICU novel, I also started writing short, humorous essays about my sons, who were then seven and five and locked in an utterly toxic and codependent relationship—they fought like dogs yet couldn’t stand to be apart from each other. These essays were only a few pages long and usually centered on a single moment of awkwardness, like the time I tried to explain the history of Saint Nicholas to my older son, who promptly marched into his kindergarten class and announced that the real Santa Claus was dead. Or the time I threatened to wash out my younger son’s mouth with soap if he continued to swear at school and, in an ill-conceived attempt to demonstrate the punishment, ended up washing out my own mouth. Whenever I’d finish an essay, I’d read it to my family and friends, sometimes to an entire party of guests, and they’d howl with laughter. I’d never thought of myself as particularly funny, at least not on the page, and it felt good to hear people laugh.
Yet it was the harder stuff, my closely guarded experiences of pain and indignity, that resided closer to my heart. These formed the stories I told my closest friends, the ones who’d stick around the party after the other guests had left, who’d help with the dishes and trash and then follow me to the couch, where, in the orange glow of firelight, we’d enter the hour when tragedies were told. Revealing my dark secrets and listening while my friends offered up their own injuries and mistakes, I could feel us drawing closer together. For all their discomforts and agonies, their purgations of pity and fear, tragedies are ultimately love stories.
Back in 2012, I’d been volunteering in the NICU for a few weeks when a baby was admitted to the unit. He’d been born at 21 weeks of gestation, even though his mother had been on bed rest in the hospital for close to a month. His trachea was so small that the doctors had a hard time intubating him and, at one point, paused to ask the mother if she wanted them to keep trying. He was the smallest, sickest baby in the unit, which also made him the smallest, sickest baby in the hospital, my city, and that entire corner of Wisconsin. On several occasions, the chief neonatologist urgently summoned the parents to the hospital because their son was on the verge of dying. The parents’ relationship frayed; even at the baby’s bedside, the tension was palpable. The nurses seemed invested in the marital drama until they weren’t. When the baby was transferred to the children’s hospital in Madison for surgery, the entire staff felt relieved.
Three years later, I tracked the mother down and asked if she’d meet me for coffee. I was at a low point in my writing; after years of research and drafting, I’d gotten lost in the weeds, and every time I sat down to work on the book, I felt a certain dread, doubting my motivations for writing it in the first place. Even if I managed to finish the damn thing, I wondered, who would ever want to read about such sorrows?
The mother and I arranged to meet at our local Starbucks on the Friday before Thanksgiving. The place was decked out with glittery snowflakes and miniature evergreen trees adorned with lights and ornaments. Her son came with her; he was three years old but looked closer to two: a wobbly toddler with a moon-size noggin. He had a horizontal scar in his neck from a tracheostomy that had once connected his lungs to a ventilator. He’d been dependent on the machine the first two years of his life. “When we left the NICU in Appleton, I was told to expect he’d be on a vent for the rest of his life,” his mom said to me. “The pulmonologist in Madison promised me he’d be breathing on his own by kindergarten. And look! He’s only three.”
“Impressive.”
“So many people told me to let him go,” she said. “Especially in the beginning. He’s my little fighter.”
As we sipped our lattes, she filled me in on her son’s progress. After leaving Appleton, he’d had nearly a dozen surgeries and spent many months in and out of the hospital, first in the NICU and then, once he’d passed a year, the pediatric ICU. He still needed a lot of therapy, and her insurance didn’t cover much of it. She and her son’s dad hadn’t been together for a while now. She tended bar at night while her son stayed with her parents. One day, she said, she’d like to go back to nursing school, but she was living paycheck to paycheck these days.
I said that must be hard. She shrugged, then nodded.
Her son sat on her lap with a book he didn’t seem much interested in. He squeaked and gurgled but didn’t say anything I could identify as an actual word. I offered to buy him a muffin, thinking that something bready and sweet might occupy his attention, but his mother declined. His years on the ventilator had disabled his ability to swallow and to talk, and though he could breathe without the help of a machine, he had to eat through a gastronomy tube in his abdomen. At three, he knew enough about food to know it went in the mouth, but even a small bite could become lodged in his throat and cause him to choke.
The Starbucks grew crowded, and the little guy became overstimulated. He began to squirm on his mom’s lap and cry. I could tell she was growing flustered, and I offered to call it a day, but she suggested we finish the conversation over tea, at her parents’ house nearby.
Once there, she carried her son inside and laid him in his bed. He’d required round-the-clock nursing care when he’d first come home from the hospital, so she and her son had lived with her parents for a while. They still kept a room for him with a crib and rocking chair, as well as a green oxygen canister the medical supply company had never bothered to collect once he’d come off the ventilator; it stood in the corner as a testament to how far he’d come in his short life. After peeking inside his room, I waited for her in the kitchen while she got him settled.
We sat across from each other at the round wooden table. I had my notebook open, though I hadn’t written very much. Steam curled up from our mugs of tea. The house was quiet. “What else do you want to know?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. “I want to know what it’s been like for you. All of this.” I gestured at the kitchen, though she knew what I meant. “You have a good attitude, but I’m sure it’s been rough.”
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. She stared at me for a long moment, as if measuring whether she could trust me. I wanted to look away, but I did not dare. Then, to my surprise, her eyes filled. She dabbed at the tears with the back of her hand. “No one knows,” she said. “No one knows what it’s like. How hard it is. Even my parents don’t totally get it. No one does.”
She looked at me as if maybe I got it. I hoped that after everything I’d seen, all the effort I’d put in, I did get it. She cried a little harder. She didn’t resent her son, she said, or regret the decisions she’d made to save his life. Nor did she regret her tumultuous relationship with her son’s dad, despite how things turned out. She only wished that the people in her life had a better sense of what it was like to hold a child so close to the edge of life and to wonder, each day, whether he would stay or go—and whether, in light of his pain, her grief, and the doctors’ confusing and discouraging advice, she was selfish to fight so hard to keep him. “I want to read your book when you’re done,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “If I ever finish it.”
“You will. You have to.”
“I’ll keep at it.”
“You’d better,” she said. “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”
I said goodbye and got back in my car. I had an appointment in Green Bay, so I headed north. Past the edge of our small city, the farmlands opened up. Plowed fields stretched all the way to the horizon. The November sky was heavy and gray-brown, the color of tea with too much milk, though in spots the sun broke through, spotlighting the tarry roofs and rolled hay bales. I watched the clouds turn orange and pink and made a promise that no matter what, I’d keep trying till I got the story right.
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It would be nice to be a doctor, I’ve sometimes thought. If you began to feel something go wrong, you could diagnose yourself. You’d know what you were in for. There’d be no surprises, and all pain and discomfort would be mitigated by an awareness of the path ahead, the forks you’d come to, and the choices to be made. I don’t think being a doctor would make your stomach hurt less, or your head or your leg not ache, or your heart not break. But surely, with a fund of knowledge about symptoms, causes, effects, and—yes—pain, you would be better prepared. If not to cure your troubles, then at least to face them. This, anyway, was my feeling as I awoke one morning to what promised to be another day of pain. It wasn’t crippling, but it was limiting, and with each day, more draining, more demoralizing. It had started with two weeks of intermittent back and hip discomfort, which wasn’t bad enough to see a doctor about. Then I stooped to retrieve a pencil, and what had been discomfort now became constant pain, and after another two weeks, I was ready to give up. “Okay, you’ve got me, I’m a wimp. You win. Now take the pain away.” But the pain did not go away, and I couldn’t even wonder why, because all I knew was that it hurt. Why was this happening to me?
The doctor was of no help. This kind of complaint often cleared up, she told me. Patience. Meanwhile, there were painkillers. She also pointed out that many people evince similar pain with their slow gaits, their bent backs, their gritted teeth and grimaces. Surely I had noticed them? Join the crowd, she seemed to be saying. I stared at her. I’m active and fit. I’m never sick, and I never take medicine. I don’t eat meat. I hardly drink, don’t smoke, have coffee only in the morning, and run 50 kilometers a week. Run, not trot. You don’t know me, I thought.
It was true, she didn’t. I live in Asturias, in northern Spain, and because I had recently moved, this was my first visit to her office. My medical history was on her computer, but she hadn’t read it and couldn’t know that what I was suffering was not simply the trial of advancing age. Such is the reality of the overburdened Spanish medical system. But thanks to that same system, the painkillers I was prescribed were practically free. It hadn’t cost me a penny to see a doctor.
Knowing how long the trouble would last or whether it would ever clear up—or if, on the contrary, I was likely to be forever impaired—might have made it all easier to bear. After a month, the pain did seem to lessen slightly, and after another week, I could manage without painkillers. I began to believe my doctor. I cheered up. Had I been a doctor myself, though, I would have faced the ordeal with more equanimity. The weather forecaster who knows where a system has come from and how long before it will move on will get just as wet in a downpour, but the drenching won’t seem an insult on top of a hardship, as it might to me, not having realized I was in the path of the storm.
So when one day, as I was walking slowly down a sloping street and saw an elderly couple coming even more slowly up it, I paid attention. They shuffled along, shoulder to shoulder, as if holding each other up. As I got closer, I saw that the man was bearing the weight of the woman, who was tilted against him, not so much leaning on him as tipping over onto him, her body listing like a boat that’s taken on water. They paused beside a bench, and she looked around, her gaze vacant and dazed. Pulling on her hands to turn her toward him while keeping close to give her body the support of his, the man got her aligned with the bench and then seated, all apparently without her help. She was small, but even so, maneuvering her into place must have been awkward. Perhaps she was just too tired to collaborate, but it seemed that she was not even aware of what was going on. No words passed between them, and he did not seek eye contact, nor did she look at him. What was I witnessing? Rather than a sinking ship to succor, or a large package to transport, she was in her constant closeness more like an appendage: a useless arm in a sling or a bandaged foot to drag along as you move—a part of him that had now become burdensome and extraneous.
As he got her seated, the man, probably her husband, eased down beside her. He was still holding her hands. I imagined him facing the problem of his wife’s condition alone, and I felt sorrier for him then I did for myself. I hope, I silently said to him as I continued past, that you are a doctor and know what ails your wife, and haven’t got the stress of uncertainty on top of everything else.
And yet, a store of knowledge about a thing does not necessarily prepare you to experience it. The vet to whom we took our dog many years ago listened calmly as we described what happened when Chimbo had a seizure. On the history of the dog we were sketchy, because we’d found him abandoned beside the road 10 days earlier. Within 48 hours, we said, he’d had his first seizure. Then more.
The dog was quiet but anxious. The vet scratched Chimbo’s ears in a friendly way, which seemed to be a message to him: “Yes, I know about you, and your worries are over.” He was a beautiful dog, a German shepherd, strong and svelte like Rin Tin Tin, except that Chimbo’s eyes showed not pride and confidence but worry and confusion. He did not seem comforted by the vet’s caresses. I was, though. I believed her, even if Chimbo did not.
The vet’s diagnosis was epilepsy, and she gave us some pills to help with the seizures. We had gone for a solution to the problem but also to be reassured that what he was going through wasn’t too much to suffer, that he would get better, and that everything would turn out okay. Maybe also so that someone who knew about these things would hear our story and say, “Oh my!”
We thanked her, paid her, then turned to leave. Chimbo, fearful of going first and fearful of being left behind, was glued to my leg; he squeezed beside me through the door into the waiting room. He was as nervous as he always was. The only moment in the day when he appeared to be free of fear was when I put his bowl in front of him. It was as if his fear were tied to hunger. But the instant he finished, he looked nervously around, fearing an attack, which is what his seizures were. Although he had been visibly nervous in the vet’s examination room and then in her waiting room, he was not more so there than anywhere else. Yet before we’d opened the door to the street, Chimbo started to pant, then twitch. His legs tensed, his eyes rolled back, and he fell to the floor in the full throes of a seizure, his head already knocking against the hard, cold tiles while his limbs jerked. I crouched beside him, put my hands under his head to cushion it from the hard floor, and looked up at the vet, who had followed us from the examination room. Her mouth was hanging open. “This is what he does,” I said. “This is what happens.”
“Dios mío, Dios mío,” she said, staring at the dog as he thrashed on the floor. Then she turned her horrified eyes on me. “It never lasts more than a minute,” I said.
It did, however, last longer than usual. And even after we started the medication, the seizures kept getting worse. Adjusting the dosage didn’t help. We didn’t know then that nothing would.
In the waiting room, Chimbo’s legs were still, with an occasional twitch, and his head was no longer banging. He opened his eyes.
The worst of those months with Chimbo—worse than the shock of the first out-of-the-blue seizure, worse than witnessing and trying to alleviate subsequent attacks, even worse than the decision to put him down after a summer of pills and more pills that did not stop the seizures, worse than when the vet said she didn’t know what to try next, when we accepted that there was no cure—the worst was every time Chimbo opened his eyes and looked around after a seizure, and cringed, as if expecting a new seizure to start right up. When he looked around, first dazed, then fearful, and then looked at me. What’s happening to me? his look said. What’s happening to me? Old people shuffling slowly along; a child wailing in a downpour while his parents impatiently shove him along, seeking shelter; even people strong and healthy who seem to think the aging body is for the already old—they often have something of the same dismay, the same question. What’s happening to me? But it’s not. It’s just happening.
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Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond; Crown, 304 pp., $28
Americans have never been particularly good at seeing the poor. Whether your cable news channel is MSNBC or Fox, you will hear very little about poor people. The middle class tends to imagine poverty as a problem of developing nations, its worst forms in the distant past and reminiscent of a Dickens novel. The cultural impulse to make the poor “invisible” is undeniable, but the so-called invisible hand of the market, writes Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, does more than notice the poor; it preys on them. Despite common assumptions about opportunity, Desmond shows how Americans of means support a government that thwarts real solutions and perpetuates inequality while never really trying to eliminate poverty.
Desmond’s book is a jeremiad, a wake-up call about one sad, simple truth: the rich, and even the middle class, actually benefit by keeping a sizable part of the population (larger than Australia’s total, in fact) below the poverty line. To illustrate, he refers to a poignant scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which a tractor driver is hired to tear down a tenant farmer’s home. As the farmer threatens to shoot him, the driver protests that he’s not to blame, that someone else would invariably take his place. “[O]ne man’s poverty,” writes Desmond, “was another man’s profit.” In this dog-eat-dog existence, Desmond implies, the poor are pitted against each other.
Desmond’s argument is familiar, that educated elites are out of touch, wallowing in abstractions and making excuses in an effort to avoid accountability. When Americans categorize the poor as charity cases, as the “other,” they miss the crucial fact that poverty is about the unequal distribution of privileges, not simply wealth. In the 19th century, Americans recognized that the enormous fortunes of robber barons rested on the backs of grossly underpaid workers. The gig economy is nothing new. After the Civil War, industrial workers were independent contractors, held liable for their own injuries. The poverty trap that Desmond writes about has a long history that he does not incorporate into his argument as much as he might.
Desmond writes that his father was a minister, suggesting that a jeremiad suits him––even in a book that contains a treasure trove of facts. Many of the points he makes have been made before: poverty is increased by the loss of unions, corporate lobbyists undercut real reform of tax or wage laws, banks exploit the poor with overdraft fees, landlords gouge renters, and predatory companies bilk the poor for profits. Consumers reap advantages from cheap goods and services, too. While the rich get massive tax breaks, the middle class gets government assistance in the form of subsidized health and retirement benefits. Desmond tactfully reminds us that we “are all on the dole.”
Some forms of inequality could be easily fixed. As Desmond notes, in many countries citizens don’t file taxes: the government does it. It’s quick, it’s fair, and high-priced accountants aren’t there looking for loopholes. As we have learned from the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, lying about one’s taxes is often cost-effective. The IRS, Desmond writes, loses a “trillion a year in unpaid taxes.”
Those who do escape poverty are often less charitable to those stuck in the poverty ditch. Moving up the ladder can mean forgetting where one came from.Desmond contends that the privatization of wealth explains why U.S. infrastructure is crumbling. Russia isn’t the only nation with oligarchs. As our American oligarchs “accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods” and, Desmond says, “less interested in supporting them.” Private schools, private hospitals, private jets, private islands, offshore accounts, and gated communities have created an exclusive parallel society where those with growing personal fortunes have no need for public institutions. The principal goal of oligarchs, we’re told, is to use all of their power to hoard wealth and privileges.
What are Desmond’s solutions? Drawing a comparison between antebellum antislavery agitation and today’s poverty, he calls for every American to become a “poverty abolitionist.” It is not enough to rely on Great Society programs, he maintains; these made poverty “less lethal” but did not make it “disappear.” Class desegregation—integrating affordable housing into every neighborhood—is one of the reforms he advocates.
The larger dilemma Desmond points to is something he calls “scarcity diversion,” by which elites stash away their money and land. By treating the practice as natural, they allot what little is left over to the poor. In the end, Americans on opposite ends of the political spectrum agree that the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor. The new millionaires club in Congress does the bidding of the rich, which means that worthwhile reform is highly unlikely to be realized anytime soon.
Desmond skirts a crucial part of the story: class isn’t merely about wealth and privilege, but class identity is reproduced in families. A most radical proposition for exposing class privilege was put forward by New Deal–era Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who contended that if 100,000 children were taken from poor families and another 100,000 from rich families, and they were given the same education, food, and housing, it would be impossible to tell the difference between them when they reached adulthood. His theoretical point was obvious: the family, more than any other institution, reproduces class identity. (The 21st-century equivalent would be a reality TV show in which the incoming class at Princeton finds itself living for four years on a Native American reservation.) Such a redistribution of wealth and privilege is something no American would ever tolerate, of course. And that’s the crux of the problem: privilege and a sense of entitlement begin at birth; parents are deeply invested in protecting their own.
If only laying out the facts as Desmond does would change the average reader’s mind. But it won’t. In the United States, poverty has generally been treated as a taboo, an inherited curse. The duty of caring for the poor is consigned to social workers, police, and religious institutions. Families are expected to help their own. Americans are tribal in more ways than partisan politics exposes: walls of rationalization are erected in our heads. It’s not privatization of wealth alone that is the barrier to reform; it’s a painfully long history in which people of promise, the “worthy,” are cleaved from the unworthy poor. By rhetorical means, the working poor are pitted against the unemployed; it turns out that those who do escape poverty are often less charitable to those stuck in the poverty ditch. Moving up the ladder can mean forgetting where one came from. The social dynamic is not just “bifurcated” into rich and poor but fractured along a series of class lines and often manipulated by pernicious and powerful ideologies.
That complexity is not effectively addressed in Desmond’s book. Rather, he sees “complexity” itself as a ruse used by elites to do nothing. And yes, he is partly correct. But getting at the root of the crisis of poverty means cutting through class fictions that persist at the community level as well as at the national level. Class is a material and a mental condition. For the rich, the educated, the professionals, and the rest of the “winners” in American society, class is so woven into identity that all are loath to part with it.
The post Life at the Bottom appeared first on The American Scholar.
Fifty-one years ago, to be exact. I met a blond angel at a health food store on the Upper West Side. The angel smiled at me. I smiled back. She was a dancer, a soloist at George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. She was startled when I recognized her stage name, Deborah Flomine. She was even more startled when I talked about my favorite dancers—Allegra Kent, Jacques d’Amboise, Eddie Villella, and Patricia McBride, all of whom she’d danced with at Lincoln Center and other venues around the world when the company went on tour.
You weren’t supposed to meet a stranger at a health food store who could examine one of Balanchine’s ballets with all the incandescence of an x-ray machine. I was Debbie’s dark angel, I suppose. I must have reminded her of Nureyev, with my high cheekbones. We fell in love. Eventually we moved in together, into an apartment house on West 67th Street originally built for artists—it had magnificent studio space with northern exposure. Our landlady offered us a reasonable rent because she liked having a “young couple” in her domain.
Unluckily, we lived on the same block as Balanchine, or Mr. B, as all his dancers and everyone else called him. He was famously possessive of his female dancers and didn’t like them to have boyfriends. Marriage might come next, and then a baby, and that could mark the end of Mr. B’s interest in that dancer’s career. A marriage might be forgiven, but a baby was most often a kiss of death.
And so, we were mortal enemies at first sight, Mr. B and I. He was never overtly impolite, though he would smile at Debbie and merely stare at me with his mournful eyes. His nose would twitch like a rabbit. I’d had the same nervous twitch as a child. I couldn’t even tell Mr. B how much I admired him and his ballets. Before I met Debbie, I’d had a girlfriend who was a balletomane. We went to the ballet as often as we could, depending on our pocketbooks and the program. My favorite pas de deux was “The Man I Love,” performed by Patricia McBride and Jacques d’Amboise in Balanchine’s homage to George Gershwin and the Jazz Age, Who Cares? The splendor and sheer sexual joy in the fluid courtship of the couple’s fast and slow steps perfectly matched the syncopations in George Gershwin’s music. Words weren’t necessary. The dance steps were far more lyrical than the lyrics Ira Gershwin had written.
I felt that the passion the two dancers had delivered onstage belonged wholly to me. As Jennifer Homans writes in her monumental recent biography of Balanchine, Mr. B, the choreographer and his dancers struggled with the perpetual question: How “to live in the real world when the unreal world of the stage was so much more alive?” The dilemma was mine, as well.
As a novelist, I believed in the almost mystical magic of words, that the meaning of a sentence was derived from its music, and here was an art form that robbed me of my own delight. Balanchine’s ballets, the steps themselves, were more musical than anything I could ever write. I would have gladly watched Jacques and Patricia do “The Man I Love” every day for the rest of my life. Robert Sealy of Ballet Review seemed to agree. In March 1970, he wrote that the dancers, in their own angular, cat-wary way, provided us with “the memory-burning dance of a lifetime.”
I loved Eddie Villella’s leaps, Jacques d’Amboise’s poise, Patricia McBride’s elegance and versatility en pointe, but the dancer who moved me the most was Allegra Kent. She was a wild child, utterly unpredictable. Allegra had three babies, not one, and still she danced for Mr. B. I first saw her in Bugaku, which was a courtship dance inspired by seventh-century Japan. There’s no corps de ballet onstage during the iconic pas de deux, only two dancers: a nobleman and suitor-husband, played by Villella during the performances I attended, and his concubine-wife, played by Allegra, dressed in tights and a kind of white bikini under the kimono that she sheds. And their ritualized romance occurred right onstage. Their bodies twisted and contorted, and it seemed as if Allegra had vacated her own psyche, as if she had fled from us and was performing in a dream state; for a moment she had made the invisible visible, and we were peering at an angel rather than a dancer in Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Mr. B was a great believer in angels, who were plentiful in the Russian Orthodox Church in which he was raised, but much rarer in Manhattan. Indeed, Allegra was possessed, a demonic angel who wrapped herself around her suitor-husband with all the fervor of a sexy python.
