Linda Greenhouse: Verlyn Klinkenborg: Leslie Chang: David Reynolds:

Resegregating The Beach Boys New Journalism Abe Lincoln,

Our Schools in the Studio in China Spiritualist

Volume LXIX, Number 15 October 6, 2022

Mark Danner: Trump’s Slow-Motion Coup

Hermione Lee: Joseph Roth’s Serial Exiles
Bill McKibben: 100 Million Climate Refugees
Michael Gorra: Who’s Afraid of Close Reading?
Erin Maglaque: Francesco Bianchini’s Godly Science
Jerome Groopman: Diabetes, Money, and Politics
 CHICAGO
Reflections on Life, Place, and Everything

States of Plague Seneca

Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic Fifty Letters of a Roman Stoic

  !
“In this mélange of history, literary analysis, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary
and memoir, the authors explore the inter- by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long
section between a celebrated novel, current This selection of fifty letters offers insight
realities, scholarship, language, and the tricks into Seneca’s life and thought in language that
that time and circumstance play on all of speaks to the modern reader.
them.”—Kirkus
PAPER $16.00
CLOTH $20.00

The Complete Works Geometry of Grief

Handbook, Discourses, and Reflections on Mathematics, Loss,
Fragments and Life
 
Edited and Translated by Robin Waterfield “Attentiveness to beauty is the instrument of
The complete surviving works of Epictetus, transcendence—that essential facet of Frame’s
the most influential Stoic philosopher from geometry of grief and readjustment.”
antiquity. —Maria Popova, The Marginalian
CLOTH $20.00
PAPER $18.00

Victories Never Last The Porch

Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Meditations on the Edge of Nature
Plague 

“The Porch is a poignant and multi-sensory
“In our time of plague, Zaretsky has returned feast in the grand tradition of wilderness
to the plagues of the past, helping us to writing by the likes of Henry David Thoreau
grasp what Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, and John Muir—told from an architectural
Montaigne, Camus, and others came to under- perspective.”—Architect Magazine
stand about the terrifying way disease can CLOTH $22.50
upend our certainties and our hopes.”
—Michael Ignatieff, author of On Consolation
CLOTH $22.50

The Pocket Epicurean On Not Knowing

"! How to Love and Other Essays
“A helpful guide to facing the manifold 

anxieties of modern life.”—The Idler “Right now, our political and aesthetic discourse
CLOTH $12.50 seems less a genuine conversation than a com-
petition of mutually exclusive certainties. How
The Pocket Stoic wonderful it is to read Ogden, a writer who says
"! that ‘the question mark’s business with me will
never be finished’ and means it.”—The Atlantic
“An excellent starting point for anyone interested in PAPER $16.00
experimenting with this approach to life.”—Five Books
CLOTH $12.00

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

Contents October 6, 2022

6 .........................................
8 .........................................
11 .......................................
14 .............................
16 ......................................
18 ............................. Jerome Groopman
21 .......................................
23 ...................................
27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ange Mlinko
29 .............................
31 ........................... Verlyn Klinkenborg
34 ....................................
36 ...................................
39 .......................................
MORE
Bill McKibben Where Will We Live?
Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to
the Ends of the Earth by Benjamin von Brackel, translated from
PERFECT
the German by Ayça Türkoğlu
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
UNION
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise
of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia
Vona Groarke Poem
Hermione Lee Poet of the Dispossessed
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim
Linda Greenhouse A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent
Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America’s Schools
by Stephen Breyer, with an introduction by Thiru Vignarajah
Michael Gorra Corrections of Taste
Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read
by Terry Eagleton
Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It
Insulin—the Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck
to Wall Street Gold by Kersten T. Hall
Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Marcia Tuchman
P E N IE L E . J O S E P H
James Walton Doomed to Lucidity
The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller
Leslie T. Chang Little Town on the Prairie THE THIRD
China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World
by Liang Hong, translated from the Chinese by Emily Goedde RECONSTRUCTION
Timeless Correspondences America’s Struggle for Racial
HERmione by H.D., with an afterword by Francesca Wade
Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D. by Donna Krolik Hollenberg Justice in the Twenty-First Century
David S. Reynolds Throngs of Unseen People
In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits
by Terry Alford “Peniel E. Joseph is one of the
Endless Summer most brilliant and gifted
Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road a documentary film directed historians in the nation today.”
by Brent Wilson
—MICHAEL ERIC DYSON,
Erin Maglaque Rome Was His Laboratory
The Incomparable Monsignor: Francesco Bianchini’s World of Science, author of the New York Times
History, and Court Intrigue by J. L. Heilbron bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop
David Shulman Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms
The Kural: Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural translated from the Tamil
by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma “Peniel E. Joseph writes
Mark Danner The Slow-Motion Coup in the tradition of Du Bois and
Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency by Michael Wolff of Baldwin as he seeks to
The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People
Who Stopped It by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague
delineate how tragedy might give
How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic way to true justice. Personal
by Sallust, translated from the Latin and with an introduction
and political, human and historical,
by Josiah Osgood
One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General Joseph’s book is urgent,
by William P. Barr important, and illuminating.”
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s
Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump —J O N M E A C H A M

“Brilliantly written and elegantly

argued, this book is a gift
to all Americans. It offers an
honest and compelling account
of how change happens, and
it forces us all to consider how
we might work together to
win the fight for racial justice.”
—KEISHA N. BL AIN,
nybooks.com Sarah Schulman: The Failed Monkeypox Response
Joe Bucciero: Representing Reality in Weimar Art
coeditor of the #1 New York Times
Jenny Uglow: Edward Lear’s Uncertain Seascapes bestseller Four Hundred Souls
Nathaniel Rich: The Dark Ironies of Italo Svevo’s Fiction basicbooks.com
Blair McClendon: James Benning Sees America

Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews
at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at
nybooks.com/issues.

3
 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris

GAGOSIAN

4 The New York Review

Contributors
SHAKESPEARE
Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Editor
Emily Greenhouse
Changing China. Her new book, about the working women of Egypt, will be Shakespeare and Cervantes:
published next year. Deputy Editor
Michael Shae
A Comparison of Their Plays
Mark Danner is the author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War and Clive Bellis/José González 228 pgs
Executive Editor
The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He holds the Class of 1961 Jana Prikryl
Distinguished Chair at the University of California at Berkeley and is the Lacan’s Interpretation of Shakespeare
Senior Editors
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein, D. Brooks, ed. 576 pgs
Hasan Altaf
Michael Gorra is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and
Contributing Editors The Globe Theatre Project
the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William
Faulkner’s Civil War, among other books. He teaches at Smith.
Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Rob Conkie 296 pgs
Art Editor
Linda Greenhouse teaches at Yale Law School and contributes regularly to Leanne Shapton Why It Is Impossible to Write a
The New York Times’s opinion pages. An updated edition of her book Justice Managing Editor Biography of William Shakespeare
on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court will be published in October. Lauren Kane Yona Dureau 260 pgs
Online Editors
Vona Groarke’s thirteenth book of poems, Hereafter, will be published this fall. Lucy Jakub, Max Nelson Tragedy of Richard II: A Newly
Jerome Groopman is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical Associate Editor Authenticated Shakespeare Play
School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Daniel Drake
Michael Egan 664 pgs
Center, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the coauthor, with Pamela Assistant Editors
Hartzband, of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You. Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman
An Examination of Verdi’s Otello
Copyeditors
Verlyn Klinkenborg’s books include Making Hay, The Rural Life, and Sam Needleman, Will Palmer
and Its Faithfulness to Shakespeare
Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. Jane Hawes 156 pgs
Editorial Interns
Hermione Lee’s latest book, a biography of Tom Stoppard, was published Arianne Gonzalez, Noel Stevens
last year. The Staging of Shakespeare’s
Editor-at-Large
Daniel Mendelsohn Romeo and Juliet as a Ballet
Erin Maglaque is a Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield and the Camille Howard 156 pgs
author of Venice’s Intimate Empire.
Publisher Renaissance Magic and Hermeticism
Bill McKibben is a founder of ThirdAct.org and the Schumann Distinguished Rea S. Hederman
Scholar at Middlebury. His latest book, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station in the Shakespeare Sonnets
Associate Publisher, Business Operations
Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Michael King Thomas Jones 188 pgs
Wonders What the Hell Happened, was published in May.
Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
Janice Fellegara Five Films on Hamlet
Ange Mlinko is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University
of Florida. Her new poetry collection, Venice, was published in April. Advertising Director
Holger Klein/Dimiter Daphinoff 524 pgs
Lara Frohlich Andersen
David S. Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, Shakespeare and Public Executions
Rights
is the author or editor of sixteen books, including, most recently, Abe: Patrick Hederman Charles Mitchell 172 pgs
Abraham Lincoln in His Times.
Type Production
David Shulman is the author of Tamil: A Biography, among other books. Will Simpson Macbeth, Murder, and the Witches:
He is a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was Production Evil Spirits and Odd Coincidences
awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. Kazue Jensen Thomas Morris 444 pgs
Web Production Coordinator
James Walton is a writer and broadcaster. He is the editor of The Faber Book Maryanne Chaney Was Shakespeare a Jew? Marrano
of Smoking and the author of the literary quiz books Who Killed Iago? and Influences in His Life and Writing
Advertising Manager
The Penguin Book Quiz: From the Very Hungry Caterpillar to Ulysses. Sharmaine Ong Ghislain Muller 376 pgs
Advertising Assistant
Lucie Swenson Shakespeare’s Holy Fools
Fulfillment Director Sandra Pyle 284 pgs
Janis Harden
Circulation Manager Defining the Shakespeare Canon:
Andrea Moore
37 Plays in 37 Chapters
Publicity Ronald A. Rebholz 308 pgs
Nicholas During
Design Director The Influence of Stoic Philosophy
Nancy Ng
on William Shakespeare
Special Projects
Angela Hederman Ben Schneider 260 pgs
Office Manager
Diane R. Seltzer Shakespeare in Children’s Books
Comptroller
Sally Sugarman 272 pgs
Max Margenau
Assistant Accountant
Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare
Vanity Luciano Rodney Symington 328 pgs
Receptionist
Teddy Wright T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare
Charles Warren 140 pgs
Founding Editors
Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
Gender Archetypes in A Midsummer
Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) Night’s Dream and M. Butterfly
Mira Wiegmann 312 pgs
Cover art
Katherine Bradford: Blue Lap Sitter, 2021
(Katherine Bradford/Campoli Presti, Paris)
Series art To order:
Jason Logan: Liquorice Carbon Tests, 2022
mellenpress.com
or
Visit your bookstore

October 6, 2022 5
 Where Will We Live?
Nowhere Left to Go:
How Climate Change Is Driving
Species to the Ends of the Earth
by Benjamin von Brackel,
translated from the German
by Ayça Türkoğlu.
The Experiment, 278 pp., $26.95
Nomad Century:
How Climate Migration
Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince.
Flatiron, 260 pp., $28.99
Border and Rule:
Global Migration, Capitalism,
and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia.
Haymarket, 306 pp.,
$45.00; $19.95 (paper)
The climate crisis can be under-
stood as an experiment in pace. By
burning the remains of hundreds of
millions of years of flora and fauna
in the course of a few decades, we’re
forcing the planet through changes
that usually take eons; deep time is
suddenly running like one of those
films of a flower opening in seconds.
In a geological instant we’ve raised
the annual global average temperature
one degree Celsius, and the second
degree will come faster still; on our
current course we’re headed toward
a third degree. Astonishing shifts in
precipitation, forest fires, sea level,
and many other systems are happening
month by month and season by season.
The pace is truly savage.
But that experiment in time is play-
ing out even more dramatically across
physical space. The rapid rise in tem-
perature is causing plant and animal
species, and people, to move toward
the poles and higher, cooler ground.
This exodus has not only begun, it’s
begun to overwhelm biological and
political stability. We need to think
deeply about it, and act with resolve, if
we’re to have any hope of not rending
both our ecological and civilizational
fabric in permanent ways. Three new
books help us appreciate the magni-
tude of the challenge; you can’t under-
stand the next decades of life on earth
if you don’t take in their joint message.
As Benjamin von Brackel notes in
Nowhere Left to Go, the ecologist Ca-
mille Parmesan was among the first to
suggest that we were seeing climate
change in action. In 1996 she published
an influential study of Edith’s checker-
spot butterflies showing that the spe-
cies was disappearing at the southern
end of its range, in Mexico, but not in
Canada: overall, the butterfly’s “center
of distribution” had shifted more than
sixty miles north and three hundred
feet higher in elevation. Other biolo-
gists began looking at the ranges of
the species they studied, and in the
past twenty years a robust science has
emerged.
Von Brackel, a German journalist,
ably chronicles the research at every
latitude and on every continent. He
describes, for instance, the invasion
of the Arctic by deer, rabbits, and
beavers—whose dams create ponds
that are now visible via satellite; that
water traps heat, speeding the melt of
6 The New York Review
Bill McKibben
Meghan Hildebrand: Seasonal Drift, 2022
the permafrost beneath. Musk oxen,
caribou, and Arctic foxes are being in-
exorably pushed north, where they will
run into the ocean. “The closer they
get to the North Pole, the more the
inhabitable territory shrinks. Earth is
an ellipsoid, after all,” he writes.
As on land, so at sea. Von Brackel
writes movingly of indigenous com-
munities now largely bypassed by the
whales on which they’ve depended for
food and cultural continuity because
the small organisms on which the
whales feed are moving as the tem-
peratures warm. Meanwhile, off Ice-
land, huge schools of mackerel were
appearing, having migrated north;
when fishermen from the European
mainland followed, violent conflicts
with their Icelandic counterparts were
narrowly averted.
Along the Eastern Seaboard, sugar
maples are moving north (and the
March days of nighttime freeze and
morning thaw that drive the sap are
moving into February or disappearing
altogether); theoretically, though, they
have some room to move, so Vermont’s
loss should be Quebec’s gain. Many
other ecosystems are simply dying
in place—von Brackel describes the
sad plight of Terry Hughes, the Aus-
tralian coral scientist whose career
has become an extended deathwatch
as the Great Barrier Reef, the earth’s
largest living structure, repeatedly
bleaches. (Followers on Twitter can
watch this obituary being written in
real time; Hughes often reports on
his overflights of the vast stretches
of whitened coral that now line the
Queensland coast.) It’s possible that
some corals may emerge in what were
once temperate waters farther north
as they become more tropical, but don’t
hold your breath—“the formation of a
coral reef the size of the Great Barrier
Reef could take, roughly, half a million
years.”
E qually fundamental changes are
underway in the earth’s most cru-
cial ecosystems. Biologists working
in the Amazon have demonstrated
that trees and bird and insect spe-
cies are moving into the mountains
to escape rising heat; eventually they
will run out of mountain to climb, but
the deeper problem is that for many
of the world’s greatest forests there
aren’t any mountains, just vast flat-
lands that are growing steadily hotter.
In the mountains, von Brackel writes,
the temperature drops three degrees
Celsius with every 1,640 feet of ele-
vation, but in the lowlands a bird or
a tree would need to travel 310 miles
north to get similar relief.
It’s complicated in the Amazon, and
in other forest basins like the Congo,
because humans are simultaneously
logging and burning big swaths of the
jungle, and together with the rising
heat this is changing the way water
moves across the region. The roots
of Amazonian trees suck up large
quantities of rainfall off the Atlan-
tic, and then transpire that moisture
through their leaves; like an airborne
river this moisture becomes rain on
the next bands of forest farther west.
But both climate-caused drought and
human-caused disruptions are break-
ing down this machine. Four years ago
the legendary tropical conservationist
Tom Lovejoy (who died last winter) and
his Brazilian colleague Carlos Nobre
calculated that “as little as around 20
percent deforestation would be enough
to throw the entire system out of bal-
ance,” transforming rainforest into
savanna.
We’re at that threshold already. Von
Brackel reports that
the Pantanal in southwestern Bra-
zil is one of the largest wetlands
in the world. It was here where
the worst drought for centuries
raged in 2020 . . . and an enormous
fire burned for weeks, destroying
a quarter of the whole ecosystem
of forests, islands, and grassland.
The rainy season across this wetland
is now 40 percent shorter, quite likely,
he says, as a result of those Amazon
“rivers in the air” beginning to stall.
We have some ability to respond to
these dramatic shifts. Many countries,
including the US, are backing a “30 by
30” plan that calls for setting aside
almost a third of their land by the end
of the decade—in the US this would
mean formally protecting an additional
area larger than the state of Texas. But
this job gets steadily more challenging
even as it gets more necessary. Where
once you could “preserve” a species by
fencing off its habitat, now you also
have to protect its escape route: grizzly
bears don’t live in Yellowstone because
they appreciate being part of the Wy-
oming tourist economy, they live there
because it’s the right temperature. If
that temperature moves hundreds
of miles north, then they must go
too—across highways and populated
areas. (Some of those highways were
destroyed in record flooding in the re-
gion this June; tourist communities
reported receipts down 75 percent or
© ME GH AN HI LDEBRAN D/ MADRONA GA LLE RY, V ICTORI A, BR IT I S H COLUMBIA
more following the storms.)
Von Brackel interviews scientists
who are working on “assisted migra-
tion” for many species, but this is hard
work, and not just for species like griz-
zlies that some people might rightly
fear. It’s hard because the change
never stops; Noah had to cope with
just forty days of rain, but (to quote
Camille Parmesan) “the problem with
climate change is that there is no end
in sight. . . . If we knew when the cli-
mate would stabilize, we could prepare
for that.”
At this point it’s clear that the de-
struction will be enormous, but as von
Brackel concludes,
the less we allow the earth to
warm, the more areas we return
to nature, and the more reserves
and corridors we create, the more
species we will be able to save, and
 The greatest banker
of his generation
H O W E D M O N D J . S A F R A B U I LT
A G LO B A L F I N A N C I A L E M P I R E

A story like no other, masterfully
pfOŠGYÑBrÑBGgigGWWOYMÑ:jiN[fÑ:YEÑ
journalist Daniel Gross
Edmond Safra’s
extraordinary life is one
of the most fascinating
stories in modern finance.
— M I C H A E L R . B L O OM B E R G

Available wherever books are sold. ABankersJourney.com

October 6, 2022 7
 we will at least be able to pass on
fragments of life on this planet
to our children and their children.
say, Germany or Turkey or Vietnam.
But they are a small fraction of what
we can expect as temperatures rise:
the International Organization for Mi-
gration has predicted that we could
At this writing, parts of the Horn
of Africa are enduring their fourth
consecutive dry “rainy season,” and
children are starving; in Central Amer-
ica, a narrow land between two fast-
of the impact of the 1619 Project—it
forces the reader to grapple with the
relentless and ongoing use and abuse
of power by rich countries and their
political and economic leaders. Walia is

E xcept, of course, that we and our

children and their children may
be preoccupied with another problem,
which is where we’re going to live our-
selves. Human beings, according to
Jens-Christian Svenning, a Danish ac-
ademic whom von Brackel quotes at
some length, have concentrated them-
selves for at least the past six thou-
sand years in a “surprisingly narrow
belt” of the planet, centered around
an average temperature of thirteen
degrees Celsius, or about fifty-five de-
grees Fahrenheit, and with relatively
low humidity: much of North Amer-
ica, Western and Southern Europe,
the Middle East, eastern China, Japan.
This is the “temperate to Mediter-
ranean zone,” and it’s appealing be-
cause “small-scale farmers can work
outdoors without suffering from exces-
sive heat or cold,” because crops and
livestock yield more here, and perhaps
because “moderate temperatures are
also conducive to elevated moods and
good mental health.”
That zone is migrating north too,
which is not perhaps an insurmount-
able problem; one can imagine the
residents of Napa relocating to Ore-
gon and then on to British Columbia.
The UK’s record heat this summer
was brutal for people without air-
conditioning, but brutal is relative: the
bigger problem is that much of the
world that is already hotter than aver-
age will become lethally hot. Less than
one percent of the planet’s surface
has an average temperature higher
than twenty-nine degrees Celsius, or
eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit; at the
moment that’s mostly in the Sahara
region. But computer modeling shows
that within fifty years those kinds of
temperatures could be common in
most of the tropics, an area projected
to be home to 3.5 billion people. Living
there will become borderline impos-
sible—it will be too hot to work out-
doors. Read the first chapter of Kim
Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry
for the Future,* about a crazy Indian
heat wave; or read the newspaper ac-
counts of the actual heat waves that
badly degraded life in India this past
spring and in China this summer, or
about the almost unimaginable deluge
that at the end of August put a third
of Pakistan underwater and turned
the Indus River essentially into an
inland ocean. People are going to be
on the move.
In fact, they already are. The UN’s
High Commissioner for Refugees re-
ported in late May that the world, for
the first time in recorded history, had
100 million forcibly displaced people.
Of those who were set on the move
in the previous year, “conflict and vi-
olence” accounted for 14.4 million, and
“weather-related events” accounted
for more: 23.7 million—though the
distinction between these is often
hard to draw. The war in Syria, for in-
stance, which produced large numbers
of refugees, followed the most pro-
found drought ever recorded in what
we once called the Fertile Crescent.
These numbers are enormous—100
million is more than the population of,
see 1.5 billion people forced from their
homes by 2050, and in 2020 an analysis
by an international team of academ-
warming oceans, drought has made
farming incredibly hard. And when rain
does come, it’s often now in the form
not a trained journalist, so the book is
light on storytelling (and a little heavy
on jargon), but it is devastating in its
ics in the Proceedings of the National of violent storms—in 2020, at the tail deployment of data and evidence.
end of the most active hurricane sea- We often hear talk of an “invasion”
son in Atlantic history, Eta and Iota of immigrants creating a “border cri-
(we were well into the Greek alphabet) sis,” Walia observes, but “mass migra-
crashed into Nicaragua, Honduras, and tion is the outcome of the actual crises
Guatemala, doing almost unbelievable of capitalism, conquest, and climate
amounts of damage—by some esti- change.” She documents centuries of
mates equivalent to almost 40 percent coercion that have taken place along
of the GDP in Honduras. When people the US-Mexican border: the US an-
cannot farm and cannot eat, they will nexed northern Mexico, worked to
move, or at least try to. thwart the Mexican Revolution, and
Let us state succinctly the most ob- with the North American Free Trade
vious point: none of these crises are Agreement began “prying open do-
caused by the people suffering from mestic industries in Mexico to a global
them. The average Somalian, at the regime of production.” This was neo-
epicenter of that withering drought, liberalism at its apex, theoretically
produces barely one two-hundredth as “opening” the economies of the US and
much carbon as the average American; Mexico to largely unhindered cross-
the average Honduran a fifteenth as border trade, but the results were as
Academy of Sciences said that by 2070 much; the average Vietnamese a sev- predictable as they were brutal: more
as many as three billion people could enth (and much of that comes from than a million Mexican farmers were
be living in areas stressed by high heat. manufacturing stuff for export to us). forced into bankruptcy within a de-
The US, with 4 percent of the world cade, while corn exports from the
population today, has produced a quar- US to Mexico increased 323 percent.
D o such numbers seem startlingly
large? Gaia Vince, in her book
Nomad Century, points out that fires
ter of all the greenhouse gas emis-
sions in the atmosphere; the carbon
we pumped into the air during our
This flood of cheap corn particularly
damaged indigenous communities that
were both economically and culturally
even in affluent places like California industrialization and (especially) our dependent on a crop first domesticated
and Australia have begun to produce suburbanization will linger there for a on their lands.
internal migrations. But wealth is a century or more. No country, not even “Millions of Indigenous people,
buffer. In poorer parts of the world far more populous ones like China, will farmers, peasants, and [villagers]
a warming planet is already a daily come close to catching us. Somalian from rural areas were dispossessed
grind; she reports that rice farmers famine, Honduran hurricanes, Viet- and then proletarianized into low-wage
in Vietnam are planting at night with namese inundation—these are crises factory and farm work,” Walia writes.
headlamps to avoid dangerous heat, caused by us, and given that many in Employment in the maquiladora fac-
and the British medical journal The industry and government have known tories along the border “exploded by
Lancet estimates that in 2018 “more the consequences of burning fossil 86 percent within the first five years
than 150 billion work hours were lost fuels for decades, you could fairly say of NAFTA ,” in cities that soon became
due to extreme temperature and hu- the climate crisis is a kind of crime deadly for women; 90 percent of these
midity.” (Of course, for many farmers Americans have been committing. factories were US-owned, and they “set
their livelihood will be a thing of the And not the first crime. The global the de facto wage floor for manufac-
past—parts of southern Vietnam, for scope and historical perspective of turing across the continent,” costing
instance, are expected to be below sea Border and Rule, by the Canadian 700,000 factory jobs in America. It’s
level by 2050.) activist Harsha Walia, reminds me easy to see how this simultaneously
Passage
I’d never been further than Ballina, and only in the back of a cart.
The train shuffled field after tree after field, as Dada did with cards
and me as a spindle at the heart of it, the last still thing in the world.
It was as well, maybe, departure was giddy so I thought the whirl
meant more than the leaving. For a while. Queenstown was a hell
of shouting and shoving and crying in the lurk of those huge hulls.
Beggars, drunks; porters who’d offer to carry bags, then disappear.
A madwoman pulling at me, asking was I not Bríd from Inis Oírr.
That packed cabin was the most at home I’d felt since Glenavoo:
warm bodies close around me, women snoring as Mama used to,
a baby crying and someone being sick and someone whispering.
But only one privy for every hundred bunks on the City of Berlin
and no deck below in third class: for six nights, the same foul air.
Getting on, I knew nothing of Berlin. Getting off, I didn’t care.
—Vona Groarke

*See my “It’s Not Science Fiction,” The New

York Review, December 17, 2020.

8 The New York Review

 Vernon Fisher
Chapter, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
42 x 42 inches, 106.7 x 106.7 cm

info@pazdabutler.com

October 6, 2022 9
drives migration pressure in Mexico
and brews resentment north of the
border. A border turns out to be a very
useful device for controlling people
on both sides. (You can, for instance,
get undocumented people to do low-
paid jobs others won’t take, and then
use their status to keep them from
complaining; according to one study
she cites, 52 percent of companies in
the US threaten to call immigration
authorities on workers during union
drives.)
But what justice demands and
what politics can produce are often
very different; we’re far from tear-
ing down borders. As Walia notes, in
one country after another right-wing
politicians have skillfully used fear
of people crossing those boundaries
to strengthen the most retrograde
governments. It’s worth remember-
ing that Donald Trump began his
unlikely presidential campaign with
remarks about Mexican rapists. His
shameless rhetoric about people from
“shithole countries” descending on
the US to take American jobs cap-
ecological localism, where immi-
grants are compared to foreign
invasive species, and . . . puts for-
ward screeds such as “Borders are
the environment’s greatest ally; it
is through them that we will save
the planet.”
G iven the realities Walia so force-
fully describes, it is worth asking
if there are ways beyond sheer justice
to make the case for more porous bor-
There are examples even in the
heart of GOP America. Earlier this
year, for instance, The Washington
Post reported from Greene County,
Iowa, a classic mid-American farming
region that has watched its popula-
tion steadily fall and its stores and
churches disappear. Voting for Trump,
and for longtime congressman Steve
King (who once referred to Mexican
immigrants as having “calves the size
of cantaloupes” from carrying heavy
bags of marijuana across the desert),
predictably did nothing to arrest the
decline, so now the county has em-

W alia makes a similarly detailed

case in country after country,
demonstrating the dynamics behind
tured support from downtrodden
voters, and now Greg Abbott is em-
ploying the Texas National Guard to
barked on a project called Nueva Vida
en Greene County to attract Latino
settlers. The county has set up cul-
Australia’s hideous island prisons patrol the border as part of his bid tural awareness classes and soccer
for migrants and Europe’s extensive for reelection as governor of Texas, teams, and provided housing and jobs.
system of deals to keep African immi- finding support among not just As one woman explained, “We need
grants away from the continent. She white but also Latino voters in the some diversity here. We’re all too old
demolishes one piece of conventional Rio Grande Valley. Walia notes that and White.”
wisdom after another: for instance, even Cesar Chavez once “led a cam- Walia hates such projects—she says
she asks, in an exploited and rapidly paign against ‘wetbacks’ and reported that programs like the German one,
heating world, what is the differ- undocumented workers to federal which Angela Merkel sold under the
ence between a worthy refugee and authorities.” slogan Wir schaffen das (We’ll man-
a scheming “economic migrant”? By The same dynamics can be seen age), “center humanitarian benevo-
the end of this remarkable account, across the world. Right-wing parties lence and Europeans materialize as
it’s hard to disagree when she writes: in Europe have used inflammatory saviors, while refugees are burdened
rhetoric around incidents of sexual ha- with the expectation of performing
I align with a leftist politics of rassment to try to turn women against gratitude”; that “liberal welcome cul-
no borders, since the borders of immigration, and an emerging “ecofas- ture” erases “European complicity in
today are completely bound up in cism” needs to be taken seriously. As creating displacement through colonial
the violences of dispossession, Walia points out, the far-right gunman conquest, land theft, slavery, capitalist
accumulation, exploitation, and who murdered twenty-three people at extraction, labor exploitation, and war
their imbrications with race, caste, an El Paso Walmart in 2019 posted an ders, and here Vince’s book may be profiteering.”
gender, sexuality, and ability. . . . online manifesto declaring, “If we can helpful. In some ways she is wildly Immigration should be better un-
Borders are not simply lines mark- get rid of enough people, then our way unrealistic—I think there is little derstood as reparations, Walia says—
ing territory; they are the product of life can become more sustainable.” prospect that we will be building and, given the power of her historical
of, and produce, social relations In France, Marine Le Pen’s National vast modern cities on the Siberian account of oppression, I think she’s
from which we must emancipate Rally party campaigns on what Walia tundra or the Canadian permafrost right on the merits. But I strain to
ourselves. calls to house arriving immigrants— see politics shifting in that direction,
but she shares Walia’s skepticism which leaves one in a quandary about
about the usefulness of borders. (In what to do. For instance, I serve on
fact, she provides a fascinating his- an advisory council at the Lutheran
tory of human mobility, which was Immigration and Refugee Service,
largely uninterrupted by immigration perhaps the country’s leading voice
controls until the invention of the for refugee resettlement, and I am in
CALL FOR FELLOWS modern nation-state.)
And she points out that the rich
awe of the remarkable work done by its
staff as they struggle to win entry slots
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at The New School for Social
countries of the world are actually for people from around the world and
Research invites applications for our 2023 Summer Seminars (June 11-17,
2023). Founded and directed by Ann Laura Stoler, and now in its ninth year, beginning to feel another pinch, not then to resettle them effectively. But it
the ICSI offers advanced graduate students and faculty from around the nearly as brutal as the climate cri- is so painfully small in scale—it feels
world the opportunity to spend a week at The New School's campus in ses affecting the Global South but too much like the years when I was
Greenwich Village, working closely with some of the most distinguished real enough: because of falling birth setting up a homeless shelter in the
thinkers shaping the course of contemporary social inquiry. Fellows partici- rates, these societies are aging quickly. basement of my church. Taking care
pate in one of three seminars where rigorous intellectual inquiry is joined (Arresting data point: in Japan, adult of ten men a night was important to
with attention to pressing political concerns to cultivate styles of thinking
diapers now outsell baby diapers.) them, but like other ad hoc charitable
that address the desperate and unequal conditions in which we live today.
Meanwhile, “many of the countries endeavors it also may have relieved
affected by climate stress and other some of the pressure for necessary
2023 pressures, such as repressive regimes, systemic change.
FACULTY & SEMINARS have large numbers of unemployed I fear very much that this tension
youth living in poverty, which triggers between liberal and radical solutions to
KENDALL THOMAS conflict. Creating secure migratory migration will simply be overwhelmed
The Resistance to Critical Race Theory pathways to depopulating” countries in the years ahead. If the climate mod-
Co-Editor of Critical Race Theory: would “help these people . . . get on elers are even close to correct, one or
The Key Writings That Formed
the Movement, The New Press 1996
with productive lives,” and also help three billion human beings attempt-
the nations where they arrive keep the ing to move away from rising heat and
MCKENZIE WARK ratio of young to old in some kind of drought, and from flooding cities, will
Transsexual Exceptions: balance. When Germany, for instance, make their own geopolitical reality.
Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality accepted a million Syrian refugees, Limiting the planet’s warming—
Author of Philosophy for Spiders: this “generous response to the hu- building solar panels and wind tur-
On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker,
Duke 2021
manitarian crisis” was also an “astute bines as fast as we can—will limit
economic decision”: somewhat the scale of the upheaval,
but it will not at this point prevent
EYAL WEIZMAN The country needed to fill labour it. Our ability to cope with a planet in
Forensis
shortages, partly resulting from motion in some even modestly humane
Author of Forensic Architecture:
Violence at the Threshold the depletion of its Turkish mi- fashion will determine the character of
of Detectability, Princeton 2017 grant population, many of whom the century ahead; thinking through
had returned to their homeland the possibilities right now, while the
during its economic boom. Sweden numbers are still relatively small, and
also took the opportunity to revive then taking the biggest political steps
its depopulated villages, includ- we can manage to open our societies

APPLICATIONS DUE ing reopening schools and football
DECEMBER 15, 2022 teams. The biggest fear Sweden
criticalsocialinquiry.org faces is those immigrants leaving
and returning to Syria.
.
to people who need to move, is our
best chance at both justice and peace.
The world must bend or else it will
break.

