James McAuley: Éric Zemmour’s Provocations

January 13, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 1

Fara Dabhoiwala:
Men Mistaken for Gods

Anne Enright:
One Hundred Years
of ‘Ulysses’

E. Tammy Kim:
Return Flights to Korea

Susan Tallman:
How Jasper Johns
Made It New

Gary Saul Morson:

Russia’s Byronic
Terrorists

Rivka Galchen:
Kate DiCamillo’s
Survival Stories

Fintan O’Toole:
Boris Johnson in
Retreat

Jacqueline Rose:
The Justice of
Simone Weil
 CHICAGO From and About the Academy

The Lost Promise Seneca

American Universities in the 1960s Fifty Letters of a Roman Stoic



  



“Required reading for anyone eager to Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by
understand the complex forces shaping Margaret Graver and A. A. Long
American higher education. . . . Schrecker This selection of fifty letters offers insight
presents a clear picture of a tumultuous de- into Seneca’s life and thought in language that
cade, synthesizing her vast research in the speaks to the modern reader.
era’s newspapers and journals and exten-
sive interviews.”—Library Journal (starred PAPER $16.00
review)
CLOTH $35.00

On Revision The Pocket Epicurean

The Only Writing That Counts 


 “Lucid and scholarly.”—Independent, on the
“Interspersed with practical counsel, On UK Edition
Revision contains a moving vindication of “A helpful guide to facing the manifold
the importance and the pleasure of scholarly anxieties of modern life.”—The Idler, on the
writing and reading.”—Deidre Lynch, author UK edition
of Loving Literature
CLOTH $12.50
PAPER $20.00

Harold Rosenberg Uncountable

A Critic‘s Life A Philosophical History of Number



 and Humanity from Antiquity to the
Present
“Balken paints Rosenberg as an outsider by  

 
design, and recreates the people, places,
and intellectual movements that influenced  


the fiercely independent thinker from his “Ricardo and David Nirenberg, father and son
native Brooklyn to bohemian, leftist Man- scholars of mathematics and history, have
hattan in the 1930s.”—Publishers Weekly teamed up in a breathtaking voyage examin-
CLOTH $40.00 ing the foundations and limits of knowledge
in western thought.”—Joachim Frank, Colum-
bia University, Nobel Prize in Chemistry
CLOTH $30.00

Permanent Crisis The Culture of Male

The Humanities in a Disenchanted Beauty in Britain
Age From the First Photographs to

!!
 " 
 David Beckham
“The authors suggest that today’s preoccupa- 


tion with crisis in the humanities is historically “Dispels the common myth that beauty is
and conceptually overdetermined, less a re- a historically feminine quality and vividly
sponse to current material realities than baked demonstrates how ideals of male attractive-
into the modern humanities’ self-conception.” ness have long mattered in shaping values,
—Chronicle of Higher Education identity, sexuality, and social status.”
CLOTH $35.00 —Christopher R. Oldstone-Moore, author of
Of Beards and Men
CLOTH $45.00

The UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS www.press.uchicago.edu

Contents
4 Fara Dabhoiwala Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin
8 Susan Tallman Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York City
Catalog of the exhibition by Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf
CLEAR AND
11 James McAuley Who Does Éric Zemmour Speak For?
15
17
Anahid Nersessian
James Shapiro
The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations by Eva Illouz
The Tragedy of Macbeth a film written and directed by Joel Coen
PRESENT
19 E. Tammy Kim Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom

22 Geoffrey O’Brien
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. by Jenny Heijun Wills
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Eurydice an opera by Matthew Aucoin, with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, at the Metropolitan Opera,
DANGER
New York City
The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera by Matthew Aucoin
23 Cyrus Console Poem
24 Anne Enright Dubliners: Ulysses at 100
26 Sean Wilentz Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution by Woody Holton
American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 by Alan Taylor
29 Rivka Galchen Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo
Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo
Beverly, Right Here by Kate DiCamillo
34 Andrew Martin James Castle: Memory Palace by John Beardsley
36 Caroline Fraser My First Thirty Years by Gertrude Beasley, with a foreword by Nina Bennett
Pity the Beast by Robin McLean
38 Maya C. Popa Poem
39 Dan Rockmore 99 Variations on a Proof by Philip Ording
42 Ian Frazier We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff
The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff
46 Nathan Whitlock Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I, 1978–1987 by Helen Garner
One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries Volume II, 1987–1995 by Helen Garner JACOB MCHANGAMA
49 Fintan O’Toole ‘Arum Arum Araaaaaagh’: Boris Johnson’s Wild Ride
55 Gary Saul Morson To Break Russia’s Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks
by Vladimir Alexandrov
Pale Horse: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia by Boris Savinkov, translated from the Russian
FREE SPEECH
by Michael R. Katz and with an introduction by Otto Boele
A History from Socrates
58 Jacqueline Rose The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky
61 Kwame Anthony Appiah The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange with David Wengrow to Social Media
CONTRIBUTORS

4,
))%,
$(&.
Brief Under Water
The Odicy

4,
&- ,-
))%,
+
Where Did Poetry Come
(
Romanian Notebook From
(
-#
*) -+2
)&& -$)(
Who Goes There
“The best history of free speech



-#
.-#)+
)!
The Origins of Sex: A History 

$,

)&.'($,-
!)+
The Irish Times
(
-#

of the First Sexual Revolution
- # ,
-
+$( -)(
(
$,
0+$-$("

 )(+

$& +"
+)! ,,)+
)!
+$,#
 -- +,
-
+$( -)(
$,
( 0
ever written and the best defense
#$,-)+2
)!
!+
,* # ))%
We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern



$,

+)! ,,)+
)!
+ -$/
+$-$("
-
($/ +,$-2
)& Ireland
0$&&

*.&$,# 
$(
-#

$(
+# of free speech ever made.”
& "
.&$(
#
#,
*.&$,# 
, / (
()/ &,
$(&.$("
'),-
+  (-&2



$,
-#
.-#)+
)!
American Faith.  +
, )(
))%
)!

Actress
*) ',
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder
0$&&

*.&$,# 
$(
)/ ' — P. J. O ’ R O U R K E

4,
&- ,-
))%
Prairie Fires: The Ameri-  +
#
$,

# 
($-
-
)&,'$-#,
($/ +,$-2
)!
)()(

can Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
+  $/ 
-#
.&$-3 +
+$3
!)+

 
$,

+)! ,,)+
)!
-# '-$,
(
)'*.- +
$
$)"+*#2
(
(
-#
$&&$'

 .%)'
 
+)! ,,)+
)!
)'*.--$)(&
$


$,
-#
.-#)+
)!
-#$+- (
))%,
$(&.$("
Great Plains
(
-
+-').-#

$,
&,)

' ' +
)!
-#
1- +(&
.&-2
)!
-#
“A lot of people now claim that
Family
On the Rez
(
Travels in Siberia (-

(,-$-.- 
$,
'),-
+  (-
))%
$,
Law as Data: Computa-
tion, Text, and the Future of Legal Analysis
) $- 
0$-#
$# &
free speech is a danger to
 

 LV WKH DXWKRU RI ¿YH ERRNV LQFOXGLQJ PRVW UH $/ +')+ 
 (-&2
-#
()/ &
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch. democracy or social inclusion.


$,
)$+ -)+
)!
-#
$+% %
(,-$-.-
!)+
-#




$,

)(-+$.-$("
)*$($)(
0+$- +
!)+
The New York
Times
(

)#),-
)!
-#
*),-
Time to Say Goodbye

.'($-$ ,
$(
)()(
 +
( 0
))%
On Violence and On Violence In this vital book, which is as
Against Women
0,
*.&$,# 
&,-
2 +



$,
-#
.-#)+
)!
Early Work

()/ &
(
Cool entertaining as it is erudite,
for America

,-)+2
)&& -$)( 


$,
-#
++2
$&& +
+)! ,,)+
)!
("&$,#
-
)&.'
$
$,
'),-
+  (-
))%,
+
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606


$,

+$,, 
)(-+$.-$("
)&.'($,-
!)+
The ( Shakespeare in a Divided America. Jacob Mchangama shows why
Washington Post (
-#
.-#)+
)!
The House of Fragile Things:
Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

4,
))%
0$-#
$ &,
)+#
 (, (
No Plan At All
that is dead wrong.”
0,
*.&$,# 
$(
-) +



$,
-#
0+ (

.',
+)! ,,)+
)!
-#

+-,
—YA S C H A M O U N K ,
(
.'($-$ ,
(

+)! ,,)+
$(
-#
&/$
("." ,
(
$- +-.+ ,




$,
-#
.-#)+
)!
-0)
()/ &,
$(&.$("
'),-

*+-' (-
-
)+-#0 ,- +(
$,
&- ,-
))%
$,
Minds Wide Shut: How +  (-&2
Congratulations on Everything

- # ,
*.&$,#$("
(
author of The Great Experiment
the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us
)0+$-- (
0$-#
)+-)(
#*$+) )''.($-$)(,
-
.' +
)&& " 



$,

+)! ,,)+
)!
("&$,#
-
-#
($/ +,$-2
)!


$,
-#
 )+"
 (+2
/$,

+)! ,,)+
)!

' +$
&$!)+($
-
),

(" & ,
 +
'),-
+  (-
))%
$,
Keats’s Odes: A (
$,-)+2
-
+$( -)(
$,
))%,
$(&.
No Property in Man: Slav-
Lover’s Discourse ery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding “Jacob Mchangama’s panoramic 
Editor: Emily Greenhouse Founding Editors: Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) exploration of the history of free
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
Executive Editor: Jana Prikryl Publisher: Rea S. Hederman speech offers a vivid, highly
Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein, Hasan Altaf Associate Publisher, Business Operations: Michael King
Contributing Editors: Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Art Editor: Leanne Shapton
Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen
Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn
readable account of how today’s
Maya Chung and Lucy Jakub, Associate Editors; Nawal Arjini and Willa Glickman, Assistant Editors; Sable Gravesandy and Anacaona Rodriguez Martinez,
Editorial Interns; Sylvia Lonergan, Researcher; Will Palmer, Copyeditor; Daniel Drake, Production Editor; Will Simpson, Type Production; Kazue Jensen,
most pitched battles over free
Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Production Coordinator; Sharmaine Ong, Advertising Associate; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice
Fellegara, Director of Marketing and Planning; Janis Harden, Fulfillment Director; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Editorial speech reflect tensions and
Director, Digital; Angela Hederman, Special Projects; Diane R. Seltzer, Office Manager; Patrick Hederman, Rights; Max Margenau, Comptroller; Vanity Luciano,
Assistant Accountant; Teddy Wright, Receptionist. impulses that are as old as
nybooks.com: Matt Seaton, Editor
history itself.”
Ŷ Anastasia Edel: A Taste of Old Soviet Home Ŷ Joyce Johnson: The Aftershocks of Pearl Harbor
What’s new on —SUZ ANNE NOSSEL,
Ŷ Nicole Rudick: Rosemary Mayer’s Fabric Art Ŷ Lawrence Lessig: Our Failed Democratic State
nybooks.com CEO of PEN America
Plus: Haunting tales from Eduardo Halfon, Irina Dumitrescu on learning Old English, and more . . .
basicbooks.com
On the cover: Mamma Andersson, Headless Man in Jacket, 2015. © Mamma Andersson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildupphovsrätt, Sweden. Courtesy of the
artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and David Zwirner. Photo by Mark Blower. The artworks on pages 8, 9, and 10 are © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
May, June, October, November, and December. NYREV, Inc., 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001
and at additional offices. Canada Post Corp. Sales Agreement #40031306. Postmaster: Send address changes to The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy,
TX 75755-9310. Subscription services: www.nybooks.com/customerservice, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info, or call 800-354-0050 in the US, 903-636-1101 elsewhere.

3

Accidental Gods:
On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
by Anna Della Subin.
Metropolitan, 462 pp., $35.00
When he stepped ashore in October
1492, in what he understood to be part
of India or Japan, Christopher Colum-
bus’s first act was to claim possession of
the land for the Spanish crown. After
that, he distributed cloth caps, glass
beads, bits of broken crockery, “and
many other things of little value” to its
inhabitants, recording in his diary that
they were a “very simple” people, who
could easily “be kept as captives . . .
[and] all be subjugated and made to
do what is required of them.” They re-
minded him of the aboriginals of the
Canary Islands, the most recent vic-
tims of Castilian conquest, Christian-
ization, and enslavement. “They are
the colour of the Canarians, neither
black nor white,” he observed.
Columbus also believed that the “In-
dians” regarded him and his crew as ce-
lestial beings. His earliest description of
this, two days after landfall, was unsure:
“We understood that they asked us if we
had come from heaven.” But speculation
soon hardened into certainty. Though
the natives “were very sorry that they
could not understand me, nor I them,”
Columbus nonetheless confidently sur-
mised that they were “convinced that
we come from the heavens.” Every tribe
he met seemed to think the same: it ex-
plained why they were all so friendly.
Over the decades that followed, this
notion became a staple of Europeans’
accounts of their reception in the New
World. According to the sixteenth-
century Universal History of the Things
of New Spain, compiled by a Franciscan
friar in Mexico, Hernán Cortés’s light-
ning capture of Moctezuma’s empire in
1519 was made possible by the Aztecs’
misapprehension that he was “the god
Quetzalcoatl who was returning, whom
they had been and are expecting.” The
following year, while rounding the tip
of South America, Ferdinand Magel-
lan’s crew encountered a giant native,
“and when he was before us he began
to be astonished, and to be afraid, and
he raised one finger on high, thinking
that we came from heaven.” The Incas
of Peru initially received Francisco
Pizarro as an incarnation of the god Vi-
racocha, so one of his companions later
wrote, and venerated the conquistadors
because “they believed that some deity
was enclosed within them.”
It was a popular, endlessly elaborated
trope. By the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, white men colonizing
other parts of the world were hardly
surprised anymore to encounter sim-
ilar instances of mistaken deification.
After all, the error seemed to encap-
sulate the innocence, intellectual infe-
riority, and instinctive submissiveness
of the peoples they were born to rule.
What’s more, as Anna Della Subin ex-
plores in her bracingly original Acci-
dental Gods, unsought divinity was a
remarkably widespread phenomenon
that spanned centuries and continents.
In Guiana, the long-lived prophecy of
“Walterali” commemorated Sir Walter
Raleigh’s supposedly providential ex-
4 The New York Review
Apotheosis Now
Fara Dabhoiwala
Illustration by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva
ploits against the Spaniards. In Hawaii,
the death of Captain James Cook came
to be regarded as the tragic apotheosis
of a man mistaken for a god. Across
British India, shrines sprang up around
the graves and statues of colonists who
were worshiped as deities with super-
natural powers. The tomb of Sir Thomas
Beckwith in Mahabaleshwar acquired a
clay doll in his image, which received
offerings of plates of warm rice. In
Bombay, the effigy of Lord Cornwal-
lis, the former governor-general, came
to be permanently festooned with gar-
lands and beset by pilgrims performing
darshan, the auspicious ritual of seeing
and being seen by a god who was pres-
ent inside his likenesses.
Even as they battled to convert the
local heathens from their misguided
ways, Christian missionaries met the
same fate. Long after he’d returned to
Scotland, a portrait of the first chaplain
of St. Andrew’s Church in Bombay,
the Presbyterian James Clow, became
the object of pagan veneration. In the
church vestry, the congregation’s “na-
tive servants” offered up ritual homage
to it and tried to carry off pieces of the
canvas as personal talismans.
An especially celebrated cult grew up
around the ferocious soldier John Nich-
olson, a staunchly Protestant Northern
Irishman who’d begun his career in
the disastrous British invasion of Af-
ghanistan in 1839, then rose to become
deputy commissioner successively of
Peshawar and Rawalpindi. He was an
unspeakably brutal man, who kept a
severed human head on his desk, fre-
quently expressed his immense hatred
for the entire subcontinent, and begged
his superiors to allow him to flay alive
and impale suspected rebels—so in-
stinctively violent were his proclivi-
ties that “the idea of merely hanging”
insubordinate Indians was “madden-
ing” to him. Yet before he died, while
leading the pitiless British invasion,
slaughter, and looting of Delhi in 1857,
he had inspired a cult of hundreds of in-
digenous “Nikalsaini” followers, army
sepoys and ascetic faqirs alike, who
surrounded his unwilling figure at all
hours, solemnly chanting prayers and
rendering obeisance to their idol.
Something similar befell General
Douglas MacArthur, the conquering
hero of World War II. From Panama
to Japan, Korea to Melanesia, his per-
sona was made to take on divine prop-
erties of different kinds, in the form
of wooden ritual statues, shamanistic
shrines, and spirit persons, and as an
avatar of the Papuan god Manarmak-
eri, whose return will herald the age of
heaven. Even Western anthropologists
not infrequently became enmeshed as
involuntary deities in the very value
systems they were trying, as neutral,
external observers, to describe.
Resistance was always futile: disclaim-
ing one’s divinity never seemed to dispel
it. Nicholson was deeply revolted at being
worshiped. He raged against the Nikal-
sainis who followed him around, kicked
them into the dirt, beat and whipped
them savagely, and imprisoned them in
chains, yet they interpreted all this as
“their god’s righteous chastisement.” “I
am not God,” Gandhi repeatedly yet
fruitlessly declared from the early 1920s
on, as ever more elaborate tales began to
spread about his supernatural powers,
and he was pestered incessantly by peo-
ple wishing to touch his feet. “The word
‘Mahatma’ stinks in my nostrils”—“I am
not God; I am a human being.”
In 1961 a group of Jamaican Rastafar-
ians traveled to Addis Ababa to meet for
the first time with their living god, Haile
Selassie. They were unfazed by the
aging Ethiopian emperor’s own stance
on the matter: “If He does not believe
He is god, we know that He is god,” his
apostles maintained. In despair, the Ja-
maican government invited Selassie for
a state visit, hoping that his public dis-
avowal of their delusions would sap the
movement’s growing strength and polit-
ical clout. “Do not worship me: I am not
God,” the diminutive septuagenarian
politely beseeched his dazzled follow-
ers when he arrived in the Caribbean.
But this only had the opposite effect, for
Rastafarian theologians knew full well
what the Bible taught: “He that hum-
bleth himself shall be exalted, and he
that exalteth himself shall be abased.”
W hat are we to make of such episodes?
As Accidental Gods brilliantly lays out,
European observers were quick to jump
to obvious-seeming conclusions. Ac-
cidental divinity bespoke the natives’
recognition of the personal greatness of
their overlords: Nicholson was adored
because he epitomized “the finest, man-
liest, and noblest of men,” as a typical
Victorian paean put it. The question of
why such worship sometimes alighted on
arbitrary, obscure, and unheroic figures
(violent sadists, deserters, anonymous
memsahibs) was submerged beneath
the general idea of effeminate natives in
thrall to their masculine conquerors.
It was also believed to testify to their
intellectual inferiority. As the academic
study of religious beliefs developed over
the course of the nineteenth century,
European scholars defined “religion” in
ways that classified the practices of “un-
civilized races” as superstitious, back-
ward, or “degenerate”—thereby further
justifying colonialism. Compared to
“real” religions with fixed temples,
scriptures, and “rational,” monotheistic
worship, above all Christianity, the be-
liefs of “the lower races,” they theorized,
were stuck in an earlier stage of develop-
ment. The worship of deified men was
a primitive category error, “the irratio-
nal, misfired devotions of locals left to
their own devices,” in one of Subin’s
many luminous turns of phrase: proof
of their inability to rule themselves.
In reality, from Columbus onward,
Europeans repeatedly blundered into
situations they didn’t properly under-
stand and whose meaning they then in-
variably recast as vindicating their own
actions. Across the Americas, the Pa-
cific, and Asia, the indigenous terms and
rituals applied to them were in fact com-
monly used of rulers and other powerful
figures, not just of deities, and signified
only awe, not some separate, nonhuman,
“godlike” status. Likewise, because
sudden death precluded reincarnation,
people in India had for millennia been
accustomed to appeasing the power-
ful spirits of those who were therefore
eternally trapped in the afterlife—that,
not reverence for white superpower, was
why they singled out many random, pre-
maturely deceased Britons for the same
treatment. Nor was the apotheosis of liv-
ing colonists usually intended to honor
them, let alone to reflect some personal
virtue: it was simply a way of mediating
and appropriating their power, one way
of creating collective meaning in the
midst of imperial precarity and violence.
Above all, the very idea of a binary
division between humanity and divin-
ity was itself a peculiarly Christian
dogma. In most other belief systems,
the two were not strictly separated but
overlapped. Reincarnations, communi-
cations with the spirit world, living gods,
 Explore Our
New Exhibitions

Surrealism Beyond Borders Inspiring Walt Disney: Before Yesterday We Could Fly:
Through January 30 The Animation of An Afrofuturist Period Room
French Decorative Arts Now On View
Through March 6
A new, global look at a revolutionary Pink castles, talking sofas, and objects Step into a home interior inspired by
idea connecting artists across place coming to life. Discover the art that Black creativity of the past, present,
and time. inspired Disney classics. and future.

Plan your visit at metmuseum.org. Find our publications in The Met Store.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

Surrealism Beyond Borders is made possible by
the Barrie A. and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
Additional support is provided by the Placido
Arango Fund, the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund,
Alice Cary Brown and W.L. Lyons Brown, the
John Pritzker Family Fund, and The International
Council of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This exhibition is supported by an indemnity
from the Federal Council on the Arts and
the Humanities.
It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum
of Art and Tate Modern.
Lead corporate sponsorship for Inspiring Walt
Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts
is provided by
Additional support is provided by The Florence
Gould Foundation, The Danny Kaye and Sylvia
Fine Kaye Foundation/French Heritage Society,
and Beatrice Stern.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan
Museum of Art and The Wallace Collection.
Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist
Period Room is made possible by the Hobson/
Lucas Family Foundation and the Director’s Fund.
Additional support is provided by Art Mentor
Foundation Lucerne and the Terra Foundation
for American Art.
Details: Mayo, Coups de bâtons (Baton
Blows), 1937. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-
Westfalen, Düsseldorf. © 2021 ARS, NY /
ADAGP, Paris. Sèvres Manufactory.
Covered vase in the form of a tower, ca.
1762. The Huntington Library, Art Museum,
and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA,
The Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art
Collection. Roberto Lugo, Queen Abolition,
2021, digital illustration. Courtesy of the
artist, commissioned by The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2021.

January 13, 2022 5

avatars, demigods, ancestor deities, and
the powers of kings and lords—all were
part of an interwoven spectrum of nat-
ural and supernatural authority. Much
the same had been true in European
antiquity. The ancient Greeks thought it
normal for men to become gods. Among
the Romans, apotheosis became a tool
of statecraft, the ultimate form of me-
morialization. Cicero wanted to deify
his daughter, Tullia; Hadrian arranged
it for his wife and his mother-in-law, as
well as for his young lover, Antinous.
For emperors, it became a routine ac-
colade—“Oh dear, I think I’m becom-
ing a god,” Vespasian is said to have
joked on his deathbed in 79 CE .
Similar ideas circulated among
Jesus’ early followers. It was only from
the Middle Ages on that the notion of
humans being treated as gods came to
be regarded by Christians as absurd,
despite the fact that their own prophet,
saints, and holy persons embodied sim-
ilar principles. And so it happened that
modern Europeans ventured abroad
and began to impose their own cate-
gory errors on the views of others. As
Subin tartly observes, “correct knowl-
edge about divinity is never a matter of
the best doctrine, but of who possesses
the more powerful army.”
T hough Accidental Gods wears its
learning lightly and is tremendous fun
to read, it also includes a series of lyr-
ical and thought-provoking meditations
on the largest of themes. How should
we think of identity? What is it to be
human? How do stories work, grow, and
stay alive? Belief itself, Subin suggests,
is as much a set of relationships among
people as it is an absolute, on-or-off state
of mind. European myths about the
primitive mentalities of others served
to justify colonization and theories of
white supremacy, and still do. Regard-
ing indigenous practices as antithetical
to the “reasoned” presumptions of “de-
veloped” cultures has always allowed
Western observers to overlook their
complicity in creating them—to see
them only as the errors of “superstitious
minds, the tendencies of isolated atolls,
rather than a product of the violence of
empire and the shackling of peoples to
new capitalist machineries of profit.”
It also serves to mask the extent to
which Western attitudes depend on
their own forms of magical thinking.
Our culture, for example, fetishizes
goods, money, and material consump-
tion, holding them up as indices of per-
sonal and social well-being. Moreover,
as Subin points out, none of us can
truly escape this fixation:
Though we may demystify other
people’s gods and deface their idols,
our critical capacity to demystify the
commodity fetish still cannot break
the spell it wields over us, for its
power is rooted in deep structures
of social practice rather than sim-
ple belief. While fetishes made by
African priests were denigrated as
irrational, the fetish of the capitalist
marketplace has long been viewed
as the epitome of rationalism.
To see a myth is one thing; to grasp
it fully, quite another. It turns over,
changes its shape, slips away, fades out
of view. The further back in time Subin
ventures, the more fragmentary her
sources become, the larger the gaps in
what they choose to notice. But more
6 The New York Review
than once she is able to illustrate, almost
in real time, how indigenous and West-
ern mythmaking can be intertwined,
codependent, and mutually reinforcing.
Following its “discovery” by Captain
Cook in 1774, the Melanesian island
of Tanna was devastated by centuries
of colonial exploitation: its population
kidnapped to provide cheap labor, its
landscape stripped bare for short-term
profit, its culture destroyed by mission-
ary indoctrination. By the early twenti-
eth century this treatment had provoked
a series of indigenous messianic move-
ments that looked forward to the expel-
ling of the colonizers and the return
of a golden age of plenty. The messiah
would incarnate a local volcano god, it
was believed, though the exact human
form he would take was not clear.
One perennially popular idea was
that the savior would appear as an
American (perhaps Franklin D. Roose-
velt, perhaps a black GI). This was be-
cause the island was under British and
French control—movements of deifica-
tion provoked by colonial injustice often
sought to access the power of their tor-
mentors’ rivals or enemies. In 1964 the
Lavongai people of the occupied Papua
and New Guinea territory sabotaged
the elections organized by their colonial
masters by writing in the name of Pres-
ident Lyndon B. Johnson, electing him
as their king and then refusing to pay
taxes to their Australian oppressors. On
similar grounds, midcentury Indian and
African religious sects sometimes de-
ployed avatars of Britain’s enemies—in
India, Hitler was seen as the final com-
ing of Vishnu, while Nigerians wor-
shiped “Germany, Destroyer of Land”:
My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
During World War I, indigenous
populations in far-flung Allied colo-
nies independently developed cults of
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, it was said,
would shortly sweep away the English-
speaking whites who had stolen their
land and were exploiting their people.
High above the Bay of Bengal, on the
plateau of Chota Nagpur, tens of thou-
sands of Oraon tea plantation work-
ers gathered at clandestine midnight
services and swore blood oaths to ex-
terminate the British. They spoke of
the Germans as “Suraj Baba” (Father
Sun), passed around the emperor-god’s
portrait, and sang hymns to his casting
out of the British and establishing an
independent Oraon raj:
German Baba is coming,
Is slowly slowly coming;
Drive away the devils:
Cast them adrift in the sea.
Suraj Baba is coming . . .
The salient point is not that such hopes
were untethered from reality, but what
they expressed. For what can the pow-
erless do? To what can they appeal to
restore the rightful order of things, in
the face of endless loss? “Do you know
that America kills all Negroes?” a Pap-
uan skeptic challenged one of LBJ’s
apostles in 1964. “You’re clever,” the
apostle replied. “But you haven’t got a
good way to save us.”
A round this time, the British colo-
nizers of Tanna were indoctrinating
its inhabitants in the goodness of their
young queen Elizabeth II and her hand-
some consort—a man, they learned,
who was not actually from Britain, or
Greece, or anywhere in particular. As
it happened, the legend of the volcano
god told that one of his sons had taken
on human form, traveled far, and mar-
ried a powerful foreign woman. Prince
Philip vacationed in the archipelago
and participated in a pig-killing ritual
to consecrate a local chief. He was the
Duke of Edinburgh, and Tanna’s is-
land group had once been called the
New Hebrides. In 1974 one of the many
local messianic factions realized that
he must be their messiah.
It proved to be a match made in
heaven, for the British monarchy it-
self, in the twilight of its authority, was
ever more reliant on invented ritual
and mythmaking. Once Buckingham
Palace learned of the prince’s deifica-
tion, it began to celebrate and publicize
the story for its own purposes, deftly
positioning it as evidence of the affec-
tion in which the royal family (and by
inference the British) were supposedly
held all across the former empire, and
as a counterweight to the prince’s well-
deserved domestic reputation as an un-
regenerate racist. This Western interest
in turn produced an unceasing stream
of international attention and visitors to
Tanna, to investigate and report on the
islanders’ strange “cult,” which not only
helped to strengthen the myth’s local
appeal but even influenced its shape.
In 2005 a BBC journalist arrived on
the island to report the story, bringing
with him a sheaf of documents compiled
by the prince’s former private secretary,
including official correspondence from
the 1970s, press clippings, and other
English descriptions of the islanders’
beliefs. His sharing of these papers, and
his lengthy discussions with the locals,
inadvertently seeded new myths, many
of which, as Subin dryly notes, sounded
“much like palace PR describing philan-
thropic activities in an underdeveloped
land.” Myths stay alive by constantly
adapting, encompassing, and feeding off
one another. This was a classic case of
mutual mythmaking: the deification of
Prince Philip was produced in Bucking-
ham Palace and Fleet Street, as well as in
the South Pacific. To this day, white men
from Europe and America keep turning
up on Tanna, claiming to be fulfilling the
prophecy of the returning god.*
I n Subin’s irresistible medley of his-
tory, anthropology, and exhilaratingly
good writing, the most powerful stories
are those of indigenous mythmaking as
outright political revolt. For in many in-
stances in which white men were turned
into gods, the purpose was wholly sub-
versive: not just to channel the strength
of the colonial imperium for one’s own
ends, but to grasp the colonizers’ power
and turn it against them. In 1864 a Maori
uprising led by the prophet Te Ua Hau-
mene killed several British soldiers. The
head of their captain, speared on a pole,
became the rebels’ protective talisman
against other white invaders and their
divine conduit to the angel Gabriel. Just
as they reinterpreted the Bible to mean
that Maori land should be restored and
the British driven out, so too they ap-
propriated a colonist’s actual mouth
and made it speak their truth.
Even more unsettlingly, across their
newly conquered African territories,
from the 1920s onward British, French,
*This is evocatively documented in the
photographs, images, and text of Jon
Tonks and Christopher Lord, The Men
Who Would Be King (Dewi Lewis, 2021).
and Belgian administrators found
themselves faced with a strange con-
tagion of spirit possession, in which the
locals took on the colonists’ identities.
People would fall into a trance and then
claim to be channeling the governor of
the Red Sea or a white soldier, secretary,
judge, or imperial administrator. They
demanded pith helmets and libations of
gin, marched around in undead forma-
tions, issued commands, and refused to
obey imperial edicts, calling themselves
Hauka, or “madness,” in the Sahel, and
Zar in Ethiopia and the Sudan.
One version in the Congo claimed to
have created deified duplicates of every
single colonial Belgian. Each time an
African adept joined the movement, he’d
adopt the name of a particular colonist,
and his wife that of the spouse. In this
way, Hauka captured the entire colonial
population, from the governor-general
down to the lowliest clerk. On entering
their trance state, the locals usurped the
colonists’ power: the wives went around
with chalked faces and wearing special
dresses, screeching in shrill voices, de-
manding bananas and hens, clutching
bunches of feathers under their arms in
representation of handbags.
Precisely because spirit possession
was unwilled and painful, this was a
means of resistance that mechanisms
of imperial power could not easily
counter. Early on, a district commis-
sioner in Niger named Major Horace
Crocicchia decided to suppress it by
force. He rounded up sixty of the lead-
ing Hauka mediums, brought them
in chains to the capital, Niamey, and
imprisoned them for three days and
nights without food. Then he forced
them to acknowledge that their spirits
could not match his own power, taunt-
ing them that he was stronger and that
the Hauka had disappeared. “Where
are the Hauka?” he jeered repeatedly,
beating one of them until she acknowl-
edged that the spirits were gone.
It only made things worse. Almost
immediately a new, extremely powerful
specter joined the spirit pantheon. All
across Niger, villagers were now pos-
sessed by the vengeful, violent avatar of
Crocicchia himself—also known as Kro-
sisya, Kommandan, Major Mugu, or the
Wicked Major. Deification of this kind
was a form of ritualized revolt, a defi-
ance of imperialist power that not only
mocked but appropriated its authority.
All this also explains why, toward
the middle of the twentieth century,
the rise of a powerful, proud, anti-
imperialist black ruler at the heart of
Africa was so intoxicating to people on
the other side of the globe who had been
dehumanized for centuries because of
the color of their skin. For black people
in the Babylonian captivity of the New
World, Ethiopia had long been held up
as Zion, the land of their future return.
Even before its dashing new emperor
was crowned in 1930, American and Ja-
maican prophecies had begun to foretell
the coming of a black messiah. Rasta-
farianism became a religion for all who
opposed white hegemony: to worship
Haile Selassie as a living god was to re-
ject colonial Christianity, racial hierar-
chy, and subordination, and to celebrate
black power. No wonder its tenets have
spread across the globe and attracted
nearly a million followers. As Subin’s
rich, captivating book shows, religion is
a symbolic act: though we cannot con-
trol the circumstances, we all make our
own gods, for our own reasons, all the
time. Q

Longing
and Other Stories
ongoing unknown in a redefinition
JUN’ICHIRŌ TANIZAKI
Translated by Anthony H. Chambers
and Paul McCarthy
“In stories rendered with elegant
precision by the veterans
Anthony H. Chambers and
Paul McCarthy, Tanizaki masterfully
probes the complexities of the
human heart.”
—Juliet Winters Carpenter,
translator of
Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel
Freedom
An Impossible Reality
RAYMOND TALLIS
Tallis brings his familiar erudition
and insight to this most intriguing
and important philosophical
question – the nature of our
freedom – one that impacts most
directly on our lives and takes us
to the heart of what we are.
A G E N DA P U B L I S H I N G
classic work features a new preface
January 13, 2022
Poetics of Liveliness
Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds
ADA SMAILBEGOVIĆ
“Science meets poetry meets the
of environmental poetics—bravo!”
—Cary Wolfe, author of
Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace
Stevens’s Birds
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
Cities of the Dead
Circum-Atlantic Performance
25th Anniversary Edition
JOSEPH ROACH
The anniversary edition of this
reflecting on the relevance of
its arguments to the politics of
performance and performance in
contemporary politics.
The Gentrification Plot
New York and the Postindustrial
Crime Novel
THOMAS HEISE
“Compelling and sophisticated,
[the book] offers richly detailed
readings of recent NYC crime fiction
that delineate and critique the
destructive effects of gentrification.”
—Kathy Knapp, author of
American Unexceptionalism
“Keep ’Em in the East”
Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar
New York Film Renaissance
RICHARD KOSZARSKI
“[The book] permanently
reshapes our understanding of
American film as an art, a business,
and a cultural force.”
—David Bordwell, author of
Reinventing Hollywood
Dostoyevsky,
or The Flood of
Language
JULIA KRISTEVA
Translated by Jody Gladding.
Foreword by Rowan Williams.
“Dostoevsky, as Kristeva’s
reminder about language and the
sacred helps us guess,
loves religious mischief precisely
because he cares so much about
religious faith.”
—London Review of Books
The Best American
Magazine Writing 2021
Edited by SID HOLT for
the American Society of
Magazine Editors.
Introduction by Clara Jeffery,
editor in chief of Mother Jones
The Best American Magazine
Writing 2021 presents outstanding
journalism and commentary that
reckon with urgent topics,
including COVID-19 and entrenched
racial inequality.
7
 The House That Johns Built
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
an exhibition at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art and the Whitney
Museum of American Art,
New York City, September 29, 2021–
February 13, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition by Carlos
Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf.
Philadelphia Museum of Art/
Whitney Museum of American Art,
347 pp., $60.00
(Distributed by Yale University Press)
If contemporary art had a book of Gen-
esis, it might well start with the night
in late 1954 that Jasper Johns dreamed
he was painting an American flag. He
was twenty-four years old, a serious but
largely untrained artist making scruffy
assemblages of found objects, almost
all of which he destroyed. Of the
dream and its consequences he later
remarked, “The unconscious thought
was accepted by consciousness grace-
fully,” though completing the actual
painting took months.
However slick and Pop-ish it may look
in reproduction, Flag (1954–1955) is
insistently handmade: three joined can-
vases (one for the star- covered canton,
two for the stripes) covered with col-
laged newspaper over which he applied
enamel paint and then, dissatisfied,
took a crack at encaustic—pigment sus-
pended in melted wax that, like a candle
drip, keeps its volume as it cools and
dries. (The Roman Egyptians used it for
mummy portraits.) Tender and intense,
the strokes nudge at and shy from the
edges of the subcutaneous collage, exe-
cuting what Johns described as “a very
complex set of corrections.”
In Walter Tevis’s novel The Man
Who Fell to Earth, the hero’s extrater-
restrial origin is betrayed by his Bayer
Aspirin tin, made from platinum, in
not quite the right size, with fuzzy lines
8 The New York Review
Susan Tallman
Jasper Johns: Flag, 1954–1955
where the fine print should be—errors
that arose from using low-res inter-
planetary television transmissions as a
model. In the mid-1950s, Johns’s Flag
must have felt similarly strange: utterly
mundane and inscrutably alien.
His first museum appearance was in
a show at the Jewish Museum in New
York in 1957 titled “Artists of the New
York School: Second Generation,” al-
though “New York School” generally
enfolded emotive abstraction, and his
Green Target (1955) was not abstract
(its concentric circles are subtle, but
the title is a tell), and its emotions were
muffled at best. There was just no bet-
ter handle for what he was doing. After
his Target with Four Faces (1955) ap-
peared on the cover of Artnews the fol-
lowing January, the term “Neo-Dada”
enjoyed a brief vogue (prompting
Johns to find out more about Dada),
but while his arrangement of plaster
faces in wooden cubbies was peculiar,
it has none of “the waywardness, the ir-
reverence, or the untidiness” of Dada,
Leo Steinberg noted.
It can be hard now to fathom the thrill
and dismay Johns’s early paintings
sparked. We have lived too long in the
house they built. But to an art world high
on abstraction and existentialist meta-
physics (Clyfford Still once defined his
paintings as “life and death merging in
fearful union”), Flag delivered the gifts
of cognitive dissonance and paradox. It
was not abstract, nor was it a picture
of a flag limp on a pole or gallantly
streaming. There was no sky, no space,
no illusion. If it partook of “a new kind
of flatness, one that breathes and pul-
sates,” which Clement Greenberg ad-
mired in the art of Mark Rothko and
Barnett Newman, it did so within the
parameters of a very un- Greenbergian
fall of brushstrokes only to pop back
Museum of Modern Art, New York
into legibility with a slight change of
attention. Drawn on top of one another
in the images titled 0 through 9, their
outlines meet in a comely tangle, part
Nixie tube, part gothic tracery. We see
numbers all the time, but Johns made
us look.
Cubism had seized upon workaday
things in order to break them and re-
configure them like a spatchcocked
chicken, but Johns was quaintly loyal
to the coat hangers, thermometers,
and rulers he attached to his canvases.
(He has used fragments of the human
figure, mainly casts and imprints, but
even then the vibe is more Mr. Potato
Head than horror film.) A cast plaster
pen shrouded in encaustic on a 1961
canvas commands respect not for the
pen as metaphor—smug rival of the
sword—but for the pen as impartial
familiar presence. “It seems to me,” he
said of the commonplace, “that those
things can be dealt with without having
to judge them.”
B orn in 1930, Johns grew up in South
Carolina, shuttled between the house-
holds of his divorced parents, his grand-
parents, and aunts and uncles. (His
remark that it “wasn’t specially cheer-
ful” has an air of understatement.) A
stint at the University of South Caro-
lina was followed by a term at the Par-
popular artifact. It treated a politically sons School of Design in New York and
divisive symbol with technical care and a string of odd jobs until he was drafted
editorial indifference. in 1951. Returning to the city after two
And yet it ticked all the boxes of years in the army (stationed in South
good art—it was visually engaging, Carolina and Japan, he never saw com-
philosophically provocative, thought- bat), he quickly found a cohort of exper-
fully made, and, in its own backhanded imentally minded peers and mentors,
way, poignantly tactile, bruised, and including Robert Rauschenberg, John
guarded. Johns came with no man- Cage, and Merce Cunningham. The
ifesto, no plan for reforming people Johns–Rauschenberg romance ended
or society. In conversation he was badly but remains legendary in the art
pragmatic, explaining his work as re- world for its “opposites attract” syn-
sponses to his own questions about ergy and for the astonishing profusion
what to make and how. For all these of era- defining artworks it produced,
reasons, Flag came to bookmark the among them many of Rauschenberg’s
chapter break between stereotypical blithe and adventurous Combines and
“modern art” (emphatic, high-minded, Johns’s object-paintings, with their
heroically self-involved) and “contem- hints of thwarted revelation—a drawer
porary” (skeptical, outward-looking, that does not open, a pen that cannot
and prone to question the terms of its write.
own making). Cage and Cunningham, meanwhile,
For a century after photography re- offered proof of concept that one could
duced the miracle of objective repre- make things in the world without try-
sentation to a trick of the light, modern ing to remake the world. To Cage’s be-
art had filled the gap with subjectivity, nign ideal of composition as “simply a
expressing internal experience through way of waking up to the very life we’re
distortion and, eventually, abstraction. living,” Johns added an autodidact’s
As Greenberg wrote in the 1930s, the drive to take a machine apart and build
avant-garde strove “to imitate God by it back up again. He began by elim-
creating something valid solely on its inating things that had already been
own terms . . . something given, incre- done well by other people—foremost,
ate, independent of meanings, simi- illusion and emotional allegory—not
lars, or originals.” But Johns wasn’t because he disapproved, but because
interested in things without similars. there was no need. (His admiration for
He was interested, as he put it in a fa- the trompe l’oeil painter John F. Peto
mous formulation, in “things the mind and for the expressionism of Edvard
already knows”—things already famil- Munch is acknowledged in the numer-
iar to everyone, things read as code ous paintings, prints, and drawings to
rather than really looked at, things that which he added their names or initials.)
were flat, often printed, and generally It is possible to see Flag or Target with
not thought of as “things” at all. When Four Faces as idiosyncratic studies in
he took up numerals as a subject, they functional design, iconography, tactil-
were not the swift working ciphers of ity, and carpentry.
arithmetic but fondly recreated typo- By thirty-two Johns was, according
graphic forms, with serifs and ball ter- to Newsweek, “probably the most in-
minals and swelling tails. Arranged in fluential younger painter in the world.”
a grid, they might retreat into a snow- Later it seemed he opened the door
for almost everything that followed:
Pop art’s embrace of the world in all
its prefabricated glory, conceptual-
ism’s inquiries into making and mean-
ing, postmodernism’s philandering in
the flea market of historical styles and
personal artifacts. In the inventory of
twentieth- century art movements—
Cubism, surrealism, AbEx, and the
rest—Johns, like Picasso, is simply his
own chapter.
Now ninety- one, he has received
virtually every major honor the visual
arts have to offer. His studio note,
“Take an object/Do something to it/
Do something else to it,” has been
an art school mantra for generations.
He is famous enough to have had a
cameo on The Simpsons (as a
kleptomaniac—take an object
and run). Every species of schol-
arly thought, from psychoanalysis
to queer theory to iconographic
symbol hunting, has been brought
to bear on his work. The refer-
ence library includes a hefty
compendium of his own writ-
ings and statements, three cat-
alogues raisonnés of the prints
and another of the monotypes, a
six-volume catalogue raisonné of
the drawings, and Roberta Bern-
stein’s magisterial five volumes
of the painting and sculpture.
(The first volume, an essential
primer on all things Johns, is
available separately as a mono-
graph.)* One might reasonably
wonder, What is there left to say?
It is the wrong question. With
Johns it has always been about
seeing; few artists have been so
attentive to the lapses and unre-
liability of the seeing/saying con-
nection. So the vast two-museum
retrospective “Jasper Johns:
Mind/Mirror” is, above all, a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
to use one’s eyes. With more than
five hundred paintings, prints,
drawings, and sculptures spread
between the Whitney Museum
and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, “Mind/Mirror” presents
a wealth of celebrated objects
alongside rarely seen things from
private collections (including the
artist’s) and a welcome abun-
dance of works on paper. Integrating
these throughout, the exhibitions en-
gineer what feels like a natural mean-
der through Johns’s career, enabling
visitors to follow an idea or image as
it slips from one set of materials to an-
other and from one decade to the next.
The museums are close enough geo-
graphically that it made no sense to
travel the show from one to the next,
*Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook
Notes, Interviews, edited by Kirk
Varnedoe (MoMA, 1996); Roberta
Bernstein et al., Jasper Johns: Cat-
alogue Raisonné of Painting and
Sculpture (Wildenstein Plattner Insti-
tute, 2014); Menil Collection, Jasper
Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing
(Menil Drawing Institute, 2018); Susan
Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts,
Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of
Monotypes (Matthew Marks Gallery,
2017); Richard S. Field, The Prints of
Jasper Johns, 1960–1993: A Catalogue
Raisonné (Universal Limited Art Edi-
tions, 1994); Roberta Bernstein, Jasper
Johns: Redo an Eye (Wildenstein Platt-
ner Institute, 2017).
January 13, 2022
though distant enough that most vis-
itors will visit only one. The curators,
Scott Rothkopf (in New York) and
Carlos Basualdo (in Philadelphia), thus
settled on the neatly Johnsian strat-
egy of echoing but not quite repeating
themselves. The two shows share the
same ten-part disposition of themes
(“Constellations,” “Reveries,” etc.) but
fill them in different ways: under the
heading “Display,” Philadelphia recre-
ates Johns’s 1960 show at the Leo Cas-
telli Gallery; the Whitney recreates his
1968 show at Castelli. Both exhibit casts
of his 1960 bronze flashlight sculpture,
and each gets two of the four “Seasons”
paintings (1985–1986) that marked his
half-turn to self-portraiture.
Jasper Johns: Untitled, 1998
The first, dream-inspired Flag (1954–
1955) opens the proceedings in Phila-
delphia, positioned to bring you close
enough to notice its curious concatena-
tion of parts. At the Whitney, the eleva-
tor doors open onto a long, charismatic
wall of prints, running from the loosely
drawn black-and-white lithograph Tar-
get (1960) to a new etching of stick
figures gathered around a large skull
under a night sky. Printmaking has
never been a sideshow for Johns; its lo-
gistical permutations—flipping things
left-right, switching between full color
and grayscale, transferring things from
one surface to another—suit his habits
of mind and feed into everything he
does. Hung in two rows that form a hor-
izontal axis of imperfect reflection, the
Whitney’s print timeline advertises the
show’s conceptual structure and, like
the overture to a musical, introduces
the main motifs and hooks to follow.
Given how widely Johns’s art has
been reproduced, it can be easy to for-
get how insistently physical it is, how
florid with incidental detail. The paint-
ings can be disarmingly clunky, joined
with hinges and metal straps, blanketed
in dermal encaustic or paint roughened
with sand. Many of the drawings were
made on top of his own prints, reveal-
ing polyphonic conversations between
the given and the remade. In his eerily
beautiful ink-on-plastic drawings, pud-
dles become puzzles, and puzzles be-
come pictures built by surface tension
and evaporation. A mesmerizing room
at the Whitney is filled with small works
made throughout his career, each no
more than a few inches a side. It is pos-
sible to look at the wallet-sized Gray
Numbers (1959–1961) for a long time
and feel it change in your mind. Even
in this tiny canvas there are too many
particulars to hold onto, so you are
drawn back again and again to
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
the surface, away from the famil-
iar sequence and toward a kind of
limitless specificity.
Both shows are strikingly
handsome. Johns’s penchant for
bilateral symmetry and echoing
refrains, for cognates and ghosts,
lends a lively cadence to the art’s
exposition in space. In all these
ways, “Mind/Mirror” is a tri-
umph. And yet . . .
or a record of the most am-
bitious exhibition of the world’s
most illustrious living artist, the
catalog comes with an unex-
pected whiff of apology. “Today,”
Rothkopf writes in his introduc-
tory essay, Johns’s work “can
sometimes feel more rooted in
the past than the present.” He
positions Johns as a lens for “un-
derstand[ing] an inflection point
in history,” undeniably important
but pinned in place, “an immov-
able feature in a landscape against
which contemporary life contin-
ues to unfold.” Johns’s conceptual
innovations, he suggests, have
been “outstripped by those of
wilder progeny that now perhaps
seem more of our time,” while the
artist’s continued attachment to
painting and “careful humanist
inquiry” mark him as “less Pro-
metheus than Moses, someone
who led his people to the Prom-
ised Land but didn’t go inside.”
The catalog works hard to com-
pensate for this perceived lack
of timeliness: its wrapper reproduces
eighty-six artworks in the format of a
Google image search, and its contrib-
utors include “artists, poets, and phi-
losophers, most of whom are writing
about his art for the first time.” Some
offer historical information and analy-
sis, some present personal reflections,
some interrogate the artist’s sexuality,
his whiteness, his southernness, and (as
always) his lack of interest in declara-
tive position statements.
This is not, however, just a prophy-
lactic mea culpa for having ceded so
much real estate to an eminent old
white guy. The intimation that Johns is
not quite cutting- edge has been around
for a good fifty years. He may have con-
cocted a paradigm shift back in the day,
but, the refrain goes, what has he done
for us lately? It’s reasonable to ask. His-
tory is full of artists who made crucial
contributions in one decade and then
just puttered along through those that
followed. Johns, like Picasso again, is
unusual in the precocity of his early
achievement and in his longevity, but a
chart of his “works cited” in the art his-
torical literature would take the shape
of a playground slide—flags and targets
at the top of the ladder followed by a
long downward slope. So while “Mind/
Mirror” performs a valuable service
in illuminating the shape and texture
of that early paradigm shift, it also,
and perhaps more importantly, follows
the artist into the present. Johns’s last
New York retrospective took place at
MoMA a quarter- century ago. There’s
a lot to catch up on.
T hough Johns is known for endlessly
recycling earlier motifs, he has never
stood still. By the early 1960s, his sta-
ble geometries of stars, bars, and circles
had grown ganglier and more fitful. In
Land’s End (1963, shown in Philadel-
phia) stenciled color names float over
and under an umbrous field of blues
and grays; a ruler lies horizontally in
the semicircle it has inscribed like a
windshield wiper, and a skid of dark
paint rises through the center, topped
with a handprint. The impression of
a storm at sea is inescapable—brief
bits of yellow and red at top recall the
breaking light in The Raft of the Me-
dusa—but the anthemic thrill is sub-
verted by the onsite list of parts: hand,
F ruler, red, yellow, blue. It’s like getting
a joke and having it explained at the
same time.
This darker, more precarious tone has
been attributed to Johns’s breakup with
Rauschenberg, but he had also started
reading Wittgenstein and looking hard
at Duchamp, whose work, he wrote,
“brings into focus the shifting weight
of things, the instability of our defini-
tions and measurements.” To enact that
instability, he created pictures like the
boisterous, sixteen-foot-long mashup
According to What (1964, at the Whit-
ney) that were stylistically eclectic and
overtly linguistic. Aluminum letters on
hinges spell out color names; screen-
printed pseudo-newsprint runs into
smoothly painted gradients and hectic
brushwork; a half-body cast hangs in
an upside- down chair. At the bottom, a
small canvas can be unhooked to reveal
a silhouette of Duchamp. Like a scroll-
ing panorama, it has no center; unlike
a panorama it changes personality at
every seam.
In the 1970s Johns changed ap-
proach again, taking up a motif that,
for the first time, actually meant noth-
ing. The “crosshatches” (a slight mis-
nomer since they don’t actually cross)
are clumps of parallel marks, roughly
the length of adult fingers, a pattern
he once glimpsed on a car driving the
other way on the Long Island Express-
way. Repeated in certain formulations,
they create rolling, spatially confusing
territories. When sufficiently complex
and regular, the structure is sensed sub-
liminally long before it can be named
analytically. The tessellation might
mirror itself, as in the prismatic Ror-
schach painting and prints Corpse and
Mirror, with their ghostly intimation
of a hovering figure, or it might roll up
and down like icons in a slot machine,
as in the Usuyuki series, whose flicker-
ing light is as close to elegance as Johns
has allowed himself to get.
The snapback to recognizable things
came as unexpectedly as the departure
from them. Adapting the pictures-
gathered- on-a-wall format of Amer-
ican still-life painters like Peto and
William Harnett, Johns painted bor-
rowed images in a shallow space. The
9
inventory of Racing Thoughts (1983,
Whitney) includes an avalanche
warning with skull and crossbones, a
jigsaw-puzzle portrait of Leo Castelli,
a Barnett Newman lithograph, a Mona
Lisa repro held up with trompe l’oeil
tape, a trompe l’oeil nail holding noth-
ing. A tub faucet and handles rise from
the lower edge, suggesting a bathroom,
but what to make of the quirky, puck-
ered pot, the white ceramic in the form
of a Rubin face- or-vase illusion, or the
tightly scripted interlocking shapes
that cover the left side of the canvas?
If viewers once wondered what Johns
meant by the images he chose, at least
they had known where they came from.
That was understood to be the point of
“things the mind already knows.” Now
it seemed they required footnotes. The
odd pot, we learned, was the creation
of George Ohr, the self-styled Mad
Potter of Biloxi, whose work Johns col-
lects. (“There is something interesting
about such a primitive way of making
forms, something touching in its fra-
gility. It is all about labor and skill.”)
Even more eccentric, the interlocking
design was revealed as a tracing of
the bloated, scabrous wretch in Mat-
thias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece
(1512–1516), cropped and inverted.
These developments were greeted
with bafflement and a bit of the pique
provoked by inside jokes. People who
had venerated Johns as the champion
of the impersonal and epistemic were
aggrieved. The word “hermetic” gained
currency. The four “Seasons” paintings
brought further autobiographical ele-
ments, including the painted shadow of
the artist himself. Mirror’s Edge (1992)
added a pinwheel galaxy and the floor
plan of his grandfather’s house, recre-
ated from memory and pictured as a
curling blueprint. There was a sense,
Carroll Dunham writes in one of the
best essays in the catalog for “Mind/
Mirror,” that Johns’s “‘things the mind
already knows’ had evolved into things
his mind already knows.”
At the same time, however, Johns
was inventing some entirely new, com-
pletely accessible conceits. A folded,
hanging cloth might call up thoughts
of Veronica’s veil or Raphaelle Peale’s
marvelous Venus Rising from the
Sea—A Deception (circa 1822), but it
can also be understood simply as a pic-
tured cloth. In Montez Singing (1989,
Whitney) the features of a face have
wandered off to eccentric locations: the
eyes stick like limpets to the margins,
one in an upper corner, one lower on
the opposite side; the lips lounge along
the bottom, while a slight squiggle of a
nose floats free. Where the brow would
be is a small picture of a boat with red
sails, suspended from a faux nail. It is
a painter’s painting, taking things that
everyone has played with and arrang-
ing them in a way that is unprecedented
yet coherent. There is a footnote here
as well: Montez Bramlett Johns was
Johns’s step-grandmother and “Red
Sails in the Sunset” was a song she
sang, though as Dunham points out,
the information may deepen empathy,
but it explains nothing.
Two decades on, it is easier to see all
these pictures not as perverse rebuses
but as further adventures in painting
and seeing. “The task of art,” the phi-
losopher Emmanuel Alloa writes in
another fine catalog essay, “is that of un-
doing recognition, so as to rivet the gaze
to what is far too well known.” So, like
the Montez face, we need to point our
10
eyes in different directions, ask them to
do different things, while holding onto
a sense of connection. The Isenheim
tracings (Johns has done many) can be
seen as an extension of the crosshatches:
How attenuated can a structure be and
still register as ordered in the mind?
And while it may feel like a game of
“I Spy” played out in someone else’s
attic (albeit a beautifully arranged
one), this mode also hints at the uncon-
strained connectedness of the world—
the sense, as William James put it a
century ago, that
no one point of view or attitude
commands everything at once in
Jasper Johns: Untitled, 2017
a synthetic scheme. . . . Things are
“with” one another in many ways,
but nothing includes everything,
or dominates everything. The
word “and” trails along after every
sentence.
One of the things that becomes clear
in “Mind/Mirror” is that Johns’s art
has never been one with the moment
of its making. There was always a back-
ward glance, even in that first flag, with
its underlayment of cast- off newspa-
pers, its fresh paint made to look like
it had been around the block. He did
not paint his first fifty-star flag until
1965, six years after Hawaii joined
the Union. In 1960, when he decided
to make a sculpture of a flashlight, he
found it difficult to locate the right
model: “I looked for a week for what I
thought looked like an ordinary flash-
light, and I found all kinds of flashlights
with red plastic shields, wings on the
sides, all kinds of things.” Finally, he
found one that looked like the ordinary
object he had in mind, the kind he had
used as a kid.
“Everything I do is attached to my
childhood,” he has acknowledged.
Beyond floor plans and flashlights, it
is tempting to see in his attraction to
modest objects and unstable mean- photographs of grief—the series titled
ings the shadow of a child passed from Regrets is built on a tattered picture
house to house. (This is not particu- of Lucian Freud, posed by Francis
larly fanciful: the 1986 painting Spring Bacon in a state of theatrical despair,
and its many related works feature the while Farley Breaks Down and related
shadow of a child and a ladder bor- works use a Life magazine photograph
rowed from Picasso’s Minotaur Moving shot by Larry Burrows in 1965 of a dis-
His House.) His early subjects were traught young marine after the death
the stuff of the schoolroom: numbers, of a comrade in Vietnam. In both bod-
alphabets, flags, maps, color names, ies of work, the initial photographs are
rulers. The vertical hand that erupts mirrored and doubled, deprived of the
through Land’s End may mark the sig- expected color values, so the picture
nal of a drowning man, but it is also the initially presents itself as an intricate
urgent gesture of a child who thinks he all- over mosaic of shapes. Let your eye
knows the answer. roam, however, and identifiable ele-
Mastery of these symbols is dangled ments gradually rise to the surface—an
before children as equivalent to mas- elbow first, then a boot, then a head
buried in a hand.
John Lund/Low Road Studio/Forman Family Collection
In one poised and lovely monotype
in Philadelphia, Johns has reflected the
central action along two vertical axes,
creating unexpected contours: a trap-
ezoidal space between arm and crate
blooms into something like a heart,
while crumpled fatigues and a boot
heel frame an intricate urn-like shape,
a face-vase without a face. In the staged
Freud/Bacon photo, mirrored negative
space conveniently outlines a skull, a
stagey Halloween metonym, death at
arm’s length. In the Farley/Burrows
picture of real and visceral mourning,
the mirror produced nothing that can
be recognized, just a particular and at-
tentive absence.
What has Johns done for us lately?
Pretty much what he did for us in the
first place: he continually disrupts the
mental shorthand that converts com-
plex visual experience into simple men-
tal categories, with all their buttressing
opinions, received wisdom, and per-
sonal preferences. In a world (includ-
ing the art world) where “visuals” are
used to simplify arguments and kindle
beliefs, Johns reminds us that dou-
bling, bifurcation, and uncertainty are
the terms of vision itself. Writing about
the fraught confrontation between ab-
straction and figuration in the 1950s,
Roberta Bernstein notes that Johns
“bridged the divide by refuting polar-
ization.” It hardly seems necessary to
tery of the world, but there are moments emphasize the relevance to our own
when the conventions of the adult world moment.
are suddenly revealed as such—when Five hundred objects is a lot to take
you realize that the border on a map is in, but two works in “Mind/Mirror” in
not drawn on the ground, or when some- particular remain lodged in my brain.
one tells you that base ten’s zero through One is the tiny Gray Numbers men-
nine is just one of a potentially infinite tioned above. The other is one of a
number of ways to represent quantities. body of works made around the turn of
Those moments may be terrifying or the millennium, all featuring a length
elating or both, but their message is sim- of white string draped across the can-
ple: there is another way to see things. vas, dropping and rising in a catenary
This is the delight of ambiguous im- curve (most familiar from suspension
ages that pop up so often in Johns, like bridges). In Untitled (1998, Whitney)
the face-vase or the duck-rabbit (which the string crosses a slender canvas that
drew the attention of Wittgenstein, and is half covered with the design of a
which Johns has paired with the child’s “Chinese” Halloween costume Johns
shadow). Here instability is limited to remembered from childhood, half with
two positions, which you can control: harlequin diamonds in the colors of
changing your mind about what’s im- midcentury linoleum. The string de-
portant turns one subject into another. scends from the top of a wooden slat
As far back as the 1960s Johns had almost to the picture’s bottom edge
made flags in inverted colors (green, before staging a small recovery (see
black, and orange rather than red, illustration on page 9). As usual with
white, and blue) to invite retinal after- Johns, it is hard to say why this is so af-
effects: if you stare at the image for sev- fecting—sad, sweet, yet robust—other
eral seconds and then move your eyes, than to note that the point of a paradox
you see a color- corrected phantom, a is not to resolve it, but to find insight in
picture that exists only in your mind being strung between two points.
and only for a moment. Contrary to the “Not knowing exactly is something
deflating adult adage, you can have it that I find fascinating,” Johns has ob-
both ways. served. “Whatever the basis, it probably
Johns has spent much of the past de- moves one to see life in an ambiguous
cade tampering with tracings of two way.” It’s a lesson that never gets old.  Q
The New York Review
 Who Does Éric Zemmour Speak For?
In mid-November Éric Zemmour, the
French far-right presidential candidate,
professional provocateur, and virulent
Islamophobe, made a campaign stop
in Bordeaux, one of France’s most
affluent bourgeois strongholds. The
hall was packed, notably with young
white men in baseball caps who came
for the rousing speech, but there were
also many women, several of whom
thanked Zemmour for his rejection of
“feminist dogma.” Thousands of peo-
ple were lined up outside to buy copies
of his latest book, La France n’a pas dit
son dernier mot (France Hasn’t Had
Its Last Word). Whatever happens in
the election next April—Zemmour’s
chances of winning are almost nonex-
istent—he will certainly sell boatloads
of books, as he does every time he pub-
lishes another lament about national
decline or “suicide,” as the title of his
best-known book, Le Suicide français
(2014), proclaims.1 That is perhaps the
moral of this story, if there is one: Zem-
mour responds to a deep and profound
French anxiety that the nation is in free
fall, a downward spiral that is somehow
the fault of Muslim immigrants. He of-
fers a crude exaggeration of what many
believe but few dare to admit.
In France, moralistic hand-wringing
over “decadence” is an intellectual
tradition, and in some ways Zemmour
is merely a continuation of the fear-
mongering of the fin de siècle and the
early twentieth century, when the likes
of Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras,
and Édouard Drumont decried the per-
ceived erosion of the organic national
community. But most of all, Zemmour
is a contemporary media creation,
foisted onto the public by CNews,
France’s equivalent of Fox News, which
is backed by the right-wing billion-
aire Vincent Bolloré.2 He has used his
platform as a television commentator
and, until recently, a columnist for Le
Figaro to launch endless culture wars
that far more reasonable people then
feel compelled to fight. He claims that
he is motivated by a sense of history,
French history in particular, but there
are moments when that history catches
up with him.
That night in Bordeaux was one of
those. Toward the end of the evening
Zemmour allowed a few questions
from the audience. The first came from
an older man who introduced himself
as the founder of an organization called
Vigilance Halal, and he asked whether
Zemmour, if elected president, would
ban ritual slaughter, which is part of the
dietary rules for both observant Mus-
lims and Jews. “You are the only candi-
date to say that Islam is not compatible
with the republic,” the man said. This
much, at least, is true. Zemmour has
repeatedly declared that Islam does
not belong in France, has been twice
convicted in French courts of racism
1
Reviewed in these pages by Mark
Lilla, March 19, 2015.
2 latan, and most of those who love him
See the in- depth report by Raphaëlle
Bacqué and Ariane Chemin, “Com-
ment Vincent Bolloré mobilise son
empire médiatique pour peser sur la
présidentielle,” Le Monde, November
16, 2021.
January 13, 2022
James McAuley
Éric Zemmour at a campaign rally, Bordeaux, France, November 2021
against Muslims and minorities, and
has even floated the idea of deport-
ing certain Muslim citizens. The man
clearly approved of these antics, but
he phrased his question more clearly
to make sure Zemmour had heard. “I
would like to know if you would ban re-
ligious sacrifice,” he said.
There were murmurs of discomfort
among the audience, who at that mo-
ment were forced to confront the one
thing about Zemmour that everyone
knows but hardly anyone will mention:
he is a Jew—a Jew who spits on Jew-
ish history, is further to the right than
France’s traditional far right, and has
elicited the ire and embarrassment of
institutional French Jewish leaders
as he seeks to deny the real history of
the Holocaust in France. Even more
perversely, Zemmour has allied him-
self with unrepentant anti- Semites
like Jean-Marie Le Pen—the ninety-
three-year- old patriarch of the French
far right and convicted Holocaust de-
nier—who are still somehow fixtures in
French public debate. But he is a prac-
ticing Jew nevertheless, a member of an
Orthodox synagogue in Paris who grew
up in a kosher home, as he describes
in detail in his book Destin français
(2018).
Zemmour became visibly uncom-
fortable at the question about ritual
slaughter, even though moments like
these—attempts to reconcile the real-
ity of his identity with the cartoonish
toxicity of his political program, to the
extent that he has one—are inevitable.
A man who is never at a loss for words
suddenly found himself a little tongue-
tied. “I confess it’s a difficult question,”
he said, searching for a pivot. “I would
try to find a compromise. I think we
should work toward a compromise.” As
I watched him struggle to answer, it oc-
curred to me that he knew what he was
really being asked, which was whether
he was French or Jewish, an imaginary
binary that exists in the minds of many
supporters he has cultivated. This is the
paradox of Éric Zemmour: those who
accept him as he is see him as a char-
might want a fundamental part of him
to disappear.
Central to Zemmour’s discourse is
the decidedly French anxiety of le grand
remplacement (the great replacement),
(Reconquer), which harkens back to
Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg/Getty Images
the Reconquista, the centuries-long
military campaign by which Christians
rid medieval Iberia of its Muslim con-
querors. But that campaign ultimately
expelled the Jews of Spain as well.
Zemmour can neither speak for nor
claim to represent the French Jewish
community, Europe’s largest and argu-
ably most vibrant. I am not French, but
I am Jewish, and my experience of Jew-
ish communal life in France during my
six years here has mostly been one of
delight at its intellectual rigor and pub-
lic pride. The rabbi of our Paris syna-
gogue, Delphine Horvilleur, one of the
most prominent voices in global liberal
Judaism today, is a good example: she
is a best-selling author, a proponent of
interfaith dialogue in a time of mount-
ing public hysteria over both Islam and
Islamism, and a respectful participant
in public debates that sometimes have
the conspiracy theory elaborated by the nothing to do with Jewish affairs. This
French writer Renaud Camus, portend- mindset probably characterizes the
ing that the white Christian majority of attitudes of most other representative
France and Europe is being “replaced” members of the French Jewish estab-
by hordes of nonwhite, and especially lishment, but Zemmour nevertheless
Muslim, migrants from North and expresses an extreme distortion of an
West Africa. That theory, of course, anti-Muslim sentiment that is very pro-
has reverberated elsewhere, including nounced among some segments of the
in the US. Behind the demographic community.
and existential nightmare of the great The complicated and undeniable
replacement, there is an obvious nos- truth is that Islamist anti- Semitism
talgia for a world that never quite ex- poses an urgent and increasingly vio-
isted. Unsurprisingly, this yearning for lent threat to Jews in France. In March
an atavistic France is the essence of 2012 an Algerian-French gunman,
Zemmour’s campaign pitch; he styled Mohammed Merah, targeted the Ozar
himself a latter- day Charles de Gaulle Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse,
in the official announcement of his can- killing the rabbi and three children
didacy at the end of November. under ten, one of whom was an eight-
But there is an obvious violence year- old girl he caught by the hair and
too. Fear of the great replacement has shot point blank. Incidents like these
generated deadly attacks around the have been occurring ever since: the
globe—most notably in Christchurch, attack on the kosher supermarket in
New Zealand, in March 2019, when 2015; the 2017 killing of Sarah Halimi,
fifty- one Muslims were shot dead by who was hurled out a window to her
a gunman in two different mosques. death; and the torture and murder
During his appearance in Bordeaux of the eighty-five-year- old Holocaust
Zemmour condoned more violence to survivor Mireille Knoll in 2018. I will
stop “ethnic substitution.” “We should always remember that during my first
be free to denounce those who attack year in Paris, we were instructed to
us . . . those who want us to disappear!” leave the synagogue after Kol Nidre
he said. Yet he panders to those who services in groups of three, with no vis-
might well prefer the ethnic substitu- ible signs of being Jewish.
tion of his own Jewishness—a great re- There are ways in which Zemmour’s
placement of himself. hostility, however vulgar and violent it
may be, channels a feeling of anger and
even despair in the French Jewish com-
Soumission, the best-selling 2015 munity. At other times, he sounds like
novel by Michel Houellebecq, is a para- a Likud hard-liner, especially of the
ble about the fall of France—this time Netanyahu era. 3 “It’s simple, if I dare
to the Islamists, not the Nazis. In the to say it,” Zemmour told me when I in-
book, which happened to be published terviewed him in 2018. “Anti- Semitism
the same day as the Charlie Hebdo was reborn in France with the arrival
massacre and two days before the re- of the populations from Muslim ter-
lated assault on a kosher supermar- ritories, where anti- Semitism—if you
ket on the outskirts of Paris, a North like—is cultural.” But homegrown
African Islamist wins France’s 2022 French anti-Semitism is itself a cultural
presidential election. So far, the can- tradition, and Zemmour has arguably
didate sucking up all the oxygen in done more than anyone else in public
the real-life 2022 election is indeed a life today to revive its vitriol and its
North African ideologue, or rather an vehemence.
ideologue of North African descent,
but he is not the character of Houel-
lebecq’s imagination: he is a Jew from Z emmour’s innumerable provoca-
an Algerian family, not a Tunisian Is- tions unite the obscene and the absurd,
lamist. The great replacement is his
political promise, and perhaps also his 3
See Anshel Pfeffer, “Eric Zemmour
personal promise. After all, the decid- and Benjamin Netanyahu, Two Jews
edly unironic name of his newly estab- with a Shared Dream,” Haaretz, De-
lished political party is “Reconquête” cember 10, 2021.
11
and he has a twisted obsession with
revising—and even denying—some
of the most painful episodes in the
French and Jewish pasts. He has dis-
puted, for instance, the innocence of
Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army cap-
tain wrongfully convicted of treason in
1894. Dreyfus’s innocence, Zemmour
has said, is “not obvious.” He has re-
peatedly defended Philippe Pétain,
the leader of the Vichy government,
which openly collaborated with Nazi
Germany in deporting Jews from
France during the Holocaust. “Vichy
protected French Jews and gave up the
foreign Jews,” he said in September
on CNews. This is the same defense
that Pierre Laval, a senior Vichy of-
ficial, offered in his postwar trial for
collaboration in October 1945. He
was subsequently executed by firing
squad.
But Zemmour insults the Jews of the
present as much as the Jews of the past.
In La France n’a pas dit son dernier
mot, he writes that the families of the
Jewish victims of the 2012 Toulouse
attack were less French because they
chose to bury their murdered relatives
in Israel:
Anthropologists have taught us
that where we are from is the coun-
try where we are buried. When it
comes to leaving their bones, they
especially did not choose France,
foreigners above all and wanting to
stay that way beyond death.
These are things that even the most
outspoken far-right ideologues stop
short of saying, even if they happen to
agree.
12
“To know that a man like him,
who openly questions the innocence
of Dreyfus, who rehabilitates Vichy,
who reopens the debate on the dual
identity of Jews—there is a consensus
among French Jews that this is nothing
less than an encouragement of anti-
Semitism in France,” Bernard-Henri
Lévy, perhaps Zemmour’s most out-
spoken public critic, told me recently.
“The only difference between Éric
and me is that he’s Jewish,” Jean-Marie
Le Pen told Le Monde in October. The
details in the interview are something
even Houellebecq could scarcely have
invented. In January 2020 Le Pen and
his wife, Jany, dined with Zemmour at
the opulent Hôtel Le Bristol in Paris.
The Le Pens brought with them a dear
friend: Ursula Painvin, born Ursula
von Ribbentrop, the daughter of Joa-
chim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germa-
ny’s foreign minister. Painvin thought
very highly of Zemmour and sent
him her “most admiring and friendly
thoughts.” Well-to-do racists like her
love Zemmour, because he can parrot
their views but will not be ushered off
the stage. What better way to deny or
diminish the Holocaust than through
the mouth of a Jew? As Le Pen put it
to Le Monde, “It’s hard to call [Zem-
mour] a Nazi or a fascist. This gives
him greater freedom.”
I once asked Le Pen what he thought
his legacy would be. He answered me
immediately, without pausing to reflect:
“After all, they can say, ‘Le Pen was
right.’” In a sense, Zemmour is an unex-
pected gift to the anti-republican, anti-
European, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant
far right of Le Pen and his predeces-
sors. The Jewish polemicist is the way
they win, if not at the ballot box then in
the minds of the public.
Z emmour was born in the Paris
suburbs in 1958, to a family of Alge-
rian—specifically Berber—Jewish im-
migrants. He was raised in a religiously
observant family but one that, in his
telling, considered its identity a private
matter. “The street should not suffer
the smallest affirmation of a religious
identity,” he writes. He looks not to the
history of French Jews during World
War II, who believed in the values of
the republic only to be betrayed, but to
the history of the French Empire and
of the Jews in France’s Algerian col-
ony, who became French citizens only
in 1870, through the Crémieux Decree.
(Muslims in the French colonies did
not receive the same rights.)
Despite that newly conferred status,
Algerian Jews initially faced orga-
nized and violent anti-Semitism from
French Algerians most of all, and they
lost their French citizenship during
the Vichy years—which in many cases
did not seem to erode their image of
France. That inconvenient fact has cer-
tainly not eroded Zemmour’s image
of it. As he writes in Destin Français:
“My ancestors became Berber-French
after having tasted peace and French
civilization.” But many Algerian Jews
also experienced violent Muslim anti-
Semitism during the Algerian War
of Independence between 1954 and
1962, a memory that lingers and that
Zemmour has now mobilized to the
extreme.
The France in which Zemmour
was raised was in the throes of an-
other struggle: how to remember the
trauma of the Holocaust. In the years
immediately after the war, France was
the crucible of both the push to com-
memorate the catastrophe that did
not yet have a name and the growing
movement to deny that catastrophe. It
was in Grenoble in the spring of 1943
that the Ukrainian-born rabbi Isaac
Schneersohn established the Centre
de Documentation Juive Contempo-
rain, the early version of Europe’s first
major Holocaust archive. It eventually
became the museum Mémorial de la
Shoah, on the site in Paris’s Marais
neighborhood of Schneersohn’s Me-
morial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr,
Europe’s first major Holocaust memo-
rial, the cornerstone of which was laid
in May 1953, before Israel had decided
to establish Yad Vashem.
France also became the epicen-
ter of denialism and in many ways its
strongest citadel. Although Holocaust
denial immediately followed the war
everywhere in Europe, in France there
was a veritable movement. Nothing
quite compared to its self-styled in-
tellectual pretentions. At least at the
beginning, it was often an elite, even
literary phenomenon, a coda to the fin-
de-siècle and early-twentieth- century
anti- Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair,
propagated by writers and thinkers
who saw the Jews as once again invad-
ing and dominating their country—this
time with fabricated victimhood.
In 1948, a fateful year in Jewish
history, the fascist writer Maurice
Bardèche published Nuremberg ou la
Terre promise (Nuremberg or the Prom-
ised Land), the first major attempt to
publicly deny the Holocaust; the book
was initially conceived as a response to
the Nuremberg trials and the establish-
ment of the State of Israel. There has
been a robust French denial industry
ever since. In his anti- Semitic journal,
La Défense de l’Occident, Bardèche
published Robert Faurisson, who went
on to publicly question the existence of
the gas chambers in Le Monde in 1978,
one of the greatest embarrassments in
the newspaper’s history.
This was the France in which Zem-
mour was formed. He was eleven in
1969 when Marcel Ophüls released
The Sorrow and the Pity, his acclaimed
documentary that exposed the extent
of collaboration with the Nazi occu-
pation in the city of Clermont-Ferrand
and that was censored by the French
government for some time thereafter.
He was thirteen when the American
historian Robert Paxton published—in
a new French edition—Vichy France,
his groundbreaking work on Vichy’s
complicity with the Nazis, which shook
the French establishment to its core.
He was nineteen when Le Monde pub-
lished the first of Faurisson’s infamous
letters about the gas chamber; thirty-
three when Jean-Marie Le Pen first
referred to the gas chambers as a “de-
tail” in the history of World War II; and
thirty-nine when Maurice Papon, who
sent hundreds of Jewish children from
Bordeaux to the Nazi concentration
camps in the 1940s, was finally put on
trial. But for Zemmour, all this is the
sign of a culture overly invested in self-
flagellation. “It’s a question of fighting
this repentance that kills us,” he said in
September, “in order to lift up France.”
Zemmour’s candidacy has essen-
tially become a campaign against an
edifice of memory that remains fragile,
however entrenched it may seem. For
Henry Rousso, a prominent French
historian who has written extensively
on the subject, the problem is that once
public Holocaust memory became ac-
cepted by the establishment, it was seen
as yet another part of the establishment
for populists to tear down. “The recog-
nition of Vichy, and particularly of the
Shoah, was the great objective of the
memory wars—in France but [also]
across the Western world,” Rousso told
me.
It’s a pillar of contemporary mo-
rality; the Shoah constitutes the
reference to absolute evil, the
crime to which we compare all
others. When [Zemmour] attacks
this understanding, he simply re-
cycles something banal on the
right—a dislike for the question
of repentance—but he goes much
further. He adds a dimension of
provocation.
“A ll historians are revisionists,”
Zemmour told me when we met in 2018.
He then explained his own method—or
lack thereof: “I don’t consider myself a
professional historian in the sense that
I don’t go to the archives to exhume
new pieces, et cetera.” Obsession with
picking away at the past, and the Holo-
caust in particular, is not as bizarre in
France as it appears from abroad. One
of the oddest, most disturbing pecu-
liarities of French life is that so many of
the debates over the soul of the nation
involve Jews as an abstract concept,
often without insight from any actual
members of France’s Jewish commu-
nity (in which Zemmour was raised).
In the French public imagination, Jews
often become metaphors in the way
The New York Review
that Jean-Paul Sartre imagined them,
a figurative embodiment of something
besides the real people they are.
The centrality of the Jewish meta-
phor has deep roots in modern history.
During the French Revolution, France
became the first European state to
emancipate its Jewish population, and
the very particular French conceit of
universalism essentially became a de-
bate about Jews: what to do with them,
how to integrate them.4 The republic’s
answer to those questions—the equal-
ity of all citizens in the eyes of the state,
but also the priority of citizenship above
all other affiliations—eventually led
to the unparalleled success of Jews in
commercial, political, and cultural life.
Jews were exemplary republicans—les
fous de la République (crazy for the
Republic), in the famous phrase of the
historian Pierre Birnbaum. 5 But this
made the republic appear, to its harsh-
est critics, as a “Jewish” construct—la
France juive, to quote the title of an
1886 book, the most infamous anti-
Semitic text in French history.
Less than a decade after its publi-
cation, the Dreyfus Affair polarized
the entire nation. Dreyfus the Jew was
a metaphor, not a real person. For his
defenders, he was the France of reason
and rationality; for his opponents, he
was the anti-France of Jews, foreign-
4
Here I am indebted to Maurice Sam-
uels, The Right to Difference: French
Universalism and the Jews (University
of Chicago Press, 2016).
5
Birnbaum’s Les fous de la République:
Histoire politique des juifs d’État de
Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992)
remains an essential reference.
ers, and immigrants. The conclusion of
the affair—the exoneration of Dreyfus
and the suppression of the Catholic
Church’s domination of civic life and
public education—was the triumph of
one metaphor over the other, not to
mention the origin of the professed val-
ues of the republic we know today.
The memory of the Holocaust—and
Jewish affairs in general—is a constant
reference in nearly every French de-
bate over identity politics, Islamism,
and even national decline, three of
Zemmour’s favorite subjects. That his-
tory is constantly being renegotiated,
but appeals to it also long ago became
a political reflex among non-Jews in
particular, the ultimate means of shut-
ting down one’s opponent in public life,
regardless of the subject at hand. The
hashtag “Juifs” trends almost weekly
on French Twitter, typically when a
non-Jewish politician or advocate com-
pares something to the Holocaust—for
example, making an analogy between
Covid vaccine passes and the yellow
star—or argues that a non-Jewish ad-
versary has not thought sufficiently
about the Jews. That such performative
philo-Semitism might itself be a form
of anti- Semitism—sometimes appeal-
ing to an imagined Jewish power struc-
ture, othering Jews in a different way
than more conventional discrimination
does—appears to occur to no one ex-
cept perhaps France’s actual Jews, who
in any case are largely irrelevant to this
psychodrama.
A s a political candidate, Zemmour
seems already to be floundering. But
this is almost beside the point. What
matters is what he represents, which
is not the far right but a distortion of
the French establishment itself: he of-
fers an extreme version of biases and
perspectives that crystalized long ago,
especially on the question of Islam. It
is the establishment that he ultimately
embodies, no matter how much its rep-
resentatives decry him (and rightly so).
The former columnist has made him-
self into something of a collective id, an
ugly mirror that reflects the raw sensi-
bilities of many in France.
Without question, Zemmour’s rise
is inextricably linked to a lingering
trauma. France has suffered the most
brutal of the recent ISIS and other Is-
lamist terrorist attacks in Western
Europe. In addition to the massacre
on Charlie Hebdo journalists and the
kosher supermarket in January 2015,
there was the the assault on the Bata-
clan concert hall and cafés across Paris
in November 2015 that killed 20 peo-
ple. There was the killing of Jacques
Hamel, an eighty-five-year- old priest,
in a village church in July 2016, and
the slaughter on the Promenade des
Anglais in Nice on Bastille Day 2016.
Most recently, there was the beheading
of Samuel Paty, a public schoolteacher
in the Paris suburbs, in 2020 for the
apparent crime of having shown cari-
catures of the Prophet Muhammad to
students in a lesson about freedom of
speech.6
For years—decades, even—one of
the urgent questions in French polit-
ical life has been the integration and
6
See Marc Weitzmann, “A Rising Tide
of Violence in France,” The New York
Review, February 11, 2021.
assimilation of the country’s Muslim
population, believed to be the largest in
Europe. That question has only grown
more urgent in the aftermath of these
devastating attacks, especially since a
number of them have been perpetrated
by young men with a very similar social
profile: French citizens whose grand-
parents arrived from former colonial
territories in North Africa in the 1960s
and 1970s and whose families enjoyed
at least some level of success in France,
however moderate. Some of these
young men are even products of the
same vaunted education system that
produced both Zemmour and French
president Emmanuel Macron, yet these
young men managed to fall under the
spell of jihadist extremism. The ques-
tion is why. And answering that ques-
tion has become a bitter fault line in
French public debate.
This was the issue in the highly publi-
cized debate in 2016 between the well-
known French political scientists Gilles
Kepel and Olivier Roy: in brief, Kepel
argued that radicalization stemmed
from Islamic fundamentalism, Roy that
Islamism is merely the most available
way for youths who feel excluded from
French society to express their frustra-
tions. Macron has clearly sided with
Kepel in this debate, but the way his
government has responded to the issue
of terrorist violence after Paty’s be-
heading has been unfortunately to suc-
cumb to public hysteria, no matter the
cost. Zemmour’s line on these events
has always been the same: with or with-
out attacks, he has long maintained
that Islam—not just Islamism—is in-
compatible with the French Republic.
What is striking, even chilling, is how