And then there was Agon, perhaps Balanchine’s greatest work, set to a score by Igor Stravinsky. It’s a “leotard ballet,” in which the dancers perform in practice clothes on a barren stage, engulfed in a panorama of blue light. The word agon comes from the Greek—it means “contest” or “struggle.” The ballet consists of four men and eight women who dance with an almost inhuman, mathematical precision. They could be icons or angels in distress. No narrative or costumes surround them, nothing but blue light. In the ballet’s single pas de deux, Allegra danced doll-like with Arthur Mitchell, the first Black member of the company. Allegra seemed made of rubber as Mitchell manipulated her movements. We were in a landscape we’d never seen before, where motion itself made its own music. As Homans writes in Mr. B: “Agon was more than a dance ‘to’ Stravinsky’s music. [Balanchine’s] ballet was a musical composition unto itself—a composition that at times competed, agon-style, with Stravinsky’s own score, which was stronger and more complex with the dances than it was alone.”
Through Debbie, I got to know Allegra, a voracious reader who developed a fondness for my fiction. I interviewed her at the very end of 2022, nearly 40 years after she had retired from Balanchine’s company. She talked about working with Mr. B, how the choreography “flowed out of him. It just seemed to arrive. He was a true magician. … He put us into another realm. We entered that realm because of him.”
Balanchine loved to build his ballets around the female form. Male dancers, however graceful, were “second-class citizens,” according to Homans. In the years before I met Debbie at a health food counter, Balanchine was bewitched by Suzanne Farrell, another long-legged beauty with a demonic quality to her dancing. He was 41 years older than Farrell. He began mounting ballet after ballet for her. “Balanchine disappeared into Suzanne,” as Homans writes. In 1969, he divorced his fifth wife, “Tanny” Le Clercq, one of his finest dancers, who had contracted polio while the company was on tour. He’d choreographed Don Quixote (1965) for Farrell, playing the half-crazed Don to her Dulcinea. His performance was heartbreaking.
He wanted to marry Suzanne. But in 1969, she married Paul Mejia, one of Balanchine’s protégés. When Mr. B found out, he banned Mejia from the theater, and when Suzanne told Mr. B that she wouldn’t dance without Mejia, he stripped her of her roles. She fled to Europe with Mejia and joined another company. Balanchine was bereft. And seeing me on 67th Street with one of his soloists must have deepened his despair.
After Stravinsky died in 1971, Balanchine mounted a festival at Lincoln Center devoted to the composer. Stravinsky had been like a spiritual father to Balanchine, or an older brother perhaps. Mr. B hadn’t come from an aristocratic line, like Stravinsky or Vladimir Nabokov. He was raised in an impoverished household and was plucked into St. Petersburg’s imperial ballet school at the age of nine. He rarely saw his parents again. It was the grueling, military-like training he received in St. Petersburg that drove him to train young dancers at the School of American Ballet.
Balanchine claimed to have talked to Stravinsky every night while he mounted new ballets for the festival. Mr. B liked talking to the dead. Once, while the company was performing at the Salzburg Festival, Mr. B told his dancers, “Last night I spoke to Mozart.” “Then,” Allegra Kent recalls, “we started laughing. And then we started crying.” It was like an epiphany that they all felt and believed. The dance steps he created “flowed out of him like Mozart’s music.”
Thanks to Debbie, I attended every performance of the Stravinsky festival. The men whirling about and the women dancing en pointe were indeed a band of angels. “The pointe shoe has its own particular music,” Allegra told me. “It lifted ballet into another realm. Pointe shoes are the slippers of the imagination.”
I believed every word she said.
The post George’s Angels appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet; W. W. Norton, 352 pp., $28.95
Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response similar to the one I experienced while reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Both books are mood-altering, mind-altering odysseys; both set forth visions of a weird and roiling body politic. Didion’s title invokes an earlier account of disintegration, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” to frame its anatomy of American chaos in the 1960s. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” Yeats wrote in 1919. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,” he wonders in the poem’s final lines, “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” This is the question hovering behind Sharlet’s essay collection, which spans a period of approximately 10 years, ending in 2021—an era he describes, borrowing filmmaker Jeffrey Ruoff’s coinage, as “the Trumpocene.”
On finishing The Undertow, I realized the degree to which the revelatory terrors of Didion’s American surreal are mercifully muted for me because I am not old enough to have known them at first hand. But I live in Sharlet’s America, a world of apocalyptic pulsings and unnatural peril made all the more visceral by the author’s capacity for ventriloquizing the grief, rage, delusion, racism, misogyny, and bad-faith histrionics that he encounters on his journeys across the United States. The river of bile on which Sharlet fights to stay afloat courses from one end of the country to the other. He ushers us into the front yards and houses of radicalized private citizens, draws us into a conference for angry members of the “manosphere,” sweeps us from the violence of the Capitol steps on January 6 to the conspiratorial depths of QAnon. He immerses us in political rallies and megachurch services, which often sound very much the same in their embrace of a prosperity gospel derived from Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). The same association between faith and material success that makes the “church of Trump” appealing to so many infuses some of the actual churches Sharlet visits.
A consummate long-form journalist and a professor of creative writing at Dartmouth College, Sharlet is also the author of several books, including The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2008) and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy (2010), which together formed the basis of a Netflix documentary series. The evangelical Christian communities that Sharlet explored in those works feature in The Undertow as ecstatic, often paranoid, and usually armed. The book alludes to the long, sometimes violent history of American evangelism that stretches back to the Puritans—a history eloquently traversed several years ago by another intrepid journalist, Frances FitzGerald, in The Evangelicals (2017). Figures like Jonathan Edwards and John Brown make cameos in Sharlet’s book, but its focus is, emphatically, on the now. The Undertow, Sharlet advises readers, “is written from the middle of something, a season of coming apart.”
Sharlet is a kind of anthropologist of the Trumpocene, and the richness of his dispatches derives from his ability to inhabit a broad range of sensibilities and psychologies. Camping out in the “funk” of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011, for example, he tries to account for the oddness of the Occupy movement. “Occupations were literally about re-filling a hollowed-out public sphere with an actual public of breathing bodies,” he writes. The protesters made headlines, even as their agenda remained somewhat unclear. They were, he concludes, holy fools: they offered poetry instead of platforms and spoke “not truth to power but imagination to things as they are.”
Despite this interlude, Sharlet is interested primarily in the imagination of the right. In his telling, it assumes more sinister expression as cant, violent fantasy, and vengeful prayer, which combine to create an “alternate reality” bolstered by “the juxtaposition of the verifiable and the absurd, each vouching for the other.” The Steal, Pizzagate, the deep state, red-pilling, the Great Replacement Theory, the satanic Clintons—these are the “feverish dreams” coursing, in their various permutations, through the book. These are the descendants of dreams, Sharlet insists, that have been “twisting through the American mind since the beginning.”
Sharlet, who has attended services in all manner of places—“megachurches and chapels and compounds and covens”—visits several in The Undertow. An early essay features Miami’s slick, celebrity-linked VOUS Church, “born on an Oxygen reality show featuring beaches, bikinis, and screaming fans, called Rich in Faith.” Sharlet’s handlers are friendly, keen that he have “fun,” but he finds only emptiness: a gospel of “style and good feeling.” Later, he attends the more “militant” and considerably less hospitable West Omaha Baptist Church, where Pastor Hank singles him out as a journalist purveying lies: “Your sin will find you out.” What finds him out first, when he is talking with some worshippers in the parking lot after the service, is an obviously armed security guard and an usher, who persuades Sharlet to leave with a threatening question: “How do you know I don’t have a gun?” The incident raises Sharlet’s blood pressure and brings into focus the autobiographical story that threads through his narrative. He reveals that he has had two heart attacks, and so the heartsickness of the body politic finds its physical analogue and somber echo in the heart disease of its chronicler, as he is dragged, and we with him, into the undertow of a distinctively American kind of sorrow and hysteria.
In The Undertow’s title essay, Sharlet takes up the case of Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 rioter killed by a Capitol Police officer. For some, Babbitt has become a martyr, a harbinger, the “first casualty” of the “slow civil war” to which the book’s subtitle calls our attention. Her death, together with the swirling fictions about it that have now replaced the facts, becomes the emblem of a Yeatsian center that “cannot hold.” Yet the book’s first and final essays offer a counterpoint to the processes of disintegration and drowning in the portraits of two musicians and political activists: Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays (a founder of the folk group The Weavers). Sharlet restores the voices of these singers, whose “best songs” have been “forgotten or worn smooth and seemingly safe by time.” Rescuing their music from the distortions of history, he reveals these artists in all their lyrical splendor as mourners, elegists. Sharlet sees these men—one Black, the other white—as heroic singers of “a kind of secret code of resistance” to lies, delusions, and Trumpian “vulgarity masquerading as candor,” as well as to the violence such rhetoric summons.
Remember grieving Orpheus, torn limb from limb by the frenzied bacchantes, his head carried along the river, still afloat and singing. Nothing could drown out that voice.
The post The Center Cannot Hold appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “The Hospital.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Hospital” by Patrick Kavanagh appeared first on The American Scholar.
After receiving a BFA in painting from the University of Minnesota in 2007, Carolyn Misterek abandoned fine art, choosing instead to focus her energy on becoming a graphic designer. She worked in the field for 12 years, but on New Year’s Day 2020, she decided to quit her job and return to painting full-time. “I had these moments of like, ‘I don’t want to be picking a color palette; I just wanted to paint with these colors,’” she says. “Ultimately, I couldn’t ignore that voice for that long.” Even as she quarantined with her family during the pandemic, she felt connected to potential buyers of her work thanks to the prominence of social media in the art world. “All I had was Instagram to reach people,” she says, “but I was already shipping art to Australia and the U.K.”
- Everyday Occurrence No. 67, oil on panel, 12 x 14 inches.
- Everyday Occurrence No. 68, oil on panel, 11 x 13 inches.
Several colors—among them forest green, blush pink, and dusty blue—feature prominently in Misterek’s work, and she believes that her background in digital graphic design allows her to map out her compositions as she paints, without any prior planning. “It’s magical alchemy,” she says. “I have no conscious thought about how I’m going to lay stuff out.” Inspired by the Impressionists, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Misterek (who also has a master’s degree in art history) chooses scenes from her daily life: still lifes, quiet interior scenes, or portraits of her two children. “I think of my work as visual poetry,” she says. “Where you just have an emotional response and you don’t always have to know why or analyze it. It’s all coming from an emotional place for me, and so my goal is the emotional response from the viewer.”
The post Carolyn Misterek appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the world of Gunnhild Øyehaug’s fiction, the mechanics of the short story are constantly being pulled apart and played with: characters we’ve followed on a bus turn out to be the inventions of the narrator on page four; an omniscient “analysis department” argues with the author about the validity of a story ending; Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil turn out to be real flowers growing by the side of the road and the cause of a woman’s broken foot. But the magic of Øyehaug’s latest collection, Evil Flowers, translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson, is how these subversions still manage to awaken us to the wonder of real, ordinary, corporeal life, whether our main character is a loner searching for connection on a travel forum or a girl who turns everything she touches into slime eels.
Go beyond the episode:
- Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Evil Flowers, translated by Kari Dickson
- Read “Nice and Mild,” from Knots, her first collection to be translated into English
- Check out her two novels, Present Tense Machine and Wait, Blink, adapted into the film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts (sadly only available in Norwegian)
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Spotify • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post The Comic Queen of Metafiction appeared first on The American Scholar.
I have seen The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, many times. The film marks the definitive end of the truly Western Western, a farewell to the time when desperadoes played poker in frontier saloons, gunfighters fought legendary battles, and the cavalry saved the day or died with their boots on. A righteous man could be John Wayne romancing Claire Trevor in Stagecoach or Gary Cooper taking on three killers in High Noon, and a little boy could end the movie by begging “Shane! Shane! Come back!” Once, when my teenage son and I watched The Wild Bunch together, he came up with the perfect two-word description of the movie: “brilliant carnage.”
Myths die not all at once but in stages, and the Western always owed something of its appeal to the knowledge that the era it depicted—and, to some extent, invented—was long since gone by the time talking pictures filled movie screens. With each year, the cowboy-as-hero, whether lawman or bandit, grew more distant. Of the horsemen making up The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are the only two who ride off into the sunset. Though they have defeated the bad guys who terrorized Mexican farmers, they know their days are numbered. “Only the farmers won,” Brynner says. “We lost. We always lose.”
In The Wild Bunch, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous outlaws with Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) as his right-hand man. Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates) are brothers with bad tempers and a healthy lust for liquor and ladies. Angel (Jaime Sanchez) is the one Mexican among them, passionate and brave, while Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), a good-natured elder statesman, remains behind the scenes, because he can no longer meet the physical demands of a hold-up job. The bunch would have had one extra fellow, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s closest friend, was arrested, flogged mercilessly, and blackmailed by a vicious railway baron (Albert Dekker) into leading a team of “peckerwood” trash to hunt down the gang. The actors up and down the line give sterling performances.
The movie begins on the outskirts of San Rafael, a small Texas town, with children gleefully burning straw atop a battle of ants and scorpions. It is a powerful image, conveying the idea that cruelty and an impulse to destroy may be innate in even the youngest and most innocent human beings. In sharp contrast, a salvation salesman leads an open-air temperance meeting in the center of town, where a pathetic crowd swears off alcohol and sings “Shall We Gather at the River?”
It is then that Pike and his men, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, ride in to rob the railway’s offices. Their plans have been anticipated, however, and an ambush organized against them. In the ensuing crossfire, only Pike and five others ride their horses to safety. One of them will die of his wounds minutes later. And their bags of stolen treasure turn out to contain no treasure—just dime-store metal washers.
After the ambush, the guys head over the Mexican border and stop for a spell of rest and recreation at Angel’s idyllic home village. It is 1913. The Mexican Revolution is underway and the First World War about to begin. Mapache (Emilio Fernández), the vainglorious warlord of a militia with ties to Imperial Germany, has killed Angel’s father and stolen the lad’s girlfriend. Given Angel’s temperament and Mapache’s appetite for gratuitous cruelty, conflict is inevitable—and only suspended when Pike and company agree to steal munitions and give most of the proceeds to Mapache.
Thanks in part to film composer Jerry Fielding’s glorious score, an air of elegy pervades the movie, though the romantic gloom lifts when—true to the generic conventions of the Western—the gang pulls off a daring railway robbery, blowing up a bridge along the way to elude the bounty hunters on their tail.
What made the movie the talk of the town in 1969 is its ultimate showdown: a slow-motion shootout between the gringos and the militia, our protagonists’ skills making up for what they lack in sheer numbers.
When the film was new, Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic advised viewers to focus on “the ballet, not the bullet.” The violence and bloodshed that once shocked moviegoers no longer seem quite so extraordinary. But Kauffman’s judgment has held up. He rated The Wild Bunch as “a Western that enlarged the form aesthetically, thematically, and demonically.” (For more on what critics have said, read The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film by W. K. Stratton.)
The film is also a study in leadership. Pike Bishop leads the group by virtue of something more than the sum of his abilities and experience. Dutch is his loyal partner. Pike maintains his leadership despite the challenges mounted by brothers Lyle and Tector, who like doing things “in tandem”—watch the film to be in on that joke. When the brothers begrudge an equal share of any profits with Sykes and Angel, Pike spikes the rebellion: “I either lead this bunch or end it right now.” Later, he articulates the group’s ethic: “When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal, you’re finished! We’re finished! All of us!”
Pike, Dutch, Lyle and Tector mount their attack on Mapache, his ill-trained soldiers, and the Germans with whom they’re in league because Mapache tortured and humiliated Angel, violated their creed, and insulted their self-respect. But there is another reason, one bordering on nihilism, for going into a battle in which the bandits know they will die. The unspoken question is: What else do they have to live for? They know their time is up. The introduction of modern machinery—automobiles, jeeps, machine guns, even the rumor of airplanes—has made their occupation obsolete. They are wanted men, outcasts, without a vocation and with no future.
Carrying rifles and wearing gun belts, Pike, Dutch, Tector and Lyle convene after a final fling with a bottle (Dutch) or a compliant lady (the others). Pike: “Let’s go.” Lyle: “Why not?” This seems like a banal enough exchange, but it will ring in your ears long after you see the four men march slowly, menacingly, to Mapache’s headquarters. Spoiler alert: the survivors, including two original members of the bunch, get the last mirthless laugh.
The post Brilliant Carnage appeared first on The American Scholar.
If you walk past a child napping on a sofa, you’ll smile indulgently, step more lightly, and lower your voice to a whisper, even though you know that eventually someone or something will disturb the child’s slumber. That will hardly matter, and, as you know, your care is unnecessary because nothing can trouble the child’s progress, not even waking.
The sleeping child I gazed at was not on a sofa in my living room but in a hospital bed, and I wasn’t present but looking at a photo in an article. He was a boy, not simply sleeping but unconscious, according to the article about the war in Ukraine. A year ago, when it was new, the war was on everyone’s tongue. It is now a few days shy of a year old, a babe in human years, and as warfare goes, young. But I hardly speak of it, and my students report that they also rarely talk about the war, either at home or at school or with friends. Except for a scare when a stray missile hit Poland, no one I know has raised the subject of the war in months. I was reading about it not out of duty or interest but because the article, which was published last March, before the war was even a month old, was next up in my reading. I’m that far behind.
According to the article, experts predicted that Ukraine would not long withstand Russia’s attack and would have to negotiate an end to the conflict. That hasn’t happened, and even while reading the year-old report, I wondered how, even back then, before so much loss of life and so much destruction, anyone could have pictured it: Would not hundreds and thousands, thinking of all that had already been lost, moan that it was too late? Too late to save this battalion, this town, this family. Two days in, and it was already too late for the boy in the bed: before turning a page and first seeing the photo, I had learned his name, what had befallen him, and that he had died. No disturbing him.
But I was plenty disturbed. First, to think of what had happened to him while riding in the family car with his two sisters and his parents one frigid day in late February of last year, two days after Russia invaded Ukraine. A shell exploded near them, and shrapnel destroyed the car. The parents and one of the sisters were killed instantly. The fate of the other sister I do not know because it wasn’t reported, so I presume the reporter didn’t know it either. I do not wish to know it. Nor whether his grandmother arrived at the boy’s bedside before he died. Nor if such a visit could assuage any pain. Nor if she herself has survived.
I was also disturbed to look at his photo. Just seeing him in the bed seemed invasive. Even knowing his name seemed so. His face and name, like a severed finger found in the road, belong to the cadaver and should be left with it to be buried. We shouldn’t possess these any more than we should any other body part retrieved from the debris. He is not a relic.
I’m not even sure his story should be used, though of course a reporter must tell stories. Generic stories will do, though, or stories where identities are protected by pseudonyms, as is often done, especially for children. Baby Doe and Baby Jane Doe are two unnamed children whose legal cases were reported on in the 1980s. The author of the Ukraine article used a pseudonym for a Ukrainian who wished not to be identified, perhaps out of concern about reprisal. Even for the boy in the bed who cannot be harmed and has nothing to fear, respectful circumspection is wanted, both for the name and for the body. To report his death, the journalist might well have adopted the original identifier that was used in the hospital: Patient Unknown No. 1.
When a woman disappeared in Asturias in early November, her name and photo were publicized for two months in the hope that someone had seen her. But after DNA testing confirmed that a body found two days before Christmas at the bottom of a cliff at Cabo Peñas was hers, there was no longer any need to show her photo or repeat her name. In its article about the end of the search, the newspaper did not include the last picture of her. But it did provide two earlier photos showing the woman smiling and beautiful, in contrast to the reported deteriorated state of the body.
To pass over the particulars of a tragedy and neglect to remind readers that the victims have a name and face and all the particulars of a real person, might simply turn a person into a statistic. In one sense, that’s okay. Statistics help, and to obtain the compelling ones for their tales is why some people might risk their lives, as the reporter of the article I read must have risked his in shell-shaken Ukraine.
But to mourn the missing and the dead, do we need names? Standing with your back to the lighthouse at Cabo Peñas, you look out onto a vast sea. You’re not likely to see even distant boats. Just gray and blue, some white, except on cloudy overcast days when it’s only gray. A sea of human misery lies to the south in Africa, and the waters people routinely drown in trying to cross from there to Europe. Another distant sea of suffering is in Latin America, where fear or need drives people from their homes. Behind me to the northeast is Ukraine. All around me I see the broadest landscape where lives unfold and grow thin, then dissolve, and untold tragedies occur and fade and cease to exist. “All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life.” Karl Marx. A boy lay on a bed while a photographer aimed a camera, no permission asked. A woman ended up at the bottom of a cliff, her image on dozens of webpages. I picture victims not as a number nor as a spectacle to gawk at, as if they were forever on a stretcher, being carried past us, but instead as wafting clouds, floating, forming, dissipating. “Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages: / Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” Shakespeare. To mourn a boy in a bed or a woman on a cliff, who suffered such different circumstances and causes, no need for their names, but for the poets’ names, yes, to pass on their hard truths that must do for comfort. Walter de la Mare: “Life with death / Brings all to an issue; / None will long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you, / Your place left vacant, / You not there.” The news is not new, but it is never old news either, as long as people are swept away in the winds of time.
The post Boy in a Bed appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Lisel Mueller’s poem “Not Only the Eskimos.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Not Only the Eskimos” by Lisel Mueller appeared first on The American Scholar.
The drumbeat of people being unlawfully killed by police officers continues. Not even the mass protests of 2020 could push Congress to enact federal legislation banning chokeholds or no-knock warrants. Why does reform remain so difficult? Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted more than two decades to analyzing how our legal system protects the police at every level, from the Supreme Court to municipal governments. Her new book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, details the dozens of ways in which civil rights plaintiffs, no matter their tax bracket, race, or zip code, can be thwarted: from the difficulties of acquiring a lawyer to the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, designed to protect police officers from personal liability.
Go beyond the episode:
- Joanna Schwartz’s Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable
- ProPublica ran a year-long investigation into America’s largest police department: the NYPD
- Read more about the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Alexander Baxter’s case against the Nashville police, which was thrown out under the doctrine of qualified immunity. Baxter initially represented himself (and handwrote his complaint) but was later defended by the ACLU.
- “Elite” police units, like the SCORPION Unit that killed Tyre Nichols this year in Memphis, are frequently the subject of scandals and complaints
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Spotify • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Justice, Arrested appeared first on The American Scholar.