10 The New York Review

 Poet of the Dispossessed
Endless Flight:
The Life of Joseph Roth
by Keiron Pim.
London: Granta, 527 pp., £25.00
Keiron Pim’s absorbing biography of
one of the twentieth century’s most
powerful and disquieting writers
begins with a description of Joseph
Roth’s birthplace, a small town called
Brody, now in western Ukraine. A foot-
note observes that “Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine occurred as this book was
being prepared to go to print. . . . De-
scriptions of buildings and population
figures may therefore be out of date by
the time of publication.” Those tragic
circumstances give the book’s title,
Endless Flight—echoing one of Roth’s
saddest novels of deracination and es-
trangement, Flight Without End—an
added edge of bitter resonance.
One of the book’s epigraphs is Roth’s
statement of 1930: “I have no home,
aside from being at home in myself.”
He was a self-driven émigré who con-
stantly liquidated and recreated his
past and his identity, and who drank
himself to death at the age of forty-
four, crying out on his deathbed, “I have
to get out of here!” He cast off peo-
ple as he cast off places, with anguish
and harsh satisfaction. A compulsive
hand-biter, he turned on anyone who
employed him, or loved him, or tried
to help him, or gave him money (and
he always needed money). He had vio-
lently mixed feelings about everything:
his homeland, his Jewishness, his reli-
gion, his marriage and love affairs, his
friendships, his reputation, his place in
the world. Only in certain things did he
end up unwavering: his complex, pas-
sionate feeling for the vanished Austro-
Hungarian Empire, which inspired his
greatest novel, The Radetzky March; his
hatred of nationalism; his prophetic
and courageous loathing for the Nazis;
and his addiction to alcohol.
This tormented and tormenting per-
sonality created writings of genius that
obsessively returned to the very places
he had most wanted to escape from.
Many great writers do this. They can’t
wait to get out of Dublin, New Zealand,
Nebraska, Newark, or Eastwood, only
to spend much of their lives writing
about it, in the zone where “memory
and imagination” meet. Roth wan-
dered through Europe, reporting on
everything he saw with unflinching
acuteness, but he also yearned after
his childhood world. His deeply felt 1927
account of Eastern European Jewish
communities and their fates was called
The Wandering Jews, and he presents
himself, if not always as a Jew, then cer-
tainly always as a wanderer. As he often
says, Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness)
defined his existence and that of the
people he wrote about: “I am a stranger
in this town. . . . That is why I was so
at home there.” “Eastern Jews have no
home anywhere, but their graves may
be found in every cemetery.” “All those
of us who set out from home [for the
Great War] and were killed and buried,
or who came back but never again came
home. . . . We are strangers in this world,
we come from the realm of the dead.”
Exile was his choice as well as his
fate. His biographer describes him as
October 6, 2022
Hermione Lee
Joseph Roth; illustration by Yann Kebbi
being in endless flight “not only from a
place but from himself, from his foun-
dational persona.” But he notes that
Roth preferred this state: “Better to
dream of home, better to wander: to
travel in hope, rather than to arrive,
settle and be disappointed. Better al-
ways to live from the three suitcases,
packed and ready for departure.”
Roth’s work is full of migrants,
border-crossers, lost souls, tricksters
forging new identities, war veterans
returning to find no place left for them,
sons who have lost their fathers, and
fathers who have lost their sons. In
The Radetzky March (1932), the hu-
miliations, hurt pride, self-harming,
and bewilderment, at once ludicrous
and desperate, of three generations of
the Trotta family, as the old empire
deliquesces under them, poignantly
embody all that this great writer knows
of change and loss.
Pim talks a great deal about multi-
ple selves, and shows us a writer full
of contradictions and paradoxes. In
insisting so much on “unresolved” du-
alities he is taking his cue from his
subject: “I am a Frenchman from the
East, a Humanist, a rationalist with
religion, a Catholic with a Jewish intel-
ligence, an actual revolutionary. What
an oddity!” Pim’s shorthand for this
“split identity” is “hyphenation”:
He was at times, often simulta-
neously, an Austro-Hungarian,
an Austrian-German, a Jewish-
Austrian and a Catholic-Jew, who
claimed to be the son of a Polish
count and a Ukrainian Jew, or an
Austrian railway official and a Rus-
sian Jew. . . . He presented himself
as a man of mixed heritage.
Hence Roth’s rejection of narrow,
monocultural nationalisms, religions, or
regimes. And there are other conflict-
ing traits, too: nostalgia and fatalism,
irony and melancholy, harsh skepti-
cism and a longing for miracles, charm
and aggression, metropolitan dandyism
and an attachment to a simple, peasant,
rural world. Hyphens are having to do
a lot of biographical work here, but they
point up the risks in this painful, grip-
ping life story: “Hyphenated identities
can prove fragile, an unstable foun-
dation on which to construct a self.”
W hen Roth was born in 1894, the
shtetl of Brody was part of Gali-
cia, on the eastern edges of the dual
monarchy’s territory, up against the
Russian border, ruled from afar by the
ancient Habsburg emperor Franz Jo-
seph. It was a once-thriving trading
town and center of Hebraic learning
(known as “the Polish Jerusalem”) with
a mixed population, including Poles,
Russians, Ukrainians, Christians, and
Hasidic Jews. The black-robed Hasidim
who prayed in the streets and the syna-
gogue to consult their miracle-working
“wonder-rabbis” were known to some
as the “fools of Brody.” Any reader of
Roth’s novels or of The Wandering Jews
will recognize that little town (often
under the name of Zlotogrod) with the
railway station on the outskirts where
the lines point westward to Vienna and
eastward to Kiev, the market stalls,
the synagogue and prayerhouses, the
barracks, the hotel and the taverns, the
outlying swamps surrounded by dark
forests, where the frogs croak and the
wild geese fly over and only the local
peasants can find their way safely. By
Roth’s time it had become “somewhere
people moved from, not to.”
Roth was the child of an absentee fa-
ther whom he never saw, a failed Aus-
trian grain-trader who abandoned his
wife, went mad, was incarcerated, and
died, possibly by suicide, when Roth
was sixteen. Roth’s German-speaking
mother, from a family of merchants,
was tough, hardworking, and posses-
sive. She wanted her son to be educated
and grow up as an Austro-German Jew
rather than a “Galitzianer”—and cer-
tainly not as a “fool of Brody.” Roth, a
precocious boy who knew he wanted to
be a writer from early on, excelled at
his local school and at the University
of Lemberg but took the train west as
soon as he could. He dropped his first
name, the “Moische” or Moses he’d in-
herited from his grandfather, and shed
the nicknames “Muniu” and “Mu,” short
for Solomon, which he’d been given as
a child for his cleverness.
At nineteen, on his first visit to
Vienna, he pretended to be a jour-
nalist before he was one, and at the
university there, from 1914, he read
German literature and turned himself
into a cosmopolitan dandy while liv-
ing with all the other eastern Jewish
immigrants in Leopoldstadt. He tem-
porarily abandoned his youthful mon-
archism and briefly became a socialist
and pacifist before joining the army in
1916. He converted his missing father
into a series of mythologized fantasy
figures. He rejected his grimly de-
voted mother—though after she died
of uterine cancer, in 1922, he asked,
morbidly, to see her womb in the hos-
pital lab, which suggests some lasting
obsession. He distanced himself from
the faith he’d been brought up in and
eventually converted to Catholicism.
(Pim doesn’t make clear exactly when
he converted, and a chronology would
have been helpful.) But everything he
tried to put behind him came back to
haunt him.
Galicia, like all of Eastern Europe,
was shape-shifting too. Its violent
and unstable history is encapsulated
in the frequent renaming of Lemberg,
part of Austria-Hungary when Roth
was born, taken over by the Russians
at the start of the war. At the war’s
end, with the defeat and dissolution of
the empire, western Galicia was made
part of the Republic of Poland, though
with the short-lived declaration of the
West Ukrainian People’s Republic in
1918, Lemberg briefly became Lviv.
Then came the war between Poland
and Ukraine. In 1919, with Galicia’s in-
corporation into the newly reunited
Poland, Lviv was renamed Lwów. In the
next war, in 1941, Lwów became Lvov,
a city in the Soviet Socialist Republic
of Ukraine. From 1991 it once more
became Ukrainian Lviv. These bewil-
dering changes stand in for a whole
nation’s experience, as Pim puts it,
“of transience and migration.”
Just as Roth was starting to pass
as an Austrian in Vienna, Galicians
were fleeing the Russian slaughter en
11
masse and crowding into the city. But
he wanted to be an Austrian citizen,
not a Galician refugee or (in 1919) a
Polish national. Always an ambitious
opportunist, he tried every ruse he
could to get renationalized. His join-
ing a Vienna regiment of the Imperial
Army in 1916 was certainly heartfelt,
though he quickly became disillusioned
with the bureaucracy of military life
(a subject of later pungent satires). He
shamelessly embellished his record,
claiming to have been on duty at the
funeral of the emperor in November
1916, to have fought on the Eastern
Front as an officer and been decorated
(a cynical friend said his medal had
been bought “at a junk dealer!”), and
to have been a Russian prisoner of war
and conscripted into the Red Army. In
fact he spent the war as a letter censor
and military journalist.
Yet his much-vaunted Austrian patri-
otism was put to use for his citizenship
claim. In 1919 he persuaded a friendly
priest to forge a baptism certificate,
giving his birthplace as Schwaben, or
Szwaby, in German West Hungary. He
got his Austrian citizenship in 1921 just
before a clampdown against Galician
Jews. Nearly ten years later he was
still trying for an Austrian passport,
commenting to a friend on the “un-
orthodox means” he had used to equip
himself with “names, dates, school, and
army career.” In an irony of fate worthy
of his own novels, by the time he got
the passport in 1928, he had begun to
abhor the Austro-German atmosphere,
outspokenly appalled by the rise in
anti-Semitism and toxic nationalism.
He had come to prefer Berlin, but Ber-
lin too began to be detestable to him.
“He should have had three Pulitzer prizes….
One reads him with wonder and admiration.”—Guy Davenport.
By contrast he called Prague, where he
first went in 1923, his “spiritual home.”
And in 1925 he fell forever in love with
Paris, “the capital of the world.”
In January 1933 Hitler took power,
and Roth was among the writers im-
mediately banned. After fleeing to
Paris and into permanent exile, he
wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig, “For
the beasts over there, a filthy yid is
what one remains.” On the night of
the Nazi book-burnings in Berlin that
May, The Radetzky March was thrown
on the fire. Roth called it “an Auto-
da-Fé of the Mind.”
A s an enemy of nationalisms, Roth
could be equally vociferous in his
attacks on Zionism. In one notorious
letter of 1935, nearly four years before
his death, he equates the Jewish move-
ment for a homeland with National So-
cialism, arguing, in Pim’s words, that
both the Zionists and the Nazis “wanted
the Jews out of Europe.” He often made
anti-Semitic comments when writing
to friends, as when complaining about
being underpaid by the “scheming Jews”
on his newspaper or calling some of
his worst critics “piggish-Jewish”—an
adjective that Pim notes was censored
posthumously, in the first German edi-
tion of his letters.
All writers on Roth struggle with
this, the most disturbing of his con-
tradictions. Pim has much to say on
“Jewish self-loathing.” But he also
gives space to Roth’s brave writings
against Nazism and to his moving
accounts of the lives and sufferings
of the Ostjuden. This ironic, worldly,
urban writer tenderly evokes the
lives of the Jewish community—the
musicians, the storytellers, the Yom
Kippur celebrants, the crowds waiting
to see the wonder-rabbis, the peasant
women’s babies suspended in swinging
baskets from the rafters—and often
writes with a shrugging, wry kind of
Yiddish fatalism, or in the form of a
Bible story or a Yiddish fable.
The translator, editor, and poet
Michael Hofmann, who has spent
many years bringing Roth to English-
language readers, notes in his preface
to The Wandering Jews how disconcert-
ing it is that Roth never identifies him-
self in the book as a Jew who is writing
about his own homeland. But this eva-
sion, Hofmann suggests, is countered
by the “tragically beautiful emblematic
images” Roth’s writing provides of the
old empire where the eastern Jewish
communities could survive, which Roth
saw as “supranational, something that
contained multitudes, something not
exclusive and not ideal, and therefore
free from bigotry. . . something whose
time was—or was almost—gone.” As
one example of this beauty, Hofmann
quotes the scene from Roth’s mirac-
ulous novel Job (1930) in which the
suffering Mendel Singer is sitting by
the roadside and weeping. His peasant
friend Sameshkin, who feels like weep-
ing too, “laid his arm around the thin
shoulder of the Jew and said softly:
‘Sleep, dear Jew! Have a good sleep!’”
Roth did not live to see the de-
struction of his hometown, Brody; in
1942 and 1943 the Nazis massacred or
exported to death camps thousands
of Jews and exterminated an entire
way of life. The Wandering Jews, com-
plete with all its harsh anti-Zionism
and scathing attacks on westernized
Jews, remained, like many of Roth’s
novels, as a priceless record of a van-
ished culture and community.
gees, returning soldiers, war-wounded,
shoeshine men, cabarets, morgues,
courtrooms, waxworks, panopticons,
accidents, burglars, panhandlers, prosti-
tutes, children at street games—no de-
tail of the underbelly of Berlin life in the
1920s escaped him. His pieces give as
vivid an impression of Weimar Berlin as
the writings of Brecht or Isherwood, the
art of Grosz or Dix, the music of Weill
or the films of Murnau. He was known
as Rote Joseph for his radical sympathy
with the poor and the exploited. These
became the people of his novels: the
one-legged veteran in Rebellion (1924)
who trusts in the government, gets
his permit to be an organ-grinder, and
loses everything by a terrible stroke of
fate; the ex–prisoner of war washed up
with all the other flotsam in Hotel Savoy
(1924); the Galician Lieutenant Tunda
in Flight Without End (1927), adrift in
postwar Paris, a “superfluous man.”
Roth’s main outlet became the
Berlin-based, Jewish-owned, liberal
Frankfurter Zeitung, for which he wrote
from 1923 until his exile. The story
of his quarrelsome relationship with
that paper and its editors could be a
book in itself, with endless crises over
money and status whenever he felt he
was being censored or sold his services
temporarily to a right-wing German
paper; or when he was enraged, having
happily settled in as Paris correspon-
dent in 1925, to be pushed out of that
post and told to write on industrial
Germany; or went off in a huff to re-
port on the USSR. He always felt un-
derrated. He was not a witty writer of
trivia, he had to tell them. No: “I paint
the portrait of the age.”
His writing overlapped with the
movement known as New Objectivity:
hard realism, sober facts, minute ob-
servation. But however harsh his truth-
telling, he always wrote “beautifully”
and with a lyrical voice about “phenom-
ena others perceived as ugly.” There

Oscar Mandel S o many contradictions and fabri-

cations provide a challenge for the
biographer, and Pim spends many
OTHERWISE POEMS pages carefully unpicking fact from
1. Places; 2.Busy Eros; 3. Names; 4. Poems with animals; 5. Tenebrae; myth. One of Roth’s friends called him a
6. Torpors and diminutions; 7. The Poet; 8.Poems in French. Maskenspieler, a “player of divers roles.”
There are many conmen in the novels.
Naphtali Kroy, the dishonest narra-
An Espresso at the ‘Number Six’ tor of the unfinished autobiographical
(London 1956) novel Strawberries, describes himself
as a Hochstapler, an impostor. The
Disinherited but dignified, double agent Benjamin Lenz, in the
alone to the right, the same to the left, chilling novel of rising nationalism
I sip my sweetened espresso The Spider’s Web (1923), is “a duplici-
this tolerable night. tous Jew,” “slippery and unknowable.”
Kapturak, the fixer, money-lender, and
I’m thirty, and where is home? people-smuggler, flits in and out of the
One more year, one more roof and soul. novels—Job, Weights and Measures
A man of many homes has none: (1937), The Emperor’s Tomb (1938), The
I call no spot of earth my own. Radetzky March—as he flits across
borders, manipulating the more guile-
This sterling English I bagged like a thief, less, naive, and passive characters who
dropping, as I ran, of Flanders, often act as foils to these tricksters.
Cracow, Vienna and France good coins: Pim doesn’t quite identify Roth
sure I must come to grief. with Kroy or Kapturak, but it’s that
wily sharp eye that made him such a
Yet most were kind. Some offered me brilliant journalist. He made his mark
a chair, few blamed the absence of a face. quickly in the postwar Viennese daily
What saved my happiness, in sum, Der Neue Tag, writing in the mode
was middling courtesy. of the feuilleton. This popular short
form of reportage had its origins with
Refreshed, I leave a middling tip and rise. Baudelaire’s alienated urban flaneur
My home is any fragrant history. observing city life in Paris. Roth put
When stones have failed, and beams are scarce, it to memorable use in his evocative
a tent, Vitruvius, must suffice. pieces—written, as he would always
write, in cafés surrounded by jour-
Turner Publishing, 137 pages, $16. Of equal interest: Otherwise Fables (2014) nalist friends. Moving on to Berlin,
and Last Pages (stories, drama, poems, essays, 2019). he described “What I See” in all that
city’s stark, strange ordinariness: refu-
is a melancholy feeling for humanity
and its sorrows alongside the savage
realities. The same humane emotion
that pulses through his brief journalis-
tic reports expands to give novels like
Job and The Radetzky March, grimly
pitiful though they are, their luminous,
heartbreaking depth.
Roth was belligerent with colleagues
and employers, and his awesomely un-
controlled drinking and restlessness
made him a difficult friend and a worse
husband. Pim describes him, by the
late 1920s, as being permanently in a
“peripatetic, chaotic, beleaguered con-
dition.” In 1927 he went on assignments
to Russia, Poland, Berlin, Prague, Vi-
enna, Frankfurt, Albania, northern
Germany, Marseille, Switzerland, Paris,
and the industrial Saarland, and then
asked his editor “where he should go
next.” Meanwhile his wife was in Paris,
alone, wretched, and very unwell.
The story of the marriage is a dread-
ful one. Roth fell in love with Friedl
Reichler when he was twenty-five and
she was nineteen, a charming, lively,
sweet, shy Polish Jew from Galicia. He
married her, after some vacillations, in
the same week as his mother’s death.
There followed a prolonged, awful pat-
tern of possessiveness, jealousy, ab-
sence, and neglect. One passing friend
in Paris, the philosopher Ludwig Mar-
cuse, observed that “he moulded his
wife until he . . . robbed her of all nat-
uralness. . . . He destroyed her.” Friedl
withdrew into anxiety, reclusiveness,
health problems, hallucinations, threats