THE STORIES AND LIVES BEHIND THE ART

NEW BOOKS FROM UC PRESS

“A lively, loping study of Hunter S. “Vividly captures the world

Thompson as litterateur.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Selz manages to capture the
expansive, unwieldy story of
Francis—a vivacious, ego-
absorbed searcher—in both his
intimate and larger-than-life
moments.”
—Hyperallergic
from which The Lodger, the
foundational Hitchcockian film,
“A powerful case for The Great
emerged.”
Escape’s prominence within the
—Sidney Gottlieb, editor of
Hitchcock on Hitchcock
generic evolution and the larger
sweep of motion-picture history.”
—Noah Isenberg, author of Edgar G.
Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins

www.ucpress.edu

January 13, 2022 13

 the self-professed liberals who run the
country and style themselves as the
last bulwark against fascism have now
essentially adopted this view, whether
politybooks.com they realize it or not.
The proudly centrist Macron, elected
in 2017 on a groundswell of opposition
to Marine Le Pen, has embarked on a
project of combating “Islamist separat-
ism,” but its utter lack of seriousness has
Never Forget Your Name been clear from the start. Perhaps the
most extreme—and Zemmourian—
The Children of Auschwitz aspect of the government’s response
to “Islamist separatism” has been its
Alwin Meyer overt crackdown on academic freedom
and what it calls—with total earnest-
“Eloquent, powerful and abounding with ness—Islamo- gauchisme, or Islamo-
humanity.” leftism, in French universities, as if
Monica Tempian, Victoria University of the perpetrators of the recent attacks
Wellington somehow became radical extremists in
seminars at Sciences Po. In February
Cloth | $35.00 Frédérique Vidal, Macron’s minister
of higher education, told CNews that
Islamo-leftism “plagues society as a
The World According whole and the university is not imper-
vious.” More than six hundred academ-
to China ics signed an open letter in Le Monde
Elizabeth C. Economy against Vidal’s comments, and their
names were quickly published on a far-
“One of the most important scholars of right blog that sought to destroy their
reputations online and to close oppor-
China in a generation.” tunities for students who might wish to
Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition study very real phenomena such as dis-
crimination against Muslims in France.
Cloth | $29.95
Under mounting criticism, especially
from CNRS, France’s premier academic
The First Days of Berlin research body, Vidal eventually walked
back her declaration of war.
Ulrich Gutmair
“captivating” T his is France’s version of the “war
Saul Friedländer, University of California, on woke” that has become the fever
dream of the American right. The dif-
Los Angeles
ference, though, is that in France, the
Paper | $19.95 loudest and most influential voices op-
posing what Macron called “social sci-
ence theories entirely imported from
The Soviet Passport the United States” are from the center
left; Zemmour is by no means the sole
Albert Baiburin knight charging those windmills. For
him, the main threat to contemporary
“Thoroughly researched, vividly written and
France is foreigners. “You just have to
moving.” look at what’s happening in the streets
Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge to see the great replacement in prog-
ress,” he said in mid-December. But
Cloth | $45.00 the same political establishment that
wastes no time in rejecting Zemmour
has nevertheless identified an appar-
Cedric Robinson ently similar threat in the foreign ideas
The Time of the Black Radical that often defend the same foreign
people Zemmour attacks. This may
Tradition be a different “replacement” anxiety,
Joshua Myers but it’s a replacement anxiety all the
same.
“A tour de force.” Macron’s hard-liner on these issues
is his education minister, Jean-Michel
Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
Blanquer, who in October established
Paper | $26.95 a think tank, Le Laboratoire de la Ré-
publique, designed to stop the spread
of the allegedly “woke” ideas that, he
Black is the Journey, told Le Monde, are at the “antipodes”
of the republic. In that interview, Blan-
Africana the Name quer said that there is a
Maboula Soumahoro republican vision opposed to this
“An intimate text that will change how you doctrine that fragments and di-
vides, and has conquered certain
look at race and blackness.” political, media, and academic
Mame-Fatou Niang, author of Identités milieux by proposing a logic of
françaises victimhood to the detriment of
the democratic foundations of our
Paper | $16.95 society.
I had this exchange in mind when I
heard Zemmour respond to a ques-
@politybooks facebook.com/politybooks tion about “le wokeisme” in Bordeaux.
“You are absolutely right,” he told the
man who asked him.
14
This woke ideology, which is to say
the people who pretend to have
awakened to inequalities, suffer-
ing real or imagined in terms of
skin color or gender, is a threat to
freedom of thought, intellectual
health, and to our schools and
universities.
Although their respective motives are
different, there was no significant dif-
ference between Blanquer’s comments
and Zemmour’s: the former legitimizes,
and even cedes ground to, the latter.
Finally, there is the problem of
the veil, the eternal blindspot of the
self-professed French “universalist.”
Unsurprisingly, Zemmour reserves a
particular vehemence for veiled Mus-
lim women, but what is truly surpris-
ing is how many others who purport
to loathe his histrionics do not neces-
sarily disagree with him on this issue,
however they justify their opinion. The
veil is banned in schools along with
other religious signs and symbols, but
it is perfectly legal to wear elsewhere in
public. Many of Macron’s mandarins,
however, seem to relish telling France’s
Muslim citizens that wearing the veil
makes them less welcome in public life
and, in a sense, less French. In 2019
France’s former health minister Agnès
Buzyn complained about a runner’s
hijab introduced by the French sports-
wear brand Decathlon. “I would have
preferred a French brand not to pro-
mote the veil,” she said. Blanquer has
also commented that although it was
technically legal for Muslim mothers
to wear headscarves while chaperoning
school field trips, he wanted to avoid
them “as much as possible.”
Thus to see Zemmour merely as a
fascist avatar is to misunderstand his
significance: he is the natural extension
of the French elite and its xenophobic
provincialism. One of the more absurd
recent spectacles on French televi-
sion took place when CNews followed
Zemmour to Drancy, the Paris suburb
where he spent part of his childhood
and where Jews were interned before
their deportation to Auschwitz. He
stood facing a Muslim woman wear-
ing a headscarf, who turned out to
be someone who is rarely veiled but
who was brought onto CNews for the
purposes of this exchange. “France is
laïcité,” said Zemmour, referencing the
country’s cherished value of secular-
ism. “We are not in an Arabo-Muslim
country. . . . In public life we, we say ‘I
am French.’” The woman took off her
headscarf, which was probably meant
to show her coming to her senses on
live television. As strange as this scene
was, Zemmour said nothing that is not
a fundamental conviction of so many
traditional French feminists and main-
stream republicans who genuinely be-
lieve that no Muslim woman can ever
freely choose to wear the veil. I often
wonder what these people see when
they watch Zemmour, and whether
they can discern their reflection in his
image.
Recently Clément Beaune, Macron’s
secretary of state for European affairs
and one of the government’s most el-
oquent representatives, said, “Éric
Zemmour is bad news for France. He
is the opposite of France, the hatred of
France.” He is certainly bad news, but
he is not the opposite of France. In re-
vealing and disconcerting ways, Éric
Zemmour is France. Q
—December 16, 2021
The New York Review

The End of Love:
A Sociology of Negative Relations
by Eva Illouz.
Polity, 315 pp., $19.95 (paper)
It was a September afternoon in 1796,
and Mary Wollstonecraft had one
thing on her mind. “What say you,”
she wrote to her lover William God-
win, “may I come to your house, about
eight—to philosophize?” This use of
code was typical. If she wanted him
she would ask to borrow books or ink;
he liked to say he needed soothing,
like a sick child. In his journal God-
win used dots and dashes to log what
he and Wollstonecraft had done, when
they had done it, and where. After their
third date he wrote, “chez moi, toute.”
Were Godwin and Wollstonecraft
having casual sex? Sure. Neither was
interested in marriage, which Woll-
stonecraft thought turned husbands
and wives into tyrants and despots.
Godwin went even further, blasting
monogamy as “an affair of property”
and “the most odious of all monopo-
lies.” If Wollstonecraft hadn’t become
pregnant they might eventually have
parted ways, since she and Godwin
believed that human beings should be
able to enter and exit intimacies as they
liked. By the mid-nineteenth century,
this would be called free love.
Free love suggests excess, an abun-
dance of partners as opposed to the
austerity of one person per person. For
its partisans, however, opting out of al-
liances was as important as opting into
them. Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist
who ran for president in 1872, proudly
claimed a “right to love whom I may,
to love as long or as short a period as I
can [and] to change that love every day
if I please.” In the press Woodhull was
known as Mrs. Satan, having crossed
the ultimate line—not just seeking
pleasure but moving on afterward.
In The End of Love, Eva Illouz of-
fers a history of “unloving”: the rise
of a culture in which sexual bonds are
dissolved “on purely subjective emo-
tional and hedonic grounds.” You or I
might call this dating. For Illouz, how-
ever, unloving is neither so ordinary as
to pass without comment nor the sort
of utopian practice Godwin or Wood-
hull hoped it might be. Instead, tem-
porary intimacy—loving for as long or
short a period as one likes—radically
transforms both sex and the self. As a
product of “the capitalist market and
consumer culture,” it reduces human
beings and especially women to goods
for sale, with no expectation of reci-
procity from their partners or even of
breakfast in the morning.
A sociologist by training, Illouz, a
professor at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and the School for Ad-
vanced Studies in the Social Sciences
in Paris, has spent her career arguing
that being white, wealthy, and hetero-
sexual, despite the advantages, is an
absolute bummer. Her books focus on
the erotic lives of urban professionals
in Europe and Israel and have names
like Consuming the Romantic Utopia:
Love and the Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism and Cold Intimacies:
January 13, 2022
Love for Sale
Anahid Nersessian
Corri-Lynn Tetz: Cave, 2018
The Making of Emotional Capitalism.
Despite the titles, any resemblance to
Marxist thought is mostly coincidental.
Instead, the draw of this work lies in
its seductive combination of left-wing
sentiment—in sum, capitalism is bad—
and good old-fashioned sex panic.
The story The End of Love tells
is simple and familiar. Illouz begins
with a brisk history of sexual intimacy
from antiquity to the present era, paus-
ing to distinguish the secular West—
where “love progressively detached
itself from . . . religious cosmology” to
become a nondenominational “life-
style”—from India and China, whose
cultures (she says) viewed romance as
inseparable from “religious values.” In
ancient Greece, male citizens beefed
up their social and political prestige
by penetrating younger boys and get-
ting their wives pregnant; for them,
sex was about power, not feelings. “It
was Christianity,” writes Illouz, “that
slowly made sexuality into a heterosex-
ual and relational bond,” even as sex
itself remained governed by patriarchy
and its economic interests. It did so by
encouraging the ideal of courtly love,
which celebrated passionate but uncon-
summated attachments between men
and women. Not surprisingly, l’amour
courtois owes much to Christian tropes
of virtuous suffering and ennobling
anguish: “Your lovely eyes,” wrote the
twelfth- century troubadour Raimbaut
d’Aurenga to his lady, “are a switch /
That whips my heart into joy/I dare not
desire anything base.”
In the eighteenth century, things
changed. The rise of a middle class in
Britain and Europe was accompanied
by cultural shifts that encouraged peo-
ple (at least, people of means) to see
themselves as free and autonomous.
The state, as John Locke and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau argued, would need
the consent of its subjects to govern,
and private life too became something
to negotiate—like a contract—on fair,
reasonably equitable, and mutually sat-
Corri-Lynn Tetz
isfying terms. In theory if not always in
practice, women were now seen as hav-
ing the right to choose and refuse their
partners. They were no longer their fa-
thers’ or husbands’ property; they were
their own.
In a well-known analysis of political
theory during the Enlightenment, the
Canadian philosopher C. B. Macpher-
son called this way of conceiving the
self “possessive individualism.” It has
its pros and cons. Like all forms of
private ownership, it encourages us to
view the needs or desires of others as
potential threats to our personal free-
dom. However, it also affirms that no
one has the right to own anyone else.
This is a good thing, although it’s nec-
essary to remember that the extension
of this claim to bourgeois women in
Britain and on the Continent did noth-
ing to stop the enslavement of African
and indigenous people in the Americas
and elsewhere.
For what it’s worth, the notion of
possessive individualism is behind
some of the greatest bangers of literary
history. Think of Jane Eyre refusing to
marry Mr. Rochester once she learns
that he is, alas, already married. “I am
no bird,” she says, “and no net ensnares
me; I am a free human being with an
independent will, which I now exert to
leave you.” Indeed, and as Illouz rightly
points out, the modern novel evolves
hand in glove with what she calls “emo-
tional modernity,” a way of being with
others—in love, in marriage, in bed—
that depends on the shared belief that
our bodies and souls are ours to share
or withhold as we please.
It’s a small step, Illouz warns, between
thinking of ourselves as our own and
thinking of ourselves as commodities,
to be signed away on the dotted line.
Contemporary sexual culture turns out
to be the worst of all worlds. We are
still treating society as a marketplace,
where our assets—height, build, favor-
ite bands, secret kinks—are put up for
sale, but we’ve also traded the protec-
tions of the old “contractual logic” for
the “generalized, chronic and struc-
tural uncertainty [that] now presides
over the formation of sexual or roman-
tic relations.” Intimacy, whether casual
or conjugal, no longer comes with the
guarantee that each party can count
on something from the other. There is
scant expectation of honesty, fidelity,
or a future beyond what happened last
night.
Dating apps are partly to blame, but
“unloving,” as Illouz sees it, is a perva-
sive feature of social life both on- and
offline. Defined as any erotic relation-
ship “driven by uncertainty” instead
of being “structured and organized
around clear norms”—such as mar-
riage, or, to use Illouz’s example, the
punishment of a woman’s adultery by
stoning—unloving encompasses every-
thing from making out with a stranger
to getting a divorce. It includes “the
one-night stand, the zipless fuck, the
hookup, the fling, the fuck buddy,
the friends with benefits, casual sex,
casual dating, cybersex,” lingerie ads,
and Sex and the City. It makes common
cause with the decriminalization of sex
work. It lines the pockets of the sex-toy
industry. It is mostly done by hetero-
sexuals, although gay men, if they’re
promiscuous, can unlove too. Not so les-
bians, whom Illouz idealizes as having
less permissive attitudes toward sex and
not caring if their partners get old or fat.
Above all, unloving is character-
ized as sexual activity that is “devoid
of emotions” and features “no or little
involvement of the self.” Here we might
pause to consider the wise words of
the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedg-
wick: “People are different,” from one
another and also from you. It is true
that some of us are not emotionally
and psychologically engaged by casual
sex; it is also true that some of us are.
It is true that some of us experience the
fuck-buddy system as confusing, pain-
ful, and maybe degrading; it is also true
that some of us sleep with our friends
because we trust as well as desire them.
What turns you on may turn my stom-
ach. What makes you feel safe might
make me feel stifled.
Such broad-mindedness escapes Il-
louz, who is committed to the familiar
proposition that women are dupes and
men are pigs. Given her source mate-
rial, she could hardly have drawn a dif-
ferent conclusion. Her evidence comes
from interviews with chronically disap-
pointed wives, girlfriends, and single
ladies along with male subjects who
range from predatory to clueless. She
also extracts testimony from the Inter-
net’s id: Reddit, Facebook, Tinder, and
the personal website of Twilight author
Stephenie Meyer.
Here is a world starkly divided be-
tween male and female, straight and
gay, sex and love, dignity and humili-
ation. None of Illouz’s informants are
identified as people of color, who ap-
pear only as items on an anonymous
man’s list of prospects: “The JAMAI-
CAN WOMAN who was getting her
PhD in literature,” “A VIETNAMESE
LADY who was in dental school,” and
so on. There are no queer people, no
15
trans people, no happy relationships,
and—with the exception of a 1,700-
word Quora post, quoted in full, detail-
ing a drug-fueled threesome—no good
sex. If anything, the book is openly
hostile toward pleasure, which, when
enjoyed “for its own sake,” turns out to
be complicit with capitalist enterprise.
“Jouissance,” Illouz concludes, using
the French word for enjoyment or or-
gasm, “cannot properly find or consti-
tute objects of interactions, love, and
solidarity.” Well, you might ask: Since
when?
The End of Love is not a book about
literature, but it’s still compulsively
literary. Illouz gets her sense of the
present from rummaging through the
dustbin of digital culture, but when
it comes to thinking about the past,
great books—by Plato, Dante, Aus-
ten, Trollope, Tolstoy, Flaubert—are
her primary sources. A historian might
complain that fictional texts don’t have
the same evidentiary heft as court or
household records, census data, and
the like, but let’s leave such grumbling
aside. Stranger by far is that Illouz
presents a view of both sex and litera-
ture so joyless and antiseptic it makes
you wonder why anyone would be in-
terested in them at all.
Not coincidentally, her ideas about
who does what to whom are derived
entirely from representations of high-
status people, among them Athenian
citizens, English aristocrats, and the
French bourgeoisie. Ancient Athens
was a patriarchal slave state, no doubt,
but its material culture—religious ar-
tifacts, paintings on urns, friezes, and
so on—depicts a world of multifarious
identities and acts that don’t make it
into Plato’s Symposium. Literary texts,
too, survive that add much to Illouz’s
crude picture of premodern sexuality,
from the songs of Sappho to some-
times rueful, often raunchy epigrams
by poets like Philodemus—“I’ve been
in love. Who hasn’t? I’ve processed /
Drunkenly after dinner to her door”—
and Dioscorides:
Doris, the rosy- buttocked: on her
bed
I stretched her out, and at her
tender touch
Became immortal. For she
straddled me,
And rode me, dominant,
unswervingly,
Till Aphrodite’s marathon was
run,
Looking me in the eye all sleepily;
And like the leaves that flutter in
the wind
She shook that scarlet bottom till
we came,
And the white seed had made us
both a mess,
And she was spread there twitch-
ing, all undone.
(translated by Gideon Nisbet)
Or take these lines from Theocritus’s
Idyll 12, in which a man welcomes his
lover’s return after an agonizing ab-
sence (of two days) with a fantasy of
reciprocal affection and future renown:
How I wish the Loves might
breathe an equal passion
Into us both, so that future men
might sing of us:
“These were two famous men in
former times—
16
One the ‘Inspirer’ (as the speech
of Amyclae has it)
And one the ‘Listener’ (as they
say in Thessaly).
They were yoked in mutual love.”
(translated by Anthony Verity)
While it would be absurd to deny
that sex is and has always been indivis-
ible from questions of power, it would
be equally absurd to suggest that no
one in the ancient world ever had a
good time or treated a lover kindly
while getting them off. Enlightenment
philosophers may have invented the
sexual contract, but they did not invent
consensual sex.
Why does this matter? For one thing,
it points out some difficulties in the
study of sexuality. People are different,
but difference tends to vanish from the
historical record. As Saidiya Hartman
puts it in her exquisite Wayward Lives,
Beautiful Experiments: Intimate His-
tories of Riotous Black Girls, Trouble-
some Women, and Queer Radicals:
Every historian of the multitude,
the dispossessed, the subaltern,
and the enslaved is forced to grap-
ple with the power and author-
ity of the archive and the limits it
sets on what can be known, whose
perspective matters, and who is
endowed with the gravity and au-
thority of historical actor.
In other words, communities, identi-
ties, desires, habits, and acts that don’t
conform to the sensibilities of elites are
often silenced or lost.
The End of Love is about relatively
wealthy, mostly straight, and mostly
white people, so it’s not surprising that
its history of hitherto existing society
focuses on that same demographic.
And yet Illouz’s conviction that the
literary past bears out her view of the
libidinal present is so tendentious one
has to ask what ends it serves. Who
benefits from denying that sex, however
complicit with social control and dom-
ination, has sometimes made human
beings feel good and happy, has been a
form of care, an occasion for solidarity,
and a nice thing in a hard world? Who
wants to forget that for every Dante
connecting amorous desire to “a quasi-
religious prayer-like emotion” there
are the refugees of The Decameron,
swapping dirty stories while they wait
out the plague?
The best way to understand this book
is as a symptom of heterosexuality’s
hard- earned contempt for itself. The
End of Love is populated by women
who see sex “as undermining the possi-
bility of being recognized as a person,”
who long for relationships anchored by
certainty only to find out that marriage
and monogamy can be terrible, too. As
“Julia,” a sixty-seven-year- old Austrian
woman, says of her husband, “He crit-
icizes me for not being careful enough
with my weight. We often have fights
about it but the bottom line is that I
have been dieting all my life.” This is
awful, but so is Illouz’s determination
to make a spectacle of her subjects and
to insist—against all evidence to the
contrary—that the problem with rela-
tionships these days is how easily they
end. Run, Julia, run!
All of Illouz’s anecdotes unfold
along these lines. There are no domi-
nant Dorises shivering with orgasmic
satisfaction, no poets dreaming of
equal passion and mutual love. Rather,
the shabby lives of her informants are
measured against the marriage plots of
nineteenth- century novels. In such un-
sexy fiction as Trollope’s Can You For-
give Her? love is “the starting rather
than end point of” courtship, which
follows “a narrative and sequentialized
structure”: men declare themselves
right off the bat and propose soon after.
This is all to the good, for it neutralizes
“emotional uncertainty” and thus saves
the female ego from fracturing with
self- doubt. In the words of Alice Vava-
sor, who in Trollope’s Palliser series
surrenders to a marriage she doesn’t
quite want, there is just “no alternative
but to be happy.”
Is this state of affairs truly prefera-
ble to our current regime of “it’s com-
plicated”? Illouz seems to think so.
For her, the marriage plot is not just
the basis for a certain kind of fiction,
it’s the blueprint for a certain kind of
life: a good one. When women (always
women) lose its shape, they exchange
Mr. Rochester for piddling jackasses
like the hero of Adelle Waldman’s The
Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Curiously,
Illouz treats the titular Nate Piven like
one of her real-world informants, his
odious appraisals of a potential girl-
friend—“If Hannah had been more
obviously hot, he was pretty sure that
he would have given her more thought”
(Illouz’s emphasis)—presented as a
window into the modern male psyche.
Now, this isn’t to suggest that Illouz
is misreading Waldman’s novel, whose
success depends—at least partly—on
how true it rings to an audience of
hyper- educated, semi-single thirty-
somethings and especially to women
like Hannah. By a similar token, the
romances of Sally Rooney seem aimed
at readers who, like her characters,
have sex with the austere diligence of
a high school valedictorian. What sets
Rooney apart is that she makes what
ought to be the most ordinary aspects
of intimacy seem aspirational, as if con-
sent and mutual gratification—how-
ever defined—were the summit and not
the ground of erotic possibility.
The End of Love is the perfect com-
plement to novels like these. It takes
great pleasure in describing a world
that offers close to none. It is also the
perfect complement to varieties of
contemporary feminist critique that
refuse to imagine what a sexually free
future might look like, instead confin-
ing themselves to the sort of fashion-
able misandry and censorious elitism
Illouz indulges here. What to make of
the claim that (according to a single,
nearly twenty-year- old study) virgins
who “transition” to casual rather than
“romantic sex . . . [are] far more likely
to suffer symptoms of depression, to
be the object of violence, or to commit
crime themselves”? With nary a word
about how poverty or racial oppression
might twist the arc of a person’s sexual
career, Illouz asks us simply to accept
that sex without love is a one-way ticket
to social death.
I f The End of Love has a literary hero,
it’s the French novelist Michel Houelle-
becq. “In the same way that Henry
James, Balzac, or Zola examined in
their novels the massive shift from a
pre-modern hierarchy and cosmos to
a society governed by exchange and
money,” Houellebecq examines “a so-
ciety governed by sexual freedom”—
that is, by a joyless permissiveness
that trivializes human attachments to
the point of destroying them entirely,
with terrible consequences. In Houel-
lebecq’s “fictional universe,” Illouz
observes, “the very future (and de-
mise) of Western civilization lies in its
(de)regulation of sexuality.” When
we talk about the end of love, we’re
talking about nothing less than the end
of the world.
Now, one would think, reading The
End of Love or, say, Houellebecq’s The
Elementary Particles—which alter-
nates between dismal scenes of group
sex and eulogies for an old regime
of “unwavering connection between
marriage, sex and love”—that sexual
freedom is precisely what we do not
have and desperately need. The trou-
ble is not that we are sluts or seducers,
that we’re too gullible or lecherous or
watching too much porn. The trouble is
that we live at a moment when our basic
needs aren’t being met by institutions,
and so we are forced to rely on personal
relationships to provide us not just with
pleasure, excitement, and spiritual
growth but with health care and a place
to sleep. That’s a lot of pressure to put
on a marriage or a throuple or a situ-
ationship and, with so much at stake,
it’s no wonder that even the most seem-
ingly adventurous propositions often
default to a depressing conventionality.
Sex, you might say, does not yet know
how to be free. It hasn’t been given the
chance.
Illouz, it seems, is one of those peo-
ple who hates capitalism without much
liking anything else. She never asks
herself if casual sex would be okay (or
even awesome) if it happened in an-
other kind of society organized around
a different set of values, one in which
people truly were free to eat when they
needed to eat, rest when they wanted
to rest, get medical treatment when
they were sick, or fuck when they felt
like it. Are dating apps bad in them-
selves? Or are they bad because the
tech companies that profit from them
also drive the gentrification that makes
Grindr necessary, the bathhouses
having long since vanished? To ask
a grander question: What would our
lives, and not just our sex lives, be
like if we thought of pleasure as a so-
cial good, to which everyone ought to
have access?
And what would modern literature
be like if it wasn’t obliged to yoke sex
to either marriage or misery? Maybe it
would be like the dream Audre Lorde
recounts in the first essay of Sister Out-
sider, in which she’s having sex with
an anonymous sick woman—not, she
notes, her longtime companion Fran-
ces Clayton—in a department store
and realizes to her delight that health
care is free and her lover is covered.
Or perhaps, like the novels of Barbara
Browning, it would follow an oblique
arc toward no particular conclusion,
leaving the marriage plot behind to
explore the narrative potential of
polyamory. Unloving, for Illouz, is a
social catastrophe with a sodden aes-
thetic footprint. It has left its mark on
a whole host of adulterous, libertine,
or otherwise incontinent fictions from
Madame Bovary to Pornhub’s most
viewed videos of the week. But un-
loving has another history: less tragic,
more ordinary, a little hard to find but
by no means invisible. It too is worth
a read. Q
The New York Review

The Tragedy of Macbeth
a film written and
directed by Joel Coen
Those who have long followed the Coen
brothers and their cinematic universe
of criminals, nihilists, and overreach-
ers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy
of Macbeth a long- deferred reckoning
with Shakespeare, who has been there
before them. We don’t typically think
of Shakespeare as a writer interested in
crime stories, but he surely was, from
the earliest play in which he likely had
a hand, Arden of Faversham—a true
crime story in which a wife conspires
with her lover to kill her husband—
through Hamlet and Macbeth. There
are moments in The Tragedy of Mac-
beth when Shakespeare and the Coens
feel in perfect alignment, such as the
scene in which Macbeth suborns two
nameless murderers to kill Banquo.
The hapless pair see the pointlessness
and peril of saying no to him, and in
their anxious glances and resignation
seem to have walked onto the set di-
rectly from an earlier Coen brothers
film.
A half- century has passed since
Roman Polanski’s Technicolor and
blood-splattered Macbeth was released
in 1971. It was the third major post-
war adaptation of the play; the first, a
black-and-white version directed by
Orson Welles, came out in 1948, and
the second, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne
of Blood, also in black and white, in
1957.1 These postwar Macbeths were
marked by the horrors of the 1930s and
1940s, much as Shakespeare’s origi-
nal had been shaped by recent events:
it was written in the aftermath of the
Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt in
November 1605 to assassinate En-
gland’s Scottish monarch, King James
I. Welles’s Macbeth, made as the House
Un-American Activities Committee
was persecuting the Hollywood Ten,
feels like a companion piece to his 1937
antifascist stage version of Julius Cae-
sar, which he subtitled “The Death of
a Dictator.” As one critic has noted, in
Welles’s Macbeth “Shakespeare’s poles
of monarchy and tyranny have been re-
placed by a right-wing world view which
can admit nothing other than dictator-
ship or disorder.”2 Kurosawa’s adapta-
tion, conceived while Japan was still
occupied by American soldiers and set
in the strife-ridden medieval Sengoku
period, explores the corrosive effect of
imperial ambitions and militarism.
The politics of Polanski’s Macbeth
are especially fraught. The scene in
which Lady Macduff and her children
are terrorized and then murdered by
killers sent by Macbeth owes much
to what Polanski had experienced as
a child in the Kraków ghetto. But the
immediate background for the mak-
ing of the film was the recent and bar-
1
There was nearly a fourth: Laurence
Olivier, hoping to build upon his string
of influential Shakespeare films—
Henry V in 1944, Hamlet in 1948, and
Richard III in 1955—wrote a screen-
play of Macbeth but failed to secure
funding for it.
2
E. Pearlman, “Macbeth on Film: Pol-
itics,” Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 39
(1987), p. 68.
January 13, 2022
Shakespeare Noir
James Shapiro
Joel Coen with Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth on the set of
The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021
baric murder of his wife Sharon Tate
and their friends by the Manson gang
in August 1969. When his collaborator
Kenneth Tynan asked Polanski whether
a scene in the film wasn’t too bloody, he
replied, “You didn’t see my house last
summer. I know about bleeding.”3
All of these directors were intent on
locating their story in a particular time
and place. Polanski insisted on shoot-
ing on location in Britain, in natural
light. Kurosawa built the set of the
castle exteriors, at great expense and
labor, in the stunted landscape and fog-
bound atmosphere of Mount Fuji. Both
Polanski and Kurosawa cared deeply
about recreating a specific, medieval
world. (Polanski made his Lady Mac-
beth deliver her sleepwalking scene in
the nude—since, he claimed, nobody
wore nightclothes back then—earning
the film an X rating that hurt it at the
box office.)
At much the same time that Polan-
ski’s film was screening in movie the-
aters, a fourteen-year- old in western
Pennsylvania was acting for the first
time, in a high school production in
which she performed Lady Macbeth’s
sleepwalking scene. A half- century
later, Frances McDormand has re-
prised the role in Coen’s film. Joel and
his younger brother, Ethan, have been
making movies together since their
childhood in Minnesota in the 1960s.
Their first commercial film, Blood Sim-
ple, was released in 1984, the same year
Joel married McDormand, who starred
in it and appeared in seven more of the
eighteen films the brothers went on to
make together. The Tragedy of Mac-
beth is the first film that Joel has made
without Ethan. According to their
longtime collaborator the composer
Carter Burwell, the reason for the solo
effort is straightforward: “Ethan didn’t
want to make movies anymore.”
Joel Coen, who shot the film on
a soundstage in Los Angeles rather
than on location, is not interested in
recreating realistic landscapes or in
situating his film in a specific past. We
3 ise of the . . . dream of psychic whole-
John Parker, Polanski (London: Vic-
tor Gollancz, 1993), p. 178.
Alison Cohen Rosa
never even glimpse the exterior of the
Macbeths’ castle. In this sense, his film
is closer to the empty stage on which
Shakespeare’s play was first performed,
in 1606—the soundstage more of an
inventive space than a literal one. If
anything, the film lands instead on the
period that really fuels Coen’s imagina-
tion: the cinematic world of the 1940s.
With its stylized sets, stark lighting,
and playful use of perspective (are we
looking up or down at circling birds?),
his Tragedy of Macbeth signals its in-
debtedness to German Expressionism
and film noir. It is shot in black and
white in a nearly square format, similar
to the “academy ratio” used by Welles
and Kurosawa and familiar to fans of
midcentury cinema. The richness of
the film is stunning, its complex tones,
from blackout to blinding white, mir-
roring the shades of meaning in what
Shakespeare wrote.
The haunting soundscape, com-
posed by Burwell, is of a piece with its
visual effects—not just the music but
also the sounds of echoing footsteps,
dripping (water and blood), and, espe-
cially, knocking. The words “knock”
or “knocking” occur nineteen times
in Macbeth, and that sound effect is
nowhere more unnerving than the
knocking at the gate heard after Mac-
beth kills Duncan. (Denzel Washing-
ton, as Macbeth, handles the murder
scene chillingly, putting a finger to his
lips as a trusting Duncan awakes, then
silently sliding a dagger into his jugu-
lar.) At this pivotal moment in the play,
as Thomas De Quincey explained two
centuries ago, in the repeated knocking
the human has made its reflux
upon the fiendish; the pulses of
life are beginning to beat again;
and the re- establishment of the
goings- on of the world in which we
live, first makes us profoundly sen-
sible of the awful parenthesis that
had suspended them.
The Coens’ recurrent interest is that
staple of film noir, “an uneasiness with
male weakness and female perfidy, as
well as a skepticism about the prom-
ness, fulfilled desire, and attainable
affluence”4 —words no less applicable
to Shakespeare’s tragedy. They came
to mind in the film’s rendering of the
scene in which Lady Macbeth must
persuade her wavering husband to go
through with the murder of Duncan,
his king, kinsman, and guest. When
Macbeth, still unsure whether to act,
asks his wife, “If we should fail?” she
replies, “We fail?”
Every actor who has played Lady
Macbeth has effectively summed up
her ambition and her marriage in how
she says these two words. That question
mark derives from the 1623 First Folio
text of the play, the earliest printed ver-
sion, at a time when it could also be used
to signal exclamation. In 1709 Nicholas
Rowe changed the line to “We fail!”
and subsequent editors have offered a
more neutral “We fail.” McDormand
opted for an adamant so-what: “We
fail.” We die trying. This is our last shot
at realizing our long-frustrated hopes.
Polanski, who was still in his thirties
when he filmed Macbeth, cast actors in
their twenties in the leads, and Tynan
supported the decision: you can’t “have
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth performed
by 60 year- olds,” Tynan said. “It’s too
late for them to be ambitious.” Coen
thinks otherwise, and McDormand
and Washington, who are both in their
sixties, bear him out: their ambition
still burns fiercely.
Coen’s attentiveness to Shake-
speare’s plotting has me rethinking my
reading of the play. Take, for example,
the scene in which Macbeth kills the
two grooms who had been guarding
the sleeping Duncan, which takes place
offstage in Shakespeare’s original. All
we know is that Lady Macbeth has
drugged them, then returned after the
murder and smeared their faces with
Duncan’s blood. When the assassina-
tion is discovered, Macbeth explains to
those gathered that he has gone back
and killed “the murderers, / Steeped
in the colors of their trade, their dag-
gers /Unmannerly breeched with gore.”
“Who could refrain,” he adds, “That
had a heart to love, and in that heart/
Courage to make’s love known?”
I had always taken this action as pre-
cautionary, part of the Macbeths’ plan.
But as Washington recites the last lines,
looking directly at McDormand, she
shoots him first a quizzical and then a
devastating look that says, “I told you
the plan, you agreed, and now you are
going off-script; get a grip.” What Coen
and his stars manage so deftly here is
locating an otherwise undefined mo-
ment in the play when the Macbeths,
until now of one mind, begin their in-
exorable drift apart. As the cocreator
of Blood Simple well knows, plans go
awry and relationships unravel once
blood is spilled.
The Tragedy of Macbeth was made
during a period of national turmoil.
Filming began in February 2020 but
was halted the following month because
of the pandemic. It was completed in
July, after the murder of George Floyd,
as Black Lives Matter protests swept
4
R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan
Coen (University of Illinois Press,
2004), pp. 48–49.
17
the country and Donald Trump and
Joe Biden fought for the presidency.
Coen drew on actors with extensive
training in the theater (“the Yale and
Juilliard mafia,” as Washington put it).
The preparation for the film owed more
to stage practices than to how movies
are usually made. The company had a
chance to rehearse for three and a half
weeks, unusual for a film, and during
table work Coen asked his actors to
read a different role each time. The
cast knew the entire play, not just their
own parts. “Covid,” Coen said, “made
us into a company.”
No Black actor has previously ap-
peared in a commercial film of Mac-
beth. Coen chose Black actors for
several of the leading roles—Macbeth,
and also the Macduffs, played by Corey
Hawkins and Moses Ingram. Coen told
the audience at the New York Film
Festival, where it premiered, that not
only “is there diversity in the casting,
but also there’s diversity in the dialect,”
as Irish accents mix with British and a
wide range of American ones.
That’s true, but for a production with
an interracial couple as the leads, com-
pleted while the nation confronted such
deep divisions in the aftermath of the
Floyd murder, it seems almost at pains
to avoid the subject of race. I was left
confused by the film’s ostensibly color-
blind casting. If race doesn’t figure, and
casting is truly colorblind, why are the
Macduffs and their children all played
by Black actors? And if race does
matter, what might that say about the
personal and political challenges the
Macbeths face as a couple? Should we
read anything into Macbeth’s decision
to send a Black man to kill Macduff’s
“We love love love our Vitsœ system.
The build quality and easiness of
assembly is amazing, but it was
your service that made the whole
process such a joy.”
‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at
Vitsœ. Other verbs just don’t seem to
cut it. Like in this heartfelt message
from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to
his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in
London, England.
As with any customer, Sophie ensured
that every detail was considered so
that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for
his needs.
Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s
passionate about good service, and
communicates with all her customers
18
family? And are we meant to overlook
race when Washington’s Macbeth, frus-
trated at being passed over by Duncan,
mutters to himself, “Let not light see
my black and deep desires”? I don’t
think there are easy answers to these
questions, but that doesn’t mean that
a Shakespeare film can all but ignore
them, because audiences won’t.
Coen shows far greater interest in
Shakespeare’s language than his cin-
ematic predecessors, and his accom-
plished cast speak Shakespeare’s verse
comfortably and naturally. While Welles
and Polanski opted for soliloquies to be
spoken in voice-over, Coen has his actors
recite them aloud, usually while in mo-
tion. McDormand reads aloud Macbeth’s
letter (in which he shares with her the
Witches’ prophesy that he shall be king)
while walking down a long corridor,
her action later matched by Washing-
ton, who recites “Is this a dagger which
I see before me” as he walks steadily
toward the sleeping Duncan’s chamber.
Speeches that in the theater are part
of group scenes take on the quality of
soliloquies here, spoken directly to the
camera. It’s a technique that invites us
to focus on the words, even as we study
facial features and, in a play rich in
equivocation, the speaker’s sincerity.
Silences matter in Shakespeare, ges-
tures too, and Coen is attentive to both.
McDormand, in a memorable scene in
which we see how much Lady Macbeth
has declined physically and mentally
after Duncan’s murder, pulls gently on
a tuft of her hair, which comes away
in her hand. McDormand refuses the
well-worn paths of playing Lady Mac-
Photo by
Melvin T
directly, wherever they are in the world.
Whether in-person, or on the other side
of the globe, our planners hold your
hand throughout the whole process.
Time and again we prove that long-
distance relationships really do work.
Be it planning your first system, moving
it to a new home or adding an extra
shelf, every single interaction is handled
with love, from Vitsœ…
Design Dieter Rams
Founded 1959
vitsoe.com
beth as manipulative, fundamentally
evil, or aligned with the Witches. Her
love for her husband is genuine, as is
her frustration with him. Hers is a de-
termined yet devoted Lady Macbeth.
The Witches have long been a direc-
torial challenge. If Macbeth is seen as a
tragedy of fate, the supernatural has to
be believable; but if the actions of the
play are attributable to human agency,
what’s the point of paying much atten-
tion to the Witches? They dominated
Welles’s film from beginning to end.
Polanski played down their role, ac-
knowledging the demonic but locating
the source of the tragedy in the main
characters themselves. Coen takes a
more ambiguous approach, casting a
single extraordinary actor, Kathryn
Hunter, as all three Witches, and in the
opening scene we witness her contort
herself into a bird—mimicking the cir-
cling crows or ravens with which the film
begins—leaving us dazzled by the per-
formance and curious about the extent
to which the Witches and the birds are
aligned. But there is never a question
here of fatedness: Coen is interested in
how humans are responsible for their
own downfalls, and the supernatural in
the play—from the dagger that haunts
Macbeth to his visions of Banquo’s
ghost and future royal line—is the pro-
jection of an overheated imagination or
a potion-induced hallucination.
Hunter plays another role in the film:
the Old Man, bearded, aged, looking
like King Lear on the heath. We are
left to wonder if this is another witch-
like transformation, or whether she is
simply doubling the part. After Dun-
can’s murder, Ross visits the Old Man’s
hovel, where Hunter speaks lines that
may give those steeped in Shakespeare
a jolt, for they are lifted from the ditty
spoken by the Fool in King Lear, writ-
ten immediately before Macbeth—
lines that underscore that life consists
of hardship and struggle:
He that has and a little tiny wit—
With hey, ho, the wind and the
rain—
Must make content with his
fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.
There’s a further twist, for the actor
who first spoke these lines in King Lear,
Robert Armin, had recycled them from
an earlier Shakespeare play in which
he had recited a nearly identical re-
frain as a different fool, Feste, in the
closing lines of Twelfth Night. Hunter
played the Fool in a Royal Shakespeare
Company production of King Lear in
2010, and I wonder whether it was she
or Coen who was responsible for this
canny interpolation, in a film so aware
of antecedents, that beautifully sets up
the ending of the film. Whether spoken
by a witch or an impoverished old man
the message is the same, and familiar
to admirers of the Coen brothers’ films:
life is dark; get used to it.
Shakespeare pulls a bait and switch at
the end of Macbeth. While the Witches
prophesy that Banquo shall be father to
a long line of kings, the play ends with
Duncan’s eldest son, Malcolm, succeed-
ing Macbeth as Scotland’s king. Film
directors in particular have made much
of this, inventing new endings. Coen’s
take turns on the character of Ross.
In the original text, Ross is one of
several unremarkable characters who
drift through the play; he appears in
eleven scenes, mostly asking for news
or sharing it. The idea of expanding his
role can be traced back to M. F. Libby,
a Canadian schoolmaster who in 1893
published Some New Notes on Mac-
beth, in which he argued, without much
evidence, that Ross was in fact “an am-
bitious intriguer, a man of some abil-
ity but no moral worth, a coward, spy,
and murderer.” Libby also claimed that
Ross was the unnamed Third Murderer
dispatched by Macbeth to ambush Ban-
quo and his son Fleance.
Libby’s ideas circulated and found
traction among directors, including
Polanski. Coen has said that he wanted
to see if what Polanski had done with
Ross “could be pressed further.” Alex
Hassell plays an inscrutable Ross in
the new film and carries much of its
political weight: his Ross finds himself
in a treacherous world and maneuvers
accordingly. Like Polanski, Coen casts
Ross as the Third Murderer, but rather
than seeking to butcher Fleance, his
Ross spares the young boy’s life, not
out of kindness but to hedge his bets.
When Ross visits Lady Macduff just
before she and her children and house-
hold are massacred, he glances out
the window, sees killers on horseback
approach, and excuses himself, saying
with punishing self-knowledge, “Cruel
are the times, when we are traitors /
And do not know ourselves.”
Had he come there to warn her? To
be able to share with her husband (as he
soon does) details of the slaughter? His
self-preservation contrasts sharply with
the selflessness of Lady Macbeth’s ser-
vant, who, in a scene invented by Coen,
overhears Macbeth’s plans and rushes
to Lady Macduff’s castle to warn her
but is unable to prevent the murders
there, including, we suspect, her own.
Only the unprincipled Rosses of this
world manage to survive, and thrive.
The film comes to a close with Ross
holding Macbeth’s severed head in one
hand and his crown in the other, which
he passes to Malcolm, saying, “Hail,
King of Scotland!” The film could have
ended there, as Shakespeare’s play
does, but Coen has one more task left
for Ross: he returns to the hovel of the
Old Man, where he has hidden young
Fleance, and we see him pull the future
ruler of Scotland onto his horse and ride
toward us, disappearing momentarily in
a dip in the road. In making what looks
and feels like a timeless film, Coen may
have wanted to sidestep our political
moment, but in the end he confronts it.
The way this scene is shot, we expect to
see Ross and Fleance reappear as the
road rises, but before they do, before the
final blackout, we are unexpectedly con-
fronted with a horrifying flock of black
birds—a “murder of crows”—startled
no doubt by Ross’s galloping horse. The
maddened, shrieking birds fill the screen
in a nod to the terrifying flock in Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). “Light
thickens,” Macbeth had said, “and the
crow/Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.”
Coen’s birds signal that between
Malcolm’s coronation and Fleance’s—
and long after—there will be more vi-
olence, more horrors, more pointless
and destructive conflict. His film, which
could seem an exercise in nostalgia for
midcentury cinema, is also a repudia-
tion of a different kind of nostalgia:
the American fantasy that things were
once different and better, and will be
again—a fitting message for our peril-
ous and equivocating time. Q
The New York Review