T. S. Eliot writes that a cat should have three names, but I am having trouble finding just one for the new black cat, the latest addition to my household. He came meowing to the window one evening in late October when the food bowl there was empty, clearly asking to be fed, like the others. But I was reluctant. “You should go home,” I scolded him. He appeared to be from next door, one of two kittens brought there in June by their mother from her secret lair once they were big enough to be out in the world. I had seen it happen—the small tabby, carrying her litter of three black kittens, one by one, from the empty buildings across the lane to quarters closer to her food source at my neighbors’ house. She had carried them through the bars of the gate and up the stairs onto the lawn. She trod on them a number of times, but, undaunted, simply got a better grip, held her head higher, and went on, stashing them among the miscellaneous items in my neighbors’ garage. One of the kittens, my neighbor told me, had since disappeared. This young cat must be one of the other two, I thought.
But my neighbor said no, this black cat wasn’t one of hers. He came around to her house at dinnertime, but was skittish, and waited until the others had finished. If he came too close, the others cuffed him. She shrugged, as if asking, “What can you do?”
Homeless he was then, not welcomed at the big house and trying his luck now with me. I filled the bowl on the window ledge when he came around again. “But that’s it,” I said. “That’s all I’m doing for you.” He meowed raucously, his voice as harsh as a crow’s. A warning? A lament? “Raven?” I asked. Is that your name? I decided it wasn’t.
He got along fine with the other young cat at my house, the one my dogs had picked up on a walk. I liked to watch the two play, one orange, one black. One Charlie, the other … Stanley? Spencer? Larry? Lucky? Radar? It wasn’t just that I couldn’t decide, it was that I couldn’t even narrow in. My guesses were all so scattershot. Maybe, I thought, I wasn’t meant to know. But I kept guessing. Jake? Freddy? I turned to my visiting son. “Jake or Freddy?”
He vetoed both. “Give the cat a cat name,” he said. But I couldn’t think of any. A horse might be Blaze or Star or Misty, but a black cat? I couldn’t even call him Mittens. Bagheera? Pluto? My son shook his head. I googled cat names and discovered that Charlie is near the top of favorite cat names, according to several lists. But I already had a Charlie. “So give me a Spanish name,” I said to my son, but he couldn’t come up with any. I googled that too: Leo, Apollo, Rayo. Luigi. Luigi? I already had a Louie.
So one day it’s Raphael, like our previous black cat, the next, Livingston, the black cat before Rafi. Could this cat be another Rasputin, the black cat I had as a child? No matter how many names I tried, I didn’t seem to hit on the right one.
Well, he wasn’t my cat, just a hapless neighbor, like the man who sat on a piece of cardboard day after day in front of the grocery store, but luckier than the man because the cat invariably found a patch of sun, and then moved across the patio with the rays, whereas no sun falls anywhere near the store entrance.
I don’t presume to call that man by his name, so why this cat? Besides, according to Eliot, a cat’s real name is one only the cat knows. And the black cat’s not saying. Not even opening my door to him and offering him a seat by the fire, which I did back in November, within a week of promising him he’d never gain entrance, will get his secret from him. I don’t even try anymore.
The post The Naming of Cats appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “The Dacca Gauzes.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Dacca Gauzes” by Agha Shahid Ali appeared first on The American Scholar.
Marie Arana is the award-winning Peruvian-American author of Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story, a book about a whole continent that manages not to be a thousand pages long—even though it covers about a thousand years of history. She makes the compelling case that there are really three driving forces behind the entire region: exploitation and extraction; violence; and religion. Of course, all of these forces are deeply interrelated—and that’s the point. To drive home how tangled the past is with the present, Arana weaves the stories of three contemporary Latin Americans together with a millennium of history to ultimately show why you can’t really explain the rest of the world without first understanding the story of Latin America.
Go beyond the episode:
- Marie Arana’s Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
- Read Richard Moe’s review on our website (“a long-overdue and persuasive corrective”)
- Here’s a less blood-soaked tale from the cloisters of Peru: librarian Helen Hazen on a clutch of rare books tucked away in an Andean convent
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Spotify • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Past is Present appeared first on The American Scholar.
The second conditional, used to talk about unreal situations, has two clauses, in either order, one with if and the past simple tense, the other with would plus the infinitive. Clear, right? My students, nevertheless, often use would in both clauses, which seems downright obtuse. My own difficulties with the conditional in Spanish, however, make me sympathetic. So when reviewing this grammar point for my upper-intermediate high schoolers, I followed the suggestion in the teacher’s book on how to introduce the structure: ask what they would do if they won the lottery. Starter was the word used for this preliminary activity, suggesting the beginning of a feast. Other books use the term warm up, as if learning a language is like doing sport. For me, welcoming students and then circulating among pairs of them engaged in talk, it seems a cocktail party metaphor might be the most apt, and I neither the chef of a meal nor the coach training athletes but the host, checking on my guests, keeping them from getting bored. I had high hopes for the lesson. Who could be bored while talking about money?
The idea was for the students to quickly decide on their first act. Then we could talk about what they could do. A whole range of possibilities! Their eyes would light up. Finally we would list the things they might do, realizing that the items on this list made a select subset of the could list, more likely than the other possibilities on that list but less likely than on the would list.
Had the textbook authors envisioned a classroom of considerate teens, remembering the items their parents lacked, or the vacation their grandparents had always wanted? Their sister’s crooked teeth and the expensive procedure for straightening them that was beyond the family’s means? A big new apartment with a baby grand for an aunt who had no room in her home for a piano? That was what I was waiting for. Instead, the first student said he’d buy a car. “Ah,” I said. Buy a car I wrote on the whiteboard. “How old are you?” He was 16, he said, so he’d keep the car in a garage, he supposed, until he got his license at 18. “You could let a friend or family member use it in the meantime,” I suggested.
“No,” he said, “it’s mine.”
The next student I called on raised his brows and said he’d buy a house. I wrote that too. For your parents or for yourself? For me, he said, but he admitted he didn’t want to live alone. He was 15. The third said he’d buy a boat. Buy a boat went on the board. This boy was 14. “Do you like the ocean? Do you know how to sail?” I asked. Not particularly, and no. Do you know about renting a berth in a harbor or insuring the boat? No. About boat maintenance? He shook his head. Well, it’s a lot of work, I said. He could pay someone, another student suggested. True. We continued around the room, and I was pleased when a student said she’d go to New York. For how long? I asked. A week. Visit New York. The final student said she couldn’t think of anything. “Well, you could put it in the bank,” I said, ready to transition into the modals could and might. “What else could you do with a lot of money that you don’t need?”
For exactly 60 seconds, the class sat in silence. I was determined to wait them out, but I broke before they did. “You could throw it out the window,” I suggested, “and then watch what happens in the street when bundles of money come raining down.” The students didn’t react as I started a new list under the heading Could.
“You could bury it, like a pirate.” They snickered.
“You could give it away.” The students shook their heads. “Well, part of it,” I suggested. They shook their heads again. “You wouldn’t give it away? Not to charity? Not to save starving children?” The incredulous no became an abashed no. “Would anyone give any of the money away?”
Despite noting their earlier avowal to keep all the money, I was surprised that not one student would give away any portion. “You could share it with your brother,” I said to one. He laughed. “No, no!”
“Maybe you wouldn’t, but you could,” I said, and added Give away to the list.
“You could burn it,” said a student. It was the student who’d said she’d go to New York. She was pretty and very quiet, always knew the answer but almost never volunteered to give it. Yes, I said, you could, and wrote that on the whiteboard. I looked at the list, satisfied. We’d gobbled the starter, then chewed it thoroughly, but now we were almost ready to move on. One last bite though: I asked them all to choose one option from the could list of actions that they might do.
That was hard. Buying a house they had no need for and no desire to live in had come easily to mind, but the choices in the second list were unappealing. I specifically asked again if they might give it away. Was that a remote possibility? No, was the answer from all six students. They might as well burn it, I thought. Given the options, they thought so too.
The post Burning Money appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 2015, Michael McGregor quit his corporate job and moved to Mexico City, where the vibrant hues of his new home inspired him to reach for his colored pencils. “I hadn’t drawn anything since I was a teenager,” he said. The city “changed my perspective completely. I woke up to the colors that were actually in the universe.” Four years later, he moved to Los Angeles and began creating bright acrylic-and-oil stick paintings of flowers, as well as interior scenes inspired by the still life paintings of the Dutch masters and the early 20th-century Fauvist movement. The canvases are semi-autobiographical. “I grew up in a flower store,” he says. “My mom and all of my sisters and I would work in the flower store together so all of my work naturally stemmed from that.”
- It's A Glamorous World (Salon Hodler, After LL), 2021, charcoal, acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 34 x 42 inches.
- Just Like The Birds Need The Sky Above, 2022, charcoal, acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 50 x 40 inches.
McGregor’s series Private Party is currently on view at the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles. A white piano features in six of the show’s 34 works—a reference to the one his roommate purchased during the pandemic and to several of McGregor’s favorite Matisse paintings, all of which depict a woman seated at a piano. For McGregor, the series is a meditation on the spoils of excess. “I’m always interested in ideas of glamour and elegance, and that sort of seesaw where elegance and glamour can become decadent or hedonistic or maybe a little bit disturbing,” he says. “How can you treat elegance in a way that doesn’t feel so refined?”
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In 1889, a group of Jewish families fleeing Russian pogroms arrived in Argentina, hoping for a new life—or at least a safe place to reside for a while before making their way to Israel. Moisés Ville, the town they founded, some 400 miles from Buenos Aires, was one of the first Jewish agricultural communities in Argentina and over the next 50 years would come to be called the “Jerusalem of South America,” replete with theaters, libraries, and two synagogues. But this sunny story of life in the new world has a dark underside, as Argentinian journalist Javier Sinay learned one day, upon reading a 1947 Yiddish newspaper article written by his own great-grandfather. The article detailed 22 murders of Jewish colonists in swift succession, all in the last decade of the 19th century. Why these people were killed—and what it says about the complex history of this once grand town—is the subject of Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robert Croll. Sinay joins us to talk about how a story from 100 years ago changed the way he saw his country, and his own relationship to Judaism.
Go beyond the episode:
- Javier Sinay’s new book, The Murders of Moisés Ville
- It’s never too late to connect with the language of your ancestors, as Phyllis Rose writes in “My Mother’s Yiddish”
- Journey further afield into the driving forces of Latin America in our interview with Marie Arana
All images courtesy of Javier Sinay:
- Farmers in Moisés Ville circa 1890 (General Archive of the Nation of Argentina)
- Jewish settlers in Moisés Ville in the late 1930s (Jewish Colonization Association photo collection, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem)
- The section of the Moisés Ville Cemetery for murder victims and violent deaths
- Javier Sinay in the cemetery of Moisés Ville (Paula Salischiker)
- Part of the Sinay family registered in Moisés Ville in the census of 1895
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Old Jewish tombs in the Moisés Ville Cemetery
- Javier Sinay’s great-grand father, Mijl Hacohen Sinay (date unknown)
- Rabi Mordejai Reuben Hacohen Sinay and his wife Rebeca Skibelsky (Javier Sinay’s great-great-grandparents) in Buenos Aires in 1914
- Reproduction of a March 1898 edition of Der Viderkol, the Yiddish newspaper founded by Javier Sinay’s great-grandfather Mijl Hacohen Sinay
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek. Follow us on Twitter @TheAmScho or on Facebook.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Spotify • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post The Promised Land of the Pampas appeared first on The American Scholar.
Is childhood a place or a time? Considering the aspirations of so many people to return to it, you’d think the answer was a place, a spot in the world, with an address, much easier to locate than a time, though times have dates to identify them as precisely as street names and numbers identify places. March along the avenue of moments looking for July 28, 1992, or September 3, 1973. Can you find it? With house numbers, one follows after another with a recognizable logic. Not so, however, when looking for the past. With dates, you might find that a day in June 1970 is right next to one in July 1976, the one being the first time you wore a new multicolored swimsuit during a two-week visit to Cape Cod and the other being a summer’s day in a daiquiri-colored bikini on a beach in Delaware. Lying on the sand, heads together, my best friend and I laughing one summer’s day, then I laughing half a dozen years later on a different beach with different friends. Smooth sand all around. Dunes as backdrop. Waves with whitecaps breaking lower right. Good outdoor lighting. For childhood, rather than time or place, perhaps stage might be the best word, meaning both a place and a period. Especially for children in their multiple acts of growing up, pretending to be what they aren’t yet. Stage 8 years, 3 months. Stage August 31, 1967. Stage Texas Christmas, stage Tennessee summer, stage cool, stage aloof.
Still, an address is so much more real than a time—searches for places so much a part of our present—and in principle possible to return to, requiring only doggedness to find, unlike the past, which is with us but not, a haze that envelops our understanding, sometimes thick and sometimes clearing to allow dispassionate observation of a distant scene. The writer Peter Handke asks, “What can one say to express the simultaneous experience of childhood and landscape?” The author of a New Yorker article I read on Handke treats the Austrian writer’s question as if it were a quest for a word, and then supplies an answer: Kindschaft, a German word, which could be translated as “childscape.” I read the question, however, as a search for an approach, a coming-closer, a seeing-better, a feeling-again. What words can one gather to capture the essence of childhood or the details of a child’s world?
In the same article I learned of W. G. Sebald’s suggestion that Handke’s sensory descriptions keep both writer and reader from falling into melancholy. How does this work? By describing experiences, you keep from reflecting too much on their meaning, avoiding a first step into the mire of nostalgia. Does plot, which Handke often eschews in favor of reflection, do the same for other writers, and keep the reader moving on rather than wallowing in the import of the past? As I reflect on my own excursions through the landscapes of northern Spain, often on my way to a footrace, I must be wary myself of nostalgia, especially now that my running future is in doubt, due to back trouble. One of my most recent races was a San Silvestre—a New Year’s Eve race—that my running partner and I ran in the town of Moreda, in a deep valley over the mountains from my home. It is a small race in a small town with a tradition of a very generous pool of gifts raffled after the awards ceremony. The race bibs that we turned in on finishing the race were our lottery tickets, pulled from a large cardboard box at the town’s auditorium and announced to the gathered runners and families. A selection of wine from one store, a gift certificate for sports gear from another, a sweatshirt, a basket of cheese and sausage—these goods and similar were donations by local merchants and organizations. Several tickets to the national lottery were among the gifts. I got nothing this year, but my partner got a certificate for a meal for two at a local hamburger joint, a gift it wouldn’t be worth his while to come back to redeem. Oh well. My partner and I had each taken the award for the fastest veteran runners, male and female, and we each had a framed plaque to add to our trophy collections. Plus, just being in the drawing, testing our luck, was fun. We would be back in a year, if we were so fortunate to still be competing.
After the ceremony, I climbed back up on stage and asked the two men cleaning up if I could look for my race bib, still in the box with the other passed-over bibs. My running partner followed me. As the men gave me the go ahead and I was already digging my hands into the large cardboard box, my partner explained to them that I saved all my race bibs. Why did he say that? As if a well-established fixation is easier to accept than a new or casual one? The men didn’t seem to care.
The bibs, pieces of paper about the size of a sheet of typing paper but slightly heavier and with a slippery feel, were half-an-inch deep in the box. Maybe there were 50 of them. I turned and parted and shuffled through them, looking for my number, until I realized I needed to spread them out, or at least separate the ones that were not mine from the unexamined jumble. I pulled some out, then my partner grabbed a handful from the box to look through, and then the two men did too. Pulling, shuffling, piling. Number 251, I told the men helping me. One of them said the job was impossible, the other said of course not. I knew it would be a moment at most before we found it. Number 251, I repeated.
“I have it!” exclaimed one of the men. He held it up. “I found it,” he repeated, “here it is.” Did the man’s tone express inordinate pride at his accomplishment? Only four of us were searching, and the task was not difficult. Same with the race—only a handful of runners in the veteran category and winning not difficult. On reflection, I felt no particular pride in the victory that day, though I did feel the accomplishment of forging ahead into the unknown. How many more races would I run? How many more race bibs would I collect to add to the bulging folder? How many more stages?
On our way out, my partner handed his meal coupon to a local runner, the son of the race organizer. His girlfriend was with him. Practically kids. They looked surprised, then pleased. I could imagine them in a few years: “Oh, the days we thought a coupon for a couple of burgers was a windfall!” They’d be right to laugh. The windfall is not the hamburgers but remembering them. It’s remembering, not the date or the address, but the almost balmy weather, the police officer at a side street, looking important, arms crossed and holding back a solitary car, a woman in a creamy sweater and sunglasses at an outdoor table sitting up to clap as you ran by, the glint of sun on the blue plastic of the arch at the finish line, beyond which runners and spectators mingled, and you changing as you passed under the arch from someone striving into someone done with striving, just one of the milling crowd.
The post Take Me Back appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared first on The American Scholar.
The codices and manuscripts of the Middle Ages are littered with the acts of kings and the edicts of bishops, full of tales of knightly romance and monkish devotions. Read between the lines, though, and you’ll find the women who made the medieval world run: bookkeepers and brewers, weavers and wine merchants, serfs and sex workers. They never got credit for it, and even their first names are often obscured by those of their husbands and fathers, but their lives were much richer and more varied than we have been led to expect. Eleanor Janega, who teaches medieval and early modern history at the London School of Economics, devotes her new book, The Once and Future Sex, to these ordinary and extraordinary women. Her analysis of the ways in which their lives were circumscribed shows how radically gender norms have changed—though not always improved—since the so-called dark ages.
Go beyond the episode:
- Eleanor Janega’s The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society
- On her blog, Going Medieval, read Janega’s take “On beer, or, why chicks rock” or peruse the index of medieval subjects
- Janega’s podcast about the Middle Ages, “We’re Not So Different” considers “how we’ve always been idiots”
- Smarty Pants has gone medieval itself: in this interview with Mary Wellesley about the ordinary lives in manuscripts, or this conversation with Jack Hartnell about physicality and the body
- We also love The London Review of Books’s podcast miniseries, “Close Readings: Encounters with Medieval Women,” hosted by Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Medieval Madams appeared first on The American Scholar.
Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers by Emma Smith; Knopf, 352 pp., $28
Long after details of plot, character, and setting have vanished from memory, the sensual traces of a book’s paper, typeface, and binding linger. The Odyssey has been translated into English dozens of times, but a distinctive heft and aroma continue to set each edition apart. Insisting that “our reading is always conditioned by our consciousness of the book itself and its inalienable bookhood,” Emma Smith wants us to focus on the materiality of those packages of ink squiggles that inform, amuse, annoy, and inspire us. A professor at Oxford University who specializes in Shakespeare, Smith contends that “books as objects convey meanings in excess of their verbal content.” Present only as pixels, digital editions possess minimal bookhood.
Despite its subtitle, Portable Magic is not really “A History of Books,” a chronological account of the evolution of codex quiddity. Instead, after dismissing the myth that Johannes Gutenberg invented printing, it proceeds topically, with chapters packed with pungent anecdotes about gift books, bibliophiles, vandals, book burnings, fetish tomes, books bound in human skin, and other matters pertinent to the matter at—and in—hand. Entire books have been published about each topic.
Smith notes that The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scroll, was printed in the year 868 and that the oldest datable book, written in Chinese by a Korean Buddhist monk, is Jikji, printed in 1377. Gutenberg produced his famous Bible in 1455, one year after printing an anti-Turkish pamphlet and two years after the fall of Constantinople. Smith contends that Gutenberg’s Bible became a weapon in contemporary religious geopolitics. In the war against Islam and the conquest of paganism, various editions of the Holy Book, carried by missionaries, teachers, and soldiers, would become instruments of Christian colonialism. Nineteenth-century collectors fetishized Gutenberg Bibles—surviving copies of which now sell for more than $1 million each—as trophies of Western triumphalism.
Until the expansion of literacy and the mass production of books, printed matter was an impractical and expensive gift. Diamonds might be a girl’s best friend, but these days, Smith writes, books are “the defining gifts of the modern era.” Nevertheless, a contemporary survey found that books were only the fifth most common offering, after candy, money, something homemade, and makeup. Since it is, as they say, the thought that counts, many gift books are valued for the fact that they were given and remain unread. They do not transcend their reality as corporeal commodities.
In the Covid era, books have been seen conspicuously in the background of many online conversations, and Smith offers some observations about what she calls “shelfies,” the positioning of books behind a speaker in order to send a message. I’ve read Hegel and you haven’t? Buy my latest published volume? I cook delicacies from Peruvian cookbooks? Smith discusses the placement of books in François Boucher’s portraits of Madame de Pompadour to suggest that Louis XV’s mistress was a sophisticated woman with cultivated taste. They anticipate Eve Arnold’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe immersed in a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Smith interprets the image as a celebration of both voluptuousness and intellect. She notes that Monroe is holding the 1934 American edition of the novel, published after its censorship had been defeated in court—reinforcing the image of Monroe as an icon of liberation. That she is apparently reading the final pages of the book, Molly Bloom’s libidinous soliloquy, makes her seem like a champion of “women’s autonomous desires and pleasures.”
A chapter that begins with the sinking of the Titanic is a meditation on bibliophilia, the sometimes pathological desire to accumulate books, but not necessarily to read them. Although they were busy acquiring large fortunes, many of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, including J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry E. Huntington, and Henry C. Folger, also assembled vast libraries of recondite titles. The namesake of Harvard’s immense Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, too, used his great wealth to collect books, and it was following a buying spree in England that he took passage on the Titanic. Along with 1,495 others, Widener was lost at sea, and so was the 1598 copy of Francis Bacon’s Essayes that he had acquired in London. Smith notes that, however rare and expensive, most of Widener’s library was replaceable. This has not always been the case. If the Cotton Nero A.x. manuscript—the only copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—had not resurfaced in the 19th century, more than four centuries after the poem’s composition, a major gap would have been left in medieval English literature.
In her discussion of book burning and book banning, Smith quotes Heinrich Heine’s prophetic precept: “Where men burn books, / They will burn people also in the end.” The Nazis did both, but when, on May 10, 1933, about 90,000 volumes were destroyed, most of these, Smith writes, were mass-produced items by Heine, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Kafka, and others. Few irreplaceable volumes were tossed into the pyres. Moreover, censorship has been known to whet the appetite for forbidden fruit. It can often boost sales. Only days after a Tennessee school board banned Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels Maus I and Maus II, sales increased by 50 percent. And yet, attempts to remove or destroy books are, Smith argues, “almost entirely ineffectual,” since books are reproducible. Should we be circumspect, Smith seems to ask, about Heine’s prophecy? “In the end,” she writes, “books are not people, and it is morally repugnant to bracket their destruction together in the same breath.” Yet those who do not or cannot read the humanizing works of the great thinkers are surely more reckless with the lives of human beings.