12 The New York Review

of suicide, and, gradually, schizophre-
nia. She was put in a sanatorium in
Vienna in 1930 and later moved to an
institution in Lower Austria. In 1940 (a
year after Roth’s death) she was taken
by the Nazis, with all the other patients,
and sent to the gas chambers.
Roth felt guilt and shame about his
marriage, blamed himself and feared
that he too would go mad, drank more
and more heavily, and had affairs in
which he replicated his behavior with
Friedl. His mistress Andrea Bell, who
was part Afro-Cuban, found him re-
lentlessly overbearing. He kept watch
on her all the time, and turned against
and insulted her mixed-race children. A
later lover, the novelist Irmgard Keun,
described him as paranoid and jealous.
He was obsessed with clocks and clock-
work and wanted to “dissect human
beings into their component parts.” He
carried a great many penknives about
with him in case he was attacked.
At night, in case Keun tried to leave
him, “he would fall asleep gripping a
fistful of her hair” and keep hold of it
till morning. He wanted to have total
control over her and to make her into
something she wasn’t.
B y the time of that affair, in the late
1930s, Roth was in a dismal plight.
He lived in hotels, drinking all the time,
moving restlessly between Paris, Ost-
end, and Amsterdam. He was desper-
ate for work and money. All his German
earnings and royalties were stopped,
he’d lost his regular outlet for journal-
ism, his spending was recklessly extrav-
agant, and his book publishers had had
enough of subsidizing him with loans
and advances and getting only abuse in
return. His letters were often howls of
despair, as here in 1934 to Zweig: “I have
worries, such worries, and I’m so UN-
HAPPY . . . . I can’t live like this any more,
it’s killing me.” His views had become
increasingly antidemocratic, royalist,
and reactionary; he even got involved
with plans to reinstate the Habsburg
monarchy and declare war, as the only
way of saving Europe from the Nazis.
Numerous witnesses (Pim has col-
lected some excellent examples) de-
scribed him in these last years, when
he was still only in his forties—though,
as he often said, “I have been old ever
since I can remember.” His eyesight
was failing and his eyes were bloodshot
and protuberant. His reddish mustache
covered up terrible teeth, his face was
bloated, his feet so swollen he could
barely walk, and his liver so distended
that he carried it like a huge paunch
above his spindly legs; the once dapper,
elegant dandy now seemed deformed.
“He looked,” said one old friend, “like
a sixty-year-old drunkard.” Sitting in
the bars and cafés all day smoking and
drinking, his harsh laughter and bark-
ing, abrasive voice silencing all around
him, he was, also, always writing, “fill-
ing notebooks with his tiny script,” with
extraordinary, unremitting energy. His
last novel (of eighteen), The Legend of
the Holy Drinker, written in extremis
and published in 1939, the year of his
death from alcoholism, is a moving,
witty fable of an alcoholic vagrant in
Paris offered a miraculous last chance
of redemption.
The charm and magnetism persisted.
Old friends (and he had many) sought
out his company and tried to help,
still seeing in him “the young, bright,
charming, noble Joseph Roth.” He made
October 6, 2022
it hard for them, begging for support
and then taking offense, quarreling over
politics and literature and money, turn-
ing against loyal supporters. The most
painful example is the long-drawn-out CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNER OF THE
breach with Stefan Zweig. The older,
famous, wealthy Viennese novelist was
an unwavering enthusiast for Roth’s
2022 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD
work and was loyal, kind, and helpful
to him over many years. But as Roth
spoke out against the Nazis and fled
into exile, he became harshly critical of
Zweig’s silence and passivity; increas-
WHAT WOULD NATURE DO?
ingly distrustful of Zweig’s attitude to A Guide for Our Uncertain Times
him, accusing him of evasiveness, in-
difference, and condescension; and re-
sentful of his own indebtedness to him.
by Ruth DeFries
Their correspondence, quoted from
Hofmann’s Joseph Roth: A Life in Let-
ters (2012), provides some of the most
lacerating moments of the biography:
RUNNER-UP
Roth, friend, I know how hard KNOWLEDGE WORLDS
things are for you, and that’s rea- Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University
son enough for me to love you all
the more, and when you’re angry
and irritable and full of buried re-
by Reinhold Martin
sentments against me, then all I
feel is that life is torturing you, and
that you’re lashing out . . . against
the only person . . . who in spite of
everything and everyone will re-
main true to you. It won’t help you,
Roth. You won’t turn me against
WINNER
Joseph Roth. It won’t help you!
Your St.Z.
Though he quotes these moving let-
ters, Pim is generally critical of Zweig,
rather like Roth himself. I found that
partisanship a weakness, and there
are other things to question, like
some heavy-handed explications, for
instance on self-hating Jews or on the
lost emperor replacing the lost father.
At times Pim seems overindebted to
Hofmann (though for any writer on
Roth this would be hard to avoid): a
reading of a photograph of Zweig and
Roth together in 1936, for instance,
closely echoes Hofmann’s account of
it in A Life in Letters.
But in the main this is a thought-
ful, thorough, and sympathetic book,
and a necessary one. It has often been
lamented that Roth’s work, apart from
The Radetzky March, has for years
been underread and neglected, and
that it has taken time for his novels
to be translated. Roth fans, includ-
ing Hofmann, Dennis Marks, and
Joan Acocella, have long called for RUNNER-UP
an English biography. Endless Flight
is a welcome aid for people like me
who can’t read Roth, or his critics and
biographers, in German, and for any
English-language readers who might
want an introduction to his work. And
now, more than ever, is the time to
read him. As Pim says, eloquently:
He is a poet of the marginalised,
the alienated and the dispos-
sessed: of those who sought refuge
after their homelands were de-
stroyed, of those whose fractured
lives reflected his own. In a time
when our social fabric is fraying
once more, when displacement,
migration and transience are again
the norm and ugly reductive na-
tionalisms threaten to overpower
liberal aspirations, Roth speaks
to us with as much urgency and
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
.
power as he did to those who read
him during his brief lifetime.
CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU · CUPBLOG.ORG
13
 A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent
Breaking the Promise of Brown:
The Resegregation of
America’s Schools
by Stephen Breyer, with an
introduction by Thiru Vignarajah.
Brookings Institution,
127 pp., $19.99
Among the thousands of cases the
Supreme Court has decided, only a
handful of dissenting opinions stand
out. There is Justice John Marshall
Harlan’s solitary dissent in Plessy v.
Ferguson, the 1896 decision upholding
the doctrine of “separate but equal.”
“All citizens are equal before the law,”
Harlan objected. “There is in this coun-
try no superior, dominant, ruling class
of citizens.” Another is Justice Rob-
ert Jackson’s warning in Korematsu
v. United States—the 1944 ruling
that upheld the wartime internment
of more than 120,000 people of Japa-
nese descent, most of them American
citizens—that the Court had deliv-
ered a decision that “lies about like a
loaded weapon ready for the hand of
any authority that can bring forward
a plausible claim of an urgent need.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dis-
senting opinion in the 2013 Shelby
County case that eviscerated the Vot-
ing Rights Act—throwing out the law
“when it has worked and is continuing
to work . . . is like throwing away your
umbrella in a rainstorm because you
are not getting wet”—has also made
it into the canon. The opinion writ-
ten jointly by Justices Stephen Breyer,
Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in
dissent from Dobbs v. Jackson Wom-
en’s Health Organization, the decision
that overturned Roe v. Wade in June,
is likely to find its way there as well.1
Another Breyer dissent, in the 2007
case Parents Involved in Community
Schools v. Seattle School District
No. 1, rarely makes such lists today. The
decision, which invalidated modest ef-
forts by two public school systems to
resist the tide of resegregation, re-
ceived a fair amount of attention at
the time—and so did Breyer’s dissent,
which he delivered from the bench on
the final day of the Court’s 2006–2007
term for an astonishing twenty-two
minutes, the longest oral delivery of
any opinion, majority or dissenting, in
Supreme Court history.2 But memories
have faded as other sharply contested
cases have filled the Court’s docket.
The legal historian Melvin I. Urofsky,
in his Dissent and the Supreme Court:
Its Role in the Court’s History and the
Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue (2015),
briefly discusses the case without even
mentioning Breyer’s opinion.
1 the modern day.” Breyer warned that if
For more on their dissent from Dobbs, see
David Cole, “Egregiously Wrong,” The New
York Review, August 18, 2022; and Laurence
H. Tribe, “Deconstructing Dobbs,” The New
York Review, September 23, 2022.
2
The late legal scholar Lani Guinier cele-
brated Breyer’s oral dissent as an example
of “demosprudence,” which she defined as
an appeal to the people as the ultimate
lawmakers by “transforming an elite stage
into a democratic agora.” See her “Foreword:
Demosprudence Through Dissent,” Harvard
Law Review, Vol. 122, No. 1 (November 2008).
14
Linda Greenhouse
Hank Willis Thomas: ‘I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd’ #1, 2017
P arents Involved is important
nonetheless. The question at its
heart—whether student-placement
policies or, by extension, university
admissions programs can ever take ac-
count of race—is arguably even more
relevant now than it was fifteen years
ago. Chief Justice John Roberts’s an-
swer, for himself and Justices Antonin
Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel
Alito, was no. (Justice Anthony Ken-
nedy wrote a separate concurring opin-
ion.) Invoking what he characterized
as the nondiscrimination principle
of Brown v. Board of Education—the
unanimous 1954 ruling that racial seg-
regation of children in public schools
was unconstitutional3—Roberts wrote,
“The way to stop discrimination on the
basis of race is to stop discriminating
on the basis of race.”
To Breyer, writing for himself and
Justices Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens,
and David Souter, Roberts’s invocation
of Brown was profoundly misleading.
Parents Involved concerned plans by
which the school systems in Seattle and
in Louisville, Kentucky, striving to re-
tain the hard-won gains of integration,
sought to avoid school-by-school racial
isolation by limiting the ability of stu-
dents of any race to select or transfer
into schools where their race was on the
verge of predominating. While Roberts
denounced this approach as an effort at
“racial balance, pure and simple,” Breyer
saw something categorically different.
“The context here is one of racial limits
that seek, not to keep the races apart,
but to bring them together,” he wrote.
“Indeed, it is a cruel distortion of his-
tory to compare Topeka, Kansas, in
the 1950’s to Louisville and Seattle in
school districts lost access to such tools,
what lay ahead was “the de facto reseg-
regation of America’s public schools.”
During its new term this fall, the
Court will hear challenges to racially
conscious admissions plans at Har-
vard and the University of North Car-
3
That there were no dissenting votes was “a
central feature of Brown’s mythic status,”
Justin Driver observed in The Schoolhouse
Gate (Pantheon, 2018), his account of the
Court’s role in American education.
olina. It’s nearly impossible to imagine
a scenario in which the universities
emerge unscathed. At the high school
level, a Virginia school district’s care-
ful nonracial approach to admission
at its prestigious limited-enrollment
science and technology school is also
being challenged in Coalition for TJ v.
Fairfax County School Board, a case
aimed at reaching the Supreme Court.
The counterintuitive basis for that law-
suit is that the decision to drop a com-
petitive district-wide, by-the-numbers
admissions system in favor of one that
guarantees places for the top eighth
graders in more than two dozen middle
schools was itself infused with race
consciousness, to the detriment of
Asian American applicants.
The Virginia school district modeled
its geography-based approach on the
“top 10 percent” system used by the
University of Texas at Austin to achieve
an automatic measure of diversity by
offering places to the top students in
all the state’s high schools. The Texas
plan has narrowly survived two trips
to the Supreme Court, most recently
in 2016. But by the time the Virginia
case reaches the Court’s docket, the
precedents on which the school district
relies may well have gone the way of
Roe v. Wade. Another challenge to the
Texas plan as unduly race-conscious is
now making its way through the lower
federal courts. Students for Fair Ad-
missions, the organization bringing
this case (it is also, notably, respon-
sible for the Harvard and University
of North Carolina cases), is clearly
counting on the Supreme Court’s re-
configuration since it last upheld the
Texas plan. Few would argue that its
confidence is misplaced.
S o now is a good time to revisit Brey-
er’s Parents Involved dissent for a
refresher course on how the Supreme
Court stood the principle of equality
on its head. That is certainly one goal
of his new book, Breaking the Promise
of Brown. There is a second purpose
as well, captured by the book’s subti-
tle, “The Resegregation of America’s
Schools.” That purpose is to validate
Breyer’s warning about the conse-
quences of the false equivalence that
Parents Involved exemplified—the no-
tion that a “color-blind” Constitution
admits of no difference between using
race to segregate and using race to
integrate.
From a high point of integration in
1988, when 37 percent of Black stu-
dents attended majority-white schools,
America’s public schools have reseg-
regated to a startling degree. By 2018,
that percentage had fallen by half.
Such a drastic turnabout can’t be laid
at the feet of any single Supreme Court
opinion, of course. But that’s the point:
while affirmative action at the univer-
sity level still hangs by a thread in an
increasingly hostile Court, the Court’s
divestment from its integration proj-
ect at the elementary and secondary
level was decades old by the time of
Parents Involved. So it’s possible to see
that decision as having slammed shut
a door, perhaps the final one.
At 127 pages, this is a very short
book, although longer than The Author-
ity of the Court and the Peril of Politics,
which Breyer published last year. That
book began as a lecture—hardly an un-
usual origin for an academic, as Breyer
once was and is now again. Breaking
the Promise of Brown consists of some-
thing more unusual: Breyer’s Parents
Involved dissenting opinion. Printed
in full, complete with the charts and
graphs he included at the end under
the label “Resegregation Trends,” the
opinion takes up most of the book. The
remainder consists of an introductory
essay by Thiru Vignarajah, one of Brey-
er’s law clerks from that term.
To one degree or another, a Supreme
Court opinion is almost always the
product of a collaboration between
justices and their clerks. It’s likely that
Vignarajah, a former president of the
Harvard Law Review who went on to
become a federal prosecutor and deputy
attorney general of Maryland, worked
with Breyer on Parents Involved, even
if only to the extent of compiling the
social science research to which
the opinion makes ample reference. The
exact nature of the collaboration that
produced this little book is undisclosed;
although Vignarajah is identified as the
sole author of the introduction, Breyer
surely read and approved it.
The introduction provides useful
context—that Breyeresque word—
and is itself a powerful piece of ad-
vocacy, distilling for easy absorption
the points that Breyer made at con-
siderably greater length in the dissent.
HAN K W IL LI S T HOMAS/JAC K S HAIN MAN GALL ERY, N EW YORK
(The typeset version of the dissent as
issued by the Court was seventy-seven
pages long, nearly twice the length of
the Roberts opinion.) Bestowing on
Parents Involved the new name of “the
resegregation cases” (the Louisville
and Seattle cases began as two separate
lawsuits), Vignarajah tracks the Court’s
retreat from the desegregation orders
that lower-court judges imposed fre-
quently during the 1970s. He points out
that even as the Court turned against
these mandatory orders a decade later,
it began at the same time to interfere
with school systems and localities that
embarked on such remedies voluntarily.
To follow the ensuing trajectory is to
step through the looking glass: race-
The New York Review
conscious remedies for segregation
that were once mandatory became
merely permissible before finally, after
Parents Involved and other cases, be-
coming prohibited.
T he distance the Court has traveled
becomes startlingly obvious in a
paragraph Vignarajah quotes from
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board
of Education, a 1971 Supreme Court
opinion that upheld a busing order in
a North Carolina school district. The
author was the conservative chief jus-
tice, Warren Burger, and the decision
was unanimous:
School authorities are traditionally
charged with broad power to for-
mulate and implement educational
policy and might well conclude, for
example, that in order to prepare
students to live in a pluralistic
society each school should have a
prescribed ratio of Negro to white
students reflecting the proportion
for the district as a whole. To do
this as an educational policy is
within the broad discretionary
powers of school authorities.
Soon enough, the “broad discretion-
ary powers” were no longer, in the Su-
preme Court’s view, the solution. They
were the problem—a problem of con-
stitutional dimension in the eyes of an
increasingly conservative majority that
began to strike down efforts by states
and localities to address the systemic
legacy of racial discrimination through
such measures as hiring preferences
and public contracting set-asides. Did
the Court really know best? Vignarajah
highlights Breyer’s lament toward the
end of his Parents Involved dissent, a
summons to the judicial humility of
an earlier era:
I do not claim to know how best
to stop harmful discrimination;
how best to create a society that
includes all Americans; how best
to overcome our serious problems
of increasing de facto segregation,
troubled inner city schooling, and
poverty correlated with race. But, as
a judge, I do know that the Consti-
tution does not authorize judges to
dictate solutions to these problems.
Rather, the Constitution creates a
democratic political system through
which the people themselves must
together find answers. And it is for
them to debate how best to educate
the Nation’s children and how best
to administer America’s schools to
achieve that aim. The Court should
leave them to their work.
What was “the promise of Brown” of
the book’s title, the promise that Parents
Involved broke? It was “the promise of
true racial equality—not as a matter
of fine words on paper, but as a matter of
everyday life in the Nation’s cities and
schools,” Breyer wrote. “It sought one
law, one Nation, one people, not simply
as a matter of legal principle but in
terms of how we actually live.”
Throughout his twenty-eight years
on the Court, up to and including the
final days of his last term, Breyer in-
sisted on the need to pay attention
to consequences. In his view, the Con-
stitution is a practical document de-
signed to guide, not impede, a workable
government. During his long tenure,
October 6, 2022
he was known not for passion but for
a cool intellectualism. But there was
passion in his Parents Involved dissent.
Its penultimate line warned, “This is a
decision that the Court and the Nation
will come to regret.” This book aims
to show, years later, that he was right.
O n one level, a dissent is a record
of failure, a job left undone, a
goal not achieved: the author has not
managed through the force of reason
to change minds. But for Urofsky in
his book on Supreme Court dissents,
a dissenting opinion is also part of
the ongoing “constitutional dialogue”
by which constitutional law is made
and society itself is shaped. Charles
Evans Hughes, who served as chief
justice from 1930 to 1941, called dissent
“an appeal to the brooding spirit of
the law, to the intelligence of a future
day.” A dissenting opinion may mark
the majority’s handiwork as not only
deeply contested, but vulnerable. It
can rally the base and inspire like-
minded lower-court judges to find
creative workarounds to holdings of
which they disapprove. Even if only
by increments, it can move the law.
Until the early decades of the twen-
tieth century, dissent on the Supreme
Court was strongly disfavored. Nearly
all decisions were unanimous under a
“norm of acquiescence,” in Robert Post’s
phrase, that was driven by the belief
that dissenting opinions undermined
the authority of the Court’s judgments.
Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932,
“In most matters it is more important
that the applicable rule of law be settled
than that it be settled right.”
Of course, which “matters” were ap-
propriate for Brandeis’s standard was
open to dispute, and the norm began
to break down. Scalia, a prolific and
enthusiastic dissenter, wrote in 1998
that dissents can “augment rather than
diminish the prestige of the Court.”
More effectively than an “artificial
unanimity,” he wrote, the existence of
dissenting opinions makes clear that
the Court’s decisions “are the product
of independent and thoughtful minds,
who try to persuade one another but
do not simply ‘go along’ for some sup-
posed ‘good of the institution.’”4
History may well vindicate Breyer’s
Parents Involved dissent, a process this
book aims to launch. But the current
Court will not—and even if it did, the
resegregation process is now so far
along that it could be reversed only
with dislocations on a scale that nei-
ther the Court nor the public would
find acceptable.
I understand the choice to include
only Breyer’s dissent in Breaking the
Promise of Brown. After all, it tells the
story he wants to tell, unchallenged
and unadorned. But I think the book
missed an opportunity. There were
four other opinions in the case: Rob-
erts’s for the plurality of four justices;
a concurring opinion by Thomas; an
opinion by Kennedy concurring only
in the judgment while withholding his
vote from Roberts’s opinion; and a
short and powerful dissent by Stevens,
then the longest-serving member of
the Court. While Stevens signed Brey-
er’s dissent, he had something to say
in addition. “It is my firm conviction,”
Stevens wrote, “that no Member of the
4
Antonin Scalia, “Dissents,” OAH Magazine
of History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Fall 1998), p. 19.
Court that I joined in 1975 would have
agreed with today’s decision.”
Readers would benefit from having
all the opinions between the same
covers. The full decision is readily
available on the Internet, and anyone
wondering what drove Breyer to his
emphatic dissent can simply download
the whole thing. (Supreme Court de-
cisions are in the public domain, and
the publisher of Breyer’s book, Brook-
ings Institution Press, notes that he
will receive no royalties or other com-
pensation.) The analytic weakness and
rhetorical excess of Roberts’s opinion
becomes evident in light of Kennedy’s
explanation for why he couldn’t sign it.
During his time on the Court, Ken-
nedy never voted to uphold a govern-
ment program that counted people
by race. So why did he refuse to sign
Roberts’s opinion, thereby depriv-
ing the new chief justice (it was only
Roberts’s second term, Kennedy’s
twenty-first) of the ability to speak
for a five-member majority?
Kennedy’s explanation was clear and
precise. Roberts’s opinion, he wrote,
“is too dismissive of the legitimate
interest government has in ensuring
all people have equal opportunity re-
gardless of their race.” The opinion was
“at least open to the interpretation
that the Constitution requires school
districts to ignore the problem of de
facto resegregation in schooling,” he
said, adding, “I cannot endorse that
conclusion.” School districts should
be encouraged to use such methods
as resource allocation, recruitment,
and strategic drawing of attendance
zones—mechanisms that, while under-
taken with awareness of race and racial
consequences, “do not lead to different
treatment based on a classification that
tells each student he or she is to be
defined by race.” Kennedy was scathing
about Roberts’s line that “the way to
stop discrimination on the basis of race
is to stop discriminating on the basis
of race.” It was “not sufficient to decide
these cases,” he wrote. The problem “de-
fies so easy a solution.” Martha Minow,
in her 2010 book In Brown’s Wake, de-
rided Roberts’s line as an “aphoristic
reduction” of Brown itself.
Without having encountered Rob-
erts’s aphorism in the text of his opin-
ion, a reader of Breaking the Promise
of Brown would have no context for
Breyer’s sly footnote 164, in which he
points out the origin of what he labels
“the plurality’s slogan.” It turns out
not to have been original to Roberts.
Rather, the chief justice lifted it with-
out attribution from a judge on the US
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Cir-
cuit, Carlos Bea, a conservative who
dissented from the decision that up-
held the Seattle plan—and whose view
Parents Involved vindicated. Breyer
quotes from Bea’s dissent: “The way
to end racial discrimination is to stop
discriminating by race.”5
P erhaps Breyer derived some small
satisfaction from unmasking the
chief justice’s benign plagiarism. If
so, it would likely have been the only
source of pleasure at the end of a
transformational Supreme Court term.
In hindsight, we can easily see what
5
I discussed the origins of the line at some
length in a 2007 law review article, “A Tale
of Two Justices,” The Green Bag, Vol. 11,
No. 1 (Autumn 2007), pp. 40–41.
Parents Involved portended, not only
for America’s public schools but for the
Supreme Court. Breyer surely under-
stood this at the time, and it was that
insight that gave his dissent its power.
He knew that in December 2005, Sandra
Day O’Connor’s last month as a justice,
the Court had refused to hear an ap-
peal challenging a student-assignment
plan in Lynn, Massachusetts, very sim-
ilar to those in Louisville and Seattle.
The federal appeals court in Boston
had upheld the plan, just as federal
appeals courts had recently upheld
the Louisville and Seattle ones. There
was, in other words, no “conflict in the
circuits” about the constitutionality of
such measures, no disagreement that
the Supreme Court needed to resolve.
Weeks later, the petitions challeng-
ing the Louisville and Seattle plans
arrived at the Court. By the time the
petitions were ready for the justices’
consideration, O’Connor was gone and
her successor, Alito, was on the bench.
In what was arguably the most import-
ant act of the reconfigured Roberts
Court, and an early sign of what it
would mean for Alito’s activism to re-
place O’Connor’s commitment to mod-
eration, the justices accepted the two
cases for decision the following term.
It was not only Parents Involved that
marked the Court’s turn during the
2006–2007 term. With Alito in O’Con-
nor’s place, the Court reversed course
on the question of so-called partial-
birth abortion, upholding a federal law
that prohibited the procedure, even
though it had invalidated an identical
law in Nebraska just seven years be-
fore. And with Alito writing for a 5–4
majority in yet another case that term,
the Court interpreted the federal law
against pay discrimination so narrowly
that Congress promptly repudiated the
decision by enacting the Lilly Ledbet-
ter Fair Pay Act of 2009.
“It is not often in the law that so
few have so quickly changed so much,”
Breyer declared from the bench in sum-
marizing his Parents Involved dissent.
It was an extraordinary statement for
a justice to make. The proceeding was
not broadcast, and the courtroom au-
dience was small, consisting mainly of
members of the elite Supreme Court
bar and the Court’s resident press
corps. But it was an audience that
Breyer surely knew was in a position
to amplify his voice. His line about the
“few” and the speed of change figured
prominently in news accounts of the
decision. People who heard or read
those accounts scrambled to find it
in the dissenting opinion’s many pages.
It wasn’t there. It wasn’t, after all, part
of a careful parsing and analysis of the
case at hand. Breyer’s written opinion
did that. This was something different.
It was one man’s lament.
Since the line was not part of a pub-
lished opinion, no subsequent opinion
ever cited or repeated it. It lived on
as oral tradition, lacking the official
status that comes with publication in
United States Reports, lacking every-
thing but its essential truth. And then,
on June 24 of this year, it surfaced.
At the end of their joint opinion dis-
senting from the overturning of Roe
v. Wade, Breyer and his two colleagues
wrote, “One of us once said that ‘it is
not often in the law that so few have
.
so quickly changed so much.’” There
followed this addendum: “For all of
us, in our time on this Court, that has
never been more true than today.”
15
 Corrections of Taste
Critical Revolutionaries:
Five Critics Who Changed
the Way We Read
by Terry Eagleton.
Yale University Press, 323 pp., $28.00
Near the end of Terry Eagleton’s Crit-
ical Revolutionaries, there’s a sentence
that made me stop for a moment in
disbelief. Perhaps it was meant to.
F. R. Leavis was by far the most dog-
matic of the twentieth-century critics
with whom the book is concerned, and
Eagleton writes that the Cambridge
don held that “literary criticism was
the best training ground for the devel-
opment of a free, unspecialised, dis-
interested intelligence, which could
be brought critically to bear on social
existence as a whole.” I read those
words with something like wonder. The
best . . . the whole? Really? I can’t imag-
ine anyone today making that broad
claim, even leaving aside the increas-
ingly specialized nature of such criti-
cism and our current skepticism about
the very possibility of disinterested-
ness in itself. We wouldn’t have the
confidence, or the nerve, though
the objections hardly stop there. By
“literary criticism” Leavis meant the
study of English literature—all other
traditions were ancillary at best—and
though Eagleton is far from sharing
those opinions he does an effective
job of ventriloquizing his subject’s
attitudes.
English studies stood for Leavis as
the “centre of humane value and judi-
cious judgement”; it was a discipline
that when properly taught would pro-
duce a body of “cultivated administra-
tors and civil servants,” along with a
cadre of intellectuals who might exert
some meaningful influence on public
policy. Properly taught—that is, by him
or his disciples, by his students or the
contributors and readers of Scrutiny,
the pugnacious quarterly that he edited
from 1932 to 1953. The usual argument
here is that the study of literature puts
a unique emphasis on one’s ability to
draw fine distinctions, to discriminate
between closely related meanings and
possibilities, even to entertain several
conflicting ideas at once.
Yet I can’t see any but self-serving
reasons why English might be thought
to do that better than history, or po-
litical theory, or environmental science.
Leavis held that critical debate began
with one person saying, “This is so, isn’t
it?” and another answering, “Yes, but . . .”
Only here the answer has to be “No.” Not
for all of us, and especially not when
one thinks of the particular burden of
Leavisite criticism, with its emphasis
on the evaluation of individual texts, on
the ranking of one writer or poem in
relation to others. Even this reviewer
wants to laugh at the idea that there
is something crucial for our “social ex-
istence as a whole” in coming to the
correct estimation of Pope or Shelley.
There’s a part of Eagleton that wants
to laugh too, I suspect, and it’s to his
credit that he doesn’t. Critical Rev-
olutionaries recaptures the moment
when literary critics in Britain began
to see themselves as monitoring “the
spiritual health of the modern age,” a
job that put their responsibilities on a
16
Michael Gorra
F. R. Leavis, William Empson, I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and Raymond Williams;
illustration by Anna Higgie
par with “those of the priest, prophet
or politician.” That was especially true
of Leavis, but in different ways the de-
scription holds for each of the figures
discussed in the book. The others, all
of them in some way associated with
Cambridge University, are I. A. Rich-
ards, William Empson, the American-
born T. S. Eliot, and the rather younger
Raymond Williams, an outlier in his
thinking as well, but someone with
whom Eagleton worked closely.
All but Eliot spent their lives as uni-
versity teachers, though none of them
had conventional academic careers,
and the work of all but Williams had
its roots in Eliot’s early poems and
essays. Together they represent both
“a specific intellectual formation” and
the tradition in which Eagleton was
trained at Cambridge at the beginning
of the 1960s. These were the critics
who made him, however much that
training was supplemented by both
his Catholic schooling and his study
of Marxist theory. I am younger and
read only Eliot and Williams as an
undergraduate. Still, the others were
ever-present names on the lips of my
teachers, through whom that tradition
had filtered down to a Massachusetts
college at the end of the 1970s. How
much of it survives? What use or rel-
evance does it have today?
E agleton has published something
like a book a year since the mid-
1960s, and his early work included vol-
umes on Shakespeare, the Brontës,
Walter Benjamin, and Samuel Richard-
son. But he made his name with Lit-
erary Theory: An Introduction (1983),
which remains both his best-known
and his most consequential work. It
is far more than an introduction. It
begins by attacking the concept of dis-
interested value judgments for which
Leavis spoke, and then proceeds to
undermine the idea of literature itself.
There is, Eagleton argues, no use of
language that is always and only “lit-
erary,” and though his polemic relies
far too heavily on extreme cases, it
does at least earn its “Yes, but . . .” The
book ends by suggesting that we sub-
stitute rhetorical for literary analysis,
concentrating on a text’s “discursive
practices” in the pursuit of a self-
consciously political criticism, though
it’s notable that this might draw on
some of the same forms of attention
as the study of poetry.
In between, Eagleton provides an
exceptionally lucid account of the
origins of English as a discipline, in-
cluding the figures in Critical Revolu-
tionaries along with the American New
Critics, and then a reliable summary
of the approaches that challenged its
founding assumptions: the methods
and questions loosely known as “the-
ory,” from Russian formalism to the
poststructuralism of Roland Barthes
and beyond. Literary Theory says little
about the then-new field of feminist
criticism and nothing about the na-
scent terrain of postcolonial studies,
but its conclusion bears on them both
and I will return to it.
Criticism has always liked and
needed to borrow from other disci-
plines. Literary Theory examines both
linguistics and psychoanalysis, but
something newly in play at the time it
appeared was the history of science, in
particular Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Struc-
ture of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Younger scholars looked to its concept
of a paradigm shift as a way to jolt the
overfamiliar interpretive fictions of
their own fields in new directions. “Nor-
mal criticism,” we might say, stood in
for what Kuhn called “normal science,”
a period in which one works comfort-
ably along on problems whose guiding
assumptions are already known—so
well known, in fact, that they barely
need to be stated. Some problems
are, however, anomalous. They can’t
be resolved by remaining within the
explanatory theories of a given age,
and the resolution of the friction or
struggle between those theories takes
the form of a new paradigm in which
one can begin to ask better questions.
Einstein replaces Newton; truth
shifts, and often suddenly. Kuhn’s work
was sometimes used to characterize
a disturbance within a particular sub-
field. I remember a conference session
in the early 1980s in which his terms
were applied to antebellum Ameri-
can literature by scholars for whom
the idea of an all-white and all-male
“American Renaissance” no longer
seemed sufficient. Often, though, that
change is a larger one. Here “theory”
itself, a critical revolution that in
retrospect coincided with Eagleton’s
book, stands as the best example: a
paradigm shift that seemed fully emer-
gent only at the moment of its consol-
idation, and even as its practitioners,
in the American academy at least, felt
that they were still insurgents.
E agleton doesn’t use this language,
but Critical Revolutionaries is
meant to define an older shift, one in
which what we still call criticism—
evaluation and interpretation—
replaced a set of earlier models in the
study of English. Or perhaps we could
call it “close reading,” a refusal to take
“the words on the page” for granted
and an attempt to offer instead what
Eagleton calls “a rigorously detailed
analysis of tone, pace, pitch, mood,
rhythm, grammar, syntax, texture.” He
gives a chapter apiece to each of his
five figures, moving easily from text
to text, quoting, paraphrasing, think-
ing his way inside their skin, and at
times noting what their arguments
miss. These aren’t chronological, book-
by-book accounts of their work and
thought; they’re portraits, sketches
or summations of a sensibility, and
written with both wit and asperity. But
in sticking so closely to them, Eagleton
often loses sight of the institutional
history that made them possible. I’m
willing to accept that what he calls
“Cambridge English” represents a
paradigm shift, and not only because
its practitioners all agreed that they
were doing something new. But just
what was the ancien régime that these
critical revolutionaries pushed aside?
“Genteel amateurism,” Eagleton says
at one point, “impressionistic prattle”
at another, and then “aesthetic waf-
fle.” His bugbear is Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch, the editor of The Oxford Book of
English Verse. Quiller-Couch held the
university’s most prestigious chair in
English literature from 1912 to 1944,
and his teaching, Eagleton writes, in-
volved banging on “for an hour or so
about the twin mysteries of the soul
within and the exquisitely designed
universe without.” Still, what gets said
in the star turn of a public lecture is
often different from the work of a sem-
The New York Review
inar room or tutorial. Eagleton notes
that the English curriculum had been
the subject of a “radical reform” in
1917, in which Anglo-Saxon was pushed
aside for a “course of study that was
overwhelmingly modern, critical and
literary (rather than linguistic) in
orientation.”
That change made the work of Rich-
ards and his followers possible. But
how did it happen, and what exactly
was replaced by what? How did the
material on which students were ex-
amined change, and how might that
have shaped the revolution to come?
After 1917 there was, one imagines,
less than there had been in the way
of literary history, of sources and in-
fluences; less about what was written
when, and who insulted whom. Fewer
facts for one’s notebook, less about
Beauty, and less too about the his-
tory of the language, though philology
would find a curious echo in the later
work of both Empson and Williams.
Here, however, one wants chapter and
verse, and from Quiller-Couch too; one
wants to compare how he works with
a poem to the way Empson does. He
may be just as bad as Eagleton says.
Probably he is—but there’s something
sketchily straw man about this account
of the past.
T he best Victorian critics almost
never wrote in detail about the lan-
guage of their subjects. Henry James
might quote at length, but he didn’t
need to linger over another writer’s
sentences in order to capture their dis-
tinctive voice and tone. Yet a part of
the critical revolution involved learn-
ing to trust—to insist on—the value
of one’s own independent judgment
rather than relying on some consti-
tuted authority, and for Eagleton’s
figures the best way to do that was
indeed by quoting. Set down a few lines
and then say something about them.
Don’t just admire. Put some pressure
on the words you’ve chosen, as Eliot
did in his essay on the metaphysical
poets, singling out Donne’s allitera-
tive “bracelet of bright hair about the
bone” from “The Relic.” Eliot threw
out one predecessor after another—
Milton especially—before he became
a constituted authority himself, and
in “Tradition and the Individual Tal-
ent” he presented literary history as a
series of paradigm shifts, a perpetual
sequence of shocks in which the pres-
ent remakes the past. He got his read-
ers to look and to listen, and through
a mixture of bluff and persuasion he
made them share his tastes.
Most literature classes still work this
way. We read a passage aloud and then
go back over what we’ve read, some-
times word by word. We remind our
students that in writing they need not
only to quote but also to demonstrate
that quotation’s relevance; gloss it,
don’t simply take it as self-evident.
And each semester I have to tell a few
puzzled STEM kids that in my course
those quotations are their data. Many
of the questions we ask are different
from the ones that interested Eagle-
ton’s subjects, but the classroom pro-
tocols are much the same.
So it’s a bit of a shock to find that
the most basic of them—look at the
words on the page—originated in an
act of remediation. As an instructor
at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the
young Richards devised an experiment
October 6, 2022
in which he gave his students a se-
quence of poems from which all con-
text had been stripped away—titles,
authors, dates. He asked them to pro-
vide detailed comments on each poem
and found that “the most literate sec-
tion of the population was effectively
unable to read.” They couldn’t reliably
date those poems on the basis of in-
ternal evidence alone, distinguishing
one century’s language from another,
and they preferred what he saw as
Victorian drivel to Hopkins or Donne.
Their ears hadn’t been trained, and
any pedagogy meant to provide that
training would therefore have to begin
by teaching them to read slowly—“the
kind of reading,” in Eagleton’s terms,
“which clings tenaciously to the shape
of the sentences,” to the choice of this
word and not that.
Practical Criticism (1929), the book
Richards made out of this experiment,
isn’t one to read for pleasure, not with
its many chapters of quotations from
student responses and Richards’s
often repetitive analyses of their
failings. It’s a book about education
rather than about literature, and it was
almost immediately superseded by one
of those students, who showed that
close reading needn’t be remedial at
all. Empson was only twenty-four when
he published Seven Types of Ambigu-
ity (1930). It could just as easily have
been four types, or fifteen, but seven
is a lucky number and there are also
the seven deadly sins. An ambiguity
for Empson is “any verbal nuance,
however slight, which gives room for
alternative reactions to the same piece
of language”; the types themselves are
but a frame on which to hang a series
of brilliantly playful accounts of En-
glish verse.
The young Empson is a showman,
someone who does card tricks with
words. He’s tremendously digressive,
he likes and follows all linguistic loose
ends, and at times he seems horribly
pleased with himself. Eagleton de-
scribes him as “the closest reader
of all,” the maker of the finest dis-
tinctions, but looking at his pages is
exhausting, and for all his brilliance—
because of his brilliance—I can take
only so much at a sitting.
S till, Empson was right about the
nature of the English language it-
self. Any piece of it seems susceptible
to “alternative reactions,” or as Joseph
Conrad once wrote, “No English word
has clean edges.” They all, the novelist
thought, carried so many connotations
as to be little more than “instruments
for exciting blurred emotions.” Ea-
gleton’s subjects thought hard about
the nature of that language. Richards
spent years exploring the idea of Basic
English, and Leavis thought that En-
glish vocabulary was something much
more than referential. At its best—
its most poetic—it seemed to him to
grow from the land itself, and in con-
sequence, Eagleton suggests, “it per-
forms what it speaks of, creates what
it communicates, so that you cannot
slide a cigarette paper between the
words and the experience they record.”
One of Williams’s best books is an id-
iosyncratic dictionary called Keywords
(1976), a set of historicized definitions
that explore both the derivations and
the ever-shifting meanings of over a
hundred central concepts in the social
sciences—“hegemony,” say, or “jargon.”
But Empson pushed that fascination
the furthest, in a book that might have
been written with Conrad in mind. The
Structure of Complex Words (1951) ex-
amines not ambiguity as such but
rather the relation between the “differ-
ent but determinate meanings” of the
same word, including some that seem
simple indeed. “Dog” is one of them,
“honest” too. Empson tracks that one
through its different appearances in
Shakespeare and finds that “he never
once allows the word a simple hearty
use between equals”; it’s always shaded
by irony or used to mark a social dif-
ference. And sometimes both at once:
“honest Iago.”
The Structure of Complex Words
is a long book, and a hard one. At
times Empson appears to rummage
through the drawers of his mind, as
if hunting for something he’s mislaid;
he is an antiquarian of language, in
search of a lost button of meaning.
At others he becomes a character in
his own argument, open-minded yet
testy, garrulous, and marked by a self-
deprecating confidence; he says that
“I shall now put forward my little bits
of machinery” before launching into
a particularly difficult piece of logic.
Yet despite its difficulty, it keeps you
reading, as Seven Types of Ambiguity
does not, and I thought as I did so of
his contemporaries, the American New
Critics. Cleanth Brooks saw poetry as
determined by “the language of para-
dox,” which stands as only one form of
complexity, and not the most interest-
ing. He claimed that paraphrasing a
poem was a sort of heresy, and some of
his purist contemporaries thought that
neither the author’s intention nor the
reader’s response could have any part
in a proper critical argument. Empson
has the flexible individual voice they
lacked; he’s less rigid and rule-bound,
more persuasive and more fun. Time
hasn’t been kind to the written legacy
of the New Critics, however much their
pedagogical practices endure. The leg-
acy of Cambridge English, however,
looks stronger than ever.
E liot thought one of criticism’s
major functions lay in “the cor-
rection of taste.” That claim now
sounds stuffy, and taking it seriously
can quickly become absurd; Leavis’s
once-influential The Great Tradition
(1948) not only argued that there were
just five major English novelists, but
also that much of their work was
inadequate. Still, I wonder. Let’s go
back—forward—to 1983 and Eagle-
ton’s closing suggestion in Literary
Theory that criticism should refound
itself on the study of rhetoric, should
return to its ancient origins and con-
sider “discursive practices . . . as forms
of power and performance.” Here’s a
short list of some lasting works of crit-
icism produced around that time in
the American academy: Edward Said’s
Orientalism (1978), Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in
the Attic (1979), and Stephen Green-
blatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning
(1980). One stands as a founding text
of postcolonial studies, another is an
early masterpiece of feminist literary
history, and the third is the central
document of what became known as
New Historicism, in which the close
reading of the New Critics was explic-
itly brought to bear upon questions of
“power and performance.”
But Said does that as well, and Gil-
bert and Gubar too. They each bend
theory back toward historical scholar-
ship, exposing the unspoken assump-
tions of the texts they write about, and
the question of rhetoric is central to
them all, of “speaking and writing,” in
Literary Theory’s terms, “as forms of
activity inseparable from the wider
social relations between writers and
readers.” So Eagleton was right, he
found his moment’s current, and we
are living and writing in it still. Though
so, in a way, was Eliot. All these books
effect a “correction of taste,” however
much they overstate their arguments.
They shift our sense of what matters;
they change our feel for the past, our
understanding of what Eliot called the
tradition; and they do it by asking a
new set of questions, not just of in-
dividual works—Jane Eyre, say—but
of the entire discursive field in which
those works have their being.
And in that disruption a once-
occluded history may find a new cur-
rency. Eagleton claims in the first
sentence of Critical Revolutionaries
that his purpose is the recovery of
“a vital tradition of literary criticism
[that] is in danger of being neglected.”
That’s true enough, and yet it’s not
the only story we could tell about the
study of English in the 1920s and
1930s. The men in Virginia Woolf’s
family had all gone to Cambridge;
so had her husband and most of her
male friends. In the fall of 1928 she
was invited to lecture at Girton and
Newnham, the university’s two wom-
en’s colleges. We know the results as
A Room of One’s Own (1929), her great
book about the relation of women to
the institutions of English literature
and to the whole of the social world
around them; it begins by describing
her inability, as an unaccompanied
woman, to enter the library of Trin-
ity College in order to consult a man-
uscript her own father had donated.
One of the things Woolf calls for, in
the printed version of those talks, is
the gathering of a “mass of informa-
tion” about women’s lives. She wants
to fill the shelves with “books that
were not there,” to learn the history
that nobody has thought to write,
and suggests that that might indeed
be a job for “some brilliant student
at Newnham or Girton.” One of the
young women listening to her at Girton
was Queenie Roth, a recent graduate
who was just beginning a Ph.D. under
Richards’s supervision. A year later
she was married to Leavis and soon
afterward began publishing as Q. D.
Leavis. Her dissertation appeared
under that name as Fiction and the
Reading Public (1932), and it does in-
deed gather “a mass of information,”
not about women’s lives per se but
rather about the history of publishing,
the literary marketplace, and both the
changing audience for and language
of popular fiction.
She described her work as “anthro-
pological,” and it stands as a pioneer-
ing example of what today is called
book studies. It’s also something to
push against; for both Leavises held,
in essence, that taste was less in need
of correction when fewer people could
read. Still, nobody had done her kind
of research before, and she went on to
write a long series of still-valuable es-
says about nineteenth-century fiction,
Austen and the Brontës in particu-
lar. Her husband was an astonishingly
17
good reader of the poetry he liked but
quarrelsome about everything else,
Woolf included. She was too, but her
interests were broader and her schol-
arship more probing. She had the his-
torical imagination he lacked, and the
story of Cambridge English is incom-
plete without her.
Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It
Insulin—the Crooked Timber:
A History from Thick Brown
Muck to Wall Street Gold
by Kersten T. Hall.
Oxford University Press,
455 pp., $32.95
Diabetes:
A History of Race and Disease
by Arleen Marcia Tuchman.
Yale University Press, 266 pp., $25.00
On April 9 of this year, The New York
Times featured an obituary for Arthur
D. Riggs, a scientist likely unknown
to most readers. Riggs’s career was
largely spent at the City of Hope
National Medical Center in Duarte,
California, where he discovered how
to use recombinant DNA technol-
ogy—which brings together genetic
sequences from multiple sources—to
convert bacteria into factories that
produce hormones for clinical use.
Among his notable successes was the
creation of artificial human insulin.
“We chose insulin because it looked
doable, and there was a need,” Riggs
recalled in an interview last year. “At
the time, diabetics were being treated
with cow insulin because there was
no source of human insulin. And cow
insulin resulted in a high rate of al-
lergic reactions.”
Hormones regulate our growth and
development as well as metabolism.
They may act locally on the tissue
that makes them, on nearby tissues,
or on distant tissues after entering the
bloodstream. When we’re healthy, hor-
mone production is controlled through
feedback loops in the body, which pre-
vents either a deficiency or an excess.
The disruption of these loops can lead
to disease.
Insulin is made in the pancreas
and secreted into the bloodstream
to promote the absorption of glucose
by various tissues, which use it im-
mediately for energy or convert the
glucose to glycogen (for short-term
storage) or fat (for long-term storage).
Insufficient insulin or bodily resistance
to it causes high levels of glucose to
remain in the blood, a condition for-
mally known as diabetes mellitus. It’s
believed that more than 400 million
people worldwide suffer from diabe-
tes, which can lead to blindness, nerve
damage, tissue necrosis necessitating
amputation, kidney failure, and stroke.
Every year about four million people
die from complications of the disease.
The race to produce human insulin
started in the mid-1970s. Riggs and his
team at City of Hope partnered with
scientists at the biotech company Ge-
nentech, which had just been founded.
18
As for Woolf, the question now barely
needs to be asked. Her connections with
Cambridge were far more sustained
than Eliot’s, and yet however formi-
dable her presence she did not have
his influence, on academic criticism
in particular—not immediately. But
the feminist scholarship of the 1970s
Jerome Groopman
Members of the team that first synthesized human insulin, City of Hope National Medical
Center, Duarte, California, 1978; from left, Keiichi Itakura, Arthur Riggs, David Goeddel,
and Roberto Crea
They first attempted to synthesize
somatostatin—a hormone about one
tenth the size of insulin—but as soon
as the bacteria produced the hormone,
it fell apart. Riggs’s seminal insight was
to link it to a larger protein molecule
while still in the bacteria to stabilize it,
and only later separate the two. Within
a year of conquering somatostatin in
1977, Riggs’s group did the same with
human insulin. In 1982 a commercial
product, Humulin, was approved by
the Food and Drug Administration.
“The discovery made Genentech,
and Dr. Riggs, rich,” the Times obit-
uary noted. “But unlike many of his
fellow biotech pioneers, he declined
the opportunity to make even more
money working in the for-profit sector;
he was under contract to Genentech,
but after that arrangement ended in
1984, he returned to City of Hope full
time.” For fifty years he lived in the
same modest house. Last year, when
he announced a $100 million donation
to City of Hope, it was revealed that
he had already given $210 million to
the hospital anonymously.
Perhaps Riggs’s humble origins