Palimpsest:
Documents from a Korean Adoption
by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom,
translated from the Swedish by Hanna
Strömberg, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom,
and Richey Wyver.
Drawn and Quarterly,
151 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
by Jenny Heijun Wills.
McClelland and Stewart,
248 pp., $22.95; $15.50 (paper)
All You Can Ever Know
by Nicole Chung.
Catapult, 228 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Amy Mee-Ran Dorin Kobus was ad-
opted from South Korea in 1974, at the
age of six. In an essay for the anthology
Voices from Another Place: A Collec-
tion of Works from a Generation Born
in Korea and Adopted to Other Coun-
tries (1999), she recalls “kicking and
screaming” as she was taken to her new
home in North Branch, Minnesota,
by white adoptive parents. “I worked
diligently to become the model Amer-
ican,” she writes. “I dressed in Ameri-
can clothes, took speech tutoring to rid
myself of my Korean accent, and, most
important, I acted American.” Still,
she felt unsettled by her past:
Most adopted children have ques-
tions about their biological par-
ents such as, “Why was I given up
for adoption?” “Didn’t my family
want me?” and “Who were my real
mother and father?” Those were
my questions too.
Dorin Kobus’s adoptive mother, en-
couraging her to explore her heritage,
took her to a Korean cultural program
in Minneapolis. After high school, her
adoptive parents sponsored her trip to
Korea with twenty other adoptees, a
“motherland tour.” She visited an or-
phanage like the one in which she spent
her infancy, but did not manage to find
her birth parents. On the way back, she
was asked to escort a thirteen-month-
old baby boy to his adoptive family in
the United States. “During the long
flight I cared for the baby as if it were
my own, knowing I would have to give
him up,” she writes. “I thought of my
biological mother and her possible feel-
ings when giving me up. I am certain
she cried many tears.”
Over the past seven decades, some
200,000 South Korean children have
been adopted abroad, mostly to the US
but also to Canada, Europe, and Aus-
tralia. For many years, South Korea
was the top exporting nation for in-
ternational adoptions; more recently,
that distinction has belonged to China,
which has sent more than 126,000
children abroad since 2000. Korean
adoptions began in the 1950s, with the
well-intentioned rescue of “war or-
phans” during and after the Korean
War. Many of these children indeed
had no living family; others were “so-
cial orphans” who’d been separated
from their parents in the fighting or
were considered unassimilable owing
to racial and social stigmas. In Voices
from Another Place, Kat Turner, the
January 13, 2022
Return Flights
E. Tammy Kim
A panel from Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption
adoptive daughter of a pastor in Iowa,
describes herself at a telling distance:
she is, she writes, the mixed-race “prod-
uct of an American soldier in Korea as
a result of the war.”1
It didn’t take long for transnational
adoption to go from emergency re-
sponse to permanent bureaucracy.
For the South Korean government,
out-adoption became a substitute for
costly antipoverty programs: in 1960
the country’s per capita GDP was just
$158, compared with $475 in Japan.2
Churches and social services agencies
in the West, meanwhile, aggressively
marketed Korean children to pro-
spective adoptive parents. One couple
described their adoptive daughters as
targets of their evangelicalism: “Our
girls are our mission field, this brings us
great pride. We never see a nationality
difference.” As Arissa H. Oh writes in
1 ciation of Black Social Workers issued
Kori Graves’s book, A War Born Fam-
ily: African American Adoption in the
Wake of the Korean War (NYU Press,
2020), documents how Black Korean
children were advertised for adoption
to Black couples in the United States,
especially those with military ties.
2
Japan’s own economic recovery after
World War II was due to a war boom: it
served as an industrial and military ally
to the United States during the Korean
War.
Beginning in the 1990s, Korean
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom/Drawn and Quarterly
adoptees met through organizing net-
works and at international conferences
as well as on the early Internet. They
shared their experiences of estrange-
ment and uncannily similar accounts
of why they had been abandoned (des-
perate teenage parents) or why their
vital records were incomplete (fires
and floods). They returned to Korea on
motherland tours, visiting orphanages
and trying to locate their birth parents.
In time, they began to tell their own
stories. The first anglophone adop-
tee memoirs appeared in Voices from
Another Place and another collection,
Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthol-
ogy by Korean Adoptees (1997). Then
came The Language of Blood (2003),
a lyrical recollection by Jane Jeong
Trenka, who later became a leading
adoptee activist. Trenka describes a
sort of double birth:
My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. . . .
Halfway around the world, I am
someone else.
I am Jane Marie Brauer, created
September 26, 1972, when I was
carried off an airplane onto Amer-
ican soil.
As a young child in the Midwest,
Trenka is taught to feel grateful but
cannot shake a sense of dread:
“We chose you,” my mommy al-
ways says. To me that means from
a store. . . . A thought comes to me
now, a frightening thought that
makes sense as I sit alone: I could
also be returned to the store. I
could be exchanged for a better
girl.
Korean adoptees, especially in
North America and Europe, have since
To Save the Children of Korea (2015), produced numerous works of mem-
South Korea designed a template for oir, poetry, film, and visual art. The
interracial family-making that plan- American poet and English professor
ners in Vietnam, Central and Latin Jennifer Kwon Dobbs has written auto-
America, India, Russia, Romania, and fictionally of found family: “An hour
China later used to send children to into reunion, Appa and I match /pace
the West. International adoption be- 1-2-3 drink! and I want to sing/the
came a long-term form of child welfare only Korean song I know.” Another US
and, despite many people’s best inten- adoptee, Deann Borshay Liem, made
tions, “a public market in which chil- two documentaries about being ad-
dren were commodified, sourced, and opted under the identity of another girl
shipped overseas like packages.” from her orphanage. Jane Jin Kaisen,
an adoptee raised in Denmark, repre-
sented Korea at the 2019 Venice Bien-
South Korean adoptions peaked in nale, with an installation based on the
1985, more than three decades after the folktale of Princess Bari, an abandoned
Korean War and well into the nation’s daughter who becomes a powerful sha-
economic rise. By then, thousands of man. And Malene Choi, also Danish,
transnational adoptees were reaching took a refreshingly experimental ap-
adulthood. In the US, they were em- proach in her feature film The Return
boldened by growing racial awareness (2018). In one scene, an adoptee named
and increased scrutiny of the child wel- Thomas posts xeroxed signs all over the
fare system. In 1972 the National Asso- tiny Korean island where he was cared
for by a foster mother before being sent
a statement against transracial adop- to Denmark: “가족을 찾습니다” (Look-
tion, asserting that “only a black family ing for my family).
can transmit the emotional and sensitive While the first wave of memoirs had
subtleties of perception and reaction an unvarnished, diaristic quality, there
essential for a black child’s survival in is now a greater diversity in content
a racist society.” Several years later, Na- and style. Today’s authors are Korean
tive activists won passage of the Indian adoptees from all over the world; their
Child Welfare Act, which recognizes the stories still involve searching for their
“essential tribal relations of Indian peo- birth families, but much more be-
ple” and requires that Native children sides. Three recent books show how
be placed with kin whenever possible. the genre has evolved alongside the
19
community. Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s
graphic novel Palimpsest: Documents
from a Korean Adoption, Jenny Hei-
jun Wills’s Older Sister. Not Necessar-
ily Related., and Nicole Chung’s All
You Can Ever Know present complex
narratives informed by the histories of
earlier adoptees. All three women find
and meet their families of origin—a
rare feat that’s understandably over-
represented in adoptee memoirs (what
better story line is there?). Along the
way, they discover unexpected bonds
whose tenderness surpasses even that
of the birth mother.
T he adoptee memoir is a genre of re-
turn, so we should start at the beginning,
with the American couple who created
the prototype of transnational adop-
tion. In 1953 Harry Holt, an evangelical
lumberman from Oregon, and his wife,
Bertha, adopted eight Korean children
orphaned by the war. They went on
to establish Holt International, which
grew into one of the largest adoption
agencies in the world. The Holts were
motivated by charity, but they also rec-
ognized a business opportunity. The
ravaged South Korean state did, too: war
orphans were a photogenic conduit for
foreign aid, and Western parents were
willing to pay to adopt from overseas.
The Korean War had left millions
of people displaced. Families were scat-
tered and split, including by the division
of Korea into North and South. Among
those lost or abandoned were large num-
bers of “Amerasian” and Black children
born to Korean women and the Amer-
ican GIs who’d occupied the Korean
Peninsula since the end of World War
II. The South Korean government was
eager to send these mixed-race children
abroad, and the US obliged. In 1955
President Eisenhower signed into law
An Act for the Relief of Certain Ko-
rean War Orphans, selectively loosen-
ing restrictions on Asian immigration.
As Thomas Park Clement recalls in his
memoir The Unforgotten War (1998),
early adoptees like him depended on
individualized acts of Congress—some-
times named for the child in question—
to be let in. (The vagaries of immigration
law have left thousands of transnational
adoptees in the US and Canada without
immigration status; some have been de-
ported to their countries of birth. In the
US, the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2021
would provide relief for undocumented
adoptees, but it is stalled in Congress.)
Eleana Kim, an anthropologist at the
University of California at Irvine and
the author of Adopted Territory: Trans-
national Korean Adoptees and the Pol-
itics of Belonging (2010), found that,
between 1951 and 1964, the number of
abandoned children at orphanages in
South Korea grew from 715 to 11,319.
The number of children adopted over-
seas increased every year between 1953
and 1985, when nearly nine thousand
children left South Korea, primarily
for the US. Why weren’t more children
adopted internally, within Korea? A
common sociological explanation is
that East Asians, with their strict fa-
milial maps, were culturally indisposed
toward adoption. There’s truth to this,
but other factors mattered just as much:
poverty and stigma toward the off-
spring of single mothers, a lack of social
services, prejudice against mixed-race
families, and welfare workers who en-
couraged poor and unmarried parents
to give up their children.
20
Adoptees sent to the West often grew
up racially isolated but found them-
selves, and one another, in the multi-
cultural climate of higher education.
Then, beginning in the 1990s, some-
thing unlikely happened: many of them
settled permanently in South Korea.
Adoptees like Jane Jeong Trenka
worked across barriers of language
and culture to study the fundamen-
tal reasons for their adoptions. Were
it not for the mistreatment of unwed
mothers and discrimination against
mixed-race Koreans, they reasoned,
perhaps they would not have been sent
away. 3 Adoptees also raised questions
of material distribution: What if the re-
sources put toward adoption had gone
instead to the birth family? The point
is as relevant to Korean adoptees as to
indigenous children sent to Canadian
Orphaned Korean children gathering around a delivery of items sent by foreign children
through the United Nations during the Korean War, early 1950s
residential schools and the African
American and Latino kids dispropor-
tionately placed in foster care.
In subsequent years, returning Ko-
rean adoptees fought successfully for
welfare reforms and their right to due
process in South Korea. In 1999 a coa-
lition led by the group Global Overseas
Adoptees’ Link won a campaign to
expand the Korean F- 4 visa: adoptees
now had the right of other ethnic Ko-
reans to reside long-term in the coun-
try. In 2011 activist adoptees further
secured the right to dual citizenship
and helped enact dramatic changes to
the adoption laws: the government now
requires robust notice and consent pro-
cedures to protect birth parents’ rights.
(Partly as a result, only 259 children
were adopted out of South Korea in
2019.)
Last year, Kara Bos, who was ad-
opted by a Michigan couple in 1984
after being left in a parking lot at the
age of two, successfully sued in Ko-
rean court to be legally recognized as
the daughter of her birth father, even
though he refused to meet her. (Some
adoptees worry that her lawsuit will
discourage other birth parents from
coming forward.) As Kristin Pak, an
adoptee organizer in Korea, told me, the
right to know one’s family, one’s history,
and one’s birth nation is a basic human
3 nant—the book’s cover illustration is
Although the birthrate in South Korea
is the lowest it has ever been—so low
that the government provides all kinds
of financial incentives for procre-
ation—unwed and nonheterosexual
parents are still stigmatized, and immi-
gration is tightly restricted.
right. Pak believes that transnational Things are different this time. On-
adoption is intrinsically flawed. “It’s not line, Sjöblom finds “critical adoption
about having a good adoption or bad forums” full of peer advice. A Korean-
adoption,” she said. “This whole system speaking friend helps her e-mail the
is demand-driven. It’s very unequal.” “countless middlemen involved in an
adoption.” After months of correspon-
dence, Sjöblom receives “the photo I’ve
W hile the adoptee memoirs antholo- been waiting for all my life”—a picture
gized in the 1990s were works of con- of her birth mother, whom the authori-
fession and communion, the books ties in Busan, South Korea, have finally
emerging now are full of confidence located. The following summer, Sjö-
and rage. They are wider in scope, crit- blom goes to Korea with her husband
ical of the choices made by the US and and two children. They meet her birth
Korean governments, and sharpened mother at a restaurant and hug and
by scholarship on global adoption. weep and do their best to relate, de-
Lisa Sjöblom’s graphic novel, Pa- spite an intractable language barrier.
limpsest, is the tale of a Swedish adop- In two imagined panels, Sjöblom rests
tee who was removed from South her head in her mother’s lap and speaks
Korea at the age of two, in 1979. The with ease. But in real life, they bumble
book unfolds in sepia-toned rectan- through with an interpreter, and her
gular panels whose lengthy text some- birth mother turns away, begging Sjö-
blom not to ask about the past. Sjöblom
National Archives/Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
learns that she has siblings and that her
father is still alive, yet she meets no one
besides her mother.
At a popular beach in Busan, Sjö-
blom encounters a stranger who comes
to represent a substitute mother. The
woman gazes admiringly at Sjöblom
and her family and invites them to tea.
Upon hearing Sjöblom’s story, she says,
“If it turns out she’s not your real mom,
I can be instead.” The scene distills an
increasingly prevalent motif in adop-
tee memoirs and activist life: a focus
beyond the birth mother. These days,
according to Mike Mullen of Also-
Known-As, an adoptee advocacy group
in New York, the “search” extends not
only to other blood relatives but also to
the foster mothers who provided pre-
adoptive care in South Korea, often for
up to a year or two.
Jenny Heijun Wills’s memoir, Older
times competes with the soft, spherical Sister. Not Necessarily Related., depicts
characters and detailed backgrounds. an extreme version of this dynamic.
Many frames consist entirely of letters Whereas Sjöblom struggles to connect
and recreated documents: adoption just with her birth mother, Wills, an
case files and e-mailed pleas for infor- English professor at the University of
mation in a mix of Korean and English. Winnipeg and the adopted daughter
As a transnational, transracial adop- of a white Canadian family, contends
tee, Sjöblom questions her origins at with an overflow of attachments. She
a young age. Her adoptive father tells goes to Korea hoping to find her birth
her, simply, “I’m sure your mom loved mother and perhaps her father. But it’s
you, but she gave you away to give you a younger half-sister she hadn’t known
a better life.” Yet at school, she is bul- about who “would become the most im-
lied for being Asian. Her classmates portant person in all of this,” she writes.
tie her to a post. We watch her face Wills begins her book with a warning:
flush, her body shrink in on itself. As
an adolescent, “in an attempt to save This story, these stories are not all
myself, I asked my parents to help me mine. Some of them, in fact, be-
find my Korean roots,” she writes. Her long to no one at all, but are the
parents agree, but a callous Swedish so- fantasies that seem to flower so
cial worker discourages them partway naturally from the mouths of those
through the search: “We can only hope of us who’ve grown lives out of half
that Lisa’s mother today has a family, facts, wishful thinking, and out-
a husband, and children. A revelation right lies.
of Lisa’s existence would most likely
break up that family and cause even The book entangles fiction and truth—
more people pain.” in vignettes, vaguely chronological
According to Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, meditations, and letters to Unni, the
the Korean-adoptee experience in Korean word for a girl’s older sister. Its
Scandinavia is marked by “a kind of form simulates the fragmentary, one-
colorblindness that’s much more in- step-forward, one-step-back journey of
tense there than in the US.” For Sjö- many adoptees.
blom, it isn’t until she has married and Wills’s trip to Korea becomes un-
settled down in cosmopolitan Stock- wieldy. She meets not only her birth
holm that she feels ready to reconsider mother and younger half-sister, Bora,
her origins. When she becomes preg- whom she’d spoken with by phone, but
also her father and his side of the fam-
of a fetus—and is unable to tell the ob- ily, including an older half-sister. Wills
stetrician about her family’s health his- learns the reason for her adoption—
tory, she decides to look again for her she was the product of an affair—and
birth parents. Pregnancy is a common watches herself become a “tripwire,”
turning point in the memoirs of female blowing “shrapnel through at least
adoptees. three generations”:
The New York Review
 To my older sister, unni . . . I em-
bodied years of deception and our
father’s betrayal. I represented her
mother’s sadness. For Halmoni
[grandmother], I’d caused years of
blackmail, a secret that kept a poor
family of grape farmers ground
down into the earth. . . . Even
for Bora, the one to whom I was
closest, I had caused pain. Bora’s
father’s rage used to burst open
without apparent cause. My sister
didn’t understand the source of her
father’s hatred for Ummah [mom].
Things get weirder still. Wills’s Ko-
rean parents, having lost touch over the
intervening decades, reunite to meet
their daughter in Seoul. They fall in
love with her—then with each other.
To the shock of their extended fami-
lies, the couple moves in together and
travels to Canada for Wills’s wedding,
as does Bora. It’s the kind of improba-
ble, transpacific reunion that an adop-
tee might dream about, but no fantasy
can last.
Like Wills’s book, Nicole Chung’s
All You Can Ever Know is a story of
sisters. Chung, a Korean adoptee and
a contributing writer at The Atlantic,
dedicates her memoir to a newfound
sister—one she meets in the course
of looking for her birth mother. But
Chung’s search has the rare distinction
of unfolding outside Korea: she was
adopted not overseas but across the
Washington–Oregon border. Chung’s
adoptive parents are white Christians
in the rural east of Oregon. Her life
with them is placid, but she wants to
be normal, meaning not Asian. She
knows only that she was born prema-
ture in Seattle and in need of a decent
home. Her adoptive mother tells her re-
peatedly, “Your birth parents had just
moved here from Korea. They thought
they wouldn’t be able to give you the
life you deserved.”
In high school, Chung tries to contact
the attorney who handled her adoption.
It’s only then that her mother confides
that the lawyer had called them years
ago: “Your birth mother asked her to
get in touch with us.” But Chung’s par-
ents refused contact. “I understood that
they didn’t want me to want to search. I
was enough for them, and they wanted
to be enough for me,” Chung writes of
their crisscrossed desires. Much like
Sjöblom, Chung swallows her curiosity
until she’s pregnant with her first child.
She suddenly thinks of “those mysteri-
ous months my birth mother had spent
carrying me” and wonders, “What had
pregnancy been like for her? Why
had she gone into labor so early? What
if the same thing happened to me?”
Chung hires a “search angel,” a sort
of adoption private eye, who fills in her
past, bit by bit. “Two sisters, a half sister
and a full one, had been living at home
at the time I was born,” Chung is told.
Her birth parents divorced six years
later and now live in different states—
neither more than a few hours’ drive
from where Chung grew up. Chung
drafts and redrafts a simple letter, to be
forwarded to her birth mother. “I am
your biological daughter,” she writes.
“I want you to know that I am well, and
happy, and have lived a good life.”
She receives e-mails from both of
her sisters in reply. “Nicole, I was very
shocked to find out I had another sis-
ter,” Cindy, her full sister, writes. “I
don’t know how much you want to
know. Our parents told us that you had
died.” Chung learns that her birth par-
ents had been unhappily married and
short of money, running a small store
while trying to raise two girls. Their
mother could be cruel, their father un-
available. When Chung was born two
and a half months premature, they gave
her up at the hospital.
After the divorce Cindy went to live
with their mother. (The older half-
sister was already away at school.) But
after six months, “she grabbed her be-
longings—everything she had packed
fit into a couple of plastic grocery
sacks—and nervously bid her mother
goodbye.” Their relationship never re-
covered, and Cindy moved in with her
father, who remarried a year later.
“There are many different kinds of
luck,” Chung realizes, “many different
ways to be blessed or cursed.” Her fam-
ily search does not lead her to a Korean
motherland or original maternal em-
brace. But it does bring her Cindy, who
also suffered rejection and pictured what
life might have been like in a different
family. “I don’t know how you would
have been treated if you’d stayed with
us, Nikki, but I know your sisters would
have loved you and tried to protect you,”
Cindy tells Chung. The reunited sisters,
though living on different coasts, visit
each other regularly with their husbands
and children—a kind of rebirth.
A few years ago Korean American
friends of mine, a married couple in
New Jersey, adopted a boy from Korea
through Holt International. The pro-
cess was long and complicated, with
repeated visits and court hearings
to safeguard the rights of the birth
family—the reforms that returning
adoptees had pushed for. I overlapped
with them in Seoul on one of their
pre-adoptive trips to meet their new
son. “Back in the day, you could start
your adoption process and a kid would
be delivered to you at JFK, and they’d
be five months old,” the wife told me.
“Now it’s impossible to get a kid home
earlier than two.” She and her husband
understood the critiques of transna-
tional adoption. But they felt that they
were well situated, as Korean Amer-
icans, to adopt a Korean child. When
they brought their son to the US from
a nurturing foster home in Busan, they
reminded him where he’d come from.
They created an album of his pre-
adoptive life and tried to read him chil-
dren’s books about adoption. None of
this interested him; he wanted only to
be an American kid and use his Amer-
ican name. “I do wonder how he’ll feel
later,” the wife said.
A lesson of adoptee memoirs, includ-
ing those by Chung, Wills, and Sjöblom,
is that adoption, search, and reunion
are not discrete events but unruly pro-
cesses that continue throughout an
adoptee’s life. At each step, new bonds
are haltingly formed. Existing bonds
can grow stronger or threaten to break
apart. For Chung, the presence of her
Korean parents and Korean American
sisters forced a revision of the “family
lore given to us as children.” It was no
longer gospel truth, she writes, “that
my birth family had loved me from the
start; that my parents, in turn, were
meant to adopt me; and that the story
unfolded as it should have.” Q

CAN ART THEORY BE SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN?

Whose Truth, Whose Creativity? is an
expert analysis of neuro-science and art
theory — this new book delves into the
source of all art and creativity, from ancient
cave paintings to contemporary art. It
explores why postmodern art theory has
had a damaging impact on the art world and
explains how neuroscience can prove this.
Does talent spring from the unconscious
mind as Paul Cézanne believed? Or does
it, as Marcel Duchamp theorized, come from
conceptual thinking at the conscious level?
regional competitions and exhibiting his work
throughout the Baltimore / Washington D.C.
region, he has lectured and taught collage
and his discovery, CUVISM, at the University
of Maryland’s Community College in
WHOSE
Columbia, Maryland. Sakkal has served as a TRUTH,
Peace Corps Volunteer architect from 1966 to
1968 and an Associate Peace Corps Director
WHOSE
from 1968 to 1971, both in Iran. He has a CREATIVITY?
Bachelor’s in Architecture from the School Why Postmodern Art Theory
Is A Culturally Damaging Mistake
of Architecture at Texas A&M University and And How Neuroscience
a Master’s in City Planning from Harvard’s Can Prove This

Graduate School of Design. A 21ST CENTURY

&RJQLWLYHQHXURVFLHQWL¿FSV\FKRORJ\DIDLUO\
QHZ¿HOGRISV\FKRORJ\H[SODLQVDQDWXUDO
mental basis for human creativity. This book
exposes the many falsehoods and distortions
of postmodern reasoning to demonstrate
how, by following this disturbing, unnatural
direction for decades, the art establishment
has been responsible for initiating an era of
damaging cultural chaos.
George J. E. Sakkal: For
RYHU¿IW\\HDUVKLVDYRFDWLRQ
has been the practice of
Fine Art. In addition to
winning several national and
ART MANIFESTO
+LV¿UVWDUWLFOHThe Problem with Postmodern
Art Theory, was published by the American
Arts Quarterly Journal in the summer of George J.E. Sakkal
2009. Examining the validity of the theories
of contemporary art’s Postmodern era
UHVXOWHGLQKLV¿UVWERRNCUVISM (Cognitive
Unconscious Visual Creativity): The Human
Creative Response, published in 2015.
PUBLICATION DATE: DECEMBER 1, 2021
HARDCOVER • 230 PAGES • $ 24.00 / £ 16.99
ISBN 978-1-913606-55-8 • AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON
AND BOOKSTORES ACROSS THE USA, UK AND IRELAND
VISIT THE AUTHOR / ARTIST AT WWW.SAKKALCUVISM.COM
WWW.BLACKSPRINGPRESSGROUP.COM
BLACK SPRING PRESS — INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING AND THINKING SINCE 1985
BASED IN WEST LONDON, A MINUTE FROM WHERE WILDE’S PUBLISHER LIVED

January 13, 2022 21


Jakub Józef Orliĸski as Orpheus’s Double, Erin Morley as Eurydice, and Joshua Hopkins as Orpheus in Eurydice
Eurydice
an opera by Matthew Aucoin,
with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl,
at the Metropolitan Opera,
New York City, November 23–
December 16, 2021
The Impossible Art:
Adventures in Opera
by Matthew Aucoin.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
299 pp., $28.00
It seemed appropriate that after the
first performance of Matthew Aucoin’s
opera Eurydice at the Met, conductor
Yannick Nézet- Séguin led the entire
orchestra onstage to take a bow. They
had certainly been playing a lot of
music, sustaining an unabated pulse
for three acts with a brightness, clar-
ity, and percussive precision that might
almost have made you forget you were
watching an opera about dying. They
did more than justice to an insistently
vigorous score full of quick changes
and fleeting stylistic intrusions of ev-
erything from Philip Glass to tango
music to medieval chant to Wagnerian
overload to Bergian dissonance, all
moving forward like a motor that can’t
be stopped. “For musicians,” Aucoin
writes in his new book, The Impossible
Art: Adventures in Opera, “the most
inescapable myth of all is the story of
Orpheus and Eurydice,” and here it’s
as if the music evoked by this myth is a
watery fusion of epochs. At thirty- one,
Aucoin writes with a precise awareness
of what has gone before in this domain;
he opens his book by surveying the
many operatic variations of the myth,
with a focus on Monteverdi, Charpen-
tier, and Harrison Birtwistle.
This seeping through of layers of
the past is fully in keeping with Or-
phic tradition. Every recasting of the
story of Orpheus and Eurydice seems
to demand to be recast in turn, mi-
grating from one medium to another,
so that (in modern times alone) Jean
Cocteau’s play and movie Orphée be-
22
Notes from Underground
Geoffrey O’Brien
came an opera by Philip Glass and an
insistent reference point in the poems
of Jack Spicer’s The Heads of the Town
Up to the Aether; Vinicius de Moraes
and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s stage pro-
duction Orfeu da Conceição became
Marcel Camus’s film Black Orpheus;
and Jean Anouilh’s occupation- era
transposition Eurydice is ritually re-
enacted in Alain Resnais’s extraordi-
nary penultimate film, You Ain’t Seen
Nothin’ Yet. Perhaps at the bottom of
all these reenvisioned reenvisionings is
the hope that this time it might turn out
differently, the fatal backward glance
averted, death for the nonce outtricked.
To engage with the myth encourages
trickery, the invention of a new story
in which Orpheus might somehow not
succumb to the urge to look back, and
art by its own will to persist would con-
jure a world in which death was some-
how (however obliquely or vicariously)
defeated. At such a juncture art is all
there is, and at the same time it is not
quite enough. Since Aucoin declares
opera to be the quintessential “im-
possible art” (because “an imagined
union of all the human senses and all
art forms . . . is itself an impossibility”),
what more suitable subject than the
myth that so emphatically demonstrates
the impossibility of the triumph over
death that art ultimately aspires to?
He has already dealt with the subject
in a short dramatic cantata called The
Orphic Moment, founded on a particu-
lar notion of Orpheus as “the ultimate
narcissistic aesthete,” half- deliberately
provoking loss as a goad to making art.1
The opera is itself a recasting of a free-
standing, highly accomplished work
well calculated to knock that figure to
the margins of the story. Sarah Ruhl’s
play Eurydice, which premiered in
1
The piece can be heard on the recently
released CD set Matthew Aucoin: Or-
phic Moments (Boston Modern Or-
chestra Project).
and mountain spirits, and the first bars
Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera
of music likewise are a dark ominous
swirl sounding orchestral depths. The
curtain rises on something quite differ-
ent: a bright abstraction of beach and
sky, the flat sun a perfect circle fixed
calmly above like a big yellow beach
ball, a postcard representation of a ge-
neric happiness. Orpheus (Joshua Hop-
kins) and Eurydice (Erin Morley) are
out on a date; with gestures he offers
her sky and birds and sea; she says (or
sings) “Wow.” It doesn’t feel like the
proverbial day at the beach, since the
orchestral music keeps getting between
them, intervening persistently and em-
phatically in every pause between their
tentative forays into each other’s hid-
den thoughts.
Aucoin has written that in opera “the
music and the poetry should each, ide-
ally, manifest a certain stubbornness;
their desires should even be somewhat
at odds with each other.” Such a con-
testation seems to permeate the opera,
with Orpheus and Eurydice themselves
sometimes acting out the struggle. They
appear to be a young couple intent on
transcendent bonding but never quite
able to communicate. Orpheus is pre-
occupied with music; Eurydice retreats
2003, aims for once to reverse the per- a bit, as if sensing that his music wants
spective and follow Eurydice into the to take possession of her. His preoccu-
underworld. Here she is reunited after pation is made visible and audible by
a fashion with her dead father, and this the descent via celestial elevator of his
reunion becomes the center of the play, winged twin (Jakub Józef OrliĔski on
a countermyth with its own tragic end- opening night; John Holiday on some
ing, in which the backward glance is subsequent dates). This character—
prompted by her speaking Orpheus’s one of the elements added to Ruhl’s
name in a moment of ambivalent hesi- play, figuring indeterminately as muse,
tation. (Ruhl, whose father died when other self, divine messenger, or secret
she was twenty, has said, “It made sense lover—is a countertenor whose voice
to me that if Eurydice went to the un- intertwines with Orpheus’s baritone
derworld she would meet her father. She to signal, presumably, moments of the
wanted to have more conversations with most unalloyed inspiration. In turning
him the way I wanted to have more con- toward him, Orpheus turns away from
versations with my father.”) I have never Eurydice, suggesting some motive for
seen it performed, but the spare, vernac- her later uncertainty in calling out to
ular, rapid dialogue would seem to lend him at the crucial moment.
itself to a multitude of possible perfor- Before we have gotten to know them,
mance styles. Sudden chasms of dream or perhaps before they have gotten
logic and dark humor function within a to know each other, the couple are
structure that feels at once made up on engaged, with their cries of “Yes!”
the spot and eerily ordained. “Yes!” sounding a little too desperate,
Aucoin writes of the play’s just as the festivity of the wedding that
“sometimes-goofy, Alice in Wonder- quickly follows feels too insistently,
land” effect, and Ruhl’s Eurydice mechanically exuberant. As Orpheus
does resemble Alice’s grieving doppel- and Eurydice finish reciting their self-
gänger, down the rabbit hole for good scripted vows, the party kicks into
and abandoned to the unconsoling gear with a blast of what sounds like
company of a trio of bullying stones. Balkan wedding music, something out
The edge of comic disruption is in of Goran Bregoviü’s raucous score for
no way inconsistent with the through Emir Kusturica’s appropriately titled
line of grief. The libretto pares the film Underground. The music thumps
play down and adds a few additional but is scarcely cheerful—it couldn’t
elements without damaging its skele- be further away from, say, the ethe-
tal strength, and however forceful the really buoyant wedding chorus from
score’s pulse, it does no more than keep Monteverdi’s Orfeo, with its effortless
pace with the play’s own darting, light- conjuring of the pervading delight, no
footed, but equally relentless rhythm. matter how tinged with melancholy,
Between them Aucoin and Ruhl have of mere being. Nothing here suggests
fashioned an opera that for all the fa- a world of luscious pleasures that one
miliarity of the myth and profusion of would never, under any circumstances,
whimsical invention generates a sus- want to say farewell to. When Eurydice
pension of disbelief. Against all expec- sings “I hate parties,” it doesn’t come
tations, the plight of the newly dead as a surprise. She walks away from her
entering into oblivion becomes a mat- own wedding party to get a drink of
ter of empathetic concern. water—a water cooler standing in the
At the production’s outset, the cur- middle of nowhere becomes a minimal
tain, which resembles an aquatint of symbol of the sunlit world she is about
a brooding landscape of forested hills to leave, and a premonition of the wa-
and misty glens, seems to bode some ters that wash away the memories of
folkloric supernatural realm of trolls newcomers to the underworld.
The New York Review
E very word sung is projected onstage.
This is not merely a convenience for the
spectators, but an integral part of the
production. The words are not above
or apart from the opera but within it,
as participants. Displayed in a variety
of styles and positions, their precisely
calibrated timing becomes, inaudibly, a
part of the music. We see every phrase
as it is sung, a doubling that accentu-
ates at each moment the primacy of
language in this story in which the dead
send letters to the living and the living
to the dead. In a first glimpse of what
awaits, we encounter Eurydice’s dead
father (Nathan Berg)—still wearing an
old-fashioned business suit, in a cage-
like cabinet on top of which a mortuary
angel crouches—as he writes her con-
gratulations on her wedding. The cur-
sive letters of his sentences melt away
as soon as they are inscribed, water
being the fundamental sign of death
here.
The newly arrived Eurydice must
learn to comprehend the language of
the dead. But her father has managed
to evade the waters of oblivion and re-
tain the memory of human language,
and he restores her to a half-life by
helping her reclaim, with difficulty, its
vocabulary, finally singing to her Lear’s
last words to Cordelia. By hanging on
to names they cultivate a forbidden ar-
chive of memories, memories that no
longer have any link to the living world.
The Father himself is a relic; there is a
moment when, emerging from the dark,
he resembles a nineteenth- century ar-
chaeologist making his way through a
labyrinth in which he has been buried
once and for all. If Orpheus has a dou-
ble, Eurydice’s existence in the under-
world hovers between two other male
figures: the Father, who by stirring up
memory sustains a connection to life,
and Hades (Barry Banks), who ac-
costed her outside her wedding party
and lured her toward death by offering
to show her a letter from her father.
Hades, who sings in a screechingly
high tenor register, materializes first as
a lounge lizard proffering dubious cock-
tails to Eurydice in a penthouse suite
while twiddling with the radio dial to
find suitable mood music. (It’s a ploy
that leads to her tumbling down the six
hundred steps of his stairway into the
underworld.) Later, in his infernal head-
quarters, giving Orpheus the ground
rules for Eurydice’s rescue, he presents
himself as the chintziest of Halloween
Lucifers, with horns and coiled tail;
subsequently, as he asserts his full dom-
ination, he parades even more absurdly
on stilts. Flanked by shadowy demonic
minions who might be refugees from
a ballet in a French Baroque opera,
Banks’s Hades carries on like a comic
emcee at a members- only nightclub,
getting the biggest laugh of the night
when he asks Orpheus if he isn’t enjoy-
ing his grief too much.2 Since the Lord
of the Underworld has the last laugh,
it’s fitting he should exude a clownish-
ness indistinguishable from cruelty.
Once we reach the country of death,
the earlier sunlit scenes fade into faintly
recalled sketches. Mary Zimmerman’s
production, with sets designed by Dan-
iel Ostling and costumes by Ana Kuz-
2
Aucoin writes in The Impossible Art,
“Orpheus seems more at home singing
elegies for Eurydice than he is actually
living with her.”
January 13, 2022
manic, reserves its strongest sense of of the production’s weight as they boss,
place for the underworld, even if it is bray, panic, and sob in a grotesque par-
a place of shifting appearances, where ody of human feeling.) The phantasms
sharply defined spaces emerge from can be auditory as well, like the unseen
darkness and fade as if they never were, train whose passage is so distinctively
an anteroom still harboring traces of marked by a blend of strings, flute, and
longing for places and people already piccolo over a low rumble of drums.
irretrievable, a bardo state or a theater In this scene of arrival Erin Morley’s
of the mind more real than life above Eurydice begins to assert her presence
ground. It’s raining in the elevator in fully, as if a latent strength surged in
which Eurydice arrives, and she steps reaction to her confusion, her amnesia,
out carrying an umbrella, dressed in a her inability to grasp where she is or to
bright green coat of an earlier era, to recognize her father, whom she mis-
find herself surrounded by the trio of takes for a porter welcoming her to a
gray stones who are there to initiate foreign city. She rises into the intensity
her into the rules of being dead. (Sta- of a belated self-realization that makes
cey Tappan, Ronnita Miller, and Chad the scenes between Eurydice and the
Shelton operate almost as a percussion Father the core of the opera’s emotional
section in human form, carrying a lot life, the assertion of an impossible per-
LAXNESS
It came to me later in the day
Walking the dog I’d decided
To put down because among other
Recent aggressions she had
Bitten the child of a stranger
I had to walk her to get away
From thinking about it and that’s when
His name finally occurred to me
An acoustic image descending
The vowel scale from “likeness”
A man’s adulthood contained so little
Of it that I took note of anything
Such as his book that made me
Burst into tears
In this tears resembled laughter
In books I had encountered scenes
Of people bursting into song
In Kidnapped Alan Breck kills four men
Then bursts into a Gaelic poem
Composed by himself on the spot
But there were few experiences like it
I tried to remember the landscape
Was bleak and the suffering relentless
The view made up for a great deal
Even before the ocean came into it
The father was mean but you forgot
Everything about him in time
Except what he did to his daughter
That and the reindeer he rode
Into the blizzard and through
The river ice trying to kill it
And I would say who wrote it
But was drawing a blank
As I held my weeping child
At 4 AM in the converted room
Blankness was the better place
I promised you the vet would find for her
And there was hope and solace in it
Like a lake famed for its monster
A long form made of lake water
And then I thought of likeness
And the dog bursting into flames
And the flames licking my hand
—Cyrus Console
sistence. The central action, however,
is neither sung nor spoken but mutely
performed, as the Father moves around
the stage with a ball of string, marking
off a room for Eurydice within the void
of the underworld, as if to act out Paul
Klee’s definition of drawing as “taking
a line for a walk.” The effect of the bare
boundary of string is epic enough in it-
self to make the music that accompa-
nies it almost superfluous. The flimsiest
of borders becomes the last and only
dividing line between form and form-
lessness, home and homelessness.
Eurydice, finally offered a chance to
return to the surface world with Or-
pheus, is torn by a desire to stay with
the Father; he, believing she has al-
ready gone on her way, submits to the
obliterating waters of a river, which
here takes the form of a shower stall
in a tiny bathroom. Returning to find
him definitively lost to her, Eurydice
surrenders to the same process: a dou-
ble suicide, each dying a second death.
The Father’s final monologue, in which
he dredges up from childhood mem-
ory the directions to the river (“Take
Route 88 West to Route 80. You’ll go
over a bridge. Go three miles and you’ll
come to the exit for Middle Road . . .”),
is spoken, not sung, over what Aucoin
describes as “a gentle, watery texture.”
It’s as if language were drowning in
sound.
The opera’s reversal of perspective
means that Orpheus takes on a role
that is, if not diminished, then at least
more distant. We are a long way away
from the piercingly beautiful (or beau-
tifully piercing) grief of Monteverdi’s
Orpheus, gathering all feeling into it-
self while Eurydice barely makes her
presence heard. Here Orpheus’s plain-
tive reflections and outcries after the
death of Eurydice seem like remote
transmissions, more depressed than
anguished. The opening scene showed
an Orpheus at once naive, vulnerable,
detached, and almost arrogant in his
absorption in his own art. He is locked
in communication, but it is not clear
with what; and his determination to re-
trieve Eurydice seems compounded of
boyish bravado as much as of despair.
When he arrives at the walls of Hell,
we are given an impressive full-frontal
view of them, something more solid
and clear- cut than the shadowlands
within: more like the implacable archi-
tecture of an old epic movie like Land
of the Pharaohs or The Egyptian, with
music textured momentarily to match
that evocation, as if the infernal pow-
ers could call on Bernard Herrmann
or Dimitri Tiomkin to shore up their
defenses. Told he can only sing to the
dead in a dead language, Orpheus and
his angelic double respond with a Latin
chant, music from a crypt to break open
a crypt. It is lovely but lost, nothing
that might plausibly move the heart of
Hades, who in any case prefers “happy
music with a nice beat.”
It is instead Eurydice who is given
an aria of love fully recollected to sing,
even if it is a love of an artist who “is
always going away from you.” In death
as in life they finally fail to connect,
moving in opposite directions until
the moment when Orpheus, no longer
singing, arrives by the same elevator in
the land of the dead, entering the same
silence and darkness as Eurydice, pick-
ing up a letter he can no longer read. It
is not so much an ending as a stopping
point, the sudden clicking off of a large
machine. Q
23