Smith is more bothered by the punishment than the crime that sent Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell to prison for six months. Until caught in 1962, the two defaced books in London’s Islington Library with their own cover designs and texts and slipped them back into circulation. (They affixed a pair of cats to a copy of an Agatha Christie novel; a biography of John Betjeman saw the body of the English poet covered in surreal tattoos.) Their caper was perhaps not as harmful as the theft or trashing of rare books, but it was vandalism in the eyes of the public library’s irate patrons. While she revels in the dazzling variety of physical objects we can call books, Smith also cautions against “a curious overinvestment in the book as a sacred object.” Her own breezy book is meant not to be collected but to be read.
The post More Than Mere Words appeared first on The American Scholar.
My gorgeous, thin, dark-eyed student with the olive skin was in her usual place, against the far wall. A window behind her showed the apartment building across the street, its windows now lit. On early evenings, someone pulling aside a curtain in one of them and gazing into the lit windows of my classroom might catch me gazing out. But that day, at that moment, while I was waiting for the students in the pre-intermediate class to finish an exercise, I was puzzling over this beautiful young woman bent over her book. Something was different. She looked up and caught me contemplating her. “Did you cut your hair?” I asked as she put down her pencil.
“Yes,” she said, with her slow smile. “Thirty centimeters.”
Thirty centimeters is about 12 inches. Her hair was still longer than shoulder-length, still straight, but 30 centimeters! That’s a lot of hair to lose. How had I not known instantly what the difference was? I asked her how long her hair had been. She swiveled in her seat and held her hand against her lower back. “About here,” she said.
My next question was how she knew exactly how much they’d taken off.
She explained that 30 centimeters is the minimum length for a donation. She’d been letting her hair grow so she’d have enough to donate and enough left to not feel shorn. I nodded.
How, I still wondered, had I missed the change? Well, it turns out that though hair is a woman’s crowning glory, it is not the only glory or even the most striking. This student with her slightly gravelly voice, her slow awkward huh huh huh laugh, her perfect teeth and hawkish nose, is sporting a dozen crowns. There she sits, gleaming. The bony shoulder, the snuggly sweater, the hair that glistens, the eyes that sparkle, the shining wit. At least a dozen crowns. Samson was diminished when his hair was cut. This woman was not. What’s the loss of one crown when you possess so many?
How long, I asked, before it grows back? She figured it would take a year. Then she’d go again to donate it. Cancer patients, she believed, were the main recipients of the wigs manufactured from the donations. Starting right then, at the moment of cutting, the surplus was just that—surplus. I wondered but did not ask if a donation was easier that way—going way beyond what was the ideal length for her and cutting back rather than cutting and slowly returning to her preferred length. All that extra hair, all that weight of all those months of accumulation. Well, I thought, the difference would be that she would never be lacking. “How wonderful of you giving up your lovely long hair,” someone might comment. With her slow huh huh huh, she’d let them know that the loss was no loss to her. She had never given up what she wanted to keep. That too is part of her demeanor, to downplay her gift. She’d be different when she left the haircutter, but she’d be exactly the same—kind and beautiful, another gift to her credit, another crown.
The post Thirty Centimeters appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Seamus Heaney’s poem “Postscript.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Postscript” by Seamus Heaney appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 2021, after 13 years away, artist Claire Whitehurst moved home to Jackson, Mississippi, to work as a high school art teacher. Returning to the place of her youth also happened to inspire a return of a different sort—from ceramics, her longtime medium, to painting. The resulting works, called Mississippi Shade, are “a reexamination of the world here,” Whitehurst says. She was raised by scientists, and she credits time spent with her father, digging in the Mississippi mud and exploring remote areas of her home state and neighboring Louisiana, for her continuing creative interest in portraying natural forms. In Mississippi Shade, these forms include molten spherical shapes and concentric circles reminiscent of tree rings.
Although her work is abstract, Whitehurst sees her most recent series as a collection of landscape paintings. “I think of landscape as kind of an expression of my own alchemy or queerness,” she says. During her adolescence, Whitehurst felt pressured to mask her identity as a member of the LGBTQI+ community. “Feeling like I had to hide part of myself from myself for a really long time, I created these other spaces to exist within,” she says, “a place nearby but completely different. The swamps or the riverbanks or deep, deep woods with pine trees that go on for miles—it’s like you’re on another planet.” Whitehurst’s paintings contain elements of escapism and fantasy, coupled with ideas of concealment. “I really am fascinated by metaphorical reflections in nature that mimic the emotional places I exist in,” she says.
The post Claire Whitehurst appeared first on The American Scholar.
John Singer Sargent is often thought of as a quintessentially American painter. Born in Florence in 1856, he shuttled across the Atlantic, painting society divas and wealthy eccentrics, Venetian gondoliers and Spanish dancers, imbuing each of his canvases with a sense of life and movement beyond the frame. But in his new biography of the artist, The Grand Affair, Paul Fisher, a professor of American studies at Wellesley College, delves into the hidden half of Sargent’s life—the portraits of male models and the romantic friendships with men that he kept hidden. Fisher joins Smarty Pants to discuss what Sargent has to offer the contemporary art lover, and how our understanding of his work changed in the intervening century.
Go beyond the episode:
- Paul Fisher’s The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World
- Explore “Boston’s Apollo,” the 2020 exhibition at the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum devoted to Sargent’s late-life muse and model, Thomas McKeller
- The National Gallery of Art’s “Sargent and Spain” exhibition is sadly past, but you can explore selected works online
A selection of the art discussed in this episode:
- Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast (c. 1882–3), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
- Head of a Young Man in Profile (c. 1882–3), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
- Carnation, Lily, Lily and Rose (c. 1885), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
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Moquito Nets (1908), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
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Mountain Stream (1912–14), John Singer Sargent (The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource)
- Portrait of Nicola D'Inverno (1892), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
- Tommies Bathing (1918), John Singer Sargent (The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource)
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The Bathers (1917), John Singer Sargent (Worcester Art Museum/Bridgeman Images)
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Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (c. 1883–4), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
- Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
- Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), John Singer Sargent (Wikimedia Commons)
The post The Sensual Sargent appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Pola de Siero Theater Auditorium is the biggest of the three big boxy buildings that make up the cultural complex in the town of La Pola. They stand together in a well-spaced jumble on a rise at the end of the principal road through town. An old people’s home run by the Little Sisters Congregation occupies an entire block behind it, and facing the complex on the other side are the typical modern apartment buildings, crowding a crumbling old mansion that survives alongside them. What an assortment! Like so many similar towns that grew rapidly in the boom years after the late ’60s, this one is nothing if not a miscellany. It includes my small neighborhood of a few ancient farmsteads reconditioned and added onto over the years, the old town and its beautifully restored traditional houses from the 19th century interspersed with even older-looking buildings in a state of dilapidation, a neoclassical church from the mid-1800s, several monumental buildings that date back centuries, and the six-story apartment buildings that line most of the town’s streets. Thrown in with this hodgepodge, the Auditorium, along with the other two buildings of the cultural complex, should hardly stand out. Yet it was one of the first buildings I noticed when I came to live in this town, 10 months ago. It stood out not only for the airy, open feel of the high ground where it sits but also for its style. The buildings of the complex are made of green glass and steel and are tipped and turned at different angles. Are they hideous? Beautiful? Presumptuous? Loud? Original? My mother on her fall visit took pictures of the streets near my house to give an idea of her surroundings to friends back home. Some of these people are my friends too. What do you think of these buildings? I asked one of them in an email, referring to the cultural complex.
This person is well spoken and well informed. He doesn’t beat about the bush. Still, I didn’t expect his refreshingly direct reply. “They’re way more interesting than dreary upright rectangular ones,” he wrote. No jargon, no theories of architecture or urban planning. Instead, something I could understand. Way more interesting. That’s worth aspiring to. I opened my eyes, no longer on the lookout only for the old and beautiful and circumspect.
The Auditorium, inaugurated in 2011, was designed by the municipality’s Technical Office, headed for 42 years by the architect José Benito Díaz, a native of La Pola. This past November, Díaz retired, his whole career spent in Siero, the municipality of which La Pola is the capital. You must have a strong vocation for public service to spend your entire career heading a municipal planning office, a reporter commented in a newspaper interview from 2021. Díaz agreed. He had found his while still an architecture student, studying under a teacher with a social vision of the profession more than an artistic one.
In the same interview, when asked how many projects he had worked on over the years, he replied that he couldn’t say exactly. Some years, though, more than a hundred. In addition to the cultural complex, his notable projects in La Pola include the rehabilitation of the town hall and of the Palacio del Marqués de Santa Cruz, both in the city park; the rehabilitation of the Plaza Les Campes, in the old center of town; and the renovation of the Plaza del Paraguas and of the Plaza Cubierta, both designed by the architect and engineer Ildefonso Sanchéz del Río, renowned for his use of reinforced concrete. The Plaza Cubierta, where farmers still sell their goods on Tuesday, market day, was finished in 1931. When the building was inaugurated, people were afraid to enter because not a single column supported the vaulted ceiling.
Up the hill from the covered plaza is the Plaza del Paraguas. The structure there, an octagonal inverted umbrella from 1973 with a single pillar, was originally commissioned for the livestock market. Under Díaz, a team of specialists rehabilitated the monument and redesigned the plaza.
Both the Plaza Cubierta and the Plaza del Paraguas are included in the Asturias Cultural Heritage catalogue. An early project of Díaz’s, the rehabilitation of the town hall in 1984, won an award for architecture; the rehabilitation of the Plaza de Paraguas earned another award in 2021. According to a co-worker, his most emblematic project is the new National Livestock Market. New buildings made, old saved, needs met, awards won, 42 years. Not the whole picture, but pieces of a puzzle if you’re a newcomer wandering around, taking stock.
One chilly winter afternoon, I caught the sunset in the Auditorium glass. Down the hill, I skirted the Plaza Cubierta. Then onward, up the slope to the Plaza del Paraguas. Although Díaz did not design the structure in the Plaza del Paraguas, it is among those he is fondest of. “People are not aware of the work of art this structure is,” he explained to the same reporter. “For me, it has the standing that a Gothic or Roman cathedral can have. It is comparable to any unique building in Spain.”
So—a cathedral for cows, I thought, remembering its origin in the livestock market. It had been a dismal failure due to air currents, which tended to funnel through the animals sheltering under the eaves of the structure, making them restless. Now the umbrella dignifies a bus station. So, these days it’s people who gather here rather than livestock. Either way, animals passing through, bound for other places. A chill breeze blew past me. Homeward I turned, to my cozy abode. Not more interesting, but more welcoming than modern cathedrals, floating roofs, or topsy-turvy cantilevered buildings. Way more.
The post Taking Stock appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Pat Schneider’s poem “The Patience of Ordinary Things.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Patience of Ordinary Things” by Pat Schneider appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1967, Alice Walker—then a 23-year-old unknown—won $300 and first place in our national essay contest. The piece led to a writing fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and offers a rare glimpse at the early writing of one of America’s literary icons.
Someone said recently to an old black lady from Mississippi, whose legs had been badly mangled by local police who arrested her for “disturbing the peace,” that the civil rights movement was dead, and asked, since it was dead, what she thought about it. The old lady replied, hobbling out of his presence on her cane, that the civil rights movement was like herself, “if it’s dead, it shore ain’t ready to lay down!”
This old lady is a legendary freedom fighter in her small town in the Delta. She has been severely mistreated for insisting on her rights as an American citizen. She has been beaten for singing movement songs, placed in solitary confinement in prisons for talking about freedom, and placed on bread and water for praying aloud to God for her jailers’ deliverance. For such a woman the civil rights movement will never be over as long as her skin is black. It also will never be over for twenty million others with the same “affliction,” for whom the movement can never “lay down,” no matter how it is killed by the press and made dead and buried by the white American public. As long as one black American survives, the struggle for equality with other Americans must also survive. This is a debt we owe to those blameless hostages we leave to the future, our children.
Still, white liberals and deserting civil rights sponsors are quick to justify their disaffection from the movement by claiming that it is all over. “And since it is over,” they will ask, “would someone kindly tell me what has been gained by it?” They then list statistics supposedly showing how much more advanced segregation is now than ten years ago—in schools, housing, jobs. They point to a gain in conservative politicians during the last few years. They speak of ghetto riots and of the recent survey that shows that most policemen are admittedly too anti-Negro to do their jobs in ghetto areas fairly and effectively. They speak of every area that has been touched by the civil rights movement as somehow or other going to pieces.
They rarely talk, however, about human attitudes among Negroes that have undergone terrific changes just during the past seven to ten years (not to mention all those years when there was a movement and only the Negroes knew about it). They seldom speak of changes in personal lives because of the influence of people in the movement. They see general failure and few, if any, individual gains.
They do not understand what it is that keeps the movement from “laying down” and Negroes from reverting to their former silent second-class status. They have apparently never stopped to wonder why it is always the white man—on his radio and in his newspaper and on his television—who says that the movement is dead. If a Negro were audacious enough to make such a claim, his fellows might hanker to see him shot. The movement is dead to the white man because it no longer interests him. And it no longer interests him because he can afford to be uninterested: he does not have to live by it, with it, or for it, as Negroes must. He can take a rest from the news of beatings, killings and arrests that reach him from North and South—if his skin is white. Negroes cannot now and will never be able to take a rest from the injustices that plague them for they—not the white man—are the target.
Perhaps it is naïve to be thankful that the movement “saved” a large number of individuals and gave them something to live for, even if it did not provide them with everything they wanted. (Materially, it provided them with precious little that they wanted.) When a movement awakens people to the possibilities of life, it seems unfair to frustrate them by then denying what they had thought was offered. But what was offered? What was promised? What was it all about? What good did it do? Would it have been better, as some have suggested, to leave the Negro people as they were, unawakened, unallied with one another, unhopeful about what to expect for their children in some future world?
I do not think so. If knowledge of my condition is all the freedom I get from a “freedom movement,” it is better than unawareness, forgottenness and hopelessness, the existence that is like the existence of a beast. Man only truly lives by knowing, otherwise he simply performs, copying the daily habits of others, but conceiving nothing of his creative possibilities as a man, and accepting someone else’s superiority and his own misery.
When we are children, growing up in our parents’ care, we await the spark from the outside world. Sometimes our parents provide it—if we are lucky—sometimes it comes from another source far from home. We sit, paralyzed, surrounded by our anxiety and dread, hoping we will not have to grow up into the narrow world and ways we see about us. We are hungry for a life that turns us on; we yearn for a knowledge of living that will save us from our innocuous lives that resemble death. We look for signs in every strange event; we search for heroes in every unknown face.
It was just six years ago that I began to be alive. I had, of course, been living before—for I am now twenty-three—but I did not really know it. And I did not know it because nobody told me that I—a pensive, yearning, typical high-school senior, but Negro—existed in the minds of others as I existed in my own. Until that time my mind was locked apart from the outer contours and complexion of my body as if it and the body were strangers. The mind possessed both thought and spirit—I wanted to be an author or a scientist—which the color of the body denied. I had never seen myself and existed as a statistic exists, or as a phantom. In the white world I walked, less real to them than a shadow; and being young and well-hidden among the slums, among people who also did not exist—either in books or in films or in the government of their own lives—I waited to be called to life. And, by a miracle, I was called.
There was a commotion in our house that night in 1960. We had managed to buy our first television set. It was battered and overpriced, but my mother had gotten used to watching the afternoon soap operas at the house where she worked as maid, and nothing could satisfy her on days when she did not work but a continuation of her “stories.” So she pinched pennies and bought a set.
I remained listless throughout her “stories,” tales of pregnancy, abortion, hypocrisy, infidelity and alcoholism. All these men and women were white and lived in houses with servants, long staircases that they floated down, patios where liquor was served four times a day to “relax” them. But my mother, with her swollen feet eased out of her shoes, her heavy body relaxed in our only comfortable chair, watched each movement of the smartly coiffed women, heard each word, pounced upon each innuendo and inflection, and for the duration of these “stories” she saw herself as one of them. She placed herself in every scene she saw, with her braided hair turned blonde, her two hundred pounds compressed into a sleek size seven dress, her rough dark skin smooth and white. Her husband became dark and handsome, talented, witty, urbane, charming. And when she turned to look at my father sitting near her in his sweat shirt with his smelly feet raised on the bed to “air,” there was always a tragic look of surprise on her face. Then she would sigh and go out to the kitchen looking lost and unsure of herself. My mother, a truly great woman—who raised eight children of her own and half a dozen of the neighbors’ without a single complaint—was convinced that she did not exist compared to “them.” She subordinated her soul to theirs and became a faithful and timid supporter of the “Beautiful White People.” Once she asked me, in a moment of vicarious pride and despair, if I didn’t think that “they” were “jest naturally smarter, prettier, better.” My mother asked this; a woman who never got rid of any of her children, never cheated on my father, was never a hypocrite if she could help it, and never even tasted liquor. She could not even bring herself to blame “them” for making her believe what they wanted her to believe: that if she could not look like them, think like them, be sophisticated and corrupt-for-comfort’s-sake like them, she was a nobody. Black was not a color on my mother, it was a shield that made her invisible. The heart that beat out its life in the great shadow cast by the American white people never knew that it was really “good.”
Of course, the people who wrote the soap opera scripts always made the Negro maids in them steadfast, trusty and wise in a home-remedial sort of way; but my mother, a maid for nearly forty years, never once identified herself with the scarcely glimpsed black servant’s face beneath the ruffled cap. Like everyone else, in her daydreams at least, she thought she was free.
Six years ago, after half-heartedly watching my mother’s soap operas and wondering whether there wasn’t something more to be asked of life, the civil rights movement came into my life. Like a good omen for the future, the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the first black face I saw on our new television screen. And, as in a fairy tale, my soul was stirred by the meaning for me of his mission—at the time he was being rather ignominiously dumped into a police van for having led a protest march in Alabama—and I fell in love with the sober and determined face of the movement. The singing of “We Shall Overcome”—that song betrayed by nonbelievers in it—rang for the first time in my ears. The influence that my mother’s soap operas might have had on me became impossible. The life of Dr. King, seeming bigger and more miraculous than the man himself, because of all he had done and suffered, offered a pattern of strength and sincerity I felt I could trust. He had suffered much because of his simple belief in nonviolence, love and brotherhood. Perhaps the majority of men could not be reached through these beliefs, but because Dr. King kept trying to reach them in spite of danger to himself and his family, I saw in him the hero for whom I had waited so long.
What Dr. King promised was not a ranch-style house and an acre of manicured lawn for every black man, but jail and finally freedom. He did not promise two cars for every family, but the courage one day for all families everywhere to walk without shame and unafraid on their own feet. He did not say that one day it will be us chasing perspective buyers out of our prosperous well-kept neighborhoods, or in other ways exhibiting our snobbery and ignorance as all other ethnic groups before us have done; what he said was that we had a right to live anywhere in this country we chose, and a right to a meaningful well-paying job to provide us with the upkeep of our homes. He did not say we had to become carbon copies of the white American middle-class; but he did say we had the right to become whatever we wanted to become.
Because of the movement, because of an awakened faith in the newness and imagination of the human spirit, because of “black and white together”—for the first time in our history in some human relationship on and off TV—because of the beatings, the arrests, the hell of battle during the past years, I have fought harder for my life and for a chance to be myself, to be something more than a shadow or a number, than I have ever done before in my life. Before there had seemed to be no real reason for struggling beyond the effort for daily bread. Now there was a chance at that other that Jesus meant when He said we could not live by bread alone.
I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing. It has been like being born again, literally. Just “knowing” has meant everything to me. Knowing has pushed me out into the world, into college, into places, into people.
Part of what existence means to me is knowing the difference between what I am now and what I was then. It is being capable of looking after myself intellectually as well as financially. It is being able to tell when I am being wronged and by whom. It means being awake to protect myself and the ones I love. It means being a part of the world community, and being alert to which part it is that I have joined, and knowing how to change to another part if that part does not suit me. To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes. This, at least, the movement has given me.
The hippies and other nihilists would have me believe that it is all the same whether the people in Mississippi have a movement behind them or not. Once they have their rights, they say, they will run all over themselves trying to be just like everybody else. They will be well-fed, complacent about things of the spirit, emotionless, and without that marvelous humanity and “soul” that the movement has seen them practice time and time again. What has the movement done, they ask, with the few people it has supposedly helped? Got them white-collar jobs, moved them into standardized ranch houses in white neighborhoods, given them intellectual accents to go with their nondescript gray flannel suits? “What are these people now?” they ask. And then they answer themselves, “Nothings!”
I would find this reasoning—which I have heard many, many times, from hippies and nonhippies alike—amusing, if I did not also consider it serious. For I think it is a delusion, a copout, an excuse to disassociate themselves from a world in which they feel too little has been changed or gained. The real question, however, it appears to me, is not whether poor people will adopt the middle-class mentality once they are well-fed, rather, it is whether they will ever be well-fed enough to be able to choose whatever mentality they think will suit them. The lack of a movement did not keep my mother from wishing herself bourgeois in her daydreams.
There is widespread starvation in Mississippi. In my own state of Georgia there are more hungry families than Lester Maddox would like to admit—or even see fed. I went to school with children who ate red dirt. The movement has prodded and pushed some liberal senators into pressuring the government for food so that the hungry may eat. Food stamps that were two dollars and out of the reach of many families not long ago have been reduced to fifty cents. The price is still out of the reach of some families, and the government, it seems to a lot of people, could spare enough free food to feed its own people. It angers people in the movement that it does not; they point to the billions in wheat we send free each year to countries abroad. Their government’s slowness while people are hungry, its unwillingness to believe that there are Americans starving, its stingy cutting of the price of food stamps, make many civil rights workers throw up their hands in disgust. But they do not give up. They do not withdraw into the world of psychedelia. They apply what pressure they can to make the government give away food to hungry people. They do not plan so far ahead in their disillusionment with society that they can see these starving families buying identical ranch-style houses and sending their snobbish children to Bryn Mawr and Yale. They take first things first and try to get them fed.
They do not consider it their business, in any case, to say what kind of life the people they help must lead. How one lives is, after all, one of the rights left to the individual—when and if he has opportunity to choose. It is not the prerogative of the middle-class to determine what is worthy of aspiration.
There is also every possibility that the middle-class people of tomorrow will turn out ever so much better than those of today. I even know some middle-class people of today who are not all bad. Often, thank God, what monkey sees, monkey avoids doing at all costs. So it may be, concerning what is deepest in him, with the Negro.