shaped his values. He was born in 1939
in Modesto, California. His family lost
their farm in the Depression, and his
father, who had only an eighth-grade
education, moved them to San Ber-
and after is inconceivable without her.
She laid down its program, even as that
scholarship allowed for the revaluation
of her own achievement. Paradigms
shift, and the past and present remake
each other. None of Eagleton’s chosen
figures can match the free intelligence
of her prose, and not even Eliot’s essays
nardino, where he built and oper-
ated a trailer park. Riggs’s mother, a
nurse, encouraged her son’s interest
in science, buying him a chemistry set
and ensconcing him in the library. He
didn’t feel the need to seek the spot-
light with his philanthropy. Gratifica-
tion came from improving the lives of
people through science.
R iggs is one of the many researchers
discussed in Insulin—The Crooked
Timber, Kersten Hall’s comprehensive
account of the modern medical history
of the hormone, which was first iso-
lated in 1921. Originally trained as a
molecular biologist, Hall now teaches
the history of science at Leeds Uni-
versity. He has a personal stake in the
story. During “middle age,” he writes,
he began to feel lethargic and irritable,
then rapidly lost weight and developed
“raging thirst and a ravenous craving
for sugar”:
A series of blood tests at the hospi-
tal confirmed my hunch. There was
so much sugar in my blood it was if
it had turned to treacle. Poisonous
compounds called ketones were
raging through my system which, if
untreated, would acidify my blood
and eventually put me potentially
are as widely read or quoted today. She
too was a revolutionary, and A Room of
One’s Own does indeed speak to our
“social existence as a whole.” It’s not
.
only the most important work of lit-
erary criticism to have emerged from
Cambridge, but the most necessary of
its century in English.
into a permanent coma. My body
was in a state of metabolic melt-
down—brought on by the onset
of diabetes.
There are two forms of diabetes. In
type 1 diabetes, the immune system de-
stroys beta cells, which are found in the
pancreas and synthesize and secrete
insulin. In type 2 diabetes, beta cells
still produce insulin, but its effective-
ness is compromised. Type 1 diabetes
used to be called “juvenile” diabetes and
type 2 “adult-onset” diabetes, though
it’s now known that the former does
not only appear in childhood, while
young people can develop the latter.
Hall assumed that, as an adult, he
must have type 2, “the one which, were
I to eat slightly less, drink slightly less,
and run a bit more, might have some
chance of being brought under control.”
But he was mistaken. It was type 1:
“From now on, insulin would be my
constant companion—the biochemical
crutch on which I would need to lean.”
While patients with type 1 and type 2
diabetes both are at risk for serious
health complications, type 1 diabetes
can be especially hard to control with-
out constant vigilance. Hall quotes a
patient who compares it to living with
a tiger: “If you look after it, and never
turn your back on it, you can live with
a tiger. If you neglect it, it will pounce
on you and rip you to shreds.”1 Little
more is said about his experience with
the disease.
Although Hall structures his nar-
rative as a series of biographies of
researchers, he rejects the view of
scientific progress as linear, without
detours and blind alleys:
Alongside ignorance of the history
of science, the particular way in
which it is remembered can also
be problematic. It is tempting to
lay the blame for this on Sir Isaac
Newton. . . . Newton famously
said that “If I have seen further
it is by standing on the shoul-
ders of Giants.” . . . It conjures up
an image that scientific progress
is achieved by a succession of
either lone geniuses or unsung
pioneers far ahead of their time,
whose work marks out a smooth,
steady triumphant ascent to the
lofty pinnacles of present-day
knowledge.
1
Type 2 can be managed with medication
like metformin, which increases our tissues’
CI TY OF HOPE
sensitivity to insulin. But for patients with
type 1, this is not an option, because the
pancreas either doesn’t produce enough
insulin or doesn’t make any at all.
The New York Review
I concur with Hall that “the real work-
ings of science” are better captured
by Immanuel Kant, who gives this
book its subtitle: “Out of the crooked
timber of humanity, no straight thing
was ever made.”2 In Insulin, Hall does
not present
a tale of bold, lone geniuses or
saints who set to work on improving
the lot of humanity. Instead, it is a
story of monstrous egos, toxic in-
securities, and bitter career rivalry
that at times resembles “Game of
Thrones” but enacted with lab coats
and pipettes, rather than chain
mail and poisoned daggers.
W hile the discovery that diabe-
tes is a malady of the pancreas
related to the hormone insulin dates
to the modern era, its symptoms have
been recognized since antiquity. The
Ebers Papyrus, written around 1550
BCE , refers to a therapy “to drive
away the too much emptying of urine,”
presumably due to excess sugar. The
second-century CE physician Aretaeus
of Cappadocia termed this condition
“diabetes,” from an ancient Greek
word that means “to siphon” or “to
flow.” At the turn of the nineteenth
century John Rollo, a Scottish doc-
tor, appended mellitus to “diabetes,”
from the Greek and Latin words for
honey. He had been anticipated by the
Hindu physician Charaka, who in the
third century BCE recorded that his
patients’ urine tasted sweet and that
ants were attracted to what he referred
to as Madhumeha, or “urine of honey.”
(Diabetics’ excess glucose is excreted
through the urine.)
In the nineteenth century the pa-
thologist Paul Langerhans found
clusters of cells in the pancreas that
resembled small islands; they later were
named islets of Langerhans. The Bel-
gian scientist Jean de Meyer postulated
that these clusters created a substance
he called insuline, from the Latin for
island. “The hunt was now on to demon-
strate its existence,” Hall writes. “The
medical rewards of isolating insulin
and then applying it in therapy were
boundless, for the current methods of
treating diabetes did little more than
delay a slow and painful death.”
Unlike Riggs, the Canadian Fred-
erick Banting, who helped discover a
breakthrough treatment for diabetes,
is likely to be familiar to many readers.
But I, for one, was not aware of his
team’s contentious backstory, which
contrasts sharply with that of Riggs
and his cohorts at City of Hope and
Genentech. Like Riggs, Banting had
grown up on a farm, in rural Ontario.
He first enrolled in a course in general
arts at Victoria College at the Univer-
sity of Toronto in 1910, but he failed
his French exam at the end of the ac-
ademic year and soon had to abandon
the arts to pursue medicine instead.
Banting’s signature hypothesis was
that the antidiabetic substance in the
pancreas “was being destroyed by di-
gestive enzymes,” Hall writes, which
2
Kant’s phrase was used by Isaiah Berlin
as the title for his book on fascism and to-
talitarianism, The Crooked Timber of Hu-
manity: Chapters in the History of Ideas,
first published in 1990. Berlin invoked it,
in the words of the critic Nicholas Lezard,
to argue against fitting “humanity into a
straitjacket of their own design.”
October 6, 2022
frustrated efforts to identify it. If you
could isolate the islet cells and pro-
Independent of the pandemic, we are beset by
tect the insulin from the destructive
a range of unprecedented developments that
enzymes, Banting posited, you could
successfully extract it. together, in this century, threaten the very
In 1920 Banting approached John existence of civilization. The current states
J. R. Macleod, a professor of phys- of just ten forces — capitalism, technology,
iology at the University of Toronto the internet, politics, media, education,
and an authority on carbohydrate human nature, the environment, population,
metabolism and diabetes, with his and transportation — are driving society in
hypothesis. Macleod, as the senior predominantly negative ways.
clinician- scientist, appropriately
offered numerous criticisms about These forces are powerful and interconnected
Banting’s initial experiment. Most im- and their combined dynamics will carry us
portantly, it lacked rigorous controls. into any number of disasters well before 2100.
This is how good science should work: We have the knowledge and solutions to address
frank challenges to experimental our difficulties, but for many reasons we will
methods are vital to avoid misleading not employ them.
results.
HEADED INTO There is urgency to this story. We face many
But Banting, insecure and suspi-
cious, took Macleod’s suggestions as
personal slights. When, in 1923, the THE ABYSS
threats, but one of them — the internet and
its hegemony and imperatives — is rapidly
two were awarded the Nobel Prize for THE STORY OF OUR TIME, changing nearly everything about our world,
their discovery, Banting was enraged AND THE FUTURE including our very capacity to recognize how
that Macleod was included, viewing it WE’LL FACE profound and dangerous the changes are.
as “nothing short of a travesty,” Hall
writes. Like the Nobel Committee, Brian T. Watson Headed Into the Abyss is comprehensive. It
Hall sees both as responsible for the presents a satisfyingly round story of our
discovery and quotes Macleod’s own Brian T. Watson is an architect time. It crosses disciplines, connects dots, and
account of it: and cultural critic. For eighteen analyzes how each force — in synergies with
years, he was a columnist with the
Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts,
other forces — is shaping society. Individually,
Dr. Banting deserves complete focused primarily on current affairs we tend to see and address things in parts,
credit; if he had not contributed and the forces that were and are but the forces shaping our lives exist now in
this idea and undertaken to test shaping societies both here and abroad. ecologies that defy piecemeal solutions.
it experimentally, the discovery
of Insulin would probably not as btwatson20@gmail.com Uniquely, Watson brings human nature and
yet have been made. On the other (781) 367-2008
trauma into his assessment of the future. People
hand, with the knowledge which have limitations, and these are playing a large
Paper, $13.00
he possessed of the methods for e-Book, $9.99 role even now.
attacking such a problem he could
certainly not have made such rapid Available on Amazon What it all adds up to — the big picture — is a
progress without careful guidance sobering conclusion.
and assistance.
Banting’s resentment of the older
scientist was misconceived. “But for
Macleod,” Hall writes, “Banting may
have remained a struggling GP in pro-
vincial Ontario and never taken those
first steps on the road to the Nobel
Prize.”
F urther advances in our under-
standing of insulin were made
in the 1940s, when the Cambridge-
trained chemists Archer Martin and
Richard Synge were recruited by a
N O V E M B E R 4 –13, 2 022
branch of the British government to
decipher the protein composition of We are delighted to celebrate our sixth festival with a host of
wool, an important economic resource distinguished national and international speakers, including:
for the United Kingdom. Working in
a converted stable in West Yorkshire,
TINA BROWN TIYA MILES
they developed a method to separate
GERALDINE BROOKS SANDRA NEWMAN
proteins known as partition chroma-
tography. Their methodological break- HERNAN DIAZ ANDREW MOTION
through led to the discovery that all EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR. JULIE ORRINGER
proteins, including those found in wool, GEOFFREY HARPHAM IMANI PERRY
are composed of ordered sequences of MARGO JEFFERSON BETSY PRIOLEAU
amino acids. Later, Hall writes, the NICK HORNBY JYOT TI THOTAM
method was used to show that insulin PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE FRANS DE WAAL
had a precise chemical structure; it JEAN HANFF KORELITZ JOHN TAYLOR WILLIAMS
also laid the foundation for modern IAN MCEWAN ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
molecular biology by offering “the first
hint at how DNA carries the genetic
message,” since DNA codes for the or- With lively events spanning 10 days, Charleston Literary
dered sequence of amino acids. Martin Festival provides a forum for the transformative power of
and Synge were awarded the Nobel literature. Join us in historic, atmospheric Charleston to
Prize in Chemistry for their develop- discuss innovative ideas that inform, enrich, and entertain.
ment of partition chromatography in
1952 and, unlike Banting and Macleod,
W W W. C H A R L E S T O N L I T E R A R Y F E S T I V A L . C O M
seem to have had an amicable partner-
ship. Hall offers many details about
Martin’s eccentric personality: a cre-
ative genius who ate only certain foods
(never fish, no fruit besides apples),
he enjoyed sunbathing nude with his
girlfriend on Synge’s balcony, drawing
19
complaints from neighbors and a visit
from the local constabulary.
Hall notes that when, in the 1970s,
Riggs partnered with the ambitious
cloning maven David Goeddel at Ge-
nentech to be the first to synthesize
human insulin, they faced “vocal pro-
test and opposition from a public and
media frightened by this new technol-
ogy.” Indeed, activists were filled with
the delusional belief that modern-day
Frankensteins, not lifesaving hor-
mones, would be cloned from recom-
binant DNA laboratories. Fortunately,
this delusion has evaporated, and the
technology is widely used to produce
not only insulin but humanized growth
hormone and follicle-stimulating hor-
mone, as well as clotting proteins to
treat hemophilia.
Efforts are underway to replace in-
jected insulin with insulin-producing
cells created from human embryonic
stem cells, which could then be trans-
planted into patients. This would allow
the body to resume producing its own
insulin, and essentially be a cure for
type 1 diabetes. Douglas Melton, a de-
velopmental biologist at Vertex Phar-
maceuticals whose two children have
type 1 diabetes, is refining the process
in anticipation of clinical trials. A sin-
gle patient treated this way has had
excellent control of his blood glucose
levels for more than a year without any
insulin injections. The use of sources
like discarded embryos from in vitro
fertilization treatment, however, could
become restricted, depending on Su-
preme Court rulings and which party
controls Congress.
A memorable scene in the Woody
Allen movie Annie Hall depicts
a Jewish family in Brooklyn sitting
around the dinner table fixating on
illness—“His wife has diabetes!” “Di-
abetes! Is that an excuse?” “Old Mos-
kowitz, he had a coronary”—satirically
invoking a stereotype of Jews as prone
to the malady and dilating on its
consequences. But as Arleen Marcia
Tuchman convincingly shows in her il-
luminating book Diabetes: A History of
Race and Disease, what the film casts
as humor, lampooning supposedly neu-
rotic American Jews, has deep roots
in the medical establishment’s dark
bigotry concerning the origins of the
disorder. And the bigotry directed at
Jews was redirected in various ways
over the past century, making diabetes
a case study in how societal prejudice
distorts medical science.
Tuchman notes that Germany at the
turn of the twentieth century was the
acme of clinical science, and its med-
ical literature termed diabetes Juden-
krankheit, or a “Jewish disease.” In 1916
Elliott P. Joslin, the leading diabetes
specialist in the US, wrote that “the
frequency with which diabetes occurs
in the Jewish race is proverbial.” Was
this in fact true? “Perhaps,” Tuchman
answers. “Jewish immigrants who had
fled poverty and hunger in Eastern Eu-
rope tended to eat better in their new
land, and this may have increased their
chances of putting on a lot of weight
and thus of developing the disease.”
While extreme obesity is a clear major
risk factor, she cautions that an ample
diet does not necessarily result in dia-
betes, and most overweight individuals
are not diabetic. In addition, diabetes
has a strong familial incidence, indi-
cating a genetic predisposition to it.
20
Indeed, there was a dearth of evi-
dence to support claims connecting
Jews and diabetes. Instead, Tuchman
writes, physicians “simply repeated
what everyone else was saying. And
those who did offer up numbers and
patterns offered statistics that were
often unreliable.” Furthermore, the
definition of “Jew” was usually ambigu-
ous. Did it include the Sephardim who
originated from Spain and Portugal?
Or only Ashkenazi Jews? If the latter,
were they the German Ashkenazi, who
first arrived in America in the 1830s
and were generally wealthy by the
end of that century? Or the millions
of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews,
primarily from the Russian Empire,
who began to arrive in the 1880s and
were poor? “It is . . . impossible to an-
swer the question of whether Jews had
a higher rate of the disease,” Tuchman
concludes.
But we can explore why, despite
the highly ambiguous nature of
the data—an ambiguity acknowl-
edged at the time—virtually no
one questioned the fundamental
link between Jews and diabetes
during the first three decades of
the [twentieth] century.
It came down to negative stereo-
types of the “Hebrew race” as loving
“high living” and parties where they
“congregate together and have fre-
quent and irregular meals.” William
Osler, often called the father of mod-
ern medicine, added that Jews had
a “neurotic temperament,” which he
claimed made them vulnerable to the
disease, whether because of, Tuchman
writes, “nervous strain, nervous tem-
perament, nervous derangements, ner-
vous tension, or the nerve-shattering
aspects of city life.” Haven Emerson,
a professor of preventive medicine at
Columbia’s College of Physicians and
Surgeons and a former commissioner
of health for the city of New York, “put
the onus on Jews for spreading what he
called ‘this great luxury disease.’” Here
Tuchman links the characterization to
“negative images of the Jew as the em-
bodiment of much that was wrong with
modernity.” Even Jewish doctors, who
denied racial traits, anticipated the
Annie Hall scene as they ascribed un-
bridled nervousness to Jews, drawing
on the Oslerian belief that diabetes and
the nervous system were intimately
connected. This “labile nervous system”
was postulated to be an outgrowth of
“the long history of suffering, which
the Jewish people have had to endure
over thousands of years.”
Blacks were also victims of bigotry
on the part of the medical establish-
ment and its understanding of diabe-
tes. First they were believed immune
to the disorder, which was deemed
a “disease of civilization”; African
Americans, Tuchman writes, were
stereotyped by prominent American
physicians as “dull” and “happy” (when
not violent) and thus distinctly “un-
civilized.” Poor Blacks were thought
not “advanced” enough to suffer from
diabetes, and middle-class Blacks sup-
posedly “did not exist.” While Tuchman
doesn’t offer statistics on how this be-
lief in “racial immunity” to diabetes
affected the care African American pa-
tients received, we can presume they
suffered as a result of it. Only later in
the twentieth century, when data on
the malady were derived from epide-
miological studies in northern cities,
did the medical establishment aban-
don the bigoted view that Black people
were somehow immune to diabetes.
A third group whose relationship to
diabetes was distorted by preju-
dice was the diverse peoples known
collectively as Native Americans. In
1962 the geneticist James Neel hy-
pothesized the existence of a “thrifty
gene,” which offered an evolutionary
explanation for how a negative trait
might persist at a high frequency in
the human gene pool. Neel posited
that a “thrifty genotype” might have
helped early humans survive periods
of feast and famine by increasing their
ability to store fat when sufficient food
was available. In the modern era, with
ready access to food no longer an issue
for most people, this efficient storage
of fat fostered disease.
By the late 1970s the thrifty gene,
Tuchman writes, “acquired the sta-
tus of a highly plausible explanation,
occasionally referred to as a theory,
about why Native Americans had some
of the highest rates of diabetes not
only in the United States, but also in
the world.” She adds, “What often goes
unnoticed is that Neel did not offer his
hypothesis as a way of explaining high
rates of diabetes among Native Amer-
icans; in fact, he did not even mention
them in his 1962 article.” Rather, he
aimed to explain the nearly global
distribution of diabetes. While Neel
was referring to “all the peoples of the
world” in his hypothesis on the origin
of diabetes in early humans,
the idea of a close link between
thrifty genes and indigenous peo-
ples has persisted until today, de-
spite Neel’s abandonment of his
own theory before his death in
1999, and despite the lack of any
concrete evidence. A belief in ra-
cial difference keeps it alive.
Tuchman points out that while there
are high rates of diabetes among the
Akimel O’odham (Pima), Cherokee, and
several other native populations, there
are comparatively low rates among
other tribes, such as the Athapascan
Indians, Eskimos, and Diné (Navajo).
Yet both professional and popular
writers continue to assert that whites
and Native Americans differ in their
“experiences of the disease.”
Tuchman ends her book by empha-
sizing that, most recently, diabetes
has become associated with poverty
and class. Appalachia, a predominantly
white region, is particularly hard-hit.
The rate of diabetes in West Virginia,
for example, is 10.2 percent, 3.5 per-
cent above the national average. The
recognition that diabetes is dispropor-
tionately affecting poor populations
highlights how social factors as well
as genetic predisposition strongly
contribute to its development. That
poor whites are afflicted further belies
the benighted racial stereotypes that
have long characterized the disorder.
Since the genetic predispositions are
not yet addressed by treatment, there
is an opportunity to stem the rising
incidence of diabetes by tackling the
social factors involved.
Riggs wasn’t interested in reaping
money for himself from his success
with humanized insulin. But since
his discovery, money has become a
flashpoint in the story of diabetes
and insulin, which now extends from
science and bigotry to the perverse
realities of drug pricing and patents in
the United States. The most common
forms of insulin can cost ten times
more in America than in any other
developed country. The price of in-
sulin has nearly tripled over the last
fifteen years, according to research
cited by the Endocrine Society in a
2021 statement calling for more af-
fordable options for patients. At the
outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the
American Diabetes Association found,
one quarter of patients with diabe-
tes reported self-rationing medical
supplies to reduce the cost of their
treatment.
A single vial of Humalog (insulin lis-
pro, or fast-acting insulin), which cost
$21 in 1999, cost $332 in 2019, a price
increase of more than 1,500 percent. In
contrast, insulin prices in neighboring
Canada didn’t budge. Why? Because
there’s neither a real free market nor
government price controls for insulin
in the United States. Rather, there is
a presumed oligopoly of three drug
companies—Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk,
and Sanofi—that appear to set prices
in sync, with a vulnerable population of
diabetics forced to pay whatever they
charge for a lifesaving treatment. Our
arcane patent laws allow for extended
protection of insulin products without
significant innovations, thereby block-
ing competition. The middlemen who
negotiate with the drug companies,
insurers, and pharmacies—so-called
benefit managers—are enriched by
keeping the prices high at the expense
of patients. And the insulin manufac-
turers have a powerful lobbying arm
that has kept Congress from taking
action.
The issue may be coming to a head,
with the Biden administration’s Fed-
eral Trade Commission looking into
price fixing and Congress asking the
Government Accountability Office to
investigate pharmacy benefit manag-
ers. Governor Gavin Newsom of Cal-
ifornia recently announced a $100
million initiative to produce generic
insulin at cost for patients in his state;
whether drug companies will seek to
block this by invoking patent protec-
tion, as they have done with privately
manufactured generic insulin, remains
to be seen. The recently passed Infla-
tion Reduction Act limits the monthly
cost of insulin to thirty-five dollars for
Medicare patients, but Republicans
blocked a provision that would have
done the same for privately insured di-
abetics, who are at grave risk of having
to ration their insulin unless a remedy
is implemented quickly.
Diabetes is a biological illness, but it
.
should also be understood as sociologi-
cal, economic, and political. Treatment
is incomplete unless each dimension
is addressed.
The New York Review
 Doomed to Lucidity
The Slowworm’s Song
by Andrew Miller.
Europa, 251 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Around ten years ago, the British
writer Andrew Miller found himself
in something of a crisis. Until then,
his career had been a pretty gilded
one. His first novel, Ingenious Pain
(1997), set in the eighteenth century,
won the International IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award—worth €100,000—
from a shortlist that included Haruki
Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chroni-
cle, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and
Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The five
novels that followed, three of them
also historical, were generally well re-
ceived, with Oxygen (2001) shortlisted
for the Booker Prize and Pure (2011)
winning the Costa Book of the Year
Award (for which—controversially for
Britain’s more high-minded critics—
novels, children’s books, biographies,
and poetry were pitted against one
another).*
By that stage, Miller was firmly
established as one of Britain’s most
respected novelists, if maybe not one
of the hippest: his books were admired
for such old-school virtues as well-
crafted sentences, psychologically per-
ceptive characterization, sure-footed
storytelling, and a satisfying blend of
intellectual and emotional weight. All
of which, it appears, contributed to his
feeling of crisis. As he later explained,
while he’d still “believed in fiction as a
uniquely powerful way of speaking the
truth about experience,” now
there was something else going on,
a chilly countercurrent, a hard-to-
pin-down sense of frustration that
seemed to organise itself around
the idea that fiction . . . had become
more competent than interesting,
more decorative than urgent, more
conventional than otherwise.
“I had precisely the same difficulty
with my own work,” Miller went on.
“Was this writer’s block? Or was it
a hazy recognition that there might
be some problem with ‘traditional
narrative’?” To drive the point home,
he quoted Iris Murdoch’s 1961 call
for a renewed sense of “the opacity
of persons” and Tim Parks’s verdict
that “so many writers now are able
to produce passable imitations of our
much-celebrated nineteenth-century
novels. . . . Their very facility becomes
an obstacle to exploring some more
satisfactory form.”
M iller’s response was to write
what he’s since called his “crazy
novel.” The Crossing (2015) has a pro-
tagonist, Maud, so opaque that it’s
impossible for anybody, including the
reader, to know what she’s thinking.
Equally inscrutable is the book’s far-
*Before Costa Coffee, the award’s sponsor
PAUL G RAHAM/ M ACK
was the Whitbread brewing and hospitality
company, whose bluff chairman took a no-
nonsense line on the idea that you can’t
compare such different genres. “It’s simple,”
he said. “They do it every year at Crufts”—
Britain’s biggest dog show.
October 6, 2022
James Walton
Paul Graham: ‘P.R.O.V.O.S.’ (Provisional IRA Graffiti), Newry, 1985; from his 1986 book
Troubled Land, which has just been reissued by MACK
from-traditional narrative, in which,
rather than one thing leading neatly
to another as in his earlier fiction
(but perhaps not as in life), we get
a succession of apparently arbitrary
events.
In the first half, Maud meets a
nice-enough man, lives with him, has
a child, and suffers a serious domes-
tic tragedy—all without any obvious
emotional response. In the second, she
suddenly sails solo across the Atlantic,
where the nautical terms go into some-
what punishing overdrive. (“She furls
the jib . . . and drops two reefs’ worth of
mainsail into the lazy jacks.”) Landing
in an unspecified part of South Amer-
ica, she comes across fourteen children
living in a fundamentalist Christian
community founded by a US evangelist
who’s gone back to Alabama, leaving
them with a strict social hierarchy and
a box of deadly snakes to handle during
religious rites. After a few weeks, hav-
ing failed to persuade the children of
the truths of Darwinism, Maud hops a
passing train and disappears.
But, as it turned out, The Crossing
didn’t represent a bold new direction
for Miller’s fiction so much as a brief
vacation—or even just something he
had to get out of his system. “I am
back now!” he declared in an inter-
view promoting his next book, Now We
Shall Be Entirely Free (2018), which was
not only his most passable imitation
of our much-celebrated nineteenth-
century novels so far—a Robert Louis
Stevenson–style adventure yarn set
in a thoroughly imagined Britain of
1809—but also triumphantly proved
that there was life in the old form yet.
Here, you felt, was a writer playing
again to his old-school strengths.
The book opens with the injured
Captain John Lacroix returning home
to southern England from fighting Na-
poleon in the Peninsular War. Once re-
covered, he resists the army’s requests
to go back to the fighting and heads
off instead to collect the music of the
Scottish islands. And it’s just as well
he does—because a military hearing
in Lisbon has established that Lacroix
was the leader of a group of soldiers
who carried out a civilian massacre
in the Spanish village of Morales. To
placate their Spanish allies, the British
have agreed that he must be executed,
and so send a Corporal Calley to La-
croix’s house to dispatch him, with a
Spaniard named Medina acting as a
witness. By then, it’s already apparent
that Calley was himself an enthusias-
tic participant in the massacre, but
his villainy becomes ever more deep-
dyed as he violently extracts informa-
tion from anybody unlucky enough to
know anything about Lacroix’s journey
northward.
The fact that these characters have
the names of soldiers involved in the
1968 My Lai massacre is among the
more pointed illustrations of Miller’s
idea that historical novels should look
“Janus-like . . . both to the past and to
the present.” Meanwhile, the novel also
confirms one of the central themes of
Miller’s work—and possibly its central
contradiction.
Throughout the book, Lacroix is
haunted by what happened in Morales,
but without being able to quite face,
articulate, or maybe even remember
exactly what did. When he sets off for
Scotland, he thinks that if he could
gather the last year of his life into “an
account of himself that would . . . be
coherent,” it might make sense again.
The project, though, seems doomed. By
the time he’s approaching the islands,
he still can’t “stop the thinking,” but
realizes that “in his effort to under-
stand he had worn language thin but
made it no sharper.” Yet would find-
ing a clear narrative make a difference
anyway? “What I have done . . . I can-
not make good, and telling it changes
nothing.”
I n virtually all of Miller’s novels,
the protagonists are in a similarly
intractable predicament. A past ex-
perience has derailed them so com-
prehensively that they’re stuck inside
“some interminable aftermath”—
unable to change what’s happened, of
course; unable to forget it, however
much they’d like to; unable to shake
off the belief that if only they could
turn it into a coherent story (which
they can’t), their lives might return
to how they were (which they can’t
either).
Or at least that’s the theory—a the-
ory Miller has propounded regularly
in interviews. “I’m interested in the
way we know so little of what we are,”
he said in 2011, and in “this stubborn
fantasy you can just start again.” In
2018 his summary of Now We Shall
Be Entirely Free was that “an event
happens, you are caught up in it. And
then what? How do you live with any
of this stuff?” Strangely, however,
this theoretical underpinning is not
matched by what happens at the end
of the books. There, the intractabil-
ity abruptly dissolves and the “inter-
minable aftermath” terminates, as
the protagonists achieve the kind of
self-understanding that both they and
Miller had so convincingly dismissed
as impossible.
Thus when Emily, the woman La-
croix has fallen in love with on a
Scottish island, discovers that he’s
been going under the false name of
John Lovall and asks him to tell her
the truth about his life, he responds
with a story that couldn’t be more
coherent—an eleven-page account,
in immaculate prose, of exactly what
happened in Morales: how he’d shel-
tered in an abandoned house and ig-
nored the urgent news from a young
soldier, Thompson, that “the others
had gone berserk.” (Not coincidentally,
the man credited with stopping the
My Lai massacre was the helicopter
pilot Hugh Thompson.) Only later did
he emerge to see the results of the
violence he knows he should have
prevented.
His conviction that telling the story
wouldn’t do any good proves as un-
founded as the one about how he could
never tell it at all. “But I do not feel
disgraced by knowing you,” Emily re-
plies. “Nor do I wish to be free of you.
I began to love you as John Lovall. I
shall love you still as John Lacroix.”
Once Calley is safely killed, we last see
the couple rowing out to board a ship
bound for Canada, with Emily speaking
the book’s title as the last line, “an ex-
pression of deepest joy” on her face. In
other words, as stubborn fantasies go,
the idea that you can just start again
mightn’t be wholly fantastical after all.
So what on earth’s going on with the
apparent failure of Miller’s novels to
practice what both he and they preach?
One possibility is that the endings are
intended to be more ambivalent than
they might appear. A challenge with
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, he
has said, was to make that last line
“not entirely ironic.” In which case,
his mission was definitely accom-
plished, the problem being that the
line felt so unironic as to contradict
what had come before. And this, in
turn, raises another possibility: that
Miller might have been onto something
after all when he worried about the
distorting effect of traditional narra-
tive on his fiction—because its mo-
mentum, its drive toward a proper
21
resolution, ultimately undermines the
intractability of which he’s theoreti-
cally in favor. It doesn’t help that he’s
so good at it.
I n Miller’s new novel these tenden-
cies are, if anything, more marked
than ever. The Slowworm’s Song is the
first he has written in the first person,
but otherwise he’s on familiar ground
as the narrator, a recovering alcoholic
named Stephen Rose, neatly explains
why he can’t neatly explain his life,
and then neatly explains it anyway.
The book, indeed, could be read as
a modern-day version of Now We Shall
Be Entirely Free—which in Miller’s
work also means a less rollicking one.
As he’s said himself, his historical fic-
tion tends to have “an extravagance”
not found in his “stiller” contemporary
novels. And this is certainly true of The
Slowworm’s Song, the title of which
is taken from Basil Bunting’s poem
“Briggflatts,” where the song in ques-
tion is in praise of contemplation. Here
the picaresque nineteenth-century
adventures of his previous book are
replaced by the tale of a fifty-one-year-
old man in 2011 buying a large notepad
and trying to write a long account of
himself for his twenty-six-year-old
daughter, Maggie. She has moved near
him, in the English West Country, and
they have nervously resumed contact
after a long estrangement.
There is, however, another reason
why Stephen has started writing the
account now. The novel begins with
a letter arriving from Belfast asking
him to give evidence to a commission
investigating “the events of the sum-
mer of 1982,” when the violence in the
city was particularly intense. At this
early stage, in the customary Miller
way, Stephen is unable to spell out “the
unfixable thing” that haunts him—not
least because there’s little chance of
“making sense of it all”—but there
are increasing hints that while serving
in Belfast as a British soldier he was
involved in one of the darker events
under investigation.
T he Slowworm’s Song offers plenty
to admire—thanks, inevitably, to its
strong traditional narrative. As Miller
has said, around 250,000 ordinary
British soldiers served in Northern
Ireland during the coyly named Trou-
bles. Yet their perspective has never
featured much in the vast amount
of fiction on the subject. Now Miller
provides it, powerfully capturing the
fear of often bewildered young men
faced with “passionate hating” from
people whose history they don’t know
anything about.
As he does so, he exhibits his usual
attention to striking detail. We learn,
for instance, that for training purposes
the British army built a replica of a
Northern Irish town in the German
countryside, complete with shops, a
church, and a pub called Murphy’s. Ste-
phen writes feelingly about the envy
that pierced him and his colleagues
when, in that same year of 1982, British
soldiers returned from the Falklands
War to the type of hero’s welcome that
would never await those being shot at
in Belfast.
That perspective also allows for
some of the Janus-faced history
writing that Miller prizes. By 2011,
Stephen argues, the narrative of the
Troubles has become essentially “pro-
Nationalist,” based on the idea of “the
22
Nationalist community as a people . . .
oppressed and provoked over many
years.” There’s “lots of reasons for
that,” he acknowledges. “The main one
is that it’s true. But it may also be that
Nationalists have . . . a clearer story,
one they’re good at telling.” Looking
back, he remembers how much safer
British soldiers felt in neighborhoods
belonging to “the others—people hold-
ing on to a flag not much valued on the
[British] mainland, who ran the police
force, government, business,” and who
these days have “a harder sell.”
He’s also keen to remind his daugh-
ter (and presumably us) of the largely
forgotten fact that British soldiers
were initially sent to Northern Ire-
land to protect a grateful Catholic
population from Loyalist attacks. But
then came the heavy-handed counter-
terrorism measures that turned the
British government into an inadver-
tent recruiting arm of the Irish Re-
publican Army (IRA ). And yet it’s the
young soldiers left to deal with the
mess who now appear to be bearing
the blame, while the former terror-
ists are part of Northern Ireland’s
administration: “They rise and rise
and nobody dares whisper car-bomb
or knee-capping or sectarian murder
to them. . . . Every day they’re quietly
rewriting history.” In this context, Ste-
phen defiantly suggests, the commis-
sion’s desire to “set the truth free” is
a slogan pitched somewhere between
the wishful, the meaningless, and the
deliberately false.
B ut when it comes to the incident
that has left Stephen in another
Milleresque “interminable aftermath,”
all defiance fades away. Naturally, he
does circle around it for much of the
book, filling us in on his pre-army
youth as the son of a gentle Quaker
widower—and on his wildly unmoored
life afterward, especially once he’d
split from Maggie’s mother, Evie. (“On
some days . . . I drank seven litres of
wine.”) Nonetheless, when the moment
finally comes, Stephen—like Lacroix
before him—explains precisely what
happened clearly and at an impressive
length. (In this case, twenty eloquent
pages.)
On August 4, 1982, when he was
twenty-one, his unit raided a working-
class Catholic area of Belfast. Ste-
phen’s job was to stand in an alley
behind a house and challenge anybody
who came out the back door. The per-
son who did was a teenage boy with
what looked like something suspicious
in his hand. He made a run for it; Ste-
phen shot and killed him.
After the shooting, Stephen was
taken in for questioning—but not of
the ferocious kind. Instead, his in-
terrogators helped him get his story
straight “for my sake and for the sake
of the army”: that he’d believed his life
was in danger and “had every right to
do as I did.” He was never charged,
merely sent back to Germany, where
he started his heavy drinking and ap-
plied for a discharge. “No difficulties,”
he notes dryly, “were put in my way.”
Even after he becomes the latest
Miller protagonist to make a single-
leap escape from intractable inartic-
ulacy to lucidity, there is one thing
Stephen can’t be completely lucid
about—although he is completely
lucid as to why. Having “examined my
conscience more than most,” he’s still
unsure what his intentions were as he
fired the shot. “To sift your intentions
is hard,” he explains—but that doesn’t
prevent him from having a good go at
it. Much sifting later, his best guess
is that he acted through a mixture of
panic, adrenaline, and fear of letting
his unit down. But, he scrupulously
wonders, “in some fold of the brain”
might there have also been an element
of payback for an atrocity of the kind
that the commission is not so inter-
ested in, now that the rewriting of
history is well underway? A few weeks
before, eleven British soldiers had
been killed when the IRA detonated
two bombs in London parks, one under
a bandstand where a military band was
playing hits from Oliver!
Either way, Stephen refuses to
accept the army’s verdict of his
blamelessness. Nor, drunk or sober,
has he ever had the dead boy out of
his thoughts for long. “Maggie,” he
writes as the account of the shooting
ends,
[his] name was Francis Harkin. It’s
taken me a while to get that down,
hasn’t it?. . . He’d be forty-seven
now. . . . He’d remember, of course,
the day the house was searched,
his wild decision to run. . . . He’d
remember it and shake his head.
Thank Christ all that’s over.
Soon afterward Stephen lays down
his pen, with the feeling that “at great
length and with many hours of work
I’ve somehow managed to miss it
all”—a feeling so obviously mistaken
that it comes across rather as if he,
Miller, or both have had a belated re-
membrance of their jointly held notion
about the impossibility of accurate
memories and coherent storytelling.
U nlike Lacroix’s, Stephen’s con-
fession doesn’t bring immediate
results. When he finishes writing it,
he goes on a bender that nearly kills
him. Fortunately, he’s found by a kindly
neighbor, Annie, lying under an aspen
tree in his garden, taken to the hos-
pital, and from there to rehab. Again,
Miller’s way with immersive detail en-
sures that the rehab section plunges
us deep into Stephen’s continuing
PTSD and provides several striking
set pieces about the other patients.
Yet there’s never much doubt that he’ll
recover, partly because he is the one
writing so fluently about the experi-
ence, and partly because at the start
of the novel he’d mentioned that, ac-
cording to folklore, a crown of aspen
leaves “allows you to enter the under-
world and return safely.” (In a further
symbolic hint that he will emerge from
hellishness, the rehab center is named
Virgil House.)
Nevertheless, nothing quite prepares
us for the blizzard of happy endings
that follows. When Stephen arrives
home from rehab, Evie shows up, hav-
ing clearly forgiven him for destroying
their relationship. Maggie, too, is soon
reconciled, with father and daughter
having a conversation in which, to
their shared surprise, they find that
“some of what we’d meant to say, per-
haps even the most important things,
didn’t need saying any more.” It’s im-
plied that he and Annie will soon be
an item, and as everyone says good-
bye after a celebratory lunch (at which
he can “see nothing but happiness” in
Maggie’s face), he doesn’t “know when
that hallway has ever seen so much
kissing and hugging.”
But even then the fixing of “the
unfixable thing” isn’t over. Stephen
finally agrees to attend a meeting of
the commission, and Maggie lovingly
accompanies him to Belfast, where he
finds a city that “had turned its back
on the past, on that past, and done it
pretty thoroughly.” True, walking the
Catholic areas he once patrolled, Ste-
phen wonders if the Troubles could
return—and the novel does finish min-
utes before he’s due to testify, with
Francis Harkin’s sister present. Yet
if this is an attempt to introduce a
note of ambivalence, it feels a rather
half-hearted one that does little to
banish the prevailing sense of joy and
triumph.
Which just leaves the question of
that first-person narration. As I noted,
this is the first time Miller has tried
it—and, as he has admitted, “it may be
the last. I found it a struggle. And I still
feel unsure about the voice, whether I
pitched it [right]” for someone who’s
“not a highly educated man.” It’s dif-
ficult to disagree with his misgivings.
Miller does throw in the occasional
remark that might be expected from
a fifty-one-year-old ex-soldier who
didn’t go to college. (“He was mixed
race, or however you’re supposed to
say that.”) Most of the time, though,
Stephen’s prose has all the elegance
and alertness to linguistic aesthetics
of a literary novelist not unlike, say,
Andrew Miller. (“Everybody got out—
debussed in the unlovely language of
the army.”)
Odder still, when speaking of those
misgivings, Miller went on to explain
that “normally, I’m like a handheld
camera, I can move around, I can be
right up close. And I like that, it’s
much better.” So why do something
that, by the logic of his own admis-
sion, is much worse? The answer, I’d
suggest, is linked to that longstanding
(and briefly crisis-inducing) conflict
in Miller’s work between theory and
practice, between his doubts about tra-
ditional narrative and how it’s always
the strongest element of his fiction,
even when his inability to resist it
undercuts his own most persistent
.
themes. This is, it seems, a writer
who—in a way not unknown in the
profession—remains suspicious of his
own strengths.
The New York Review
 Little Town on the Prairie
China in One Village:
The Story of One Town
and the Changing World
by Liang Hong, translated from
the Chinese by Emily Goedde.
Verso, 307 pp., $26.95
Liang Village sits on the edge of the
North China Plain, about 650 miles
south of Beijing. The area was set-
tled by migrants who came in waves
throughout Chinese history, attracted
by the fertile soil in what was tradi-
tionally one of the country’s breadbas-
kets. But its economic promise faded a
long time ago. The brickworks shut in
2004; the elementary school, which also
closed, is rented out to pig farmers, and
the doctored sign over the door—“The
Liang Village Pigpen Imparts Knowl-
edge and Educates the People”—reads
like a mocking commentary on the vil-
lage’s decline. Much of the local eco-
nomic activity is concentrated in the
dredging vessels on the Tuan River
that mine sand for construction. In
every way, this place is nothing spe-
cial, “unknown within China, just one
among countless villages like it.”
So writes Liang Hong, who was born
and raised in Liang Village but left to
attend college and eventually became
a professor of Chinese literature at a
prestigious university in Beijing. When
she was in her mid-thirties, she re-
turned to live in her family home for
five months and write a book about
the villagers who stayed—the retir-
ees, farmers, and failed entrepreneurs
whom professors of literature don’t
usually bother with. China in One
Village: The Story of One Town and
the Changing World describes a com-
munity in crisis. Its 1,300 residents,
many in their sixties and seventies, are
struggling to maintain family farms
and raise their grandchildren while
the village’s able-bodied adults work
migrant jobs far from home. Extended
families no longer gather on holidays,
ancestral homes are collapsing, and
Confucian values like respect for edu-
cation and filial duty are disappearing.
Behind the recent rape and murder
of an eighty-two-year-old woman by a
local high school student, Liang sees
the breakdown of a social order that
had existed for centuries. “Villages
no longer have cultural cohesion,” she
writes. “They are like a patch of loose
sand, arbitrarily piled together, but
quickly scattered again.”
When China in One Village was
published in China in 2010, it was a
surprise hit that sold more than a
quarter of a million copies. The book
won awards and praise for its lyrical
writing about ordinary people and
their problems; Liang, in her attention
to an obscure place, was compared to
Hardy and Faulkner. China in One Vil-
lage opened up a commercial market in
IM AGI NE CHI NA L IMI T ED/ALAM Y
China for feixugou, or nonfiction writ-
ing, and paved the way for books about
Tibetan migrant workers, Alzheimer’s
patients, road construction crews, and
rural pyramid schemes, among other
subjects. Four decades into a social
and economic transformation unprec-
edented in scale, Chinese writers are
waking up to the fact that great ma-
terial may be right under their noses.
October 6, 2022
Leslie T. Chang
Xihewan Village, Xinyang, Henan Province, China, 2016
This outpouring has parallels to the
New Journalism of 1960s America,
which sought new ways of depicting
intense social transformations that
seemed too bizarre for fiction. “It was
as if everything changed ten times
as fast in America, and this made for
extraordinary difficulty in creating
a literature,” wrote Norman Mailer,
who published three nonfiction books
during the decade. Mailer, along with
writers such as Tom Wolfe, Truman
Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and
Joan Didion, chronicled contemporary
events with techniques borrowed from
the novel, including psychologically
complex characters, vivid scenes, and
long stretches of dialogue. They ex-
perimented with point of view and
language, delved into unusual sub-
cultures (astronauts, topless danc-
ers), and spent time with people on
the margins of society (drug-addicted
hippies, motorcycle gangs, murderers).
Their method of “saturation reporting”
required following a subject around for
days, months, or even years.
The New Journalism exerts a strong
influence on Chinese writers. Classics
like In Cold Blood and Is Paris Burn-
ing? continue to sell well in Chinese
bookstores. The US market is seen as a
possible model for publishers in China,
which also has a large pool of educated
readers who could support in-depth
reporting projects. Could the next
Capote or Mailer turn out to be Chinese?
I t’s often said that China is under-
going industrial, economic, and so-
cial revolutions all at the same time.
“The short thirty years of Reform and
Opening has been like covering the
past hundred years’ history in other
countries,” one magazine editor has
said. “These are all a rich goldmine
of themes for nonfiction works.” Yet
much of the recently published nonfic-
tion shows Chinese writers struggling
to make sense of the moment. They
may conduct exhaustive research but
fail to articulate a broader point, or
present interesting details without any
background. They seem ill-equipped to
analyze their own society and arrive
at a convincing conclusion.
These flaws are evident throughout
China in One Village. Liang’s central
theme is rural decline, which she sees
reflected everywhere in the landscape:
The trees were being cut down
until the green river plain had
become an empty wasteland.
The small deer in the woods, the
swampy pond, the wild ducks, the
warblers, at some point they all
disappeared.
All across the village weeds and
debris rule the land around the
houses. They reveal the village’s
inner desolation, its decay, its
exhaustion.
Those eternal villages . . . are rid-
dled with ills like this multilane
expressway, crossing through the
plains, as if proclaiming to all the
world: modernization has arrived
at the countryside’s doorstep. But,
as far as the villages are concerned,
modernity is as distant as before,
and perhaps even more so.
Modernity is as distant as before:
over three hundred pages, Liang tries
to back up this claim even as she accu-
mulates evidence mostly proving the
opposite. The quality of life in Liang
Village has improved dramatically in
the years she’s been away. The gov-
ernment made a concerted effort to
eradicate rural poverty. It paved roads,
introduced sanitation measures, and
rebuilt earth-and-wood structures in
brick and cement. A central business
district lined with new buildings has
replaced the old market quarter, and
the village has expanded and merged
with a neighboring town. With their
earnings from migrant work, the res-
idents have built multistory houses
with modern appliances.
These kinds of changes have been
taking place across the entire country
in recent decades. But Liang fails to do
the basic research that might explain
what she sees, and instead regards de-
velopments as a literature professor
might. The new structures are “all built
in the same slanted roof, European
style, which appears both very modern
and very out of place,” she writes. The
recently built expressway resembles
“an immense scar on the plains be-
neath the sun.” The construction of
an interprovince highway network has
done more than anything to connect
remote places to the modern world, but
Liang mourns the damage to “village
ecology” and the disappearance of a
slower pace of life. She recalls fondly
when all the members of an extended
clan lived as neighbors, followed the
same rituals, and knew everything
about one another. It’s a surprising
position for an elite scholar from Bei-
jing who turned her back on that world
long ago.
Liang’s writing is strongest when
she evokes her childhood, the only time
she knew the village well. She describes
an older relative who would invariably
appear at the door right before lunch:
“In one meal he could eat three days’
worth of our flour.” She remembers
her first visit to the county seat, which
appeared immense to her eyes:
Once, on this bridge, I saw the
most beautiful moon in the whole
world. It was nearly dark, and the
moon had already risen in the sky.
Its color was a strange, light yel-
low, like fine Xuan rice paper, and
its round elegance was set off by
a wisp of cloud across it. . . . I was
thirteen that year, and it was both
my first time at the county seat
and my first time seeing a train,
yet my first impression of the city,
the one that has remained with
me, is that moon.
This narrative assurance disappears
when Liang tries to make sense of
present-day developments. “On behalf
of us all, I raise the question: What on
earth is going on in the Chinese coun-
tryside?” she writes in her preface. The
deeper she digs, the more muddled and
confused she becomes. If Liang Vil-
lage is really a place of desolation and
decay, how does that square with the
highways, the business district, and
the new houses with their European-
style slanted roofs? The villagers say
they’re happier than they’ve ever been,
but Liang dismisses this: “Chinese
rural people are easily satisfied: do a
little something good for them, and
they’ll remember it forever.”
Liang Village may be nothing spe-
cial, “just one among countless villages
like it,” but making sense of the place
isn’t easy. The Chinese countryside
is complicated, just as the country is
complicated—it contains multitudes.
For all her claims to know “every tree,
every house, every person I encounter”
in the village, Liang remains the aloof
intellectual who doesn’t understand
a place that she nevertheless feels
compelled to try to fix. The ground
is constantly shifting beneath her
feet, like the sandy banks down by
the Tuan River where dredging has
created pockets and holes under the
earth. You could drown if you’re not
careful.
I t’s telling that almost no one in
China before Liang had bothered
to write about ordinary people. There
has always been a divide in Chinese
society between the educated elites
and everyone else. In imperial times,
23