The centennial of Ulysses is in 2022,
and coming back to the book after a
gap of some years I remember the way
it makes me fall asleep somewhere in
the middle of Stephen’s walk across
Sandymount Strand. The first two ep-
isodes—all fine. Surprisingly easy.
What’s all the fuss about? Then the
book unlooses itself entirely in the
mind of Dedalus and starts to dream:
“He comes, pale vampire, through
storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying
the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss.”
Hang on. Did Stephen actually visit
his aunt’s house, or just imagine that
he did? Is he still thinking of his moth-
er’s death? There is a dead dog on the
strand, and also a live dog called Tat-
ters, and this living dog is actually quite
funny, as he smells a rock and pisses on
it, then pisses at an “unsmelt” rock.
“The simple pleasures of the poor,” ac-
cording to Stephen, but is he also tak-
ing a leak? Or is he doing something
else now?
I have felt it before, the same swoon-
ing sense of complexity, the same de-
licious struggle not to allow my own
thoughts in. The attempt to make sense,
fill in blanks, tell the real from the
imagined, becomes tiring the way a pro-
found conversation is tiring, when the
subject is important but not clear. It is
a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like
writing fiction. Joyce has been in our
brains, playing in the place where mean-
ing is made, and this can feel disturbing
or delightful. Something has been done
to the act of reading itself. It seems as
though he is inviting us to write his book
for him, or with him, as we go along.
On June 16, 1904, Stephen Dedalus,
a young writer, is mourning his mother
and in need of a better father. Leopold
Bloom, an adman, is avoiding his un-
faithful wife and mourning a long- dead
infant son. They meet, drink, recognize
something in each other. Apart from
this, nothing much happens. There is
a funeral. People wander around Dub-
lin while thinking. Momentous events
(Molly Bloom’s adultery, the birth of a
baby) happen elsewhere. Meanwhile,
the reader is left with men blathering
on, singing, arguing, lapsing into rev-
erie, playing with themselves. Bloom
dodges the man who is heading uptown
in order to sleep with his wife. He is
subjected to anti- Semitism in a pub. At
dusk he masturbates, covertly enough,
on a beach.
The title may be taken from Ho-
mer’s great epic, but this is all very far
from heroic. Unless the book itself is
heroic; it keeps doing monumental
things—outlandish, never previously
attempted. The English language is
regrown from its historical roots in the
basement of a maternity hospital, the
whole caboodle goes completely mad
in a brothel. Bloom dusts himself and
Stephen down, and the prose comes
strenuously together in a great rhetor-
ical to-and-fro until, at last, it runs easy
and wild in the mind of Molly Bloom.
Copyright © 2022 by Anne Enright. This
essay will appear, in somewhat different
form, as the introduction to the Vintage
Classics edition of Ulysses, published in
January 2022 and edited by Hans Walter
Gabler.
24
Dubliners
Anne Enright
Illustration by Paolo Ventura
Perhaps it has been, after all, pretty
epic, though we are still not sure what
kind of journey we’ve been on. We
stalk the references, and this can be re-
assuring. Buck Mulligan “is” a real man
named Oliver St. John Gogarty; the old
woman who comes to sell him Sandy-
cove milk “is” Athena, from Homer’s
Odyssey. Many of the answers we find
to the questions that the book provokes
don’t, in fact, answer anything much. As
Molly says, “If I asked him hed say its
from the Greek leave us as wise as we
were before.” The Homeric correspon-
dences are so constantly disappointing,
they are a joke in themselves, and yet
they tell us that we are reading a story,
so we refer to the chapters—as Joyce,
finally, did not—by the titles of epi-
sodes from the Odyssey on which they
are obliquely based. And there we are,
writing the book for him again.
People say that they finished Ulysses
or that they could not finish it, as if ei-
ther outcome were some kind of big
deal. But I have never managed to fin-
ish Ulysses, even though my eyes have
seen all the words it contains. You can
finish it all you like; the next time you
pick the book up it will be different, be-
cause you are different. Ulysses invites
meaning, then throws it back at you,
multiplied.
I bought my first copy for under a fiver
in a bookshop in Kinsale when I was
fourteen. This was, of course, a pre-
cocious thing to do, but—consider—
when Joyce was fourteen, he bought
his first sexual experience on the street.
If that happened today, we would call
social services. How much did he pay,
I wonder? Bloom remembers his own
first, Bridie Kelly on Hatch Street,
who could be had “for a bare shilling
and her luckpenny.” So perhaps that’s
how much loose change Joyce had in
his young pocket as he came back from
the theater, which in those days cost
as much as fifteen shillings or as little
as sixpence. Young James Joyce may
have asked the girl or woman her name
(but I do not think he did) and she
most certainly asked him for that extra
penny. In Paris, seven years later, he
was so destitute he wrote to his mother
complaining that, after starving for
forty-two hours, he had blown her res-
cue money on a single meal costing a
shilling.
A lot of energy has been spent
talking about the rudeness of Ulysses.
Now that I know more about the world,
I sometimes follow the money instead.
The book is set on a day when Deda-
lus, who owes money everywhere, gets
paid much less than he needs in order
to make good. The men who bump into
one another around Dublin are inter-
connected by debt—they are borrow-
ing and lending, buying drinks or, like
Bloom, failing to stand their round.
Bloom’s goodwill is patient and mate-
rial, however—he is a charitable man—
and when he sees Stephen’s sister in the
street, he is shocked at the state of her:
“Good Lord, that poor child’s dress
is in flitters. Underfed she looks too.
Potatoes and marge, marge and po-
tatoes.” This girl, Dilly, begs money
from her father, Simon, for food, also
in the street—“I’m sure you have an-
other shilling”—and she spends a
penny of what he gives her on a sec-
ondhand French primer. A girl who
burns old boots to keep warm wants to
learn French. These glimpses of hun-
ger and hopefulness are so pathetic
and shaming, you might think the fart-
ing and the frottage were just there to
distract us.
It was the bodily functions that
caused all the trouble. When the book
was published it was feted, vilified,
banned. Edna O’Brien said, however,
that “what hurt Joyce most was the re-
sponse of his family,” which makes you
wonder what he thought he was doing
when he wrote all that. In fact, when his
relatives described the book they might
have been describing themselves. His
blackguard of a father looked at it
through his monocle and said that his
son was “a nice sort of blackguard.”
His brother Stanislaus, who could be
cold, said the novel “lacked serenity
and warmth.” Stanislaus also disliked
the way the book wants to get bigger as
it goes on and is so reluctant to close:
“As episodes grow longer and longer
and you try to tell every damn thing
you know about anybody that appears
or anything that crops up, my patience
oozes out.”
Nora said nothing. She read only
twenty-seven pages, including, Joyce
said bitterly, the title page. Where did
she stop?
Here’s a different question. Do you
read Ulysses in an intellectual fashion?
Does the challenge make you feel bril-
liant, pedantic, a little bit pretentious—
does it make you feel, that is, like
Stephen Dedalus? Or do you go with
the flow, read feelingly, sensuously, let
this gorgeous stuff work inside you as
if you were Leopold Bloom, a man who
pictures his penis floating in the bath as
a languid floating flower?
Reading Ulysses without notes—just
as it is, just as you are—is an act of ei-
ther arrogance or submission, both of
which are available to the very young.
For me, at fourteen, it was like main-
lining language, getting high on words,
just the pleasure of them, their intrica-
cies and density. I also read it one word
at a time, which is not a bad way, child-
ish as it may seem, to read a book that
is so disruptive of the sentence.
My Dublin aunts lived, in a slightly
Edwardian atmosphere, not far from
Bloom’s fictional home, so I’d had
glimpses of this world already. Here
on the page were their violet-flavored
cachous, which Bloom called “kiss-
ing comfits.” Here were their odd-
sounding religious “sodalities,” which
had nothing to do with turf sods, or
sodomy, or solidarity. “I declare to my
antimacassar,” says one narrator, and I
knew an antimacassar was not another
kind of auntie, it was a doily that aun-
ties put on the backs of chairs. I also
knew what a bowsy was and what was
a gusset. To these pleasures of famil-
iarity were added the headier delights
of Joyce’s linguistic violations and his
refusal to tell the inside of a character’s
head from the outside world. I did not
understand Ulysses, but I certainly un-
derstood (before it sent me to sleep)
the possibility that anything at all
might come to mind, and that this was a
deeply subversive, potentially filthy and
wonderful assertion to make about the
human soul.
No wonder my mother was not pleased
to find me reading it. My copy was put
in the attic to wait until I was eighteen.
At which time I climbed the ladder,
took off its dusty newspaper wrapping,
and read the thing. It was my pass into
the adult world. This was some years
before the popularity of Bloomsday,
The New York Review
that happy pantomime of literary
Dubliners going about in straw boat-
ers or long skirts on June 16. Ulysses
was still a book, a private as opposed
to public experience, and some of the
conversations about it felt a bit pervy.
It seemed to attract a certain kind of
knowingness in clever men, and the
way they looked at me, if I talked about
reading it, managed to make me feel
ashamed.
Is this Joyce’s fault? The culture of
Joyce commentary can be an invitation
to pedantry for men who are interested
in everything that isn’t sex between two
people. Was Bloom masturbating at, to,
or for a young woman on Sandymount
Strand at dusk? The prepositions
seem important. Gerty McDowell, the
woman in question, certainly seems
to enjoy it. The episode is written as a
high romance; she thinks like a woman
in a novelette or like a consumer of the
advertisements in a woman’s magazine.
Perhaps this is why she is so interested
in her own underwear and has an im-
pulse to show it off at just the right mo-
ment for Bloom.
The slyly inadequate correspon-
dence from Homer is that she rep-
resents the marriage-minded Princess
Nausicaa, who helps Odysseus after he
is cast up on her shore. Joyce described
the episode as “the projected mirage,”
and this may explain Gerty’s rhapsodic
participation in Bloom’s excitement.
Of course! The text shows Bloom’s
projection, not Gerty’s reality. She isn’t
thinking about her underwear; she is
thinking, like any young person on a
beach, about life, love, art, and her din-
ner. When Joyce was asked what really
happened between Bloom and Gerty,
he said, “Nothing . . . It all took place in
Bloom’s imagination.”
But he also said the episode dealt
with “female hypocrisy,” which seems a
typically sour comment about women,
and also unfair. When Joyce lived in
Zurich he wrote some highly roman-
tic letters to a woman named Martha
Fleischman, on whom he had become
fixated after he saw her “pulling a
chain” in her bathroom opposite his
apartment. Later, in the street, he real-
ized that she had a limp. Each of these
details shades his infatuation with para-
philia—coprophilia, voyeurism, devo-
tism. Sexuality stalls at the fetish, and
though Joyce loves to be high-flown
as well as low-minded, the parody can
seem gleeful, while the smallness of his
interest disconcerts.
The prose is not small, however.
Gerty’s thoughts are written not by a
hack writer of romantic fiction but by
a great prose stylist, and the reader is
also transported. The moment when
Gerty limps away is—for us, if not
quite for Bloom—one of great sym-
pathetic enlargement. An image of
Gerty will return in the brothel sec-
tion to accuse Bloom, as one of a se-
ries of sadomasochistic fantasies that
culminate in his being feminized and
violated. Later again, we learn that he
has not come inside his wife, Molly, in
the ten years since their son died. A
book that avoids intercourse has room
for everything else—fantasy, imagina-
tion, remembrance, reproduction, and
love.
If Gerty is a third-person object,
to Bloom and to the book, Molly is
triumphantly a first-person subject.
Sometimes petty, often vain, and very
far from monogamous, Molly consid-
ers various partners past and future,
January 13, 2022
including the young Dedalus, and she
rails against the double standards im-
posed on women. She thinks about sex
a lot, about motherhood very little, and
about her dead son only fleetingly. She
does all this without punctuation. The
thrill and difficulty of reading Molly
comes from the libidinous rush of a
style that constantly threatens to slip
or surprise, and it can be hard to find
a discussion of her character that does
not feel dated. She is earth mother
or adultress, cheap or mythic, she is
“an invitation to the readers’ voyeur-
ism,” and seldom allowed to be just
herself.
What would happen if she used a few
full stops? Molly farts a bit, gets her
period, and uses the chamber pot. Such
anatomical events are not more shock-
ing because they happen in a woman’s
body—unless they are. They do not
read as arousal, and only sometimes
as the writer’s prurience. “Of course
hes mad on the subject of drawers,”
Molly says about Bloom, because she
is no fool, but she also fell for him be-
cause she saw that “he understood or
felt what a woman is.” Joyce may have
had his own kind of good time writing
Molly, but this adventure in female de-
siring is the opposite of misogynistic,
not just because of the freedom of her
voice, but because there is no doubt-
ing that Molly is in charge of herself:
“theyre not going to be chaining me up
no damn fear.”
T hese days I read everything slowly;
my brain is like an old computer file
with too much information in it. I slow
down, stop. I go back over it again.
This is also a good way to read Ul-
ysses, with a guidebook, notes, the In-
ternet at your fingertips. And I read as
my parents used to watch Irish-made
films: in order to identify the loca-
tions and, loudly, point them out. The
Oval pub still exists and was up till re-
cently frequented by newspapermen;
Davy Byrne’s is still moral; the read-
ing room of the National Library re-
mains open to scholars. I gave birth in
the same building as Mina Purefoy, I
swim with Buck Mulligan, and mourn
the passing of friends in the chapel at
Glasnevin.
For a while I lived in a house named
in the book, a fact that seemed, until
just recently, not especially thrilling.
The address 13 St. Kevin’s Parade is
given for Moses Herzog, referred to in
the “Cyclops” episode as someone to
whom money is owed for sugar and tea.
There I “lived in sin” back in 1985—the
phrase was in active use in my Catho-
lic family, and it made the relationship
feel forbidden and doomed. My fellow
sinner is, in 2021, usefully sitting across
the room from me, so I can ask him to
confirm the number of the house. A
quick search discovers (on Twitter!)
the relevant page in Thom’s Official
Directory of 1904, which Joyce used as
a reference while writing Ulysses. The
house is three up from the intersection
with Clanbrassil Street, which is close
to where the Islamic Relief center now
stands. M. Herzog is listed by Thom’s
at that address, though the official cen-
sus of 1901 shows an Isaac and Abra-
ham Herzog. In fact, Thom’s misspells
and misgenders four other residents of
the street who then turn up, botched, in
the pages of Ulysses.
There are few or no Jewish residents
now in Dublin’s “Little Jerusalem,”
the network of redbrick streets where
Bloom was born and where Molly later
walked, while pregnant, with Mrs. Moi-
sel. I had no idea, when I lived there
in 1985, that the house opposite had
once served as a synagogue. The dis-
appeared community was made up of
migrants from Lithuania, who moved
on to larger houses in better areas, and
eventually left an increasingly Cath-
olic, economically stagnant Ireland
altogether.
Of course, Molly did not actually
walk these streets with Mrs. Moisel, be-
cause Molly did not, strictly speaking,
exist. It’s also a bit of a stretch to see
her accepted so easily in a conservative
Litvak enclave. Molly went to Mass,
her father-in-law was Hungarian, her
husband, Bloom, was twice baptized
and nonpracticing. Joyce got the reli-
gion of the residents exactly right, and
their culture slightly wrong. Even so,
because of his insane attempt at accu-
racy and his weird, often libelous insis-
tence on cramming the book with the
names of real people, it is possible to
fall through the text into a place like
Little Jerusalem, which Ireland’s ho-
mogeneous, nationalist history-making
has more or less forgotten.
Because the text is so unstable and,
for many different reasons, inaccurate,
you can also fall into a shouting match
with six academics and your Dublin
mother, who may consider you have got
your facts, or your interpretation of the
facts, a tiny bit wrong. This, with a sa-
cred text like Ulysses, means entirely,
horribly wrong. Joyce was a genius, so
even his mistakes were made on pur-
pose. There is no such thing as a mis-
take. Stick a pin in any page and you
will find a fight.
Is the Pidgeon who gave poor Mary
Shortall the pox a reference to the
Holy Ghost? Hmm. According to the
prostitute Kitty Ricketts, Mary was
“in the lock with the pox she got from
Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a
child off him that couldn’t swallow.”
The line is followed by a recurring
joke about the “pigeon sacré” who put
the Virgin Mary into an embarrassing
condition. I chase the bird, flapping
and cooing, through the text. Stephen
is reminded of the joke about the Holy
Ghost when he sees the Pigeonhouse
from Sandymount Strand—this build-
ing was named for John Pidgeon, who
had an eatery there in the 1760s, but
there is no clear relation to Jimmy.
In the post office Bloom thinks about
the problem of pox-bearing British
soldiers (the blue caps) while waiting
for the postmistress to retrieve his
letter from a “pigeonhole”—but that
is surely just another decoy among
many.
One commentator says that Pidgeon
was a common Dublin name, but there
were only eighty-two of them in the
1911 census. Among them is a Rob-
ert Pidgeon who worked in the Gen-
eral Post Office, and might well have
been the father of our postman in the
1970s. He was a smiling man, who was
rumored to have fifteen children—“so
far as we know,” my father used to say,
darkly. He also got great mileage from
the phrase “the pigeon post.”
It is possible to spin out from this sin-
gle pin stuck in the text to a historically
shifting map of the real Dublin—the
concrete chimney stacks of the Pigeon-
house are visible from any point along
the bay. I, meanwhile, am back in the
punning proliferation of my comically
(not) cuckolded father, who found in
Mr. Pidgeon’s name a daily pleasure.
Habit is also important here, and what
could be more habitual than the post?
I am reminded of a style of nurturing
masculinity, which is always mild, al-
ways funny, and this informs my expe-
rience of Leopold Bloom. Don’t ask
me to read Ulysses without my own
father there—why would I want to do
that?
F or some years now, I have lived
close to the Joyce Museum in Sandy-
cove, which is housed in the Martello
tower where Joyce once slept and
where he later set the first chapter of
Ulysses. The sea, I am happy to say,
is no more snot-green than Homer’s
was wine- dark. But though the water
resists Joyce’s famous description, the
squat, round stone tower belongs al-
most completely now to the book. It is
populated by shades both fictional and
historical, and by living people who are
their familiars. I walk through a neigh-
borhood of Joyce tourists and badly
behaved Joycean ghosts. There, up the
road, is the house where the real play-
wright J. M. Synge lived and a fictional
Dedalus pissed against the hall door—
unless, as he says, it was Mulligan.
(“—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was
your contribution to literature.”) An-
other example of Joyce fixing the real
to the literary by a transgressive use of
waste matter.
Recently, just to get the full experi-
ence, I sat on a bench near the Forty
Foot, the swimming spot below the
Martello tower where Buck Mulligan
goes for his dip, and I read a page or
two. It was a mild September after-
noon. The day was so windless and
still, I could hear a man address a quiet
friend, one leaving, one arriving, both
of them with their towels rolled.
“Hello there, young Thomas,” he
said. “Were you aware that a certain
gentleman is home this week? Your
presence may be required.”
And it seemed to me a continuation
of the book I held in my hand.
The dialogue in Ulysses uses tricks
of speech that are as real and abiding
as the streets of the city that Joyce
worked so hard to recreate. This tone
is not exactly camp, but it is rakish,
mock-heroic; a glittering game that fills
the verbal space between men who like
each other—but not too much!
“I’ve been in since four,” the man
went on, cheerfully. “Went for a walk,
took a Barry White in the new jacks
they have up there. Lovely.” The local
council had recently reopened a nearby
public restroom, so this good news was
both personal and civic. It was also as-
tonishingly male.
I felt a theory coming on. I wondered
at the way male speech often confuses
top and bottom, why Irish men are so
happily described as “talking shite” or
“bollocks,” or why an “old fart” is by
default male. So many of the men in
Ulysses are heard huffing and blow-
ing, not to mention gassing about pol-
itics. Perhaps, for Joyce, speech was
just another thing that came from the
body and lingered on the air. If you
ask me what Ulysses has to offer—
despite the maleness of the text, de-
spite the author’s perversion, despite
the way it exists not on the page but
in your reading of the page—the
answer is still “Everything, everything,
everything.” Q
25
 The Paradox of the American Revolution
Liberty Is Sweet:
The Hidden History of the
American Revolution
by Woody Holton.
Simon and Schuster, 779 pp., $37.50
American Republics:
A Continental History
of the United States, 1783–1850
by Alan Taylor.
Norton, 515 pp., $35.00
The battles over American history pro-
voked during the latest national reckon-
ing on race have focused heavily on the
Revolution and the Civil War. As David
A. Bell recently observed in these pages,
descriptions of America’s egalitarian
founding principles as covers for white
supremacy—“formulated to promote
exclusion and oppression”—have gained
a sudden currency.1 By these lights, the
Revolution was in large measure a pro-
slavery secession sparked by American
fears of British threats to slavery. The
Civil War supposedly originated as a
clash between contending white suprem-
acists over the spread of slavery, which
ended by replacing chattel bondage with
a new regime of black subjugation.
Two ambitious new studies, Liberty
Is Sweet by Woody Holton on the Rev-
olution and American Republics by
Alan Taylor on the decades that led to
the Civil War, examine far more than
the history of American slavery and
racism. Both take up the array of po-
litical and social transformations that
shaped the nation’s growth from an
aspiring republic hugging the eastern
seaboard to a boisterous, even bellicose
capitalist democracy that spanned the
North American continent. Yet both
books advance claims in accord with
interpretations of white supremacy as
the driving force of American history.
Holton and Taylor are serious scholars,
and given the larger stakes involved, the
reliability of their conclusions on these
matters assumes importance in debates
that go far beyond the academy.
Woody Holton is the McCausland
Professor of History at the University of
South Carolina, the author of four pre-
vious books, and the recipient of many
honors, including the Bancroft Prize
for his biography of Abigail Adams.
That book aside, his scholarship has
chiefly concerned relatively obscure
Americans—enslaved men and women,
Native Americans, indebted small farm-
ers. While building on the work of re-
cent historians including Gary B. Nash
and Peter H. Wood, Holton has also
sought to establish how the Revolution
was, in the formulation of the Progres-
sive historian Carl Becker more than
a century ago, a battle not simply over
American home rule but over which
Americans should rule at home. Thus,
he has argued, turmoil among ordinary
Virginians in 1775 persuaded the col-
ony’s gentry to declare independence
from Britain lest they lose their own
local control. And he has asserted, in
1
“Whose Freedom?,” September 23,
2021; a review of Tyler Stovall, White
Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea
(Princeton University Press, 2021).
26
Sean Wilentz
‘Flight of Lord Dunmore’; postcard, 1907
an updating of a famous interpretation
by Becker’s contemporary Charles A.
Beard, that the framers of the Constitu-
tion, unnerved by popular uprisings like
Shays’s Rebellion, designed a strong na-
tional government responsive to the in-
terests of economic elites, at the expense
of the great majority of small farmers.
Very much in that vein, Liberty Is
Sweet offers what its subtitle proclaims
is the Revolution’s “hidden history,”
as made by enslaved workers, contrary
women, prophetic small farmers, and
resistant Native Americans, among oth-
ers. After what Holton acknowledges as
more than a half-century of research on
the Revolution from the bottom up—in-
cluding work on black history that, he
writes, “has . . . fought its way from the
back of the bus to the driver’s seat”—a
great deal of that history is, in fact, no
longer so hidden. Nor, with all of its un-
familiar stories, does Liberty Is Sweet
venture a major new interpretation of
the Revolution. Still, Holton is a profi-
cient and tireless researcher who, using
his own findings and those of others,
presents fresh appraisals of important
developments based on lives and events
long condemned to obscurity.
He explores, for example, the con-
nections between the evangelical Great
Awakening of the mid- eighteenth cen-
tury and the Revolution, long a matter
of intense academic dispute. His discus-
sions, though, center not on well-known
religious thinkers like Jonathan Edwards
or George Whitefield but on Sarah Os-
born, a remarkable teacher and spir-
itual leader in Newport, Rhode Island.
Osborn, in defiance of prevailing patri-
archal norms, gathered her own weekly
meetings of the faithful, including black
converts as well as white. By telling her
story, Holton presents the Awakening
as an outburst of religious intensity that
helped generate the revolutionary era’s
powerful democratic currents.
Readers of Holton’s earlier work will
find more surprising his copious treat-
ment, making up nearly half of Liberty
Is Sweet, of the Revolution’s military
history, a subject less prominent in re-
cent decades as historians have focused
on politics, ideas, and culture.2 He
2
Important exceptions include Robert
Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The
in 1765—the movement that initiated
Jamestown Amusement and Vending Co./Library of Congress
the colonists’ resistance—arose from
genuine anger at a British tax that
Americans of all classes truly could
not afford to pay, which reasonably
led to charges that the king’s ministers
and Parliament had become tyranni-
cal. Nine years later, when Parliament
responded to the Boston Tea Party of
December 1773 by punishing the city
with the ham-fisted Coercive Acts,
political issues beyond narrow self-
interest pushed the colonies rapidly to-
ward independence. As the best recent
study of the Stamp Act crisis notes,
“constitutional and commercial consid-
erations were difficult to distinguish in
a mercantile empire such as Britain’s,
where both were stretched and folded
into a system of imperial governance.”3
By slighting the first consideration in
favor of the second, Holton elides how
the relationship between them helped
produce the revolutionary movement.
highlights the military importance of Holton goes on to assert that despite
unfamiliar individuals as distant geo- the furious immediate response to the
graphically and socially as Haidar Ali, Coercive Acts that led a year later to the
the sultan of Mysore, who, half a world bloody engagements at Lexington and
away, was involved in both starting the Concord, colonial leaders remained
war and ending it. Holton emphasizes skittish about independence until pop-
the participation of Native American ular turmoil finally pushed them to
warriors on both sides of the fighting, abandon efforts to reconcile with the
as well as the military exploits of Af- Crown. The argument is overstated.
rican Americans, especially those who Well before the outbreak of armed
joined the British. hostilities, writings like Thomas Jef-
He is just as perceptive, however, ferson’s Summary View of the Rights of
when he assesses the strategy, tactics, British America, published in Virginia
and leadership of George Washington, in 1774, denied the Crown’s authority
as well as Washington’s fellow Ameri- over the colonies and strongly augured
can and allied French officers and their revolution unless Britain immedi-
British adversaries. His writing sparkles ately changed course. By mid-1775 the
in these chapters, in crisp, assured expo- Continental Congress, although still
sitions. While attentive to the cold logic willing to communicate politely with
of command, Holton never minimizes London via petition, firmly refused to
warfare’s grotesque inhumanity. His yield, while the British government re-
book’s real achievement may be to re- sponded by proclaiming the colonists in
direct academic historians’ attention to open rebellion and preparing to crush
the battlefields and to appreciating anew them violently. Royal authority had
some of the least hidden aspects of the broken down in most of the colonies,
Revolution. rendering them virtually independent.4
Holton concedes that for “many
Americans,” from New Hampshire to
O ther of the book’s central interpre- North Carolina, the bloodshed at Lex-
tations are less convincing. Follow- ington and Concord in April 1775 was
ing the earlier Progressive historians, “the final argument for independence.”
Holton describes the colonial leaders’ Yet he also contends that for many oth-
grievances as mostly economic and ers, especially in Virginia, the question
self-interested: they aimed at enriching remained open until much later, and
themselves by removing Native Amer- that the decision for independence was
icans and speculating in western lands; “heavily influenced by the 40 percent
trading freely in commodities that were, of the [southern] population that was
as often as not, produced by slaves; and enslaved.” He points in particular to a
avoiding taxes imposed to support the panic late in 1775 over a supposed in-
British Empire. From this perspective, cipient uprising of the enslaved in coor-
the ideology shaped by Americans’ po- dination with the British—and here his
litical complaints about taxation without book leaps into the current history wars.
representation, ministerial corruption,
and arbitrary, unconstitutional gov-
ernment can appear like lofty rhetoric T hree months prior to the publication
meant to ennoble unlofty purposes. of Liberty Is Sweet, Holton captured
The crass aims and activities Holton attention with an op-ed for The Wash-
describes were real enough, but as
the record shows, the colonists were 3
Andrew David Edwards, “Gren-
also inflamed by material issues that ville’s Silver Hammer: The Problem of
were inseparable from constitutional Money in the Stamp Act Crisis,” Jour-
matters and political ideals. Opposi- nal of American History, Vol. 104, No.
tion, for example, to the Stamp Act 2 (September 2017), p. 361.
4
On the rapid growth of pro-
American Revolution, 1763–1789 (Ox- independence sentiment, see Mary Beth
ford University Press, 1982); and David Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revo-
Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Cross- lution (Knopf, 2020); reviewed in these
ing (Oxford University Press, 2004). pages by T. H. Breen, March 11, 2021.
The New York Review
ington Post that strongly appeared to
endorse race- centered interpretations
of the Revolution’s supposed proslav-
ery origins. According to the op-ed, a
November 1775 proclamation by the
royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dun-
more, that offered freedom to slaves
who would join him and take up arms
against their patriot masters was a cru-
cial turning point in the run-up to the
Revolution. Dunmore’s proclamation,
according to Holton, aroused hysteria
about what he called an Anglo-African
alliance that finally convinced white
Americans to separate. The Revolution
was thus in fundamental ways a racist,
proslavery “secession from Britain.”5
Liberty Is Sweet presents a more
measured view of slavery and the Revo-
lution. In the book, for example, Holton
takes pains to dismiss the race-centered
assertion that fears of growing abo-
litionist political influence in Britain
helped convince American slavehold-
ers to favor independence in 1776.6 The
book also makes clear, as the op-ed did
not, that Holton thinks Dunmore’s pol-
icy mainly disturbed white Virginians,
not white Americans in general. Yet the
book does insist that it was a fateful ep-
isode, and that “no other document . . .
did more than Dunmore’s proclamation
to convert white residents of Britain’s
most populous American colony to the
cause of independence.”
Even this carefully framed assertion,
however, is highly misleading. Well be-
fore Dunmore announced his policy,
royal authority had almost completely
collapsed in Virginia, where Loyalists
were relatively scarce. Having fled Wil-
liamsburg, the colony’s capital, in June,
Dunmore holed up with a token force
on a man-of-war offshore. In desper-
ation, acting on his own initiative and
with no intention of organizing a slave
insurrection, he took what he called
“this most disagreeable, but now ab-
solutely necessary step”—expanding
upon a military tactic that British en-
slavers had found essential for decades
in the Caribbean: arming slaves to do
their bidding, in this case in exchange
for a promise of freedom.7
Besides augmenting his tiny army,
Dunmore hoped to turn the tide by ter-
rorizing the patriots, whose investment
in slavery and fear of slave rebellion
would presumably outweigh their com-
plaints against the British Empire. Up
to a point, he succeeded. Unsettling re-
ports that slaves were preparing to take
up arms and fight alongside the British
had been circulating in Virginia and
5 The Negro in the American Revolu-
“The Declaration of Independence’s
Debt to Black America,” July 2, 2021.
Several prominent historians of the
Revolutionary era severely criticized
the op-ed. See Carol Berkin et al., “On
1619 and Woody Holton’s Account of
Slavery and the Independence Move-
ment: Six Historians Respond,” Me-
dium, September 6, 2021.
6 by British officers who wanted slaves of
Holton singles out Nikole Hannah-
Jones’s original introductory essay to
The New York Times Magazine’s 1619
Project, claiming that it “vastly ex-
aggerates the size and strength of the
British abolition movement” in the
years before the Revolution.
7 “nearly a million souls” that Holton in-
On arming slaves before the Revo-
lution, see Philip D. Morgan and An-
drew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming
Slaves in the American Revolution,” in
Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to
the Modern Age, edited by Christopher
Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan
(Yale University Press, 2006).
January 13, 2022
elsewhere for at least a year; Dunmore
himself had fed those fears months
earlier by briefly threatening to turn
the enslaved against their masters. His
proclamation in November unleashed a
torrent of anger and dread. “Tidewater
Virginia took alarm,” the historian
Benjamin Quarles observed in his stan-
dard account, “as rumors spread that
slaves were stampeding to the British.”8
Washington, having assumed command
of the Continental Army in Cambridge
five months earlier, projected that, were
Dunmore not crushed, his strength was
bound to increase “as a Snow ball by
Rolling; and faster.”
But Dunmore’s despairing strategy
backfired. “The stampede [of slaves], if
it occurred, did not go very far,” Quarles
concluded. Above all, Dunmore’s gam-
bit, instead of breaking the patriots’
will, only reinforced their allegiance to
the independence cause, based on their
conviction, built up for a decade, that
British authorities would use any tactic
to enforce their iron rule. Dunmore did
organize and outfit what he called his
Ethiopian Regiment, consisting of some
three hundred black men, then led them,
after an initial victorious skirmish, to a
disastrous defeat in the Battle of Great
Bridge in December 1775. Barely a
month after releasing his proclamation,
having failed to staunch the patriot tide,
Dunmore retreated to his ship and never
again gained a foothold on the Virginia
mainland. He eventually sailed to New
York with about five hundred newly
freed blacks but abandoned one thou-
sand others to die on Gwynn’s Island,
stricken by a smallpox outbreak after he
neglected to inoculate them.
It would take a few more months for
the American patriot leaders, North
and South, after more than a year of
revolutionary mobilization, combat,
and self-government—and squabbling
among themselves—to finally agree that
the time was ripe to declare formally the
united colonies’ independence. They
duly included in their long list of griev-
ances against the Crown the inciting of
slave insurrections, an outrage that the
antislavery patriot Thomas Paine de-
nounced, weeks after the Dunmore
incident, as a cynical military tactic un-
dertaken by “a barbarous and hellish
power” that dealt “brutally” with the
colonists and “treacherously” with the
blacks.9 Some of the relatively small
number of prominent Virginia Loyalists,
including the planter William Byrd III,
did switch sides after November 1775,
and some cautious patriots may have be-
8
tion (1961; University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1996), p. 23.
9 See Hillel Italie, “Gordon Wood and
The British treachery became clear
with their handling of the tens of thou-
sands of slaves whom they seized from
patriot slaveholders or who ran to Brit-
ish lines during the ensuing Revolution-
ary War. Some ended up either claimed
their own or given as compensation to
Loyalist slaveholders whose slaves had
run away. A large number were enslaved
in the Bahamas, where they increased
the black population by threefold—and
where the slaveholding Lord Dunmore
ruled as governor from 1787 to 1796.
Thousands more wound up as slaves
elsewhere in the British Caribbean,
with the largest single group consigned
to a dubious freedom in a largely hostile
Nova Scotia. See David Brion Davis, In-
human Bondage: The Rise and Fall of
Slavery in the New World (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2006), p. 151.
come more determined, but they hardly
represented a mass of white Virginians.
None of this validates viewing the Dun-
more incident as a major turning point in
the drive to independence.
Nevertheless, Holton has recently
made an aggressive public show of evi-
dence about contacts and rumored con-
tacts between enslaved blacks and the
British, and about how Dunmore’s proc-
lamation infuriated and unified white
Virginians.10 There were certainly, as
Quarles demonstrated decades ago, un-
told numbers of restive slaves ready and
eager to flee to and fight for anyone who
would offer them freedom, and tens of
thousands of them would escape to Brit-
ish lines during the Revolutionary War.
But historians have known about all of
this for a very long time, and Holton’s
blitz of documents is mostly noisy ob-
fuscation. What Liberty Is Sweet fails
to offer is a single piece of evidence—a
letter or diary entry or newspaper arti-
cle or pamphlet—in which any patriot
states that Dunmore’s proclamation
converted him or anyone else to support
independence.11 Without that evidence,
Holton’s argument collapses.
T he coverage of slavery and the Rev-
olution elsewhere in Liberty Is Sweet is
similarly skewed and questionable. The
book is especially weak on the Revolu-
tion’s antislavery impulses. Holton does
allow that its ideals could take on anti-
slavery meanings, to the point of help-
ing to inspire the revolution in Haiti
in 1791. He includes a few paragraphs
noting the passage of Pennsylvania’s
unprecedented gradual emancipation
law in 1780 and the freedom suits and
petitions by enslaved men and women
that led to the abolition of slavery in
Massachusetts three years later. Other-
wise, though, he says virtually nothing
about the pioneering American anti-
slavery politics that grew alongside the
revolutionary movement outside the
lower South—the most advanced and
effective antislavery upsurge of its kind
in the Atlantic world before 1787.
Elsewhere, Holton goes overboard in
his indictments. Historians have lately
been arguing over how much the Con-
stitution enshrined slavery, and he un-
surprisingly sides with those who call
its framing and ratification a complete
proslavery victory. The Constitution, he
writes, “facilitated a postwar boom in
the forced transportation of Africans to
the Americas: nearly a million souls be-
tween 1783 and 1792.” In fact, the Consti-
tution’s facilitation of the Atlantic slave
trade amounted to authorizing Congress
10
Woody Holton Clash Over Past and
Present,” Associated Press, October
28, 2021. In line with his fervent dou-
bling down on the point, Holton has
asserted, preposterously, that “for men
like Washington, Jefferson, and Mad-
ison, the Dunmore Proclamation ig-
nited the turn to independence.” See
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,
edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones et al.
(OneWorld, 2021), p. 16.
11
Holton does cite a letter written by the
South Carolinian Edward Rutledge,
who was then living in Philadelphia
and speculated that Dunmore’s procla-
mation would do more than any other
act to “work an eternal separation” be-
tween Britain and America. On histo-
rians’ misreadings and manipulations
of this document, see my “A Matter of
Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020.
to abolish US involvement in 1808, a step
that all but two of the states, North Car-
olina and Georgia, had already taken on
their own before the framers assembled
in Philadelphia. It did permit US ships to
carry slaves to the rest of the Americas
before 1808—about 2.4 percent of the
total for the decade beginning in 1783—
but it neither facilitated nor protected
anything at all before its ratification in
1788, halfway into the period Holton
specifies. (Between 1786 and 1795, years
more in line with the Constitution’s
framing, an estimated 10,006 enslaved
Africans disembarked in what had
been British mainland North America,
which represented an enormous decline
from before the Revolution.) Tying the
Constitution to “nearly a million souls”
transported to the Americas over a sin-
gle decade after 1783 is highly deceptive.
The story of the Constitution’s conces-
sions to slavery is sobering enough with-
out exaggeration.12
Overall, Holton is divided about the
Revolution. At one level, he writes, it
demonstrated “the desire of Ameri-
cans—of every race, rank, and gen-
der—to breathe free.” At the same time,
he thinks that the revolutionary elite
frustrated those desires among the less
privileged, making the vast majority of
Americans victims as much as victors.
“For the founding generation,” he con-
cludes, “the American Revolution pro-
duced more misery than freedom,” in
large part because that generation failed
to abolish slavery outright. Put aside,
though, the fact that the Revolution pro-
duced a society and polity that, with all
of its horrific contradictions and oppres-
sion, was more democratic and inclu-
sive—and, in the North, more actively
antislavery—than any other in the world
as of 1787. Put aside, as well, whether the
success of any of the great modern revo-
lutions ought to be judged on its imme-
diate effects or on what it helped achieve
(or destroy) over time. Holton’s conclu-
sion still begs a basic question, partic-
ularly concerning slavery: What might
have happened had the British won the
Revolutionary War, or had the Revolu-
tion never happened at all?
One powerful interpretation holds
that the loss of the American colonies,
as well as the rise of antislavery politics
in America, stimulated the emergence
of an authentic abolitionist movement
in Britain.13 Equally important, it is
virtually inconceivable that had Brit-
ain, with its domination of the Atlantic
slave trade, its lucrative sugar colonies
in the Caribbean, and its cotton fac-
tories at home, retained the colonies
that became the United States—soon
to become home to the slavery-driven
cotton kingdom—it would not have
12
The Constitution did permit South
Carolina to reopen its slave trade in De-
cember 1803, which led to the arrival of
an estimated 63,862 enslaved Africans
to the Carolinas and Georgia before
Congress abolished US participation
in the trade after January 1, 1808. The
total roughly equaled that for all ports
in the colonies during the fifteen-year
period prior to the outbreak of the Rev-
olution. But even this enduring shame
is very different from the figure of
vokes. Figures from the Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade Database, at slavevoyages
.org/assessment/estimates.
13
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral
Capital: Foundations of British Aboli-
tionism (University of North Carolina
Press, 2006).
27
become a slaveholding leviathan. Had
that happened, the antislavery cause
would have been set back indefinitely.
In short, although slavery became
more entrenched and the slavehold-
ers more powerful in the new United
States after the Revolution, the success
of the Revolution greatly hastened, di-
rectly and indirectly, the overthrow of
slavery in the Anglo-American world.
Holton’s hidden history of the Revolu-
tion, with all of its richness of detail on
popular egalitarian politics, does not
admit of that paradox. To understand
the paradox fully, though, requires a
closer examination of the decades that
led to the Civil War.
Alan Taylor, the Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Foundation Professor of His-
tory at the University of Virginia, is a
preeminent historian of early America,
the author of ten books, and the recip-
ient of two Pulitzer Prizes. His new
book, American Republics, is the final
installment of an impressive trilogy that
began in 2001 with a sweeping survey of
colonial America and was followed fif-
teen years later by a sequel on the Revo-
lution. Now comes his volume covering
the era from the Revolution to 1850.
All three books display Taylor’s tal-
ents for writing engaging, sprawling
narratives that greatly expand early
American history beyond its conven-
tional Anglocentric boundaries. The
first, American Colonies, embraced Af-
ricans and Native Americans as well as
the Spanish, French, and Dutch as im-
portant participants in settling Amer-
ica. The second, American Revolutions,
presented the Revolution as a product of
numerous imperial struggles in the New
World, not least important the colonists’
conflicts with Native Americans and
enslaved Africans. (It also offered, as
did one of his other books, The Internal
Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia,
1772–1832, an account of the Dunmore
incident that is similar to Holton’s and
equally unpersuasive.) By design, ev-
idently, American Republics is a less
ambitious and comprehensive work,
described by Taylor simply as “a concise
introduction” that offers “basic cover-
age of some conventional topics” com-
bined with less familiar excursions into
the country’s difficult relations with the
British and Spanish Empires, numer-
ous Indian nations, and the two other
independent republics in the Americas,
Mexico and Haiti. Yet his description is
too modest, as the book emphatically
develops two important arguments
about postrevolutionary America.
The first argument, broadly accepted
by professional historians, is less fa-
miliar to the wider audience Taylor
addresses. “The United States,” he
writes, “was far from united before
1850.” Despite the framers’ efforts
to create a national government that
would, as James Madison envisaged,
check divisive parochial interests,
Americans remained firmly, even pas-
sionately tied to their state and local
allegiances. Rent internally by mutual
suspicion, exposed to interference
by external forces (including Native
Americans and, long after the Revolu-
tion, the British Empire), and haunted,
at least in the South, by the specter of
slave insurrection, the United States
was less a nation and more like a league
of autonomous states periodically on
the verge of disunion. The Confederate
secession in 1860–1861 marked not a
28
wrenching break from a settled Amer-
ican nationalism but a continuation
and culmination of the country’s essen-
tial fractiousness, turning on slavery,
which had from the start been (as Tay-
lor quotes one newspaper editor) “the
weak point of our Union.”
The second argument, more con-
tested among historians, holds that the
primary force uniting the majority of
the citizenry was a belligerent expan-
sionism based on deeply engrained pre-
sumptions of white supremacy. Taylor
by no means presents America’s empire
building as single-minded and purpose-
ful. “By 1850,” he contends, “the United
States had swept its claims across the
continent to the Pacific coast—but it
did so with far less confidence than we
usually recognize.” Truculent asser-
tions of America’s Manifest Destiny to
invade other countries like Mexico and
other countries’ possessions like Flor-
ida stemmed less from confidence than
from anxiety, covering what Taylor calls
a “pervasive, driving fear of dissolution”
and a search for “elusive security against
the internal divisions of an unstable
union.” Still, white supremacy prevailed
throughout the country in his account;
it is an unrelieved story of acts of bru-
tality by white men against Natives and
African Americans, from the disposses-
sion of indigenous people whom whites
regarded as savages to deadly mob as-
saults on free blacks in northern cities.
T his evaluation represents not so much
a modification or even rejection of ear-
lier scholarly arguments as an inversion
of them. One influential line of interpre-
tation of the period, for example, em-
phasizes how emerging class divisions
among white men aroused small farmers
and hard-pressed workingmen to rally to
the Democratic Party of Andrew Jack-
son. The centerpiece in these accounts is
Jackson’s war against the Second Bank
of the United States—an enormous
private institution with extraordinary
public power. Jackson denounced its cor-
porate monopoly and decried how “the
rich and powerful too often bend the
acts of government to their selfish pur-
poses.” Political struggles over slavery
figure in, exposing deep contradictions
in the egalitarianism of the slaveholder
Jackson and his party. But by focusing
on class divisions, many of these histo-
rians minimized or even completely
overlooked the racial divisions deep-
ened by Jacksonian Democrats, not
least Jackson’s notorious Indian re-
moval policies, as well as the imperial
dimensions of American expansionism.
Taylor turns that view inside out. He
writes early on that “while denying the
power of class in public life, Americans
practiced it with a vengeance in private
circles.” That perception fades, how-
ever, through the rest of the book, apart
from a brief section covering the Low-
ell factory girls, exploited big-city wage
earners, and early trade unions. Taylor
has little to say about the travails of
ordinary rural white households strug-
gling to make ends meet while beset by
periodic financial panics and economic
depressions. He notes in passing that,
by the 1840s, the wealthiest 5 percent of
free men owned 70 percent of the wealth
in the nation’s major cities but does not
explore how those glaring inequalities
fed the era’s turmoil, including racial
turmoil. Disregarding the question of
the Second Bank’s concentration of
wealth and power as a genuine threat
to democracy, he dismisses Jackson’s
war against it as conspiracy-minded
demagogy—playing “the class card”—
in order to whip up votes for a party
devoted chiefly to eradicating Indians,
expanding racial slavery, and other-
wise fortifying white supremacy. While
Taylor’s reversal rightly corrects other
historians’ omissions and distortions, it
ends up presenting a caricature of his-
tory reduced to a chronicle of racial op-
pression and imperial conquest.
Taylor’s fixation on white supremacy
enfeebles his treatment of abolitionism
and the antislavery movement. Like
Holton, he has little to say about the
antislavery currents that flowed out of
the Revolution except to scoff at the
gradual emancipation laws passed in
the northern states for not securing
freedom for those already enslaved.
He thereby omits that these laws, with
all of their limitations, were of world-
historical importance, the first leg-
islative emancipations of their kind
enacted by any slaveholding govern-
ment in human history; he also omits
that they were instigated by the first an-
tislavery activities of their kind in the
world and achieved with difficulty.
Taylor devotes a meager if admiring
section of just over four pages to the
radical abolitionist movement of the
1830s, which was, he allows, antiracist
as well as antislavery. Yet precisely be-
cause of their radicalism, he suggests,
these abolitionists succeeded chiefly in
inflaming northern racists and provok-
ing southern leaders, who banned their
literature from the mails, blocked their
petitions to Congress, and sharpened
the defense of “the peculiar institu-
tion” as a positive good. Taylor misses
how the movement, by standing de-
fiantly for its right to be heard and by
exposing the true horrors of southern
slavery, began awakening the sympa-
thies of northerners far beyond its ac-
tual membership.
H ow, then, in Taylor’s white suprema-
cist America, did opposition to slavery
eventually generate the world’s first mass
antislavery political party, win a presi-
dential election, and prompt southern
secession? Because American Repub-
lics concludes in 1850, it does not cover
the formation of the Republican Party,
but it does discuss the developments in
the 1840s that prepared the way by forc-
ing the issue of slavery’s expansion to
the center of national debates. In what
Taylor correctly views as an enormous
paradox, America’s imperial drive to
annex Texas, invade Mexico, and annex
Mexican land north of the Rio Grande
opened up the question of whether slav-
ery ought to be allowed to expand into
the newly acquired territory. The con-
troversy battered the two major parties,
the Democrats and the Whigs, and bol-
stered the rise of national antislavery
politics, leading in 1848 to the creation
of the Free Soil Party, a successor to the
smaller Liberty Party and the Republi-
can Party’s forerunner.
The Free Soilers only managed to win
10 percent of the total presidential tally
in 1848 and collapsed into a remnant in
1852 before dissolving, but according to
Taylor, this hardly meant that the party
was not also white supremacist. Rather,
he writes, white America had divided
into two camps of what he calls “white
nationalism”: northern racist Free Soil-
ers who wanted to halt slavery’s expan-
sion in order to prevent the migration
of blacks and the degradation of white
free labor, and southern racists who as-
serted that slavery enabled white men
to achieve their ambitions. It would
take another dozen years before Amer-
icans went to war with each other, but
by 1850, in Taylor’s account, a good
deal of the political ground had been
cleared, with white supremacy uniting
the white male citizenry, no matter
their views on slavery.
This is another caricature. To be sure,
particularly in the western states, anti-
slavery could go hand in hand with Ne-
grophobia, and the Free Soilers in those
areas, seeking the largest possible coa-
lition, appealed for those votes. But the
Free Soilers were hardly proponents of
“white nationalism.” Having ignored
the larger history of abolitionism and
antislavery politics, Taylor disregards
the fact that the figures who guided the
party’s rise and progress and defined its
political program—including Salmon
P. Chase, Joshua Levitt, John P. Hale,
and Charles Sumner—were veteran po-
litical abolitionists who devoted their
careers to opposing racial inequality as
well as slavery.
Because he erases the history of anti-
slavery constitutionalism dating back to
the founding, Taylor fails to see that bar-
ring slavery’s expansion was a means to
hasten its destruction throughout the
United States, not just to keep slavery
(and thus blacks) out of the territories,
which antislavery proponents well un-
derstood—slavery’s “ultimate extinc-
tion,” as Abraham Lincoln later called
it. He certainly cannot explain how and
why Frederick Douglass and other mil-
itant black abolitionists supported the
Free Soilers in 1848 and even attended
the party’s founding convention—pre-
saging Douglass’s support of the Re-
publican Party and Lincoln’s election.
H olton’s and Taylor’s books are in-
dicative of several current trends in
the writing of American history. Both
continue the long-standing emphasis
on the lives and impact of Americans
whom historians overlooked sixty
years ago. Both sustain an enduring
skepticism about America’s professed
egalitarian ideals, portraying them as,
at best, unfulfilled platitudes and, at
worst, camouflage for greed and bru-
tality. Both advance a more recent
turn toward placing early American
history in a larger Atlantic and global
setting. Yet both books also offer fresh
perspectives, Holton’s by linking his-
tory from below with more traditional
military history, Taylor’s by exploring
how anxiety and fear of disunion lay at
the heart of American expansionism.
These arguments are certainly open
to debate at every step, much like the
work of the historians that Holton and
Taylor build on.
Less open to debate, though, are
weak but attention-getting arguments
based on glaring inaccuracies or gross
distortion, as when Holton suggests that
slaveholder hysteria helped cause the
American Revolution or when Taylor
presents the pre–Civil War clash over
slavery as a battle between white nation-
alists. Those claims turn out to be no
more credible coming from two distin-
guished historians than they are coming
from less accomplished writers. Lacking
stronger arguments and actual evidence,
they amount to fables constructed in
search of a past tailored to the issues and
causes of the present. Q
The New York Review
 Wonderful Warnings
Rivka Galchen
Raymie Nightingale

Margaux Williamson/McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario

by Kate DiCamillo.
Candlewick, 263 pp.,
$16.99; $7.99 (paper)

Louisiana’s Way Home

by Kate DiCamillo.
Candlewick, 227 pp.,
$16.99; $7.99 (paper)

Beverly, Right Here

by Kate DiCamillo.
Candlewick, 241 pp.,
$16.99; $7.99 (paper)

Marina Warner’s scholarship has long

demonstrated how fairy tales can trans-
mit female secrets. An older woman
communicates something to a girl that
can be said only in the code of stories.
Think of a tale like “Beauty and the
Beast” being told to a child who may
one day find herself married off to a
brute. Or consider the harsh destinies
of the unkind stepsisters in “Cinder-
ella”: in some versions they cut off their
own toes or heels, and pigeons peck out
their eyes. A story of female revenge is
perhaps most wisely told in the privacy
of the nursery.
In From the Beast to the Blonde: On
Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994),
Warner tracks the term “old wives’
tale” back as far as Plato’s Gorgias,
where it was used to disparage stories
told for the purpose of amusing, fright-
ening, or consoling children. “It is still,
in English, an ambiguous phrase,”
she writes. “An old wives’ tale means
a piece of nonsense, a tissue of error,
an ancient act of deception, of self and
others, idle talk.” And yet, she argues,
“although male writers and collectors
have dominated the production and
dissemination of popular wonder tales,
they often pass on women’s stories
from intimate or domestic milieux.”
Charles Perrault, whose Tales of
Mother Goose (1697), Warner writes,
“inaugurated the fairy tale as a literary
form for children,” gathered his ma-
terial from his grandmother and ser-
vants. Hans Christian Andersen said
his stories were based on those told
to him as a child by the old women in
his village. For the Grimm brothers,
too, their “most inspiring and prolific
sources were women”—including an
old woman in an almshouse who was
famous for her stories but would not
speak with the brothers. They hired a
little girl as a secret intermediary; she
asked the woman to tell her tales, and
then retold them to the Grimms.
The enduring power of fairy tales
lies in the way they can be retold and
retailored, their elements forming
what Warner calls “an Esperanto of
the imagination.”1 Carlo Collodi’s Pi-
nocchio presents a remarkable exam-
ple. Collodi was a Florentine political
journalist and satirist who, in 1875, was
invited to translate Perrault’s French
fairy tales into Italian. Those stories,
though complex and contradictory,
are distinguished by the assured mor-
als that end them. “Little Red Riding
1
Marina Warner, “How Fairytales
Grew Up,” The Guardian, December
12, 2014. See also her Fairy Tale: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2018).
Margaux Williamson: Painting to Moby Dick, 2006
Hood” concludes with this message:
“Children, especially well-bred young
ladies, should never talk to strang-
ers.” At the end of “Puss in Boots,” the
reader is told, “There is great advantage
in receiving a large inheritance, but dil-
igence and ingenuity are worth more.”
When Collodi began to write chapters
of Pinocchio for a children’s weekly in
1881, he imported Perrault’s fairy-tale
morals but changed their placement
and function. They are no longer end-
ings; instead they are bits along the way.
Remember the conscientious cricket
who urges the wooden puppet to study
and not run away from home? In Collo-
di’s text (though not in the Disney film)
Pinocchio crushes him early on with a
mallet. The dead cricket later returns
as a ghost and pleads with Pinocchio
not to be deceived by the Fox and the
Cat, a pair of archetypal con artists who
have convinced him that if he buries his
gold coins in the Field of Miracles, they
will multiply five hundred times over.
“My boy,” the cricket says, “never trust
people who promise to make you rich
in a day. They are generally crazy swin-
dlers.” Sure enough, when Pinocchio
goes by moonlight to bury the coins,
the Fox and the Cat attack him, hang
him from a tree, and leave him for dead.
The story originally stopped there—a
moralistic ending, arguably, or even
a covert condemnation of charming
tales: the Fox and the Cat were better
storytellers than the good Geppetto
and the cricket; their tall tales won. But
readers complained, so Collodi wrote
more chapters, reviving Pinocchio
with the magic of the Blue Fairy. The
wooden puppet may be a liar, but his
lies are not like those of the Fox and the
Cat, who use their charm to take what
little belongs to others weaker than
they are. Pinocchio’s lies are those told
by an innocent—defensive, exuberant,
or wishful in nature, they help him to
clumsily navigate peril and power.
Kate DiCamillo has written more
than twenty-five books for children.
Some of them—including her newest,
The Beatryce Prophecy, 2 about a young
girl in the Middle Ages whose mind is
crowded with mesmerizing stories—
are written in a fairy-tale mode. But be-
fore The Beatryce Prophecy she wrote
a trilogy of lyrical, goofy, very moving
novels set in the South during the 1970s:
Raymie Nightingale (2016), Louisiana’s
Way Home (2018), and Beverly, Right
Here (2019). Though realistic, they
are still laced with fairy-tale elements.
Each focuses on a different young girl
who assembles her own story out of
the scraps of tales she gathers from her
surroundings, making something new
out of them. The trilogy is marketed
toward middle-grade readers, but its
bright, buoyant sadness reminds me of
Joy Williams; its dark optimism and
playful language recall Stevie Smith.
Raymie Clarke, Louisiana Elefante,
and Beverly Tapinski are ten years old
in the first book, twelve in the second,
and fourteen in the third. At the start of
Raymie Nightingale, Raymie’s father,
who owns a small insurance business
in the fictional Florida town of Lister,
has just run off with a dental hygienist.
Raymie gets the idea that if she can
win a local contest called Little Miss
2
Candlewick, 2021.
Central Florida Tire, her father will see
her photograph in the newspaper and
return home. This is the quest that fate
seems to have assigned Raymie—and
the one she ultimately has to reimagine
in order to survive. But first she needs a
talent for the pageant. She signs up for
baton-twirling lessons, and that’s where
she meets Louisiana and Beverly.
DiCamillo grew up in Florida, hav-
ing moved there in 1969 at the age of
five with her mother and older brother.
Her father was expected to join them
there but never did. In interviews, she
has said that she did not set out to write
an autobiographical novel, or a trilogy;
her initial idea simply involved a young
girl who wants to win the Little Miss
Central Florida Tire contest. But then
she wondered: What was this girl’s mo-
tivation? She found herself writing that
it was to regain the attention of a father
who had left. DiCamillo is, in a sense,
the archetypal older female storyteller,
recounting a tale to her younger self
about how one might handle or survive
such an abandonment.
Raymie, Louisiana, and Beverly are
all white girls from households of mod-
est to no means. None of them, it turns
out, has a father at home. As in a fairy
tale, they have a series of tasks to per-
form, obstacles to overcome. They must
rescue Louisiana’s cat, Archie, whom
her grandmother claims to have taken
to a place she calls the Very Friendly
Animal Center because they can’t af-
ford to feed him. They also must steal
a baton from their instructor Ida Nee’s
house, as it rightly belongs to Bever-
ly’s mother, herself a former champion
baton twirler and beauty queen. And
they must retrieve a library book about

January 13, 2022 29

 Florence Nightingale that Raymie has
lost under the bed of a nursing home
GOODS & EFFECTS patient. They can’t reclaim their miss-
ing parents, but their shared pursuit of
these substitute objects bonds the girls
Hannah, a Mennonite widow, into a new kind of family.
creates a store in a van and This alternative family begins to
becomes the heart of a form at the baton-twirling class. When
network of lives that span Raymie hears Louisiana apologizing to
her absent cat—“Archie, I’m sorry! I’m
many years. Her tender lies, sorry I betrayed you!”—she quietly re-
clever schemes, and good- peats the apology to herself: “‘I’m sorry,’
heartedness fuel the dreams Raymie whispered. ‘I betrayed you.’ For
some reason, the words seemed worth
of beguiling characters. repeating.” Raymie collects phrases like
Golden Antelope Press these, often shuffling their elements as
though they are parts of a rebus. Within
BookViral Millennium Finalist her experience of abandonment, she has
an unusually strong version of a power
“A timeless story beautifully
specific to childhood: that of making
written…wholly endearing
something valuable out of not much at
characters that exude strength of all. For a moment, Louisiana’s repur-
personality and purpose…nothing posed words help Raymie imagine how
short of superb.”—BookViral her father could have left, and what he
might have said in a good-bye.
“Stunning writing and language used
Raymie has an elderly neighbor, Mrs.
throughout.”—Literary Titan
Borkowski, who sometimes sits in a
“Eloquent, erudite and deftly penned.”—Midwest Book Review lawn chair in the middle of the street.
Raymie’s mother says that Mrs. Bor-
“Engaging tale about a spirited woman’s compelling journey.”—Kirkus Reviews kowski is “crazy as a loon,” but Raymie
likes her company. She brings the Little
“Hannah leaps off the page…a strong, powerful, and self-directed woman…a
Miss Central Florida Tire application
remarkable person not easily forgotten.”—The US Review of Books
over to Mrs. Borkowski for help filling it
“Great cast of complex characters.”—Dick Leonardo, Book Room Reviews out, at which point the old lady launches
into what sounds like an old wives’ tale.
“Its quirky characters radiate kindness and humor.”—Catherine Beeman, Reedsy Once, she saw a giant seabird snatch a
Discovery baby from a mother’s arms:
“The descriptions of the scenery and events are so vivid that I felt I was watching
“But the mother got the baby back,
a television series.”—Rosemary Wright, Online Book Club right?”
“The characters are eclectic and wonderfully relatable.”—Lit Amri, Readers’ “From a gigantic seabird?
Favorite Never,” said Mrs. Borkowski.
“Those gigantic seabirds, they
“What a wonderful movie it could be!...brilliant.”—Soumya Sreehair, Readers’ keep what they take. Also, they
Favorite steal buttons. And hairpins.”
“A work of sheer beauty and ingenuity.”—The Book Commentary This story could easily be dismissed as
a fiction, or even a delusion. But Ray-
mie listens carefully and accepts the
Mr. Staphopoulos believed that
flexing your toes cleared your
mind and that once your mind was
clear, it was easy to isolate your ob-
jectives and figure out what to do
next. For instance: save whoever
was drowning.
These ideas—about flexing her toes
and isolating her objectives—become
phrases that Raymie repeats to herself
throughout the book. They guide her and
buy her the time she needs to allow other
actions to become imaginable, then
possible. And so when Louisiana nearly
drowns in the lake after the girls rescue
a one-eyed dog named Buddy from the
pound during their hunt for Archie, Ray-
mie tacitly rewrites the ghost story her
father told her: she saves the life of her
friend, and she herself doesn’t drown.
D iCamillo has said that after com-
pleting Raymie Nightingale she kept
hearing the voice of Louisiana Elefante
and “was really surprised by how much
Louisiana wanted to tell her story.” The
first and third books of the trilogy are
narrated in close third person, but in
Louisiana’s Way Home, the title char-
acter, now twelve years old, directly ad-
dresses the page. “In some ways, this is
a story of woe and confusion,” she says,
“but it is also a story of joy and kind-
ness and free peanuts.”
Louisiana has been raised in precari-
ous circumstances by her grandmother,
a crafty old woman in bunny barrettes
whose practical advice is to steal cans
of tuna fish for their high protein con-
tent. Granny has always said that Lou-
isiana’s parents were “famous trapeze
artists known as the Flying Elefantes,”
who drowned in a shipwreck. She has
also impressed upon Louisiana the ne-
cessity of outwitting an unseen figure
named Marsha Jean.
In Raymie Nightingale Louisiana

ZERO
An egotistical buffoon with
no talent becomes the
darling political celebrity
of his country. A bawdy
satire of tabloid politics set
in a fictitious land overrun
by Zealots, Hysterics and
Fanatics.
Cabal Books.
“Uproarious and terrifying in how closely
its madness parallels reality.”—Midwest
Book Review
“Political satire delivered with sensational
results…wholly sublime.”—BookViral
“The characters are ludicrously colorful
with sort of a Dr. Seuss meets Monty
Python vibe.”—Elaine Pascale, Hellnotes Review
“Inventive and unique novel filled with laugh-out-loud comedic moments…fast-paced,
sharp and witty.”—Lesley Jones, Readers’ Favorite
“Brilliant political farce…mind-boggling comedic use of language.”—Jon Michael Miller,
Readers’ Favorite
“Combines playfulness and preposterousness…had me gasping with shock, laughing
hysterically…brilliant.”—Foluso Falaye, Readers’ Favorite
“A stand out…one of the funnest [sic] books I’ve read this year.”—Literary Titan
Amazon • Barnes and Noble
www.playsanddesigns.com
wisdom in it. It offers her a slantwise
consolation: a family member is stolen,
rather than having left. It also offers a
slantwise truth: the separation is final.
And it gives her the consolation of story-
telling itself, a bright whistling she and
her friends will use repeatedly against
whatever is out there in the dark.
One of Raymie’s strongest memories
of her father is an ambivalent one: it in-
volves a story about a girl named Clara
Wingtip who drowned in the town’s
lake long ago. An aerial photograph of
the lake hangs above her father’s desk
at the insurance company, where she
saw it for the first time at the age of six:
He had put her on his shoulders
so that she was close to the photo-
graph, and Raymie had traced the
shadow of Clara with her fingertip.
For a long time after that, she had
been afraid to go into his office,
afraid that Clara was waiting for her
and that her ghost would pull Ray-
mie into the lake, pull her under the
water and drown her somehow.
Raymie is still haunted by her father’s
tale. In his absence she thinks of the
practical lessons she learned from her
old lifesaving coach, Mr. Staphopou-
los—who, unlike her father, said good-
bye when he moved away from Lister:
Every day in Lifesaving 101, Mr.
Staphopoulos had all the students
stand on the dock and flex their
toes and isolate their objectives.
tells her friends that Marsha Jean
“wants to capture me and put me in
the county home, where they only
ever serve you bologna to eat.” For the
reader, Marsha Jean appears to repre-
sent the risk of Louisiana being taken
from Granny by child welfare services,
or of Granny being put into a mental
institution. She also reads as a stand-in
for the more workaday menaces that
pursue them: electric companies want-
ing their bills paid, law enforcement
objecting to Granny’s and Louisiana’s
petty thefts from convenience stores.
Beverly is sure that Marsha Jean
doesn’t exist, and she is baffled that
Louisiana seems to swallow Granny’s
stories hook, line, and sinker. Raymie is
less certain. When they visit Louisiana
and Granny at the empty house where
they appear to be squatting, Raymie
asks Granny if Marsha Jean is real.
Out of Louisiana’s earshot, Granny re-
sponds that she is “the ghost of what’s
to come”: “It’s good to be on the lookout
for those who might do you harm. I need
Louisiana to be cautious. And wily. I
won’t always be here to protect her.”
For all her slyness, Granny is essen-
tially sympathetic in Raymie Nightin-
gale—a pragmatic eccentric and kindly
deceiver. This is complicated in Lou-
isiana’s Way Home when she wakes
Louisiana at 3 AM and says, “The day
of reckoning has arrived. The hour is
close at hand. We must leave immedi-
ately.” This time they are fleeing not
from Marsha Jean but from a “curse of
sundering”—the result of Louisiana’s

30 The New York Review

great-grandfather, a magician, having
cut her great-grandmother in half and
never put her back together. It’s an-
other story that Louisiana has grown
up with. Now, Granny says, “the curse
at last must be confronted.”
Walter Benjamin famously observed
that the wisest thing children can learn
from fairy tales is to meet the world
not with obedience but “with cunning
and with high spirits.” A character such
as Puss in Boots tells lies because he
and his master have to make their way
through an unjust world; the “is” of the
world is not the “ought” of the world,
and that is why the deceptions are re-
quired. So we might say that Louisiana
is the most cunning and high-spirited
of the three girls—she has no choice.
The morning of their departure from
Lister, Louisiana is devastated, angry,
and tired. She has been through this
sort of thing too many times before.
She stops speaking to Granny on the
drive north, but when they cross the
Florida–Georgia state line, Granny
pulls over. “Oh, my tooth, my tooth.
Oh, it is the curse of my father,” she
says. Her pain is so severe she can no
longer drive. Louisiana writes:
I sat there for a minute and thought
about my options, and there
weren’t many of them.
And that is how it came to pass
that I—Louisiana Elefante—slid
behind the wheel of the car and
cranked the engine and put the
blinker on and pulled out onto the
highway and went in search of a
dentist.
Louisiana has long been attached to
Granny’s stories, including the one
about the Flying Elefantes. In Louisi-
ana’s Way Home, she starts to let these
stories go, isolating what few facts re-
main. Of her parents she writes:
They are dead, and I do not re-
member them at all. I have only
ever known Granny. She has been
my mother and my father. She has
taught me everything I know.
Louisiana’s tale, as she tells it, is a
deliberate reimagining of Pinocchio,
with Pinocchio here being a young girl
raised by a charismatic confabulator
whose stories make more sense as tan-
gled codes than direct truths. Through
writing, Louisiana tries to understand
why Granny has driven her away from
Lister, working out the balance of anger
and love she feels toward Granny, whose
delusions have had such control over
Louisiana’s own well-being and needs.
“Finding a dentist is not as easy as
you might imagine,” Louisiana says.
“Nothing is.” But Granny has taught
her how to gather information from
strangers—including by smiling with
“all of my teeth”—and she manages
to find one named Dr. Fox. Unlike the
Fox in Pinocchio, the dentist turns out
to be a nice man. He does, however, ex-
tract Granny’s rotted teeth in an emer-
gency procedure. Louisiana evades the
unpayable bill by making up a nonexis-
tent grandfather named William Sun-
der who lives on Blue Fairy Lane.
Granny, now toothless, has lost one
of her greatest resources: her ability to
smooth-talk her way through transac-
tions with those who can provide what
she and Louisiana need. When she sends
Louisiana into a motel called the Good
January 13, 2022
Night, Sleep Tight later that day to try to
get a room without paying, she instructs
her, “Use your charm.” Louisiana has
charm, but she also has wonder, which
is often a source of her charm. She no-
tices a vending machine in the vestibule:
It was stocked with the most amaz-
ing array of things. There were
toothbrushes with little tubes of
toothpaste attached to them, and
candy bars with caramel and nuts,
and also bags of peanuts, and rain
bonnets that were folded up into
neat little squares, and packages of
crackers with orange cheese in the
middle of them.
The vending machine was such
a miracle that as I stood and con-
templated it, I almost wondered if
I was dreaming.
Her awe at the vending machine speaks
to her poverty, but also to her sensitivity
to unremarked-upon splendor—a gift
at least in part attributable to Granny.
When others are in the presence of
Louisiana and Granny, they sometimes
see the world in that way, too. One of
Raymie’s happiest moments in the first
book is the girls’ visit to Granny and
Louisiana’s house, where they eat tuna
fish together directly out of the can and
drink water out of paper cups that were
discarded. Louisiana explains:
They’re supposed to have the an-
swer to the riddle on the bottom,
but they made a mistake and forgot
to put the answer there . . . and that’s
why we got thousands of the cups
for free. Because they don’t have
the answer. Isn’t that something?
In Raymie Nightingale, the reader
experiences Louisiana’s near drowning
from Raymie’s perspective. In Louisi-
ana’s Way Home, we get Louisiana’s
version, which replaces the ghost of
Clara Wingtip with the comforting fig-
ure of the Blue Fairy:
The Blue Fairy is very beautiful. I
don’t know if you know this or not.
She is very beautiful and very kind.
And when I was underwater and
almost drowning, the Blue Fairy
opened her arms to me and smiled.
Her blue hair was floating above
her head, and there was a light all
around her.
And then Raymie came and
saved me from drowning and the
Blue Fairy floated away. She went
in the opposite direction, deeper
into the pond. She looked ex-
tremely disappointed as she left.
I have never told anybody that
before—about the Blue Fairy ap-
pearing to me and how sad she
seemed that I was not going with
her. But I am writing it down now.
There is a great deal of power in
writing things down.
Louisiana clearly knows her Pinoc-
chio. The Blue Fairy that she sees, and
disappoints, is, in the original Collodi
text, herself a ghostly child when Pin-
occhio first meets her:
Seeing that it was useless to knock,
he began kicking the door, and beat-
ing it with his head. At that, a lovely
child opened the window. Her hair
was blue, and her face as white as
wax; her eyes were closed, and her
hands were crossed on her breast.
Without moving her lips she said
in a very low voice that seemed to
come from another world, “There
is nobody in this house. They are
all dead.”
Eventually Louisiana learns her true
origin story, which, like Pinocchio’s, is
not straightforward. Granny is not her
biological grandmother, and her parents
were not famous trapeze artists who
tragically drowned. In a letter, Granny
finally offers an explanation that seems
closer to the truth: she found Louisi-
ana as an abandoned infant, wrapped
in a floral blanket, alone on a pile of
cardboard behind the Louisiana Five-
and-Dime in New Orleans, where she
was working at the time. “You smiled
at me,” she writes. “I named you for
where you were found, and caring for
you has been the greatest joy of my life.”
Granny writes this letter to Louisiana
before driving off from the motel to die
alone. Although her leaving echoes Lou-
isiana’s original abandonment, Granny
has equipped Louisiana with a set of sur-
vival skills, and does everything in her
power to convey her love: “I have loved
you with the whole of myself, Louisiana.
You will always and forever be loved by
me.” In so doing, she sets Louisiana free.
T he third novel, Beverly, Right Here,
poses a distinct problem: its central
character is now fourteen, an age nei-
ther enchanted nor fully mature. What
use are fairy tales to someone who is
convinced she has outgrown them?
Beverly’s mother is often drunk and
angry; Beverly herself is guarded and
alert, quick to spot the lies of grown-
ups. She also has a gift for telling truths
that others would leave unsaid, as when
she says to Raymie, in the first book,
what no one else will acknowledge:
“People leave and they don’t come back.
Somebody has to tell you the truth.”
Beverly, Right Here begins with the
death of the dog Buddy, whom Beverly
adopted after the three girls rescued him
from the pound. After burying him in
her backyard in Lister, she thinks to her-
self, “Buddy is dead—my dog is dead. . . .
No one can make me stay.” She hitches a
ride with her nineteen-year-old cousin,
Joe Travis, to a town called Tamaray
Beach, an hour or so down the highway.
During the drive Joe Travis offers her a
cigarette, which she declines. When she
won’t tell him what she’s planning, he
accuses her of being secretive and just
like her mother: “You always did think
that you was better than everybody else
on God’s green earth. . . . I don’t care
how many beauty contests your mom
won back in the day.” The truth is, Bev-
erly has no particular plan. But she isn’t
like her mother, nor is she taken in by
clichéd stories of sophistication.
Beverly applies for a job busing ta-
bles at the first business she sees—a
fish restaurant—telling the manager
that she’s sixteen. He knows she’s lying,
but he agrees to take her on; the fact
that he has three daughters of his own,
who live with their mother in Pennsyl-
vania, seems to be part of the reason.
“It’s a tragedy, having kids,” he tells
her. “Don’t let anybody tell you any
different.” The waitress is an older
girl named Freddie, who tells Beverly
that she needs to dream bigger: “I’m
going to be somebody. . . . You could be
somebody, too. You’ve got good, long
legs. . . . And your hair is nice. Let me
see your teeth.” Beverly bares her teeth
at Freddie, keeping her at bay in much
the same way she did with her cousin.
Though Beverly rejects the openness
to wonder that worked for Raymie and
Louisiana, she’s guided by snippets of
lyricism. Away from home, she thinks,
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds”—a
bit of poetry from school that stays
with her. At another point she notices
some text scratched into the glass of a
phone booth: “In a crooked little house
by a crooked little sea.” These nursery
rhyme–like words guide and comfort her
more than the phone call she makes to
her mother, whose response to hearing
that Beverly is okay is “Whoop-de-do.”
Beverly ends up rooming in a trailer
park with an old woman named Iola,
whose cat, Nod, takes an immediate
shine to her. She also becomes friends
with a gentle and bullied sixteen-year-
old named Elmer who works at the local
convenience store, Zoom City. He hands
out dimes to children of little means
who want to ride the mechanical horse
out front. Behind the counter, he reads
about art history. When Beverly first sees
him there, he’s reading a book that has an
image of wings on the cover: “The wings
were a bright, impossible, glorious blue.”
Beverly is not interested in ghosts or
fairies. But there is something about
this Italian Renaissance painting that
speaks to her:
Beverly studied the blue wings on
the cover of the book. They be-
longed to an angel who was hover-
ing over a woman with her hands
on her cheeks. The woman didn’t
look all that happy.
But then, neither did the angel.
When Elmer asks Beverly what she’s
looking for as she roams the aisles of
the store, the angel’s wings come to
mind: “That was what she was looking
for—that brilliant, impossible blue.”
The next day Beverly returns to Zoom
City and asks Elmer questions about the
painting—in particular about how that
blue is made. “It’s a gem,” he tells her as
she walks him to his bus stop after work.
“It’s lapis lazuli. They ground it up
and turned it into paint.” For Beverly,
saying the words “lapis lazuli” is “like
muttering a spell, an incantation”:
“‘Lapis lazuli!’ she shouted after the
bus. ‘Lapis lazuli!’ They were such
beautiful words. She couldn’t help it.
She loved them.”
The Florida-born writer Karen Rus-
sell once said to me of an irrational but
desirable plan—like the plan of writing
stories, say—that it’s like planting mints
and lug nuts and old pennies in a field
and then expecting a garden to grow.
Yet unlikely objects sown in the imag-
ination do occasionally bloom. DiCa-
millo’s prose often works by revealing
affinities between the grand and the in-
significant. For Beverly, the discovery of
the color of the angel’s wings—and the
words to name it—unlocks something.
She begins to pay attention not only to
what she doesn’t want but also to what
she does want. Back at the fish restau-
rant, she surveys her surroundings:
Outside the open door, past the
seagull and the dumpsters and the
hotels, there was a small strip of
ocean visible. It was a bright, spar-
kling blue.
Not as bright as lapis lazuli.
But bright enough.
 Q
31
 M. MOLEIRO THE ART OF PERFECTION

ALBUMAZAR
TREATISE
(Liber astrologiae)
Sloane MS 3983
Mid-14th century

For the very first time the astral mythology

of the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece,
Persia and India is condensed into a single
lavishly illustrated book. The intellectual
voyage unfolding upon its pages evokes
the migration of the astrological beliefs
of Antiquity through the Arab world into
medieval Western Europe.

Ref. NYRB X.21

OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE:
Atlas Miller (1519)
Bible moralisée of Naples (c. 1340–50)
Bible of St Louis (13th century)
The Book of Felicity (1582)
The Book of Hunt by Gaston Fébus
(early 15th century)
Book of Treasures (early 14th century)
The Cardeña Beatus (c. 1175–85)
The Great Canterbury Psalter (13th/14th century)
The Golf Book – Book of Hours (c. 1530)
The Hours of Charles of Angoulême (c. 1485)
Hours of Henry IV (c. 1510)
Hours of Henry VIII (c. 1500)
The Pleasures of Women (18th century)
Picture Book of the Life of St John and the Apocalypse
(c. 1400)
Tacuinum Sanitatis (mid-15th century)
Tractatus de Herbis (1440)
Universal Atlas of Fernão Vaz Dourado (1571)
The Val-Dieu Apocalypse (c. 1330)
Vallard Atlas (1547)
Vindel Parchment (13th century)
FULL DETAILS AT
www.moleiro.com

32 The New York Review

 First, unique and unrepeatable editions limited to 987 copies
numbered and certified by notary public

MATTIOLI’S
DIOSCORIDES
ILLUSTRATED
BY CIBO
Additional MS 22332
1564–84

Much more than a mere herbal, it is a

testimony of the long way the humanity
has come in order to understand the
world of plants and their health benefits.
A bibliographic treasure that combines
ancient medical knowledge with botanical
discoveries of the Renaissance and Italian
art at its very peak.