I think there are so few Negro hippies today because middle-class Negroes, although well-fed, are not careless. They are required by the treacherous world they live in to be clearly aware of whoever or whatever might be trying to do them in. They are middle-class in money and position, but they cannot afford to be middle-class in complacency. They distrust the hippie movement because they know that it can do nothing for Negroes as a group but “love” them, which is what all paternalists claim to do. And since the only way Negroes can survive (which they cannot do, unfortunately, on love alone) is with the support of the group, they are wisely wary and stay away.
A white writer tried recently to explain that the reason for the relatively few Negro hippies is that Negroes have built up a “super-cool” that cracks under LSD and makes them have a “bad trip.” What this writer doesn’t guess at is that Negroes are needing drugs less than ever these days for any kind of trip. While the hippies are “tripping,” Negroes are going after power, which is so much more important to their survival and their children’s survival than LSD and pot.
Everyone would be surprised if the Israelis ignored the Arabs and took up “tripping” and pot smoking. In this country we are the Israelis. Everybody who can do so would like to forget this, of course. But for us to forget it for a minute would be fatal. “We Shall Overcome” is just a song to most Americans, but we must do it. Or die.
What good was the civil rights movement? If it had just given this country Dr. King, a leader of conscience for once in our lifetime, it would have been enough. If it had just taken black eyes off white television stories, it would have been enough. If it had fed one starving child, it would have been enough.
If the civil rights movement is “dead,” and if it gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever. It gave some of us bread, some of us shelter, some of us knowledge and pride, all of us comfort. It gave us our children, our husbands, our brothers, our fathers, as men reborn and with a purpose for living. It broke the pattern of black servitude in this country. It shattered the phony “promise” of white soap operas that sucked away so many pitiful lives. It gave us history and men far greater than Presidents. It gave us heroes, selfless men of courage and strength, for our little boys to follow. It gave us hope for tomorrow. It called us to life.
Because we live, it can never die.
The post The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It? appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 2018, the novelist and poet Perhat Tursun disappeared into a Uyghur detention center somewhere in Xinjiang, China, where he is now serving a 16-year prison sentence for an unspecified offense. Between one and three million Uyghurs, including a number of academics, writers, and cultural figures, have been arrested by the Chinese government on similarly spurious or entirely opaque grounds. Tursun is the author of, among other works, The Backstreets, which never found a publisher in his homeland despite the success of his previous books. This extraordinary novel follows an unnamed narrator, who has left his rural village for a temporary office job in Urumqi, as he wanders through the night, the city smog, and his memories. The book was recently published in English, translated by the anthropologist Darren Byler and an anonymous co-translator, who was last seen in 2017 and is also presumed to be in a Chinese detention center. Byler, an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University and the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, joins us to talk about Tursun and his mesmerizing work.
Go beyond the episode:
- Perhat Tursun’s The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang, translated by Darren Byler and anonymous
- Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City
- Read more about Tursun’s poem “Elegy,” translated by Joshua Freeman
- The poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of Tursun’s closest friends, wrote about the crisis in his homeland for The Atlantic: “One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps”
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Lost in Smog appeared first on The American Scholar.
Have you heard the one about the two English professors who walk into a bar while lamenting their professional demise thanks to ChatGPT? They order a couple of beers, and the bartender says, “Why so glum, my friends? ChatGPT is just a tool. Don’t let it define you.”
No? Well, neither had I—until I asked ChatGPT to fill in the blank after “and the bartender says.” For the heck of it, I also asked the program to generate the answer as a koan. It’s hardly a knee-slapper, granted, but no worse than my own lame effort: “What’ll it be, gents? / Wait, no need to tell me / I’ll ask ChatGPT.”
The joke, it seemed, was on me.
But no one in the academy is laughing.
ChatGPT, released in November, is a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that, according to its creators, “interacts in a conversational way” and can “admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” The implications of this, particularly for the education field, are huge. So much so that several contributors to The Atlantic foresee in this latest spawn of Silicon Valley, the future of teaching. The reason is simply that ChatGPT works all too well.
In one essay, high school teacher (and former professor) Daniel Herman declares that with the advent of ChatGPT, his life “and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators is about to drastically change.” In another, Stephen Marche, also a former professor, offers a timeline for the coming apocalypse: “Two years for students to figure out the tech, three more years for professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five more years for university administrators to figure out what, if anything, to do about it.”
Marche and Herman believe that they did the right thing by getting out of the humanities profession. But is the situation so dire for those of us who are still in it?
Not necessarily, according to Zeynep Tufekci. In her New York Times column, she observes that this is hardly the first time that the world has been upended by seismic changes in the transmission of knowledge. More than two millennia ago, Plato fretted over the shift from oral to written culture. Referring to what she calls Plato’s “Dialogues,” Tufekci cites the myth of Thamus, the Egyptian god who warned that writing, shunting aside memory, would breed “forgetfulness.” More ominously Tufekci continues, Plato believed this would allow anyone—even fools and knaves—to pretend they are someone “omniscient and wise.” But rather than, like Plato, lament these “supplanted skills,” as Plato did, Tufekci concludes, we should look for ways to create with these new technologies.
As I stare as my laptop, which rests on a table littered with student exams and papers, a coffee mug, my iPhone, and scattered books, including an old copy of the Phaedrus, I wonder if either of these camps has got it right. The subtitle to Marche’s essay is: “The College Essay is Dead.” Perhaps because Marche no longer teaches, he does not realize that the obit is a bit late: the college essay died years ago. During my three decades of teaching at a public university, I have encountered a dwindling number of students who can write a declarative sentence, much less a clear thesis. Perhaps more important, they have no desire to learn how.
The essay is dead, yes, but it is not yet buried. Instead, it has become the lifeless star of “Weekend with Bernie in the Groves of Academe,” a corpse that students and teachers have an equal interest in pretending is still alive. It’s a mug’s game in which a student sends me an electronic file that, when open, spills out a jumble of words that the sender propounds to be a finished paper. A week later, I send back the file, which, when open, spills out a cascade of red markings underscoring that the student’s words amounted to, well, a jumble. In determining grades, I try to find the elusive mean between the papers that my students wrote and the ones they thought they had written.
To paraphrase Dr. Who, memory is a wibbly-wobbly thing. But I do not think I am being overly nostalgic when I remember how students wrote when I first began teaching in the 1980s. Bad writers abounded back then, too. The difference was that writing—or, for that matter, reading—was a familiar, not a foreign, activity. Writing was as much a part of my students’ world as it was of mine—so essential a part that they most often took up my standing offer to comment on drafts.
Today, that offer still stands, but it stands mostly alone. The current generation of students has moved on from writing. Literally. Most students fail to see the relevance of writing in a world—their world—that is largely post-literate. They are at home in media not yet born when I began teaching, media that privilege images and sounds over written text. This does not spell the end of the world, but it does spell “tbh, dwbi.”
“Don’t worry ’bout it” is part of the appeal to Tufekci’s position. Just as we adapted to earlier leaps in communications technology, she writes, we can do so with artificial intelligence and language models. By flipping the classroom—the practice where students listen to recorded lectures at home and draft their essays in class—teachers can remain relevant.
Lol. Given the sheer irrelevance of writing in their world, one defined by mumblecore and memes, texting and TikTok, students will mostly flip the finger at such solutions.
Tufecki perhaps unwittingly points to a different approach. When she refers to the “Dialogues” of Plato, she means a specific dialogue, the Phaedrus. Yet the passage she quotes, the myth of Thamus, comes at the dialogue’s end and cannot be understood without knowing the rest of the text. Socrates and his sole interlocutor, Phaedrus, begin by agreeing to discuss what kind of speech—scripted or spontaneous—is truer to knowledge of ourselves and our world. Walking outside the city, with its streets channeling traffic, and into the countryside, where one is free to roam, the two interlocutors take turns trading claims and counterclaims. Just as their steps wander, so too do their words.
The spontaneous nature of this stroll mirrors Plato’s fundamental point about language: the superiority of an unscripted conversation to written words, which Plato calls “images.” As the interlocutors, who chose to join each other in this philosophical activity, pursue this dialectical back and forth, they stumble across—though do not always welcome—new perspectives on old matters. These shifts, Plato believed, cannot happen when one reads a written text. How could it be otherwise? Unlike a teacher or student, a book can no more protect itself against misinterpretation, the Platonic scholar Thomas Szlezak has observed, than it can choose its readers.
There is an irony too obvious for Tufekci to note: Plato writes to warn us against writing. Compounding the irony is that Plato writes so well. Szlezak might well be right when he asserts that Plato “never thought of entrusting his entire philosophy to writing.” But although he and countless other commentators debate such matters, Plato’s written words remain wordless. No matter how brilliantly Plato re-creates the artlessness of dialogue, his written words remain only that, re-creations—pale images of a free-flowing conversation between two people who, in the moment, were able to react to each other’s comments and further explain themselves.
What if ChatGPT spells not the end of the academy, but instead a revival—a return to its beginnings? The late Pierre Hadot, whose work revolutionized our understanding of the ancient Greek and Hellenistic schools of philosophy, contended that their goals were wholly unlike our own. Students enrolled in these schools, including Plato’s Academy, to be formed, not simply informed, by their teachings. Rather than studying in order to exchange their degrees for jobs, these students studied to change their lives.
According to Hadot, the Academy was not the ancient equivalent of a moot court, a place where students were taught effective debating techniques. They were taught, instead, to engage in dialogues, or dialectics. Ultimately, such dialogues—which cannot be scripted—are an exercise in humility, even a kind of wisdom, for they teach students (and teachers) “to put themselves in one another’s place and thereby transcend their own point of view.” In short, they entail “spiritual exercises which demanded that the interlocutors undergo an askesis, or self-transformation.”
Of course, the crisis facing the academy, apparently heralded by the invention of language models, will not be saved by trying to scale up this ancient approach. But while we debate the place of writing at the academy, it might help to recall that writing did not have much of a place at all in the original academies. Like most everything else, ChatGPT might prove to be little more than a footnote to Plato.
The post Words, Words, Words appeared first on The American Scholar.
The little girl leaned back on the floor pillow where she was seated. “Soy la más lista,” she announced, I’m the smartest, which is surely a common claim, either made outright as this four-year-old had, or hinted at by someone pointing out accomplishments. So far, subtlety is not this little girl’s strong suit, and the statement came out of the blue, no lead-up, but with utter naturalness.
My son was visiting me for the afternoon, and he asked the little girl, who had dropped in with her grandfather, “Ah sí? De quién?” The smartest of whom?
“De los dos,” was her answer, of you two, and with her forefinger and middle finger in a vee, she indicated my son and me where we were sitting on the sofa, facing her. What struck me was that in her calculation she explicitly excluded her grandfather, sitting beside her on a low stool and looking up footraces on my tablet. Why? Because she would lose in a contest with him? Because she wished to honor him by not questioning his status as the maximum in everything? Because it never occurred to her to compete with him in anything? He is even higher in her estimation than her parents because he takes her to the park for hours, buys her sweets, and can fix any broken toy. He even lets her hold the tools while he does.
Now she backed up her claim by offering proof. “I know where all the countries are,” she said in Spanish.
“Ah?” replied my son. “Where is Spain?”
She tilted back her head, stuck out her bottom lip, and said she wasn’t going to say.
My son laughed pleasantly. “What good is it being so smart and knowing so much if you won’t tell us?”
She haughtily turned away to fiddle with a toy at her elbow. She knows when to step away from a contest. I thought that was pretty good for four years old.
Soon her grandfather set aside the tablet. He stood up, looked at his granddaughter, and said it was time to go. This man once told me that you should start a child off on a short rope because you can always lengthen it, but if a child is used to a long rope, you’ll have trouble shortening it. How short was the little girl’s rope? Not so short to make her stand up when he did. Instead, that day, like most, his suggestion was met with an automatic rejection. She never wanted to go. She did not whine but imperiously negated his suggestion. “No.”
“Come on. It’s time.” Her grandfather held out his hand to her.
“I want a cookie,” she said, looking up from her pillow.
“I’ve got one in the car,” he said, to which she countered that she knew I had in a cookie in the kitchen.
“I’ve got two in the car,” he said. She looked interested. “Do you know what else there is?” he asked.
“What?”
“Ah! We’ll have to go look.”
She seemed torn, but before she could decide what to do, he asked if she wanted to leave by the front door or through the French window, and she switched her attention to that question. The door, she said. When her grandfather turned that way, she played her trump: no, the window, she decreed, and led the way.
They left, but I never thought that she’d fallen for the same two-cookie trick he plays every visit. I think that they have simply worked out a routine with both of them getting a part to play. In Spanish, a common refrain is that it’s not important to know the answer but to have the number of the person who does. She has that number, her grandfather’s, as birthright. That number will resolve her problems in innumerable situations. I’m pretty sure she’d insist that he is the smartest. El más listo. She has as well, though, her grandfather’s number in the English sense of the expression: she knows who’s holding the rope and how far that rope will stretch. Hard to say who is the sharper of the two.
I stood in the lane and watched them leave. “Let’s race!” she said. They lined up. Who’s going to give the signal, her grandfather asked. “Me!” was the answer. Then they were off, the two of them laughing. The person they both wanted to win, did.
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Amanda Holmes reads William Meredith’s poem “The Illiterate.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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A reported 82 million households watched the first season of the Netflix show Bridgerton—writer and producer Shonda Rhimes’s romance set in early-19th-century Britain—but until recently, mine was not one of them. Not that I didn’t want to see it. I’d heard a great deal about this period drama, with its prominent Black and women characters. I also knew that those bold casting decisions had led to its massive success, especially with people of color. And yet, just four minutes and 25 seconds into the first episode, I found myself wanting to gag.
Bridgerton unquestionably looks good. The surfaces—from the lavish furniture to the kaleidoscopic costumes to the made-up faces of all the beautiful people—are impeccable. But watching it was like overdosing on cotton candy. In particular, I couldn’t get past the actions of one character: Queen Charlotte, played by the British-Guyanese actress Golda Rosheuvel. The Queen, solely responsible for state affairs because of the mental condition of her husband, George III, is obsessed with gossip, equates appearances with character, and runs her court with a caricatured boredom that is both infantile and banal. She’s supposed to be a dignified commander but comes off as a petty mean girl, wielding her considerable power and influence only in the arenas of manipulating, meddling, and matchmaking. Her court reminded me of every seventh-grade playground I’ve ever been on, and I should know—I used to teach seventh grade. I was so bothered by this characterization that it took four attempts before I was able to get past those first few minutes.
Am I being too hard on the show? I wondered. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone the guilty pleasure of binge-watching television that doesn’t overtly challenge the viewer and is primarily meant to entertain. But Bridgerton’s wild popularity revealed that I was nearly alone in my critique. So was the show really as soulless and insipid as I’d thought, or was something else going on?
Bridgerton is fiction, of course, inhabiting a kind of fantasy alternative universe. The first season follows Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), the oldest daughter of the powerful Bridgerton family, as she makes her debut into the competitive marriage market of Regency London. Enter the exquisitely gorgeous and rebellious Simon, Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), who is the obvious catch of the season and a committed bachelor. Together, Daphne and Simon stage a fake relationship to make her more desirable to other potential suitors and provide him an escape from the overbearing mothers trying to hitch their daughters to him. (The women on this show are sickeningly preoccupied with men, even when they are being recalcitrant; their inherent shallowness always wins out.) It is both unavoidable and predictable that the two will fall for each other. The second season takes a similarly predictable path. The characters are archetypes—they represent; they do not live and breathe. And the dialogue works only as it could in that made-up world, often becoming cringeworthy.
As I thought more deeply about the show and its immense popularity, I started to wonder whether something in my past had conditioned me to respond the way I had. I am now a cultural anthropologist, but when I was an undergrad at Columbia, I studied film. I remembered a young white teaching assistant who told me, “You’re never going to make it here, because you can’t write.” I had graduated at the top of my class in high school, and now my papers, covered with horrible red markings, were earning Ds. Was I really not as smart as I had thought? My high school looked a lot like the cast of the television show Abbott Elementary—a smattering of white teachers and only one white student. But some of my biggest fans were those white teachers, and my writing teachers (all white) had regularly told me how much they looked forward to reading my papers. I had been led to believe that I was the smartest student in school.
But at Columbia, I started to wonder whether my high school teachers had lowered their expectations because I was Black. Or had I been ranked on a very low curve against my peers? Was that teaching assistant correct? Was it true that I really couldn’t write?
I was curious about the writers my Columbia professors were quoting in class—all of them white cinema theorists—and I went to the library and looked up their work. What I found were highbrow, academic, elitist texts, with long, elaborate, jargon-filled sentences. I read those works over and over until I understood their style. Then I mimicked that style, and I started getting As on my papers.
What I didn’t realize until a decade later is that copying that style actually facilitated a 10-year block that made writing excruciating. But it may also have led to the formation of an unconscious bias: my equating “excellence” with a certain kind of elitist white discourse. As I ruminated on that experience and my subsequent responses to the work of Tyler Perry, Tracy Oliver, and others—films and shows popular among Black audiences—I wondered whether I was automatically being harder on shows produced by Black filmmakers. Had I unknowingly swapped the definition of white with the definition of good?
In a controversial 2019 interview with The New York Times, actress, producer, and screenwriter Lena Waithe argued that, in fact, Black critics are not hard enough on Black artists because of an obligation to support that work publicly. An episode of #blackAF, a mockumentary sitcom also on Netflix, revisited Waithe’s comments the following year. In that episode, Kenya Barris—he is the show’s creator and plays a fictionalized version of himself—slams a hit film by a fictional, up-and-coming, African-American artist, spending the entire episode trying to understand its popularity among Black audiences. Making a cameo in this episode is Tyler Perry (playing himself), who says that he unapologetically produces Black stories for Black people—he knows his viewers, and they know him, and he’s talking to them and them alone.
People of color frequently find themselves clashing, within themselves and with each other, as they toggle back and forth across racial lines in an attempt to integrate into society at large—without losing their identities to knockoff, assimilated versions of themselves. Since my undergrad experience, I have attempted to reconcile the two clashing forces inside me: my Ivy League university experience and the culture I grew up in. I would like to think that I can easily have a foot in either world, that I am able to form my own opinions. But as an anthropologist, I also know how hard it is to know where our opinions come from, how they are constructed, and how to express them inside the social structures that are available to us. When I was studying film at Columbia, I never imagined I’d live to see a moment of cultural reconstruction like this one—when there are so many films and television shows written and produced by Black creators that I would feel comfortable enough to say publicly that I think one of them is awful.
To be clear, I have high regard for the talent of Shonda Rhimes, a powerhouse who dumped network TV for a nine-figure deal with Netflix. She is one of my heroes, along with Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay, and Lena Waithe. But Bridgerton also happens to be predictably ordinary and ironically colorless. It’s possible I’ve been whitewashed in the sense that I’m still channeling those biases I acquired at Columbia. Or maybe the show really is trash. Perhaps a little of both. That’s the nature of opinions: they are highly subjective and yet culturally formed. Which part of me hates Bridgerton? I may never know.
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The table was mostly cleared, and we had ordered dessert. Three flans, two coffees, and a strawberry ice cream cone for the six of us—my mother and me, my friend, his daughter, her husband, and their daughter, a child of four. It was about five p.m. Activity in the restaurant had slowed, and most diners were finishing up, though a few had recently ordered and were still waiting for their food. The weekend lunch hour in Spain is long, and you can expect to be shown a table at a restaurant if you arrive anywhere from two o’clock until as late as four or even after. If there is a table, that is.
The waiter seemed a bit dazed from the rush that was now tapering off. He brought the order not all together on a tray but piecemeal, one item at a time as he went past our table to attend to customers at the outside tables. When he set a flan in front of my friend, my friend passed it on to me. I passed it to my mother, who asked, “What about you?” I answered that mine would arrive soon. But the waiter did not bring mine, nor the one for my friend. My mother finished her dessert, my friend’s daughter and her husband drank their coffees, and the little girl ate half of her strawberry ice cream cone. In Spain, you do not wait for the waiter to see you’re ready and bring the bill, but instead ask for it or get up to pay at the register, as my friend got up to do. I no longer believed that the waiter would appear with my dessert. He had heard the order, I was sure, so he must have just forgotten. Out on the street, my friend’s daughter checked the bill to make sure we hadn’t been charged for the dessert we hadn’t gotten. We had not. My friend said who cared about that—we had ordered the dessert and should have been served. But he was not the kind of person to settle the matter by reminding the waiter of his error.
Once, when my friend and I were overcharged in a restaurant, I had wanted to point out the error. Not he. “Do you think they don’t know?” he’d asked me, and in truth it never occurred to me they might be deliberately overcharging us, meaning that the error in the bill was in fact an act of cheating. But my friend was sure they did know. He would rather be overcharged than give them the satisfaction of feigning dismay, as if we were bobo enough to believe it. Tonto is another word with the same meaning—gullible, foolish. He didn’t want to play that game. His solution was simply to never go back. That was his last word.
But it wasn’t always. Moscancia is a type of sausage typical in Asturias that is eaten in a stew with garbanzos and flavored with a ham bone, and one day many years ago at the local market on a Tuesday, my friend stopped at a stand where these sausages were dangling behind the counter, next to other goods. When he ordered the sausage, however, the merchant told him he sold the sausage with the ham bone, not separately. He didn’t want the bone, my friend explained, just the sausage, but the merchant wouldn’t oblige. “All right,” my friend said, and left.
He didn’t leave the market though but circled through it until he found the policeman patrolling the market, as there typically is on market day. He pointed out the stand and explained the situation. Why he didn’t want the bone was no one’s business, so I was not surprised that my friend invented a reason. “My dog,” he told the policeman, “eats only moscancia.”
“Follow me,” said the officer, and off they went to the stand, where the merchant said he’d be glad to sell the sausage with the bone, whereupon the officer, quoting from the civil code, informed the merchant that he was obliged to sell as much as was wanted of any items on display to a customer who waited his turn and had money to pay. He could not refuse. If an item was sold only with another item, the two had to be packaged together.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I bought the sausage,” my friend said.
“Why didn’t you just leave? Not give the man your business?”
He smiled. “The sausage was for my mother. Do you think I could go home to my mother empty-handed?” he asked. “What do you think I am, bobo?”
The post Bobo appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Lasse Söderberg’s poem “The Fig Tree.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Fig Tree” by Lasse Söderberg appeared first on The American Scholar.