These heirloom quality bone china mugs are
printed and decorated with detailed illustra-
tions in Scotland by a family business. Hand
wash only. Suitable for use in a microwave.
Size: 3.54"H x 3.34"D. Capacity: 1.5 cups
SHAKESPEARE CHARACTERS MUG
More than 40 characters from 14 of Shake-
speare’s major plays are portrayed on this mug:
Macbeth, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antony and
Cleopatra, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing,
Richard III, Hamlet, Henry IV Part One, The
Tempest, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, and
King Lear.
#05-QPD04 • $27.95
WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD
From secret agents, scientists and suffragettes,
to politicians, presidents and paleontologists—
and of course writers—this detailed design
celebrates 40 remarkable women who have
had a significant impact on the world, from
Ancient Egypt through to the present day.
Cleopatra, Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, Frida
Kahlo, Miriam Makeba, Mae C. Jemison,
and Malala are some of the women from
around the globe featured in this design.
#05-QPD54 • $27.95
GREEK GODS AND GODDESSES MUG
Decorated with 12 Greek gods and goddesses,
along with their Roman names in italics and
their areas of dominion, the Olympians are
each depicted with their symbolic signifiers,
wonderful departure points for revisiting the
myths or introducing Hephaestus, Demeter,
Dionysus, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis, Apollo,
Ares, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, and Zeus to a
young Hellenist.
#05-QPD70 • $27.95
TIME SPENT READING IS
NEVER WASTED
Quentin Blake’s irresistible illustration of a
storytelling dragon reading to four captivat-
ed children includes the reminder: “Time
spent reading is never wasted.” Devotees of
all the Roald Dahl books will recognize Sir
Quentin’s inimitable style; from his pen,
Matilda, the BFG, James (of Giant Peach
fame), and hundreds of other beloved char-
acters have come to life.
#05-QQB50 • $27.95
Also available: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë,
Charles Dickens, and Canterbury Tales Characters
Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
24
scholars who were trained in the Con-
fucian classics ran the civil service and
were expected to set a moral example
for the people they governed. Modern
intellectuals still see themselves as
the nation’s conscience, expressing
concern for the popular welfare while
maintaining a distance from actual
people. The poor may be objects of pity
or concern, or targets of social reform
or political indoctrination, but rarely
are they seen as individuals who are
interesting in themselves.
In China’s literary tradition, national
concerns have always come before
individual ones. For more than two
millennia, scholars have written his-
tory with an eye to legitimizing rulers,
promoting Confucian ideals, and pro-
viding moral instruction for later gen-
erations; there’s not much room for the
varieties of individual experience. In
the modern era, Chinese writers have
maintained their historical respon-
sibility of youguoyoumin, “to worry
about the nation and the people.”
Scholars and ambassadors in the late
nineteenth century wrote about their
travels in the US or Europe, but their
memoirs focused less on actual people
than on finding policy prescriptions
for China’s domestic problems. The
travel writer Zou Taofen, on a visit to
the Soviet Union in the 1930s, fixated
on road conditions as an expression
of class conflict. Under the tsars, he
wrote,
the streets were twisted and com-
plex and difficult to improve
because of the corruption and ob-
struction of powerful landowners.
After the revolution, all this cor-
ruption and obstruction was swept
away. . . . By the end of the second
five-year plan the streets of Mos-
cow will all be as smooth as glass.
The closest precursor to today’s non-
fiction is baogao wenxue, or literary re-
portage, which emerged in China in the
1930s. Inspired by their leftist coun-
terparts in Germany, Japan, and the
Soviet Union, Chinese writers visited
factories, mines, and other industrial
sites in order to expose oppression
and promote Marxist revolution. But
even in writings that are supposed to
be about the working class, the voices
of individual workers are rarely heard
or taken seriously. The poor function
as a collective symbol of misery, as
in the writer Ji Hong’s 1937 account
of a visit to a Shanghai soup kitchen:
These people ought to actively go
out and find the path to a perma-
nently better life. But what could
I say to them? These thousands
of people I see living in hellish
darkness, leading an inhuman
existence have no one to educate
them, no one to lead them to break
out of this hell and seek out the
path to the light.
“One does not expect the direct psy-
chological exploration commonly as-
sociated with the modern fictional
character,” the scholar Charles A.
Laughlin writes in Chinese Reportage:
The Aesthetics of Historical Experience
(2002). “In reportage, meaning is gen-
erated from . . . the ability of the char-
acter’s externally observable qualities
to suggest something more general,
such as a social group or a historical
trend.”
The best recently published Chinese
nonfiction shows capable and some-
times exhaustive reporting. (Few of
these books are available in English,
but a number of articles have been
translated and published on websites
like Reading the China Dream, Chi-
narrative, and Paper Republic.) Renwu
(Portrait) magazine published “Deliv-
ery Drivers, Stuck in the System,” a
six-month investigation by Lai You-
xuan into the working conditions of
food deliverymen; the journalist Du
Qiang wrote a 30,000-word essay, “The
Vagabond Club,” about migrants and
prostitutes living in a factory district
in Shenzhen. But the tendency is still
to view the masses as masses, not in-
dividuals, and their characters tend to
be weakly drawn, stereotypical, even
interchangeable.
“On the Road with a Chinese Trucker,”
for example, begins promisingly when
the author, Huang Jian, hitches a ride
with a veteran semi driver who works
the Shenzhen-to-Chongqing route. But
a third of the way through the story, he
abruptly switches his focus to another
driver in a different city, then back
to the original one, then to the sec-
ond and later a third driver, toggling
among them as if all members of this
group shared the same experiences
and feelings. (A more accurate title
would have been “On the Road with
Three Chinese Truckers, All Confus-
ingly Surnamed Zhang.”) In an arti-
cle by Ba Rui, “Escaping the Beauty
Salon,” about a group of women who
were forced to work as prostitutes
in what they initially thought was a
hairdressing establishment, the ex-
periences of six of the victims blend
together until it’s impossible to re-
member who’s who. Without strong
characters, you can’t tell a good story,
and much recent Chinese nonfiction
is missing both.
L iang’s little town on the prairie
feels devoid of individuals, too.
She organizes her book around themes,
like a government report on rural prob-
lems, and the villagers mostly serve
to illustrate this or that social crisis:
“Save the Children” is the title of one
chapter, “Rural Politics Under Attack”
another. The suicide of a young wife
was caused by the sexual repression
endured by millions of migrant couples
who are forced to live apart. A man
who occupies a house in the cemetery
is a victim of society’s indifference, “a
moral stain on the village, the mocked
and rejected ‘other.’” The high school
student who murdered and raped the
old woman, Liang speculates, acted out
of loneliness because his parents work
in faraway Xinjiang, never mind that
most children raised by their grand-
parents or other relatives don’t commit
violent crimes. When she finally has
a chance to interview the young man
in prison, she has no idea what to ask
him. “What attitude should I adopt
before him?” she writes. “What frame
of mind? I didn’t know. I was at sea.”
Such failures in reporting occur
at several crucial moments. When
Liang comes across the man living
in the cemetery, she doesn’t seem to
realize that she should ask him ques-
tions and find out what he’s doing
there. After the other villagers fill
her in on his name and background,
she seems stunned: “To be honest,
it hadn’t occurred to me that he had
a name.” Throughout the book, one
gets the sense that the villagers are
being brought in, usually by Liang’s
father or brother, for interviews with
the respected professor from Beijing,
but she isn’t interested in spending
much time with them. “The smell in
the room is unbearable, so we don’t
stay long,” Liang says of a visit with a
troubled relative who has suffered a
mental breakdown. “Every time I live in
the village for a while, I want to hurry
away,” she writes at another point. “You
can’t help your sense of superiority or
the disdain that arises from differences
in rural and urban lifestyles.”
This inability to connect with ordi-
nary people blinds Liang to changes
that are taking place before her eyes.
When she meets a cousin’s wife who
ran a successful vegetable business in
Beijing with her husband and lives in
a house they built with their savings,
she is surprised at the woman’s “strong
opinions” and finds her “conceited.”
On a visit with another villager, Liang
writes, “I was shocked to see how mod-
ern and urban their home was.” Money
from migrant labor is the main source
of income growth in rural China, and
it’s changing the face of the country as
migrants build homes, start businesses,
or remake themselves as urban citi-
zens. But Liang is locked into her view
of this class as helpless and suffering:
Untold numbers of workers move
cautiously through city streets,
wearing shabby clothing and
strange expressions. They move
clumsily, as if half dead, like fish
out of water. Imagine: in the vil-
lages, in their own homes, they
might be revived, restored to their
natural selves, like fish returned
to the stream.*
When you’re confused about how
the world is changing, one response
is to valorize the way things used to
be. “Principal family members don’t
live at home and are losing their con-
nection to the land,” Liang writes, as
if it would be better if everyone just
stayed on the farm. Clans lack the in-
fluence they once had, she complains;
children growing up in the city are
cut off from their rural roots; no one
shares braised dishes on the holidays
anymore. She proposes a “cultural re-
vival” in the villages but doesn’t sug-
gest which aspects of rural culture
should be preserved. At one point,
she makes the bizarre claim that mi-
gration is “a fundamental obstacle to
the progress of democratic politics,”
without seeming to register that an
authoritarian government is a bigger
impediment. Swimming against four
decades of history, Liang seems to
wish that migrant workers, “like fish
returned to the stream,” would quit the
city and make another go at village life.
As someone who left home herself, she
should understand why others make
the same choice. Somehow, she can’t.
There’s a richer and deeper story
to be told about Liang Village, and
Liang’s reporting does uncover
important issues that face small
*Liang writes about the experiences of
the village’s migrants in a follow-up book,
Chu Liangzhuang Ji (Leaving Liang Village,
2013), but she persists in seeing this group
as victims, whom she describes variously as
“dull,” “isolated,” “depressed,” “deprived,”
and “apathetic.”
The New York Review
 BROOKLYN
BOOK
FESTIVAL
2022
SEPT. 25 - OCT. 3
BOOKENDS
SEPT. 25- OCT. 3