REQUEST YOUR
FREE CATALOGUE “ The replica is visually indistinguishable from the original
manuscript, from its vegetable parchment paper
AT: moleiro.com/online with the same texture, thickness, feel and even smell as the
original, to the sewing pattern and goatskin
✉ info@moleiro.com and the paint used for the illuminations.” / Herald Tribune

Moleiro Books Corp

2655 Lejeune Road, suite 810
Coral Gables, FL 33134 +1 (646) 543-9905

January 13, 2022 33


James Castle:
Memory Palace
by John Beardsley.
James Castle Collection
and Archive/Yale University
Press, 279 pp., $65.00
Every James Castle picture
seems to contain a secret.
Approaching one of his
works for the first time, you
peer into pockets of shadow
and smudge, examining the
depopulated landscapes and
interiors for explanations.
Here, an empty rural road,
with telephone poles stand-
ing like sentries at precise
intervals, stretching to the
drawing’s vanishing point;
there, a cryptic attic space
with a yawning doorway,
captured on disintegrating
paper that is then stitched to
cardboard backing with red string. A
series of drawings from multiple angles
depicts the walls of an unloved upstairs
bedroom, which seem to be shadowed
by cage-like patterns hovering behind
the brooding furniture arranged hap-
hazardly around the space. Another
piece shows two empty blue coats
standing upright in front of a farm-
house next to an overturned bottle, a
spiritual cousin of American Gothic.
Even after repeated viewings and an
immersion in Castle’s sprawling, insu-
lar oeuvre, these works refuse to yield
their intentions. Their power lies in
their ability to remain in one’s mind
like half-remembered dreams.
The circumstances under which Cas-
tle made his art have, since it was first
exhibited publicly in 1951, received at
least as much attention as the work it-
self. Central to its fascination, beyond
the appeal of the images, is the idea
that an ordinary American life, cut
off from the wider currents of artistic
influence by geography and disability,
could contain such a rich, multifaceted,
and mysterious aesthetic sensibility.
He was born in 1899, the fifth of
seven children to survive infancy, and
lived his entire life with his family on
a series of small farms and homesteads
in rural Idaho. He was two months pre-
mature—perhaps because his mother,
Mary, had rushed from the house to put
out a fire that started after a tree was
struck by lightning—and born deaf, or
became so soon after birth. Despite five
years at the Idaho State School for the
Deaf and Blind, Castle never learned to
read, write, or speak. There is evidence
that he knew some sign language, but
his family (with the exception of his sis-
ter Nellie, who lost her hearing around
the age of eight, perhaps as a result of
measles) did not sign. Another sister,
Julia, recalled that James was close to
four years old before he began walking,
but that he started drawing “as soon as
he could get up and use the pencil.”
For much of his life he made art only
for himself, his family, and the occa-
sional visitor, drawing on found mate-
rials with soot from a woodstove mixed
with his saliva. Only after his nephew
Robert Beach, an artist himself, recog-
nized the quality of his work did Castle
begin to show it in small regional ex-
hibitions that emphasized his deafness
34
Castle’s Kingdom
Andrew Martin
James Castle: Untitled self-portrait, undated
and muteness. (Many were unfortu-
nately titled “A Voice of Silence.”) He
died in 1977, having spent the last years
of his life living in a small trailer his
family had purchased for him with the
proceeds of his art.
Decaying bundles of his drawings
and constructions, wrapped in twine
or string, are still being discovered in
the walls of his family’s houses. All of
his work is untitled and, with rare ex-
ceptions, undated, making it difficult
to assess his development as an artist
over time. What we have instead is a
huge body of work in a variety of forms
and moods—meticulously recollected
landscapes and interiors, surrealist
collages, modified copies of advertise-
ments and newspaper comics, rough-
hewn people and animals constructed
out of cardboard, and books written in
private codes of letters, numbers, and
images—that all seems to exist in the
same jumbled temporal moment.
Though Castle’s work has received
major exhibitions in recent years at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008)
and the Smithsonian American Art
Museum (2014), there remains some-
thing fugitive and unassimilable about
it when shown in the company of his
contemporaries. At the inaugural,
collection-spanning exhibition of the
new Whitney building in 2015, and in
“Memory Palaces,” a group show of
self-taught artists at the American Folk
Art Museum in 2019, Castle’s drawings
and constructions seemed, even amid
a wild diversity of approaches, to have
been beamed in from a parallel uni-
verse of art-making with its own his-
tory and traditions. His art exerts an
uncanny pull on the viewer’s attention,
a result of the combination of his sober,
technically adept draftsmanship and
his tendency to skew or obfuscate ele-
ments of a scene just enough to create a
sense of nagging disquiet.
James Castle: Memory Palace, the
beautifully designed and produced new
book of his art from the James Cas-
tle Collection and Archive, contains
many examples of this destabilizing
tendency. Trees in an otherwise realis-
tically detailed landscape are rendered
as blocky monoliths. A stark bedroom
interior, depicted from a low angle, fea-
tures irregular, oval-patterned wallpa-
per that matches the framed, scribbled
pictures hanging on the wall in front of
it. (Throughout his work, Castle’s lively
decorative patterns often seem to tell
a different story from the rest of the
composition.)
Other images push more brazenly
into the territory of surrealism: a man’s
face is transformed into the siding of a
house; a huge bottle and drinking glass
are almost as tall as the barn they share
a landscape with. In one of my favor-
ite sets of images, Castle transposes
a giant redwood with a tunnel cut
through it, an image taken from a tour-
ist postcard, to the family farm, matter-
of-factly importing novelty to a familiar
landscape. And then there are those
countless works that pose bleak, un-
answerable questions. A heavily inked
ladder leads to a shadowy loft area, with
books arranged in rows on the floor
and tall, closed doors looming to the
right. Three striped barrels stand warily
against a checkered wall, seemingly
keeping their distance from a coffin-
like wooden box in the foreground. You
search these careful, monochromatic
pictures for evidence of a crime.
When Castle did depict people, most
significantly in a touching image of
himself in a doorway and in a pair of
self-portraits drawn on his deathbed,
the figures are ghostly and insubstan-
tial, both there and not there. An image
of a man posing on a front porch, hat in
hand, has the stiff, generalized quality of
a wax statue. The figures to whom he de-
voted more significant attention are the
freestanding humanoid creatures with
elemental or obscured faces that he con-
structed out of cardboard and included
in his drawings. His family referred to
these figures as his “friends”; some that
have survived are so crudely formed and
worn with handling that they resemble
a child’s dolls, intended more for com-
fort and direct engagement than as art
objects. They gain complexity and sig-
nificance, however, when we see them
portrayed in Castle’s drawings. Some
of my favorite pieces show the “friends”
socializing in various configurations,
hovering awkwardly around the room
like aliens in ill-fitting human disguises.
In American art, we are used to de-
pictions of rural life that make overt
political or cultural points, celebrating
the heartland or bemoaning
James Castle Collection and Archive
its plight. One thinks of the
photographs of Dorothea
Lange and Walker Evans that
foreground the individuals
who suffered during the De-
pression, or Grant Wood’s
camp classicism commemo-
rating and subtly undermining
the value of stoic forbearance.
Castle’s work unsettles in part
because, despite its apprehen-
sive or playful moods, it does
not easily yield its purpose or
meaning. The more examples
of it you see, the less confi-
dent you are in identifying a
key to the whole.
Art-making and catalog-
ing were themselves often at
the center of Castle’s project.
Some of his most engaging
works depict his studio, where
his drawings, constructions,
and books are displayed, sometimes
covering all available surfaces. Space is
off-kilter in these drawings, as though
Castle has created extra pockets in the
room to accommodate the multitude
of his imagination. His totemic figures
are lined up at attention, ready to be
admired or engaged. Like paintings
of nineteenth- century salons, Castle’s
works communicate the pleasure of
abundance, though his wobbly line and
stark color palette shade them with a
sense of melancholy. In a particularly
poignant drawing of this type, Castle
himself seems, with a creator’s anxious
pride, to be showing a room full of his
figure constructions to his brother-in-
law, Guy, in the process demonstrating
his familiarity with the emotional cli-
max of any artistic practice: the sudden
revelation of one’s inner life to a scruti-
nizing public.
Castle was discriminating in sharing
his work. In her catalog essay for “Unti-
tled,” the Castle exhibition at the Smith-
sonian, the curator Leslie Umberger
writes, “Family members recall that his
text pieces and books were reserved for
private reflection, while landscapes, in-
teriors, and color washes were paraded
out to share with relatives, friends, and
visitors to the Castle home.” It’s a tan-
talizing glimpse into the way Castle
perceived, or perhaps even played to,
his audience. In his more straightfor-
ward images, he was giving his viewers
what he imagined they wanted; in oth-
ers, he was going deeper into his own
world, experimenting with new aes-
thetic possibilities. Umberger goes on
to posit the sharing of these works as
a way, deeper perhaps than that of an
artist with more conventional means of
communication, of conveying his phys-
ical reality. “To thrust a drawing into
the hands of another was to entangle
an outsider within Castle’s experience
of his world,” she writes.
The recognition of a paper’s orig-
inal function, of its weight and
its thumbed, irregular edges, the
smudged and roughened surface,
the scent of highly acidic stock,
inks, and soot worked in league
to communicate viscerally James
Castle’s sensory surroundings.
The New York Review
 The apparently more private books
he made also convey a sense, or imi-
tation, of record-keeping. The pages
resemble catalogs, newspapers, or
yearbooks: drawings of figures are in-
terspersed with wavy lines to simulate
writing, or sometimes full pages con-
tain a series of letters and numbers.
In his admirably thorough and illumi-
nating text for Memory Palace, John
Beardsley writes that the books
reveal a lexical or even indexical
quality, functioning either as dic-
tionaries of his own language or as
guides to terms whose meanings
are dependent on the context in
which they are presented—if only
we could figure them out.
A phrase that recurs in many
pieces (alongside a classical Zodiac
Man figure) is the enigmatic “Purse!-
Discusses,” sometimes shortened as
“P!D.” Beardsley proposes that Castle
adapted this personal insignia from
speech drills he remembered from
school. It is hard not to interpret it,
with the near-homonym of “parse” and
interrupting exclamation point, as an
urgent cry for comprehension.
T here’s an understandable anxiety,
running through almost all contem-
porary writing about Castle, to take
the circumstances of his life into ac-
count without making them the all-
encompassing explanation for his
abilities and output. Beardsley writes
that Castle’s “deafness might have been
as much a creative asset as a limitation,”
suggesting that it “enlarged Castle’s
non-hearing sensate capacities; in par-
ticular, it may have sharpened his mem-
ory of physical surroundings to a degree
nothing short of extraordinary.” Con-
sidering that many of Castle’s earliest
works were lost when the family moved,
it does seem that his depictions of the
first farm he lived on were drawn with
astonishing accuracy long after he’d left
it behind; this can be appreciated on
foldout pages in Memory Palace, where
his architectural and landscape draw-
ings line up seamlessly in panoramas.
Beardsley acknowledges, however,
that loss of hearing by no means neces-
sarily enhances a person’s other facul-
ties, and he is careful to make Castle’s
“acute visual-spatial memory, and not
his deafness per se,” the overarching
theme of his study. After quibbling
with Umberger’s suggestion that Castle
was “without any conventional linguis-
tic constructs in terms of his internal
thought process,” and dismissing an-
other writer’s supposition that Castle
may have been autistic, Beardsley ar-
gues more broadly that “speculations
about cognitive and behavioral differ-
ences are a distraction, engaging us
with possible pathologies instead of
Castle’s extraordinary achievements.”
It’s a fair point, but as Beardsley’s text
amply demonstrates, a full understand-
ing of Castle’s work benefits from both
biographical investigation and aes-
thetic engagement, just as it does for
more conventional artists. Why deny
his life the ardent conjecture less fret-
fully imposed on Louise Bourgeois or
Willem de Kooning?
Even if this reading of the work stems
from romanticized suppositions about
Castle’s psychology, it’s hard not to feel
that his drawings, even the less unset-
tling ones, radiate a profound sense of
January 13, 2022
isolation. The interiors and landscapes
that he created are almost always
empty, even as his inanimate objects—
the chairs, beds, windows, houses, and
sheds he repeatedly drew—are imbued
with intense particularity, their signif-
icance verging on talismanic. Castle
also made hats, jackets, and vests, pre-
sumably for the “friends” to model, or
simply to imagine the outfits they might
try on. Separated from their wearers,
the clothes take on independent, if for-
lorn, life.
Umberger observes that Castle
frequently instills his vistas with a
palpable sense of limitations; en-
tanglements and obfuscations are
the norm. . . . Bedframes impede
doors . . . fences challenge access to
further realms . . . and words are not
conveyors of shared meaning but
instead, poignantly signal an aware-
ness of a vast, inaccessible realm.
It’s tempting, then, looking at these ob-
jects and pictures, to imagine Castle as
a lonely child grown into a lonely man.
But as Jacqueline Crist, the managing
partner of the James Castle Collection
and Archive, writes in her foreword
to Memory Palace, what we know of
the artist’s personality doesn’t easily
fit with the desolate mood of his best-
known work. “He laughed a lot and
found joy in simple pastimes like read-
ing newspaper comics,” Crist writes.
He seems to have possessed an in-
ternal clock that allowed him never
to miss a TV comedy he loved. He
sensed when his nieces and neph-
ews were misbehaving, prompting
him to make it known to his sister
Peggy that she needed to check on
the children. He was a man com-
pletely integrated into his family’s
life and was a respected member of
the household.
None of this, of course, precludes an
artist from rendering alienation and
despair, or from consciously or un-
consciously gravitating toward images
and scenarios that suggest he was not
as “completely integrated” as he might
have appeared. If he made images of
cheerful family life, not many of them
have survived to be reproduced, and his
inability to communicate clearly with
most of his family members couldn’t
have been easy on him. He was prob-
ably sent away to board at the Idaho
State School in 1910 or 1911. Following
the trends in deaf education, advocated
at the time by Alexander Graham Bell,
the school encouraged students to vo-
calize and read lips, and strongly dis-
couraged signing. His representations
of the school indicate mixed feelings.
There’s an unusually convivial draw-
ing of a room crowded with seemingly
happy students and teachers sitting in
a circle, the walls covered in Castle’s
characteristic scribbled circles and an-
imal forms. There are also drawings
more in keeping with Castle’s standard
aesthetic: empty stairwells and empty
classrooms, and a picture with the hand
sign for “dumb” in place of the subject’s
head. A neighbor who grew up around
Castle remembered that other chil-
dren called him “Dummy” with such
consistency that the acquaintance was
“somewhat along in years” before he
learned James’s actual name.
Castle was spared most of the chores
around the house and farm, and spent
much of his time making his art. His metic, metaphorical worlds that are as
parents were the local postmasters for open to interpretation as those of Rot-
Garden Valley and the surrounding hko or Frankenthaler.
area, with part of the house serving Including Castle in this com-
as a general store and post office. This pany requires one to forgo the more
provided Castle with access to a wealth straightforward measures of conscious
of printed materials that served both as influence and instead consider how
visual influences and, once discarded, the visual culture of a society perme-
as materials from which to create ates the art created within it. After all,
his art. (In more than one image, the Beardsley writes,
pointed flap of an envelope becomes a
gable roof.) It may have also informed Castle was responding to some of
the habit of bundling his material— the same cultural circumstances
perhaps in imitation of, or homage to, that attracted the attention of other
the mail bundles that came in and out artists—print media, advertising,
of the house on a regular basis. Though and the larger culture of abun-
his family provided him with standard dance, obsolescence, and disposal.
art supplies, Castle preferred his own
methods, and in later years they went Reading this, I thought of Warhol’s ten-
to great lengths to supply him with ma- dency to instinctively repurpose Amer-
terials to his liking. According to a let- ican society’s clutter without offering
ter written by Beach, after the Castles explanations or judgments, as well as
traded their woodstove for an electric his working- class origins and child-
range and oil furnace, they acquired hood illness, establishing his identity
soot for him from the Veterans Hospi- as an “outsider” from an early age in
tal in Boise. much the same way that Castle’s cir-
cumstances made him an artist.
John Yau finds a link between Castle’s
A s Castle’s work is integrated into the transcription of his surroundings and
canon, it has been justifiably placed in a typically gnomic statement by Jasper
conversation with his contemporaries. Johns, another artist, notably, from a
Stephen Westfall has compared Castle rural background who found inspiration
to Giorgio Morandi and Philip Guston, in metropolitan detritus. “Sometimes,
noting that, like those two giants of I see it and then paint it,” Johns said.
twentieth- century figurative painting, “Other times I paint it and then see it.
Castle “developed a slow line that itself Both are impure situations, and I prefer
feels like an animate creature becom- neither.” The ambiguity of the distinc-
ing the consciousness of the form that tion between these two “situations”—
it fills out with a nearly comic dogged- between that of the conjurer and the
ness, without flourish or ornament.” It’s recorder—is present for all artists, but
a fittingly idiosyncratic way of linking especially acute in Castle’s case. He
a group of artists who, while resisting can’t tell us what to look for in his work,
or rejecting abstraction, conjured her- but we can see what he shows us. Q
The Writers’ Institute
at CUNY Graduate Center
AN EXCEPTIONAL
OPPORTUNITY
FOR WRITERS
Celebrating our fourteenth anniversary, the Writers’ Institute
is accepting applications from talented writers eager to work
with New York’s finest and most prestigious senior editors.
We’re accepting 12 fiction writers and 12 nonfiction writers
for fall 2022. Workshops are held online.
For more information on this unique program please visit
www.gc.cuny.edu /thewritersinstitute
35

My First Thirty Years
by Gertrude Beasley,
with a foreword by Nina Bennett.
Sourcebooks, 320 pp., $16.99 (paper)
Pity the Beast
by Robin McLean.
And Other Stories, 377 pp., $25.95
Larry McMurtry, our principal critic of
Texas, once described the condition of
women there:
Years ago someone pointed out
that Texas is hell on women and
horses. He was wrong about
horses, for most horses are consid-
ered to be valuable, and are treated
well. He was absolutely right about
women though, the country was
simply hell on them, and remained
so until fairly recently.
We could quibble with that last point,
but overall it’s still a pretty solid judg-
ment. Texas is currently intensifying
the suffering of women, particularly
poor women and women of color, with
its notorious law placing a vigilante-
style bounty on abortion providers and
those aiding women who seek to have
the procedure. The law has no excep-
tion for rape victims or survivors of in-
cest. What won’t Texas do to humiliate
and subjugate women? Very little, it
appears.
McMurtry had an unerring eye for
the casual cruelty and endemic social
hypocrisy that made his state a pit of
sexual viciousness, long chronicling
the local appetite for behavior ranging
from bestiality to incest between sib-
lings. In a 1968 essay, “Eros in Archer
County,” he revisited a passage in his
novel The Last Picture Show (1966),
the scene in which rural youth copu-
late with a blind heifer, a practice rep-
resented as traditional, cows not being
the half of it. “Farm kids did it with
cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever
else they could catch,” he wrote, call-
ing the scene “sober realism.” Indeed,
Texas was keeping its options open on
that front even lately. Bestiality did not
become illegal there until 2017, when
the state legislature made it a felony.
A scholar of state history and a book-
seller, as well as a writer devoted to
demythologizing the West, McMurtry
was always gratified to discover “sober
realism” wherever he could find it,
often in rare or out- of-print sources
that addressed life on the frontier as it
actually was. Thus he came to admire,
and eventually republish, Gertrude
Beasley’s breathtakingly frank mem-
oir, My First Thirty Years, which origi-
nally appeared in 1925.
Born in 1892 in Cross Plains, a stage-
coach crossroads in central Texas, Edna
Gertrude Beasley was the ninth child of
William Isaac Beasley and Lucy Bea-
sley, and grew up dirt poor in a state
specializing in dirt. Her account openly
acknowledges bodily functions and
features sketches of domestic violence,
rape, incest, molestation, bestiality, bul-
lying, prostitution, and abortion. To call
her memoir unflinching is an under-
statement: it’s a virtual encyclopedia of
misogyny. For its time and place—and
even now—it’s unprecedented.
36
From Hell and Back
Caroline Fraser
Gertrude Beasley, circa 1920s
This scandalous book was published
in Paris in 1925 by Robert McAlmon’s
Contact Editions, famous for bring-
ing out works of the Lost Generation,
including those by Hemingway, Ger-
trude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, and oth-
ers. Beasley and her book would be lost
too, albeit literally. After the United
States’ 1921 ban on Joyce’s Ulysses for
obscenity (following publication of a
chapter in The Little Review), Beas-
ley’s work was vigorously suppressed,
but unlike Joyce she found few defend-
ers, although Bertrand Russell, whom
she met on her travels, tried to help her,
sending money and recommending a
lawyer.
So far as we know, the only public
comment she made on this suppression
occurred in the January 1926 issue of
Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan,
which featured a sanitized version of her
experience titled “I Was One of Thirteen
Poor White Trash.” Packaged as one of
the sensational first-person accounts for
which the magazine was known, it ap-
peared alongside contributions by The-
odore Roosevelt, Ring Lardner, and
W. Somerset Maugham. Beasley was
clearly trying to promote her work.
Yet the existence of the memoir was
mentioned only in the caption beneath
her author photo. She referred to the
censorship of the book obliquely in her
melancholy conclusion:
Those who have been through
my long road of poverty, family
US Department of State
sorrows, and social discrimina-
tions, recognize the scars which
such a struggle leaves. They are
mostly distrust, hysteria, suspicion
and fear—the results of an over-
wrought body and soul.
There are many women who like
myself have hacked their way out
of the labyrinth of superstitions,
lies, ignorance, unfair advantage
and poverty, who have been great
warriors in a mighty battle, in a
battle so horrible that if they told
the truth about life it would take
away the last breath of the censors
of Anglo- Saxondom.
Two years after this was published,
Beasley was silenced forever. Ten days
after her return to the US from En-
gland in 1928, she was committed to
an asylum, the Central Islip Psychiat-
ric Center on Long Island, where she
remained until her death in 1955. Her
diagnosis and the circumstances of her
committal remain unknown.
In an afterword to the limited edi-
tion of My First Thirty Years published
by the Book Club of Texas in 1989, Mc-
Murtry speculated about the book’s
fate, saying that “three hundred copies
were lost in America, presumably to
Customs,” a hunch later confirmed. As
a result, McMurtry writes, the memoir
became “to an unusual degree a book
known only to . . . antiquarian book-
sellers.” Although reprints appeared
once or twice, the memoir has now
been released by a trade publisher,
making it widely available for the first
time. The timing could not be more
fortuitous: My First Thirty Years
provides a foundational exploration
of the Lone Star State’s treatment of
women, which, if not uniquely bru-
tal, shows real ambition in a crowded
field.
M cMurtry called the opening of My
First Thirty Years “as violently indig-
nant as any in literature,” but it’s not
merely the aggrieved tone that sets it
apart. Beasley is attacking every mawk-
ish preconception about the sanctity of
life:
Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb
of a woman, conceived in a sexual
act of rape, being carried during
the pre-natal period by an unwill-
ing and rebellious mother, finally
bursting from the womb only to
be tormented in a family whose
members I despised or pitied, and
brought into association with peo-
ple whom I should never have cho-
sen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay
in the womb, a pink soft embryo, I
had somehow thought, breathed or
moved and wrought destruction to
the woman who bore me, and her
eight miserable children who pre-
ceded me, and the four round-faced
mediocrities who came after me,
and her husband, a monstrously
cruel, Christlike, and handsome
man with an animal’s appetite for
begetting children.
A photo of the entire Beasley clan
posted on the genealogical website
Ancestry.com roughly confirms her de-
scription of her father, if Christ sported
a handlebar mustache, wore suspend-
ers, and looked mean. In the image all
seven Beasley boys, with the exception
of the youngest, seated on his mother’s
lap, are together on the left side of the
image, the six girls on the right, the
sexes divided by their mother’s heavy
presence, seated in the middle, scowl-
ing and squinting in the sunlight.
The division was only too appropri-
ate, for Gertrude’s first memory is of
her older brothers trying to rape her:
I was lying on my back on the
hard, dirt floor of the stalls in my
father’s horse lot. My hands were
being held by my older brothers
and my feet also, I think, and the
great weight on my body seemed
about to crush me. God, what an
awful thing! Would the conscious-
ness, the struggle for breath, which
seemed about to be pressed out in
case my frame broke in, my ribs
stuck into my entrails and heart,
ever return! Thus was I first made
conscious. The rest was only a
dark whirl; perhaps the wind was
blowing, and it seems to me now
there was laughter. My oldest
brother, then about sixteen years
old, though he was very small for
his age, was trying to have sexual
intercourse with me, although I
was only about four years old at
the time.
The New York Review
She follows up with a description of her
own early fascination with copulation,
which is just as unsparing, casually ad-
mitting that she and her younger broth-
ers enjoyed “watching and talking
about animals in their sex acts, and . . . I
was quite as interested in our childish
efforts at sexual intercourse as they
were.” That degree of honesty is Bea-
sley’s mission throughout the book.
She addresses every physical sensation,
including the “contraction or move-
ment in the region of my sexual organs,
which was nothing more or less than sex
desire,” and moments of corresponding
guilt or shame.
After the umbrage of her opening,
she records her consciousness of phys-
icality in a remarkably matter- of-fact
manner. She notes as well the process
of learning to suppress such feelings,
beating down sensual daydreams with
“mental blows like those of my father’s
sledgehammer against the anvil.” She
candidly acknowledges having a score
to settle with her brothers yet relates
their escapades in the same tone that
she uses to describe church meetings.
When her mother whipped one brother
for having sex with a cow or another
for making free with the hens, leaving
“their rectums torn and bleeding,” it
was just another day in the life.
What’s more, she refuses to make a
joke of herself or the grotesqueries of
her family, and her direct tone prevents
this book from becoming a forerunner
to the weird American vogue for com-
edies about enormous broods, such as
the 1940s best sellers The Egg and I,
Betty MacDonald’s rural memoir in
which the fecund couple are the hillbil-
lies Ma and Pa Kettle, and Cheaper by
the Dozen by the siblings Frank and Er-
nestine Gilbreth, retailing life among
a family of twelve. Fascination with
profuse human litters continues today,
with reality television gawking at the
Duggars, a Baptist family in Arkansas,
children. Not without reason, Lucy was
“obsessed,” according to her daugh-
ter, with the notion that her husband
intended to kill her. After the birth of
their tenth child, she begged him to
desist, whereupon he denounced her
in terms the current Texas legislature
would surely admire: “There’ll be more
wimmen in hell for trying to keep from
having babies than for any other one
thing.”
It was Lucy Beasley’s exhaustion,
fearing that she would die if she had
any more children, that precipitated
the breakup of the family. After re-
covering from her thirteenth birth (it
emerged later that she had also had
three abortions, though we never hear
the details), Lucy prevailed on two
of the older girls to sleep in bed with
her, guarding against further marital
duties with a poker and a shovel. Not
long after, she and the children left
her husband on the farm, ostensibly to
pick cotton for the season, promising
to return. Instead, borrowing money
to supplement the cotton proceeds,
she bought a small house in Abilene,
moved the children there, and filed for
divorce, an act considered so shocking
in the community that Gertrude could
not bring herself to say the word even
as an adult. In response to questions,
Lucy and her children would imply that
William Beasley had died, saying, “He
is not living,” a euphemism for “He
is not living with us.” While her ex-
husband was still alive, Lucy described
herself on one census form as widowed.
A year or so after the split, the
household was again thrown into tur-
moil: Lucy received an urgent call say-
ing that Willie, the eldest daughter, was
“dying” in a town twenty miles away. It
transpired that she was actually giving
birth in a house of prostitution, having
sought shelter there after being “ru-
ined” by a man who had promised to
marry her. She and the “bastard” were
instantaneously banished by Lucy,
amid loud laments that the family was
Teacher or whore seemed to be the two
likeliest roles available to her. Given
her mother’s travails, the third option,
wife and mother, had no appeal. In later
life, despite temptation, she adamantly
refused to allow any of her many suit-
ors to so much as kiss her. “All the trou-
ble in the world came through kissing,”
she writes.
Beasley’s pursuit of an education was
an epic task of physical heroism, con-
ducted amid the domestic equivalent of
the Augean stables. As a young child,
she was assigned to do the “disgusting
washing” for her two next-youngest
siblings:
I had stood over whole tubfuls . . .
and shaken off the worst in the
water; then secured a tub of clean
water and continued until the ba-
by’s diapers were rid of all their
dung and ready to be washed with
the other things.
Until the age of twenty-two, she “con-
sumed all my surplus energy” in such
perpetual household tasks, washing
and ironing before breakfast, after
school, and on Saturdays. “How much
I have washed!” she cries at one point.
Her hatred of her older brothers was in-
tensified by their refusing to help, even
when out of work.
Keeping up with her studies along-
side such labors led to breakdowns: fits
of weeping and a delirious collapse at a
school graduation exercise. Nonetheless,
she pressed on, winning a scholarship to
attend a Christian academy, earning her
first teacher’s certificate at seventeen,
and completing a bachelor’s degree at
Simmons, a local college. By the time
she was twenty, she was the chief finan-
cial support of the family, teaching in
tough rural schools, proving her mettle
by whipping a seventeen-year- old boy
for “making obscene pictures.”
At twenty- one she moved to Chi-
Closing the Chasm
letters from a bipolar
physician to his son
By Benjamin Diven M.D.
closingthechasm.com
STET!
A GAME FOR LANGUAGE LOVERS,
GRAMMAR GEEKS, AND BIBLIOPHILES
Whats’ wrong with this sentence?
If that misplaced apostrophe leapt right off
the page, this is the game for you. Based on
the New York Times bestseller by Random
House’s copy chief Benjamin Dreyer, STET!
will help you sharpen or show off your lan-
guage skills. One hundred entertaining sen-
tences await you, the copyeditor, to correct
—or, alternatively, to STET (a copyeditor’s
term that means “let it stand”). The first
person to spot the error, or, if there is no
error, to call out “STET!”, gets the card.
There are two ways to play: compete for points
in a straightforward grammar game, or play
with style and syntax and whip the author’s
sentences into splendid shape. The person
with the most cards at the end of the game
wins. This is a witty, informative, challenging,
and fun card game for language lovers.
#05-37857 • $19.99
Price above does not include shipping and handling.
TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
2022
E!
LA W
BL
AI NO

in 19 Kids and Counting. That show, as now “disgraced.” cago, where she spent five years teach-
Beasley herself could have predicted, While relaying these tumultuous ing and studying for a master’s degree New York
AV

was canceled after it emerged that their

eldest son had sexually molested some
of his sisters.
At a time when large farming fam-
ilies were still common, Beasley was
mortified by the size of hers and espe-
cially by their vulgarity of speech and
behavior. Despite the presence here
of western elements—covered wagons
and dryland farming—this family had
none of the modest airs and graces of
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s. Lucy, Beasley’s
ma, constantly raged over her husband’s
failure to provide, because Beasley’s
pa, like Wilder’s, wasn’t much of a
farmer. His daughter recalls his griping
about the grass being “too dry, or the
summers too hot, or the cotton crop
too little. . . . Something or other was
always wrong with the big central taps
of the resources of life.” This pa drank;
he played the fiddle missing three fin-
gers from his left hand after blowing
them off with a six-shooter, and he had
a habit of expectorating on the walls
and urinating outside the front door.
He regularly abused his children and
livestock, whipping an old mare with a
chain until one of her eyes popped out,
beating his sons “with as little concern
as though they were cast iron,” flaying a
daughter until she defecated blood.
On several occasions he struck or
choked his wife, and Lucy, for her part,
delivered “slaps and thrashings” to the
scenes, Beasley begins to analyze her
intense physical and emotional sen-
sitivity, ranging from tears and trem-
bling to “nervous prostrations” and
delirium, a fear that her body might
fall “into pieces.” She attributes her
nerves not only to the mayhem at home
but to her will to succeed in school, an
ambition she steeled herself to pursue
even when it exposed her to the mock-
ery and jealousy of her siblings, none of
whom shared it.
The family’s financial situation grew
perilous, with Lucy peddling vegeta-
bles from a cart, taking in boarders,
and sending her children out to pick
berries or cotton, exposing her daugh-
ters to further sexual harassment. The
Beasley girls were fondled or molested
by males aside from their brothers, in-
cluding a preacher and the one-armed
proprietor of the berry-picking opera-
tion, who tried to rape Gertrude’s older
sister Emma in the middle of the night,
excusing himself (after she threatened
to “knock hell out of him”) by recalling
the eldest sister’s degradation.
The word “whore” assumed immense
power in their lives. At eleven or twelve,
Beasley found herself practically par-
alyzed by shame, waiting inside the
school outhouse with her teacher to use
the “privy,” when she spotted a fresh
obscenity carved in large letters on a
wooden seat: “Fuck me you whoar.”
in education at the University of Chi-
cago. There she heard Margaret Sanger
Review
speak on contraception and the birth
control movement, becoming an aco-
Calendar
lyte. When she learned that an older
sister was expecting, she was appre-
hensive, writing that “it was a terrible
thing to bring a human being into the
world under any circumstance; a trag-
edy, yes, a crime to bring one unloved,
unwanted.”
In other ways she was not progres-
sive: racist attitudes she absorbed as
her mother’s child (Lucy was raised on
an Alabama plantation where her fa-
ther was the overseer) were challenged
by friends and fellow students when she
saw fit to defend the Texas taste for mob
2022 David Levine Calendar
violence, earning her the nickname
“Lyncher.” “Ain’t your people civilized This handsomely printed calendar
yet?” one asked, and she decided to includes 13 David Levine caricatures
adopt northern ways “in Yankee land,” drawn exclusively for the Review. The
jumping into a swimming pool with 12½" x 9½" wall format with large
“negro girls.” It’s unclear, however, date blocks makes it ideal for record-
how open-minded she became.
Even as she achieved success, she ing notes and appointments.
railed against authority, denouncing Shipping is FREE within the US!
the Chicago School System, where she At just $14.95 each, why not
taught, as “a perfect hell of lies and stu- order one for yourself and
pidities,” symptomatic of larger evils. several for your friends?
“America is the land of murderous
institutions,” she wrote, throwing her
Go to: shop.nybooks.com or
lot in with the Socialists. In 1919, after call (646) 215-2500
earning her master’s degree, she went
to teach in Bellingham, Washington,

January 13, 2022 37

and promptly offended the president
of her school by publishing an article
in The Seattle Times criticizing teach-
ers’ low salaries. The editorial listed
many jobs requiring less training that
paid more, including waitressing and
bricklaying.
The official retaliated by telling her
she was “out of harmony” with the
school and calling her doctor (who once
consulted for the school) to inquire
about her health. Having previously
seen the physician about her difficult
periods, she began to fear gossip about
the state of her “genital organs” or
“sexual virtue.” Enraged, she browbeat
the president right back, shaming him
for “his nonsense” and emerging victo-
rious, with her job, if not her privacy,
intact.
On June 23, 1920, she sailed for
Japan and went on to China and Korea,
writing as a freelancer. There’s no ex-
planation of why or how her “dream” of
world travel evolved, and she ends her
account abruptly, on a wistful ellipsis,
betraying a surprisingly conventional
hope: “A secret wish hid in my heart; I
hoped I was going to find someone . . .”
There are few memoirs one wishes were
longer, but this is one. It was composed
at least in part in Soviet Russia (where
she also wrote about policies on contra-
ception for Sanger’s Birth Control Re-
view), and in her book, which actually
covers twenty-seven years, she reveals
little more about her travels and noth-
ing about her later journalism career.
One distinction of My First Thirty
Years lies in Beasley’s devotion to ac-
curately recording a portrait of the
mother–daughter relationship in all its
emotional weathers, its dark frustra-
tions and disappointments, its seasons
of helpless love and nostalgia when
she and her sisters found a cozy ref-
uge with their remaining parent, lis-
tening to Lucy wax sentimental over
her southern childhood. Herself a vic-
tim, Lucy had nonetheless often tor-
mented her children, telling them they
were just like their father. In moments
of distress, she acted like an animal,
“hissing” and “rearing and pitching,”
invoking vermin to berate them: “toad
frogs” and fleas.
Losing her fear of Lucy as an adult,
Gertrude yearned to rescue her, vowing
that she would tell her mother’s story.
In what must have been one of their
last meetings, she squired Lucy around
Chicago, embarrassed by her friends’
astonishment at the older woman’s un-
educated talk, then ashamed of herself.
“How I ever dared to be critical of a
woman whom life had hurt and scarred
as it had hurt my mother was incom-
prehensible,” she writes. She marveled,
too, at how her sensitivity to Lucy had
shaped her own personality, observing
that there “was something inside me
that looked just like my mother.”
In a harsh irony, Beasley’s fate may
have been sealed by repeating her
mother’s gossip. Recalling Lucy’s
mockery of a Baptist pastor who ap-
peared in their down-at-heels Abilene
neighborhood “to preach to the wash-
erwomen and the prairie dogs,” Beas-
ley casually notes in her memoir that
Lucy suspected a friend’s mother, Mrs.
Paxton, of fooling around with the pas-
tor. Her friend’s sister, Mildred Paxton,
would marry a powerful lawyer, Dan
Moody Jr. By 1925, when Beasley’s
book came out, Moody had become the
38
attorney general of Texas. Two years time is an eternal present; the setting
later, Beasley found herself in a contre- is somewhere remote out on the range,
temps in London that saw her briefly near the fictional Mormora Mountains.
institutionalized there. It begins with a timeless scene, a man
According to Bert Almon, a Texas excoriating his wife for being unfaith-
scholar who researched the suppression ful: “You fucked me over. You fuckin’
of Beasley’s book for This Stubborn fucked me over.”
Self: Texas Autobiographies (2002), That’s Dan. They’re in the barn, and
British customs seized proofs of her Dan’s wife, Ginny, is tending to a preg-
book, which they characterized as nant mare whose water has just broken.
“grossly obscene”; she was arrested in The mare is in trouble because she too
August 1927 after deliberately break- has had illicit sex (at the same time as
ing the window of a hotel from which Ginny) with a Percheron, a breed of
she was being evicted. Released, she heavy draft horse originally bred for
sailed for New York, writing a para- war. This Percheron, owned by Shaw,
noid letter to the US State Department a neighbor and Ginny’s lover, is so big
while on the boat, claiming there was that the small mare, bought at a can-
a conspiracy to have her “executed.” nery auction, may be killed by the size
She then ended up in the asylum. By of the foal she’s about to deliver. The
that point, Moody was the governor of birth is thus a bitter reminder of Gin-
Texas. ny’s infidelity, the hottest gossip in
She died in 1955, at the age of sixty- town. The couple have been together
three, in obscurity. In 2018 The New for twenty years; sentiment is running
York Times published a belated obitu- heavily against the cheater.
ary in its Overlooked No More series, Dan leads the horse up a hillside to
referring to Almon’s suggestion that the shade of a lone oak, a spot over-
Moody may have been responsible looking Shaw’s land and the Perche-
for an “unofficial interdiction” of her ron’s paddock. There, for the next sixty
book. In the 1940s Texas Rangers did pages, Dan and Ginny continue their
detain a bookseller for selling a copy argument. The mare struggles to give
to the University of Texas library. Lucy birth to a dead foal; by the time it has
had begged her family never to reveal left her body, she’s unable to stand. To-
their shameful sexual secrets, and the gether, the couple carry the dead foal
book’s revelations apparently upended to an offal pit and hurl it in.
all of their lives. The year it appeared, At the oak, others arrive, bearing
Lucy moved from Abilene to Califor- liquor: Ginny’s venomous half-sister,
nia. It’s hard to believe the timing was Ella, who sees herself as the good
an accident. woman; Ella’s husband, Saul; an array
of neighbors who’ve heard about the
mare’s plight; a guy with a pistol; a
T he West as hell on women and horses mule skinner; a rodeo kid. Over the
emerges as a theme in Robin McLean’s course of the afternoon, they drunk-
stunning debut novel, Pity the Beast. enly try to bring the mare to her feet
The hero of our “garish and transient by lifting her with ropes tied to the
frontier fiction,” as R.W. B. Lewis once oak; by evening, they’ve constructed a
wrote, is the American Adam, a con- bizarre wooden contraption to support
ception expanding on Crèvecoeur’s her with a sling.
definition of the continent’s “new The scene turns into a picnic, then a
man,” a breed born into a world with- party, then a melee. The sisters bicker;
out aristocracy, forging the principles Ginny smacks Ella. When the more
of freedom. So what happens when benign guests depart and the day’s
Eve takes the reins? Can she ever enjoy drinking takes effect, an angry knot of
such freedom? That’s a question posed Ginny-haters gathers around a bonfire,
by this revisionist western. It opens embroidering elaborate images of her
with a long first section culminating in sexual crimes in graphic language that
perhaps the most memorable gang rape excites them: “Screwing . . . groping and
since the Sabine women. sucking . . . dripping and moaning.” Her
Pity the Beast does not take place in face, one man suggests, “is sin.” Egged
Beasley’s Texas but might as well. The on by Ella, Dan drags Ginny behind
TURKEY VULTURES
Since the wind knocked down power lines
and lightning set a birch aflame
from within, three turkey vultures roost
along the topmost branches,
matted black feathers with small red heads,
unfortunate harbingers of death,
though really, almost comically alive—
hunched as though deciding
some minor point before slipping off
on the umbrellas of their wings to rid
the roads of evidence of violence not theirs.
—Maya C. Popa
the oak, rapes her, beats her uncon-
scious, and the remaining men, includ-
ing Saul and the rodeo kid, take their
turns. Then they drag her body to the
pit, throw her in, and shovel lime on
top.
Ginny, however, is not dead. By
dawn she has regained consciousness
and manages to climb out by creating
a staircase of calf carcasses. Putting a
merciful bullet in the mare’s temple,
Ginny takes off into the mountains on
a cob, pursued by Ella, Saul, Dan, the
mule driver with his string of mules,
and a tracker. They’re intent on killing
her to cover up their crime; she’s intent
on wreaking vengeance on them. A
greenhorn deputy from New Jersey fol-
lows their trail, and so does the rodeo
kid.
It’s a slow-motion chase, the
stuff of westerns from time almost-
immemorial, or at least since The
Searchers (1956), but as it develops,
we take a sharp turn into experimental
metafiction, as the author begins self-
consciously parodying the genre itself.
Ginny, who we learn is the sixth in a
line of women named Virginia, may be
a reference to the first western novel,
Owen Wister’s 1902 The Virginian,
and to “virgin,” which Ginny is not.
In westerns, as in the Bible, women
require constant sexual classification
and, if warranted, elimination. These
searchers conclude that Ginny deserves
to die: “Adam would have dropped Eve
in a pit too.”
Things get murky. The narrative
is soon littered with Ella’s numbered
“Mule Thoughts,” written in a note-
book; the doomed deputy’s postcards
to his mother; and stage directions
revealing that the rodeo kid is a stock
figure: “Ain’t it time for another rip-
roaring episode of The Long Trail of
That There Kid? . . . Starring the kid as
THE KID.” There are science-fiction
passages, too, introducing geological
deep time, notes from a post–climate
crisis future when shallow seas have
again flooded parts of the West and bi-
ologists are attempting to reintroduce
a giant race of mules, beginning with
“Adam” and “Eve.”
The whole thing eventually devolves
into Quentin Tarantino–style violence,
but it’s those first hyperrealistic sixty
pages that stay with you, an opening so
arresting that it stands apart and unbal-
ances the rest of the novel. The rape in
Pity the Beast takes up the problem of
the whore, stretching back in an unbro-
ken line through Western life and liter-
ature. Beasley knew the power of such
epithets, lasting “far beyond child-
hood.” The issue is ubiquitous in the
genre and beyond. Cormac McCarthy’s
men are beset by “Goddamn whores.”
McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, probing
Hollywood sentimentality, ends on the
word, a whispered explanation for the
suicidal burning of the town saloon by
a man torn by lust and self-loathing:
“The woman. They say he missed that
whore.”
That’s a line harking back to John
Ford’s seventeenth-century revenge
tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the
Renaissance handbook on women’s
vile “hot itch” and “belly-sports.”
And farther, as McLean implies, to
the Bible, which is full of whores and
what they deserve. Pity the Beast, at its
best, suggests that women have always
been the half- dead horse men beat be-
cause they hate themselves for being
animals. Q
The New York Review

99 Variations on a Proof
by Philip Ording.
Princeton University Press,
260 pp., $24.95; $19.95 (paper)
Mathematics is writing. For all the
quantification it makes possible and all
the technological and scientific discov-
eries it has helped to produce, it is ul-
timately words upon words. There is a
bedrock of definitions (“A point is that
which has no part,” says Euclid) cross-
cut by axioms (“A straight line segment
can be drawn joining any two points”),
whose only restrictions are that they
not contradict one another. From this
starting material we derive the terse
assertions of consequences that are
known as theorems and lemmas and
corollaries. Were a theorem the result
of a prosecutor’s successful argument,
then the lemmas would be the settled
issues of fact, the corollary the sentenc-
ing. The arguments are the key. These
are the “proofs”—sometimes called
“demonstrations”—without which the
assertions are just so much blather. The
proofs actually conjure mathematics
into existence.
Stephen King has described writing
as an act of telepathy across time and
space.1 This is surely true of mathe-
matical writing: I’ve figured out that
the square root of two is irrational—
and this is my proof. What follows is as
close to the written transmission of one
person’s pure thought as any writing
can be. But even in mathematical writ-
ing, it’s not just what you say but how
you say it—better known as style.
This is the subject of Philip Ording’s
99 Variations on a Proof, which sur-
veys different styles that can be used to
prove a single theorem—a mathemat-
ical version of musical variations on a
theme. In fact, there are one hundred
numbered entries, beginning—accord-
ing to the mathematician’s style—with
chapter 0, a little math joke in itself.
The entries range from the technical to
the whimsical, from real proofs to more
meditative reflections on the process
and activity of mathematical research.
But Ording’s book is more than just a
survey. Each proof is accompanied by a
brief commentary, outlining the inspi-
ration of the variation and reflecting on
the culture of mathematics through the
ages. The less mathematically inclined
reader might benefit from reading
these commentaries first.
If one has any familiarity with math-
ematical proofs, it probably comes from
a year-long sojourn into Euclidean ge-
ometry in middle or high school. For
many, this is a jarring scholastic expe-
rience sandwiched between two years
of algebra. Until that moment mathe-
matics has been about finding the an-
swer to a question: for example, “Sally
rows downstream for 20 miles with
a current of 2 miles per hour and the
trip upstream takes 5 hours. How fast
does Sally row?” In geometry, however,
you’re told the answer—“If in a trian-
gle two angles equal each other, then
the sides opposite the equal angles also
1
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir
of the Craft (Scribner, 2000); reissued
in 2020 with contributions from King’s
sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.
January 13, 2022
Prove It!
Dan Rockmore
Emma Kunz: Work No. 004, undated
equal each other”—and then asked to
find a reason, and explain it. QED.
Students learn in geometry that a
mathematical proof has three simple
ingredients: definitions, axioms, and
deductions. The ways in which they log-
ically combine—the recipe—depends
on what you are cooking up. Definitions
and axioms are statements whose truths
are both obvious and incontrovertible
(as in the example above involving
the connection of any two points with
a straight line), while deductions are
statements that follow from the defi-
nitions and axioms, or even previously
proven facts (which are themselves de-
ductions), arrived at through the step-
by-step application of deductive logic.
Proofs are usually expressed in two
columns, a sort of logical accounting
ledger with assertions on the left and
justifications on the right.
Such classical proofs read a little like
a distillation of the Socratic method
(“Well surely if you grant me that,
then you must grant me this!”), and
they can sound a bit like a prosecutor
leading a witness to the nub of revela-
tion. Many may be surprised to know
that mathematical proofs often are
text-heavy, even if symbol-laden, which
is itself a form of stylistic evolution.
In Carl Boyer’s timeless A History of
Mathematics 2 we learn that in early
Egyptian mathematics the unknown
was referred to as “aha” for a “heap”
of to-be- determined size—the sound
of discovery and what was waiting to
be discovered were one and the same.
The letter x has been around as a sym-
bol for millennia, including to mark
the unknown on treasure maps, but it
wasn’t until the seventeenth century
2
Originally published in 1968 and most
recently issued in an updated version
coauthored with Uta C. Merzbach
(Wiley, 2010).
Emma Kunz Stiftung
that it began to represent the unknown
in mathematical compositions.
A mathematical assertion often can
be proved by many different kinds
of arguments. Each proof should be
correct and clear, and perhaps even
captivating or charming. The way it is
written may appeal to one kind of intel-
lect or another (or sometimes none at
all). But the style of the argument—the
writing—is not just about convincing
the reader; it is also about the manner
in which the reader is convinced. One
truth, but in the range of tellings, differ-
ent aspects, implications, inspirations,
and connections are revealed—just
like great literature, but with “How do
I love thee? Let me count the ways”
traded for “How do I count these? Let
me show you the ways I love best.”
P hilip Ording is a professor of math-
ematics at Sarah Lawrence College.
His interests include geometry and to-
pology (especially the mathematics of
knots), as well as the intersections of
mathematics and the humanities. The
organization of the book pays homage
to its inspiration: the French polymath
Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style
(1947), which was itself inspired by
Bach’s The Art of Fugue. Queneau’s
book, Ording explains,
takes the same simple story—that
of a peculiar individual who is first
seen in a dispute on a bus, and then
later in conversation with a friend
about the position of a coat but-
ton—and transforms it in ninety-
nine different ways.
Queneau was one of the founders of Ou-
lipo, an avant-garde literary collective
whose members included writers and
artists ranging from Italo Calvino to
Marcel Duchamp, as well as the math-
ematician Claude Berge, a pioneer in
graph theory—a mathematical theory
of connectivity that has found direct ap-
plication in the broad and burgeoning
study of networks, and even in formal
literary constructions. “Oulipo” is short
for “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle,”
which translates to “workshop of poten-
tial literature.” It’s an appropriate name
for a group that together investigated
what literature could be rather than
what it was, fueled by experimentation
in literary production, often involving
formal or rule-based systems.
Some connect Oulipo’s birth to
Bourbaki, a collective of French math-
ematicians also united by a shared be-
lief in the importance of formalism who
strove to rebuild all of mathematics
from the ground up, axioms first. Que-
neau is known to have attended at least
one of their meetings, and the manifes-
tos of Oulipo co-founder François Le
Lionnais directly refer to the highly ab-
stract elements on which Bourbaki was
founded. Ironically, what was an avant-
garde approach to literature was seen
by many as reactionary when it came
to mathematics. 3 Bourbaki’s stripped-
down axiomatic framing waxed briefly
and has since waned.
Queneau didn’t just admire mathe-
matics. He published two peer-reviewed
papers, both on “s-sequences”: lists of
numbers characterized by conditions
such that any number in the list depends
in certain ways on numbers that precede
it.4 You don’t need to squint to see this
as an abstraction of writing. In one of
Queneau’s last works, Les fondements
de la littérature d’après David Hilbert, he
pushes the analogy, turning the axioms
of geometry (as written by the math-
ematician David Hilbert, a towering
figure and great fan of formalism) into
axioms for literature. Points become
words, lines become sentences, and
planes (infinite flat sheets comprising
lines and points) become paragraphs.
Each of Queneau’s ninety-nine varia-
tions in Exercises in Style demonstrates
that even the simplest set of facts can
be brought differently to life by a range
of storytelling styles. In this way it is
something like a literary version of
Euclid’s Elements, whose many more
mathematical “stories” derive from five
(or ten, depending on how you count)
simple axioms, each even plainer than
the few quotidian activities that define
Queneau’s peevish hero.
The variations in Queneau’s Exer-
cises in Style include a sonnet, a book
blurb, and a one-act opera. There is a
musical score. An entry titled “Zoolog-
ical” is animated with animals (“In the
dog days while I was in a bird cage . . .”).
And of course there is mathematics.
“Negativities” is the story of what it
3
For a fascinating recounting of the
interactions between and coevolution
of Oulipo and Bourbaki, see Amir D.
Aczel, The Artist and the Mathemati-
cian (Thunder’s Mouth, 2006).
4
The well-known Fibonacci sequence is
an example of a sequence—although not
an s-sequence—wherein each number of
the list depends on previous numbers. In
this case, each number (after starting
with a pair of ones) is given by the sum
of the two numbers that precede it.
39
is not (“It was neither a boat, nor an
aeroplane . . .”). “Probabilist” works
in the theme of chance. First read-
ing aloud and then disentangling the
mathematically sophisticated “Permu-
tations by Groups of 2, 3, 4 and 5 Let-
ters” (“Ed on to ay rd wa . . .” becomes
“One day toward . . .”) is a delight, even
if you have to work a little. As a whole,
Queneau said in a published conversa-
tion with the French painter and poet
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, he
hoped that the collection might act as
a “rust remover of literature” without
“boring the reader too much.”
I
n 99 Variations on a Proof Ording ex-
plains that, after discovering Queneau’s
Exercises in Style, he “wanted to see
what effect constrained writing strate-
gies would have on a mathematical nar-
rative—a proof.” Mirroring Queneau,
each of Ording’s variations is born of
a simple fact, but a mathematical one,
expressed in this cubic equation:
Let x be real. If x3 – 6x2 +11x – 6
= 2x – 2, then x = 1 or x = 4.
Admittedly, there is a bit to unpack
here. For starters, this equation involv-
ing interacting cubes, squares, and the
like is just an example of “solving for
x,” where you discover that if you plug
in 4 for x on both sides you get the same
number (6), and if you plug in 1 for x
on both sides you also get the same
number (this time it is 0). 5 But—and
more interesting—these are the only
two “real” numbers (i.e., numbers with
decimal expansions or numbers on the
familiar “number line”) for which this
is true. This part of the proof reaches
back to the earliest recorded arithme-
tic exercises, in which a “proof” was an
actual demonstration of a calculation.
Ording’s choice of theorem runs the
risk of being a deterrent to readers
with “little or no predisposition to the
subject matter,” whom he hopes to at-
tract. It introduces a heavy dependence
on notation—x’s and y’s make regular
appearances among the hundred vari-
ations—and there is a fair amount of
moving them about through the use
of algebra. Legend has it that Stephen
Hawking’s editor on A Brief History of
Time warned him that every equation
included in the book would reduce his
audience by half. He chose to include
just one: E=mc2. By that arithmetic,
this little aside and the paragraph above
may have cost us fifteen sixteenths of
our readers. Ording’s book would suf-
fer an even more dramatic loss.
But Ording’s assertion seems a clear
nod to Queneau. As a simple (even “bor-
ing”) statement that two combinations
of numbers work out to be the same, it
serves as a mathematical doppelgänger
for Queneau’s bumptious commuter.
That it too could inspire so many vari-
ations and accompanying reflections
deserves applause, even from the non-
predisposed reader.6 There is much that
5 the ancient Greeks). They don’t succeed
In case your algebraic skills need to
be dusted off: plugging in 4 for x in
x3 – 6x2 +11x – 6 gives 64 – 96 + 44 – 6, or
6; as does plugging in 4 for x in 2x – 2
(which gives 8 – 2); and analogously
for plugging in 1 in both expressions
(1– 6 +11– 6 = 0 and 2 – 2 = 0).
6
For those who read French, I must rec-
ommend Ludmila Duchêne and Agnès
Leblanc’s Rationnel mon Q: 65 exer-
cices de styles (Paris: Hermann, 2010),
40
can be learned—and plenty of rust to be
removed—for both the uninitiated (but
open-minded) and the sophisticated.
Early mathematical arguments and
styles are well represented in the book,
ranging from an imagined Babylonian
justification (chapter 16, “Ancient”)
to a proof using Euclidean geometry
(chapter 52, “Antiquity”). I’d challenge
anyone to check the work in the glyphs
that make up the former. Chapter 88,
“Dialogue,” is a back-and-forth between
a master and a disciple—a form of rea-
soning through a problem that Ording
posits is “a likely candidate for the oldest
style of presenting a mathematical argu-
A ‘wordless’ visual proof of the solutions to the cubic equation x 3 – 6x 2 + 11x – 6 = 2x – 2;
from Philip Ording’s 99 Variations on a Proof
ment.” Some variation of it still goes on
during office hours all around the world.
There are two medieval efforts,
each of which serves as an example
for the utility of a simplified—even if
abstract—notation that cleans up the
flowery and somewhat laborious text.
English is really not well suited to alge-
bra. The first, chapter 34, is formatted
to look like an illuminated manuscript
and restates the theorem as follows:
which uses the fact (theorem) that the
square root of two is an irrational num-
ber as its core (it can’t be written as a
fraction, a fact that blew the minds of
in producing ninety-nine variations, but
the sixty-five they do achieve are won-
derful. If you happily read mathematics,
I also recommend John McCleary’s Ex-
ercises in (Mathematical) Style: Stories
of Binomial Coefficients (Mathemat-
ical Association of America, 2017) for
ninety-nine often but not always very
technical takes inspired by the numbers
that some might know as the entries in
“Pascal’s triangle.”
Suppose that the intensity of a
quality is as the cube of its exten-
sion and 9 times that less 6 times
its square. It will be demonstrated
that when this quality achieves an
intensity of 4, its extension is 1 or 4.
In the accompanying commentary Or-
ding credits the proof as following the
method of Leonardo of Pisa (aka Fibo-
nacci) and the scholastic philosopher
Nicole Oresme, with connections to an
ancient Chinese text, The Nine Chap-
ters on the Mathematical Art.
The second medieval-style proof,
chapter 70, continues the high language
Philip Ording
but in a normal font, opening with “In
the name of God, gracious and merci-
ful!” and closing with “It is now time that
we should conclude this demonstration
with gratitude to God and praising all
of His prophets.” Sandwiched between
is a clever geometric proof that includes
circles, conics, and intersecting lines. We
learn from Ording’s commentary that
this kind of proof could be found in the
eleventh- century Treatise on Demon-
stration of Problems of Algebra, a mas-
terpiece by the Persian mathematician
Omar Khayyam, who is now surely bet-
ter known for his poems in the Rubaiyat.
Khayyam’s Algebra was the first writ-
ten attempt to address all the ways in
which cubic equations can arise and
then be solved via clever geometric con-
structions. With no x’s and y’s present
it may seem to the modern reader to be
ironically titled, but the word “algebra”
is derived from the Arabic al-jabr, which
refers to the process of simplification
(e.g., “cancellation”) of mathematical
relations. Its origin is usually attributed
to the ninth- century Persian mathema-
tician al-Khwarizmi, whose name lives
on in the word “algorithm,” which re-
fers to any recipe of instructions that
underlies a computer program and, for
some, is poetry of a different sort.
Fast forward several hundred years
to Renaissance Italy, where solving
equations was a form of dueling, with
mathematicians challenging one an-
other to contests for money and honor.
Ording memorializes this in chapter
43, “Screenplay,” a script in which a
character announces:
I hereby declare that on this the
tenth of August in the year fifteen
hundred and forty-eight of our
Lord in our fair city of Milan, the
visitor Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia
of Brescia challenges Girolamo
Cardano, represented here by
Ludovico Ferrari Esquire, to a duel
of the mind. The dishonored shall
pay the winner two hundred scudi.
All of the characters mentioned here
are real historical figures. Out of such
challenges grew formulaic approaches
to the solution of the cubic equation
you get if you move the pieces around
in Ording’s original theorem.
Such a formula—analogous to the fa-
mous quadratic formula—is among the
discoveries to be found in Ars Magna,
Girolamo Cardano’s sixteenth- century
magnum opus. Elsewhere Ording re-
produces a two-page spread from Ars
Magna (chapter 7, “Found”) with the
exact cubic relation that is the focus of
the book. Ording claims to have been
“stunned” to find it there, but one can’t
help but wonder if that isn’t where his
project started. (There are an infinite
number of cubic equations with real
solutions to investigate.) References
to Cardano are sprinkled throughout,
suggesting that he’s something of a
hero to Ording. Khayyam also receives
a handful of mentions, but generally—
as Ording points out in chapter 71,
“Blog”—early Eastern contributions
to mathematics continue to be less well
known to Westerners than their later
Western counterparts.
T he order of the variations in Ording’s
book confuses the timeline of discov-
ery, even if it might reflect the time-
lessness of mathematical truths. But
99 Variations on a Proof is not really
meant to be a history lesson, even if it
is by necessity partly that. One aim is to
display the variety of possible proofs,
the different ways in which we might
convince one another that there are
only two solutions, 1 and 4, to this lit-
tle problem. To this end, various proofs
exhibit particular styles of logical argu-
mentation, including at least two that
involve indirect argument.
Chapter 13, “Reductio ad Absur-
dum,” bears the title of a form of proof
in which one assumes the conclusion
to be false—that there is another solu-
tion different from 1 and 4—and with
that additional hypothesis, as Ording
explains, concludes that “some third
statement that was already known to
be true—an axiom or proven propo-
sition—is false,” in this case that 0 =1.
This is a roundabout way to show that
the stated conclusion must therefore
be true—a feat of logical magic called
a “proof by contradiction” that makes
use of the famous “law of the excluded
middle”: either there is a third solution
or there isn’t, and no other option (“the
The New York Review
middle”) is available. Here Ording
quotes the Hungarian mathematician
Georg Pólya, who noted that this kind
of indirect proof “has some resem-
blance to irony which is the favorite
procedure of the satirist.”
Similarly, chapter 14, “Contrapos-
itive”—which also relies on indirect
argument—makes use of the fact that
proving an “If this, then that” statement
is equivalent to proving “If not that,
then not this.” These introductions to
the mechanics of logic are for me like
little mathematical madeleines. I recall
my own early difficulties with the lan-
guage of mathematical proofs. It took
me several weeks in my first pure math
class to understand that the technical
meaning of “A if and only if B” is both
that A implies B and that B implies A,
and not just that the author was being
emphatic about B following from A.
There are also several proofs here—
chapter 0, “Omitted”; chapter 44,
“Omitted with Condescension”; and
chapter 94, “Authority”—that aren’t
really proofs at all: each in its own way
says “this is obvious” and doesn’t actu-
ally do the work of demonstrating any-
thing. Ording uses “Omitted” to talk
about the idea that choosing to prove
something is part of the “aesthetic” of
writing mathematics or about mathe-
matics. He uses the other two chapters
to call out some of the ways in which
pedagogy can be lazy or even cruel.
“Authority” produces a proof that
says only that “it follows from Euler,”
one of the great mathematicians of all
time, whose collected works fill ninety
volumes. Good luck finding that ref-
erence. I can’t count the hours of self-
flagellation I’ve experienced laboring
(and swearing) over the word “obvious”
in a textbook or research paper. These
madeleines are migraines. As Ording
says in the commentary accompanying
“Authority,” “When the authority of
reference is oneself, a proof by author-
ity becomes a proof by intimidation.”
As the saying goes, sometimes words
are not enough, even in mathematics.
Mathematical inspiration and argumen-
tation often make use of the visual—
which for some mathematicians might
not rise to the level of a proof, but could
very well be more convincing for those
who blanch at symbols. These make for
some beautiful variations. A favorite is
chapter 10, “Wordless,” a visual proof—
or “Proof Without Words”—based on
Ording’s Euclidean chapter 52, “Antiq-
uity.”7 It uses drawings of cubes, squares,
rectangles, columns, and lines, and
makes tangible the manipulations of al-
gebra that to many can seem inscrutable.
This is also called a “Look-see! Proof.”
A paper-folding diagram in chapter
39, “Origami,” shows that abstract ar-
guments can be made physical, and the
photograph that is chapter 29, “Model,”
shows a delicate and beautiful paper-
model embodiment of a solution. As
one who has always had trouble “see-
ing” mathematics, I found these picto-
rial arguments a delight.
Some mathematical styles have to do
with genre. An algebraic style of ar-
gument—such as chapters 23 and 24,
“Symmetry” and “Another Symme-
try”—will almost surely include a lot of
7
For more on visual proofs, I heartily rec-
ommend Roger Nelsen’s Proofs Without
Words, volumes 1, 2, and 3, all published
by the American Mathematical Society.
January 13, 2022
formula rewriting and make use of sym-
metries, sometimes symbolic (“cancel
out the x’s”), but other times reflected
in a pictorial or geometric representa-
tion. “If a problem will divide along
a line or axis of symmetry,” Ording
notes, “it means there’s a good chance
that a solution to one part of the prob-
lem will extend . . . to the problem as a
whole.” A geometric proof will frame
the assertion using the familiar lines,
curves, and notions of distance in a
two- dimensional or three- dimensional
space, or if necessary might even re-
quire analogous “objects” that reside in
spaces of higher dimensions or having
exotic curved or crenellated structures.
Topological arguments—as in chap-
ter 51—can have a geometric feel but
allow the freedom to slide, squash, and
squeeze the shapes. An analytic proof,
such as chapter 33, “Calculus,” will usu-
ally involve techniques that derive from
or are related to calculus. On the whole,
it is not uncommon in mathematics to
use newly developed ideas and subject
areas to reprove old and seemingly
settled problems; as with many kinds
of writing, old themes revisited in new
styles have the power to reveal previ-
ously unseen subtleties or even produce
simpler arguments than the original.
Some of Ording’s variations give
readers a glimpse of the culture of math-
ematics as a practice. Chapter 48, “Com-
puter Assisted,” shows how computers
are now used not just to solve equations
but to assist with or even fully produce
proofs. Doron Zeilberger, a mathema-
tician at Rutgers, has even listed his
computer program “Shalosh B. Echad”
(a Hebrew-English mashup based on
the model name of Zeilberger’s first
computer) as a coauthor on some of his
published papers. More recently, the
same technologies that are producing
machine-written news articles are also
being used to solve math problems.
In a different direction, computers
can now provide the modern mathema-
tician with a platform for experimenta-
tion, giving mathematics more of the
laboratory feel of the physical or life
sciences. For many this has changed
the way mathematics is approached—
see, for example, chapter 76, “Ex-
perimental,” and chapter 77, “Monte
Carlo”—as well as the way in which
mathematics is written. The latter is
the source of another variation, chap-
ter 35, “Typeset,” which gives a win-
dow into the TeX typesetting software
package (invented by Donald Knuth, a
computer scientist at Stanford) that has
revolutionized the production of math-
ematics papers and the pace of modern
mathematical research.
This acceleration in the production
of new mathematical ideas is transfor-
mative for the discipline. Historically,
mathematics has been among the slow-
est of the sciences. Articles submitted
for peer review can take years before
they are returned with comments that
may then need to be addressed and the
articles returned for second reviews
before acceptance for publication—if
accepted at all. But nowadays math-
ematicians often deposit preliminary
versions of their papers, known as
“preprints,” on arXiv.org, a digital de-
pository and preprint server, which ac-
celerates the availability of the work at
the expense of detailed review; Ording
refers to this in chapter 37. Some math-
ematicians—most likely those with
tenure—may not even go to the trouble
of pursuing official publication.
Despite all the new ways of doing
mathematical research, most mathema- “Szilárd Borbély was one of
ticians are still attached to the chalk-
the best and most original
board—a picture of which is shown
in chapter 21, displaying Cardano’s poets and novelists of his
method for finding the solutions to generation—and Ottilie Mulzet
the book’s ur- equation. “More than a is a wonderful translator of
teaching aid, a blackboard is a medium his work.” —George Szirtes
for mathematics,” Ording writes, al-
though it can also be “a source of anx-
iety” for a student “when called to the
board.” But that’s often where the hard
work is done: scribbling, erasing, work-
ing out examples in front of colleagues,
even sketching cartoons as inspiration.
Around 3,500 years ago in Mesopota-
mia traders scratched marks on clay to
work out the proto-problems of mathe-
matics. In that sense, little has changed.
For further evidence, I recommend
Jessica Wynne’s Do Not Erase: Math-
ematicians and Their Chalkboards,8 a
collection of photographs of the chalk-
boards of mathematicians from around
the world, each accompanied by a re-
flection or explanation from its creator.
The chalkboard is just one meeting
place for ideas. Ording points out that
“many university mathematics depart-
ments hold tea in the afternoon,” creat- Szilárd Borbély spent his childhood in a
ing “a venue for informal discussion.” tiny impoverished village in northeastern
Ours at Dartmouth is every weekday, Hungary, where the archaic peasant world
usually at 3:30—come visit. Chapter of Eastern Europe coexisted with the col-
65, “Tea,” is an imagined exchange lectivist ideology of a new Communist
during such a get-together. The partic- state. Close to the Soviet border and far
ipants include a person referred to as from any metropolitan center, the village
Lambda, who has just proved Ording’s was a world apart: life was harsh, monot-
theorem by complicated means—see onous, and often brutal, and the Borbélys,
chapter 64, “Research Seminar”— outsiders and “class enemies,” were shunned.
and a few attendees, buttonholing (à
la Queneau?) Lambda for details or In a Bucolic Land, Borbély’s final, posthu-
maybe just to strut their stuff. Ording mously published book of poems, combines
cleverly has tea follow a seminar, as is autobiography, ethnography, classical my-
often the case in real life. thology, and pastoral idyll in a remarkable
Group proof efforts of course no lon- central poetic sequence about the starkly
precarious and yet strangely numinous
ger require contributors to be in the
liminal zone of his youth. This is framed
same room. Chapter 25, “Open Col-
by elegies for a teacher in which the poet
laborative,” is an imagined exchange
meditates on the nature of language and
on a blog thread, and those interested
speech and on the adequacy of words to
in this lively online research culture
speak of and for the dead. Ottilie Mulzet’s
might make an excursion to the Math-
English translation conveys the full power
ematics Stack Exchange website; it’s
of a writer of whom László Krasznahorkai
not just students hunting for homework
has said, “He was a poet—a great poet—
solutions. An updated version of Ord-
who shatters us.”
ing’s book might have to add an entry:
chapter 100, “Zoom.” “Borbély’s poetry, prose, and essays try
This is of course but a sampling of to bring the readers closer to the lives of
Ording’s mathematical buffet. The those who cannot speak of their trauma
more linguistically inspired variations or suffering. They can be uneducated and
in the book feel like direct tributes to poor villagers, survivors of the Holocaust,
Exercises in Style. Chapter 9, “Mono- women grieving after a miscarriage, or
syllabic,” is a proof using words of only victims of terrible aggression. Through
one syllable. Chapter 81, “Doggerel,” is Borbély’s texts we readers become
written in verse and resembles, Ording increasingly less cruel-hearted."
notes, a “stanza from Lewis Carroll’s —László Bedecs, Asymptote
double acrostic, The First Riddle.”
Chapter 98, “Mondegreen,” is—as per IN A BUCOLIC LAND
the definition of the word—a homo- SZILÁRD BORBÉLY
phonic rewriting of the proposition: Translated from the Hungarian by
Ottilie Mulzet
Their omelette: eggs, beer, eel.
Paperback • $16.00
If eggs cued my nose, six eggs
queered. Also available as an e-book
Plus nine eggs. On sale January 11, 2022
My nose for equals—zero.
Then, egg sequels one or four. . . .
“Whenever I see the ubiquitous ru-
bric ‘Theorem. Let . . . ,’” Ording ex-
plains, “I cannot help but hear ‘their
omelette.’” These proofs’ playfulness ALSO BY
at the boundary of sense and nonsense SZILÁRD BORBÉLY
BERLIN-HAMLET
surely expands the limits of mathemat-
ical exposition as well as readerly re-
sponse to mathematical ideas. I think
Queneau would have been proud. Q
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
8
Princeton University Press, 2021.
41