“Hickory Wind” is a 1960s Gram Parsons song that I know from my childhood, when I listened to Joan Baez’s rendition. Bob Buchanan, a former bandmate of Parsons’s, contributed to the writing, but how much, exactly, is debated, as is the claim of authorship by Sylvia Sammons, a blind folk singer, made nearly 40 years after the song was first recorded. I came across these inconclusive discussions on the Internet, where I was looking for an explanation of what a hickory wind is. I did not find an answer, only guesses. One is that it’s a breeze carrying the smell of burning hickory wood, which is prized for smoking meats. Another is that it’s a wind with the scent of hickory flowers. Commenters rejected both of these possibilities. Might it be, I wondered, a warm wind that ripens the hickory nuts? Such a warm fall wind in Asturias is called a chestnut wind, as my neighbor told me one day in late October when the sun was shining and the temperature was mild, and the branches on the trees across the lane were waving in the gusty day. They call this a chestnut wind, he said, because the warm air opens the husks and the gusts knock the nuts, still in their husks, from their branches.
“Ah,” I said, adding that I’d seen scores of people out with bags gathering chestnuts along the river trail.
In the hills too, he said. He didn’t go himself, though, not being fond of chestnuts.
“No?”
He cocked his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the flavor, he admitted, so perhaps it was all the chestnuts he’d eaten as a child and youth. Chestnuts, he reminded me, were once a staple in Asturias.
It’s true. Even more appreciated than hazelnuts, which ripen in late August and September, or walnuts, gathered in September and October, are chestnuts. In late fall, forest floors as well as country lanes are covered with the bright green of newly fallen erizos, as the prickly husks are called for their resemblance to sea urchins or hedgehogs, both also called erizos. You can’t handle the husks without gloves, but a practiced press and drag with a shoe will free the three nuts clustered within, which you can pick up. After a warm wind, a chestnut wind, people by the dozens gather the nuts along trails and lanes. At stands in local markets, you can buy chestnuts by the kilo, and street vendors roast them on the street and sell them hot, wrapped up in newspaper. Schoolchildren celebrate the fall harvest, magüestu, with roasted chestnuts and apple cider. Hazelnuts are a crunchy treat either raw or toasted, walnuts are eaten straight or ground up to make cakes, but chestnuts—so many ways to eat them. During the late fall, a week is unofficially designated as chestnut week, and savory chestnut stews with sausage are served in many bars and restaurants. Chestnuts are also candied or canned in syrup. Once peeled, chestnuts will soften and become sweet, as the carbohydrates turn to sugar. They are a delicious snack like this. Spread to dry, they become as hard as rocks and keep from one year to the next. Suck on one like hard candy, and it will last an hour. Soak them in water and then chew them like gum. Or, fresh or dried, boil them up to mash with milk and sugar for a nutritious kind of porridge, hot and sweet and filling, good for the deepest winter evening, when you might think back as Parsons did on a time before troubles were real.
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Amanda Holmes reads Emily Dickinson’s poem “I cannot live with You.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “I cannot live with You” by Emily Dickinson appeared first on The American Scholar.
At the beginning of 2020, Argentine painter Patricia Iglesias moved from New York City to Los Angeles, where, during the pandemic lockdown, she and her husband went on frequent neighborhood walks, explored nearby hiking trails, and generally spent more time outside than she ever had before. Iglesias began paying more attention to the flora and the fauna of her adopted home, and she imagined scenarios in which nature flourished unencumbered by human presence. “And then I started seeing all this news of the animals in different parts of the world claiming back their own space,” she says. “So I was seeing monkeys in the streets of India and dolphins in Venice, and I was thinking of this sense of who is the animal, right? I felt like maybe we were the animals in quarantine.”
Iglesias’s two most recent series, Animals in Quarantine and Caminatas, are explorations of that idea. Iglesias rarely plans her compositions, preferring instead to let her insatiable need for color drive the strong, loose brushstrokes of her paintings. “I have an idea of a color—that’s how I start the paintings, but after that, there’s no planning,” she says. “The way that I work, I feel it’s very sculptural. I take paint away and then I add it in.” Her greatest reward, she says, has been hearing from viewers of her work. When she posted her initial animal paintings to Instagram in late 2020, “people were really responding, like, ‘We need this joy and this really speaks to us right now,’” she says.
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For all the glühwein and good cheer, mid-December also marks the darkest part of the year, when families around the world gather to watch their favorite holiday ghost story: A Christmas Carol. Easily the most famous spooky Yuletide movie, it is by no means the only one: Black Christmas was arguably the first American slasher movie; the mischievous creatures from Gremlins squealed their way into many hearts in 1984; and the Alpine Krampus has more credits to his name than Santa has reindeer. For generations, the heart of winter—not Halloween—was when we told unsettling stories around the fire, whether they featured the ghosts of our own pasts or Gryla the Icelandic ogre and her evil Yule cat. This week on Smarty Pants, writer and director Kier-La Janisse offers a primer on how these stories have found their way onto the screen, from annual BBC television specials to big-budget Hollywood bloodbaths.
Go beyond the episode:
- Kier-La Janisse’s Yuletide Terror, co-edited with Paul Corupe, is out of print, but her House of Psychotic Women, an “autobiographical topography of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films” was just released in an expanded edition
- Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a thorough history of folk horror, which makes its way to the holidays with movies like Krampus (2015) and Rare Exports (2010), and wintry tales like Marketa Lazarová (1967), The White Reindeer (1952), Hagazussa (2017), and November (2017)
- You can watch the newest episode of the BBC’s anthology series A Ghost Story for Christmas on Britbox. Discussed in this episode: The Stalls of Barchester (1971) and A Warning to the Curious (1972), both based on M. R. James stories of the same name, and Stigma (1977)
- New Santa slashers out this year: Violent Night and Christmas Bloody Christmas
- Forget Halloween: the original tropes of the slasher movie can be found in 1974’s Black Christmas (the original “The call is coming from inside the house!” movie), remade in 2019 sans Olivia Hussey
- Among TV specials, Janisse recommends the 1965 episode of The Avengers called “Too Many Christmas Trees” and the 1986 episode of Tales from the Darkside called “Seasons of Belief”
- Watch Elves (1989), not to be confused with Elf (2003) or the 2021 Netflix series Elves
- At Paste, Jim Vorel investigates the first real slasher film (which did not feature Santa)
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
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When children arrive, nothing from our old lives is sacred anymore. Not sleep and not sex, not furniture arrangements or retirement plans or long-settled agreements about who washes dishes and who folds laundry.
And then, as our children grow into themselves, the disruption can feel weirdly personal. Bookworms find themselves raising budding athletes. Sworn night owls have a brood of early risers. Hog farmers land an indignant vegan. In the calm of night, we envision who our children will become and who we will become on their behalf, but we plan and God laughs. Sometimes, God has a field day.
Seven years ago, I was an expert. I had a PhD in cognitive psychology, a postdoc in child development, and several scholarly publications under my belt. I studied how people of all ages learn and process information, particularly language. For three years, I wrote about what I studied in a weekly column for this magazine’s website. Eventually, I moved full-time into science communication, taking a job at Northwestern University as editor-in-chief of a magazine that translates academic research into articles for a general audience.
When I became pregnant with my first child, I recognized that I had a lot to learn about being a parent—namely, everything. But what I did know was the science of child development: the big debates among researchers, the hallmark studies and shiny new findings that shaped current thinking. I assumed that when questions of my own cropped up, I’d know where to turn for answers. I even envisioned leaning into my identity as a scientist-turned-writer-turned-new-mom, peppering future work with my daughter’s earliest words and charming misunderstandings as she inevitably and adorably did all the things that babies do, each at the developmentally appropriate time.
Then, at a routine checkup, our pediatrician handed my six-month-old a small block. It slipped through her fingers as if it had no weight at all. As the doctor explained, and as a host of specialists and evaluations would confirm, almost no area of her development was “on track.” She appeared to be nowhere near the track. If every other six-month-old was on a direct train to Topeka, we were driving around the suburbs of Indianapolis, unsure how long we’d be out or whether we’d ever get home again.
The videos had a trippy, surrealist quality. “Happy. Happy. I feel happy. I feel happy. I am happy. Haaaa-pppppy.” My daughter was intrigued.I knew, going into that appointment, that my daughter was a late bloomer. A very late bloomer. But I also knew that development is notoriously variable, and that most kids do eventually get to Topeka, on their own route and timetable. Children are astonishingly innovative and resilient learners. The literature is full of studies that demonstrate how well equipped they are at shockingly young ages to help someone solve a problem (14 months!), intuit that others can hold false beliefs (13 months!), assign meanings to nouns like banana (six to nine months!), or recognize familiar speech patterns (while still in the womb!). Read enough studies and you’ll get the impression that babies are like tabletop wind-up toys, born ready to unspool into walking, talking, Red Rover–playing kindergartners. To raise them right, all we really have to do is keep them from falling off the table.
So the doctors’ and specialists’ concerns, written in stark paragraphs and accompanied by percentiles so low that they appeared mathematically dubious, knocked me flat. If babies accumulate milestones as easily as they do months, why did my daughter need six kinds of therapies? I frantically calculated how I’d get both of us back on track: if she worked hard enough, and if I worked hard enough, we’d be on familiar ground soon enough.
Desperate, I found myself acquiring objects my previous self would have dismissed as gratuitous, even shameless in their appeals to parental anxiety: gadgets that blinked and beeped (to hold her attention), a pegboard with stackable dowels (for fine motor skills), a trampoline (for gross motor skills and balance), fish oil (for brain development), an electric toothbrush (to “wake up” the mouth), and a set of secondhand language-learning flashcards for the extremely discounted price of $100. For several bewildering months, I even subscribed to Gemiini, a provider of online videos that teach language skills. The videos featured short clips of different speakers saying the same thing over and over, sometimes at a normal rate, sometimes slowed down, sometimes embedded in a sentence, sometimes with the camera zoomed in tight on the lips. They had a trippy, surrealist quality. “Happy. Happy. I feel happy. I feel happy. I am happy. Haaaa-pppppy.” My daughter was intrigued.
But the company’s marketing didn’t just tap into parental anxiety; it seemed singularly dedicated to stoking it into something all-consuming. “Regret will tear you apart as a parent,” read a post on the company’s blog:
How will you feel if you knew you could have made a difference in your child’s life, but you quit after a few months, when a breakthrough could have been two years away? It could be the difference of a life where others make decisions for your child, or a life of independence. We don’t want thousands of parents, years from now, going to bed every night with regret wondering “what might have been” if they had persevered with Gemiini.
Had I really become a person who would read that manipulative heap of a post and still type in my credit card number?
It’s not that I was a bad expert, I realized. It’s not that I couldn’t interpret the studies I was reading. It’s not even that all those studies were wrong—as I confirmed after the birth of my second child, who could’ve hit her developmental milestones under the tutelage of a pack of friendly dogs. What I was, though, was the wrong expert for the moment. In nearly every study I could think of, my daughter would have been tossed from analysis as an outlier. There were limits to my knowledge, limits that didn’t seem important until I slammed into them headfirst. Suddenly they were all that mattered. The realization was painful and slightly shocking, like learning that someone you’ve long admired actually dislikes you.
Friends and family would comment on how fortunate I was to have the background I did, and how much my daughter was sure to benefit from my expertise. I began to believe the opposite: that I was uniquely ill prepared to be the mother she needed, and that my supposed expertise could just go to hell.
I am not the first, of course, to experience an uncanny collision between my parental and professional identities.
Shashank Sirsi, an associate professor in the department of bioengineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, researches neuroblastoma. This cancer’s name often makes people think of the brain, though it begins most commonly in the adrenal gland before spreading to other areas of the body. “Technically, it can at times present in the brain,” he says. “But it’s very rare.”
For many years, Sirsi only barely identified as a cancer researcher. He is an engineer: someone who builds things. His lab develops novel ways of targeting drugs directly to neuroblastoma tumor sites. If drugs are more precisely targeted, patients will need fewer of them, which in turn means fewer side effects. A common chemotherapy drug like doxorubicin “is very effective at destroying cancer cells,” Sirsi says, but it “also destroys the heart.” Side effects can be particularly devastating for children—those who survive cancer have more years left to live than adults do and experience more prolonged suffering as a result. This is why Sirsi chose to focus his work on this younger population.
Then in 2020, his wife, a pediatrician, noticed a lump on the abdomen of the couple’s three-month-old son. It was neuroblastoma.
The collision of Sirsi’s lives as a researcher and as a father was cause for a strange sort of professional reunion. “Neuroblastoma is a very rare disease,” he says. “So everybody in the field knows everybody.” A collaborator on a recent grant helped his son get admitted to the hospital; eventually, his son switched over to the care of a former student of another collaborator’s colleague. The web of connections became a “really big source of comfort” in the midst of a scary time—as were the upbeat predictions about how his son would fare in treatment. These predictions were spot on: after just two cycles of chemotherapy, his son’s tumors shrank by 75 percent, and his current prognosis is excellent.
But experiencing neuroblastoma in this new, devastatingly personal sense felt “like more than coincidence,” Sirsi says. He felt embarrassed, even guilty, that he’d never before considered how onerous it is for families to coordinate the care they need from the various specialists they are expected to frequent. Or even that there are so many specialists to see.
This insight has seeped into Sirsi’s latest work. Plotting out a convoluted treatment plan on a chalkboard is one thing; expecting families to follow it is another. A current project uses augmented reality to help doctors better pinpoint metastatic disease in patients who are being treated at the same time with focused ultrasound—essentially saving patients and their families a step. “I can see how some parents or patients would just throw up their hands and give up if they have to keep on coming back to a clinic every day,” Sirsi says. He is now trying to simplify that process by designing a device, for instance, that would allow this new procedure to occur simultaneously with other forms of treatment.
When I ask Sirsi whether the collision of his identities ever felt like too much, he is adamant that it did not. “If anything, it motivated me to sit down with my lab and say, ‘This is the direction we’re going to go,’ ” he says. “This is the universe kicking me in the ass and saying, ‘Get off the chalkboard and start helping patients.’ ” These days, the content of his conference slides hasn’t changed much, but the framing is different: he’s no longer presenting on the mechanics of targeted drug delivery. He’s talking about therapy for children with neuroblastoma.
The odds that a story like Sirsi’s would happen seem minuscule. Yet for all its bizarre particulars, similar tales abound. There’s A. Thomas McLellan, an addiction scholar who loses a son to a drug overdose and then develops a consumer guide for assessing adolescent treatment facilities. There’s the developmental biologist Soo-Kyung Lee, who studies a rare gene family and gives birth to a daughter with a related gene mutation, a mutation that she now researches full time. There’s the rehabilitation engineer James Sulzer, whose three-year-old experiences a traumatic brain injury after being struck by a tree branch and who finds his child on the receiving end of the kinds of therapies and technological interventions he has spent his career developing.
Some are tales of gentle comeuppance, like that of the screen-time expert Anya Kamenetz, whose advice to parents about monitoring “the nine signs of tech overuse” in kids undergoes a pandemic-induced tone shift after Covid-19 wipes out her usual childcare arrangement. But most collisions promise something deeper: rare insights of the sort that can be gleaned only by traveling a winding path first as an expert, then as someone stripped of all credentials—unmoored and terrified—and then yet again, precariously empowered, scanning the horizon for a better route.
Natalia (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is a pediatrician at a large American hospital, which means she sees more children with severe medical complexities than most pediatricians do. Perhaps that’s why she spent so much of her pregnancy worried about giving birth prematurely. Her daughter arrived full term, but almost immediately, she had some concerns. “I held her in the nursery and remember feeling like she was too stiff,” she tells me now. At six weeks, her daughter seemed stronger in one side of her body than another. At three months, she was still missing a protective reflex—the mechanism by which parts of our bodies recoil from potentially harmful stimuli. She wasn’t gaining weight.
As Natalia’s concerns mounted, part of her—the high-achieving parent who wanted to feel in control and have a plan—was inclined to immediately demand every available diagnostic test. But ultimately, she turned the diagnostic process over to trusted colleagues. When the results from a genetic test came back, she finally had her answer: a point mutation on one of the many genes that help neurons communicate. Variations to this gene are associated with a host of developmental and medical challenges, including intellectual disability and hypotonia, a condition in which a patient’s muscle tone is diminished; in severe forms, it can affect sucking and swallowing. Her daughter wouldn’t suffer a physically painful childhood, but the life of independence Natalia had envisioned for her would never come to fruition. “I was so relieved and so sad at the same time,” she says.
When I ask how parenting her daughter, now six, has changed her as a pediatrician, Natalia has a very different take from Sirsi. For the most part, things hadn’t changed at all: she had initially gone into pediatrics “to be a fierce advocate for patients,” and in this respect, her experience as a mother simply affirmed her approach, especially in regard to her bedside manner.
Occasionally, she will mention her daughter to patients and their families. To a parent who dismisses a state-supported early intervention program as a government handout, for instance, she might say that her own daughter had benefited greatly from that very program. Or to the parents who hesitate to vaccinate a child with a genetic disorder, for fear the vaccine will interact in unforeseen ways with their child’s unique DNA, she will explain that her daughter also has a genetic disorder, and she chose to vaccinate. “But you have to be super careful about it, because it’s not about you,” she says. Only a few long-time patient families, now something closer to friends, know more of her daughter’s story.
If the way Natalia practices medicine hasn’t changed dramatically, the collision’s toll on her well-being has been more complicated. A few years ago, when she decided to move to a new neighborhood so that her daughter could receive superior special education services, she considered a house near her work. But as a pediatrician for high-risk kids—kids in pain, kids who do occasionally die—she couldn’t bear the thought of recognizing those very patients in her daughter’s classroom. She moved elsewhere.
And though her medical training is an asset when it comes to navigating her daughter’s disability, she has also felt the weight of parents’ expectations. Against her wishes, she was introduced to a parent who’d founded an advocacy group devoted to the rare syndrome that both of their children shared. “I remember her saying to me, ‘We’ve been waiting. We’ve been waiting every day for you to call us,’ ” Natalia says. “I told her I am not this savior that’s going to come in and fix this for our kids.”
The very idea of a fix rubs Natalia the wrong way. Many parents in the advocacy group are pushing for a cure—something she views as both medically impractical and a waste of resources better directed to patients with preventable diseases, deadly diseases, and diseases for which everyday pain could be reduced. Natalia’s daughter, unlike a lot of her patients, is happy. And though society may not quite see it this way, “in the grand scheme of how people are doing,” Natalia says, “she’s actually okay.”
Today, Natalia declines to see children with her daughter’s syndrome, which isn’t always easy. Once, when scrolling through a syndrome-related Facebook group, she saw her name on the feed. One parent was looking for a new pediatrician, and another mentioned Natalia as a possibility. So she messaged the woman privately: stop by for a glass of wine sometime, she urged. Just don’t come to me as a patient.
She eventually referred the woman to another pediatrician. But recently, that colleague went on leave. “And guess who shows up on my schedule?” Natalia sighs. “It’s just so hard. I know she’s just trying to get by like the rest of us.”
Jonathan Adler, a professor of psychology at Olin College, has never studied collision stories like Sirsi’s, or Natalia’s, or mine. To his knowledge, nobody has. But he has spent a lot of time investigating how identity develops over time, how we craft an evolving story about ourselves so as to ascribe meaning to our lives. The more coherent our story is—that is, the more our own journey makes sense to us—the more secure we feel in our identities.
For the most part, we are pretty good at tweaking and expanding our sense of self to accommodate the messiness of life. Getting divorced, being fired: these can be life-altering events, but they don’t necessarily have to be identity altering. “People can spin those into whatever kind of story they need to support who they are,” Adler says.
But some events aren’t integrated so easily: dramatic changes in physical function from a severe chronic illness, for instance, or an acquired disability. “They offer this discrete and inescapable moment of disintegration,” he says. “When something happens to your body, you can’t just ‘story’ it away. It’s an unavoidable, inescapable constraint on identity where you have to figure out who you are.” He suspects that at times, parenting collisions can offer similarly stark moments of disintegration. Imagine, he says: “Your entire life in one role. And then something happens that flips that role in a very particular way.”
It isn’t uncommon for parenting and professional lives to intersect. A physician may serve as a medical adviser for her child’s school district—something we’ve seen plenty of during the pandemic—or a social scientist may pivot to criminal justice reform after his child’s tangle with the legal system. Indeed, an early transformative personal experience with a medical or social issue can be what leads someone to become a doctor or a social scientist in the first place. But that is a choice, generally speaking, a conscious decision meant to bridge the gap between one’s personal passions and professional aspirations.
Collisions can be more disruptive, as if the fabric of our being has caught on a nail and no amount of wiggling will get it unstuck.
In his book Far From the Tree, psychologist and journalist Andrew Solomon distinguishes between the “vertical identities” that children inherit from their parents, such as ethnicity or language, and the “horizontal identities”—the “recessive genes, random mutations, prenatal influences, or values and preferences”—that they do not. The distinction is helpful when considering how parents, experts or otherwise, interpret a child’s diagnosis. None of us wants to see our child ostracized or in pain, or brushing shoulders with death, but some parents, by virtue of their own diagnostic histories, are better prepared to make sense of the situation and to imagine what a good life can look like. Parents who share some disabilities with their children—deafness, dwarfism—may not view them as disabilities at all, but as meaningful identities, tied to a rich and affirming culture. Perhaps this is one reason why Moyna Talcer’s parenting collision unfolded so differently from mine.
New motherhood is always a drubbing of feelings and sensations, but for Talcer, who lives in England, the intensity of those sensations was startling. It began during pregnancy, when she developed a severe form of morning sickness. Sometimes she would vomit as many as 25 times a day. The smell of her own skin got to her. “I want to be clear—I did wash it!” she says. “But I was so sensitive that any smell that I perceived was just overwhelming.”
When she gave birth to her son, the nausea stopped, but not the feeling that her senses were in overdrive. The constant touching. The constant need for vigilance lest something, anything, happen. And the screaming. Her son had colic, and the sound of his cries regularly put her on the edge of panic. Knowing that these visceral experiences were outside the norm, she tested herself for a variety of conditions, like postpartum depression. But nothing fit.
A diagnosis, when it came, was a relief: autism. Talcer had felt since childhood that she wasn’t quite like everyone else—that she was standing on the outside of social settings, looking in. Over the years, she’d been diagnosed with dyslexia and then dyspraxia, a neurological disorder that affects coordination skills. She’d spent the previous 15 years as an occupational therapist for the National Health Service, where she worked regularly with autistic children and teenagers. Her clients and their families often remarked that she seemed to “get” them at an intuitive level. The knowledge that she, too, was autistic helped her own story make more sense.
She was, however, nervous about disclosing her diagnosis to others. Talcer was particularly concerned about what her fellow health care professionals might think. Would they judge her? Dismiss her? The issue came to a head when she decided to conduct a research project on the sensory experiences of autistic mothers—her effort to bolster a depressingly anemic literature. After conferring with a few trusted researchers and professionals who’d similarly “outed” themselves as autistic, she decided to mention her own diagnosis in the published study.