VIRTUAL
FESTIVAL DAY
SEPT. 25

FESTIVAL DAY
& LITERARY
MARKETPLACE
OCT. 2
DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

CHILDREN’S DAY
OCT. 1
DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN

Illustration by Johnnie Christmas 2022

2022 FESTIVAL AUTHORS IN PERSON & VIRTUAL

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ • ELIF BATUMAN • KATE BEATON • ANGELINE BOULLEY • JAMEL BRINKLEY • GERALDINE BROOKS
DHONIELLE CLAYTON • ANGIE CRUZ • PAISLEY CURRAH • HERNAN DIAZ • DAVID DUCHOVNY • JENNIFER EGAN • C.G. ESPERANZA
ROSS GAY • KEITH GESSEN • AYANA GRAY • ANNABELLE GURWITCH • MOHSIN HAMID • HEATHER HAVRILESKY • SHEILA HETI
MARLON JAMES • MARGO JEFFERSON • MARIAME KABA • MIEKO KAWAKAMI • RYAN LA SALA • YIYUN LI • E. LOCKHART • KYLE LUKOFF
BILL MCKIBBEN • CASEY MCQUISTON • OTTESSA MOSHFEGH • JOYCE CAROL OATES • MEGHAN O’ROURKE • CLARIBEL ORTEGA
JULIE OTSUKA • SARAH RUHL • JESS RULIFFSON • SALMAN RUSHDIE • KELEFA SANNEH • DAN SANTAT • ESMERALDA SANTIAGO
NAMWALI SERPELL • NADIA SHAMMAS • WARSAN SHIRE • VLADIMIR SOROKIN • JAMES SPOONER • RYANN STEVENSON
(00$ 675$8% ȏ *(1*252+ 7$*$0( ȏ 2/œ)̵ɤ0Ζ 2 7ƒΘ:” ȏ /Ζ1'$ 9Ζ//$526$ ȏ -$&48(/Ζ1( :22'621 ȏ $1' 0$1< 025(