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem:
The Unheralded Story of
Native Americans in Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff.
Simon and Schuster, 318 pp.,
$27.00; $18.99 (paper; to be
published in February)
The Comedians:
Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels
and the History of American Comedy
by Kliph Nesteroff.
Grove, 425 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper)
When Barack Obama was campaign-
ing for Joe Biden in 2020, he spoke at
an event in a gymnasium in Michigan.
As he was leaving, someone bounce-
passed a basketball to him. From deep
in the corner, he tossed up a shot, and
it went in. People yelled, “Whoa-whoa-
whoa-whoa-whoa!” and “All net!”
What former president—what national
political figure of any kind—had ever
hit a walk- off three-pointer, and with
the cameras watching? Amazing! Un-
heard of! Millions later saw the video
online. In a karmic sense, the Demo-
crats won the election right there.
I propose this important moment as
an analogy to stand-up comedy. Mak-
ing an audience laugh hard, without
coercion or restraint—it’s a walk- off
three-point moment, an epiphany of
accuracy, coolness, and style. The pure
high of it must be one of the greatest
feelings in the world.
Kliph Nesteroff, a longtime student
of comedy, has written two books about
this fateful thrill and occupation. The
more recent one, We Had a Little Real
Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story
of Native Americans in Comedy, turns
to a subject that even some who work
in comedy might know nothing about.
Today about a hundred young men
and women from many North Amer-
ican tribes are writing TV and sketch
comedy and performing stand-up and
improv, remuneratively or not. The Na-
vajo comedian Ernie Tsosie says, “Now
almost every tribe has a comedian.”
One question might be: Is there
something in particular about coming
from a Native background that makes a
person want to write and perform com-
edy? Nesteroff mentions the Native
tradition of the sacred clown, called
heyoka by the Lakota, Nanabozho by
the Ojibwe, and Wesakaychak by the
Cree. The clowns, sometimes known
as “contraries,” did things backward
in everyday life and showed the comi-
cal side of their societies. As Adrianne
Chalepah, a Kiowa Apache comedian,
explains:
It can feel sometimes like our com-
munities are in a constant state of
mourning, like there aren’t enough
tears to cry about every single trag-
edy. Being able to laugh is import-
ant. Native humor is part of why
we survived. It’s allowing yourself
to feel a little bit of joy in a moment
that might otherwise break you.
Doing stand-up comedy takes nerve,
whatever one’s culture or background
(public speaking is one of the most
common fears), and stories of individ-
ual bravery and hero tales have always
been part of tribal cultures. Long be-
42
‘Part of Why We Survived’
Ian Frazier
Charlie Hill performing on The Tonight Show, June 1991
fore Sitting Bull became a featured
member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
show, he was famous for his many brave
deeds. In a skirmish with the army es-
cort of a party of railroad surveyors
in the Yellowstone valley, Sitting Bull
sat down within range of the soldiers’
rifles and smoked a pipe while bullets
flew. A few fellow warriors joined him
and passed the pipe. When it was done,
the others got up and ran. Sitting Bull
walked. Stand-up comedy seems like
a modern- day version of that—maybe
one reason Native people admire it.
I n We Had a Little Real Estate Prob-
lem, Nesteroff goes back to Native
performers from the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Some
of them ended up in Wild West shows
through an agreement between the
government and impresarios like Buf-
falo Bill; sometimes the choice was to
join the company or go to jail. The Of-
fice of Indian Affairs placed others in
medicine shows, where they provided
a backdrop for peddlers of fake Na-
tive cures and sometimes did ethnic-
comedy sales pitches. The first Native
satirist in print was a Muscogee Creek
named Alexander Posey, who used
the pseudonym Fus Fixico. He wrote
a column in Indian dialect for a tribal
newspaper in which he made fun of
the doings of the federal bureaucracy
(a subject Native people know more
about, usually, than do non-Natives,
because of the tribes’ unique, nation-
Gary Null/ NBCU Photo Bank/ NBCUniversal/Getty Images
northeastern corner of what’s now
Oklahoma, and prospered. In 1842 he
was murdered by Cherokee vigilantes.
His son, Clem, Will Rogers’s father,
inherited the ranch and the enslaved
people, whom he freed provisionally
during the Civil War, though he fought
for the South.
Will, born in 1879, could do miracles
with a lariat, like someone hitting three-
point shots on every try. As a rodeo
cowboy, he could catch all four feet of
a running horse with four ropes simul-
taneously and bring it to a stop. When
he moved from rodeo to vaudeville,
Rogers became a lariat-twirling star.
For a while his horse accompanied him
on stage. Then he began interspersing
his act with jokes and dispensed with
the sidekick. As a humorist and a wry,
smarter-than-he-looks cowboy type,
Rogers appeared on radio and in mov-
ies, and wrote a syndicated newspaper
column five days a week that drew 40
million readers. Today no commenta-
tor has the level of national reach that
Will Rogers had, but even in the best
periods of his career, he fell into deep
depressions. He never forgot the evil
that had been done to the Cherokee
or forgave President Andrew Jackson
for setting in motion the Trail of Tears;
Rogers sometimes expounded on those
subjects, to the discomfiture of white
observers.
I knew about Rogers’s wit (“I am not
a member of any organized political
party—I am a Democrat”; “Common
sense ain’t common”; “Never miss a
good chance to shut up”), and of course
I remember that he never met a man he
didn’t like; but I had not given much
thought to his family’s slave- owning
past, or how it might have influenced
to-nation relationship with the fed- him. Nesteroff’s description of Rogers’s
eral government). For example, Posey final two years was news to me. On his
mocked the forced anglicization of radio show in 1934, while introducing
Native names, saying that a “name like “The Last Round-Up,” a traditional
Sitting Bull or Tecumseh was too hard cowboy song, Rogers described its mel-
to remember and don’t sound civilized ody as “really a nigger spiritual.” He
like General Cussed Her.” Between repeated the word three times during
1902 and 1906 he wrote seventy-two the broadcast. The Pittsburg Courier,
humorous columns as Fixico for the a leading Black newspaper, called it
Eufaula Indian Journal, in what’s now an “unwarranted and vicious insult
Oklahoma. These caught the attention to 12,000,000 Negroes” that “also
of a promoter, who arranged for him to shocked countless thousands of white
join a national lecture tour. Before he radio listeners.” Blacks boycotted his
could, however, Posey/Fixico drowned sponsor (Gulf Oil) and his movies.
while crossing a flooded river near his Rogers responded with non-apologies
house, and so he did not get a chance to that made things worse. He didn’t see
be the first Native American stand-up why the word offended anybody. He
comedian. said millions of white southerners used
That honor goes indisputably to the word all the time and were the tru-
Will Rogers, a Cherokee whose image est friends the race had.
now adorns postage stamps, a huge Nesteroff suggests that a connec-
mural overlooking downtown San Ber- tion existed between this controversy
nardino, California, and the airport and Rogers’s subsequent escape into
in Oklahoma City, which is named for flying, his favorite pastime. In August
him; he has joined Mark Twain in the 1935, while on a pleasure jaunt with
sparsely populated pantheon of be- Wiley Post, the famous one- eyed avi-
loved old-time humorists. Nesteroff ator known for his carelessness, Rog-
fills in some details of the Rogers fam- ers died in a crash near the Alaskan
ily’s history. Before the Cherokee were Native village of Barrow. His abrupt
driven out of Georgia and North Caro- and sad end wiped out any memory of
lina along the Trail of Tears to Indian the still-recent outrage he had caused.
Territory, Rogers’s grandfather, Rob- Will Rogers’s death became the biggest
ert, was among the minority of tribal news story of the year, and as Nester-
members who took a buyout from the off says, “The complex and nuanced
government. This angered the majority Cherokee comedian was reduced to a
who resisted. Like some other Native simple, homespun cowboy, represent-
people in the South, Robert Rogers ing God and country. . . . A myth was
owned Black slaves. He established a created that has endured for nearly a
ranch in the Cherokee Nation, in the century.”
The New York Review
T he book jumps around chronolog-
ically, as the early chapters on Fixico
and Rogers alternate with ones about
Native comedians of the more recent
past and the present. It also hopscotches
North America geographically. One of
its pleasures is reading about the places
in which the present- day comedians
first heard the call. For Dakota Ray
Hebert, a Dené of the English River
First Nation, it happened in the town
of Meadow Lake in northwestern Sas-
katchewan, where she listened to tapes
of Bill Cosby on her Walkman. Adri-
anne Chalepah, the Kiowa Apache,
often watched Monty Python’s Flying
Circus with her family while moving
between small Oklahoma towns like
Anadarko and Cache. In the pulp and
paper mill town of Fort Frances, On-
tario, north of the Red Lake and Leech
Lake Reservations, Ojibwe comedian
Ryan McMahon remembers as a child
seeing the grown-ups laughing at Eddie
Murphy’s Delirious. The experience
“sent [him] on the trajectory” that led
to a life in comedy.
Drew Lacapa, son of a White Moun-
tain Apache father, herded cattle with
his five brothers near Whiteriver, Ari-
zona, and watched The Carol Burnett
Show and The Red Skelton Hour. Also
from Arizona, Sierra Teller Ornelas,
a self- described “sixth generation Na-
vajo tapestry weaver,” whose family
lived “rug to rug,” remembers watch-
ing videocassettes of Richard Pryor,
George Carlin, Steve Martin, Johnny
Carson, and Saturday Night Live while
her mother wove. Ornelas went on to
become a writer and producer of sit-
coms in Los Angeles. Unfortunately,
we’re not told what in particular about,
say, Murphy’s or Burnett’s comedy at-
tracted these devotees.
Charlie Hill, the most successful
Native American comedian of the
network-TV era, who performed on The
Tonight Show, Late Night with David
Letterman, and The Richard Pryor
Show, and in various specials, came
from the Oneida Reservation in north-
ern Wisconsin. On Saturday nights his
family would go to the Oneida Mis-
sion to take showers and then come
home and watch Jackie Gleason. In a
radio interview, Hill said, “That’s when
it kind of set in. . . . I loved watching
Jackie Gleason.” When his mother
watched Jack Paar, past his bedtime,
he would look on from behind a door
and wonder, “How do I learn how to do
that? How do I get in that box?”
Eventually, he did. The title We Had
a Little Real Estate Problem refers to
Hill’s signature joke, which he told in
his first appearance, in 1978, on The
Tonight Show (by then hosted by Car-
son): “My people are from Wisconsin.
We used to be from New York. We had
a little real estate problem.” It’s both a
joke and a fact. The Oneida were one of
the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy,
in what’s now upstate New York. They
fought on the side of the colonists in the
Revolutionary War, but many Oneida
were pushed off their land anyway.
They moved west and reestablished
themselves near Green Bay. There are
now Oneida reservations in both New
York and Wisconsin. The line about
real estate compresses centuries of
history and injustice into seven laconic
and eloquent words. Like “Take my
wife—please,” it goes for maximum
density. Hill compressed the sentiment
further in a “Henny Youngblood”
homage, “Take my land—please!”
January 13, 2022
All of Hill’s routines derived from his
being Indian, and his subjects ranged
Independent of the pandemic, we are beset by
from the origin of the name “Indian”
(“Sure glad [Columbus] wasn’t looking a range of unprecedented developments that
for Turkey”) to the Pilgrims (“Pilgrims together, in this century, threaten the very
came to this land four hundred years existence of civilization. The current states
ago as illegal aliens. We used to call of just ten forces — capitalism, technology,
them whitebacks”) to the Battle of the the internet, politics, media, education,
Little Bighorn (a complicated, rather human nature, the environment, population,
broad joke involving General Custer, and transportation — are driving society in
a cow with a halo over its head, and predominantly negative ways.
the punch line “Holy cow—look at all
those motherfucking Indians!”) These forces are powerful and interconnected
On his way up, Hill played some and their combined dynamics will carry us
tough gigs. He once did his act in San into any number of disasters well before 2100.
Francisco at the People’s Temple, run We have the knowledge and solutions to address
by the cult leader Jim Jones (“Jim our difficulties, but for many reasons we will
Jones thought I was funny”). Other not employ them.
venues—powwows, Native rec centers,
land-rights rallies where he opened for HEADED INTO There is urgency to this story. We face many
the singer Buffy Sainte-Marie—were threats, but one of them — the internet and
more far-flung. Native American co- THE ABYSS its hegemony and imperatives — is rapidly
medians sometimes perform a long way THE STORY OF OUR TIME, changing nearly everything about our world,
from anywhere, in places where even AND THE FUTURE including our very capacity to recognize how
microphones and chairs are not a given, WE’LL FACE profound and dangerous the changes are.
or where somebody’s back porch is the
stage and the microphone is a bullhorn. Brian T. Watson Headed Into the Abyss is comprehensive. It
Vincent Craig, a Navajo comedian, presents a satisfyingly round story of our
sometimes performed on the back of Brian T. Watson is an architect time. It crosses disciplines, connects dots, and
a flatbed truck in open fields. The La- and cultural critic. For eighteen analyzes how each force — in synergies with
dies of Native Comedy, a three-woman years, he was a columnist with the
Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts,
other forces — is shaping society. Individually,
troupe, have worked on bare ground in we tend to see and address things in parts,
focused primarily on current affairs
the middle of the desert while trying to and the forces that were and are but the forces shaping our lives exist now in
stay in the headlights of a car. Many in- shaping societies both here and abroad. ecologies that defy piecemeal solutions.
door venues—such as a motel in Elko,
Nevada, or a steakhouse near Mount btwatson20@gmail.com Uniquely, Watson brings human nature and
Rushmore, or the Fiesta Room in the (781) 367-2008
trauma into his assessment of the future. People
basement of the Phil-Town Truck Stop have limitations, and these are playing a large
Paper, $13.00
in Sturgis, South Dakota—sound not role even now.
e-Book, $9.99
much more promising.
Remoteness, a difficult fact in the Available on Amazon What it all adds up to — the big picture — is a
lives of many Native people, makes it sobering conclusion.
hard for the comedians among them
to get performing time. Nesteroff fol-
lows Jonny Roberts, an Ojibwe social
worker raising a big family on a res-
ervation in northern Minnesota, who
drives five hours to the Twin Cities to
do seven minutes of stand-up and then
drives five hours back, arriving in time
to help his wife get the kids to school in
the morning before he goes to his day
job. When at the end of the book he
quits the job so he can devote himself
to comedy full-time, you wonder how
that will work out. As one might guess,
beginner stand-ups usually make no
MLA 2022
During the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention
money.
in Washington, D.C., January 6–9,
copies of this issue of
N esteroff’s previous book, The Co-
medians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels
and the History of American Comedy,
provides a wild ride through that larger
subject. Not a single Native American will be available gratis at
comedian or humorist appears in it:
there’s no mention of Hill, and in the
part about vaudeville Rogers does not
turn up, either. Within comedy, there
The University of Chicago Press
are worlds that don’t overlap. Nesteroff,
who grew up in western Canada, had Booths 401P, 403P, and 405P
been used to seeing Native issues in the
news all the time, and Native stand-up
comedians on TV. When he moved to
Hollywood ten years ago, he was sur-
prised at how few Native performers he
saw in the entertainment business. He
knew that plenty of Native people were
doing stand-up, and he wrote We Had
a Little Real Estate Problem to remedy
the omission.
Mainstream comedy has always been
mostly white, and tilted Jewish, with a
CHICAGO
smaller but highly influential number The University of Chicago Press
of Black comedians (Red Foxx, Cosby,
Pryor). Within those categories there
have been non-mainstream subsets,
such as Black performers who worked
43
mostly at Black nightclubs (the chitlin’
circuit), borscht belt comedians who
never left the Catskills, and truck-stop
comedians who concentrated on the
white blue- collar audience. From the
grassroots level a few rose to wider
fame; Foxx began as a chitlin’ circuit
comedian. Native comedians have their
own non-mainstream world, which
made Hill’s successes on national TV
all the more remarkable and inspiring
to them.
A strain that runs between both
books is the diciness of comedy as
a way to make a living, or even as a
way to live. Some of the most success-
ful comedians go through unusually
drastic career swerves. One might
have thought, from watching Shecky
Greene’s talk show appearances years
ago, that he was a semi-funny hack-ish
comedian more admired
by the hosts, who seemed
to be friends of his, than
by the audience. In The
Comedians Greene ca-
reens through the story as
a comic genius–madman,
climbing the curtains in
Las Vegas nightclubs and
driving his Cadillac into
the fountain of the Caesars
Palace Hotel. Frank Sina-
tra has him beaten up (but
for something else). Then
there’s Rodney Danger-
field failing at comedy,
going broke, becoming
a scam aluminum-siding
salesman, getting arrested,
receiving the lucky break
of no jail time, returning
to comedy with the line “I
don’t get no respect,” and
making his fortune.
There’s also the slow-
motion train wreck of
Lenny Bruce as he de-
scends toward heroin ad-
diction and poverty while
performing some of the
most avant comedy ever,
admitting, for example,
not only that the Jews killed Christ,
but that “we did it—my family. I found
a note in the basement. It said, ‘We
killed Him. Signed, Morty.’” (The joke
as I remember it; it’s not mentioned
by Nesteroff.) There’s the Greek-
dialect comedian Parkyakarkus, also
known as Harry Einstein, delivering
a hilarious monologue at the Friars
Club, sitting down to a roar of ap-
plause, and dropping dead of a heart
attack. But there’s also the calming
presence of his sons, Bob Einstein
and Albert Brooks, whose own ca-
reers in comedy seem to have been less
fraught.
Nesteroff considers the special dif-
ficulties faced by comedians whose
subject is politics. When Oswald shot
Kennedy, he also as good as destroyed
Vaughn Meader, the Kennedy imper-
sonator whose first comedy album, The
First Family, went platinum in 1962.
Meader’s career ended with the assas-
sination the following year. He began
drinking, ran out of money, scrounged
in garbage cans. Mort Sahl, whose act
involved reading and commenting on
that day’s newspaper, lost popularity by
clinging to political riffs when the fash-
ion changed. Bob Hope suffered from
a similar problem, constantly teeing off
on hippies and the counterculture and
boring everybody but his own Palm
Springs demographic.
44
A figure of importance in both The
Comedians and We Had a Little Real
Estate Problem is Dick Gregory, the
Black comedian who not only found
most of his subject matter in politics
but who joined marches for civil rights
and was beaten and arrested and jailed.
Charlie Hill took inspiration from
Gregory, who was his hero. The two
both came up in the late- Sixties, early-
Seventies protest era, and Gregory
even participated in Native fundraisers
and land rights demonstrations. Pub-
lic awareness of Native issues in those
years would later shrink to a point
where some people remembered only
the American Indian Movement (AIM)
from the takeover of Alcatraz Island,
and maybe a larger number could also
recall Marlon Brando turning down
the Academy Award to protest Holly-
Members of the comedy troupe the 1491s, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2016. From left: Thomas Ryan RedCorn,
Dallas Goldtooth, Sterlin Harjo, Migizi Pensoneau, and Bobby Wilson.
wood’s mistreatment of Indians. Hill’s
career as a comedian began in that po-
litical atmosphere. In the first comedy
routine he did on network television,
he said that his dream was to win an
Academy Award and turn it down in
protest of the mistreatment of Marlon
Brando.
Yet Nesteroff doesn’t give some of
the political moments the deeper look
they deserve. He talks about the case
of Leonard Peltier, which is an opaque
business to this day, but he mentions
only in passing the killing of two FBI
agents in 1975 that led to Peltier’s ar-
rest, trial, and conviction. Jack Coler
and Ronald Williams had come to the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Da-
kota during an investigation of crimes
there, and they were brutally executed
at close range after first being am-
bushed and wounded. And it’s weird
to see the name of Anna Mae Aquash
listed without further identification
among the important women behind
the scenes at AIM. Aquash, a Mi’kmaq
tribal member from Nova Scotia, was
thought by AIM higher-ups to be an
FBI informant, and they may have or-
dered her murder, in 1975; two men
were given life sentences for the crime.
In a book about comedy, it might have
been hard to put that in, but some refer-
ence should be there, for her sake and
for the sake of reality.
H ill’s career did not last long enough. Dallas Goldtooth, also of the 1491s, por-
During the 1980s boom in stand-up that
strewed at least 260 comedy clubs across
the country and multiplied opportuni-
ties for comedians on TV, Hill worked
a lot. But in the early 1990s the boom
ended, TV appearances dried up, and he
was broke. He found occasional writing
jobs, such as for the sitcom Roseanne.
Meanwhile Native would-be comedi-
ans were watching his old cassettes and
memorizing his groundbreaking rou-
tines. Today, young Native people still
know and revere his name. A Canadian
Ojibwe, Craig Lauzon, said Hill was
“the first genuinely First Nations person
I ever saw on TV, and he wasn’t pretend-
ing to be anything else.” Working only
seldom and unable to afford his apart-
ment in Venice Beach, Hill went back
to the family home on the reservation in
Wisconsin with his Navajo wife, Lenora
Hatathlie. There he was diagnosed with
lymphoma, and he died in 2013 at the
age of sixty-two.
In the most recent decade, political
events again brought attention to Na-
tive comedy. The pipeline protest on the
Standing Rock Reservation in North
and South Dakota drew tribal delega-
tions from around the continent; as the
protests grew, attracted more coverage,
and (temporarily) succeeded, Native
comedians and performers found they
were getting more calls and opportu-
nities for work. The 1491s, a comedy
troupe of five Native writer-performers,
had existed before the protest, doing
shows at reservations and small-to-
medium venues. After Standing Rock,
they branched out abundantly. Troupe
member Thomas Ryan RedCorn took a
writing job on Rutherford Falls, a cable
sitcom with a large Native cast, whose
showrunner is Sierra Teller Ornelas, the
sixth-generation Navajo weaver.
Another of the 1491s, Sterlin Harjo,
a Seminole independent filmmaker, co-
created a series for FX called Reserva-
tion Dogs, based on life in his hometown
in Oklahoma. Everyone who writes for
the show is Native, plus most of the cast. sun before our tent, kicking his heels
This multi- episode documentary-style
comedy- drama is brilliant and hilari-
ous—the best modern American West-
ern I’ve seen. Among its many standouts,
trays the ghost of a Lakota warrior who
has returned from the spirit world to
cajole and counsel one of the characters
and offer fractured wisdom; he makes
me laugh to tears. The show’s details of
res life are sharp—the rearview mirror
duct-taped to the windshield, the lariat
lying coiled-up and forgotten on the
floor next to the mops by the restroom
in the town’s convenience store. I don’t
know if the lariat was intended to refer
to Will Rogers, but in that setting how
could it not? The show certainly has an
awareness of history; one of the minor
characters is named Fixico.
Y our standard B-movie cowboy had
only about four lines: “Yep,” “Nope,”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” and “I
wouldn’t do that if I was
Shane Brown
you, mister.” Just four
lines, and some dust and
six-shooters, and that’s
your whole story. But if
the standard cowboy had
little to say, the stock
Indian had less. In the
non-Native imagination,
Indians were supposed to
be stoic and silent. Where
this fantasy came from
is a mystery, because in
actual meetings between
whites and Native people
of the Americas, the Na-
tives often said plenty. In
an account of the Span-
ish conquest of Cuba,
Bartolomé de Las Casas
writes of a Franciscan friar
who tried to baptize a Na-
tive by promising him that
baptism would get him
into heaven in the next
life. The Native asked
if he would meet other
people like the friar in
heaven; the friar said yes.
The Native replied that in
that case he preferred not
to go.
When Joseph Brant, the Iroquois
leader who translated the Book of
Mark into Mohawk, met King George
III, he was told that he had to kneel and
kiss the king’s ring. Brant declined but
offered to kiss the hand of the queen in-
stead. Sometimes the indigenous peo-
ple observed even fewer proprieties.
During the Battle of Boston, in 1775,
the Americans’ Mohican allies were
described as standing on the shore and
mooning the British navy.
Impassive, with an austere dignity
of mien—such was supposed to be the
deportment of the Noble Savage. None
of that fit with the image of a person
mooning a warship or laughing his
head off. When the historian Francis
Parkman lived with a tribe of Oglala
Sioux in 1846, their humor flummoxed
him so that he shrank from describing
it. In his book The Oregon Trail, the
greatest warrior of the tribe wins Park-
man’s admiration, with passages refer-
ring to “his statue-like form, limbed
like an Apollo of bronze,” his “singu-
larly deep and strong” voice, and so on.
Then suddenly something strikes the
bronze Apollo as funny, and Parkman
says, “See him as he lies there in the
in the air and cracking jokes with his
brother. Does he look like a hero?”
Parkman can barely endure the sight.
After those two sentences, he’s back to
The New York Review
  AND

 A CURRENT LISTING
Helicline Fine Art Victoria Munroe Fine Art Alexandre
KHOOR#KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRPKHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP 67 East 80th Street #2, New York, NY 10075; (917) 900-6661 291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002
Midtown Manhattan, Private Dealer by appointment YLFWRULDPXQURHÀQHDUWFRPPDUJR#YLFWRULDPXQURHÀQHDUWFRP (212) 755-2828
Open Wednesday–Saturday, 11AM –5PM and by appointment www.alexandregallery.com
New Exhibition: American Art: The WPA Era And Beyond
Adrian Nivola: New Paintings and Pastels Vincent Smith (1929–2003): For My People
Helicline Fine Art offers twentieth-century American and European Through January 29, 2022 January 8–February 26, 2022
modernist paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. We specialize in
American scene, modernism, social realism, mural studies, industrial
landscapes, regionalism, WPA, abstraction, and more.

Dale Nichols (1905–1995), Winter, c. 1960s, oil on canvas, 30" x 40" Adrian Nivola, The Matriarch, 2021, oil on canvas, 10" x 9 1/2" For My People, 1965, oil on masonite, 49" x 46"

Alice Gauvin Gallery Bowery Gallery Marlborough Gallery

43 York Street, Portland, ME 04101 547 W 27th Street, Suite 508, New York, NY 10001 545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
(207) 805-1707; alicegauvingallery.com (646) 230-6655; www.bowerygallery.org (212) 541-4900; www.marlboroughnewyork.com
Wednesday–Saturday, 12PM –6PM Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM –6PM Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM –6PM

$OLFH*DXYLQ*DOOHU\LVSOHDVHGWRDQQRXQFHLWVÀUVWVKRZLQLWV Glen Cebulash: Places and Things Tomás Sánchez: Inner Landscape
new space in Portland, ME. For this inaugural exhibit, the gallery January 4–January 29, 2022 Through January 22, 2022
presents Stages, a group show featuring Simon Carr, Xico Greenwald,
Thaddeus Radell, Rachel Rickert, and Emily Zuch. The show will run
through January 29, 2022.

Simon Carr,
Vegetables with
Cutting Board, 2017, Birobidzhan II, 2020–21, oil on canvas, 66" x 78" Tomás Sánchez, Aislado (detail), 2015, acrylic on canvas
acrylic on canvas, 78 5/8" x 98 3/8", 199.7 x 249.9 cm © Tomás Sánchez
24" x 24"

Yossi Milo Gallery LewAllen Galleries

245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001; (212) 414-0370 Railyard Arts District
yossimilo.com; info@yossimilo.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM –6PM 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 988-3250
Current Exhibition: contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com
Pierre Knop: Paysage Wonderlust
Through February 5, 2022 
Bill Barrett: Choreography of Abstraction

Upcoming Exhibition: Asif Hoque: New Works AND Bronze sculpture and works on paper by Bill Barrett, prominent Ameri-




can sculptor.

A collection of notable art and

exhibitions from around the world.

If you would like to know more

about the listing, please contact
gallery@nybooks.com
or (212) 293-1630

Pierre Knop, The View, 2021, Oil and ink on canvas

© Pierre Knop, Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York Trav, 1982, bronze, 7" x 7.5" x 5"

January 13, 2022 45

describing the warrior majestically ar-
rayed and riding off to battle. He doesn’t
understand that he has just glimpsed a
whole continent laughing. And what
does “before our tent” suggest? Was it
possible that the Oglala hero and his
brother were laughing at . . . him?
The famous portrait photographs
of Native Americans taken by Ed-
ward Curtis in the early 1900s were
intended to preserve a record of this
people before they died out. Theodore
Roosevelt, who wrote the foreword to
an edition of Curtis’s book The North
American Indian, said that soon the In-
dian would disappear and join his van-
Yellow Notebook:
Diaries Volume I, 1978–1987
by Helen Garner.
Melbourne: Text, 253 pp., AUD$29.99
One Day I’ll Remember This:
Diaries Volume II, 1987–1995
by Helen Garner.
Melbourne: Text, 297 pp., AUD$29.99
Making new friends as an adult can be
difficult. During a time when almost
any social interaction not conducted via
webcam was a potential super-spreader
event, when most of us were forced to
use Zoom to do minimal upkeep on
all but our closest relationships, it be-
came nearly impossible. And yet, over
the past year or so, my wife and I ac-
quired a new mutual friend: a brilliant,
charming, irascible oversharer we call
Helen. We spent hours in the company
of Helen, laughing or nodding in admi-
ration at the things she does and says,
shaking our heads at the romantic and
social messes she gets herself into, get-
ting angry at the terrible behavior she
endures. (As well as some she is party
to—Helen is no saint.)
Our Helen is, and isn’t, the renowned
Australian author Helen Garner, who,
at seventy-nine, is something very close
to a literary institution in her coun-
try—a fact I’m fairly certain she both
cringes at and sees as her due. I can
only guess what the real Helen Garner
is like, but the one who appears in these
two published volumes of her diaries,
Yellow Notebook and One Day I’ll Re-
member This, is a person I’ve come to
know intimately.
Helen is loyal and committed as a
friend, though somewhat less so as a
romantic partner, rarely in a swoon,
and often logging evidence for why a
relationship is doomed when it has only
just begun: “Being in love makes me
selfish and mean, puts blinkers on me,”
she writes in an entry from 1987. Hav-
ing spent her young adulthood living in
neo-hippie communal households in
Melbourne, she is politically progres-
sive and empathetic: when a friend of
hers undergoes sex reassignment sur-
gery, she writes, matter- of-factly, that
“one is already to use the word she.
This is not difficult.”
She does occasionally exhibit impa-
tience with militant identity politics:
during a radio interview, the host be-
46
ished ancestors. The subtext suggested
that this development would be all for
the best, merely part of the march of
progress, and that nobody, not even
the already-silent Native people them-
selves, need feel too badly about it.
The racism of the whole notion paral-
leled the reduction of Black people to
racist caricatures in public imagery at
about the same time. The mute and
vanishing Indian helped excuse land
theft and treaty-breaking and neglect,
as the anti-Black images spuriously
justified Jim Crow. But human beings,
when not totally exterminated, tend to
survive—and survive as themselves,
Misbehaving Like Adults
Nathan Whitlock
Helen Garner; illustration by Fien Jorissen
comes “almost manic” in her conviction
that something Garner wrote has “set
feminism back twenty years.” Garner
decides to keep quiet and “and let the
girl pour out her spleen.” But she is just
as willing to admit her own failings as a
feminist writer: “I’ve been tagging along
on men’s coat-tails, watching for their
approval, and look where it’s got me.” She
considers herself “old-fashioned”—her
evidence: “I believe that children should
be strictly brought up”—and yet, when
she overhears some male academics gos-
siping about a famous woman who was
reported to have had “sixty-four lov-
ers,” she thinks, “You call that a lot?”
Helen is always ready to spill the
beans or to judge others witheringly,
but she is just as quick to admit when
triumphantly. In 1900 about 237,000
Native Americans remained in the
present- day United States. According
to the 2020 US census, 9.7 million peo-
ple now identify themselves as Native
Americans.
Humans are resilient, and the risky
exhilaration of making one another
laugh helps them to be. Again and
again in We Had a Little Real Estate
Problem, Native people describe how
comedy sustained them, and how seeing
comedians who looked like themselves
lifted them and changed their lives.
Nesteroff writes about a few comedians
who worked partly in Yiddish and some
she has no idea what she’s doing. She
says exactly what she’s thinking, no
matter how bad it makes her or anyone
else look. As a journalist friend tells
her in 1981, “What’s attractive about
you is a very charming . . . nastiness.”
Helen Garner is underrated outside
of Australia, though she enjoys pock-
ets of devoted fandom in the UK and
North America, and certainly the pub-
lication of her edited diaries is a liter-
ary event. These two volumes—a third
volume, How to End a Story, was re-
cently published in Australia and will
be available elsewhere in 2022—come
from Text Publishing in Melbourne,
which has been reprinting almost all of
who work partly in Navajo. Chances
are that members of such small catego-
ries will never reach the mainstream.
I like to think of the Navajo Vincent
Craig, whom most people never heard
of, performing stand-up for sold-out au-
diences of two thousand in the remote
Four Corners region of New Mexico. Or
the 1491s finding inspiration in Charlie
Hill and Mel Brooks, making kids on
reservations laugh; and if a wider au-
dience likes the group’s work, that’s
great, too. As Bobby Wilson, another
of the 1491s, says, “I’m not saying we’re
saving the world or anything like that,
but it’s just a solid contribution.” Q
Garner’s work, including her original
screenplays for the films Two Friends
(1986), directed by Jane Campion, and
The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992),
directed by Gillian Armstrong. (In the
latter publication, Garner restored ele-
ments that had been cut from the movie
because of budgetary constraints, stub-
bornly reclaiming the script of a film
that came out thirty years ago.) Text
also recently published gorgeous hard-
cover collections of Garner’s complete
short fiction and essays—Stories (2017)
and True Stories (2018), respectively.
Garner’s literary reputation is hydra-
headed, resting both on her nonfiction,
which tends to focus on true crime
and high-profile trials, and her fiction,
which is far more domestic in its set-
tings and scenes, and where the only
plot- driving crimes tend to be of the
interpersonal variety. This split in her
oeuvre means that some of her books
have devoted readers who might never
bother with others. (Perhaps inevitably,
her true crime books have sold more,
though like most such books, they’ve
had a shorter shelf life.) For those who
venture on both sides of the divide,
however, the differences are mostly su-
perficial. The same curious, funny, mis-
chievous narrative voice animates all of
her work. The seeming chasm is a line
drawn with chalk.
I first came to Garner through The
Spare Room (2008), her masterful,
brief, and highly autobiographical
novel about a middle-aged woman
named Helen helping an eccentric
friend through her last months of stage
4 cancer. As the narrator exhausts her-
self acting as nurse, chauffeur, health
advocate, and confidant, growing ever
more frustrated with her dying friend’s
unwillingness to face the truth about
her condition, the novel posits that this
exhaustion and frustration is a signifi-
cant part of how we love others:
Three times that night I tackled
the bed: stripped and changed,
stripped and changed. This was the
part I liked, straightforward tasks
of love and order that I could per-
form with ease. We didn’t bother
to put ourselves through hoops of
apology and pardon.
The writer who calls out “hoops of
apology and pardon” is self- evidently
The New York Review
the same one who in This House of
Grief (2014)—an award-winning ac-
count of the trial, retrial, and ultimate
conviction of a man accused of killing
his children—dismisses an attempt
by the defense to suggest that the de-
fendant could not have committed the
heinous act because he loved his kids:
“There it was again, the sentimental
fantasy of love as a condition of sim-
ple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit re-
gion in which we are safe from our
own destructive urges.” The people in
Garner’s books are defined by their
interactions with others; life is com-
munal, even for those who wish it were
not so. Her most desolate portraits are
of those who get left on their own. (In
This House of Grief, she repeatedly ex-
presses pity for the father, despite her
growing conviction that he did kill his
children, because he seems increas-
ingly lonely and lost in the courtroom.)
In her fiction—a handful of novels
and novellas, and few dozen short sto-
ries, all of them contemporary, most set
in or around Melbourne, where she has
spent most of her life—Garner writes
about middle- and lower-middle-
class women and men for whom the
definitions of love and relationship
and family are never stable, the rules
never set. Mothers, like the one in her
1980 novella Honour, find themselves
displaced owing to divorce and the
novelty of new living arrangements.
Women who never wanted children,
like the main character of her 1992
novel Cosmo Cosmolino, end up as
den mothers to the damaged drifters
who board in their homes. Friends and
family members can fall away almost
overnight; strangers can swoop in out
of nowhere and cause chaos.
There is ample darkness in Garner’s
books, even beyond the works of true
crime. People die, both literally and
spiritually. People are betrayed and
abandoned. Parents fail their children
at critical moments. Yet the experience
of reading her is much warmer and
more enjoyable than that description
would suggest. Even at its darkest, her
world is fundamentally human and em-
pathetic, a place where even infanticide
can exist on the spectrum of parental
behavior—albeit way out on the edge.
Love is never finished or whole, and
neither are her people. “We’ll have
to start behaving like adults,” says a
character in one of her stories, about
a woman having a long- distance affair
with a married man. “Any idea how it’s
done?” Her characters, real and imag-
ined, are capable of the most awful
acts, but are almost never judged for
them. More often, she depicts social
transgressions with a kind of cheerful
acceptance, as in her 1984 novel The
Children’s Bach:
Over the back fence, nearer the
creek, lived an old couple whom
Dexter and Athena had never
seen but whom they referred to as
Mister and Missus Fuckin’. They
drank, they smashed things, they
hawked and swore and vomited,
they cursed each other to hell and
back.
They’re terrible, Garner seems to be
saying in moments like these, but at
least they’re being honest about how
they feel. Honesty—at its most un-
sparing, risky, noble, and occasionally
foolish—is the core of Garner’s work.
She has spent her entire career freeing
January 13, 2022
herself from the hoops of apology and
pardon.
Garner was born Helen Ford in 1942
in Geelong, a small port city about fifty
miles southwest of Melbourne. She
changed her last name when she mar-
ried her first husband, Bill Garner, an
actor—with whom she had a daughter,
her only child—and hung onto it after
their divorce in 1971, and then again
through two subsequent marriages and
divorces. She has said that “Ford was
my child name, and then my really stu-
pid, self- destructive youth name. Gar-
ner is my grown-up name.” She had
a brief but infamous career as a high
school teacher, which came to an end
in 1972 after she published an essay de-
scribing a pair of impromptu sex educa-
tion lessons she provided to a group of
thirteen-year- old students.
The lesson culminated in a student’s
asking Garner if she’d ever performed
oral sex on a man. “Yes, I have,” she
writes of her reply. “There’s a second
of amazed silence. . . . To break it I say
calmly, Well, I guess it is a bit hard for
you to picture me with a cock in my
mouth.” Though Garner published the
essay anonymously, that did not prevent
the inevitable. (“Of course they sacked
me,” she writes in a 1996 postscript.)
In A Writing Life, a 2017 biographical
study of Garner’s work, Bernadette
Brennan adds a delectable detail to
this incident: “She met with the school
principal, was shown his draft report to
the Department of Education and, in
typical Garner manner, corrected his
spelling.”
The story of Garner’s firing estab-
lishes early the themes of her career:
a forthright and cheerful willingness
to explore seemingly untouchable
subjects, as well as a habit of walking
blindly into trouble, driven partly by
ruthless honesty, partly by naiveté, and
partly out of an unmistakable sense of
mischief. (The recent decision to pub-
lish volumes of her private diaries while
she—along with many of the people
she writes about in them—is still very
much alive and active is clearly born of
the same tendencies.)
Finding herself with unexpected free
time after losing the teaching job, Gar-
ner started going through the diaries
she’d been keeping, with an eye to pos-
sibly drawing a book out of them. She
describes this pivotal moment in a 1996
essay called “The Art of the Dumb
Question”:
At first you simply transcribe.
Then you cut out the boring bits
and try to make leaps and leave
gaps. Then you start to trim and
sharpen the dialogue. Soon you
find you are enjoying yourself. . . .
What is it, though? Have you got
the gall to call it a novel?
She did, as it turns out. As she puts it in
the same essay, “A year later, Monkey
Grip was in the shops.”
Monkey Grip, her first novel, pub-
lished in 1977, is a loosely structured
yet intense account of a young single
mom named Nora sliding through a
series of late- era hippie communal
homes in Melbourne, in love with an
intermittently charming heroin addict.
It was a best seller and brought Garner
near-instant literary fame and notori-
ety in Australia, where it is considered
a modern classic and is a touchstone
for many contemporary feminist writ-
ers. It is also the rare “counterculture
novel” that still feels immediate and
alive, thanks to Garner’s sharp, precise
prose—she has spoken of her desire to
keep the shape and speed of her prose
as close to speech as possible—and her
preternaturally wide empathy. We are
drawn into Nora’s doomed infatuation
as easily as we might that of an Austen
heroine or a member of Miss Jean Bro-
die’s set, never having to adjust for the
book’s era:
I went out all day and didn’t see
him till six-thirty in the evening,
when I found him in the theatre.
His pupils were large. He did not
seem pleased to see me, and was
offhand and cold. I went home
and did four loads of washing
at the laundromat. I washed his
shirts and jeans and socks. Why
do I do it? I do it for love, or kind-
ness. Women are nicer than men.
Kinder, more open, less suspicious,
more eager to love.
Some of Monkey Grip’s early re-
viewers trashed Garner for hewing too
closely to her own life, for assuming, as
one (male) critic put it, “that the reader
will share the author’s absolute fascina-
tion with herself.” Garner admitted in
a 2002 essay to going “round for years
after that in a lather of defensiveness,”
insisting that Monkey Grip is “a novel,
thank you very much,” but also that she
is “too old to bother with that crap any
more. I might as well come clean. I did
publish my diary. That’s exactly what I
did.”
I n the mid-1990s Garner consum-
mated a growing obsession with trials
and court proceedings by swerving
away from fiction and into true crime.
Her first book in the genre, The First
Stone (1995), a best seller, made her a
cultural and political target by seeming
to take the side of a middle-aged male
college official accused of being inap-
propriately handsy with two young fe-
male students at a party. (In an essay
on the book and its attendant contro-
versy, Garner accused her critics of
“being permanently primed for battle”
and “read[ing] like tanks,” which prob-
ably didn’t help.)
The feminist anger at Garner eventu-
ally cooled, but the critical perception
of her as a raging literary narcissist,
stuffing each book to the margins with
herself, has persisted. Even The Spare
Room and This House of Grief, minor
masterpieces in their respective genres,
were hit with the charge of containing
Too Much Helen.
I’ve never fully understood the ten-
dency of some readers and critics to
view the interplay between an author’s
work and the facts of her life as a mat-
ter of ethics or integrity, as if there were
something morally greasy about draw-
ing too heavily on autobiography in
the creation of art. Anytime a literary
writer is accused of narcissism, I have
the same response as when I hear a US
president called a war criminal: well,
duh. It must be a question of degree.
All of Garner’s work, in every genre,
is open, playful, and spacious; we don’t
get smothered by her authorial self in
the way the British publisher Carmen
Callil described the effect of reading
Philip Roth: “It’s as though he’s sitting
on your face and you can’t breathe.”
Also, does the truth really matter
once it’s been transformed into fiction?
Most writers’ biographies are only use-
ful for literary gossip and choice anec-
dotes. Even the best of them are rife
with confident assertions as to which
parts of an author’s life correspond
with which elements of their work.
(An Alice Munro biography from 2005
has the irritatingly presumptuous title
Writing Her Lives.) Even if you could
be 100 percent certain about a partic-
ular life-to-fiction connection, what
would you be left with? It’s like iden-
tifying a street corner where a scene
from a famous film was shot—there
may be a small thrill of recognition, but
it doesn’t tell you much about the film
itself. As Martin Amis once put it, the
ideal reader “regards a writer’s life as
just an interesting extra.”
Garner herself writes about the dis-
sociative process of inspiration in an
entry from One Day I’ll Remember
This: “It’s as if I’ve extracted or bor-
rowed from the real person the aspects
of them that I needed to struggle with,
and the character consists only of those
aspects. I can return to the real person
with no sense of overlap.”
The criticism that Garner puts too
much of herself in her work also misses
a large part of what makes her books so
good: their unnerving sense of imme-
diacy. In the essay “Woman in a Green
Mantle,” Garner mentions Philip Lar-
kin’s belief “that the urge to preserve is
the basis of all art,” adding that she has
“had it up to here with rhetoric about
art; but the urge to preserve—I under-
stand that. I’ve been a captive of it for
most of my adult life.”
What matters is what she chooses to
preserve, which is not, as in the work
of so many other autobiographical
writers, her early wounds and worries,
or the sights, sounds, and smells of her
childhood homes, but rather her life
as it is now. She keeps her experiences
alive by transforming them into living
art, not by placing them under glass.
“That’s why I write the way I write, so
that people can go there,” Garner has
said. “When you open a book, you’re
throwing yourself into the arms of a
writer. It should say, ‘I’m here! Come
in!’” In One Day I’ll Remember This
she records an exchange with her third
husband about Australia’s history:
“I’ve got no feeling for the past,” she
tells him, to which he replies, very per-
ceptively, “You’ve got a pretty strong
sense of the present, though, haven’t
you.”
A strong sense of the present is the
central paradox of Garner’s published
diaries. The occasional reminders of
the provenance of some of the entries—
when, for example, she expresses won-
der over a fax machine or notes the
protests in Tiananmen Square—feel al-
most like editorial insertions, as when
characters in a period movie overhear
a historically significant piece of news
on the radio. Early on in Yellow Note-
book, she writes that “a reviewer of a
collection of women’s diaries from the
late eighteenth century is surprised to
find that they’re about family affairs
and do not mention the French Revolu-
tion. I don’t find this at all surprising.”
Garner is concerned with capturing not
a moment in time but her own percep-
tion of that moment, her feelings as a
person living through it—or, more ac-
curately, stumbling through it. Which
47

THE COWSHED
MEMORIES OF
THE CHINESE CULTURAL
REVOLUTION
Ji Xianlin
Introduction by Zha Jianying
Translated from the Chinese
by Chenxin Jiang
Paperback • $18.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale January 11, 2022
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
MRS PALFREY
AT THE
CLAREMONT
Elizabeth Taylor
Introduction by Michael Hofmann
Paperback • $15.95
Also available as an e-book
Mrs Palfrey was the December 2021
selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club.
“It is, in some regards, a very sad
book, about loneliness and mortality.
But it also features two beautiful
portraits: one of a happy marriage
viewed in retrospect, and one of an
unexpected springtime friendship that
rescues two people—one very young,
one very old—from neglect.”
—Madeleine Davies, Church Times
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
48
NOW IN PAPERBACK
“A searing first-person account of becoming
the target of Red Guard fury. The most important
Cultural Revolution document published in China
in the 1990s, this harrowing, stylishly writ-
ten book’s English-language edition benefits
from Chenxin Jiang’s deft translation and Zha
Jianying’s superb introduction.”
—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Financial Times
“At the center of Ji’s account, ably translated by
Chenxin Jiang, is the ‘cowshed’ of the title . . .
[Ji’s] description of this institution, really a kind
of mini concentration camp, is unforgettable.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times Book
Review
“Offers a rare and harrowing description of life
as a prisoner of the Red Guards. . . [with] a com-
pelling introduction.”
—Jane Perlez, The New York Times Sinosphere
blog
“The Cowshed deserves to be near the top of
anyone’s list of literary memoirs of China under
Maoist rule.”
—Philip F. Williams, World Literature Today
“China doesn’t make it easy for its people to
openly discuss sensitive issues. Some were
surprised, then, when a professor at one of
the country’s most prestigious universities
published this memoir in 1998 of his abuse
during the decade-long, deadly social upheaval
known as the Cultural Revolution. This book is
a short, clear read, and now it’s in English.”
—Cara Anna, Associated Press
“A bestseller in China, this memoir calls atten-
tion to the tremendous injustices wrought in
that anarchic time. . . . [Ji’s] pages seethe with
grievance and reckoning. . . . [A] meaningful
document of a time too little chronicled and now
all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Elizabeth Taylor’s exquisitely drawn character
study of eccentricity in old age is a sharp
and witty portrait of genteel postwar English
life facing the changes taking shape in the
60s . . . Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for
me, her masterpiece.” —Robert McCrum,
‘The 100 Best Novels,’The Guardian
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the
recently widowed Mrs Palfrey moves to the
Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. “If it’s
not nice, I needn’t stay,” she promises herself,
as she settles into this haven for the genteel
and the decayed. “Three elderly widows and
one old man. . . who seemed to dislike female
company and seldom got any other kind” serve
for her fellow residents, and there is the staff,
too, and they are one and all lonely. What is
Mrs Palfrey to do with herself now that she has
all the time in the world? Go for a walk. Go to
a museum. Go to the end of the block. Well,
she does have her grandson who works at the
British Museum, and he is sure to visit any day.
Mrs Palfrey prides herself on having always known
“the right thing to do,” but in this new situation she
discovers that resource is much reduced. Before
she knows it, in fact, she tries something else.
Elizabeth Taylor’s final and most popular novel
is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.
ALSO BY ELIZABETH TAYLOR
ANGEL • A GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK
A VIEW OF THE HARBOUR
YOU’LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE
means that, as with her fiction, there
is no datedness here: even the entries
written forty years ago feel as though
they could have been written last week.
In a sense, Garner’s diaries are the
culmination of her lifelong blurring of
the lines between fiction and nonfiction.
“I need to devise a form that is flexible
and open enough to contain all my de-
tails, all my small things,” she writes
in an entry from 1989. “If only I could
blow out realism while at the same time
sinking deeply into what is most real.”
It’s hard not to feel that Garner is giv-
ing us a knowing look here, since the
volumes we are reading appear to be
the solution to the very problem she is
describing. As Joan Didion once wrote,
“Our notebooks give us away, for how-
ever dutifully we record what we see
around us, the common denominator
of all we see is always, transparently,
shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’”
These diaries begin shortly after the
publication of Monkey Grip, in part
because Garner burned all of her ear-
lier notebooks decades ago: she has de-
scribed herself as being “so bored with
my younger self and her droning sen-
timental concerns that there was noth-
ing for it—this shit had to go.” (The act
of burning the earlier notebooks is, of
course, dutifully noted in the later di-
aries, in an entry from 1994.) Garner
edited her diaries, selecting the entries,
and though she doesn’t say how much
she cut, she claims to have made only
the most minor changes to what she left
in. “I could trim, I could fillet, yes, but
I was not to rewrite,” she has said about
the process.
To select, fillet, or trim is, of course, to
get a large part of the way toward creat-
ing, so it’s no surprise that the Helen of
the diaries is a semi-fictional construct,
a character in every sense of the word,
one who exists at the nexus of art and
autobiography. Helen is a sharp critic:
reviewing a collection of short fiction,
she notes that “the only woman in it is
the naked one on the cover.” She is un-
snobbishly catholic in her tastes, noting
her “rave review of Wayne’s World”
but also that she was “swept away” at
a production of Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde. Reading interviews from The
Paris Review, she gets annoyed by au-
thorial egotism—“Nabokov: too clever
and nasty. Kerouac: vain and noisy, a
show- off. Eudora Welty: a nice, dear
old lady full of respect and modesty”—
and disparages the idea of taking her
accomplishments too seriously.
But she is honest about her petty de-
sires, as when her second novel is short-
listed for a major award: “I don’t know
who I’m up against but I want that
prize.” Repeatedly, despite her success
as a writer, she questions her status:
I’m worried about art, what it’s
for, whether what I do is any use to
anyone, whether I’ve been kidding
myself all these years that I’m any
good at it, that I’ve got anything
at all to offer the human race,
whether I should just chuck it in
and look for a job.
Subcription Customer Service Center
Go to: nybooks.com/customerservice
Renew subscription • Check account status • Change address • Make a payment •
Renew a gift • Change auto-renew status • Report missing/damaged issue • Cancel with refund
Obviously, making an imaginary
friend out of the version of herself an
author presents in her own diaries is
probably not the appropriate response
for any critic who has been trained to
respect the treacherous gulf that lies
between text and creator—who has, in
other words, read some Barthes. But it
demonstrates how seductively Garner
creates her diaristic world, allowing
readers to enter her life—that “inter-
esting extra”—in ways that make it
difficult to maintain a proper critical
distance. Reading the published di-
aries of, say, Virginia Woolf, we are
constantly aware that we are in the
presence of genius, of someone whose
literary sensibilities and powers of per-
ception are far beyond ours. Woolf’s
diaries are full of self- doubt, pettiness,
and worry, but those passages feel like
the momentary lapses of a god or a
parent, or at least an indisputably
brilliant older sibling. We must work
to be worthy receivers of her private
musings.
Reading Garner’s diaries, we en-
counter someone much more human,
quick-tempered, and messy. Over the
course of the books, we get drawn into
her struggles—with men, with work,
with age, with burgeoning religious
urges, with her critical reputation—and
before we know it, we start responding,
assuring her that whatever book she’s
working on will be great, and not just
because we, to borrow an idea from the
comedian Mike Birbiglia, are in the
future. We commiserate with her over
professional slights (like when she is
mistaken “by three separate male writ-
ers for a staff helper” while attending
a literary festival in Toronto) and bite
our tongues when she fills us in on her
latest love affair—or affairs: Yellow
Notebook ends with Helen in the midst
of relationships with not one but two
married men. In One Day I’ll Remem-
ber This, we watch, helpless, as she
marries one of those men, who, as “V,”
gradually becomes the closest thing the
book has to a villain. (Most of the peo-
ple who appear in the diaries are given
an initial as a pseudonym, but it’s fairly
easy—with the help of Bernadette
Brennan’s book and Wikipedia—to
work out who the central people are.)
Garner’s diaries will not be much
use to future cultural historians; they
exist for readers right now, at a moment
when their author is alive and willing
to own up to what seems, on the sur-
face, to be an impressive act of self-
indulgence, but somehow feels like a
generous gift. As with the best literary
diaries, there is much here that is witty
and wise and quotable, but the heart of
these volumes are the moments when
our new friend acts out in sudden, emo-
tional, and downright silly ways. In an
entry from 1990, Garner notes that she
is reading an essay in which Woolf is
quoted as haughtily dismissing Rob-
ert Louis Stevenson’s use of adjec-
tives, of all things: “Ooh I was furious!
She’s a goddess, but at that moment I
wanted to kick her flabby Bloomsbury
arse.” Q
The New York Review

In his opening address to the UN Cli-
mate Change Conference in Glasgow
at the beginning of November, Boris
Johnson evoked the end of a James
Bond movie in which the hero is
“strapped to a doomsday device, des-
perately trying to work out which col-
ored wire to pull to turn it off, while a
red digital clock ticks down remorse-
lessly to a detonation.” His audience of
politicians and diplomats from around
the world responded to the analogy
with the same excruciating silence that
met all his bad jokes. But Johnson’s do-
mestic allies in the Conservative Party
surely appreciated its ironic humor. It
was they who strapped their country
to the doomsday device that is Boris
Johnson. Like anyone who has even
the most cursory knowledge of his ca-
reer, they have been waiting for the big
red clock to tick down to his inevitable
detonation.
One way to get a flavor of Johnson’s
current situation is to consider two
meanings of the word “knowing.” It
suggests, at its simplest level, compre-
hension, understanding, recognition.
But in another guise it hints at a kind of
private collusion, a shared agreement
to pretend not to be aware of what is
really going on. In Johnson’s case, both
of these meanings have long worked
together. Everyone recognized that
he was never remotely fit to be prime
minister. But a very wide group of peo-
ple—those most strongly in favor of
Brexit—enjoyed that feeling of com-
plicity, of being in on the Boris joke.
In the last two months, however,
these two meanings have gradually
drifted away from each other. The
subtle game of knowingness doesn’t
work anymore. There is only the flat
knowledge that England chose to be
governed by a man who lies about ev-
erything, who has no principles and no
care for other people, and who cannot
govern himself, let alone a large and
complex country.
I remember watching a film on Brit-
ain’s Channel 4 of a focus group made
up of former supporters of the Labour
Party in so- called Red Wall constit-
uencies, in the Midlands, shortly be-
fore the general election of December
2019. Those taking part were asked
what they thought of Johnson. They
said things like “If he can lie to the
queen, he can lie to anybody,” and
called him “a buffoon to some extent,
but . . . a lovable buffoon.” And they all
said they were going to vote for him.
The election results would suggest that
they did—Johnson’s victory was won
largely in these working- class areas. It
would be misleading, and falsely com-
forting, to say the voters were fooled by
him, that they thought he was a man of
steely integrity and cool competence.
The knowingness was not just an elite
indulgence. It went deep.
When and why did it vanish? How
does a lovable buffoon become merely
a buffoon? Johnson’s discombobula-
tion in recent weeks is not unreason-
able—the change has come quickly
and, from his point of view, without
warning. There is a song, “Station
Approach” by the British rock band
Elbow, about wanting to “be in the
town where they know what I’m like
and don’t mind.” Johnson has always
January 13, 2022
‘Arum Arum Araaaaaagh’
Fintan O’Toole
Boris Johnson; illustration by Tom Bachtell
lived in that town, always had news- strange reason, however, he decided to
paper editors and magazine owners be faithful to Owen Paterson, a Tory
who know he lies to their readers but member of Parliament, former cabinet
pay him a lavish salary anyway, lovers minister, and fervent Brexiteer. While
who know he is serially unfaithful but continuing to work as an MP, Paterson
choose to believe his protestations of was receiving large payments from two
devotion, political allies who know that private companies. This, remarkably
he is wildly incompetent but don’t mind enough, was within the rules. But the
so long as he can win elections. Why parliamentary commissioner for stan-
should all this change now? dards, Kathryn Stone, found that he
had directly lobbied ministers on be-
half of these companies, which is not.
Consider the things that did not seem The commissioner recommended that
to damage Johnson very much, if at all. Paterson be suspended from Parlia-
In mid- October two House of Com- ment for thirty days.
mons all-party committees issued a Johnson, however, decided to come
joint report describing Johnson’s slow to Paterson’s rescue by instructing all
and muddled response to the begin- Tory MPs to vote to overturn this find-
nings of the pandemic in March 2020 ing and to weaken the whole system of
as “one of the most important public ethical oversight by allowing MPs to
health failures the United Kingdom appeal adverse rulings. This provoked
has ever experienced.” That did him a large-scale backlash from many of
no harm. Nor did the revelations that those MPs, forcing Johnson into igno-
hugely expensive contracts for the minious retreat. Many of them were
procurement of medical devices and baffled that Johnson had squandered
personal protective equipment for the so much political capital merely to pro-
National Health Service were awarded tect an ally from the consequences of
to Tory cronies who had no experience his own breach of the most basic ethical
in supplying them. Nor the direct evi- standards. But the strong probability is
dence of his former lover Jennifer Ar- that Johnson was also thinking of him-
curi that Johnson, when he was mayor self. There is an expectation that Stone
of London, offered to advance her busi- will investigate the strange saga of the
ness interests. Nor his flagrant abuse of lavish refurbishment, by Johnson and
patronage in appointing more cronies, his wife Carrie, of their private flat in
including his own brother and the son Downing Street. Overturning Stone’s
of a Russian oligarch, to the House of ruling on Paterson would, conveniently,
Lords. He shrugged these things off, as have rendered her patently powerless
he has always done, with the tacit, and or even forced her to resign.
perfectly reasonable, question: Well, The reason Johnson wanted to do
what did you expect? this became obvious in mid-December
It’s actually quite funny that it all when the Electoral Commission pub-
started to unravel for Johnson when he lished a report on the failure of the
tried his hand at something that is pa- Conservative Party to declare a dona-
tently out of character for him: loyalty. tion from the Tory peer Lord Brown-
Johnson betrays people, causes, and low toward the cost of the designer
allies whenever it suits him. For some upgrade. The report made it pretty
clear that Johnson had lied about this
too. Back in May, Johnson’s indepen-
dent adviser on standards, Lord Geidt,
cleared him of a conflict of interest
over the donation from Brownlow, on
the grounds that he appeared not to be
aware of the arrangement. But the new
report cites a WhatsApp message from
Johnson to Brownlow in November
2020 asking directly for extra money
for the redecoration.
Another lie—so what? Yet there’s
something in this whole business that
is particularly dangerous for Johnson.
It touches the raw nerve of English
society: social class. Johnson’s great
strength, and the reason he was so
crucial to Brexit, is that he managed
somehow to transcend class. As a jour-
nalist in the 1990s, he drew snobbish
caricatures of British working- class
men as (to quote one of his Spectator
columns) “likely to be drunk, crimi-
nal, aimless, feckless and hopeless.”
But as a politician, he has had an ex-
traordinary ability to project himself
as both a toff (and thus to engage the
old instincts of class deference) and an
honorary member of the proletariat, a
bit of a lad whose carefully arranged
dishevelment could be interpreted as
“not putting on airs and graces.”
The problem with spending £200,000
on rattan chairs and Lulu Lytle sofa
covers for the Downing Street flat is
that it pulls this fusion apart from both
ends. The expenditure exceeds the av-
erage price of an entire house in a Red
Wall area like Stoke- on-Trent, which
reminds working- class voters that John-
son really is not one of them. But that
might be okay if he did not have to beg
donors for the money; that makes him
not a toff, either. (True toffs don’t buy
furniture—they inherit it.) It makes
Johnson seem what he actually is—a
middle- class opportunist on the make,
very much putting on airs and graces.
It negates the impulse toward deference
among his voters while simultaneously
scraping off the carapace of authentic-
ity that Johnson built around himself by
seeming not to care about appearances.
There’s another trick of language at
work here. Playing fast and loose with
money can be regarded as an aristo-
cratic virtue, an expression of devil-
may- care insouciance. But an invisible
line divides devil-may- care and its dark
and politically dangerous twin, sleaze.
That word has a peculiar potency in
British politics. It is a six-letter corro-
sive that strips the sheen of glamour
from bad-boy antics. In recent years
it seemed to have lost its currency,
perhaps because it had sexual conno-
tations that have been complicated by
shifting attitudes. A search of Hansard,
the record of parliamentary debates at
Westminster, shows that it was used
just five times in 2016, not at all in 2017,
once each year in 2018 and 2019, and
five times in 2020. But it has been ut-
tered 131 times in 2021.
Those who deploy the word are, of
course, Johnson’s political enemies,
mostly in the Labour Party and the
Scottish National Party, but it is telling
that opponents feel suddenly embold-
ened to use it so often. Sleaze is a great
reducer. It deflates sprezzatura into
49