To her delight, the disclosure has been a boon for her professional career, connecting her to other autistic scholars and opening new avenues of research. She has found it energizing to join this growing body of passionate researchers putting their mark on our understanding of autism. “If you’ve got neurotypical people talking about autistic needs and research, you need to have the autistic perspective,” says Talcer. “I don’t see how you can have a conversation without autistic people involved.” She points to the work of autistic scholar Damian Milton, who has proposed the “double-empathy problem.” For Milton, communication difficulties attributed to autism are better understood as challenges facing both autistic and nonautistic people in their interactions with one another. Nonautistic researchers, steeped in a view that sees autism solely as a set of flaws rather than differences, tend to assign responsibility for these mishaps solely to the autistic person.
Talcer was particularly concerned about what her fellow health care professionals might think. Would they judge her? Dismiss her?A few years later, when her son was also diagnosed as autistic, Talcer took it in stride. She felt confident that she could support him in any way he needed—not that it has been easy juggling dual roles as occupational therapist and parent for her son. “You never know if you’ve got the balance right,” she says. “But I think if he’s happy and engaged, and he’s able to function in a way that doesn’t cause him anxiety and stress, I would say I’m probably doing it right.” She provides him with “visual schedules” (sequences of pictures that allow him to see how his day will proceed), and she hands him a stick of chewing gum to provide sensory input as he transitions between home and school—the kinds of things she’d do for her clients.
Talcer’s unlikely parenting saga has changed her as a therapist, too—particularly in how she relates to her clients’ parents. For instance, as she has learned more about the genetic heritability of autism, she’s become aware that, statistically, a few of those parents are likely autistic themselves. So she tries to do things that will feel safe and welcoming to them, too, like offering them choices for how they’d prefer to communicate with her.
As her theoretical understanding of how to parent a child with additional needs gave way to a very real one, she gained a “deeper compassion, a deeper respect” for the families she works with. “Being a mum,” she says, “you learn a whole different way of being.”
For years after my daughter was born, I abandoned all pretense of having anything useful or cogent to say. My days of being an expert were over. Instead, I took copious notes, dull and hopelessly inane notes about non-milestones—data for the strange study that had become my life.
9/12—has learned you have to move your hands to shift the puzzle pieces in
10/13—seems like she is saying “ball” every now and then, but not consistently and we may just be making things up
2/26—was about 90% accurate putting her wooden blocks in one container and her plastic blocks in another
3/14—will try to mimic the different roars of dinosaurs in her book
6/17—still working on jumping, but knows what to do in theory
12/1—understands more than she can show us
I retreated into the scientific literature where I was most at home, sinking deeper into the reference sections that link researchers’ collective knowledge. But despite a wealth of studies, insight was elusive. This is partly because my daughter’s diagnoses, of which she had accumulated many, lacked the clarity and specificity of a genetic difference, and also because research on developmental trajectories, or even the effectiveness of different therapies, is conflicting, incomplete, and often hopelessly outdated.
But mostly because what I wanted was impossible: a scientific study with 30,000 participants—with each participant a version of my daughter, living out a different life in a different possible world. In which of these 30,000 worlds is my daughter happiest and most fulfilled? And what kinds of everyday decisions could we as parents make to help construct that winning world?
Slowly I came to understand that I was seeking solutions to the wrong problem. I watched as my daughter struggled to develop the language and cognitive and motor skills that other children acquire effortlessly. And I watched when, after hundreds of hours of therapy, she correctly pronounced octopus and put together her first puzzle. I watched as the child who couldn’t grasp a block gripped the chains of a swing and taught herself to pump. I gradually released the idea that her life had a trajectory that could be predicted, or that anything but trial and error and a bit more trial and error would help me help her. No study was going to tell me more about my silly, gentle daughter than I could see every morning at the breakfast table, and no therapy was going to get her back on track, because there is no track.
Parenting my daughter is an act of reconciling the nearly irreconcilable. People with intellectual disabilities live in far more poverty, experience more physical and sexual assault, and die more than a decade earlier than other people. I know that this is not okay, and also that my daughter is whole and good. I am aware that the world must change, and I am aware that I am just one imperfect mother, an unraveled expert who occasionally makes absurd, fear-based impulse buys. I brag about my daughter’s accomplishments to relatives on WhatsApp, recognizing also that those accomplishments are completely beside the point. Somehow, knowing all these things feels a lot like knowing nothing at all.
So I turn to a different academic literature. I read about “intellectual humility” to become aware of my own limits. I read about “the quiet ego” to temper my desire to be right and certain. People with quiet egos can see more clearly where others are coming from, engage nondefensively with their arguments, and interpret world-shaking events as opportunities for growth. It’s a personality trait, meaning some people naturally have quieter egos than others, and these folks tend to handle life’s stressors better than most. But at least some research suggests that it can be cultivated by regularly reflecting on its importance.
And I collect collision stories, though this was never a conscious decision. It was more that, once I noticed them, I began to see them everywhere, the way a botanist can spot a pitcher plant from across a bog. They appealed to me not because I expected to be inspired by them or to apply their lessons directly to my life. The takeaways are often as targeted as Sirsi’s drug delivery techniques, the insights both peculiar and bespoke.
I collect collision stories, I suppose, to place my own alongside many others. I am building a library of the unlikely, a place where the strangest twists of fate find their even stranger brethren. I’m arranging an unruly meeting of mastery and doubt, of access to the very best that science can offer and the obligation perhaps to make those offerings better. I am creating space for God to laugh and for others to laugh along with him, haltingly or determinedly or with abandon.
The post Anatomy of a Collision appeared first on The American Scholar.
Four days until Christmas, and Spain is ready to celebrate. But the country has been ready since mid-October, it seems, when all the typical Christmas candies appeared in the stores just days after the día de la hispanidad, on October 12. I was flabbergasted. So early and so much! Turrones of every kind and flavor, candied fruit, polverones and mantecados, candied almonds called almendras garrapiñadas, delicious roscos de vino, and more. Surely it wasn’t so blatant last year—the need to be on to the next eating and spending spree? It seemed very nervy of business interests to push forward so relentlessly toward the year’s biggest extravaganza. And the Christmas season in Spain, with family dinners, workplace dinners, reunions of friends and clubs and classes, is extravagant indeed. The festivities last through January 6, which is Reyes, the traditional day of gift-giving. In the States, long ago, I was dismayed to hear Christmas carols the day after Thanksgiving. But worse is Spain, without Thanksgiving to lock Christmas into December, and by mid-November, stores were advertising huge selections of toys, tools, snuggly pjs for the whole family, and perfume, as if these things weren’t available all year round. It was still mild fall weather, but snowmen and red-cheeked Santas decorated displays of all manner of useful and useless goods. It was not putting me in the Christmas spirit at all. It was too much too soon.
What was missing was a white space of ordinary life between the holidays, a space such as you have in stories or articles separating one part from another, a time when nothing was in the offing. A gap. Instead, with día del Pilar followed by Halloween followed by todos los santos, then el magüestu followed by the twin holidays in early December of día de la Constitución and the fiesta de la Inmaculada Concepción, half a dozen celebrations were piled into one season, crowned by the medley of eating and drinking and spending known collectively as las navidades.
So yes, a sort of frame to keep occasions separate. To contain them and to set them off. What was wanted for Christmas was not ornate, however, but plain, even humdrum, in contrast to the holiday. No, no gilded frame for Christmas, which is all glitter, and both overstimulating and tiring, without a clear beginning and with an ending that, coming so late in Spain, after Reyes, is more fizzle than closing.
For everything a time. But when, exactly, is the season? This year, my first Christmas in my new house, is a year for establishing a sensible tradition. What do I want, of course, but also when?
A wreath for the door, though the door, within a patio, is visible only to the neighbors. Lights all around the windows onto the street. A very modest Christmas tree. And for the first time in my adult life, the stockings hanging from a real mantelpiece. They will be the stockings I made for my children years ago on the model of the ones my grandmother had sewn in red and green felt for my older brother and me, another added later for my younger brother. Mine are not nearly as nice as my grandmother’s. I made them under some stress one Christmas when I decided my children needed decorative stockings, not just oversized socks. How strange to think of the haphazard attempts to lead an adult life. To do things right. Some things I insisted on, some I let go. Some I believed I’d have time in the future to focus on. Some I thought I’d make a stab at, and if the results were unsatisfactory, I’d try again in the future, and do them differently, why not? Why not constantly revise? “Next year,” I must have told myself countless times. Well, I am not saying it this year about Christmas. This is the first Christmas of the rest of my life. Whatever happens will start the tradition. I have a new, pretty wreath on the door, the same three stockings as always, hung by the chimney, lights around the window, the Christmas cards from past years arrayed on the mantel, a small, shining tree, and candies in a glass candy dish. Peace. And just to give the holiday a start and finish, I even decided to buy for the first time ever an advent calendar, this one with a candy behind each flap, and advance day by day, sweet by sweet, to the goal. The last window is marked 24. Perhaps it will be apparent on the following day that the glitter of Christmas is the frame, and the very small and almost imperceptible treasure at the center is the Christmas spirit, even if it is just remembering to tell yourself to breathe deeply, now, and for the future, before you make ready for another new day.
The post A Gilded Frame appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara appeared first on The American Scholar.
I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise: A Life of Bunny Mellon by Mac Griswold; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pp., $40
It began with a tiny patch of land—a sandbox, actually—measuring just one square foot. Rachel Lambert, known as “Bunny,” was a small child when she received this gift from her adored maternal grandfather during a summer visit to his New Hampshire home. For her, the sandbox became a studio of sorts that she used to decode the natural world, creating one fantasy garden after another.
Born in 1910, the daughter of Rachel and Gerald Barnes Lambert, founder of Lambert Pharmaceuticals, Bunny was raised on Albemarle, an 18-acre estate in Princeton, New Jersey, with grounds designed by the exalted firm of Olmsted Brothers. Schooled by family gardeners, she grew up to become, as architect I. M. Pei once called her, “the greatest landscape gardener and architect in this country.” Her exquisite gardens, often incorporating her signature roses, boxwoods, and allées of apple trees, rose up from Antigua to Manhattan. Of these, perhaps the most widely admired was her work, at Jackie Kennedy’s request, on the 1961 restoration of the White House Rose Garden, anchored by four flowering magnolias, with striking diamond-patterned sections in each bed. (It was radically altered, amid controversy, during a 2020 renovation.)
The story of Bunny’s rise to horticultural prominence is the subject of writer and landscape historian Mac Griswold’s new biography, I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise. As a classmate of Bunny’s daughter, Erika, Griswold grew up in close proximity to her friend’s family. At one point, Bunny even asked for Griswold’s help in writing her memoir, which forms part of the foundation of this book.
As a teenager, Bunny attended Foxcroft, the Virginia boarding school for girls, where some of her wealthy classmates stabled their own horses on the school grounds. Few of these young women went to college; most, including Bunny, were groomed to make “good” marriages—that is, ones that were financially advantageous. “More money means more power,” Griswold points out. Bunny married Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr. in 1932. Like the other old-line WASPs who figure in this book, the young Lloyd had “a breeziness that comes from an utter confidence in what wealth can—and should—provide.” The couple settled briefly in Philadelphia before moving to an 18th-century mansion in Virginia called Carter Hall, which she helped to restore. By 1940, through this and other projects, Bunny had become widely recognized as a superbly gifted gardener and fine horticulturist with an uncanny ability to shape a landscape.
In Virginia, the couple befriended the equestrian, huntsman, and art collector Paul Mellon and his wife, Mary. Paul had been deeply traumatized by the cruelty he experienced as a boy at the hands of his father, Andrew Mellon, the eminent industrialist, former Treasury secretary, and founder of the National Gallery of Art. Griswold movingly describes the struggle of this young man of unimaginable wealth—at one point, the fifth-richest person in the world—to come to terms with his complicated background, a process that included trips to Zurich for psychoanalysis with Carl Jung.
During World War II, both Paul and Bunny’s husband were posted to London with the OSS, at a time when that city “lay defenseless against the buzz bombs screaming in.” The war also had a powerful effect on those who stayed at home. It “rocked women,” Griswold writes, giving them “space and time to consider their lives … and what they could be and do.” In this way, “almost surreptitiously,” Bunny became “that rare thing for a woman of her class and station—a working woman.”
After Mary Mellon died of an asthma attack in 1946, when she was in her early 40s, Paul turned toward Bunny, then still married to Stacy Lloyd. His courtship was relentless. “He’s drowning me in diamonds!” she told a friend. In 1948, she divorced Stacy and married Paul. The couple eventually moved to the vast estate of Oak Spring, a veritable French village in Upperville, Virginia, with a weathered, stone-walled main house, numerous outbuildings, and gloriously conceived gardens and outdoor spaces, each one unfolding into the next.
Within five years, the Mellons’ marriage stalled. According to Bunny, their problems were such that, by 1957, another of Paul’s psychoanalysts, this one trained by Freud, instructed him to stop having sexual relations with his wife. “You’ll have all the money you want,” Paul reassured her. “You will be Mrs. Paul Mellon.” At which point, Bunny claimed, she set out “to find a girl” for her husband. The one she steered him toward—Dorcas Hardin, charismatic owner of an uber-chic Georgetown boutique—was his mistress for the next 40 years.
We can’t really know if Bunny really did handpick her husband’s lover: Griswold gently warns the reader of “startling variations” in her subject’s versions of key events. What’s inescapably true is that the Mellons’ marriage—which the couple came to describe as a “partnership”—continued in significant ways, long after their sexual relationship ended. For the rest of their lives, Bunny and Paul orbited among their many residences, sometimes living in the same one at the same time. They were in constant touch, exchanging affectionate notes. (Mellon invariably signed his with a hand-drawn heart.)
A crucial part of the Mellons’ lasting relationship involved art. They were avid collectors. Bunny opened Paul’s eyes to impressionism; he fell hard for these painters who, as he put it, “applied pigment in fragmented dabs.” They ultimately donated more than 1,000 impressionist and postimpressionist works to the National Gallery, along with much of the funding for the I. M. Pei–designed East Wing that housed the collection.
After Bunny’s arrangement with Paul was established, she went on to flower artistically. Partly schooled by John Fowler, of the London interior design firm of Colefax & Fowler, she cast a spell on all seven of her residences—including ones in Nantucket, Washington, D.C., and New York City. In this phase, too, she championed and collaborated with a long line of gay visual artists. These relationships took the form of “violent crushes”; each of them, for her, was a kind of romance. And one, the gifted French jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger—”the black cat,” she called him—is rumored to have been her lover in the early 1950s. He escorted her to Paris, where she attended the haute couture collections for the first time. Once “perilously close to dowdy,” Griswold writes, Bunny was transformed. She became a style icon, seemingly overnight, thanks to her new, romance-tinged friendships with two famed fashion designers, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy. The latter brought Bunny into Paris’s haut monde. She purchased an apartment on the Avenue Foch and basked in the attention of a chic new crowd she called her “French family.” The courtly Givenchy steered Bunny toward one of her most celebrated projects—her impeccable restoration of the 1678 Potager de Roi, Louis XIV’s kitchen garden at Versailles, which had long fallen into desuetude.
Griswold is a deft and charming writer; the first chapters of her book move at a rapid clip. But the pace slows in later chapters after she deviates from a chronological recounting of Bunny’s life, focusing on particular people or projects instead. Some of these harken back to events covered earlier in the narrative. The results can be confusing. Although Jacqueline Kennedy, for example—Bunny’s “best friend and soulmate”—is mentioned glancingly early on, we don’t learn much about their long and deeply affectionate friendship for another 200 pages.
Yet there’s so much here to applaud. Griswold’s thoughtful portrait brings new depth to her complex subject. While Bunny could be warm and, at times, touchingly kind, she also had a ruthless, imperious side. She was notorious for dropping even longtime friends, seemingly at random and without regret. Servants whose work was less than perfect were quickly shown the door. “Bunny was in some ways grotesque,” Griswold writes, rather startlingly, at one point. “I had feared her as much as I loved and admired her.” Readers of this deeply absorbing biography will likely share her ambivalence.
The post Have Trowel, Will Travel appeared first on The American Scholar.
The line between land and water can take on so many moods: romance, danger, playfulness, despair; calm, or the storm that follows. In her first collection of nonfiction, A Line in the World, the Danish writer Dorthe Nors spends a year traversing the North Sea Coast, from where it meets the Baltic at Skagen, across the King River, and down to the nebulous Wadden Sea and Amsterdam. She describes her own life on the water, as well as the lives of others from the near and distant past. The Jutish ship that got stranded on the Vedersø dunes, spilling its cargo of tulips to bloom the next spring and leaving its captain to wed a local girl. The now-extinct matriarchy of Sønderho on the Island of Fanø, where women ran the village while waiting for their husbands to return from sea—or not. The empty space where Skarre Cliff used to jut into the water, and her father’s expression as he watched it collapse on television in 1978. In these 14 essays, Nors invites us into an inner landscape that can be as changeable as the borderlands she describes.
Go beyond the episode:
- Dorthe Nors’s A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
- Our introduction to her work was the darkly comic novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017
- Watch the traditional dance of Sønderho described in the book—and then learn the steps
- Tirpitz, the largest of the Nazi bunkers abandoned on the North Sea Coast has been turned into a museum
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post By Land and By Sea appeared first on The American Scholar.
My favorite student wasn’t yet my favorite when she identified a song that I happened to mention in class. It was from decades earlier, but she recognized it as soon as I played the opening notes on my tablet. “Michael Martin Murphey!” she exclaimed, naming the singer, not the most familiar name in country music. That was more than I had known. I looked at her with new interest. We became friends just before the pandemic and lasted through Spain’s shutdown. When schools opened up again, she enrolled for another year of class, advancing slowly, before giving up on English. Or on me. “Life goes on,” as they say in the songs, and I haven’t seen my friend in months. With confinement over, mask wearing mostly behind us, and isolation no longer a policy of the Spanish healthcare system, more activities fill people’s days. More worries, too. We’re all busy. We all have looming responsibilities. Children grow up. Aging parents get older. We get older. Yes, life goes on.
But it also hovers, and circles. In a new class this fall, the discussion revolved around music, and when a student said he played the banjo, I asked if he liked country. He smiled apologetically and said not too much. Well, that’s not surprising—so many people don’t. But I can’t understand it. Doesn’t everyone like a story? My brother inherited all the musical ability in my family, as I like to say to deflect criticism for any deficiencies I show, but I recognize a good first line when I hear one. In a New Yorker article I was reading one dark and chilly early morning, Amanda Petrusich, writing about John Mellencamp and so-called heartland rock, says that the genre’s best songs start like short stories. As examples she gives Lucinda Williams’s “The Night’s Too Long,” which begins, “Sylvia was workin’ as a waitress in Beaumont / She said, ‘I’m movin’ away, I’m gonna get what I want.’” Then Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” with the opening line, “Well, I was born in a small town / And I live in a small town / Probably die in a small town.” I sat back, stroked the orange cat on my lap, and considered.
Are these good songs? I don’t know either song, but even if I did, I wouldn’t presume to answer. But do they unfold like short stories?
Well, there are stories and there are stories. I would say these two don’t start as fast or cut as deep as the best. For that, look at Dallas Frazier’s song “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp,” which I know from Kenny Rogers’s rendition. It begins, and within seconds you know what troubles happened and to whom. “Corn was dry, the weeds were high when Daddy took to drinkin’ / Then him and Lucy Walker, they took up and run away.” The lost crop, despair, and the human response: drink and abandonment of the family. Not even two dozen words. It’s a miracle. Why am I doing anything other than trying to make miracles too? Why am I teaching English?
The cat did not have the answer, but stretched and resettled.
Why does the carpenter use the saw and chisel? Why does the smithy use the anvil and the hammer? Because tools are necessary. English is a tool, like French or German. Or Spanish. My students know a language already. They have their tool. Why avail oneself of more than one set? Why study English in the seaside city of Gijón in the third decade of the third millennium? Not to write poetry. Not to understand it, either, though English song lyrics are as common on the airwaves as lyrics in Spanish. My adult students almost invariably say their motive is to get ahead: a better job, or just get a job at all. Sometimes the reason is to keep the job they have. Well, as Hickory Holler’s tramp knew, you have to make a living, you need to put food on the table. When the crop fails and the provider runs off, you shed a tear and then you do what you have to: you go on. Isn’t that so?
The cat purrs on my lap. How easy for him to be happy! Maybe I haven’t heard from my favorite student because she’s back to traveling, which was her reason for studying English. To facilitate arrangements wherever she goes and to communicate with the people she encounters. To read the signs and the people, one of the loftier reasons I’ve heard. Or, who knows, she might be busy writing poetry. She’s got the tools—we all do—and as a lover of country, she surely appreciates a good story when she hears one. It’s just a hop from there to making one. Right?
The cat sleeps on.
The post Corn Was Dry appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Robert Desnos’s poem “J’ai tant rêvé de toi,” translated from the French by Paul Auster as “I Have So Often Dreamed of You.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “I Have So Often Dreamed of You” by Robert Desnos appeared first on The American Scholar.
When Meghann Riepenhoff was an undergraduate art student at the University of Georgia, she struggled to overcome a creative block in her darkroom photography class. Then, a classmate suggested that she try creating a photographic image of something she had never seen before. “That really stuck with me,” Riepenhoff says. “Like, does that exist? Can I do that? What does that mean to make pictures I haven’t seen before? That question was bobbing around in my head like a challenge: to find a vision that was uniquely mine.” For the past decade, Riephenhoff—who has worked in sculpture and drawing in addition to photography—has evolved her practice to mainly focus on cyanotypes, a type of chemical photographic printing process that yields work characterized by blue hues.
Riepenhoff’s most recent solo exhibition, Ice, at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, references nature—both its impermanence and the entropic forces at play there. “I think about this moment we’re in called the Anthropocene,” she says. “It used to be that water was the primary carver and shaper of the planetary surface, and we have actually shifted this balance. I’m looking at: How does water now move across this surface that is totally, dramatically changed by suburbs and highways and other interventions we have within the landscape?” In developing her cyanotypes, Riepenhoff uses elements such as sand or ice, resulting in a kind of multimedia print with an added ecological resonance. The images are at once familiar and slightly unfinished, suggesting a yet-to-be-discovered resolution. She says that she thinks about them as a microcosm invoking the macrocosm of the universe—the way ice crystals can resemble pictures we’ve seen of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. “I hope the work elicits an immersive experience,” she says. “The processes of light and that magical moment of something showing up in the development tray really lured me into a long-lasting love of the field.”