BROOKLYNBOOKFESTIVAL.ORG

October 6, 2022 25

Tales, Myths and Legends of India
Madhur Jaffrey
Illustrated by Michael Foreman
Hardcover • 8" x 11" • $27.95 • For ages 6-12
On sale October 4th
“[Jaffrey’s] feeling for drama imbues this collection with the color and vigor of Foreman’s
paintings and drawings. . . Each tale is unusual and enthralling in itself, as well as a
rewarding excursion into the culture of an ancient country.” —Publishers Weekly
Seasons of Splendour is a treasury of stories about Indian gods and goddesses, kings and
queens, princes and demons. Here are engaging and beautifully told tales of Krishna,
Ram, and Sita, along with stories based on the Hindu epics the Ramayana and Mahab-
harata, as well as other stories of ancient origin with no known source.
When Madhur Jaffrey was a young girl growing up in her grandfather’s house in Delhi,
storytelling was an integral part of life. After dinner, she and other family members would
gather round and listen. This collection contains those stories, each one introduced by a
childhood memory or humorous anecdote and arranged in the sequence in which they
were told, in conjunction with religious festivals throughout the Hindu calendar year.
The cycle of stories are illustrated in full color with Michael Foreman’s sumptuous water-
color paintings. Also included is a “Who Is Who and What Is What” glossary and English
pronunciation guide.
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
BOOKS BY GWENDOLINE RILEY,
ONE OF THE “BEST BRITISH NOVELISTS WORKING TODAY.” *
“Eloquent and compelling reading. . . . Riley’s bril-
liant ear for dialogue falls in an excellent British
literary lineage that includes Henry Green and
Barbara Pym. . . . Riley’s bitter precision, replete
with dark humor, offers perhaps more reality
than our saccharine culture wishes to contend
with, and this may explain why her work is not yet
better known in the United States. . . . We are
fortunate when so gifted a writer illuminates,
with such nuance, what life is like.”
—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
“Very clever, very devastating novels that cap-
ture the excruciating separateness that can
MY PHANTOMS define our most intimate relationships. They are
Paperback • $16.95
full of awkward, perfunctory dinners with family
A bold, heart-stopping portrayal
of a failed familial bond, which
members, pointless rehashed arguments with
brings humor, subtlety, and lovers, and stunted catch-ups with old friends long
new life to the difficult terrain outgrown. Improbably, they are also laugh-out-
of mothers and daughters. loud funny. . . . Her books stand apart.”
—Rachel Connolly, Vulture/New York Magazine
“I read My Phantoms with great pleasure. It’s a
wonderful combination of achingly sad and sub-
versively funny, simultaneously sharp and tender,
and always finely observed. The dialogue is pitch
perfect. The relationships are agonising. It’s a
subtle book, with big themes lightly drawn and
precisely rendered, about how to live and how
to love.” —Monica Ali
“Riley’s examination of human relationships is
bleak, yet her vision is so expansive, her analysis
so blistering, that First Love resonates with a
power that is bittersweet and highly affecting.”
FIRST LOVE —Francesca Wade, Financial Times
Paperback • $16.95
A story of an ongoing conflict,
full of helplessness and hostility,
in which both husband and
wife have played a part. Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
26
towns. These include the seismic im-
pact of migration, the environmen-
tal damage wrought by unrestrained
growth, the emergence of corporations
cultivating farmland on a large scale,
the changing dynamics between local
officials and increasingly savvy citi-
zens, the clash in generational values,
and the rise of Christianity. But find-
ing the meaning behind these devel-
opments would require a closer look
at individual experience and a more
honest reckoning with the past and
present than Liang is capable of.
Instead, she falls into what may be
the literature professor’s occupational
hazard: reducing everything she sees
to symbols. The cut-down forests and
polluted ponds suggest the village’s
impending demise; the shuttered
school signals a dwindling respect
for education. “How many people
are forgotten in a village, in the life
of a community?” Liang writes. “My
childhood companions, Qingli, Dong-
xiang, Duozi, where have they gone?”
But many of her interpretations are
just wrong. The ravaged landscape is
most likely a sign of economic devel-
opment. (Even the denuded hillsides
run counter to trends in rural China,
where the government has been im-
plementing the largest reforestation
program in the world for the past two
decades.) The village school probably
closed due to out-migration of much of
the population and the aging of resi-
dents who remain, reflecting a national
trend. And her childhood friends? It’s
a good bet that they’ve grown up and
moved to the city, where their kids are
getting a better education than they
could have had back home.
If Liang had tracked down these
women, she might have found that
they’ve become symbols of social
mobility and self-invention. But ap-
parently she didn’t try very hard to
find them.
I n 2013 I traveled to Beijing and
Shanghai to promote the publication
of my book Factory Girls in Chinese. It
traces the lives of two young women
who left their farming villages to work
on the assembly lines of Dongguan, a
factory town across the border from
Hong Kong. Over five days, I had two
press conferences, four talks, five TV
appearances, and probably twenty-five
interviews with print media outlets.
(“In China, a book tour is like war,” my
editor told me.) Many of these encoun-
ters circled around the same question:
How come you wrote this book and
not us? “You’re very perceptive,” a
writer for Southern Weekend, which
is known for its investigative report-
ing, told me. “Only a foreigner could
write this book. Chinese could never
write this book.” “Why not?” I asked.
“That world is too strange for us,” he
replied.
Over the past decade, much of the
successful nonfiction about China has
been written by foreigners. Journalists,
mostly American ones, have published
books exploring the socioeconomic
changes experienced by migrant work-
ers in factory towns, the residents of
a Shanghai street, and neighbors in a
*TLS traditional Beijing neighborhood fac-
ing demolition. There’s an idea among
Chinese critics and readers that for-
eigners bring a unique perspective to
the country. A more important factor
may be that they come from an edu-
cational tradition that emphasizes the
importance of processing information
as a social scientist would, respecting
individuals’ stories, and challenging
conventional wisdom when necessary.
In a well-known short story by Lu
Xun called “My Old Home” (1921), a civil
servant returns to his village to pack
up his family home, which has been
sold. Told that a friend from child-
hood named Runtu plans to visit, he
has a sudden, vivid flashback. Runtu,
the son of a hired laborer, had daz-
zled the ten-year-old narrator with his
“treasure-house of strange lore”: how
to set traps and catch birds, and the
names and colors of exotic seashells.
When the grown-up Runtu appears,
the narrator is stunned at the change
that has come over him:
He had grown to twice his former
size. His round face, once crimson,
had become sallow, and acquired
deep lines and wrinkles; his eyes
too had become like his father’s,
the rims swollen and red, a fea-
ture common to most peasants
who work by the sea . . . .
He stood there, mixed joy and
sadness showing on his face . . . .
Finally, assuming a respectful at-
titude, he said clearly:
“Master! . . .”
I felt a shiver run through me;
for I knew then what a lamentably
thick wall had grown up between us.
The narrator stays to pack up or give
away the rest of his things, to entertain
visitors and say his good-byes. As he
departs his hometown by riverboat,
he thinks about Runtu: “The vision of
that small hero with the silver necklet
among the watermelons had formerly
been as clear as day, but now it sud-
denly blurred.” We must remake our
world, he thinks, so that the poor aren’t
so beaten down by hardship and cut off
from the rest of society, as Runtu has
been cut off from him. Lu Xun’s story
has one of the most famous endings
in modern Chinese literature:
I thought: hope cannot be said
to exist, nor can it be said not to
exist. It is just like roads across
the earth. For actually the earth
had no roads to begin with, but
when many men pass one way, a
road is made.
The spirit of this story suffuses
Liang’s book. (One of its chapters is
titled “Runtu Grows Up.”) Her home-
coming is also marked by alienation
and regret; she feels the same sorrow
at the village’s backwardness, the same
guilt for having left. The divide be-
tween the native son (or daughter)
who has done well and the villagers
who stayed behind feels as wide as
it’s ever been, even though China is
a richer and more equitable country
now. One hundred years after Lu Xun’s
story was published, Chinese writers
are still searching for a language in
which to write about common people.
Liang has said she plans to write
a book about Liang Village every ten
years until she dies. “I consider it my
duty to keep doing so all my life,” she
writes at the end of China in One Vil-
lage. Perhaps she, or some of the other
.
writers working today, will develop the
skills to humanize the individuals they
are writing about, thus creating new
roads across the earth.
The New York Review
 Timeless Correspondences
HERmione
by H.D., with an afterword
by Francesca Wade.
New Directions, 241 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Winged Words:
The Life and Work of the Poet H.D.
by Donna Krolik Hollenberg.
University of Michigan Press,
378 pp., $85.00
At the end of The Gift, a memoir of
H.D.’s American childhood unpublished
in her lifetime, she appends a chapter
set in the present, London, 1943. An air
raid takes her household by surprise,
and she describes what it’s like in her
fifth-story flat in Lowndes Square with
“terrific shattering reverberations of
the great guns.” Annie Winifred Eller-
man, her partner (better known by her
pen name, Bryher), switches off the
lights, closes all the doors, and turns
on a small lamp only after the blackout
curtains are drawn:
The noise was so terrible now that
I could not hear what Bryher was
saying, but she was saying some-
thing. She got up from her chair
and took a few steps across the red
and grey patterned rug and she
stood by my chair. I did not move.
The chair would go down too, as if
we were both in a lift, an elevator,
and we would keep on going down
and down. But now the floor was
level and I was not going down.
But she did go down—very deep, in
fact, into the past, into her psychic
depths, for the final chapter makes it
clear that proximity to death opened
a creative vein.
Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethle-
hem, Pennsylvania, in 1886 and died in
Zurich in 1961, but for the duration of
both world wars she was a Londoner—
barely even leaving the city for the
comparatively safer countryside. The
first war was a personal, a psychic,
catastrophe: she lost her father, her
brother, and a baby—after which her
marriage foundered. The second war
brought on a creative storm. She wrote
The Gift, dedicated to her mother;
Tribute to Freud, with whom she had
H. D. PAPE RS / BE IN E CKE R ARE BO OK AND M ANUS C RIPT LI BR ARY/ YAL E U NI V ER S IT Y
undergone analysis in the 1930s; and
three long poems collected under the
title Trilogy, sometimes referred to as
her “war trilogy.”
“The past is literally blasted into con-
sciousness with the Blitz in London,”
she wrote in 1944. It was frightening
but overwhelmingly euphoric. Writing
to May Sarton about Virginia Woolf’s
suicide, she couldn’t believe that Woolf
would turn her back on the world “just
when . . . one longs to be able to live to
see all the things that will be bound
to happen later. . . . Times were NEVER
so exciting.” As she wrote in The Gift:
It had been worthwhile. It had
been worthwhile to prove to one-
self that one’s mind and body could
endure the very worst that life had
to offer—to endure—to be able
to face this worst of all trials, to
be driven down and down to the
uttermost depth of subconscious
terror and to be able to rise again.
October 6, 2022
Ange Mlinko
H.D., 1920s
The scene in her apartment as the
bombs dropped has the mood of a
séance—dark room, dim lamp, the
anticipation of doors flying open,
“pushed out by the repercussion of the
blast.” All her life, in addition to her
devotion to poetry and ancient Greek,
H.D. maintained a fascination with the
occult: astrology, tarot, spiritualism.
After attending lectures on medium-
ism by Hugh Craswell Tremenheere,
Lord Dowding, an RAF officer who
helped win the Battle of Britain (he
claimed to have communicated with
his dead pilots), H.D. started pester-
ing him with letters asking to join his
“circle.” Having been rebuffed several
times, she insisted that she too was
hearing from RAF casualties. Not long
after the war ended, she had a total
physical and mental collapse and was
sent to a Swiss sanatorium.
I n her 1984 biography of H.D., Herself
Defined, Barbara Guest vividly imag-
ines a scene in the British Museum
tearoom in 1912: Hilda Doolittle shows
her new poems to Ezra Pound, who,
enthralled, invents Imagism on the
spot. He singled out her poem “Hermes
of the Ways” and signed it with her
new nom de plume: “H.D. Imagiste.”
“Would that today the excised poem
with its corrections might rest in the
Berg Collection in New York,” Guest
writes, “alongside Pound’s similar se-
lective corrections and deletions to
‘The Waste Land’ of Eliot.”
Guest’s intention was to restore H.D.
to the first rank of modernist poets,
just as H.D. worked to restore the fe-
male figures of myth to their rightful
place at the center of our oldest stories.
H.D.’s poetry eschews colloquial real-
ism—or, as her acolyte Robert Duncan
put it, respectability. It creates a closed
world. It demands a certain comfort
level not only with the personae of
Greek poetry but with Celtic and Egyp-
tian religion, Christian saints, heresies,
and cults. (Hermes Trismegistus, any-
one? Mithra’s tomb?) You could say that
Eliot and Pound got away with myth
and anachronism; Stevens created
closed worlds too. H.D. goes all in for
hermeticism. It was she whom William
Carlos Williams was thinking of when
he wrote in his preface to Kora in Hell,
“Hellenism, especially the modern sort,
is too staid, too chilly, too little fecun-
dative to impregnate my world.”
It’s true. H.D. doesn’t sound mod-
ern—she sounds timeless. While one
of the ironies of modernist verse was
that much of it was archaeological in
method—think of Eliot delving into
The Golden Bough or Pound excavating
Greek lyric—H.D.’s version doesn’t let
in the rank air of the industrial city,
twentieth-century politics, contempo-
rary vernacular. It eschews pathos and,
at least in the Imagist poems, evokes
something languid and passive, subject
to the assaults of pagan nature:
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.
And yet it is this poem, “Heat,” recited
by a schoolteacher—one Miss Keough,
in 1930s Bakersfield, California—that
electrified a teenage Robert Duncan
and showed him his vocation; he
worked on a poetic treatise titled
The H.D. Book for almost thirty years,
trying to account for her lyric power.
The rhythmic force of H.D.’s spare
and sensual poems was learned from
Emily Dickinson, the Pre-Raphaelites,
and the Greek Anthology. If it appeals
primarily to initiates, no matter: there
are enough of the initiated through
the ages to recognize one of their own.
T he great salutary effect of reading
H.D.’s novels and memoirs—many
brought out late in life or posthu-
mously—is to restore her to her era.
For all her intense communing with
the past and other worlds, it is this
dimension, the extraordinary life lived
in extraordinary times, that captivates.
It is something to have been at the
vanguard of early-twentieth-century
poetry and film in London: an analy-
sand of Freud’s, a friend of Havelock
Ellis and D. H. Lawrence, and, frankly,
the lifelong kept woman of a (female)
English millionaire.
It all could have been otherwise: she
was born the daughter of an astronomy
professor at the University of Penn-
sylvania. (Her mother was a pianist
who had given up her vocation when
she married.) As she recounts in The
Gift as well as HERmione, a roman à
clef of her youthful love triangle with
Pound (to whom she had been briefly,
and ambiguously, engaged) and her
lover Frances Gregg, H.D.’s upbringing
was in many respects stifling. A woman
of striking beauty (even the camera
captures it), she was made to feel too
tall, too intense; she stooped and ad-
opted a pose of diffidence. Pound was
instrumental in freeing her from her
parents and fastidious Bryn Mawr and
blasting her to Europe.
It’s one of the most riveting stories
in American poetry: they met at a Hal-
loween party in 1901. She was fifteen,
from Upper Darby; he just sixteen,
from nearby Wyncote but already a
first-year undergraduate at Penn. He
had “Gozzoli bronze-gold” curls and
wore a green Tunisian robe, every inch
the flamboyant troubadour the world
would come to know. In HERmione,
Pound’s alter ego George Lowndes is
forever entwined with the color green,
and green with Pennsylvania: when
he makes love to Hermione Gart she
imagines the room is a bower of moss
27
and trees. (H.D.’s “first kisses” were
with Pound in the woods.) Both George
and Pennsylvania are immersive and
ambivalent and threatening:
“This is the forest primeval, the
murmuring pines and the hem-
locks,” (George intoned dramat-
ically; she knew why she didn’t
love him) “bearded with moss and
with garments green, indistinct in
the twilight.” She knew why she
couldn’t love George properly.
George gone tawny, hair the co-
lour of vermillion seaweed, wash of
vermillion over grey rocks, the sea-
green eyes that became seagrey,
that she saw as wide and far and
full of odd sea-colour, became (old
remembered reincarnation) small
and piglike. George being funny is
piglike. His eyes are too small in
his face. His teeth are beautiful
but when he is being funny he un-
nerves one. George back of George,
George seen through a screen door,
George gauzed over by lizard-film
over wide eyes, George seen with
perception was wavering tall and
Gozzoli-like with green jerkin. Al-
most this is the forest of Arden.
Here H.D. creates a thicket of prose,
looping with repetitions like a lost
person walking circles in the woods,
to imitate the claustrophobia she feels:
“Pennsylvania had her. She would
never get away from Pennsylvania.”
Yes and no; her destiny was Eu-
rope, but it was Pound who drew her
there; she distanced herself from him
(and his politics) but kept him in her
orbit; she accepted his nickname for
her, Dryad, and when late in life she
wrote a memoir of him, End to Tor-
ment, she appended to it Hilda’s Book,
the poems he wrote for her between
1905 and 1907. As excruciating as any
teenager’s love poetry but notable for
its Petrarchan pastiche (after all, this
is Ezra Pound), Hilda’s Book gets one
thing absolutely right: in “The Tree” he
laments that they could have been the
faithful couple Philemon and Baucus,
whom Apollo turns into two trees to
keep them united after death; instead
H.D. chose to be Daphne, his ever-
elusive laurel.
In H.D.’s novel, George Lowndes
calls her Undine, not Dryad; the undine
is a water sprite, and H.D. was rightly
afraid of submerging her identity in
his. (He “would have destroyed me and
the center they call ‘Air and Crystal’ of
my poetry,” she wrote in End to Tor-
ment, hence the broken engagement.)
But there was a similar danger in her
other affair, with bisexual Frances
Gregg—Fayne Rabb in HERmione. The
trancelike rhythms and repetitions of
the sentences immerse the reader in
the febrile, obsessive quality of ado-
lescent passion:
Words with Fayne in a room, in any
room, became projections of things
beyond one. Things beyond Her
beat, beat to get through Her, to get
through to Fayne. So prophetess
faced prophetess over tea plates
scattered and two teacups making
delphic pattern on a worn carpet.
Pattern of little plates, of little
teacups (Fayne as usual had had
no lunch) and people and things
all becoming like people, things
seen through an opera glass. The
two eyes of Fayne Rabb were two
28
lenses of an opera glass and it was
Hermione’s entrancing new game
to turn a little screw, a little handle
somewhere (like Carl Gart with his
microscope) and bring into focus
those two eyes that were her new
possession. Her Gart had found
her new possession.
Gregg was also a would-be writer,
two years older than H.D., extremely
thin with piercing blue eyes and a
boyish beauty. They met shortly after
Pound left Philadelphia for Europe in
1910, leaving a gulf in H.D.’s emotional
life that Gregg quickly filled as a long-
desired feminine twin-self. (H.D. had
five brothers but no sisters.) When
Pound returned, he scoffed at their
liaison, calling them witches, yet an
“explosive three-way entanglement en-
sued, with Frances falling in love with
Ezra and H.D. continuing to be in love
with both of them.” H.D.’s parents sent
her to New York to force a separation
from Gregg, but after five months H.D.
returned, and both women, supervised
by Mrs. Gregg, set off on the ocean
liner Floride to join Pound in London.
HERmione, like many of H.D.’s works,
is a game of names. As a stand-in for
Hilda, Hermione refers to the Shake-
spearean heroine who is the victim of
tyrannical passions, and when short-
ened to “Her” becomes anonymous
and amoebic—a pronoun in search
of an identity. Alluding to a lesbian
code of “wild hyacinths” in a climactic
moment of the novel, Hermione sees
Fayne’s love as a trap: “I will be caught
finally, I will be broken. Not broken,
walled in, incarcerated. Her will be
incarcerated in Her.” The genius of
that mimetic, palindromic line—will
walled in by two Hers—pivots on the
multiple meanings of “will”: if a verb,
the first Her is a subject and the sen-
tence grammatical; if a noun, it turns
passive and the grammar falters into
a fragment.
I n London Pound introduced the
women not only to literary society
but to their future husbands. And thus
another chapter began. Donna Krolik
Hollenberg’s new biography, Winged
Words, divides H.D.’s life into neat
chapters, a grid in which to contain a
many-faceted subject: marriage to the
fellow poet Richard Aldington, World
War I, a stillbirth (in the 1910s); sepa-
ration, pregnancy with another man’s
child, and alliance with her partner and
benefactress Bryher; a further affair
with the bisexual filmmaker Kenneth
Macpherson and the various ménages
that ensued (in the 1920s); Freudian
analysis in the 1930s; World War II and
prolific literary output thereafter, in
London and then Switzerland, where
Bryher sent her to recover from the
war.
This is a very bare outline of a very
tangled interpersonal web. Like that
other well-known literary cluster in
Bloomsbury, with which H.D.’s circle
sometimes overlapped, everyone loved
in triangles, if not quadrilaterals. One
of H.D.’s best novels, Bid Me to Live,
offers a fictionalized account of the
lively and painful games they played
circa 1917, when she gave permission
for Aldington, who was frequently away
on military duty, to pursue an affair.
She found it agonizing, but when a
couple shows up—D. H. and Frieda
Lawrence in real life—she is drawn
into their force field and into creative
battle with Lawrence. Like HERmione,
it’s a bit of a highbrow potboiler.
In both books, it’s notable that eros
is essentially a conduit to one’s own
genius. These recognizable types argue
monstrously, smoke, drink, talk in cir-
cles, and drive one another crazy with
opacity in the guise of—forgive the
buzzword—transparency. Less looping
and repetitive than HERmione, Bid Me
to Live offers some of H.D.’s sharper
observations, with descriptions of
Lawrence verging on sunburnt satyr
or smiling werewolf, while his wife
looks on “with the justifiable pride
of a barn-yard hen who has hatched
a Phoenix.”
But readers, not satisfied with fic-
tion, will want to know the ins and
outs of a creative woman’s life. How
did H.D. manage to be a mother and so
prolific and also drift through various
fascinating entourages? The answer
of course is money—Bryher’s money.
When H.D.’s marriage to Aldington
faltered, she sought comfort in Cecil
Gray, a musician and writer in their
circle, and ended up pregnant. Bryher
muscled Gray aside and adopted the
child, Perdita, after marrying Robert
McAlmon, another bisexual writer, for
appearances. Perdita, now surnamed
McAlmon, was thus saved from illegit-
imacy and also had the benefit of two
mothers—one who was high-strung,
poetic, and often unavailable, and an-
other who managed her upbringing.
Bryher did not endear herself to
everybody; she was autocratic and
manipulative, and undoubtedly her
adoption of Perdita was tactical.
She was possessive of H.D., though
the sexual aspect of their alliance
was short-lived. Nor was she a muse:
H.D. did not write about Bryher in the
highly charged way she wrote about
Gregg, Pound, or D. H. Lawrence. They
only once cohabited over an extended
period. Mostly they led separate lives,
but they never parted ways: Bryher’s
wealth and belief in H.D.’s genius
proved stabilizing. Without Bryher
there would have been no H.D. as we
know her today.
T he many details I must gloss over
for brevity’s sake can be found in
Hollenberg’s dogged, academic bi-
ography, but readers looking for an
electrifying narrative should seek out
Barbara Guest’s Herself Defined. One
of the problems with Hollenberg’s
flavorless prose is that it is unable
to convey sympathy—either as ad-
vocate or as skeptic—and one needs
a helping of the biographer’s good
faith to accept some of H.D.’s dottier
theories and practices. She looked at
herself as a “hieroglyph” to decode, and
this led her to obsess tediously over
dreams and sigils—images such as a
serpent wrapped around a thistle, or
a “jelly-fish experience” relating to a
“womb-brain.”
There are the séances and rapt at-
tention paid to tarot and astrology,
attempts to reconcile “feminine”
and “masculine” aspects of identity
through mystical projections. Pages
and pages of speculation in Hollen-
berg’s affectless account feel tenden-
tious and inconclusive and ultimately
vapid. In the chapter dealing with
H.D.’s analysis in Vienna, Hollenberg
gives us, poker-faced, one psychoan-
alyst’s account of writer’s block as a
dancer’s “magic phallus”: “The dancer
is frozen in terror at her unconscious
hatred of her mother and desire to
have what her mother had, ‘from milk
to children and the father’s penis.’” I
was unconvinced.
Guest, with greater fluency and im-
mediacy, traced H.D.’s mysticism to
her childhood as a Moravian Christian,
the descendant of a pacifist sect that
originated in Bohemia in the fifteenth
century. (The poet-philosopher Novalis
was also one; H.D.’s poetry can sit com-
fortably beside his.) The persecuted
Moravians, led by Count Nikolaus Lud-
wig von Zinzendorf of Saxony, found
sanctuary in Pennsylvania, naming
their settlement Bethlehem. For her
first decade, in the constant company
of close kin and fellow churchgoers,
H.D. was cocooned in a way of life that
organized itself around symbols and
found expression in music especially.
(Thomas Mann details the musical
practices of Pennsylvanian Moravi-
ans in a spellbinding passage in Doctor
Faustus.) When her father took a job as
the director of the Flower Observatory
at Penn, she was jettisoned from the
magic circle in Bethlehem to a drab
and secular suburb.
Sometime between 1949 and 1951,
H.D. wrote about Zinzendorf and his
followers in The Mystery, a bridge work
between her wartime books and her
late epics, Helen in Egypt and Hermetic
Definition. The war—though it eventu-
ated her removal to a Nervenklinik—
proved more of a wellspring than eros
had ever done. It led her back to her
childhood and a renewed appreciation
of her origins, especially her mother;
it returned her to her mother’s reli-
gion and its avowal of universal love
and peace. It provided the stimulus for
the most interesting idea for poetry
that she ever had: an epic about Helen,
not Homer’s Helen but Euripides’ and
Stesichorus’s Helen, the one who was
spirited away to Egypt to wait for
her husband’s return from the Trojan
War, whose rumored liaison with Paris
never happened, who was slandered
and never served as the occasion for
bloodshed. Stesichorus’s palinode—
that is, a counter or negation of a previ-
ous ode—could be the perfect emblem
for H.D.’s poetry, or any woman’s poetry
effecting historical reversals.
Helen, as it happens, was her moth-
er’s name. Like Bethlehem, it had per-
sonal as well as mythic significance.
H.D. was trained early on, by religion
and by music, to spot correspondences
and to look beyond appearances, as she
wrote in an early story: “Behind the
Botticelli, there was another Botticelli,
behind London there was another Lon-
don . . .” Echoing this thought later, in
HERmione, she rhapsodized:
She did not know that Pennsylva-
nia bears traces of a superimposed
county-England and of a luscious
beauty-loving Saxony. She could
not know that the birdfoot violets
she so especially cherished had far
Alpine kinsfolk, that the hepaticas
she called “American” grew in still
more luminous cluster at the base
of the Grammont, along the ridges
of the Jura, in rock shelves above
Leman and the Bodensee.
.
Of this poetic, perceptual, historical
way of knowing, less mystical than
simply highly attuned, I was, yes, com-
pletely convinced.
The New York Review
 Throngs of Unseen People
In the Houses of Their Dead:
The Lincolns, the Booths,
and the Spirits
by Terry Alford.
Liveright, 298 pp., $27.95
When eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln
died of typhoid in the White House in
February 1862, his parents were dev-
astated. For weeks President Lincoln
held solitary grieving sessions every
Thursday, the day of his son’s death.
Mary Lincoln swung between agonized
sobbing and passive despair. She wore
mourning clothes for months, wrote on
stationery trimmed in black, and could
not bear to look at photos of Willie or
enter the room in which he had died.
Solace came to her through spiri-
tualism, the popular movement that
allegedly put the living in direct con-
tact with the dead. Mary communicated
with Willie and other deceased loved
ones through mediums and her own
powers of spiritual sight. She told a
relative about Willie’s private visits
to her: he “comes to me every night
and stands at the foot of my bed with
the same sweet adorable smile he has
always had. You cannot dream of the
comfort this gives me.” President Lin-
coln, who attended some of the dozen or
so séances that were held at the White
House during the Civil War, was not,
like his wife, a devotee of spiritualism,
but he viewed it with genuine interest.
Contact with the other world was
not considered unusual in America
during spiritualism’s heyday, from
the late 1840s to the 1880s. Rooted
in various kinds of mysticism, spir-
itualism mushroomed in America
during the 1840s—an age of marvel-
ous inventions, notably the telegraph,
which was first demonstrated in 1844.
If communications could travel thou-
sands of miles within seconds, surely
the “spiritual telegraph” could con-
nect the living and the dead through
what was thought to be invisible elec-
tromagnetic fluid. Emma Hardinge
Britten, a leading spiritualist, wrote,
“Our city streets are thronged with
an unseen people, who flit about us,
jostling us in thick crowds; and in our
silent chambers, our secret closets.”
In 1848 fourteen-year-old Margaret
Fox and her eleven-year-old sister
Kate claimed to hear rapping sounds
in their upstate New York house
produced by a spirit they called Mr.
Splitfoot. The Fox sisters traveled the
country giving séances and became
celebrities. Imitators proliferated, and
the spiritualist craze swept America.
People gathered in the presence of
a medium—often a young woman—
whose special powers resulted in mi-
raculous signs from beyond: knocking,
musical sounds, ghostly hands, objects
rising in the air, and so on. At the peak
of the spiritualist movement, some
of its leaders claimed 11 million ad-
herents nationally—almost a third of
the population. Among those who took
up spiritualism were the abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison, the women’s
rights advocate Sojourner Truth, the
antislavery novelist Harriet Beecher
Stowe, the progressive journalist
Horace Greeley, and the Radical Re-
publican congressmen Benjamin Wade
October 6, 2022
David S. Reynolds
Illustration by Emmanuel Pierre
and Joshua Reed Giddings. Walt Whit-
man attended at least one séance and
counted the “spiritualist” among “the
lawgivers of poets.”
T erry Alford’s absorbing book In
the Houses of Their Dead describes
the engagement with spiritualism
of the Lincolns and of the family of
John Wilkes Booth, the president’s as-
sassin. Alford, the author of a biogra-
phy of Booth, shows that both families
had histories of belief in omens and
superstitions that led to experimen-
tation with spiritualism.
Alford does a fine job of describing
the Booths and their circle. The actor
Junius Brutus Booth moved in 1821
from England to America, settled in
Maryland, and toured widely, establish-
ing himself as the nation’s foremost
tragedian. He and his common-law
wife, Mary Ann Holmes, had ten chil-
dren, three of whom—John Wilkes,
Edwin, and Junius Jr.—became fa-
mous actors as well. At an early age,
John Wilkes went to a fortune teller
who said he was “born under an un-
lucky star” and was destined for “trou-
ble in plenty.” She predicted for him “a
fast life, short but . . . grand.” Accepting
the latter part of the prophecy, he de-
clared, “The Gypsey said I was to have
a grand life. No matter how short then,
so let it be grand!”
Alford writes that other members of
the Booth family also had momentous
experiences with the mystical. In the
weeks after the death of Junius Brutus
Booth, his wife saw his spirit twice.
The family member who was most
frequently involved in spiritualism
was Edwin Booth. Superstitious by
nature, Edwin feared peacock feathers,
ivy vines, and broken mirrors. During
the Civil War he gained fame as an
actor but sank into depression after
his young wife Mary died in 1863. He
had frequent visions of her lying in
a coffin with a white cloth wrapped
around her head and under her chin.
He found relief by communicating with
her and others through mediums. De-
scribing two sittings he had with Mar-
garet Fox, Edwin said, “The raps began
very loud the moment she entered.”
He developed a special enthusiasm
for another celebrated seer, Charles
H. Foster. With Foster’s help, Edwin
reported, “Mary, my Father and my
friend Cary converse with me as truly
and distinctly as though they were in
the flesh. . . . All is clear—solid—true.”
Edwin’s confidence in Foster’s
powers was shared by Mary Lincoln,
who had “multiple sittings” with the
famous medium. Alford’s revelation
of this and other connections be-
tween the Booths and the Lincolns
is what distinguishes In the Houses
of Their Dead from previous stud-
ies of spiritualism in the Lincoln
White House.1 Both families were
haunted by thoughts of the world
beyond.
Surveying Abraham Lincoln’s youth,
Alford reminds us that the frontier
people among whom he grew up in In-
1
Alford’s claim that his book is “the first
to examine in depth Lincoln’s curiosity
about spiritualism” is not true. See Troy
Taylor, The Haunted President: The History,
Hauntings and Supernatural Life of Abra-
ham Lincoln (Whitechapel Productions,
2005); Susan B. Martinez, The Psychic Life
of Abraham Lincoln (New Page, 2007); Chris-
topher Kiernan Coleman, The Paranormal
Presidency of Abraham Lincoln: Presenti-
ments, Precognition, Prophetic Dreams, and
Other Uncanny Encounters of the 16th Pres-
ident of the United States (Schiffer, 2012);
and Michelle L. Hamilton, “I Would Still Be
Drowned in Tears”: Spiritualism in Abraham
Lincoln’s White House (Savas, 2013). See also
diana believed in ghosts, witches, and
portents. They planted crops according
to phases of the moon and searched
for water by using hazel sticks. Lin-
coln, though rightly remembered as a
rational pragmatist, was at the same
time superstitious. His longtime law
partner William Herndon wrote that
Lincoln’s superstition “ran through
his being like a bluish red vein runs
through the whitest marble.” Another
lawyer recalled him saying that he
heard “phantom voices” when he was
alone in the woods. Lincoln declared,
“Once I heard a voice right at my
elbow—heard it distinctly and plainly.
I turned around expecting to see some-
one. No one there but the voice.”
Although as a young man Lincoln
had said that he had doubts about
an afterlife, he clung to the hope of
one. When he and Mary lost their son
Eddie, who died at three in 1850, they
consulted what he called “three good
women who were in touch with the
spirit world,” according to a woman
who worked for the Lincolns. As presi-
dent, Lincoln was fascinated by Mary’s
mediums, especially Nettie Colburn, a
slim, curly-haired woman in her early
twenties who conducted séances in
the White House. Colburn channeled
many spirits, including Pinkie (an an-
cient Aztec princess), Bright Eyes (a
diminutive Native American woman),
Priscilla Alden (of Mayflower fame),
and Dr. Bamford (a physician from
Colburn’s Connecticut childhood).
Lincoln said that Dr. Bamford, with
his Yankee twang, was his favorite
spirit. Aware of the calming effect that
Colburn’s appearances had on Mary, he
once told the young medium, “My child,
you possess a very singular gift. That
it is of God, I have no doubt. I thank
you for coming here tonight.” While in
a trance, Colburn gave Lincoln political
counsel. She told him that he should
stand firm and not waver in issuing the
Emancipation Proclamation, which,
she said, would be “the crowning event,
the spirit said, of his administration
and his life.”
Alford cites this statement and other
evidence to suggest a political dimen-
sion of spiritualism. He presents a
gallery of people in the Lincoln admin-
istration who accepted spiritualism,
including the Treasury Department
clerk John Pierpont, Thomas Gale Fos-
ter in the War Department, Cranston
Laurie in the Post Office Department,
and Commissioner of Agriculture Isaac
Newton, who arranged visits of me-
diums for the Lincolns. Alford casts
light on these and other government
officials, but he overlooks some of the
president’s other political associates
who were connected with spiritualism,
most notably the Indiana congressman
Robert Dale Owen. The author of Foot-
falls on the Boundary of Another World
(1860), Owen was a leading spiritualist
chapter 3 of Mark Lause, Free Spirits: Spir-
itualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism
in the Civil War Era (University of Illinois
Press, 2016). A number of Lincoln biogra-
phies include discussions of spiritualism,
including my Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His
Times (Penguin, 2020), which explores this
and other movements.
29
and a strong antislavery voice. In Sep-
tember 1862, shortly before Lincoln
issued a preliminary version of the
Emancipation Proclamation, Owen
drafted a similar proclamation and
sent it to the president. His version
was more radical than Lincoln’s, be-
cause it called for the complete abo-
lition of slavery nationally, not just in
the rebel states.
O wen’s sweeping declaration of
freedom points up a connection
between spiritualism and abolitionism
that Alford doesn’t explore in depth. In
the main, spiritualists were abolition-
ists who came to be vocal supporters
of Lincoln.2 Emma Hardinge Britten,
a staunch advocate of the president,
explained that “the known and wide-
spread proclivity of Spiritualists for
anti-slavery” sprang from the radically
egalitarian belief that all humans, re-
gardless of race or social rank, have
souls that pass from this world to
the next in a positive progression. All
people, then, were equal in a spiritual
sense. Britten explained:
The teachings of Spiritualism,
this democracy of its tendencies
on earth, and the republicanism
of its societies after death, were
wholly inconsistent with the au-
tocracy of the slave-holding power.
A nationwide spiritualist convention
held in Chicago in August 1864, when
the president’s prospects for reelection
seemed dim, passed resolutions back-
ing Lincoln’s antislavery war effort in
the firmest terms. Lincoln alone, the
convention affirmed, had the moral
fiber to lead the war to end slavery.
In the words of one of its resolutions:
Abraham Lincoln stands before
this nation, and before all Europe,
as the political embodiment of the
spirit and principle of freedom and
free institutions, and as the po-
litical representative of the anti-
slavery sentiment of the nation.
Lincoln’s critics, on the other hand,
sharply attacked him because of his
alleged devotion to spiritualism. Al-
ford notes the hostility vented by
the Ohio attorney David Quinn, who
in 1863 wrote that “Mr. Lincoln is not
only a spiritualist of the abolitionist
school . . . but is, and has been, from
the beginning of his term, directing
the war under the direction of spirit
rappings.”3 There was a secret “rap-
ping table” in the White House, Quinn
claimed, where the president received
advice from Caesar, Washington, Jef-
ferson, Napoleon, and Andrew Jackson.
What Alford doesn’t mention is that
criticism like Quinn’s was part of an
avalanche of attacks on Lincoln by
Southerners and antiwar Democrats
in the North who counted spiritualism
among the evil “isms” that Lincoln and
2 ographical facts, events of the Civil
R. Laurence Moore notes, “Many of the
abolitionist leaders believed in spirit voices
as strongly as they did the wickedness of
slaveholding.” See “Spiritualism and Sci-
ence: Reflections on the First Decade of
the Spirit Rappings,” American Quarterly,
Vol. 24, No. 4 (October 1972), p. 474.
3
Interior Causes of the War: The Nation De-
monized, and Its President a Spirit-Rapper
(M. Doolady, 1863), p. 6.
30
his fellow Republicans supposedly es-
poused. Just as today, when epithets
like “radical socialist” and “fascist” are
traded by political opponents, so in
the Civil War era both sides engaged
in mudslinging.
Especially rabid were defenders of
slavery. A Confederate political car-
toon pictured antislavery Republicans
swarming around a religious altar that
featured an image of Lincoln and was
made up of stones representing nefar-
ious Northern movements; one was
labeled SPIRIT RAPPING , and others
included SOCIALISM , FREE LOVE , and
NEGRO WORSHIP . In 1864 a typical Lin-
coln critic wrote, “It is well known that
the infidels, atheists, free-thinkers,
free-lovers, Spiritualists and ‘progres-
sive Christians’ have always been ar-
dent admirers of Mr. Lincoln and his
policy.” Another alarmed commentator
wrote, “Has it come to this! A great
country governed by ghosts, spirits,
hobgoblins, table-turnings, rappings,
&c. Be not deceived; this is the nimbus
of the administration.”
A belief that the country was con-
trolled by hobgoblins and spirits
sounds bizarre, but no more so than
current conspiracy theories, such as
the claim that an international pedo-
phile ring is trying to subvert a for-
mer US president. To Alford’s credit,
he treats spiritualism with the same
evenhandedness that Lincoln did. For
instance, he tells of Lincoln’s genial
response to Belle Miller, who sat with
Mary Lincoln more than any other me-
dium. One of Belle’s stunts was play-
ing the piano under the influence of
spirits who made the instrument pitch
back and forth. Lincoln once sat at the
White House piano, banged away at it,
and shoved it around with his knees.
He turned to Mary and said, “See,
mother, our piano can dance, too!”
A lford ranges widely into the per-
sonal backgrounds of Lincoln and
the Booth family, opening new vistas
on both. His book is made up of many
interwoven threads—neglected bi-
War, and acting styles—connected in
varied ways to superstition or the af-
terlife. Alford tells us of the mentally
unstable paterfamilias Junius Brutus
Booth, who once exhumed the corpse
of a daughter, cut open a vein in her
arm, and tried to suck out impure
blood in the hope of reviving her. Al-
ford also follows the lives of the jour-
nalist Adam Badeau and the Boston
Brahmin Richard Cary, close friends
of Edwin Booth’s. Badeau, a closeted
homosexual who made a futile advance
toward Edwin, at first rejected spiri-
tualism but then embraced it when he
became convinced that otherworldly
forces had overtaken him during a
séance. Alford also provides a mov-
ing account of Cary’s death in a Civil
War battle and Edwin’s struggles to
cope with the loss through the aid of
mediums.
Alford’s portrayal of John Wilkes
Booth is interestingly complex. On
the one hand, he takes note of Booth’s
cruel streak. As a boy, he took plea-
sure in killing cats or torturing them
by tying them together in a way that
caused severe pain. This behavior, Al-
ford writes, showed “a lack of common
compassion, and it boded ill. Repeated
intentional abuse of animals by a child
is a likely precursor of later violent be-
havior by an adult.” On the other hand,
he informs us, Booth had a high regard
for dogs, horses, and even insects, such
as butterflies and katydids, which he
tried to protect. Although he had bouts
of gloom, he was capable of great joy.
He told his sister, “How glorious it is to
live! How divine! To breathe this breath
of life with a clear mind and healthy
lungs! Don’t let us be sad. Life is so
short, and the world is so beautiful.”
This is not the kind of language that
we would expect from the murderer of
a president. How was this man capa-
ble of killing Lincoln? One can point
to Booth’s political views, which were
intensely reactionary. He called slavery
“one of the greatest blessings” for both
whites and blacks “that God ever be-
stowed on a favored nation.” He loathed
abolitionism and regarded Lincoln as
a dangerous leader whose reelection
would install him as a tyrant for life.
(There were then no presidential term
limits.) Ironically, Lincoln, who often
attended the theater, admired Booth’s
acting. Booth, repeatedly urged by a
fellow actor to visit the president in
his theater box, rejected the idea. A
contemporary wrote, “Booth said that
he would rather have the applause of
a negro” than that of Lincoln.
But such proslavery venom was often
spewed at Lincoln, who received so
many threats that he had a folder of
letters on his desk marked “A” for
“Assassination.” What explains the
persistence of Booth, who obses-
sively plotted against Lincoln for
months? The answer seems to lie in
Alford’s perception that Booth came
to identify with “heroes of resistance
to autocratic rule” that he played on
stage, such as Brutus, the nobleman
in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar who
conspires against the would-be Roman
emperor, and William Tell, the Swiss
huntsman who in Friedrich Schiller’s
play of that name kills an oppressive
governor. Booth didn’t just relate to
such assassins, whom he impersonated
onstage; in effect, he became one of
them. When in 1864 he quit acting and
committed himself to political terror-
ism, America itself became his stage
and Lincoln the targeted tyrant. Even
Booth’s most private thoughts, as re-
corded in a diary he kept while he was
fleeing south after the assassination,
ran to stage roles he had played. While
being hunted through the cold swamps
and woods, he scribbled these words:
I am here in despair. And why; For
doing what Brutus was honored
for. What made Tell a Hero. And
yet I for striking down a greater
tyrant than they ever knew am
looked upon as a common cut-
throat. My action was purer than
either of theirs.4
A lford gives vivid accounts of the
murder in Ford’s Theatre and the
manhunt for Booth, who was pursued to
a Virginia farm and shot by the Union
soldier Boston Corbett. Afterward spir-
itualists circulated a story of a reunion
between Lincoln and his killer in the
afterlife. Booth at first wanted to fight
Lincoln but then became contrite, re-
gretted his crime, and befriended the
president, who forgave him.
Tracing spiritualism into the post–
Civil War period, Alford describes its
brief expansion and ensuing decline.
Mary Lincoln remained a believer. She
attended séances in which she com-
muned with her husband and her three
dead sons. (Eighteen-year-old Tad Lin-
coln died in 1871.) She was invigorated
after a visit in 1872 to William Mum-
ler, a Bostonian famous for producing
spirit photographs for the bereaved.
In the picture he made for Mary, her
husband stands like a benign ghost,
his hands on the shoulders of the
round-faced, thin-lipped widow, who
is dressed in the mourning apparel
that she wore in her later years. Mary
wept with joy over the photograph.
Soon thereafter, she gave accounts of
an Indian spirit visiting her at night
and doing various things to her head.
Such delusions were not unusual for
spiritualists, but the staid Robert Lin-
coln, Mary’s only surviving son, used
this and other symptoms as grounds
for having her committed in 1875 to
Bellevue Place, an asylum in Batavia,
Illinois. Mary’s four-month stay there
was uneventful. After her release, she
struggled on until her death in 1882.
By that time, Alford notes, spiri-
tualism was on the wane, as alterna-
tive forms of belief, such as Christian
Science, theosophy, and various social
and political causes won adherents.
Formerly famous spiritualists went
in various directions. Nettie Colburn
retired and wrote her autobiography, in
which she recounted her experiences
as a medium for the Lincolns. Charles
H. Foster, after a stay in the Danvers
Insane Asylum in Massachusetts, died
of “brain fever” in 1885. The Fox sis-
ters turned against the movement they
had pioneered, calling it “an absolute
falsehood from beginning to end, . . .
the flimsiest of superstitions, . . . one
of the greatest curses that the world
has ever known.” “Mr. Splitfoot,” they
revealed, referred to sounds they had
made by cracking their toe joints under
their dresses. In the early twentieth
century Arthur Conan Doyle and oth-
ers tried to revive spiritualism, but
Harry Houdini punctured their efforts
by demonstrating that spiritualism’s
apparent miracles could be easily pro-
duced by an illusionist.
But spiritualism had performed sig-
nificant cultural work. During Amer-
.
ica’s greatest crisis, it had brought
consolation and hope to millions—
most crucially to the grief-stricken
couple in the White House.
4
Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writ-
ings of John Wilkes Booth, edited by John
Rhodehamel and Louise Taper (University
of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 154.
The New York Review