Now in English for the first time
The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed
portrait of Vienna in the early twentieth
century, a vast novel crowded with char-
acters ranging from an elegant, alcoholic
Prussian aristocrat to an innocent in-
genue to “respectable” shopkeepers
and tireless sexual adventurers, bohe-
mians, grifters, and honest working-
class folk. The greatest character in the
book, however, is Vienna, which Heimito
von Doderer renders as distinctly as
James Joyce does Dublin or Alfred Döblin
does Berlin.
Interweaving two time periods, 1908
to 1911 and 1923 to 1925, the novel
takes the monumental eponymous out-
door double staircase as a governing
metaphor for its characters’ intersecting
and diverging fates. The Strudlhof Steps
is an experimental tour de force with
the suspense and surprise of a soap
opera. Here Doderer illuminates the
darkness of passing years with the daz-
zling extravagance that is uniquely his.
“[The Strudlhof Steps is an] evocative
novel of manners set in the 1920s
Vienna of the shattered Habsburg
Empire, originally published in 1951
and now translated into English for
the first time. . . . von Doderer ably
captures a lost world in a book that
belongs alongside the works of
Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus. . . .
A swirl of complicated characters and
plot turns makes this a rewarding if
sometimes demanding read."
—Kirkus
THE STRUDLHOF
STEPS
THE DEPTH OF THE YEARS
Heimito von Doderer
Afterword by Daniel Kehlmann
A new translation from the
German by Vincent Kling
Paperback • 864 pages • $24.95
Also available as an e-book
A VIRTUAL EVENT
FOR THE STRUDLHOF STEPS
Thursday, January 20th, 7:30pm
With Daniel Kehlmann,
Vincent Kling, and Tess Lewis
Hosted by Community Bookstore
Register at communitybookstore.net
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
50
squalor and sordidness. And it retains
something of its etymological origins:
thin or flimsy in texture; having little
substance. Neither of these meanings
is good for Johnson, who is peculiarly
vulnerable to both.
This is why it was especially idiotic
for Johnson to identify himself so
closely with Paterson’s moonlighting
and greed. Anyone with any sense of
British political history knows that
the word “sleaze” acted like a curse
on John Major’s Tory government of
the 1990s, a malediction that, once ut-
tered, cast a spell of doom that could
never be broken. This was in spite of
the fact that Major’s personal integrity
was never questioned. Even more per-
tinent, though, is the scandal of 2009,
when the details of expenses paid to
MPs from the public purse (most mem-
orably Sir Peter Viggers’s claim for the
cost of installing a house for the ducks
in his garden pond) were leaked, deep-
ening an existing sense of disgust with
the political system.
That sense of alienation from “the
elites” in Westminster fed into the
great rebellion of 2016: Brexit. If any-
one should understand this, it is the
embodiment and beneficiary of that
project, Johnson himself. It is a mark
of his strategic, as opposed to merely
managerial, incompetence that he in-
vited the casting upon himself of the
hex of sleaze. Under the influence of
that dis- enchantment, telling lies about
how you begged for money to fund your
dream interior does not look roguish. It
looks slimy.
All of this still had, however, some
degree of abstraction. It was Westmin-
ster business: donors, lobbyists, funny
money. What made Johnson’s person-
ality disorder explosive was the way
it became, for most voters, personal,
through two things that almost ev-
eryone in Britain cares deeply about:
Covid-19 and Christmas. For most peo-
ple in 2020, the most important family
holiday of the year was a time of sad-
ness, because many of their familiar
gatherings and visits had to be canceled
in the interest of public health. Johnson
himself summed it up on December 19,
2020, when he warned people against
the usual seasonal socializing: “We’re
sacrificing the chance to see loved ones
so we have a better chance of protect-
ing their lives.”
The government-issued rules were
clear: “You must not socialize with
anyone you do not live with or who is
not in your support bubble in any in-
door setting.” There was an exception
for work that was “reasonably neces-
sary.” That did not mean office parties.
Yet there were parties, lots of parties:
in the fabulously refurbished Downing
Street flat on November 13 (apparently
to celebrate the departure of Johnson’s
chief adviser Dominic Cummings), a
small gathering with drinks in Down-
ing Street at which Johnson made a
short speech on November 27, a Christ-
mas quiz for staff at which Johnson ap-
peared virtually on December 15, and
a larger and more raucous party down-
stairs in Downing Street on December
18 that Johnson did not attend but of
which he must have been aware. In the
unfolding of this story, two of John-
son’s most potent weapons—the power
of the joke and his ability to hover be-
tween the real and the unreal—have
turned against him.
There is, firstly, something almost too
neat in the fact that what has accelerated
Johnson’s appointment with doomsday
is a laugh. It is, to be more precise, a
leaked video of Allegra Stratton, the
journalist brought into Johnson’s inner
circle in October 2020 to impose some
order on its chaotic communications. In
the video, shot on December 22, 2020,
she is rehearsing for Downing Street’s
planned daily televised briefings (a plan
soon abandoned). Other staffers are
playing the roles of journalists. John-
son’s adviser Ed Oldfield asks her, “I’ve
just seen reports on Twitter that there
was a Downing Street Christmas party
on Friday night. Do you recognize
those reports?” And she laughs, the
first of three warm, charming chuckles.
The third comes when she says, “This
fictional party was a business meet-
ing, and it was not socially distanced.”
These are not evil cackles or villainous
guffaws. They are friendly laughs of
knowingness, the signals that we here
are all in on the joke. The problem is
that considering the real sorrows that
ordinary people were enduring, this
idea too has crossed the invisible line
between being in on the joke and being
the butt of the joke, between having a
laugh and feeling that you are being
laughed at.
Johnson has always walked that line
like a political Philippe Petit. His high
wire has been strung between the poles
of outrageous insult (almost always of
people weaker and more vulnerable
than him) and “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it
was only a joke.” The idea of humor has
been utterly essential to his success—it
is the solvent in which a lie is merely
an exaggeration, and a racist slur is
merely a merry jape. Emmanuel Ma-
cron has reportedly described Johnson
as “a clown,” and he was by no means
the first to use the term. But successful
clowns are very smart people, acutely
aware that if they do not stay within the
fuzzy boundaries of what the audience
is finding funny, they become embar-
rassing and even frightening.
This fate was already creeping up
on Johnson before the Stratton video
emerged in December. The style that
worked in front of already drunk corpo-
rate audiences when he was practicing
his lucrative sideline as an after- dinner
speaker does not impress when his lis-
teners are sober and serious. The melt-
down in November when he lost his
place in a speech to the Confederation
of British Industry, rambled into a long
diversion about Peppa Pig World, a
theme park based on the children’s car-
toon character, and imitated the sound
of an accelerating car with grunts
that the official Downing Street press
release transcribed as “arum arum
araaaaaagh,” dramatized the moment
at which the clown became both mor-
tifyingly infantile and, for those who
have to live in the pandemic-stricken
country he governs, quite scary. When
that happens, the collusive atmosphere
that Johnson has been so good at cre-
ating—what does it matter so long as
we’re all having fun?—rapidly evap-
orates. Johnson keeps playacting but
his public (both within and outside of
Westminster) stops playing along.
T he other skill that Johnson wielded
so deftly and effectively was the con-
juring of what we might call nonreal-
ity. His career was built on his talent,
as Brussels correspondent of The Daily
Telegraph, for inventing stories about
the madness of the European Union.
These were not mere lies—Johnson
had the ability to keep them suspended
somewhere between existence and non-
existence, real enough to help shape
his country’s fate yet always held up in
the air by invisible quotation marks of
knowing irony.
This way of shaping stories has now
come back to haunt him. His tale about
the Christmas bash is a classic Johnson
narrative: the party, he claims, was not
a party because all the Covid-related
rules were obeyed, and since the rules
said there could be no party, it wasn’t
a party. This fits perfectly into John-
son’s familiar mode in which the rela-
tionship between the signifier and the
signified is always fluid, always up for
grabs. But his past success at pulling
off this trick has entirely misled him
this time. The right answer for his own
survival was the simple one: there was
a party, I wasn’t at it but I should have
stopped it, and I’m very sorry. Instead
he could only make things worse by of-
fering people who were hurt and angry
a stale rehash from his old repertoire of
absurdities.
Shaping these responses to specific
scandals is the slow waning of the glow
from Brexit. Johnson’s little lies were
folded into a bigger lie: that Britain
could leave the EU without any real
consequences. So long as he could
hold that great deception aloft, John-
son’s petty deceptions were, for those
who support Brexit, of minor account.
Getting Brexit done—the slogan that
won him the 2019 election—was a
great test of honesty. As Brexit sup-
porters saw it, they had made a con-
tract in that referendum, and Johnson
was the only man who would honor it.
This made him, oddly, an honest man,
even one they knew with certainty
would “lie to anyone.” The problem,
though, is that the contract was bogus.
The pain-free Brexit it promised could
not be delivered. The clearer this be-
comes, the more naked Johnson must
appear.
Johnson’s behavior has made a mock-
ery of his ability to tell the English pub-
lic how they should behave in the face
of the Omicron variant of Covid-19.
His dithering and posturing cost many
lives in 2020, and his undercutting of
official advice and rules will undoubt-
edly do the same in 2022. His loss of
authority on the management of the
pandemic was evident on December 14,
when almost a hundred of his own Tory
MPs voted against his proposals for
Covid passports for entry into night-
clubs and other venues. (The proposal
passed only with votes from the Labour
opposition.) As Covid fatigue deepens,
the evidence that their leader does not
himself believe anything he says will
make it ever more difficult for people in
England to separate the vital messages
from the wildly implausible messenger.
Johnson’s last hope lies in the par-
adox that he is a liar but no deceiver.
Those who have the ability to bring
him down—the powers that be in the
Conservative Party—are those who
raised him up, in full consciousness
of what that meant for their country.
It was they who set the big red digital
clock ticking down toward the chaotic
finale. Only their reluctance to ac-
knowledge this responsibility is delay-
ing the approach of zero hour for Boris
Johnson. Q
—December 16, 2021
The New York Review
 Please order books by using the contact information listed under each press’s name, or visit your local bookstore or online retailer.
SHARE INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION
www.share-international.org/books; (510) 883-1848
THE WORLD
TEACHER FOR ALL
HUMANITY
by Benjamin Creme
Creme describes an extraordinary
planetary event now unfolding:
the public emergence of Maitreya,
the World Teacher, into the every-
day world. Here to help us solve
our most critical global problems,
Maitreya is shown to be a great
Spiritual Avatar as well as a friend
and brother to humanity. His wise
counsel, if heeded, will inspire a
brilliant new civilization.
978-90-71484-39-1 • Paper, $6.00 • 141 Pages • Spiritual
Available on share-ecart.com and Amazon.
ED MAROHN
LEGACY OF EVIL
A John Moore Mystery
by Ed Marohn
The Neo-Nazis, the Baader-Meinhof
Gang, a Cold War nuclear device,
and the Arctic by dog sled—John
Moore is again up to his neck in al-
ligators.
9781098391294 • Paper, $16.25
• 340 Pages • Action/Adventure/
Fiction
Available at Amazon, Independent
Bookstores, and Barnes & Noble.
Author’s website:
www.writingsfromed.com
CROSS SEAS PRESS
crossseaspress.com
GROUNDED EAGLES
Three Tales of the RAF in WWII
by Helena P. Schrader
Disfiguring injuries, class prejudice
and PTSD in the context of WWII
are the focus of three heart-wrenching
tales by award-winning Helena P.
Schrader.
9780989159791 • Paper, $19.95 •
356 Pages • Historical Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Ingram Spark.
Author’s website:
www.helenapschrader.com
AESOP PUBLICATIONS
www.aesopbooks.com; +44 7933331977
EXPLORING THE
CLOUDS
by John Fraser
Fraser, “the most original novelist
of our time,” explores the nature of
happiness, betrayal, vengeance, and
the motivation for exploration, in
this profound, startling novel.
978-1-910301-89-0 • Paper, $16.99
• 202 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon UK, Amazon,
The Book Depository, and Barnes
& Noble.
Author’s website:
johnfraserfiction.com
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
January 13, 2022
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS
rowman.com; (800) 462-6420 ext. 3024
DEMOCRACY’S
MEDICI
The Federal Reserve
and the Art of Collecting
by Mary Anne Goley
A non-economist’s take on the Fed-
eral Reserve Board by an art his-
torian who served as the founding
director of its Fine Arts Program
under five chairmen.
978-1-5381-4537-1 • Hardcover,
$75.00 • 262 Pages • Nonfiction
Available at Rowman & Littlefield,
Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and your
local bookstore.
SCOTT DOUGLAS PRILL
INTO THE
REALM OF TIME
A Novel of the Fourth Century
Roman Empire—Second Edition
by Scott Douglas Prill
372 AD—A fearsome Roman gen-
eral seeks a new life away from the
army and warfare and encounters a
disparate group of soldiers, clergy,
Britons, and Huns. He discovers a
peaceful life is not to be.
“A satisfying historical novel with
richly drawn characters and vivid
settings.” —Kirkus Reviews
978-0-9908604-2-6 •Paper, $14.99 • 661 Pages • Historical Fiction
Available on Amazon and Kindle.
Author’s website: www.scottprill.com
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
global.oup.com; 1(800) 445-9714
TOTALLY TRUFFAUT
23 Films for Understanding the
Man and the Filmmaker
by Anne Gillain
Totally Truffaut raises, film after
film, two major questions: How
does autobiography become art?
What should a “good film” deliver?
François Truffaut knew the answers.
978-0197536308 • Paper, $35.00 •
336 Pages • Cinema
Available on Amazon and Barnes
& Noble.
BQB PUBLISHING
bqbpublishing.com
UNDER A
POACHER’S MOON
A Novel
by W. Aaron Vandiver
“An American woman looks for ad-
venture on safari and instead finds
a passion for a cause. . . . An exciting
and thought-provoking work that
will stay with readers.” —Kirkus
Reviews
Paper, $16.95, 978-1952782480 •
e-Book, $8.49 • 205 Pages • Fic-
tion/Thriller/Action & Adventure/
Women’s Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, and Apple Books.
Author’s website: aaronvandiver.com
SERVING HOUSE BOOKS
servinghousebooks.com; editors@servinghousebooks.com
LOVING MODIGLIANI
The Afterlife of Jeanne Hébuterne
by Linda Lappin
A love story, a ghost story, and a
search for a missing masterpiece.
“Brilliantly researched, imagina-
tive cross-genre historical fiction.”
—Kirkus Finalist, 2021 Daphne du
Maurier Awards
978-1-947175-30-3 • Paper, $15.99
• 353 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, iBooks, and Ingram.
Author’s website: www.lindalappin.net
RILEY PUBLISHING
THE LEAST YOU
SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT MEDITATION
A Brief and Practical Guide to
Mindfulness
by Mac MacLean
A straightforward guide for start-
ing your mindfulness practice.
Clear and jargon-free instruc-
tions, with illustrations, describe
appropriate postures, basic breath-
ing techniques, and what gear you will (and won’t) need.
978-06921622-2-4 • Paper, $16.95 • 114 Pages • Meditation
Available on Amazon and IngramSpark.
Author’s website: meditation.theleast@gmail.com
IGUANA BOOKS, TORONTO
iguanabooks.ca; (416) 214-0183
THE GREAT CYPRUS
THINK TANK
by Larry Lockridge
Second of four standalone yet
interrelated satirical novels, The
Enigma Quartet. “Mindful of all
kinds of disaster, this is a novel of
deep comedy, energy, and chas-
tened joy.” —Maureen N. McLane
978-1-77180-424-0 • Hardcover,
$26.99; 978-1-77180-337-3 •
Paper, $14.99; 978-1-77180-338-0
• e-Book, $9.49 • 182 Pages •
Literary Fiction
Available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Kobo.
Author’s website: www.LarryLockridge.com
SOLKROKEN MEDIA
solkrokenmedia.com
YOUNGHO AND
CHADORI
The Door to the Spirit World
(Book 1 in the Trilogy)
by B. K. Chu
Dickensian Christmas tale about a
Korean boy and his dog, this hu-
morous yet heartwarming novella
looks at love, friendship, and grief
with humor and optimism.
978-82-692085-5-9 • Paper, $5.99;
e-Book, $0.99 • 212 Pages • Middle
Grade/Multicultural/Christmas/
Fantasy/Animal Friend
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Google
Play.
Author’s website: bkchu.com
51
 IPBOOKS
IPBooks.net; (718) 728-7416
NECESSARY VOICES
A Collection of Short Fiction
by Merle Molofsky
These stories are necessary, because
they insist on being told. Michael
Eigen said, “These stories illustrate
the paradox that fiction is an open-
ing to truth.”
978-1-949093-11-7 • Paper, $23.95
• 112 Pages • Fiction
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
STREETS 1970
by Merle Molofsky
This novel about heroin addicts’
spiritual lives exists because I am
inspired by Elie Wiesel’s words:
“Human suffering anywhere con-
cerns men and women everywhere”.
978-0-9906613-2-0 • Paper, $24.95
•190 Pages • Fiction
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
POETIC DIALOGUES
by Sandra Buechler
Poetic Dialogues pairs poems that
express the sorrows, joys, humili-
ations, hopes, regrets, lonely chal-
lenges, and sources of inspiration
and renewal that recur in our lives.
978-1-956864-05-2 • Paper, $25.95
• 522 Pages • Literary Criticism
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
INTER ALIA
A Memoir
by Ernest Kafka
Spiked with humor, this 20th-
century immigrant’s tale illumi-
nates possibilities for immigration
today. Using opportunities, the
way he contributes to our culture
inspires awe.
978-1-949093-60-5 • Paper, $40.00
• 552 Pages • Memoir
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
FELA’S STORY
Memoir of a Displaced Family
by Phyllis Beren
A child in flight with her family in
war-torn Europe and their refuge in
displaced persons camps. “In prose
marked by wit, elegance, and search-
ing candor. . . .” —Kirkus Reviews.
An immigrant story of loss, resil-
ience, and survival.
978-1-949093-42-1 • Paper, $29.95
• 227 Pages• Memoir
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
52
FROM INNER SPEECH
TO DIALOGUE
Psychoanalysis and Development
by Theodore Shapiro
Shapiro presents 50 years of study
concerning how humans represent
experience. He augments psycho-
analytic interpretation with lin-
guistic and developmental models
enhancing the meaning of symp-
tom, fantasy, and even fairy tales.
978-1-949093-66-7 • Paper, $39.95
• 644 Pages • Psychoanalysis
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
CAUGHT BY
THE WIND
by Gerald Gargiulo
“These are exquisite, delicate works,
gems, that explore the ineffable
being of things, feelings inherent
in moments of reflection experienc-
ing natural processes.” “Gargiulo is
a gifted poet and psychoanalyst; in
this work he shows us the sensitiv-
ity and vision that both disciplines
require.”
978-1-949093-83-4 • Paper, $15.50
• 54 Pages • Poetry
Available on IPBooks.net and Amazon.
RAGE AND
CREATIVITY
How Feminism Sparked
Psychoanalysis
edited by Lucille Spira
The anthology includes an essay by
Arlene Kramer Richards, followed
by discussions from feminist psy-
choanalytic thinkers—women
and men—about the essay, gender,
race, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Nominee, 2021 Gradiva Award for
edited book.
978-1-949093-73-5 • Paper, $25.00
• 354 Pages • Psychoanalysis
Available on IPBooks.net and Amazon.
MEMORIES OF A
CHAOTIC WORLD
Growing Up as the Daughter of
Annie Reich and Wilhelm Reich
by Lore Reich Rubin
This introspective memoir of a
traumatic childhood includes his-
tory of psychoanalysis, right and
leftwing movements, adjusting to
immigration. New attachments and
identity formation aided healing.
978-1-949093-96-4 • Paper, $25.99
• 294 Pages • Memoir
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
PERSON THEORY
Toward a New Developmental
Paradigm for the Origin, Nature,
and Disorder of the Mind
Augustus Kinzel
Person Theory defines the origin of
good, rich, and gracious life devel-
opment tracks in cosmic substance,
energy, unconsciousness, conscious-
ness, gravity, light, time, and qualia.
978-0-9906613-3-7 44 • Paper,
24.95 • 450 Pages • Psychology
Available on IPBooks.net and
Amazon.
CARLETON STREET PUBLICATIONS
(510) 543-9561
COIT TOWER
A Novel of San Francisco
by Bill Issel
In World War II San Francisco, a
team of undercover operatives inves-
tigates a murder linked to local cul-
tural politics and the country’s na-
tional security policies. “Riveting . . .
Unflinchingly captures the zeitgeist
of 1940s San Francisco.” —Barbara
Berglund Sokolov, author of Mak-
ing San Francisco American.
9780926664203 • Paper, $10.95 •
212 Pages • Historical Fiction
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Author’s website: sites.google.com/site/billissel/home
WAYBACK PRESS
LAKE OF FLOWERS
Book 5 of the Lord Hani Mysteries
by N. L. Holmes
Palace thefts may be something
more sinister, and Hani’s daughter,
the palace physician, has witnessed
a deception that may cost her her
life.
978-1-7352916-3-5 • Paper, $14.99
• 345 Pages • Historical Mystery
Available on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes
& Noble, and the Apple Store.
Author’s website:
nlholmes.com
BAD ROOSTER PRESS
TERMS OF SERVICE
Subject to Change Without Notice
by Craig W Stanfill
250 years from now, a traumatized
youth named Kim must claim her
freedom from an Orwellian surveil-
lance state dominated by all-powerful
corporations and their AIs.
This vivid work of literary science
fiction takes you to a tomorrow
that is becoming all too familiar
today and asks, where does it end?
“What intense world building!
Wonderful character growth! Crisp
story line . . . you get my point by
now—this is a fantastic book.” —Myra, Oh Just Books
978-1638778356 • Hardcover, $34.99; 978-1638778219 • Paper,
$7.95; B091b7m47x • e-Book, $2.99 • 334 Pages • Literary Science
Fiction
Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The New York Review
ATMOSPHERE PRESS
atmospherepress.com; (740) 416-0443
RELATIVELY PAINLESS
Twenty Stories
By Dylan Brody
“Dylan Brody is funny in ways
that don’t remind me of anyone.”
—David Sedaris
“Dylan Brody is always worth the
read.” —Jenny Lawson
978-1-64921-901-5 • Paper, $17.99
• 216 Pages • Family Drama/
Anthology
Available at Amazon, Atmosphere
Press, and at the author’s website:
dylanbrody.com
NEWER TESTAMENTS
by Philip Brunetti
Encounter a mercurial narrator
on a surreal, neo-noir journey in
Newer Testaments—“an innovative
existential novel told through hal-
lucinatory poetics.” —Independent
Book Review
978-1-64921-943-5 • Hardcover,
$25.99 • 204 Pages • Experimental/
Literary Fiction
Available on AtmospherePress.com,
IndieBound, Amazon, and Ingram
Spark.
Author’s website: philipbrunetti.com
TWISTED SILVER
SPOONS
by Karen M. Wicks
In Twisted Silver Spoons we experi-
ence the struggle of a protagonist
who defies expectations to find his
voice and become his own man.
978-1637528198 • Paper, $18.99 •
360 Pages • Literary Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Ingram, and IndieBound.
Author’s website: karenmwicks.com.
PRONGHORN PRESS
PronghornPress.org; (307) 765-2979
FOUR MILES WEST OF
NOWHERE
A City Boy’s First Year in the
Montana Wilderness
by John Phillips
“An excellent ride.” —Jay Leno
“Phillips observes with affection
and detachment.” —Tom McGuane
“John is hilarious about his tus-
sles with Mother Nature.” —P. J.
O’Rourke
“Charming turn of good humor
and self-awareness.” —David Abra-
hamson, School of Journalism,
Northwestern
“A hoot, a sideways Tilbury Town of Montana’s prickly and particu-
lar.”—Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize winner, Wall Street Journal
978-1-941052-54-9 • Paper, $19.95; 978-1-941052-55-6 •
Hardcover, $35.95; 978-1-941052-53-2 • e-Book, $9.95 • 400 Pages
• Memoir
Available at your favorite bookseller.
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
January 13, 2022
ARCHWAY PUBLISHING
www.archwaypublishing.com/en; (844) 669-3957
THE NEW EUGENICS
Modifying Biological Life in the
Twenty-First Century
by Conrad B. Quintyn
The author considers whether
genetic engineering used today to
repair “defects” in all humans will
exacerbate social injustices and/or
lead to a public safety issue.
978-1480899209 • Paper, $28.99 •
424 Pages • Science and Society
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Archway Publishing.
Author’s website: intranet.bloomu.edu/quintyn
KINDLE DIRECT PUBLICATION
kdp.amazon.com; (888) 280-4331
DARE YOU SEE A SOUL
A Frank Gould Mystery, Vol. 7
by Alan Asnen
Frank, tired, life punching down, fa-
mous but broke, in bad health, now
comes news of murder in the family.
And the past comes back, haunting.
B09H5H6VQ7 • e-Book, $2.99
• 279 Pages • Mystery/Thriller/
Literature
Available on Amazon.
Author’s website: www.facebook.com
/The-Frank-Gould-Mysteries
LET’S BLOW UP THE
ELITE COLLEGE
ADMISSIONS
BLACK BOX
It’s Roiling Young Lives,
Rigged for the Rich,
and Wrong for America
by Terry Connelly
“A blistering takedown of the ad-
missions process at elite academic
institutions . . . with practical, ac-
tionable steps on how to create a
fairer and more balanced . . . pro-
cess.” —Kirkus Reviews
9798652036003 • Paper, $14.95; eBook, $5.49 • 366 Pages •
Nonfiction
Available on Amazon.
Author’s Page: Terry Connelly on Amazon
MUSTANG PUBLISHING
www.mustangtn.pub; sales@mustangtn.pub
HUMANITY’S
GREATEST LEAP
The Science and Technology
Behind Feasible Interstellar
Space Travel
by Mark Pickrell
Explains, for a general audience, re-
cent scientific discoveries that make
interstellar travel possible, arguing
for a global endeavor to explore
nearby stars.
978-0-9964111-0-3 • Hardcover,
$19.99 • 80 Pages • Science
Available on Mustang Publishing and Amazon.
Author’s website: www.pickrell.net
TRAFFORD PUBLISHING
www.trafford.com; (812) 339-6000
THE ODYSSEY OF THE
WESTERN SPIRIT
From Scarcity to Abundance
(Third Edition)
by Jack Meyer
The Odyssey is a general theory as to
how mankind moved from the scar-
city of primitive life to the present
world of technological abundance,
from the primitive to the iPhone.
9781490796239 • Hardcover,
$39.99; 9781490796246 • Paper,
$28.99; 9781490796321 • e-Book,
$3.99 • 423 Pages • History and
Philosophy
Available on Trafford and Amazon.
BOOK BABY
bookbaby.com; (877) 961-6878
DOCTOR ASSASSIN
A Medical Science Thriller
by Mark R. Belsky
Max Dent, heart surgeon and former
assassin, is drawn into a terrorist plot
that threatens another holocaust.
Only Max can stop it, if he survives.
978-1-09839-488-2 • Paper, $17.99
• 384 Pages • Fiction/Spy Thriller
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, The Book Store (Lenox, MA),
and The Strand Bookstore.
Author’s website:
markrbelskymd.com
NAOMI ULSTED
www.idletimepress.com; 44 (0)7462 613289
THE APOLOGY BOX
by Naomi Ulsted
When a teen girl causes a forest fire,
she must find redemption. An un-
likely friendship and a box of apol-
ogy letters might be the key.
978-1-7372629-9-2 • Paper, $12.99
• 236 Pages • YA Contemporary
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and ThriftBooks.
MARK DUFF
authormarkduff.com; (970) 309-5435
ON JERICHO FLATS
by Mark Duff
A beautifully written sci-fi/nature
story in which climate change, AI,
and the holographic universe con-
verge. The story pushes the bound-
aries of reality, belief, and what it
means to be human.
978-0-578-95309-0 • Paper, $10.00
• 145 Pages • Science Fiction
Available on Ingram, Amazon, and
Barnes & Noble.
53
 AMARE PRESS
(720) 270-0070
PROTECTING
YOURSELF FROM
EMOTIONAL
PREDATORS
Neutralize the Users, Abusers and
Manipulators Hidden Among Us
by Steven J. Wolhandler, JD,
MA, LPC
A new paradigm for protection from
toxic people epidemic in politics and
life. Comprehensive. Practical.
“A must read!” —George Simon,
author of In Sheep’s Clothing
978-0-692-16052-7 • Paper, $16.95
• 280 Pages • Nonfiction/Psychology
Available on Amazon, Audible, and Tattered Cover.
Author’s website: emotionalpredators.com
RONDINI PRESS
(857) 928-5050
THE LAND OF PICENO
The Life and Times of
Le Marche Italy
by Phoebe Leed
and Nathan Neel
Marauding invaders, stolen art,
cataclysmic earthquakes. Brigands,
partisans, necromancers, a seduc-
tive sibyl. Snowcapped mountains,
rippling vineyards and olive groves,
Roman ports—Picenum!
978-1-7358532-0-8 • Paper, $28.50
• 204 Pages • Archaeology/History/Travel
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play Books.
GAIN KNOWLEDGE TO GROW ENERGY LLC
www.aedgar.com
THE CONSCIOUS
VIRUS
An Aedgar Wisdom Novel
by Miki Mitayn
A virus, created with malign intent,
developed consciousness. Dr. Ner-
ida Green discovers this through
unorthodox, thoroughly unscien-
tific, channels: talking to spirits
through her shaman wife.
978-1922612007 • Paper, $25.99 •
432 Pages • Magical Realism
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Kindle Unlimited.
IAIN M. RODGERS
THE ZIMA
CONFESSION
by Iain M. Rodgers
An intellectual thriller set in the
world of international IT and
banking. The twisty, clever plot
takes you from 1970s Glasgow to
current-day Moscow.
978-1916191815 • Hardcover,
$24.99; 978-1916191808 • Paper,
$11.99 • B09DPXFX74 • e-Book,
$3.91 • 361 Pages • Mystery/
Thriller/Suspense
Available on Amazon, Waterstones,
Litres, and Bokus.
Author’s website: www.thezimaconfession.com
To advertise your books, email ipress@nybooks.com, call (212) 293-1630, or see www.nybooks.com/ipl.
54
REGAL HOUSE PUBLISHING
tinyurl.com/regalsea
OUT FRONT THE
FOLLOWING SEA
by Leah Angstman
Amid brutal French/English ten-
sions in 17th-century New England,
an Englishwoman accused of witch-
craft must save her French sailor
from the noose. “Stunning, master-
fully crafted.” —Readers’ Favorite
9781646031948 • Paperback,
$19.95 • 334 Pages • Literary/
Historical
Available anywhere books are sold.
Author’s website: leahangstman.com
MILL CITY PRESS
www.millcitypress.net; (407) 339 4217
GALLANT
The Call of the Trail
by Claire Eckard
Number-one Bestseller on Amazon.
A sweeping saga of love, adventure,
and redemption featuring the long-
distance sport of endurance riding.
For horse lovers of all ages.
978-1662826146 • Paper, $17.99 •
275 Pages • Young Adult Fiction
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Target, and Walmart.
Author’s website:
ClaireEckardAuthor.com
SHE WRITES PRESS
www.shewritespress.com; (480) 275-4280
LEMONS IN THE
GARDEN OF LOVE
A Novel
by Ames Sheldon
Cassie Lyman finds suffrage car-
toons, diaries, and letters belonging
to her relative, founder of the Birth
Control League of Massachusetts.
A terribly timely novel that pro-
vides a much deeper understanding
of the depths and human costs of
the long struggle for reproductive
rights and its centrality to the un-
finished fight for gender equality.
978-1-64742-048-2 • Paper, $16.96
• 238 Pages • Historical Fiction
Available on IndieBound and Amazon.
Author’s website: www.amessheldon.com
TOBIAS MAXWELL
NAKED INK
Diary of a Smalltown Boy
by Tobias Maxwell
Everyone has read about the jour-
neys of famous actors. But what
about the thousands of actors who
struggle to survive the dog-eat-dog
actor’s life in New York City and
never reach fame and fortune?
Welcome to the nitty-gritty life
of an actor–cum–art model in all
its naked glory; the story of an il-
legal alien’s journey to America, a
sex-addicted bisexual, hell-bent on
making something happen for himself in NYC, circa 1980.
9781627878807 • Paper, $21.95 • 412 Pages • Memoir
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your favorite bookstore.
Author’s website: Tobiasmaxwell.com
BUBLISH
Bublish.com; (843) 513-7337
SOULWORK
Connecting with the Universe and
Your Spiritual Path to Find your
True Purpose in Life
by Elizabeth Radcliffe
“A mind-expanding introduction to
spiritual development . . . Radcliffe
has struck a balance that so many
self-help and spiritual advisors
miss . . . a true standout.” —Self-
Publishing Review
978-1647044077 • Paper, $12.00;
e-Book, $9.99 • 244 Pages • Spiritu-
ality/Self-Help
Available on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, and Kobo.
Author’s website: RadSoulwork.com
GREENLEAF BOOK GROUP
www.greenleafbookgroup.com; (512) 891-6100
DO YOU FOLLOW?
by J. C. Bidonde
Twisting, smart, and wickedly dark.
Do You Follow? is a tautly woven
thriller about what happens when
long-buried family secrets surface.
9781626349025 • Paper, $19.95 •
248 Pages • Thriller
Available, on Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, IndieBound, and
Bookshop.org.
Author’s website:
www.jcbidonde.com
LWL BOOKS
lanceleeauthor.com
ORPHEUS RISING
By Sam and His Father, John,
With Some Help From a Very Wise
Elephant Who Likes to Dance
by Lance Lee
“An Indie Best Book of 2021”
—Kirkus Reviews
A book “that can stand with the
classic’s of children’s literature”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Imaginative and emotional”
—Editor’s Pick, Publishers Weekly
(Booklife)
978058885599 • Paper, $15.50 •
310 Pages • Children’s Epic Fantasy
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Amazon (UK), and
Waterstones (UK).
BLUE TRIANGLE PRESS
www.FredMisurella.com
A PONTIAC IN THE
WOODS
by Fred Misurella
A young woman’s rude, sometimes
primitive narrative about living
alone, in a novel that packs a sur-
prising punch. “Beautifully and em-
pathically written.” —IndieReader
978-0-578-71792-0 • Paper, $14.00
• e-Book, $4.99 • 306 Pages •
Literary Fiction/Young Adult Fiction
Available on Amazon and
FredMisurella.com.
The New York Review
 Falling in Love with Terror
To Break Russia’s Chains:
Boris Savinkov and His Wars
Against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks
by Vladimir Alexandrov.
Pegasus, 562 pp., $29.95
Pale Horse:
A Novel of Revolutionary Russia
by Boris Savinkov, translated
from the Russian by Michael R. Katz
and with an introduction by Otto Boele.
University of Pittsburgh Press,
119 pp., $23.95
In the late 1870s, a new type of hero
arose in Russia. “Upon the horizon
there appeared a gloomy form, illumi-
nated by a light as of hell . . .with lofty
bearing, and a look breathing forth
hatred and defiance,” explained Sergei
Stepniak in Underground Russia: Rev-
olutionary Profiles and Sketches from
Life (1882). This hero, who “made
his way through the terrified crowd to
enter with a firm step upon the scene
of history,” was the terrorist: “Noble,
terrible, irresistibly fascinating . . . he
combines in himself the two sublimities
of human grandeur: the martyr and the
hero.”
Stepniak was himself a terrorist who
in 1878 had assassinated the head of
Russia’s secret police by stabbing him
and twisting the knife in the wound.
He escaped abroad. His “revolution-
ary portraits” of assassins (he calls
them “saints”) celebrated the People’s
Will movement, which culminated in
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II
in 1881. Infiltrated by a tsarist double
agent, the People’s Will had collapsed
by 1883, with the arrest of its legendary
leader Vera Figner. Terrorism abated,
only to reach unprecedented heights
two decades later.
Terrorism practically defined the
early twentieth century in Russia, the
first country where “terrorist” became
an honorable, if dangerous, profes-
sion, one that could be passed down in
families for generations. Its extent was
breathtaking. As Anna Geifman ob-
serves in her authoritative 1993 study
Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terror-
ism in Russia, 1894–1917:
During a one-year period begin-
ning in October 1905, a total of
3,611 government officials of all
ranks were killed and wounded
throughout the empire. . . . By the
end of 1907 the total number of
state officials who had been killed
or injured came to nearly 4,500.
The picture becomes a particularly
terrifying one in consideration of
the fact that an additional 2,180
private individuals were killed and
2,350 wounded in terrorist attacks
between 1905 and 1907. . . . From
the beginning of January 1908
through mid-May of 1910, the au-
thorities recorded 19,957 terrorist
attacks and revolutionary robber-
ies, as a result of which 732 gov-
ernment officials and 3,051 private
persons were killed.
Polite society celebrated terrorists,
who included the first suicide bomb-
ers. Killing and maiming (throwing
sulfuric acid into the face) evolved
into a sport in which victims, Geifman
January 13, 2022
Gary Saul Morson
Boris Savinkov, 1910s; photograph from the records of the Okhrana,
the Russian imperial secret police
explains, were just “moving targets.”
In 1906–1907 a group of terrorists, or
“‘woodchoppers’. . . as one revolution-
ary labeled them . . . competed . . . to
see who had committed the greatest
number of robberies and murders, and
often exhibited jealousy over others’
successes.” One anecdote told of an
editor who was asked if his newspaper
would run the biography of the new
governor-general. “No, don’t bother,”
he replied. “We’ll send it directly to the
obituary department.”
After 1905 terror became so com-
monplace that newspapers “introduced
special new sections dedicated exclu-
sively to chronicling violent acts . . .
[with] daily lists of political assassi-
nations and expropriations [robberies]
throughout the empire.” In Warsaw, rev-
olutionaries threw explosives, laced with
bullets and nails, into a café with two
hundred people present, in order “to
see how the foul bourgeois will squirm
in death agony.” “Robbery, extortion,
and murder,” Geifman notes, “became
more common than traffic accidents.”
S tepniak’s mythic portraits of terror-
ists found many imitators. Like Step-
niak, Boris Savinkov practiced the
epoch’s two most prestigious Russian
occupations, terrorism and novel writ-
ing. Citing Winston Churchill’s over-
stated observation about Savinkov that
“few men tried more, gave more, dared
more, and suffered more for the Rus-
sian people,” and applying W. Somerset
Maugham’s comment that “there is no
more sometimes than the trembling of
a leaf between success and failure” to
Savinkov’s attempts to drive the Bolshe-
viks from power, Vladimir Alexandrov’s
new biography of Savinkov, To Break
State Museum of the Political History of Russia, St. Petersburg/Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
ished,” she explained. Growing up at
Bialkovo, an estate in Smolensk prov-
ince, “I had never heard of the horrors
of serfdom . . . and I don’t think there
were any.” Savinkov ascribed a similar
morbid psychology to terrorist Dora
Brilliant, who demanded to be an ac-
tual bomb thrower. “No, don’t talk . . . I
want it,” he quotes her. “I must die.”
Savinkov cites the letter the terrorist
Boris Vnorovsky wrote to his parents
before he died throwing a bomb: “Many
times, in my youth, I had the desire to
end my life.” In terrorism he found a
way to do it. He was resolved on death,
and all that “remained to be done was
to find a definite program.” The terror-
ist Fyodor Nazarov was equally “far
removed from acceptance of any party
program,” Savinkov notes. Instead of
loving the common people, “he devel-
oped a contempt for the masses.”
Savinkov irritated PSR leader Vic-
tor Chernov when—“with a chuckle,”
in Alexandrov’s words—he expressed
indifference to the party’s defining
commitment to the peasantry. At times
he pronounced himself an anarchist,
Chernov noted, and at other times a
devotee of “spiritual-religious revolu-
tionism.” According to Alexandrov,
a woman Savinkov tried to recruit for
terror “concluded that terrorism for its
own sake had eclipsed all other consid-
erations for Savinkov.”
Chernov and others reached the
same conclusion about Savinkov’s mo-
tives. What attracted him to terror was
Russia’s Chains, presents him as a secu- its risk, adventure, and the sheer thrill
lar saint who “chose terror out of altru- of dramatic murder. The hero of Sav-
ism.” Alexandrov, a prominent scholar inkov’s novel Pale Horse, George—the
of Russian literature who grew up in a English name Savinkov himself had
Russian émigré family, is best known adopted—finds this thrill addictive.
for his writings on Nabokov and for The “What would I be doing if I were not
Black Russian (2013), a biography of involved in terror?” he asks himself.
an African American named Frederick “What’s my life without struggle, with-
Bruce Thomas, who became a wealthy out the joyful awareness that worldly
entrepreneur in tsarist Russia and, after laws are not for me?” The hero of an-
the Bolshevik takeover, in Turkey. other novel by Savinkov, What Never
There is no doubt that Savinkov was Happened, explains, “I live for murder,
the best known of early twentieth- only for murder.” He realizes that “he
century Russian terrorists. The son of had fallen in love, yes, yes, fallen in love
a Russian imperial justice of the peace, with terror.” Savinkov quotes his real-
he impressed others with his worldly life bomb maker Alexey Pokotilov: “I
polish, charming conversation, good believe in terror. For me the whole rev-
looks, and elegant dress. A lifelong olution is terror.”
dandy, he had a taste for role-playing Savinkov changed the Combat Or-
and was a master of disguises. In the ganization’s preferred weapon from
1904 campaign in St. Petersburg that guns to bombs, which, of course, were
resulted in the death of Interior Min- much more likely to kill bystanders. In
ister Vyacheslav von Plehve, Savinkov, one successful assassination, a coach-
without knowing any English, proudly man died, in another the target’s fellow
pretended to be an English business- passenger. Having successfully blown
man named George McCullough. up von Plehve in 1904 and the tsar’s
Joining the Combat Organization of brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexan-
the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries drovich the following year, Savinkov
(PSR), he became its second leader. acquired an aura of mysterious power.
Strangely enough, ideology didn’t in-
terest him. Perhaps the most interesting
feature of his Memoirs of a Terrorist is Savinkov began his two careers, writer
the almost total absence of concern for and terrorist, at about the same time,
alleviating people’s suffering. He was and, according to the scholar Lynn Ellen
not alone. In the memoirs of other ter- Patyk, he kept clippings about both. Did
rorists, and in Savinkov’s descriptions Savinkov write novels to glorify his ca-
of them, concern for the people is often reer as a terrorist or did he turn to ter-
a decidedly secondary matter. Vera rorism to provide compelling material
Zasulich, whom Stepniak celebrated for fiction? In either case, he engaged
as the “angel of vengeance,” recalled assiduously in a process that Russians
how, as a girl, she wanted to die as a call “life creation,” a form of self-
Christian martyr. Losing her faith, she mythologization in which one lives as if
sought a different martyrdom. “Sym- one were a literary exemplar. “As a mem-
pathy for the suffering of the people ber of the gentry, a cosmopolitan aes-
did not move me to join those who per- thete, and a dandy,” Patyk persuasively
55

New York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets,
The New York Review Children’s Collection,
NYRB Kids and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank
Executive Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae,
Lucas Adams
Associate Editor: Alex Andriesse
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During,
Publicity Director; Abigail Dunn, Senior
Marketing and Publicity Manager;
Alex Ransom, Assistant Marketing Manager;
Evan Johnston, Production Manager;
Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.
Have you read this
NYRB Classics bestseller?
“A tour de force laying open the
mind and motives of a killer with
extraordinary empathy. The structure
is flawless, and the scenes of
postwar LA have an immediacy that
puts Chandler to shame. No wonder
Hughes is the master we keep
turning to.” —Sara Paretsky
“Hughes. . . belongs in the
crime-writing pantheon with male
icons like Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler. . . . In a Lonely
Place is a gripping story, but Hughes
was too talented, ambitious, and
grounded to play it merely for
suspense. . . ” —John Powers, NPR
“In a Lonely Place blasted my
mind open to new ways of reading.”
—Sarah Weinman,
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Crime was never Hughes’s interest,
evil was, and to be evil, for her, is to
be intolerant of others. . . With her
poetic powers of description,
she makes that evil a sickness in
the mind and a landscape to be
surveyed.” —Christine Smallwood,
The New Yorker’s Page-Turner Blog
“A fascinating example of a genre
novel where the author is doing
what she needs to do to be a part of
the genre while totally turning genre
tropes upside down. . . [In a Lonely
Place] is a refusal to turn [characters]
into classic femme fatales. . .
Exhilarating.” —Backlisted Podcast
IN A LONELY PLACE
Dorothy B. Hughes
Afterword by Megan Abbott
Paperback • $14.95
Also available as an e-book
www.nyrb.com
56
argues, “Savinkov embraced a model
of authorship bequeathed to Russian
literature by . . . Lord Byron and na-
tivized by Alexander Pushkin and
Mikhail Lermontov, all of whom re-
mained among Savinkov’s favorites.”
Betrayed by a double agent, Savin-
kov was arrested but staged a thrilling
prison escape, aided by a guard who
was a secret Socialist Revolutionary and
who tried to put other guards to sleep
by feeding them morphine-laced candy;
when that failed he had Savinkov im-
personate a guard. Savinkov then went
abroad, where he became a Russian na-
tionalist. When World War I broke out,
Chernov and other socialists declared
neutrality in this war among imperial-
ists, but Savinkov agitated against the
hated Germans. The February 1917
revolution allowed him to return to
Russia, where he joined the Provisional
Government and served in several roles,
including director of the Ministry of
War. He supported General Kornilov,
who aspired to authoritarian military
rule, and opposed the Bolsheviks both
before and after their October 1917
coup. For many years, Savinkov was the
Bolsheviks’ most implacable foe.
He joined or founded various anti-
Bolshevik groups—once again, ideol-
ogy didn’t matter. Writing to his friend
the poet Zinaida Gippius, he declared,
according to Alexandrov, that hence-
forth “he would work with anyone,
of any political persuasion.” And he
would not be fastidious about means, ei-
ther. “Dealing with Bolsheviks brought
out a cruel streak in him,” Alexandrov
concedes. The Polish leader Józef Pił-
sudski convinced Savinkov to set up an
anti-Bolshevik detachment on Polish
soil and joined forces with the rogue
general Stanislav Bulak-Balakhovich,
who conducted mass pogroms in the
Pale of Settlement. According to Alex-
androv, Savinkov
condemned the pogroms and con-
fessed that they made him feel
personally ashamed. However, he
also tried to explain—but not ex-
cuse—their origin and concluded
that “the peasant, the Red Army
soldier and the follower of Ba-
lakhovich perceives the Jew as an
enemy, as a true ally of the Reds.
From this comes the hatred—that
blind, unreasoning, spontaneous
anti- Semitism that falls like a
black spot on Balakhovich’s glory.
It’s a rather qualified “condemnation.”
Savinkov’s National Union for the
Defense of the Motherland and Free-
dom conducted raids into Bolshevik
territory during which, according to
Alexandrov,
no method was off limits, at least
in theory, and at one point the
GPU [secret police] claimed that
captured members of the National
Union were found to have large
quantities of potassium cyanide
that they were planning to use to
poison the most loyal Red Army
units.
Sergey Pavlovsky, the National Union’s
military chief of staff in Warsaw, dis-
played special brutality. Following
Savinkov’s orders, he conducted a five-
month campaign of armed attacks and
robberies during which he and his band
apparently killed more than sixty peo-
ple and “carried out bloody outrages
against Bolshevik Party members, in-
cluding torture.”
Using his charming conversational
and acting abilities, Savinkov secured
support for the White Army through-
out Western Europe, impressing Som-
erset Maugham, Churchill, and the
famous “ace of spies,” British secret
agent Sidney Reilly. Savinkov even met
with Mussolini, who suggested that the
Russian “join him in fighting commu-
nism in Italy,” Alexandrov explains.
“This was not what Savinkov came for,
but he agreed.”
Fascism may have been the only
ideology that appealed to Savinkov.
Defending Mussolini, Savinkov in-
sisted that “fascism saved Italy from
the commune” and that “the so- called
imperialism of the Italian fascists is an
accidental phenomenon that can be
explained by an excess population in
the country and the absence of good
colonies.” Still deeper reasons made
the movement attractive. “Fascism is
close to me psychologically and ideo-
logically,” he wrote. “Psychologically—
because it stands for action and total
effort in comparison to the lack of will
and the starry- eyed idealism of parlia-
mentary democracy,” and ideologically
because “it stands on a national plat-
form” and relies on the peasantry for
support.
The most dramatic events lay ahead.
Hoping to assassinate Bolshevik lead-
ers, he communicated with his support-
ers behind enemy lines. Unfortunately,
the group he trusted had been created
by the Bolsheviks to lure him back
to Russia. When Savinkov returned,
he was promptly arrested. And then,
amazingly enough, this implacable
foe of the Bolsheviks joined them. Re-
nouncing his former professed beliefs,
he proclaimed at his trial, “If you are
Russian, if you love your motherland,
if you love your people, then bow to
the workers’ and peasants’ rule and ac-
knowledge it without reservation.”
And so Savinkov became a Bol-
shevik propagandist. “This change in
Savinkov’s attitude,” Alexandrov com-
ments, “is so improbable that it could
be compared to the pope of Rome sud-
denly professing admiration for Satan.”
The shock in the West was profound.
At first Reilly defended Savinkov, but
at last he branded him “a renegade,
the likes of which world history has not
known since the time of Judas.”
The Bolsheviks treated their turn-
coat well. Commuting his death sen-
tence to ten years, they placed him in
a luxurious apartment—albeit one
within Lubyanka Prison. Even before
his public confession at his trial, Savin-
kov demanded (and received) a range
of personal comforts, including two sets
of silverware, cigarettes, books, writing
materials, and beer. After the trial, his
mistress lived with him, he met writers
and friends, and agents of the OGPU (as
the GPU was now called) took him on
excursions to the theater, restaurants,
and parks. Soviet journals published
three of his stories depicting Russian
émigrés in an unflattering light.
And then, in 1925, quite unexpect-
edly, Savinkov died at the age of forty-
six. According to the official account,
which Alexandrov believes Soviet ar-
chives confirm, Savinkov committed
suicide by leaping from a window.
Needless to say, others have rejected
this story because of its dubious source,
because his mistress denied it, and
because he had told his son Victor
during a visit, “If you hear that I’ve
laid hands on myself—don’t believe it.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claimed that
a dying former agent with the Cheka,
the first Soviet secret police organiza-
tion, told him he had participated in
defenestrating Savinkov. Alexandrov
does not mention Semyon Ignatiev,
Stalin’s last director of internal secu-
rity, who recalled that, during the so-
called Doctors’ Plot of the early 1950s,
in which Jewish doctors were accused
of planning to poison Soviet leaders,
Stalin demanded that torture be used
to make the doctors confess: “‘Beat
them!’—he demanded from us, de-
claring: ‘what are you? Do you want to
be more humanistic than LENIN, who
ordered [Cheka director Felix] DZER-
ZHINSKY to throw SAVINKOV out a
window?’”
H ow Savinkov died is crucial to the
very purpose of Alexandrov’s book: to
exalt the Russian terrorist movement
in general and Savinkov in particu-
lar. “The [PSR] assassins called them-
selves ‘terrorists’ proudly, but what
they meant by this bears no resem-
blance to what the word means now,”
Alexandrov argues. The difference, he
maintains, is that today’s terrorists kill
people randomly and “attack almost
any national, social, or cultural group
chosen by chance and engaged in any
pastime, with the more victims the bet-
ter. . . . Had the Socialist Revolution-
aries known of such events, they would
have condemned them as unequivo-
cally criminal.”
As Geifman’s account demonstrates,
however, the SRs behaved similarly to
modern- day terrorists. “By 1905, terror
had indeed become an all-pervasive
phenomenon, affecting every layer of
society,” she writes, and “the PSR pro-
vided . . . a fresh justification for their
deeds.” In contrast to earlier terrorists,
the PSR “allowed its members to exer-
cise terrorist initiative freely and in the
periphery.” Soon enough there devel-
oped what the liberal politician Peter
Struve called a “new type of revolu-
tionary,” “a blending of revolutionary
and bandit [marked by] the liberation
of revolutionary psychology from all
moral restraints.” As the historian
Norman Naimark observed, terrorism
became for them “so addictive that
it was often carried out without even
weighing the moral questions posed
by earlier generations.” In Geifman’s
words, it entailed “robbing and kill-
ing not only state officials but also or-
dinary citizens, randomly and in mass
numbers.”
Like other recent historians, Geifman
seeks “to demystify and deromanti-
cize” the Russian terrorist movement.
Those she calls “far from impartial
memoirists”—including Stepniak and
Savinkov—created a myth of humane,
high-minded, noble, and reluctant
terrorists and of “selfless freedom
fighters.” It was common “to use lofty
slogans to justify what in reality was
pure banditry,” and often much worse.
Soon enough, sheer sadism became
routine. “The need to inflict pain was
transformed from an abnormal irra-
tional compulsion experienced only
by unbalanced personalities into a
formally verbalized obligation for all
committed revolutionaries,” Geifman
explains. Some victims were thrown
The New York Review
into vats of boiling water; others were
mutilated both before and after death.
Conscious mythmaking prevailed
from the movement’s beginning. In
his highly influential Historical Letters
(1868–1870), the social philosopher
Peter Lavrov, who wrote a preface to
Stepniak’s Underground Russia, called
for “critically thinking individuals” to
arouse the unenlightened masses by
fabricating heroic myths. “Martyrs are
needed, whose legend will far outgrow
their true worth and their actual ser-
vice,” Lavrov foresaw. “Energy they
never had will be attributed to them. . . .
The words they never uttered will be
repeated. . . . The number of those
who perish is not important: legend
will always multiply it to the limits of
possibility” so as to “compile a long
martyrology.”
F or Alexandrov, the noblest, most
spotless of all these heroes is Savinkov.
To Break Russia’s Chains begins,
“This is the story of a remarkable man
who became a terrorist to fight the ty-
rannical Russian imperial regime, and
when a popular revolution overthrew
it in 1917 turned his wrath against the
Bolsheviks because they betrayed the
revolution and the freedoms it won.”
His motives, Alexandrov believes, were
entirely pure: “All his efforts were di-
rected at transforming his homeland
into a uniquely democratic, humane,
and enlightened country.”
Accusations that Savinkov loved ter-
ror itself, Alexandrov concludes, “are
profoundly unfair because they are the
result of ideological bias, not historical
or psychological understanding.” In
Alexandrov’s view, Savinkov “chose
terror out of altruism, although what he
did bears no resemblance to what ‘ter-
rorism’ means today.” For that matter,
Alexandrov repeats, although Savinkov
organized terror, “he never killed any-
one himself.” Is someone not a killer if
he planned, organized, and provided
weapons for murder but, rather than
throwing bombs himself, instead re-
cruited others to do so?
Alexandrov stresses an incident
figuring prominently in terrorist my-
thology. When Savinkov’s recruit and
childhood friend Ivan Kaliaev was
about to throw a bomb at the Grand
Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s carriage,
the presence of the duke’s wife and
children made him draw back, because
the Socialist Revolutionary Party had
issued no instructions about this (not
unforeseeable) possibility. Believe it or
not, Savinkov writes matter- of-factly,
the party “had never discussed or even
raised the question” of killing family
members. Savinkov recalls telling Ka-
liaev that killing innocents “was quite
out of the question,” evidence for Al-
exandrov that his hero was supremely
considerate of innocent human life.
Alexandrov is correct that Savinkov
did not deliberately target innocent
people, as other terrorists did, but if he
was so concerned about not harming
bystanders, why did the Combat Or-
ganization under his direction switch
from guns to bombs? And why did Sa-
vinkov’s bomb makers construct their
weapons not in remote buildings but in
hotels, where, on two occasions, they
accidentally exploded? After Pokoti-
lov, whose heavy drinking should have
been a warning sign, blew himself up in
the Northern Hotel in St. Petersburg,
Maximilian Shveytser died when an ac-
January 13, 2022
cidental explosion destroyed his room,
several adjoining ones, and a French
restaurant. Lumber, plaster, and fur-
niture landed on the street below. Sav-
inkov even cooked up the scheme of
using an early (and hard-to-manage)
airplane carrying a giant bomb. “One
wonders what precautions Savinkov
believed he could take to spare the lives
of innocents,” Alexandrov asks. What
indeed.
Although he barely mentions the
indiscriminate carnage Geifman de-
scribes, Alexandrov does note the
attempt of the Maximalists—an off-
shoot of the PSR too violent even for
them—to kill the tsar’s chief minister,
Pyotr Stolypin, by bombing his house
when it was crowded with petitioners.
Twenty-seven people were killed, and
about thirty others—including Stoly-
pin’s daughter and son—were wounded,
some seriously. The minister escaped
with minor injuries. Is this an example
of the targeted killing that bears no re-
semblance to modern terrorism?
“Savinkov and [his mentor Mikhail
Gotz] rejected what the Maximalists
had done,” Alexandrov assures us,
“because of the horrifying number of
innocent victims”—which sounds as if
they were shocked by the deaths of by-
standers rather than the setback to pro-
paganda. Yet in his memoirs, Savinkov
reports his own reaction to the PSR’s
official “proclamation repudiating the
terror of the Maximalists”:
I did not approve of it. Gotz ex-
pressed sympathy for the Maxi-
malists. He was sorry for them,
pointing out that the explosion . . .
had not been carefully prepared. . . .
Gotz also pointed out that the kill-
ing of many innocents was bound
to have an adverse effect on public
opinion. He refrained, however,
from passing judgment on the
Maximalists. The explosion . . .was
the only possible answer to [the
tsar’s] dissolution of the Duma.
Savinkov reports that he tried to join
forces with the Maximalists. Once
again, ideology made no difference to
him. “Look here, we’re talking man to
man,” he recalls telling the Maximalist
leader.
Why cannot we work together? For
my part, I see no obstacles. It is all
the same to me whether you are a
Maximalist, an anarchist, or So-
cialist Revolutionist. We are both
terrorists. Let us combine our orga-
nizations in the interests of terror.
Are statements like this why so many
have concluded that Savinkov was pri-
marily motivated by terror itself?
Most studies of Savinkov focus on his
novels, especially Pale Horse. An early
English translation by Z. Vengerova
(known to Churchill) has been far sur-
passed by the sparkling new one by
Michael Katz, who has ably translated
several works of Russian radical fic-
tion—including Vasily Sleptsov’s Hard
Times and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s
utopian novel What Is to Be Done? In
his 562-page biography, Alexandrov
devotes only six pages to Pale Horse,
and there he mostly denies that the
work expresses Savinkov’s real views.
To present Savinkov as an altruistic
hero, Alexandrov could hardly do oth-
erwise, since the novel has always been
taken, in the historian Aileen Kelly’s
words, as a “savage demystification” of
the terrorist hero.
Pale Horse includes conversations DAVID LEVINE’S
about the morality of terrorism. Curi-
CELEBRATED CARICATURES
ously, they concern not whether terror-
ism is justified but which justification
is best. The Christian Vanya, evidently
based on Kaliaev, reasons that even
though Christians should not kill, he is
a bad Christian and so is bound to do
so. In one shocking passage, the hero
George describes how in the Belgian
Congo, Africans who lived on one side
of a river would kill those who wan-
dered over from the other shore, and
vice versa. He concludes that killing is
normal: “I want to do something and I DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR MUG
do it. Does this [need for justification] Caricatures by world-renowned artist David
perhaps hide some cowardice, fear of Levine enriched and enlivened the pages of
someone’s opinion?” When Vanya asks The New York Review of Books for almost
how George can live without love, he five decades. Thirty-three of Levine’s most
answers, “You spit at the whole world.” arresting and iconic caricatures of authors
George at last murders his lover’s decorate this heirloom quality bone china
husband. “There is no distinction, no mug, including the artist’s self-portrait. Each
difference. Why is it all right to kill for time you pick up one of these mugs, you’ll
the terror,” he asks rhetorically, “but find more to look at in the wonderfully
for oneself—impossible? Who will detailed illustrations which express the wit,
answer me?” Like the protagonist of commentary, and virtuoso technique for
Lermontov’s Byronic novel A Hero of which Levine’s caricatures received world-
Our Time, after the murder George wide acclaim.
immediately loses interest in his lover. Authors depicted are:
Alexandrov asserts that George’s “aim- Zora Neale Hurston, William Shakespeare,
less egoism has no relation to anything James Joyce, Beatrix Potter, Frederick
that mattered most deeply to Savinkov Douglass, Walt Whitman, Vladimir
personally,” but even if this is true, the Nabokov, William Faulkner, James
book surely glorifies the Byronic self- Baldwin, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde,
image Savinkov labored to construct. Colette, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf,
One might suppose that Savinkov’s Voltaire, Rachel Carson, Samuel Beckett,
willingness to join the Bolsheviks Herman Melville, Langston Hughes,
would shake Alexandrov’s certainty Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote,
that his subject was not an adventurer Jane Austen, W. E. B. DuBois, M. F. K.
but a man of principle. Alexandrov Fisher, Victor Hugo, Gertrude Stein,
instead constructs a scenario rescu- Alice B. Toklas, Mary Wollstonecraft,
ing his hero’s reputation. He surmises Mary Shelley, Marcel Proust, Dante,
that Savinkov must have been deceiv- Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lewis Carroll.
ing the Bolsheviks so that they would Hand wash only. Suitable for use in a micro-
eventually free him and give him an- wave. Size: 3.54" H (90mm) x 3.34" D (85mm).
other chance to kill their leaders. Even Capacity: 1.5 cups (350ml)
if the Bolsheviks had eventually freed
#05-DLMUG • $27.95
Savinkov, is it remotely plausible that
the Cheka would allow him to roam
unmolested and build a new terrorist
organization? Given Savinkov’s “abso-
lute commitment to personal and polit-
ical freedom,” Alexandrov reasons, his
death must have been suicide prompted
by the realization that he would never
be released to carry out his scheme.
Having “lost his gamble,” his suicide
was “the only blow he could make
against” the regime.
In contrast to Savinkov and many
others, Lenin despised those who ro-
manticized terror. They suffered, he
wrote, from “petty-bourgeois revolution-
ism,” “dilletante-anarchist revolution-
ism,” and, most famously, an “infantile
disorder.” “The greatest danger. . . that
confronts a genuine revolution,” he
declared, “is exaggeration of revolu-
tionariness . . .when they begin . . . to el-
DAVID LEVINE AUTHOR NOTEBOOK
The same thirty-three Levine caricatures
evate ‘revolution’ to something almost decorate this beautifully crafted hardcover
divine.” It is no wonder that Lenin notebook, which includes a ribbon marker.
triumphed, since his grasp of power The cream paper is lined and suitable for
politics was never obscured by dreamy ballpoint, rollerball, and fountain pen ink
idealizations. (most fountain pens will not bleed through
One sympathizes with Alexandrov’s or feather as so often happens with cheaper
wish that tsarism could have been re- paper so both sides of the page may be used).
placed by something other than Bol-
Hardcover; 8.35" x 5.8" x 0.6"; 96 pages.
shevism. Savinkov, he believes, came
a hairsbreadth from ensuring just that. #05-DLVAN • $19.95
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda
Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
Mandelstam posed a different question:
Could it be that the romanticization of TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
terror and revolution is the main reason 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
Russia followed its lugubrious path? Q
57