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Michelle Gallen grew up in Northern Ireland’s County Tyrone amid the period of sectarian bloodshed known as the Troubles. By the time she left home for university in the 1990s, her town was neatly segregated, with Protestants sticking to their neighborhoods and Catholics to theirs. Gallen’s new novel, Factory Girls, takes place in in a town much like this during the summer of 1994. While waiting for her final exam results, Maeve Murray lands a job at a shirt factory working alongside her best friends, Aoife O’Neill and Caroline Jackson—and a gaggle of Protestants. It’s the first time in their lives that the girls have spent time with “the other side” (let alone working under the thumb of a British boss). As tensions rise outside the factory, the temperature rises within it, too, and what started as a summer job ends up teaching—and costing—Maeve more than she imagined.
Go beyond the episode:
- Michelle Gallen’s Factory Girls
- Listen to Nicola Coughlan read Gallen’s debut novel Big Girl, Small Town
- We do love Derry Girls, too
- In 1993, Dolores O’Riordan wrote the most heartbreaking song about the Troubles: “Zombie,” which the Cranberries released in 1994 after the first ceasefire
- There are dozens of books about the Troubles—we recommend starting with Richard English’s Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA
Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.
Subscribe: iTunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Acast
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman.
The post Girl Troubles appeared first on The American Scholar.
A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré edited by Tim Cornwell; Viking, 752 pp., $40
John le Carré suffered for your reading pleasure, but not in any material way: after more than two dozen bestsellers that spawned multiple blockbuster films—from The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to The Constant Gardener and A Most Wanted Man—le Carré (in real life, David Cornwell) had enough jack in the bank for a chalet in Switzerland, an ever-expanding compound on the windy Cornwall coast, and a home in London. But he was also a tormented soul, the walking embodiment of the first line in Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Those agonies, and others, pulse through the letters in A Private Spy, edited and introduced by his son Tim Cornwell. They surface despite the lifelong curation of the archive by his ex-spy father, who, before his death in 2020, was ever mindful of his reputation beyond the grave. “My father mostly covered the tracks of his untidiness”—a suitably filial reference by Cornwell to the lacuna of le Carré’s letters to his mistresses. (Tim Cornwell himself died in May 2022, at the age of 59.) Other gaps loom, too, like the letters le Carré wrote to Jack Geoghegan, his first American publisher, all of which were destroyed. In A Private Spy, you see only what le Carré and his family want you to see. Yet such was le Carré’s life, such were the genius and range of his storytelling and the span of his acquaintances and experiences, that you don’t have to be a diehard fan to find the collection rewarding. Indeed, for writers both established and aspiring, the letters open a valuable window on the works, methods, and milieu of a novelist whose success spanned six decades.
Le Carré liked to quote a saying he attributed to Graham Greene—that childhood is the credit balance of the writer. By those standards, he was a millionaire. Among those “riches” were the repeated bankruptcies of his father, Ronnie, a notorious confidence man who inflicted all manner of injuries and indignities on his family. When le Carré was three, his father was jailed for fraud; when he was five, his much-abused mother, Olive, walked out on le Carré and his older brother, Tony. (Le Carré was told she was dead; he wouldn’t see her again for another 16 years.) Over the years, his letters were punctuated by bitter denunciations of both parents. To wit: His father was “an infinite, darkest swindler”; “his very existence is a complete mockery of any moral consideration”; “I felt not so much humiliated as socially in debt to those who lay crippled in my father’s fearful wake.” He wrote to his aunts in 1986 that his barely disguised venomous portrait of Ronnie in A Perfect Spy, the semi-autobiographical thriller that Philip Roth praised as “the best English novel since the war,” had “alleviated my own pain, which has been prolonged and crippling.” Even so, 21 years later, he still railed to his brother (to whom he sent many of his rawest letters) that “our father was a mad genes-bank, a truly wild card, and in my memory disgusting—still.” About his mother he added: “When I met our mother I thought her spooky & unreal, & I was never able to understand … how you walk out on two sons in the middle of the night, then take the moral high ground.” As he told Tony, “We were frozen children, & will always remain so.”
The recruitment of damaged, smart children into the intelligence services is a cliché straight out of James Bond. Yet this was precisely le Carré’s experience. He left Sherborne School early to study German at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where British intelligence tapped him to report on left-wing student groups, a role he continued at Oxford University for MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency. In 1958, after joining MI5 formally, he took up writing on his train commutes to London. Two years later, having switched to MI6, which gathers intelligence overseas, he was posted to Germany. Under his le Carré pen name, he published his first novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality. In 1963, he followed these with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, which Graham Greene blurbed as “the best spy story I have ever read,” propelling it to become 1964’s best-selling novel in the United States. With his income and prominence rising (the latter a distinct no-no for a clandestine operative), le Carré resigned from the Foreign Office.
As Tim Cornwell notes, “The contemporary record in letters from le Carré about his years in the intelligence services is for obvious reasons thin.” Not until the 1970s did he begin to acknowledge his service. But the letters in A Private Spy confirm the impression from his books that the experience was stitched to le Carré as tightly as his shadow. He remained in close touch with his former MI6 colleague John Margetson, for instance. Toward the end of his life, he lamented to Alan Judd, a former diplomat, “I miss the Office, always have done—both Offices—in their way. In a sense they are the only places, apart from writing.” Witness, also, his fiery rejection of his left-wing Oxford classmate and friend Stanley Mitchell, who in 2006 demanded an apology from le Carré for having spied on him: “We were in combat with ruthless, insidious people who used British communists and sympathisers as their hunting ground.” Le Carré served during a time of dark betrayals by Soviet agents such as Kim Philby, George Blake, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean. (Philby may well have blown le Carré’s undercover identity to the KGB.) Their treachery not only furnished plot material; its tumultuous aftermath also shaped le Carré’s portrayals of both agencies as incompetent, petty bureaucracies.
The feelings he expressed about his country in these letters are likewise mixed. Writing from Austria in 1951 to his future first wife, Ann, he talked of escaping the “grey indifference of England.” To his brother, he wrote: “Every time I go abroad (except to our former colonies, as a rule), I feel the boulders roll off my back. Every time I return, I put on the harness.” Britain’s entrenched class structure grated. Le Carré hated the boarding schools he had attended, a feeling amplified by a later stint as a teacher at Eton, the incubator of England’s elite. In the last years of his life, he routinely railed in letters against Prime Minister Boris Johnson, an Eton graduate, calling him “an Etonian oik.” The middle-class Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, he admired, despite her politics. As he told the American journalist David Greenway, his friend and traveling companion, “There isn’t anyone else around who can hold a candle to her when it comes either to forensic argument or Tamany (?) Hall barnstorming.” Nonetheless, in 1981, he refused her offer to be made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. As he wrote to Dick Franks, his former station chief in Bonn who later became the head of British intelligence services, he did so in part because of a desire “to stay out of the citadel.”
One citadel he never cracked was Britain’s literary establishment, with which his relationship was prickly. When A Small Town in Germany (1968) was greeted with unfavorable reviews, he wrestled in a letter to his publisher Charles Pick with the problem his writing posed to reviewers: Was he “a thriller-writer with pretentions? A novelist who hasn’t the guts to drop the thriller form?” The problem never went away. Salman Rushdie, for instance, sparked a feud with le Carré by panning The Russia House: “John le Carré … wants to be taken very seriously indeed. Much of the trouble is, I’m afraid, literary. There is something unavoidably stick-figure-like about le Carré’s attempts at characterization.” In a 1998 letter to Margetson, le Carré acidly predicted how British publications would treat his latest book (Single & Single): “The ‘Times’ will give it to their thriller man, the ‘Observer’ will trash it because I’ve been le Carré for too long, & the Guardian will as usual refuse to treat it as a novel at all, and … give it to one of their political-investigative reporters.” Le Carré’s complicated feelings on his standing tainted even his relationship with Graham Greene. Notwithstanding his respectful letters to Greene, to others le Carré would make fun of Greene’s religious and political beliefs, saying also that “I never knew anyone who tended his image more carefully than Graham.” For his part, Le Carré pointedly refused to allow his books to be considered for the Booker Prize. And his response to a gentle inquiry in 1977 from the Nobel literature committee for input on possible candidates has more bristles than a porcupine: “It is very kind of you to seek my opinion on the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I must tell you honestly that I have never given the subject a moment’s thought, except perhaps to reflect that, like the Olympic Games, a great concept has been ruined by political greed.”
Whether le Carré’s writing has the literary merit that Big Novelists like Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, and others have ascribed to it is for the reader to decide. But A Private Spy makes clear that le Carré cared deeply about his calling and his prose, from the moment ideas and stories were conceived to the most granular details of how they were presented. Perhaps with an eye to posterity, the collection is studded with letters encouraging younger writers such as Ben Macintyre and Nicholas Shakespeare. One tiny gem: le Carré’s messy draft of a note to John Cheever is a model of grace and humility that shows the care le Carré took with words. His research for his books could be prodigious (all the more remarkable because of what he called, in a 2016 letter to Shakespeare, his “darkest secret”—he had dyslexia and read “at a snail’s pace, much as I wd read aloud.”) For The Honourable Schoolboy—the first time, as le Carré puts it, “I put on the non-uniform of a field reporter in order to obtain my experiences and my information”—he and Greenway took a grueling trip tracing the opium trail through Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. His letters to various experts setting up consultations and requesting information about everything from pharmaceuticals in Africa and the intricacies of Middle East politics to the operations of the Russian mafia are as perceptive as they are demanding.
In corresponding with publishers and editors, he was direct and at times ruthless in defense of his interests, including with Robert Gottlieb, his editor at Knopf, whom he praised as “the greatest of them all.” A 2009 letter to Penguin, his new publisher, detailed his instructions on everything from communications and publicity to launch parties (none, please), reviews (don’t send them), and editing: “The best editor for me is the one who diagnoses freely but never suggests remedies or comes up with alternative wordings.” Ever mindful of prying eyes, he hated doing publicity, in one case turning down a request to appear on BBC’s Desert Island Discs by saying, “I would pay good money never again to have to talk my way through a sanitised version of my life.”
Those who want to get past any sanitization should drop the letters of A Private Spy and pick up Adam Sisman’s painstaking 2015 biography, which had le Carré’s grudging cooperation—something he later regretted, not least for the details of his infidelities to Jane Eustace, his faithful, and professionally invaluable, second wife. (Wags might note the less-than-coincidental recent publication of The Secret Heart, a shag-and-tell memoir by one of le Carré’s lovers.) Yet even with its gaps and curatorial discretion, these letters bring out what le Carré described to Vivian Green in 2001 as the “ferment of buried anger and lovelessness from childhood” that he sometimes found “almost uncontainable.” Once, when a 10-year-old fan wrote and asked how he might become a spy, le Carré suggested that the boy should instead find a great cause. If he did that, “you won’t need to deceive anybody, you will have found what you are looking for. You will be more than a spy then. You will be a good, happy man.”
A Private Spy reveals a great writer, and even a good man. But happy? Not so much.
The post Declassified appeared first on The American Scholar.
Comer de cuchara means “eat with a spoon” and refers to meals that are served in a bowl. Fabada, the Asturian stew of beans and sausage, bacalao con garbanzos y espinacas, which is salted codfish with chickpeas and spinach and is traditional during Lent, and pote, bean, potato, and kale stew, are favorite examples of mine. But there are so many more. Marmitako, a Basque recipe with potato and tuna, is a new favorite, and pisto, thinly sliced zucchini sautéed with onion, green pepper, and tomato, is an old standby for me. With olive oil and paprika, you can’t go far wrong with any of these dishes: they are never anything but delicious. To have them at a friend’s house is to be comforted that tradition lives on. If you order the menu del día in a restaurant, the fixed price meal, you will surely find a hearty soup or stew among the choices. So far so good. But a plate of fabada is the starter: you will also choose a second course, a dish of meat, fish, or chicken. With dessert to follow. You don’t get up hungry.
If, on the other hand, you are not a big eater but do like to nibble at various dishes, a cider bar is a good choice for a meal where you can picar, meaning order finger food, which is brought to the table and set in the middle so everyone can partake at their leisure of whatever dish appeals to them. Today makes a break between the excesses of yesterday’s holiday, Día de la Constitución Española, and those of tomorrow’s, Día de la Inmaculada Concepción. But to join friends and family in a lively meal, any excuse will do. Though my fridge was full of food, when my brother visited in October, three dishes made a robust meal for my mother, my brother, and me at a cider bar in the town’s principle plaza, Plaza les Campes. We ordered croquettes, stuffed onions, and a kind of scallop pâté called paté de zamburiña. You’ll like it, we told my mother, and she did.
I’d had this kind of scallop before, but not often, and when I looked them up later on the Internet, I found them identified as queen scallops and toted as an exquisite shellfish with “a full flavor and texture of great quality.” One cares about the exuberance in a hug, and the grip when shaking someone’s hand, and the texture of food in one’s mouth. The feel of a thing. But to see texture put on a par with flavor suddenly brought home to me the horror of eating, of sinking teeth into flesh, grinding. And yet, a pâté, where all the grinding has been done and the creature turned to pulp, is horrifying too. I thought of the nutritional drinks developed as a substitute for eating, where a meal is a glass of a thick, tan liquid, easy to pour, to consume, and to clean up. No fuss, no mess. No lost time. Back to work. The businesslike dullness and efficiency of drinking your food does not appeal. What would be a happy compromise between tearing your food from the bone and eating what seems essentially formula for adults? Comer de cuchara, half sauce, half not. And substantial and comforting, even to someone from a different tradition.
The post Comer de Cuchara appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Lucille Clifton’s poem “What the Mirror Said.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Lydia Moland on the children’s writer who had a change of heart
The post The Forgotten Radical appeared first on The American Scholar.
Fires in the West, hurricanes in the East—what it’s like on the ground as we confront our rapidly changing world
The post The Road to Paradise and Back appeared first on The American Scholar.
The key to avoiding an ecological catastrophe might be found in the wealth of nations and the spirit of innovation
The post The Corals and the Capitalist appeared first on The American Scholar.
Was Mississippi John Hurt really the first person to sing the tragic tale of Louis Collins?
The post The Bully in the Ballad appeared first on The American Scholar.
Fifty years later, the fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto still speaks to the madness of India’s Partition
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Our species may soon evolve, with the help of technology, into something more than human
The post The End Is Only the Beginning appeared first on The American Scholar.
Four years ago, I bought myself a paperback atlas—a floppy, glossy, 200-page edition quite unlike the hardback tome that had gathered dust on my shelf for decades. And this flimsy new atlas soon altered my grasp of reality in a way so elemental that I realized I’d obtained an essential tool of knowledge and power, […]
The post The Book of Maps appeared first on The American Scholar.
The lyrical, spiritual work of Darrel Ellis began with a precious inheritance
The post In the Frame of the Father appeared first on The American Scholar.
The many lives and loves of the mysterious Saint-John Perse
The post Foreign Af fairs appeared first on The American Scholar.
The art of dislocation in the verses of Wong May
The post Bearing Witness Beyond Despair appeared first on The American Scholar.
The uncle I never knew and the war that was his
The post I Am Become a Name appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the summer of 1947 … [William Kapell] played the Third Rachmaninoff Concerto. No one who heard it will forget that performance. With it Kapell moved into the company of Horowitz and Rachmaninoff himself, who alone had conquered the citadel of that strange concerto, which is cheap unless it is magnificent. He forged the full […]
The post Remembering Pianist William Kapell appeared first on The American Scholar.
The entrenched dichotomy at the center of the national story
The post Our Founding Contradiction appeared first on The American Scholar.
How the FBI’s founding director ruled from the shadows
The post Head of the State appeared first on The American Scholar.
Opening night at David Geffen Hall was an attempt to reconcile with an institution’s past and map out a way for the future
The post Not Your Parents’ New York Phil appeared first on The American Scholar.
Hollywood’s surprising links to the antebellum South
The post Don’t Tell the Tourists appeared first on The American Scholar.
A year ago this month, I went to the province of Málaga for a trail race in Almogía. This town of some 4,000 inhabitants, pocketed in the hills of the Montes de Málaga range, is where my running partner had spent four months of his military service 40 years earlier. He and another soldier were […]
The post Three Stories appeared first on The American Scholar.
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Sadness of Clothes” by Emily Fragos appeared first on The American Scholar.
“Rhett Butler” Romances Claudette Colbert in Frank Capra’s Comic Masterpiece It Happened One Night
The post What Hath Gable Got? appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Zegama-Aizkorri is the world’s most popular foot race, but I had never heard of it. Is that on a par with never having heard of the Tour de France, Wimbledon, or the World Cup? Not at all. Running is growing in popularity as a pastime, and more and more people care about running at […]
The post Footwork appeared first on The American Scholar.
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “We Lived Happily During the War” by Ilya Kaminsky appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ted Conover on life off-grid
The post Roughing It appeared first on The American Scholar.
Seven weeks after filing a claim for a missing bag, I found an email in my inbox from the central luggage specialist at American Airlines. She asked if my luggage was still lost or if it had turned up, so I answered that yes, the bag had reappeared, two weeks after it had gone missing. […]
The post Lost Luggage appeared first on The American Scholar.
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “For My People” by Margaret Walker appeared first on The American Scholar.
Learning to live with your inner mishegas
The post Enough Already with the Trauma appeared first on The American Scholar.
Laura Kaplan on the vital work of Jane
The post The Abortion Underground appeared first on The American Scholar.
Rodiles Beach is half an hour from my home. I’d planned to take my mother there in August, when the water was still warm and inviting, but we didn’t manage to get to the beach until an afternoon in mid-September when my brother was visiting from Madrid. As we three drove over from my house, […]
The post Ocean Motion appeared first on The American Scholar.
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “The Glow of the Night Sky” by Jaan Kaplinski appeared first on The American Scholar.
An Italian master’s unlikely depictions of Dante’s dark vision
The post To Hell and Back appeared first on The American Scholar.
RJ Young on the commemoration—and commercialization—of the massacre’s centenary
The post Tulsa 2022 appeared first on The American Scholar.
A fresh translation revives the ending of an ancient Indian epic
The post Of Dharma and Doom appeared first on The American Scholar.
Catherine Wilson brings self-help back to its ancient roots
The post More Than a Mere Tastemaker appeared first on The American Scholar.
Harvesting wild ginseng has sustained Appalachian communities for generations—so what will happen when there are no more plants to be found?
The post The Root Problem appeared first on The American Scholar.
Covid-19 has contributed to a crisis in America’s classrooms, but the problems predate the pandemic and are likely to outlast it
The post Why We Are Failing to Make the Grade appeared first on The American Scholar.
A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal behavior
The post The Degradation Drug appeared first on The American Scholar.
Seeing the world anew in the aftermath of family tragedy, through the lenses of physics and theology
The post Averted Vision appeared first on The American Scholar.
Then This, The Conversation, June, Tendrils of Trumpet Vine, Frame Structure With Post and Lattice 2, Breath
The post Five Poems appeared first on The American Scholar.
A childhood in Haifa—before Israel attained statehood and just after—helped form an architect’s vision of what an ideal home should be
The post Rooms With a View appeared first on The American Scholar.
Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays: Second Series, 1844 Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? —John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644 To eat an oyster raw […]
The post Autumn 2022 appeared first on The American Scholar.
Intimations of living and dying in the lines of Forrest Gander
The post Ways of Being appeared first on The American Scholar.
For a club gathering late in the spring, Henrietta chose rosy maple moths, which Marion loved. A moth like a flower, a moth like a doll: the body furred in soft yellow, legs and feathered antennae bright pink, dark eyes shiny above pink-and-yellow wings. She had some pupae just ready to open and the afternoon’s […]
The post Henrietta and Her Moths appeared first on The American Scholar.
American history was shaped as much by Native Americans as by their colonizers
The post Power of the Peoples appeared first on The American Scholar.
Matthew Wong broke all the rules and flourished online, but he craved what the outsider typically eschews: commercial success
The post An Artist of Our Social Age appeared first on The American Scholar.
Long before the contentious school board fights of today, Lydia Maria Child tried to help America’s children understand their country’s racial transgressions
The post Freedom Tales appeared first on The American Scholar.
In 1967, three years after graduating from college, I landed the job of assistant art director at Seventeen magazine. It was a chirpy, all-female place—except for Horace, who archived illustrations and prepared layouts for production. In the art department, Ellen, Honey, Mary, and I worked in blue cotton lab coats. Open pots of Best-Test Rubber […]
The post Where’s Warhol? appeared first on The American Scholar.
Martin Edwards on the history of mystery
The post The Butler Did It appeared first on The American Scholar.
“Mod” London takes center stage in Michelangelo Antonioni’s mind-blowing Blow-Up
The post The Allure of the Enigmatic appeared first on The American Scholar.
In the last week of June at the academy where I teach, very few students attended class. At the end of the academic year, with the students’ regular school out for the summer, the first days of freedom are sweet, not to be spoiled by further class. At six o’clock, only one student came, an […]
The post The Artist appeared first on The American Scholar.
Poems read aloud, beautifully
The post “Ich grolle nicht” by Heinrich Heine appeared first on The American Scholar.
Exploring Exploration
The post Terence Nicholson appeared first on The American Scholar.
Hayley Campbell on the hidden labor after life
The post Don’t Forget the Death Workers appeared first on The American Scholar.
On New Orleans’s most famous thoroughfare, it’s always 1986
The post Mullet Street appeared first on The American Scholar.
Screams are what you would have heard on that mild cloudy morning in late June. Unabated screams. Maybe two minutes’ worth, maybe less. I heard them myself, and on hearing them, thought they would stop. They were, after all, issuing from my mouth, and I understood that they did not help my cause. So wouldn’t […]
The post The Scream appeared first on The American Scholar.
Ethical inquiry requires lived experience, not just logical examination
The post Morals, Meaning, and Nonsense appeared first on The American Scholar.
Sabine Hossenfelder considers the biggest questions in physics and philosophy
The post When Science Is Not the Answer appeared first on The American Scholar.
Remembering the plight of Dreyfus and the effect it had on a young Marcel Proust
The post The Affair Rekindled appeared first on The American Scholar.
“What to do with my mother?” is the question I’ve been asking myself. It may sound like I have a problem, but that’s not so. It’s not what to do about my mother, as in assisted living or a live-in assistant; it’s what to do with her, as in do together, while she’s visiting. She’ll […]
The post What to Do appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Amy Lowell’s poem “The Taxi.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Taxi” by Amy Lowell appeared first on The American Scholar.
Creating New Patterns
The post Victoria van der Laan appeared first on The American Scholar.
T. J. English on the surprising relationship between two grand American traditions—jazz and organized crime
The post Mob Music appeared first on The American Scholar.