The Subversive Simone Weil:
A Life in Five Ideas
by Robert Zaretsky.
University of Chicago Press,
181 pp., $20.00
The French philosopher Simone Weil’s
two visits to Italy in 1937 and 1938 were
among the happiest experiences of her
life. “For some years,” she wrote to
the young medical student Jean Pos-
ternak on her return to Paris in 1938,
“I have held the theory that joy is an
indispensable ingredient in human life,
for the health of the mind.” Absence
of joy, she suggested, is the “equivalent
of madness.” Shortly before her trip,
which began at Lake Maggiore and
took in the cultural treasures of Milan,
Florence, and Rome, she had been ad-
mitted to the hospital for headaches
that sometimes struck with such in-
tensity that she wanted to die. “Joy” is
perhaps not a word most readily associ-
ated with Weil. On the other hand, the
epithet of “madness” has constantly
trailed her, mostly coming from those
who could not fathom her, including
Charles de Gaulle, who came to know
of her through the papers on resistance
that she wrote in London in the last
year of her life.
And yet it is central to Weil’s unique
form of genius that she knew how to
identify the threat of incipient madness
for the citizens of a world turning in-
sane. A straight line runs through her
writing from the insufferable cruelty of
modern social arrangements—worker
misery, swaths of the world colonized
and uprooted by “white races,” force
as the violent driver of political will—
to the innermost tribulations of the
human heart. What would it mean,
under the threat of victorious fascism,
not to feel that you might go crazy?
During the course of her Italian
visits, Weil encountered several Fas-
cists, one of whom stated, in response
to her outspoken antifascism, that her
“legitimate and normal” place in so-
ciety would be down a salt-mine. Weil
reacted to the suggestion with some-
thing akin to glee. Surely, she wrote,
that would be less suffocating than
the political atmosphere aboveground:
“The nationalist obsession, the adora-
tion of power in its most brutal form,
the collectivity (Plato’s ‘great beast’),
the camouflaged deification of death.”
Likewise, France on the eve of World
War II was living in an “unbreath-
able moral atmosphere” as it fought
against the ignominy of demotion to a
second-class power, while still “intox-
icated” by Louis XIV and Napoleon,
who believed himself to be an object
“both of terror and love to the whole
universe.”
“An incredible amount of lying,
false information, demagogy, mixed
boastfulness and panic” were the con-
sequence of the deluded public mood.
She could be describing the UK in
the throes of Brexit, or the US faced
with the ascendancy of China, as they
each struggle to stave off a similar fate.
For Weil, such laments are misplaced.
“Freedom, justice, art, thought, and
similar kinds of greatness” are not the
monopoly of the dominant nations.
Far from it. Think small—one of her
58
An Endless Seeing
Jacqueline Rose
Simone Weil; illustration by Andrea Ventura
favorite words was “infinitesimal”—if
you want to create a more equal and
peaceable world. “French sanity,” she
concluded, “is becoming endangered.
To say nothing of the rest of Europe.”
Weil is best known as a political phi-
losopher, a revolutionary trade-union
activist, a mystic who devoted her last
years to the search for sacred truth,
and a Jew who turned to Catholicism,
rejecting her heritage. She was also a
classicist, a poet, an occasional sculp-
tor, and the author of an unfinished
play. “Why,” she proclaimed, “have I
not the infinite number of existences I
need?” She was haunted, she wrote, by
the idea of a statue of Justice—a naked
woman standing, knees bent from fa-
tigue, hands chained behind her back,
leaning toward scales holding two
equal weights in its unequal arms, so
that it inclined to one side. Despite the
weight and weariness, the woman’s face
would be serene. As so often in Weil’s
writing, it is almost impossible not to
read this image as a reference to her-
self, although her political and moral
vision always looked beyond her own
earthly sphere of existence, which she
held more or less in steady contempt.
She may have been sculpting herself in
her dreams, but her template was uni-
versal. Justice was for all or for none.
The fact that Justice was a woman
was not incidental. According to Sim-
one Petrément, her biographer and one
of her closest friends, Weil’s mother
told her that killing to prevent a rape
was the one exception she made to the
commandment against murder. Much
later, she took the image of a young
girl refusing—with an “upsurge” of her
whole being—to be forced into prosti-
tution as the model of a true politics.
Antigone and Electra were Weil’s her-
oines, both belonging to the Greek lin-
eage in which she sourced the cultural
values she most cherished in the mod-
ern Western world. (She translated cen-
tral passages from Sophocles’ plays.)
Antigone in particular she returned to
at the end of her life, for her appeal to
an unwritten law that transcends nat-
ural rights—which, as she saw it, al-
ways sink to the individual claim. The
Greeks, she insisted, had no notion of
rights: “They contented themselves
with the name of justice.”
A s Robert Zaretsky recounts in his
recent life study, The Subversive Si-
mone Weil, Albert Camus was one of
the earliest devotees of her writing. In
a special issue of the Nouvelle revue
française dedicated to Weil in 1949,
he described justice as the principle to
which the whole of her work was “con-
secrated.” (He recognized that for her,
this had been a spiritual calling.) Jus-
tice, then, should “surely guarantee her
a place in the first rank,” a prize that
she had so “stubbornly refused” when
alive. Camus did all he could to fulfill
his own prediction. As editor of the se-
ries Espoir at Gallimard, he published
seven of her works, tracing the arc of
her writing from La condition ouvrière,
her acclaimed account of the human
degradation of factory work, which she
experienced firsthand in 1934–1935,
to her final extended essay, The Need
for Roots, a meditation on the evil of
displacement precipitated by her own
exile from France during the war.
Her output was prodigious, and she
never stopped writing even though,
apart from a scattering of essays, not
one of her works appeared during her
lifetime. She was convinced that she
would be forgotten, a prospect that
did not appear to dismay her. In one
of her last letters to her parents in July
1943, she wrote of her inner certainty
that she contained within her a deposit
of pure gold that should be passed on
but most likely wouldn’t be: “This does
not distress me at all.” Weil was a refu-
gee—she described herself as an exile
wherever she found herself. Together
with her parents, she had fled the im-
minent Nazi occupation of France to
New York, having first traveled to Mar-
seilles on the last train to leave Paris on
June 13, 1940.
She felt she had deserted her people,
and almost on arrival in America in-
sisted on going to London in the face
of her parents’ objections, in the sole
hope of joining the forces of resistance
across the Channel. Her final letters,
brimming with optimism, kept her par-
ents completely in the dark about her
rapid physical decline. In April 1943
she had been admitted to Middlesex
Hospital with tuberculosis, from which
she had no chance of recovering since
she refused to eat any more than the
rations her compatriots were receiving
in France. “Hope,” she instructed them
in one of her final letters, “but in mod-
eration.” She was thirty-four years old
when she died.
After her death, her parents devoted
themselves to a painstaking transcrip-
tion of her work, including every word
of the outpourings of her final months,
which contained some of her most im-
portant writing. According to her niece
Sylvie Weil, born in the last year of
Simone’s life, the question of owner-
ship—where the reams of paper should
be housed, how they should be pub-
lished—effectively tore her surviving
family to pieces. (Sylvie was the daugh-
ter of Simone’s only brother, the distin-
guished mathematician André Weil.)
“You have,” she reproaches Simone in
her memoir, “bequeathed these ruined
faces to me.”
As Zaretsky points out, there is no
one thread running through her writ-
ings, a difficulty he responds to by
picking out the five themes he consid-
ers most representative of her thought:
affliction, attention, resistance, roots,
and “the good, the bad, and the godly”
(the last referring to her version of mys-
ticism, in which spiritual apprehension
was the one true source of a viable
ethical life). This has the advantage of
focus but, as he is aware, compartmen-
talizes her ideas, creating distinctions
and separations whereas, more often
The New York Review
than not, her concepts slide into and
out of one another in a sometimes cre-
ative, sometimes tortured amalgam or
blur. Weil’s writing is like an intricate
tapestry with multiple strands—pull on
one and it can feel as if the whole thing
will fall apart in your hands.
Nonetheless, the absence of “justice”
from the list strikes me as a strange
omission in what I read for the most part
as an informative and attentive book.
Weil’s heart was set on justice. It was her
refrain. A recurring principle in pretty
much every stage of her writing from
start to finish, the concept of justice ren-
ders futile any attempt—though many
have tried—to separate Weil the mystic
from Weil the activist, or Weil the lover
of God from Weil the factory worker,
who felt that the only way to understand
the wrongs of the modern world was to
share the brute indignities of manual
labor, which reduced women and men
to cogs in the machines they slaved for.
Weil changed her mind a number of
times, most significantly when she repu-
diated her earlier pacifism after Hitler
invaded Prague in March 1939. By then
she had also lost her faith in Marxism
and in any version of politics grounded
in parties and trade unions, or in what
she increasingly came to see, from the
Hebrews and Romans to Hitler, as the
inevitably totalitarian powers of state;
her unqualified inclusion of the He-
brews in that list is seen by many as the
most compromised and treacherous
component of her writing. But on cer-
tain matters she never falters. Right to
the end, she grappled with the question
of how to conduct oneself in the service
of a more equitable world. “The Chris-
tian (by instinct if not by baptism) who,
in 1943, died in a London hospital be-
cause she would not eat ‘more than her
ration,’” wrote her former pupil Anne
Reynaud-Guérithault in her preface to
Weil’s Lectures in Philosophy, “was the
same person I had known, sharing her
salary in 1933 with the factory-workers
of Roanne.”
Measuring her food portions served
no one, but in both cases Weil was of-
fering up a piece of herself. She was
weighing her actions on the scale of jus-
tice. Far from being a narcissistic act,
as these endeavors are characterized
by her critics (serving her own con-
science or slumming it), Weil’s work
in the factory and on the farm is better
understood as her way of anticipating
the proposition advanced in 1971 by
the legal theorist John Rawls that jus-
tice will be done only when humans are
willing to envisage themselves—or, in
her case, to put herself—in the place
of the disadvantaged and oppressed.
“Only if you believe your place is on
the lowest rung of the ladder,” she
wrote in her Marseille notebook of
1941–1942, “will you be led to regard
others as your equal rather than giving
preference to yourself.” She was not
martyring herself. She was demonstrat-
ing, in her person, a form of universal
accountability. “I envied her,” Simone
de Beauvoir stated, “for having a heart
that could beat right across the world.”
Weil wanted to be in the thick of
it. As a ten-year-old in Paris she had
joined a demonstration of workers
demanding shorter hours and higher
wages; a year later, she was back on the
streets on behalf of the unemployed. In
the 1930s, while teaching philosophy at
the lycée in Le Puy in the Haute-Loire,
January 13, 2022
she organized and led a demonstration
on behalf of unemployed workers who
had been given the thankless task of
breaking stones in the city square. She
was charged with incitement and threat-
ened with dismissal from her teaching
post. When the committee asked her to
explain why she had been seen in a café
with a worker, she replied, “I refuse to
answer questions about my private life.”
Le Charivari, a Parisian weekly, de-
scribed her as “the Jewess, Mme Weil,”
a “militant of Moscow.” (The episode
came to be known as “the Simone Weil
Affair.”) According to other reports,
the Anti-Christ had arrived in Le Puy
wearing silk stockings and dressed
as a man. Only the second was true.
Weil wouldn’t have been seen dead in
silk stockings. She cross-dressed all
her life. On one occasion she agreed
to accompany her parents to the opera
on condition of being allowed to wear
a specially made tuxedo. Her mother
did her utmost to encourage in her the
“forthrightness” of a boy rather than
the “simpering graces” of a girl. As a
young woman, she signed her letters to
her mother, “Your son, Simon.”
Much later, in a letter from New York
in 1942, Weil explained to an old school
friend, Maurice Schumann, that she
sought hardship and danger only be-
cause the oppression of others pierced
her to the core, “annihilating” her fac-
ulties. Action alone would allow her to
avoid “being wasted by sterile chagrin.”
Today we can only be struck by how far
her final plan—to parachute nurses into
occupied France, where they would risk
their lives in the service of care—mir-
rors what we have witnessed in hospitals
everywhere in response to Covid-19, a
new form of global solidarity that has
been one of the few positive outcomes
of a pandemic that has also laid bare
and exacerbated the world’s inequali-
ties. It was this plan, which she held on
to passionately till the very end, that
led de Gaulle, when he was presented
with it by one of her keenest advocates,
to dismiss Weil as a madwoman. Struck
low by repeated rejection, she felt that
she risked dying of grief (a good reason
not to rush to classify her death as sui-
cide, as many have done, including the
coroner). According to Simone Petré-
ment, no one in London responsible for
her care believed that she wanted to die.
A central question that has vexed
so much political thought becomes
why justice is always so elusive. Weil’s
struggle with this question makes her
a psychologist of human power. “Ev-
eryone,” wrote the Athenian historian
and army general Thucydides in lines
that she quoted more than once, “com-
mands wherever he has the power to
do so.” No one can resist mastery over
others, because the alternative—to be
dominated—is so wretched. “We know
only too well,” the quotation continues,
“that you too, like all the rest, as soon
as you reach a certain level of power,
will do likewise.” (That “you” is ge-
neric and aimed at everyone.) Justice
requires, before anything else, a laying
down of arms, in both senses of the
term. It demands a “supernatural vir-
tue,” Weil comments, because, however
advantaged you might be, it involves
behaving as if the world were equal;
“supernatural” therefore suggests both
inspired by divine grace and requiring
superhuman effort, as if it were almost
too much to ask of anyone.
These reflections on power come in
the midst of her 1942 text Attente de
Dieu, her deepest meditation on God:
“The true God is God conceived as
all-powerful, but as not commanding
everywhere he has the power to do so.”
(This makes God the one exception to
Thucydides’ rule.) In fact, “God causes
this universe to exist, but he consents
not to command it.” Through Creation,
God renounced being “everything.” To
revolt against God because of human
misery is to misrepresent God as a
“sovereign” or tyrant who rules the
world, as opposed to a deity who has
laid down his power. It falls on humans
to create a better world—a form of
freedom, or divine abandonment, or
both.
Most often translated as Waiting for
God, Attente de Dieu might also be
rendered as God’s Expectation; it is
God who is waiting for man to fulfill
this promise. To do so, he must relin-
quish the misguided conviction, cher-
ished by the strong, that the justice of
their cause outweighs that of the weak.
Nothing, we might say, perpetuates
injustice as much as the belief of the
privileged that their privilege is just.
Or, as Weil observes in her Marseille
notebook, “the rich are invincibly led
to believe they are someone.”
In an unstable world, Weil observes
in one of her finest essays, “Person-
hood and the Sacred,” written during
her last months in London, the privi-
leged seek to allay their bad conscience
either by defiance (“It is perfectly fine
that you lack the privileges I possess”)
or through bad faith (“I claim for each
and every one of you an equal share in
the privileges I myself enjoy”). The sec-
ond, she comments, is condescending
and empty; the first is simply odious.
If US conservatism seems unapolo-
getic in affirming the former, British
conservatism has historically oscillated
between the two. Today the idea of
“checking your privilege” has entered
the public lexicon, to be met with a bar-
rage of criticism—as if keeping an eye
on your privilege somehow made it all
OK (hardly what Weil had in mind).
Weil’s concept of “decreation” is
undoubtedly her most difficult. In the
moment of creation, God shed bits and
pieces of himself; this made human be-
ings the debris of a gesture that leaves
neither God nor humans complete.
In one of the strongest, earliest com-
mentaries on Weil, Susan Taubes, best
known for her 1969 novel Divorcing,
unravels Weil’s proposition that human
existence is “our greatest crime against
God.” Man must “decreate” himself
in order to restore to God what he has
lost. For Taubes, Weil has created a
negative theodicy: “The dark night of
God’s absence is itself the soul’s contact
with God.” Suffering must be intolera-
ble for the “cords that attach us to the
world break.” As Taubes sees it, Weil
is finally offering as grave an insult to
those who suffer as those who prom-
ise they will be rewarded in heaven or
that their suffering serves God’s final
purpose.
Weil herself knew she had presented
the world with a spiritual conundrum
that she had failed to solve. “I feel
an ever-increasing sense of devasta-
tion,” she wrote to Schumann some-
time between her arrival in London
in December 1942 and her admission
to Middlesex Hospital in April 1943,
“both in my intellect and in the centre
of my heart, at my inability to think
with truth at the same time about the
affliction of men, the perfection of God
and the link between the two.” She was
mortified.
In the libretto to the opera Decre-
ation, Anne Carson gives the kinder,
poetic rendering of Weil’s dilemma.
For her, Weil is better understood as
making an erotic triangle between
God, herself, and the whole of cre-
ation. As Carson cites Weil, “I am not
the maiden who awaits her betrothed
but the unwelcome third.” In her New
York notebook of 1942, Weil compared
God to an importunate woman cling-
ing to her lover and whispering end-
lessly in his ear: “I love you. I love you.
I love you.” (Like all mystics, her faith
never detracts from the sensuousness
of her writing.) For Carson, Weil, along
with Sappho and Marguerite Porete,
the fourteenth- century French mystic
who was burned at the stake, “had the
nerve to enter a zone of absolute spir-
itual daring” in which the self or ego
dissolves.
This is just one moment in Weil’s
thinking that resonates with psycho-
analysis. Weil had taught Freud’s con-
cepts of repression and the unconscious
in her philosophy classes at the girls’
lycée in Roanne in 1933–1934. What
was “dangerous” (her word) about
Freud’s work, she wrote, was the idea
that purity and impurity can coexist in
the mind: “Thoughts we do not think,
wishes we do not wish in our soul”
(like “wooden horses in which . . . there
are warriors leading an independent
life”). “Are there really in our souls,”
she objected, “thoughts which escape
us?” It would take some time before
she herself would embrace such a radi-
cal disorientation of the ego as the only
possible spiritual and psychic path to
take. “What we believe to be our self
[moi],” she wrote, is as “fugitive” as
“the shape of a wave on the sea.”
None of this detracts one iota from
Weil’s passionate presence in her own
life. “If we are to perish,” she wrote
in her 1934 essay “Oppression and
Liberty,” “let us see to it that we do
not perish without having existed.”
How, Carson asks, can we square her
“dark ideas” with the “brilliant self-
assertiveness of [her] writerly proj-
ect?” “The answer is we can’t.” Carson
considers Weil’s thinking, writing,
and being as the best riposte to her
own afflicted vision. This seems to me
to be more consistent with, and cer-
tainly fairer to, Weil as I read her than
Taubes’s finally uncompromising cri-
tique. However bleak the terrain, noth-
ing, she repeatedly insists, must “be
allowed, far from it, to reduce by one
jot our energy for the struggle.”
At the heart of that struggle was the
most fundamental and cherished form
of mental freedom, which was currently
under threat: “It is often said that force
is powerless to overcome thought,”
she wrote as early as 1934, before the
extent of the danger was fully clear,
“but for this to be true there must be
thought.” It was the reason why, despite
her conversion, she would not enter the
Catholic Church, whose concept of
heresy she found suffocating. The well-
spring of a crushing totalitarianism,
she argued, resides in the use of these
two little words: anathema sit. She re-
fused to be baptized.
In her “Draft for a Statement of
Obligations Toward Human Beings,”
59
which appears to have been one of the
last texts she wrote, Weil makes even
clearer the indissoluble link between
love of God and human obligation.
A truer reality beyond and above this
world escapes every human faculty
except attention and love, but it can
be recognized only by those who bear
equal respect to all human beings, and
“by them alone.” It enjoins on mankind
the “unique and perpetual obligation”
to rectify “all privations of the soul and
of the body likely to destroy or muti-
late the earthly life of any human being
whoever they may be.” Any state whose
doctrine provokes failure toward this
obligation in its citizens is subsisting in
crime.
This turns love of God into something
like a civic task, or at the very least the
sole mode of being through which the
evils of the world can
begin to be understood,
let alone redressed.
Remember, she is now
writing in 1942–1943, in
the midst of World War
II. Hitler’s Germany is
the criminal state she is
talking about. But even
though the full extent of
the Nazi genocide was
not yet known, and she
does allude at moments
to anti-Jewish persecu-
tion, her failure at this
point fully to acknowl-
edge the extent of that
persecution is, by general
consent, unforgivable.
Weil insisted that she
did not qualify as Jewish
under Vichy rule, as she
had neither been raised
or ever identified with
the Jewish faith. In re-
sponse to the Vichy gov-
ernment’s 1940 “Statut
des Juifs,” which she de-
rided, she suggested that
the best response for
Jews would be to assim-
ilate or even disappear.
In perhaps her worst
moment, she implied
that the uprooted Jewish
people were the origin
of uprootedness in the The cover of one of Simone Weil’s notebooks from 1941
world, which comes per-
ilously close to making them the cause
of their own persecution.
Why, Sylvie Weil asks in her mem-
oir, At Home with André and Simone
Weil (2010), could her aunt not see how
her political fervor echoed the ancient
prophets’ zeal? Why was she blind to
the glaring affinity between her own po-
litically charged generosity and the core
Jewish principle tzedakah, or charity, “a
form of justice, a way of restoring bal-
ance”? Her paternal grandmother, Eu-
génie Weil, who had lived by that very
principle, was a devout Jew. Sylvie Weil
thus corrects the view—more or less the
orthodoxy since Petrément’s 1976 biogra-
phy—that Simone was born into a family
of purely secular Jews. In fact, the hos-
tility of Simone’s mother, Selma, toward
her mother-in-law was a constant strain
in the family, filtering down through the
generations. As a young woman, Sylvie
smuggled herself into the library on her
father’s membership card to devour Tal-
mud treatises, Ginzberg’s legends, and
Graetz’s history of the Jews. “You are
doing what my sister would have done,”
André responds when he finds out,
“because she was honest, by and large.”
60
D espite this dark shadow, Weil’s
spiritual journey was far from being
an exit from political life and thought.
Her encounters with God—in her cor-
respondence and notebooks she talks
of three divine visitations—intensify
her earthly commitments, for all the
ruthlessness with which she detaches
them from her Jewish antecedents. If
there was a turning point in her think-
ing, a far better candidate than her
mysticism would be her experience at
the front during the Spanish Civil War,
which is too often dismissed as a bit of
a joke because she had to be rescued by
her parents when she tripped and im-
mersed her leg in a drum of burning oil,
or because, to her credit as I see it, she
was useless at aiming a gun.
In fact, she had every intention of
returning to the front as soon as her
wound had healed, on condition that
her solidarity would not require her
to be complicit with spilled blood.
For Zaretsky this experience hastens
her move away from political engage-
ment. Instead, I suggest, it initiates a
new level of political understanding.
She had already learned from George
Bernanos and others of the atrocities
being carried out on Franco’s veterans
by the insurgents, including the killing
of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been
offered the choice between death and
joining the anti-fascists, which he re-
fused to do, and of a young baker, who
was murdered in front of his father,
who promptly went mad. All of which
led her to recognize fully for the first
time the potential for violence, regard-
less of political affiliation, in everyone:
“As soon as any category of humans is
placed outside the pale of those whose
life has value, nothing is more natural
than to kill them.”
According to Camus, the experience
inflicted on Weil a “serious wound”
that never ceased to bleed. Out of this
moment emerges a sustained commit-
ment to confronting human violence
in order not to fall prey to it. There
is an analogy, Weil insists, between
Germany’s treatment of Europe and
France’s conduct toward its colonies,
which would make victory in World
War II hollow unless decolonization—
to use today’s term—was the result. “I
must confess,” she had written in 1938
to Gaston Bergery, the editor of the
weekly newspaper La Flèche, when she
was still opposed to war against Hitler,
“that to my way of feeling, there would
be less shame for France even to lose
part of its independence than to con-
tinue trampling the Arabs, Indochi-
nese and others underfoot.”
France, like every other nation, had
been thinking only of “carving out for
herself her share of black or yellow
human flesh.” In her 1938 essay on the
colonial problem in the French Empire,
she suggested that it
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
would not be hard to find
a colony ruled by a dem-
ocratic nation imposing
harsher constraints than
those exerted by the
worst totalitarian state
in Europe. This, as she
knew, was a scandal-
ous observation when
preserving democracy
was generally accepted
as a central aim of the
approaching war. But
she was right that a de-
mocracy made up of
opposing parties had
been powerless to pre-
vent the formation of a
party whose aim was the
overthrow of democracy
itself.
For Weil, colonial-
ism was the exertion of
force in its purest form,
uprooting or eradicating
the traditions it meets
in its path, destroying
all traces of indige-
nous histories, wiping
out communities’ own
memories, and then, as
the final insult, deny-
ing the violence it has
wrought. (“Simone Weil
anti- colonialist” is the
title given by her editors
to this section of her
collected works.) What follows, in the
colonizing nations, is a regime of “ig-
norance and forgetting,” a whitewash
of their own past. The problem, Weil
concludes, “is that, as a general rule,
a people’s generosity rarely extends to
making the effort to uncover the injus-
tices committed in their name.”
Weil is treading on dangerous
ground, and not just because of the
analogy she makes between Nazism
and colonization. (Today, though the
connection can be traced back to Han-
nah Arendt and Frantz Fanon, any such
link is routinely met with outrage.) She
is describing what psychoanalysis sub-
sequently theorized as the process of
projection, a way of ridding oneself of
anguish that makes it more or less im-
possible for people, regardless of what
they may have done or what might have
been enacted in their name, to shoul-
der the burden of guilt, whether his-
torical or personal. These lines from
her 1942 essay “Forms of the Implicit
Love of God,” written on the eve of
leaving France, read almost as if they
were lifted from the famous Austrian-
British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein:
In so far as we register the evil
and ugliness within us, it horri-
fies us and we reject it like vomit.
Through the operation of transfer-
ence, we transport this discomfort
into the things that surround us.
But these same things, which turn
ugly and sullied in turn, send back
to us, increased, the ill we have
lodged inside them. In this process
of exchange, the evil within us ex-
pands and we start to feel that the
very milieu in which we are living
is a prison.
Weil knew the process of projection
at first hand. Her headaches made her
want to hit others in the head and to
besmirch the whole world with her own
pain. In a strange and most likely un-
intended echo of Freud on the death
drive, Weil argues that death is the
“norm and aim of life.” Only if one rec-
ognizes “with all one’s soul” the frailty
of human life and the mortality of the
flesh, and admits that we are a “mere
fragment of living matter,” will we stop
killing. The resonances are as political
as they are personal and intimate, not
least for nations on the cusp of victory.
In her 1940 essay “On the Origins of
Hitlerism,” she wrote that “the vic-
tory of those defending by means of
arms a just cause, is not necessarily,
a just victory.” She was pleading with
the Allies, when the moment arrived,
not to disarm Germany by force. The
only way to avoid doing so would be for
the victors—“allowing that this is our
destiny”—to “accept for themselves
the transformation they would have
imposed on the vanquished.” (Not, we
might say, the customary path taken
by nations that win wars.) Weil is pro-
posing a radical identification across
enemy lines, which requires each of
us to be willing to see ourselves in the
least likely or hoped-for place. This is
a version of Rawls once more, but now
with a psychodynamic gloss and inter-
national, military, colonial reach. To
mention Beauvoir again, it is Weil’s
heart beating right across the globe.
Why has this psychodynamic aspect of
her politics received so little attention?
In these moments Weil is proposing
a new ethic, one that goes far beyond
the idea of attention, or being seized
by the other, which Zaretsky rightly
picks out as one key to her thought. It
is more like magical thinking, because,
by giving over one’s very being to the
wretched of the earth (“pauper, refu-
gee, black, the sick, the re-offender”),
you are flipping the natural revulsion
humans feel toward misery—natural,
that is, for those who have been even
minimally spared. You are turning
disgust into a willing and tender em-
brace. “It is as easy,” Weil suggested,
“to direct the mind willingly towards
affliction as it is for a dog, with no prior
training, to walk straight into a fire
and allow itself to be burnt to death.”
An “upsurge” of energy “transports”
you into the other. You lose yourself
in allowing the other to be (contrary
to power-grabbing, which expands to
fill all the available space). In the final
analysis, with the odds piled against it,
only such a move makes it possible to
recognize the fundamental equality
and identity of all people, which means
it is also the only chance for justice.
It is, then, all the more ironic that the
one leap of identification she herself
The New York Review
seemed incapable of making, the one
form of historic empathy she refused,
was with herself as a Jew.
Weil was going against the grain of
what she believed, at the deepest level,
humankind to be. She was also going
against the grain of her own experi-
ence, her feeling of eternal exile, of
being radically unloved and incapa-
ble of loving herself. In May 1942 she
wrote a long letter to the radical Do-
minican priest Father Perrin. It was her
“spiritual autobiography,” written from
the Aïn-Sebaa refugee camp in Casa-
blanca, where she was waiting for her
transit to New York. It was an outpour-
ing. Whenever anyone speaks to her
without brutality, she explained, she
thinks there must be some mistake. He
was the first person in her life who she
felt had not humiliated her. “You do
not have the same reasons as I have,”
she wrote, “to feel hatred and revulsion
towards me.” “I am the colour of a dead
leaf,” she wrote to him, “like certain
insects.” Weil’s inspiration is sourced
in revulsion, regardless of the love of
those who surrounded her, perhaps
above all that of her mother, whose love
The Roots of Inequality: An Exchange
To the Editors:
In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber
and I present a new history of humanity,
based on the latest findings in our fields of
archaeology and anthropology. These find-
ings challenge long-held assumptions about
the origins of inequality, the nature of free-
dom and slavery, the roots of private prop-
erty, and the relationship between society
and the state. They present fresh opportu-
nities for a dialogue between archaeology,
anthropology, and philosophy, but Kwame
Anthony Appiah in his review of the book
prefers to challenge the empirical basis of
our work [NYR, December 16, 2021]. He
argues that we distort our sources in order
to present an artificially rosy picture of our
species’ past and its prospects for greater
freedom.
For example, Appiah is dissatisfied with
our account of the Ukrainian “mega-sites,”
huge prehistoric settlements that exhibit
no evidence for temples, palaces, central
administration, rich burials, or other signs
of social inequality. We note that popu-
lation levels are “estimated in the many
thousands per mega-site, and probably well
over 10,000 in some cases.” Appiah alleges
that these figures are inflated, based on a
“discredited maximalist model.” He cites
archaeologist John Chapman in support.
According to Appiah, Chapman argues that
the mega-sites were not cities at all, but sea-
sonally occupied festival grounds.
In fact, Chapman proposes three models
of habitation, ranging from seasonal to rel-
atively permanent habitation. He discounts
none of them and argues that—whichever
one adopts—the mega-sites can indeed be
considered “cities,” and strikingly egalitar-
ian ones at that. Far from adopting a “max-
imalist model,” the population figures we
give in The Dawn of Everything are more
conservative than those offered by some
other archaeologists, which range above
40,000. Appiah has misrepresented our
position, and Chapman’s, to create a false
impression.
Elsewhere, Appiah alleges that we mis-
characterize the work of Jonathan Mark
Kenoyer, an expert on the Bronze Age civ-
ilization of the Indus Valley. According to
Appiah, Kenoyer argues that the ancient
site of Mohenjo-daro was “likely governed
as a city-state,” something we dispute in
January 13, 2022
Selma herself acknowledged had been
too much for her daughter to tolerate.
Such revealing moments are often
read as indicating a level of despair
or mental torment that disfigures her
judgment. I lost count of the epithets
that circulate freely in relation to Weil
in Zaretsky’s book, even though he is at
pains to temper and on occasion even
retract them: “morbidity,” “fetishiz-
ing,” “insufferable,” “inhuman,” “exas-
perating,” “the ravings of a lunatic,” or
“cursed by the inability to stop think-
ing”—that’s just a selection. (How
many of these would pass with refer-
ence to any male thinker?) Instead,
I would argue that it is her abjection,
and above all her willingness to know
and to accept it as her own, that propel
her to the heights of her ambition for
spiritual grace, mental freedom, and a
fairer world. I, for one, can only marvel
at the hill she had to climb.
A final clue as to how she managed it
is to be found in Weil’s way with words.
I always come away from her work
with a sense of her dexterity or even
playfulness, as if writing were the one
place where she could be most at ease
The Dawn of Everything. We are hardly
the first to do so. Another expert, Gregory
Possehl, argued that the Indus cities were
organized on more egalitarian lines, and the
most recent scholarship comes down firmly
on his side. We don’t cite Kenoyer for his
views on political organization, but for
his work on urban craft specialization. So
what is Appiah’s objection? Is he saying we
cannot cite Kenoyer’s insights on any one
aspect of Indus archaeology without sub-
scribing to all his other views as well? Does
Appiah’s own citation of Alvin Goldman
on causal theories of knowledge grant us
license to assume he agrees with Goldman
on social epistemology?
With regard to Mesopotamia, Appiah
accuses us of drifting, in the space of a
hundred pages, from a negative character-
ization of Uruk’s early phases—as lacking
evidence for monarchy—to their positive
characterization as examples of collective
self-rule. He forgets the ground we cover
in those pages, which review diligent work
on the topic by Assyriologists, ancient his-
torians, and archaeologists. What it shows
is that, even in later periods of monarchy
and empire, Mesopotamian cities exhibited
a remarkable degree of self-governance
through neighborhood assemblies, local
wards, and councils. Where does Appiah
think those forms of urban self-government
came from? Would he have us believe the
inhabitants of the earliest cities had no
knowledge of them?
With reference to Teotihuacan, in the
Valley of Mexico, Appiah suggests that
few archaeologists would countenance the
views of art historian Esther Pasztory about
the city’s political structure. But the oppo-
site is true. The latest archaeological studies
vindicate Pasztory’s view that Teotihuaca-
nos rejected dynastic personality cults and
built a society where wealth, resources, and
high-quality housing were distributed in a
more equal fashion. We could have listed
every dissenting opinion, but then—as we
say in the book—we are trying to strike a
balance:
Had we tried to outline or refute every
existing interpretation of the material
we covered, this book would have been
two or three times the size, and likely
would have left the reader with a sense
that the authors are engaged in a con-
and loving toward herself. By her own
account, she is a creature of analogy,
starting with perhaps the most vexed of
them all—between Hitler and ancient
Jerusalem, or Nazism and colonial-
ism. Analogies are deceptive (trom-
peuses), she wrote in 1939, but they
are her “sole guide.” Once you start
looking for them, they are everywhere
in her work—remember dogs walking
into fires, unconscious thoughts like
warriors concealed in wooden horses,
and God as a clinging female lover. To
which we could add a dog barking be-
side the prostrate body of his master
lying dead in the snow, to convey how
futile calling out dishonesty and in-
justice can feel. Or skin peeled from a
burning object it has stuck to, in order
to evoke the Frenchman forced to tear
his soul from his country after the 1940
fall of France. Or freedom of thought
with no real thinking, compared to “a
child without meat asking for salt.”
Nothing exists, Weil states, without its
analogy in numbers (her bond with her
brother was profound).
Visceral and unworldly, Weil’s
analogies push at the limits, giving voice
stant battle with demons who were in
fact two inches tall.
Appiah presents as novel our “claim” that
the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, in Turkey,
lacks evidence of central authority. In fact,
this is the consensus among archaeologists.
Ian Hodder, longtime site director, charac-
terizes Çatalhöyük as a fiercely egalitarian
community that, despite its large size, held
inequality at bay for a thousand years. If
our agenda—as Appiah insists—were to
find some “primordial utopia” among our
Neolithic ancestors, surely we would have
embraced this conclusion. In fact, we ques-
tion it, pointing out the likelihood of sea-
sonal variations in the social organization
of the town. According to Appiah, we see
in Çatalhöyük a “gynocentric society.” Not
so. We draw attention to the importance
of women’s knowledge and roles in these
early Neolithic societies, but that’s hardly
the same thing.
M ost of the archaeological ground cov-
ered in The Dawn of Everything lies be-
yond the scope of Appiah’s review, as does
nearly all of the anthropology. His crit-
icisms of our intellectual history rest on a
surprisingly naive and unfounded expecta-
tion that what academics write will neces-
sarily mirror their personal politics. “Learn
to respect, and love, and be intimate with,
a man of a far distant stage of life, and you
see then how very deep down is the wide
platform of elemental feeling and thought
which you have together in common,”
wrote the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in
1898. Petrie was also a fervent eugenicist.
Appiah claims we have a thesis, that Eu-
ropeans, before the Enlightenment, lacked
the concept of social (in)equality. In fact,
we give a whole series of examples to the
contrary. The question we ask is more spe-
cific: How did a consensus form among Eu-
ropean intellectuals that human beings—in-
nocent of civilization—lived in “societies of
equals,” such that it made sense to inquire
as to “the origins of inequality”? Appiah’s
evocations of Gregory the Great, Thomas
Müntzer, Montaigne, and the rest are be-
side the point, because—while all express
powerful sentiments of equality and in-
equality—none root those ideas in a search
for its origins.
to something painful or something that
eludes understanding. God loves not
as I love, but as an emerald “is” green.
The fools in Shakespeare (notably the
one in King Lear), she writes to her
parents in one of her last letters, “are
the only characters to speak the truth”:
“Can’t you see the affinity, the essential
analogy between these fools and me?”
Analogy is a spiritual principle, since it
is only by means of “analogy and trans-
ference” that our attachment to partic-
ular human beings can be raised to the
level of universal love. Weil has often
been criticized for the unyielding tenac-
ity of her judgments, but this wrongly
tips the scales, ignoring the risks she
takes. At her best, Weil contains mul-
titudes; it is a miracle, she insists, that
thoughts are expressible given the myr-
iad combinations that they make. In
the end, spiritual, ethical, and political
generosity require you to reach, with-
out limits, beyond yourself. I can think
of no other writer in the Western canon
who pushes us so far off the edge of the
world while keeping us so firmly, and
resolutely, attached to the ground be-
neath our feet. Q
The notion of a primordial society of
equals may have pre-Enlightenment roots
in Europe, notably in the constitutional
antiquarianism of the seventeenth century
(brilliantly discussed by J. G. A. Pocock in
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal
Law). Jurists appealed to the customary
freedoms of a preliterate past as a legal foil
to royal absolutism. But Appiah makes no
mention of that, or whether he thinks such
juridical concepts were already extended
beyond specific “peoples” and “nations”
to humankind in general. Perhaps because
he knows the answer. They were not, or at
least, not yet.
Rousseau’s answer, in 1754, to the novel
question “What is the origin of inequality?”
was, we argue, a synthesis between ideals of
human freedom—shaped by Native Ameri-
can critiques of European society—and the
concept of history as stages of technological
progress, which was then gaining ground
through the writings of A. R. J. Turgot. The
just-so story told by Rousseau gave us our
modern concept of civilization, whereby
each step toward cultural advancement—
the invention of agriculture, metallurgy,
writing, cities, and the arts, even philoso-
phy itself—came with a loss of freedoms.
It’s a familiar and deeply ambivalent story.
As we show in The Dawn of Everything, it
is also at odds with the facts of modern ar-
chaeology and anthropology.
Appiah finds our reading of Rousseau’s
Discourse on Inequality “perplexing.”
How, he asks, could Rousseau promulgate
the indigenous critique of European soci-
ety—with its passionate advocacy of free-
dom—and smother it at the same time? But
surely this is precisely why myths endure.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, myths
take root in the human imagination by evok-
ing profound oppositions (“Man is born free
and everywhere he is in chains”) and then
work to mediate those contradictions. “We
will not find our future in our past,” writes
Appiah. But myths are not just about our
past. They work in the present to circum-
scribe our understanding of human possibil-
ities. In The Dawn of Everything, we show
that conventional tellings of the broad sweep
of human history are one such myth, incul-
cating a profound sense of pessimism about
the prospects for change in our societies.
Archaeology, like all historical recon-
struction, is partly a work of imagination. But
61
it is constrained by evidence, and under-
pinned by scientific principles of discovery,
interpretation, and refutation. Occasion-
ally, it has the power to challenge myths
and overthrow dogma. The strength of the
past lies precisely there, in its unpredictabil-
ity, its capacity to surprise and upset con-
ventional wisdom. Today the information
available to us, even for remote periods
of the human past, reveals a kaleidoscope
of social possibilities undreamed of in the
philosophies of Hobbes and Rousseau, and
also, it seems, in the philosophy of Appiah.
David Wengrow
Professor of Comparative Archaeology
University College London
United Kingdom
Kwame Anthony Appiah replies:
The Dawn of Everything is a mammoth un-
dertaking and, inevitably, it characterizes
archaeological research its authors know
only through the scholarly literature they
have consulted—through the authorities
they enlist. They’re entitled to sift through
the evidence and present their own conclu-
sions; I agree with Wengrow on this. The
difficulty arises when what they present as
a summary of the archaeology is at variance
with the scholarship they cite. “Experts
have largely come to agree that there’s no
evidence for . . . anything like what we would
recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civiliza-
tion of the Indus Valley,” they say. Then
we turn to the source material and find
that experts are quite divided on the topic.
My point was not that The Dawn of Every-
thing mischaracterizes Kenoyer’s judgments
about Mohenjo-daro’s political structure
but that it doesn’t characterize them at all. I
was observing, that is, a pattern about which
views get a hearing. Wengrow says that “the
most recent scholarship” supports Possehl,
but the paper he has in mind—a fascinating
theoretical overview by Adam S. Green,
which indeed stresses the evidence for egal-
itarianism—gingerly dissents both from Ke-
noyer’s “managerial elite” model and from
Possehl’s “stateless paradigm.” Green’s
paper, exquisitely provisional, makes clear
that the nature of Indus politics is a topic of
contention, not consensus.
The Dawn of Everything likewise sug-
gests that archaeological research has
converged on the view that Teotihuacan,
starting around 300 AD, embraced egali-
tarianism and collective governance and re-
jected overlords, even “strong leaders.” It’s
what “all the evidence suggests.” We hear
that “other scholars, eliminating virtually
every other possibility, arrived at similar
conclusions”; we hear that its self-conscious
egalitarianism is affirmed by a “general
consensus among those who know the site
best.” But only a strategy of bifurcation
would force us to say that the place was ei-
ther purely autocratic or purely collective.
What I observed was not that few archae-
ologists would countenance Pasztory’s view
but that we get no sense that many have
reached different conclusions.
Those archaeologists include the author-
ities The Dawn of Everything cites in sup-
port of Pasztory, such as René Millon, who
cataloged evidence of hierarchy and milita-
rism in Teotihuacan, and thought its gov-
ernance might have become oligarchical;
and George Cowgill, who explicitly demurs
from Pasztory’s “utopian” account and pro-
poses Renaissance Venice, a republic under
a doge, as a model. The epigrapher David
Stuart says that, in the late fourth and early
fifth century, someone represented by an
owlish glyph was the king of Teotihuacan,
while other archaeologists conjecture that
there might have been an elite assembly
or aristocracy rather than a monarch; this
glyph might have designated an office
rather than an officeholder. Recent discov-
eries have rekindled such debates. Again,
Graeber and Wengrow are free to reach
their own conclusion as to whether Teoti-
huacan was “a utopian experiment in urban
life,” but it cannot be said to represent a
professional consensus.
62
As for the “at least seven centuries of
collective self-rule” that Uruk enjoyed,
per Graeber and Wengrow, is the proof
really to be found in the wards and coun-
cils of the monarchical era? Or does the
very coexistence of monarchs and councils
suggest that we may be building castles, or
communes, in the air? I don’t say that Uruk
did or didn’t enjoy those seven centuries of
“collective self-rule,” but unless the term is
being used in a very permissive way, I strug-
gle to see how this possibility qualifies as a
settled fact.
With respect to Çatalhöyük, my discus-
sion didn’t take up The Dawn of Every-
thing’s broad political characterization of
the place. It took up what inferences we
should draw from the existence of female
figurines, and the putative absence of equiv-
alent male ones. Did such representations
demonstrate “a new awareness of wom-
en’s status”? Graeber and Wengrow never
use the term “gynocentric” with respect to
Çatalhöyük; they use, in this context, the
term “matriarchal” and devote a few helpful
paragraphs to defining this term in a special
way that sidesteps the “-archy,” the con-
nection with rulership. (I avoided the term
“matriarchal” because, without their careful
definition, it risks implying a form of rul-
ership The Dawn of Everything disputes.)
Graeber and Wengrow, following Hodder,
find it obvious that the female figurines,
with their pendulous breasts and avoirdu-
pois, could have nothing to do with eros or
fertility but are “quite possibly matriarchs
of some sort, their forms revealing an inter-
est in female elders.” Here, questions arise.
One is whether we’d weigh the evidence dif-
ferently had The Dawn of Everything men-
tioned that most Çatalhöyük figurines that
archaeologists have cataloged are of quad-
rupeds (or their horns).
Why does this matter? Because when it
comes to a certain class of cases—prehis-
toric cities that they think lacked a ruling
or managerial elite—Graeber and Wen-
grow appear to cherish their thesis a little
too much and, like overprotective parents,
tend to keep it away from the chilly drafts
of adverse evidence. Which brings us to
those Trypillia mega-sites. In a 2017 article,
John Chapman methodically challenges
the view of them as “permanent, long-term
settlements comprising many thousands of
people,” a view he divides into a maximal-
ist and a standard model. Drawing on evi-
dence from his work in Nebelivka and cal-
culations based on available evidence about
the other sites, he concludes that
the only logical response is to replace
the standard model (not to mention the
maximalist model) with a version of the
minimalist model that envisions a less
permanent, more seasonal settlement
mode, or a smaller permanent settle-
ment involving coeval dwelling of far
fewer people.
Perhaps there was a small year-round pop-
ulation; perhaps these were sites where
“hundreds of pilgrims or festival-goers”
showed up in a seasonal way; perhaps both
occurred.
In this account, what we’d find on the
mega-sites, even one as expansive as Tal-
janky, aren’t cities—that is, these settle-
ments are remote from the dictionary
definition of a city, from what we readers
understand by the word, and, as best as I
can judge, from what Graeber and Wen-
grow mean by it. They say most archae-
ologists will call “any densely inhabited
settlement” of 150 or 200 hectares a city;
yet one thing Chapman is confident about
is that the “mega-sites were low-density
settlements.”
Now, archaeologists sometimes use the
word “city” differently; the idea is that if a
settlement, including one that looks like a
hamlet, is the biggest thing around, it might
function as a city. A hundred people living
in face-to-face autarky, a seasonal festival
site like Burning Man: even these could, in
the right circumstances, count as cities. The
paper Wengrow cites, though it pointedly
declines to define “city,” sets aside absolute
scale as a prerequisite. For Graeber and
Wengrow, however, a central question is
whether lots of people can live in a dense
settlement without rules and rulers. That’s
why they say cities often emerged as “civic
experiments on a grand scale.” In their con-
cept of a city, absolute scale can’t be set
aside.
Nor should we set aside the vigorous me-
dieval arguments about the nature and ori-
gins of social inequality, as when The Dawn
of Everything states that in the Middle Ages
“‘social equality’—and therefore, its oppo-
site, inequality—simply did not exist as a
concept.” Many thought, as Pope Gregory
did, that people, in their primordial, Edenic
state, were equal in their liberty. Then
some act of human sinfulness left us with
masters and serfs. For Gregory, Christ’s re-
demptive sacrifice was meant to bring back
our original freedom. Such arguments had
real-world reverberations. “When Adam
delved and Eve span/Who was then the
gentleman?” was an English saying that the
priest John Ball declaimed amid the 1381
Peasants’ Revolt, calling for a primordial
classless society to be restored by force.
Wengrow’s cautions about “personal”
politics are well taken; Lévi-Strauss’s
emerging conservatism is no key to his
thought. By contrast, the political tenets
Lewis Henry Morgan espoused within the
book that entrenched social evolution-
ism were integral to his intellectual vision.
Thorstein Veblen’s theory of predatory
and productive activities seamlessly con-
nected his prehistory to his politics. And
so it goes; we would do the great James C.
Scott, whose studies have been invaluable
to people from a range of ideological posi-
tions, a disservice to suppose that his politi-
cal vision and his political science belonged
in separate bins.
Yet this procession of caveats, I fear,
risks obscuring The Dawn of Everything’s
real triumphs. It is the work of two remark-
able scholars, and almost every page is en-
ergized by their intelligence, imagination,
and surly sense of mischief. When it comes
to confident claims about dense large-scale
settlements free of rulers or rules (or, for
that matter, the Haudenosaunee attitude
toward commands), readers might well
adopt Gertrude Stein’s mot “Interesting if
true.” But as I hope I made plain, there’s
much more to the book than that. Grae-
ber and Wengrow’s argument against his-
torical determinism—against the alluring
notion that what happened had to have
happened—is itself immensely valuable.
Readers who imagine foragers on the Sah-
linesque model of the San will encounter
foraging societies with aristocrats and slav-
ery, while the book’s account of the Pov-
erty Point earthworks is a riveting study of
collective action. We get an intriguing pro-
posal about the nature of the state. And this
is just to begin a long list of fascinations.
That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities”
emerges vibrantly from these pages.
If readers should be a little cautious—
possibilities may not be probabilities—they
should be much more than a little grateful,
as I am. “This book is mainly about free-
dom,” Graeber and Wengrow tell us, but
it’s also for freedom. I’m glad of that; oddly
enough, freedom needs advocates these
days, and few have been as eloquent.
Letters to the Editor: letters@nybooks.com. All other
correspondence: The New York Review of Books, 435
Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994;
mail@nybooks.com. Please include a mailing address
with all correspondence. We accept no responsibility
for unsolicited manuscripts.
Subscription Services: nybooks.com/customer-service
or The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big
Sandy,TX, 75755-9310, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info.
In the US, call toll-free 800-354-0050. Outside the US,
call 903-636-1101. Subscription rates: US, one year
$99.95; in Canada, $110; elsewhere, $115.
Advertising: To inquire please call 212-757-8070, or
fax 212-333-5374.
Copyright © 2022, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
Nothing in this publication may be reproduced with-
out the permission of the publisher. The cover date of
the next issue will be February 10, 2022.
The Classifieds
The Classifieds
To place an ad or for other inquiries:
email: classified@nybooks.com
tel: (212) 293-1630.
You may also place an ad through our
website at www.nybooks.com/classifieds/
Classified Department
The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson St., Suite 300
New York, NY 10014-3994
All contents subject to Publisher’s approval.
Publisher reserves the right to reject or
cancel, at its sole discretion, any advertising
at any time in The New York Review of Books
or on our website. The advertiser and/
or advertising agency, if any, agree to
indemnify the Publisher against any liability
or expense resulting from claims or suits
based on the contents or subject matter of the
advertisement, including, without limitation,
claims or suits for libel, violation of rights of
privacy, plagiarism, copyright or trademark
infringement, or unauthorized use of the
name, likeness, statement, or work of any
person.
For NYR Boxes only,
send replies to:
55¢
NYR Box Number
The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, Suite 300
New York, NY 10014-3994
Individual fueled by intellectual curiosity, cultural
hedonist, Grecian Urn enthusiast, allergic to online
dating, and no stranger to conversation, candlelight, or
tight elections—
If the above describes you or the person you hope to
meet, then place a personal ad in The New York Review
of Books’s February 24, 2022, Valentine’s Day issue.
Submit your ad by January 13, 2022. We will run the most
inventive personal free of charge, and runners-up will be
offered 50% off regular rates.
E-mail submissions to: Classified@nybooks.com,
15-word minimum, 35-word maximum.
Brevity, after all, is the soul of wit!
PERSONALS
82 YEARS OLD, MANHATTAN WIDOW, able, would like
to meet a male resident to share thoughts. NYR Box 68445.
SF, 65, LOVELY CREATIVE INTERESTING sensual world
traveler would like to curl up with a Renaissance man who
feels like a warm bear, occasionally rising to produce gor-
geous food with great joy. lynnyoga@juno.com.
EXTRA-BRIGHT, GOOD-LOOKING, youthful, humorous,
passionate reader and good conversationalist, left-politics,
mid-70s, seeking similar sort of guy 50–80! Contact me @
julien.gide@outlook.com.
SECURE NYC 60s SWM LOVER OF ART, music, travel,
seeking unconventional woman forty to sixty for adventure
and relationship. kasvc@aol.com.
YOUTHFUL NJ WIDOW, 64, VAXXED, seeks single
JHQWOHPDQWRVKDUHDQGHQMR\%URDGZD\ÀOPV3\UH[FDV-
VHUROHVIDOOIROLDJHDQGGHOLJKWIXOGRJV/HW·VKDYHFRIIHH
NYR Box 68460.
FRENCH PROFESSIONAL NYC vigorous early 60s stably
married seeks equally stably married woman for mutually
safe amitié amoureuse. Sense of humor a necessary ingre-
dient. francoislecomte558@gmail.com.
GAY. LOVING MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER. Curious
Mind. Compassionate soul. Love beautiful, fast cars. Now
drive more carefully. Seeks kindred spirit for companion-
ship and adventure. NYC Area. NYR Box 68465.
I WANT LOVE IN MY LIFE AGAIN. DO YOU? I have a full
life but a special man who makes my heart smile would be
LFLQJ RQ WKH FDNH ,·P D ÀW ZRPDQ GHVLULQJ D ÀW PDQ 
years +) who enjoys NY cultural events, travel, and the
beach. xtmsriberg@me.com.
MIDCOAST MAINE. RECENT WIDOWER, successful re-
WLUHGH[HFXWLYHÀWDFWLYHLQYHVWRUSKLODQWKURSLVWZLWKFRP-
fortable waterfront lifestyle seeks mature woman to share
same. jam35rkd@gmail.com.
MWM SEEKING CONVERSATIONS ZLWK 0) RU 6) DQ\
age) about life, music, travels, experiences, humor, etc. Email
me and see if we connect. sunshineman234@gmail.com.
I AM A 90-YEAR-OLD MAN looking for a partner for my
next life. If you believe in reincarnation, write me a letter to
Editor@mellenpress.com.
The New York Review
 The Classifieds ,QTXLULHVRUFODVVLÀHG#Q\ERRNVFRP

NYC GAY MAN,:LOOLDPV%$1<8-'<DOH3K'

 INTERNATIONAL RENTALS
140 lbs, athletic, vegan, teetotaler, nonsmoker, classical
music lover, divorced, seeks like-minded and lean man in
NYC for affection and intimacy. See www.danpinello.com.
ATTRACTIVE, SLIM, VIBRANT, late 70s, Manhattan wid-
ow with part-time academic career. After a long happy mar-
riage, I miss the companionship of a gentleman who is kind,
BOOKS
FRANCE, DORDOGNE—3ULYDWHO\ VLWHG EHDXWLIXOO\ UH
stored, 18th-century stone farmhouse. Antiques, modern
amenities, saltwater pool. 28 bucolic acres of woods, mead-
ow, orchards, stream. Charming nearby villages. Sleeps 4.
Weekly. (212) 772-2030; francefarmhouserental@gmail.com;
www.gaurenne.com.
The New York Review is pleased to support
BOOZE HOUNDS! PARTY GIRLS! WHAT-NOTS! This
book is for you! Google The Poetry of Alabaster Bosoms
compiled by Kevin Joy.
SHAKESPEARE AND PUBLIC EXECUTIONS. Charles
Mitchell. 152 pgs. NYRBVRIWFRYHUSULFH7RRUGHU
this organization that challenges institutional
violence imposed on women and transgender
people by the prison industrial complex:
The California Coalition for Women Prisoners
is an abolitionist organization that partners
IXQDQGLQWHOOHFWXDOO\FXULRXV²HDUO\Vberg37707@ mellenpress.com.
gmail.com. 3$5,6 648$5( %(5/,2=³7+ $55 Fiber+, 3BR/
with people in women’s prisons to change
%WK EHDXWLIXO IXOOÁRRU FRQGR WK Á HOHYDWRU www conditions of confinement and the criminal
NYC WOMAN SEEKS MSW,\HVWKDW·VPDOHVRFLDOZRUN
er, 60-plus, to share enjoyment, outings, and affection in
1<& RU /RQJ ,VODQG·V (DVW (QG ,·P VOLPÀWDWWUDFWLYH 
yo, a longtime food/literature professional with close MSW
IULHQGV3OHDVHEHHPSDWKLFDQGNLQGZLWKDVHQVHRIKXPRU
mswmsw221@gmail.com.
SDULVÁDWXFRP7HO legal system. We publish The Fire Inside
newsletter which is available on our website,
PARIS—MARAIS. Renovated 17th-century, tri-level, top- www.womenprisoners.org, and can be
ÁRRUFRXUW\DUGDSDUWPHQW&HQWUDOTXLHWH[SRVHGEHDPV
KDUGZRRG ÁRRUV ÀUHSODFH IXOO\ HTXLSSHG 1RQVPRNHUV
requested by mail if you write to CCWP, 4400
Week/Month. (206) 723-6538; www.acrossthewater.net. Market St., Oakland, CA 94608.

GAY 27-YEAR-OLDVHHNVPDWXUHPDQLQ1<&IRU ST GERMAINODVWÁRRUDJUHHDEO\IXUQLVKHGYLHZHOHYDWRU

romance, tenderness, and adventure. Me: self-reliant, bud-
ding Francophile, Chobani addict, warm-hearted, well-read.
nicusit3@gmail.com. THERAPEUTIC SERVICES
You: funny, avuncular, preferably bearded. invisiblelilacs@
gmail.com.
CONTESTS POISE VS PAIN: 'HYHORS '\QDPLF 3RVWXUH EHWWHU$7EH
LQJ³$OH[DQGHU 7HFKQLTXH (OL]DEHWK +XUZLWW &HUWLÀHG
$1,000 AND PUBLICATION for best script and solo per- Teacher. www.betteratbeing.com.
PERSONAL SERVICES IRUPDQFHYLGHRDERXWWKHOLIHRIRQHSHUVRQHJ-HDQQH
G·$UF)RULQIRUPDWLRQFRQWDFWEditor@mellenpress.com. USE YOUR BRAIN TO HELP YOUR BODY! Live Online
DATE SMART. Join the introduction network for single )HOGHQNUDLV &ODVVHV DQG 2Q'HPDQG 3URJUDPV ZLWK
graduates and faculty of the Ivies, Stanford, and other ex- Feldenkrais Trainer David Zemach-Bersin. Join us online
Billy and the Ants
cellent schools. www.rightstuffdating.com. for “Liberate Your Mood” this January. Free Intro Class!

&$//'$1,(//(·6&+$7/,1( All credit cards and debit



 

Billy and the Fairy

Billy and the Bulldozer
www.feldenkraisaccess.com/liberate-mood.

Billy and the Unicorn

FDUGV DFFHSWHG 3HUVRQDO DQG SULYDWH GLVFUHHW FRQYHUVD
tions. (773) 935-4995.
ANNOUNCES $5,000 PRIZE Billy and the Spacemen :5,7(5·66(59,&(6
in open competition for essays Billy and the Wizard DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR. Top 10 New England. “Sharp-
DATING FOR BOOK LOVERS. Find a date that loves Billy and the Pond Vikings HVW ,PSURYHPHQW (YHU 6HHQµ 0DVWHU 6W\OLVW 3URIHVVRU
books. Join free. www.booklovers.dating.
about Marc Jampole’s novel, The Billy and the Time Skateboard poet, captain. susu@susanschmidt.net; www.susanschmidt
Brothers Silver. All essays submitted Billy and the Talking Plant .net; www.the-efa.org/memberinfo/m-susan-schmidt-13097.
EXCELLENT MASSAGE BY EVA . . . Incall & Outcall. Billy and the Magic Midget
Foreveryounghappy85@gmail.com.
are eligible for $300 honorarium if Billy and the Flying Saucer EXPERIENCED GERMAN RESEARCHER, 3K' DX
published in an eligible journal. Owl Billy and the Withc thor of two books, assists you in your research, especially
Billy in Dinosaur City on things German or Russian, but not only that. info@
Canyon will publish finalist essays research-for-authors.com.
in an anthology in 2023. Final judge 978-1-9409-8348492 • Paper, $7.95 •
83 Pages • Humor I EDIT FICTION, NONFICTION, MEMOIR, and poetry man-
is David Finkle, novelist and critic. uscripts. Sixty books I edited have been published in the
No-cost entries must be emailed to Available on Amazon last eight years. Free consultation. www.wyncooper.com;
wyncooper@gmail.com.
silver@owlcanyonpress.com before
the deadline of May 31, 2022.




 

TIME TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIR? Ghostwriting by New
York Times best-selling author-biographer. (917) 673-6341;
For more information and  



www.jackieaseditor.com.

complete rules: 



Follow NYR TYPING/PROOFREADING: :KHQ \RX GRQ·W QHHG DQ
www.owlcanyonpress.com/silver editor, just good typing and professional proofreading–
on Social Media! 
#$ "
 &
#$
grammar, spelling, punctuation, consistency corrections
%"




LQFOXGHG)ULHQGO\VHUYLFHVLQFH06:RUGW\SHZULWHU
handwritten, audio accepted. Medical terminology specialty.
$

#$
 '

MISCELLANEOUS Free brochure. Will type sample pages of your manuscript
@nybooks PHILANTHROPIC FUNDING SOUGHT for pursuing ideas


 %+#
## 
$

&
$
$

#

free. (800) 538-8206. wordstation@comcast.net.

and strategies that collectively may represent our best hope

for saving the planet. www.ecoideaman.com.
 &
( %
%$"
FURNITURE WANTED
$
&

$
$

facebook/nybooks ROBERTLAMONT.COM. Download the parables or the mir- 

%#
BUYING MID CENTURY
DFOHVRI-HVXVRUERWK.-93D\SDORobertLamont.com. %#

 "!(
DESIGN FURNITURE
# &"#
(
" '
1950s–1970s Danish, French, Italian Modern,
@nybooks WANTED: Someone with a rich audible voice to read to a
VPDOO FLUFOH RI VLJKWLPSDLUHG VHQLRUV ELZHHNO\ RQ 1<&·V 
#$"
"  #$#
Herman Miller, Knoll, Memphis.
Noted designers sought: Eames, Wegner, Juhl,
UES. readrenderer@gmail.com.
" 

""
) %$!" & 
#
'
Nakashima, Ponti, Noguchi.
#
$"$*
Open Air Modern (718) 383-6465
MARKETPLACE info@openairmodern.com
ADVICE SERVICE 


 
LOOKING FOR THE UNFILTERED TRUTH? Send Mai
your questions about your relationships at home, school,
work, and more at PDLWKHXQÀOWHUHGWUXWK#JPDLOFRP INCREASE AFFECTION Thoughts and Visions
a collection of short, insightful, essays, plus sketches
TELL YOUR STORY
ARTS Created by from visions had between sleep and wakening. and share it with
Winnifred Cutler,
INTERVIEWS WITH ARTISTS AND WRITERS. Can the Ph.D. in biology from
Nostalgia for the Avant-Garde the readers of
truths of nature be rendered only through falsehoods? Read a collection of short short stories of a new type. The New York
our new essay on photographer Sharon Stepman, “Through
U. of Penn, post-doc
Stanford. Genius Without Genius
the Magic Mirror.” www.LanguageAndPhilosophy.com. Review of Books
Co-discovered human autobiography of an American original: jazz musician
$87+25·648(5< pheromones in 1986 and short-story writer in youth, then manager of a doc-
umentation dept. in early Silicon Valley, then researcher The Independent
WANTED: SAVVY AGENT OR MANAGER to replace late Effective for 74% in
outside of academia while living in Berkeley, CA.
agent. Viable new scripts ready for market. Email: scripts@ two 8-week studies, Press Listing showcases
susannahtalley.com. 68% in 3rd study. thoughtsandvisions.com new and notable books
Author: John Franklin
AGENT WANTED to represent 30-year-experienced jour-
nalist/author who focuses on social injustice, race, and
PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 johnfranklin6364@cs.com
from independent presses
HQYLURQPHQWDOLVVXHV3UHIHUDJHQWIDPLOLDUZLWKSXEOLVKLQJ
OLWHUDU\ZRUNVDQGVFUHHQSOD\VDQGZKRKDVÀOPSURGXFWLRQ
DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES and self-published authors.
Athena Pheromones increase
FRQWDFWV 3OHDVH VXEPLW UHTXHVW IRU LQWHUYLHZ WKUHH UHIHU
ences, and information you want us to know about you to: your attractiveness. Worn daily RESEARCH
lasts 4-6 mos, or use it straight. To learn more visit:
bmaxwell@billmaxwell.info. BOOK-LOVING serious biological scientist, reader of NYR
Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 VLQFH ÀUVW LVVXH  QRZ QHHGV \RXU KHOS H[SODLQLQJ D www.nybooks.com/ipl
PLAYWRIGHT SEEKING TWO HIP ACTRESSES (OOHQ Unscented 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 medical paradox. I had a painful slipped disk unexpectedly
Burstyn, Jean Smart, Frances Conroy, Bette Midler, Jessica Fragrance Additives Cosmetics Free U.S. Shipping get cured during cancer chemotherapy. I suspect the rea- or contact
Lange type), to co-star with Ronald Keaton of Churchill son is cell contraction induced by an anti-microtubule drug. Sharmaine Ong at
fame in a charming romp about: old age, depression, ♥ Gary (VA) 5 orders “I love the 10X product. Have you had such a cure? Has someone you know had
psilocybin, and Where we go from Here. Email: scripts@ It seems to make a difference! I am married and VXFK D FXUH" <RXU H[SHULHQFH PD\ KHOS ÀQG IXWXUH FXUHV ipress@nybooks.com.
susannahtalley.com. there is a noticeable difference in my wife’s 3OHDVHHPDLODNKDUULV#ELRXQFHGX$OEHUW.+DUULV3UR
attitude. Friskiness I would say.” fessor Emeritus, University North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

♥ Shirley (OH) 48 orders “10:13 really is a

secret weapon. I walk into a meeting full of EDUCATIONAL
men and I get good professional attention. A RADICAL APPEAL to African American intellect appears

 
 
 I get all the other kind of attention from in “A Faraway Light,” a passage to be found in “Education
my husband.” Fads versus Individual Rights” on the Web.


 



 
SAVE $100: 6-Pak special (',725·648(5<
ENCUUKƂGF"P[DQQMUEQO Not in stores 610-827-2200
Athenainstitute.com I WILL PAY $1,000 for a 40,000 wd. monograph about
$XJXVW :LOVRQ·V 7HQ 3LWWVEXUJK 3OD\V &RQWDFW Editor@
Athena Institute, 1211 Braefield Rd., Chester Spgs, PA 19425 NYB
mellenpress.com.

January 13, 2022 63

 Now Available from University of Toronto Press

CL OT H 9 7 8 1 4 8 7 5 0 8 0 4 3 C LOTH 9781487502706 C LOTH 9781487529079

“A deeply researched and entirely new “Reveals the powerful role the Old “Taran Kang explores the fraught and
account of the connections among law, English epic has played in children’s fascinating terrain where the aesthetic
literature, and early modern drama.” imaginative lives since the early and ethical transect.”
JESSICA WINSTON
nineteenth century.” MARIAN EIDE
Idaho State University IRINA DUMITRESCU Texas A&M University
University of Bonn

PAP E R 9 7 8 1 4 8 7 5 0 9 4 2 2 PAPER 9781487525736 C LOTH 9781487506735

“Zilcosky deftly shows how the modern
discourses of psychiatry, medicine,
and insurance contribute to a crisis of
causality that both troubles and fuels a
distinctly modernist aesthetic.”
“The Typewriter Century brings together
currently segregated strands of research
on print technology, modernist style,
and authorship informed by the rise of
cultural studies.”
“A stimulating and innovative analysis
of the illustrated journalism of the late
Victorian era and its legacy for present
day print media literacy.”
JOANNE SHATTOCK

KATA GELLEN SHAFQUAT TOWHEED University of Leicester

Duke University The Open University

@utpress