Brian Wilson:
Long Promised Road
a PBS American Masters
documentary film
directed by Brent Wilson
In September 1963 my family
moved from Clarion, Iowa, to Osage,
Iowa, eighty-two miles away. I was
eleven, the oldest of four children.
Both towns were roughly the same
size—population three thousand or
thereabouts—and their residential
streets ended abruptly in cornfields.
In Clarion, I knew everyone and every-
thing. My friends were Bill and Greg
and Scott, and I liked a girl named
Jolene. In Osage, I knew no one and
nothing. All the girls already had boy-
friends named Chuck and Deke. And
because we arrived after the school
year had started, I suddenly found my-
self in a sixth-grade classroom full of
strangers studying subjects from an
alternate reality. Then the president
was shot. Not quite three years later—
summer 1966—my family moved once
more, from Iowa to a suburb of Sacra-
mento, California. I was fourteen and
about to begin high school. It was less
a move than a transubstantiation.
There’s another way to tell the story
of those years. We moved to Osage just
as the Beach Boys released their third
album, Surfer Girl—the first to ac-
knowledge Brian Wilson’s role as pro-
ducer on the back cover. The Beatles’
earliest American hit, “I Want to Hold
Your Hand,” erupted in late Decem-
ber. Soon after we got to Sacramento,
Revolver appeared, and a few weeks
later the Beatles stopped touring for
good. Then came “Good Vibrations,”
the Beach Boys’ last major hit and the
beginning of the end of their import-
ant recordings.1 I’ve often wondered
who I would have been if my family
hadn’t moved to California when we
did. But who would I have been without
the Beach Boys and the Beatles from
ages eleven to fourteen?
This was all long ago, and it’s tempt-
ing to talk about what was missing
then—the digital and informational
ubiquity we take for granted now,
everything everywhere, all at once.
But none of that was actually miss-
ing because it hadn’t been thought of.
When I walked down Main Street to
the one store in Osage with a (tiny)
record section and paid ninety-nine
cents for a 45-rpm single (“Fun, Fun,
Fun” or “Ticket to Ride,” for exam-
ple) and brought it home and put it
on the record player, I was the first
person who’d ever heard that very
disc. I wasn’t siphoning the song from
a ceaseless, invisible digital flood. I ex-
perienced a discrete event contained in
the moment of listening, a personally
owned artifact of black vinyl spinning
on a platter while a needle wobbled in
its grooves. How the wobbling turned
into sound, how the record was written
and recorded and produced and mixed
and pressed and distributed, how the
physical disc in its paper sleeve made
its way to our little Iowa town to be
1
Yes, “Kokomo” reached #1 in 1988. I don’t
ALAMY
care. Brian Wilson had nothing to do with
it. It was produced by Terry Melcher.
October 6, 2022
Endless Summer
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Brian Wilson around the time he was making Pet Sounds, circa 1966
traded for my allowance, and who made
money from my allowance and in what
proportions, I had no idea. Only the
music mattered—and what it made
me feel.
Because I had no older brothers
or sisters, I’d heard almost no pop-
ular teen music by the time I was
eleven—no Elvis Presley, no Buddy
Holly, no Chuck Berry—so the Beach
Boys and the Beatles hit me especially
hard. Until then, music had been some-
thing that sifted vaguely down from
the adult world above. (In Clarion, my
favorite song was “Moon River,” sung
by Andy Williams, who was a big deal
in 1962.) And because I had no close
friends in Osage, there was no one to
share this new music with. Which was
fine. Songs like “Don’t Worry Baby” and
“She’s a Woman” were far too entranc-
ing, in their different ways, to listen
to in anyone else’s presence. I’d never
kissed a girl or driven a deuce coupe
or caught a wave or seen an ocean or
a surfboard, but still the music spoke.
A “woman” to me was a teacher or
parent, possibly a school nurse, an
inhabitant of the alien grown-up world.
“Baby” was something a woman might
have, not an endearment a girl might
use when her boyfriend pushed the
other guys too far. It was fascinating,
every bit of it.
Strangely perhaps, I had no desire
to see the Beatles or the Beach Boys
perform in person. I owned the records
and that was more than enough. When
I saw A Hard Day’s Night in Osage in
August 1964, it was instantly clear that
the world of the Beatles was magically
impenetrable in a way that could never
be fully revealed in live performance
or understood by being a member of
a screaming audience. And when I
bought the Beach Boys Concert album
two months later, I realized that the
touring Beach Boys were essentially a
cover band, which has been true ever
since.2 Every forthcoming revelation
in their music would be found in the
songs that Brian Wilson fashioned in
the recording studio, not in their—or
his—performances onstage.
Here I am nearly sixty years later,
and it all still matters, as I can tell
from my reaction to two recent doc-
umentaries. The first is Peter Jack-
son’s The Beatles: Get Back, which
began streaming on Disney+ last
fall and uses extensive footage shot
in January 1969 by Michael Lindsay-
Hogg. It’s simply the most interesting
television I’ve ever seen, and it pro-
foundly deepened my understanding
of who the Beatles were and how they
worked and why they ended. The sec-
ond is Brian Wilson: Long Promised
Road, directed by Brent Wilson (no
relation), which was shown last year
at the Tribeca Film Festival and is now
part of the American Masters series
on PBS .
The two documentaries could hardly
be more different. There’s no interpre-
tive overlay, no narration, no voiceover
in Get Back because, in a sense, noth-
ing needs explaining. No one needs to
wonder aloud why this music still mat-
ters because it so evidently does—and
2
Brian Wilson stopped touring with the
Beach Boys in December 1964 after a ner-
vous breakdown on a flight to Houston.
Eight of the thirteen cuts on Beach Boys
Concert are not original Beach Boys songs.
because we get to watch it beginning
to matter, song by song, as the Beatles
rehearse. There’s nothing equivalent
in the Beach Boys’ past—only concert
footage and brief bits of film shot in
the studio, circa 1966. (The Beach Boys
were never remotely as visual as the
Beatles.) To understand where their
songs came from would require look-
ing into the mind of Brian Wilson, a
mind that has always needed a lot of
explaining.
F or five, maybe six years—1962
to 1967—the best songs Wilson
wrote and recorded with the Beach
Boys changed what was possible in
popular music. But not afterward. It’s
tempting to look at his long, later solo
career—roughly 1988 to the present—
and celebrate his personal recovery
from various forms of addiction, his
emotional stability, his desire to
write and perform, while regretting
the music he has written. But that’s
a little like being disappointed that
his astonishing voice—so high and
gilded on the early records—wasn’t as
pure at age seventy-eight (when Long
Promised Road was filmed) as when
Wilson was in his early twenties. (In
2004 the critic Robert Christgau called
it “soured” and “thickened.”)
Having the profound influence Wil-
son had for as long as he did in the
1960s is miraculous in itself. In Long
Promised Road, an interviewer—after
a 1964 concert in Oklahoma—asks him
where he gets the “incentive” to write
his songs. “We’re in the industry,” he
says. “There’s a lot of groups compet-
ing with us, and you feel that compe-
tition.” The competition Wilson felt
with the Beatles is well known. The
Beach Boys were the most popular
band in America until early February
1964, when the Beatles appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show for the first
time, and everything changed. Wilson
was amazed by the American version
of Rubber Soul—by the unity of the
album and the fact that none of the
songs were filler. That led directly to
the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which in
turn amazed the Beatles and helped
inspire Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band.
But Wilson wasn’t only competing
with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
He was competing in the studio with
his idol, the producer Phil Spector, and
in a sense with George Martin, the
Beatles’ producer. He was struggling
with the constant demand from Cap-
itol Records (also the Beatles’ Amer-
ican label) to continue delivering hit
songs of the kind that had made the
Beach Boys popular—songs about
surfing, cars, summer, girls—a demand
summed up in the title of their 1968
song “Do It Again.” He faced a similar
pressure to stick to the Beach Boys
formula from other members of the
band, especially his cousin and lead
singer Mike Love, the antihero of the
Beach Boys saga.3
And, of course, he was forced to con-
tend with his appalling father, Murry,
3
His absence from all the Brian Wilson
documentaries is notable.
31
an arrogant, insecure man who sat in
obstreperously on recording sessions
even after he was fired as the band’s
manager in April 1964, when Brian
was still just twenty-one. “I’m a ge-
nius too,”4 he’s heard telling Brian
on tape during a session in February
1965. But Murry’s only genius was his
crippling ability to mix praise, belit-
tlement, and physical abuse. By 1967,
as Brian withdrew into isolation after
giving up on Smile, the successor to Pet
Sounds, he was trying to survive his
own psychological fragility—a condi-
tion later diagnosed as schizoaffective
disorder—which had been exacerbated
by drug use. Musically speaking, he
had always been fundamentally alone.
The creative partnership you sense
in Lennon and McCartney—even in
January 1969, shortly before the band
broke up—was largely missing from
Wilson’s life.
T his story has been told many times.
Long Promised Road is merely the
latest in a series of documentaries,
including Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t
Made for These Times (1995) by the
music producer Don Was (who also
appears in Long Promised Road) and
Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and
the Story of “Smile” (2004) by the music
historian David Leaf.5 These films fol-
low a pattern: lots of talk with Wilson
and lots of footage of him, in the film’s
now, performing songs he’d recorded
thirty and forty and fifty-plus years
earlier. What changes is Wilson’s age
and the musicians who are interviewed
to explain why his music matters. In
Was’s film, the list includes Thurston
Moore, John Cale, Tom Petty, and
Linda Ronstadt. In Leaf’s, we hear
from Elvis Costello, Jimmy Webb,
and Burt Bacharach. In Long Prom-
ised Road, Bruce Springsteen, Elton
John, Nick Jonas, and Taylor Hawkins
appear. Perhaps the saddest thing I
can say about Long Promised Road is
that it may be remembered more for
the interviews with Hawkins, who died
at age fifty in March 2022, than for
anything else.
Inevitably, Long Promised Road is
hampered by the passage of time. So
many people who knew and worked
with Wilson in his early twenties are
now gone. Dennis and Carl, his broth-
ers and fellow Beach Boys, died in 1983
and 1998. Most of the great session
musicians Wilson worked with—like
the drummer Hal Blaine, who appears
in the two earlier documentaries I’ve
mentioned—are also gone. Al Jardine,
the original Beach Boys rhythm gui-
tarist, who was locked for years in a
legal battle with Mike Love over the
right to use the band’s name, is given
exactly one spoken line. Wilson begins
to sound like a lone survivor, the last
one left to tell the tale. And as the
tale gets retold it gets thinner and
thinner. The slightly shell-shocked
quality Wilson often evinced in ear-
4
In October 1967, Capitol Records released
The Many Moods of Murry Wilson, an album
that is testament to his ability to irritate
record executives.
5
There are several other Brian Wilson docu-
mentaries, as well as films about the Beach
Boys, including the documentary Endless
Harmony (1998) and the docudrama Love
& Mercy (2014), starring both John Cusack
and Paul Dano as Brian Wilson.
32
lier interviews has now deepened.
Each sentence he speaks seems to
emerge abruptly from an unknowable
remoteness.
The film’s makers also seem to as-
sume that the audience isn’t actually
interested in detail of any kind, mu-
sical or otherwise. A good example
is the title. The song “Long Prom-
ised Road” appeared on the album
Surf ’s Up in 1971. In the film, we hear
it playing on a car stereo as Wilson
is being driven around Los Angeles,
and we see it being rehearsed in the
studio as the final credits blur past.
It’s all too easy to come away with the
impression that this is a Brian Wilson
song. But it’s not. It was written by
Carl Wilson and the Beach Boys’ for-
mer manager Jack Rieley. It was also
sung by Carl, who produced the song
Brian Wilson holding a mirror reflecting the other members of the Beach Boys, 1966;
from left, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, and Dennis Wilson
and played most of the instruments
on it.
At the heart of Long Promised Road
is Brian Wilson’s friendship with the
music journalist Jason Fine, who
cowrote the film and has written sev-
eral articles about Wilson for Rolling
Stone magazine. On camera, Wilson
and Fine have lunch at the Beverly
Glen Deli, and Fine drives Wilson
around LA—visiting his former homes
and places like Paradise Cove, where
the cover of Surfin’ Safari was photo-
graphed in 1962—while playing Beach
Boys songs and asking questions Fine
has surely asked many times before.
Perhaps half of Long Promised Road
amounts to a kind of dash-cam docu-
mentary. Watching those scenes feels
like being trapped in a ghastly therapy
session, especially the moments when
Wilson is left to face on camera his
grief over the deaths of Rieley and Carl
Wilson. The contrast with the opening
scenes of I Just Wasn’t Made for These
Times—a voluble, happy Brian and his
wife, Melinda, making a similar tour
in a convertible—couldn’t be greater.
In short, though Brian and Melinda
are listed as executive producers, Long
Promised Road feels both vapid and
exploitative. And worse, it has almost
nothing of value to tell us about the ac-
tual music Wilson created. Only Elton
John says anything about its technical
innovation. He points out that Wilson’s
bass lines—played in the studio by the
great Carol Kaye—often start on the
fifth rather than the root of a chord.
This is something McCartney noticed
in 1966 after listening to Pet Sounds,
and it changed the character of his
own bass playing.
T he question I’m suggesting, a
question completely bypassed in
Long Promised Road, is whether the
accomplishment of Wilson’s miracu-
lous early years is enough for a whole
lifetime. How do you best celebrate
the life of a musician, now eighty, who
will be remembered almost entirely
for what he recorded by the time he
was twenty-five?
It’s not terribly surprising—no mat-
ter how sad it is—that Wilson himself
now has almost nothing useful to tell
us about those amazing years from
1962 to 1967. Even to glimpse them
he has to look back through some
bitter, psychologically devastating
times, including the nine years he
lived under the manipulative super-
vision—a sort of house arrest—of
the psychologist Eugene Landy, who
took over in Wilson’s life the abusive
role his father once played. In Long
Promised Road, Wilson seems rightly
focused on who he is now and on en-
joying the prolonged reprieve he’s had
since the emotional chaos of his youth.
By continuing to perform before live
audiences (including concert dates this
past summer) he is, in a sense, accept-
ing for himself, on his own terms, the
magnitude of what he did when he was
young. He is being, it seems to me,
generous to himself.
And yet I can only listen to the
original recordings and their various
remasterings, not the note-perfect
recreations of the recordings that
audiences experience when they see
Wilson in concert today. I have trouble
accepting that Smile—the album he
abandoned in 1967—was finally fin-
ished in 2004, because I question the
continuity of the creative mind that
“finished” it nearly forty years after it
was begun. My skepticism makes me
wonder whether I’m simply clinging
to the memory of my own experience
of the Beach Boys when I was young.
But I don’t think so. They’re the same
doubts that apply, say, to Wordsworth’s
late revisions to The Prelude.
The joy I experience listening to
those early Beach Boys records—
through “Good Vibrations” and “Heroes
and Villains” and slightly beyond—
has nothing to do with nostalgia, with
memories of where I was or who I was
when I heard them. They don’t evoke
for me an idealized California or even
my adolescent yearnings. I don’t hear
them from Osage or Sacramento. I hear
them from now. Wilson’s songs still
have the power to astonish on their
own terms, from their own time. What
makes them so remarkable isn’t just
the artistic fulfillment they achieve.
It’s the artistic promise they embody.
You can feel the explosive, disruptive,
but ultimately controlled power of Wil-
son’s musical imagination—usually in
three minutes or less.
One of the best examples occurs on
side 2 of Summer Days (and Summer
Nights!!), which was released in July
1965. Everyone knows the first song
on that side—“California Girls.” Wil-
son has said that its slow, delibera-
tive introduction is the best music he
ever wrote. And those opening bars,
as many people have noted, feel like
a direct link to Pet Sounds, his next
album of original work, which appeared
in May 1966. In a sense “California
Girls” is almost too familiar now. It
takes effort to rehear it without letting
your memory elide or override what’s
actually happening.
It’s the next song on the album that
really interests me—“Let Him Run
Wild,” which was also the B-side of the
“California Girls” single. It’s not a song
most people know well, but its spare,
highly melodic instrumental track
(which you can hear, isolated, on the
strange 1968 Beach Boys album Stack-
O-Tracks) is as full of musical augury
as the opening passage of “California
Girls.” In the opening bars of “California
Girls” and the syncopated antiphony of
vocals and backing track in the verse
of “Let Him Run Wild,” you can hear
musical strains unfolding that are fully
realized in the jubilant instrumentation
of poignant sadness called Pet Sounds.
In the 1995 Don Was documentary,
Tom Petty reminds us how far ahead
Wilson had to be thinking when he
recorded his songs, given the complex-
ity of his musical arrangements after
early 1965. Petty is talking about the
imagination needed to create highly
sophisticated compositions involv-
ing multiple vocal and instrumental
parts. But he also means the practi-
cal foresight required to hire all the
studio musicians needed for a Brian
Wilson recording session in 1965 or
1966. I think that’s a powerful clue to
what’s often been called—uselessly—
Wilson’s “genius.” We can feel the pre-
dictive power of “California Girls” and
“Let Him Run Wild” because we know
what followed, in Pet Sounds. But it’s
still worth trying to imagine some-
thing that’s wholly unrecoverable: what
Wilson himself must have felt as he
looked ahead into how a song was de-
veloping, while discovering, intuitively,
where that song would lead him next.
Wilson marvels, in one of the docu-
mentaries I’ve mentioned, how quickly
he wrote the melody of a song like
“Caroline, No.” To me, that’s a sign
that he’s allowed himself to misun-
derstand—in wholly conventional
terms—what’s most remarkable about
his work. It isn’t the melodic line or the
speed with which it was written that
stuns me now and stunned me then.
It’s the shape of the mind in which
the intricate shapes of his music en-
.
tangled and resolved themselves. That
mind has only ever been captured in
ALAMY
one place: in the music as Brian Wilson
recorded it long ago.
The New York Review
 

  
A CURRENT LISTING
Alexandre Helicline Fine Art Victoria Munroe Fine Art
291 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002 KHOOR#KHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRPKHOLFOLQHÀQHDUWFRP 67 East 80th Street #2, New York, NY 10075; (917) 900-6661
(212) 755-2828 Midtown Manhattan, Private Dealer by appointment YLFWRULDPXQURHÀQHDUWFRPPDUJR#YLFWRULDPXQURHÀQHDUWFRP
alexandregallery.com Wednesday–Saturday, 11AM –5PM and by appointment
<RX·OO%H6ZHOO<RX·OO%H*UHDW7KH)LQH$UWRI3HUIRUPDQFH Our cur-
Emily Nelligan: UHQWH[KLELWLRQIHDWXUHVZRUNVGHSLFWLQJWKHDWUHÀOPGDQFHDQGPXVLF
*UHDW&UDQEHUU\,VODQG Fulvio Testa:
Remains on view through October 22, 2022 12:+(5(
12:+(5(
:DWHUFRORUV
September 29–
October 29, 2022

(GLWK+HDG²Costume design for Fulvio Testa

Judy Garland in KHUODVWÀOP´,&RXOG*R2Q6LQJLQJµ Now 1, 2020, watercolor,
1963, Watercolor and pencil on paper, 17" x 14" Chinese ink on paper
2FW1999, charcoal on paper, 7-1/4" x 10-1/2" Inscribed “Garland”upper right and signed lower left [

Marlborough Gallery Yossi Milo Gallery LewAllen Galleries

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001; (212) 541-4900 245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001 Railyard Arts District
www.marlboroughgraphicsnewyork.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM –6PM (212) 414-0370; info@yossimilo.com 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501;
(505) 988-3250
Picasso: 7KH6HULHV Jeremy Jaspers: 2WKHU9RLFHV2WKHU5RRPV contact@lewallengalleries.com; www.lewallengalleries.com
September 17–October 29, 2022 October 27–December 3, 2022
Linda Stojak: As of Now
September 30–November 12, 2022

Linda Stojak
is regarded for
her highly
nuanced,
evocative
representation
of the female
ÀJXUH

Pablo Picasso
347 Series: No. 163,
-XQH, Jeremy Jaspers
HWFKLQJHGLWLRQRI Sebastian and Garrett
sheet: 13-3/4" x 11" 2022, acrylic on canvas
[FP 39-1/4" x 31-1/2" Untitled
© The Estate of the [FP (Figure 128)
Artist / Artist Rights © Jeremy Jaspers, 2022
Society (ARS), Courtesy of Yossi Milo oil on canvas
New York Gallery, New York 32" x 32"

Blue Mountain Gallery VWHYHQKDUYH\ÀQHDUWSURMHFWV OnPaper.Art

547 West 27th Street, New York, NY; (646) 486-4730 208 Forsyth Street, New York, NY 10002 onpaper.art; (617) 610-7173
bluemountaingallery.org; Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM –6PM www.shfap.com; (917) 861-7312
Wednesday–Saturday, 12PM –6PM Ny Satellite Print Fair 2022
7KHJDOOHU\·VIDOOVHDVRQZLOOIHDWXUHDFHQWHQQLDOWULEXWHWR1HZ<RUN 3UHVHQWHGE\2Q3DSHU$UW
School painter David Sawin, along with new work by his daughter, In The White Album, Peter Acheson shows work from 1984 through October 27–30, 2022
*LQD6DZLQ1RY²'DYLG6DZLQ·VSDLQWLQJVPHUJHDEVWUDFW WKHSUHVHQWIRFXVHGRQDOLJKWHUSDOHWWH$FKHVRQXVHVODQJXDJHDQG
SULQFLSOHVZLWKWUDGLWLRQDOPRWLIVRIODQGVFDSHÀJXUHDQGVWLOOOLIHLQD collage in his myriad, Visit the show live in
XQLTXHV\QHUJ\RI(XURSHDQPRGHUQLVPDQG$EVWUDFW([SUHVVLRQLVP variegated surfaces SHUVRQDW:HVWWK
to expand our visual 6WUHHW1HZ<RUN&LW\
XQLYHUVH7KURXJK
2FWREHUWK Experience the virtual
VKRZRQOLQHZZZ
1<6DWHOOLWH3ULQW)DLUFRP

Peter Acheson Derrick Adams

Spanish Landscape ,QWHULRU/LIH:RPDQ, 2019
with Figures, 2022 Image courtesy of Michael
David Sawin,Still Life, 1978 21" x 17" Steinberg Fine Art

October 6, 2022 33
 Rome Was His Laboratory
The Incomparable Monsignor:
Francesco Bianchini’s
World of Science, History,
and Court Intrigue
by J. L. Heilbron.
Oxford University Press,
327 pp., $27.95
No one in Rome would let Francesco
Bianchini punch a hole through their
ceiling. Bianchini wanted to measure
the size of the solar system, which re-
quired the use of a sixteen-foot-long
telescope— hence the hole. When
he finally found a suitable place to
mount his instrument and take mea-
surements, tracking Venus and Saturn
across the night sky on November 19,
1727, he used a trigonometric method
to calculate the distance between the
sun and Venus, the first step to mea-
suring the whole solar system. He cal-
culated a distance of about 53 million
miles. He was short by some 40 million.
In 1726 Bianchini had rigged up an
even more powerful seventy-eight-
foot-long telescope, which magnified
objects by a factor of 112. He must
have borrowed a church garden for the
night, or the gardens of the Palazzo
Barberini, or a friend’s villa, where he
could find the structural supports—a
bridge, a high wall—required to prop
up such a long tube. Through it he
saw, for the first time, the face of
Venus, “Mirror of Divine Beauty, the
brightest of all bodies, the brilliant
star of the morning.” Visitors flocked
to peer into the telescope delicately
cantilevered into Rome’s evening air.
Since no one could replicate Bianchi-
ni’s prodigious instrument, skeptics
emerged. In January 1728 Bianchini
collected signed testimony from two
priests, one professor, and three lay-
men who had pressed their eyes to the
lens that night and seen the face of
Venus. “Vidi et testo,” they wrote—
“Seen and sworn.”
But what had they seen? Bianchini
thought he had seen spots on the plan-
et’s face. He mapped them; named
Venus’s features after his generous pa-
tron, the Portuguese king João V, and
after Portuguese colonizers; engraved
them; and finally published his findings
in a book titled Hesperi et Phosphori
nova phaenomena sive observationes
circa planetam Veneris (New Phenom-
ena of Hesperus and Phosphorous, or
Rather Observations Concerning the
Planet Venus). Bianchini was surely his
century’s version of Galileo, who had
first mapped the terrain of the moon
more than a hundred years before. But
Venus, we now know, is covered in ex-
tremely dense sulfurous clouds, which
reflect sunlight. The planet’s surface
was invisible, in fact, to Bianchini’s
telescope; the first visible-light images
of Venus’s surface were captured by
NASA ’s Parker Solar Probe in February
of this year.
So what did Bianchini see? A smudge
on his lens? Was his telescope too long,
subject to visual error or distortion?
Was Venus’s cloudy atmosphere unusu-
ally calm that day, making all that gas
appear as solid as Galileo’s moon rock?
Was it a problem of representation:
was Bianchini’s process of engraving
too sure—the contrast of black ink on
34
Erin Maglaque
Four views of Venus; mezzotint from Francesco Bianchini’s Hesperi et Phosphori nova
phaenomena sive observationes circa planetam Veneris, 1728
white paper too stark, the burin too
sharp—to render in print something
as ineffable as a swirling pattern of
planetary clouds? Or did Bianchini
see what he had desperately wanted
to see—what had never before been
perceived by human eyes, what could
be mapped and named, a fitting cul-
mination to a life lived in the pursuit
of science?
In depicting Venus’s orbit, Bianchini
had to make a choice. Either Venus cir-
cled the earth, in accordance with the
system still defended by the Church
and in agreement with Scripture, or
it orbited the sun, as Copernicus and
Galileo had it, and as Bianchini himself
would have surely known to be cor-
rect. On a plate in the tragically wrong
Nova phaenomena, Bianchini depicted
a beautiful armillary sphere showing
Venus’s orbit. The image avoided that
most perilous question of early modern
religion and science with tactful si-
lence: there was nothing at the center.
The planet circles empty space.
“The heavens declare the glory of
God, and the firmament sheweth his
handiwork,” the Psalms proclaim. For
Bianchini, a deeply religious man, an
aide to three consecutive popes, and
a student of Galilean experimental
science, astronomy was the science
of describing God’s handiwork—of
calculating dimensions, capturing the
universe’s harmony, discovering and
illuminating the arrangement of God’s
firmament—not speculating about its
causes or making any claims about
“the unreachable truths of natural and
human history,” as J. L. Heilbron writes
in The Incomparable Monsignor, his fas-
cinating biography of Bianchini. Those
truths were for God alone. No matter
how long the telescope, men would al-
ways view them through a glass, darkly.
R ome was Bianchini’s laboratory. He
used his friends’ gardens and vil-
las as scaffolding for his astronomical
instruments, the city’s ruins as critical
evidence to be sketched and included
in his histories of ancient civilizations,
its libraries and collections of antiq-
uities as repositories to be plundered
for authoritative information. Rome’s
residents were his patrons, employers,
colleagues, and co-conspirators in the
Republic of Letters. Even Bianchini’s
rooms at the Quirinal, the papal pal-
ace, were part of his grand experiment,
stocked with books, telescopes pointed
out its windows, and a sundial in the
garden. He was provided with servants
to launder his clothes, cook his meals,
and clean his flat. As Heilbron writes,
Bianchini and his celibate scholar
peers “lived in a perpetual seminar”
free from the obligations of domes-
ticity, a life passed dashing between
the academies and music chambers of
early Enlightenment Rome.
Bianchini was especially well dis-
posed to the pure life of the mind. He
had been training for it since child-
hood. Born in Verona in 1662, he was
favored early by the patronage of a
family friend, Cardinal Pietro Otto-
boni, who reigned as Pope Alexander
VIII from late 1689 until his death in
early 1691. At eleven Bianchini was
sent to a Jesuit college in Bologna,
where he became fluent in Latin and
adept in Greek, and also learned gram-
mar, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, and
mathematics. Enrolling at the Univer-
sity of Padua to study theology, he was
taught the Galilean fisicomatematica
by Geminiano Montanari; in Mon-
tanari’s lectures, Bianchini learned
about trigonometry, military architec-
ture, experimental physics, the laws
of motion, atomic theory, and how to
praise Galileo without offending the
Church’s inquisitors.
Montanari proceeded from the ev-
idence of his eyes and his hands. He
feared that theoretical science was
inevitably prone to error, that “we
all mislead ourselves when we want
to discuss things that take place far
from us, applying to them the same
concepts we use for terrestrial things
that we have in our hands.” Here is his
fictional dialogue with his hero Galileo,
on the nature of the infinite:
Galileo: Tell me, Prof. Montanari,
whether you understand the
infinite.
Answer: I understand only that I
do not have the intellect to un-
derstand it.
Galileo: Excellent . . . You have
learned everything that can be
learned about infinity.
Bianchini, whose curiosity was matched
only by his piety, was naturally sympa-
thetic, in Heilbron’s account, to Mon-
tanari’s modest claims about the limits
of experimental science. His notes on
his teacher’s lectures say that most of
what we want to know about nature is
beyond our understanding.
At Padua in 1683, Bianchini made
his first scientific discovery. Studying
the night sky with Montanari, he com-
pared what he observed with what was,
at that time, the most complete atlas
of the stars yet published, Johannes
Bayer’s Uranometria (1603). He realized
that, contrary to the writings of the
ancients, the stars were not fixed in
the sky but instead had a “genius for
instability”: stars might vary in lumi-
nosity or even nearly vanish from the
heavens altogether. As Heilbron writes,
Bianchini overstated the scale of his
findings (only two of the many unsta-
ble stars he identified were actually
LI NDA HALL L IBRARY OF S CI ENCE , E NG IN EE RI NG, AN D TE CH NOL OGY, KA NSAS CIT Y, M I S S OU RI
variable); what he really discovered
was his own keen eye, the thrill of
experimental science under the stars.
The following year Bianchini went
to Rome. In 1688 he took up a post as
Ottoboni’s librarian, overseeing a vast
collection of manuscripts and printed
books; these materials became sources
for his Istoria universale, a history of
the world from Creation to his own
day. After Ottoboni’s death, Bianchini
was supported by the late pope’s great-
nephew, also named Pietro Ottoboni
and also a cardinal. In 1699 Bianchini
became a canon at Ottoboni’s church,
San Lorenzo; in 1701 he was appointed
cameriere d’onore, a top aide to Pope
Clement XI, and moved into his rooms
in the Quirinal. He took on new re-
sponsibilities, too, managing Rome’s
water supply through ancient aque-
ducts, calculating the date of Easter,
and overseeing ancient Latin inscrip-
tions and monuments that were dug
up across the city.
Though Bianchini was happiest
peering through a telescope or con-
cocting complicated numerological
The New York Review
 jokes for his friends’ amusement, he
liked a bit of intrigue, too, and that was
in no short supply at the Vatican. Rome
was a partisan of the Catholic Stuart
claim on the English throne. Bianchini
acted as a papal diplomat, smoothing
over the awkward conversations that
followed the Old Pretender, James III,
around Europe as he tried to gather
the support of the Catholic powers for
his doomed cause. The younger Pietro
Ottoboni described Bianchini as pos-
sessing “the prudence of the serpent
and the simplicity of the dove”; the
same prudence and simplicity also
came in handy for scholarly diplo-
macy. Bianchini counted among his
friends Baron Philipp von Stosch, an
apparently inspired antiquarian, spy,
atheist, and pornographer. Bianchini
saw what he wanted to see and closed
his eyes to the rest.
Bianchini’s career as an astron-
omer, historian, and archaeologist
culminated in the 1720s. He wrote
on Rome’s ancient palaces, edited an
authoritative ninth-century history
of the early papacy, and saw those
spots on the face of Venus. The Nova
phaenomena was published in 1728.
Bianchini died a year later, wearing
his beloved hair shirt. He had been an
aide to three popes and confidant to
one Polish princess and an exiled king.
Leibniz and Newton—who could never
agree on much of anything—found
common ground in their praise of him.
Bianchini was, in Newton’s words, “a
candid seeker of truth.”
W hat were the truths Bianchini
sought? One was the precise date
of Creation. By the early eighteenth
century, scholars had calculated two
hundred competing dates, based on
scriptural evidence, scrutiny of ancient
texts, astronomical data, and evidence
from physical artifacts. How to account
for the fact that the people of China
and the Americas did not descend from
Noah, or for the long and illustrious
histories of Egyptian, Babylonian, and
Chinese civilizations? Fixing the date
of Creation would also fix the relation-
ship between ancient civilizations and
Judeo-Christian Scripture. Bianchini
sought to provide a timeline and at
the same time a theory of our deepest
human past.
He approached the problem in Is-
toria universale, a chronological and
comparative history of cultures and
civilizations. His historical research
was predicated on certain assumptions:
that material evidence was critical in
the pursuit of ancient chronology; that
the Flood, a world-historical event, had
obliterated prehistory and transformed
it into mythology, and therefore that
G OVE RN ING BODY OF CHR IST CHU RC H, OX FORD U NI VE RS IT Y
mythology could be used as histori-
cal evidence; and that all civilizations
made equal progress in equal time,
which gave him a firm foundation
for the tricky work of periodization.
Matching his prodigious research with
his skill as an artist, Bianchini drew
over 140 objects and arranged them
into collages that symbolized each
epoch. He issued some separately as
an educational card game.
Bianchini found evidence for Cre-
ation wherever he looked, agreeing
with Montanari that people across the
world believed in it long “before the
errors of those who called themselves
philosophers threw it into doubt.” In
his collage depicting the evidence of
October 6, 2022
Creation, he included a drawing from
an ancient Roman lamp showing Nep-
tune separating the oceans, Egyptian
hieroglyphs supposedly commemorat-
ing creation and renewal, and an image
of a stag sacrificed every spring by the
indigenous people of Florida. He urged
fellow scholars to head to the foot of
the nearest volcano and measure the
dampness of the soil there, to fix once
and for all the date of the Flood.
Bianchini’s history showed the con-
temporaneous invention of agriculture,
astronomy, and navigation across clas-
sical sources, Chinese records collected
by Jesuit missionaries, and indigenous
mythologies of the Americas. He cop-
ied out drawings of the constellations
from a Chinese planisphere and the
observatory of the eleventh-century BC
ruler Chou Kung. With its principles
Design for a long telescope; drawing by Bianchini from Nova phaenomena
of equal progress in equal time, sym-
metrical divisions of historical epochs,
and emphasis on parallel and univer-
sal human development, Bianchini’s
book was a testament to a deeply re-
ligious apprehension of the world that
found evidence of God’s ordered and
harmonious Creation across sources,
cultures, and epochs, from Pompeii’s
damp feet to the stars. The composite
images of Bianchini’s Istoria inspired
Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s archaeo-
logical fantasies of Roman ruins; its
comparative historical method was an
important predecessor of the one used
by the philosopher Giambattista Vico
in The New Science.
C hronology was a sacred art, and
the pope entrusted it to Bianchini.
The date of Easter is calculated as the
first Sunday after the first full moon
after the spring equinox; astronomical
observation was therefore required to
precisely identify it. For the jubilee
year of 1700, Pope Clement XI com-
missioned Bianchini to construct a
meridian line in the Roman church
of Santa Maria degli Angeli. The me-
ridiana transformed the church itself
into a monumental scientific instru-
ment. Bianchini put a hole through
the roof and inlaid a 145-foot-long
metal line into the church floor. The
hole projected onto the floor a disk of
sunlight, which swept across the me-
ridian line at solar noon each day. As
the sun moved across the sky between
the summer and winter solstices, the
disk tracked along the metal line. (The
original iron was eventually replaced
with brass.) The sun’s position on the
line indicated with great precision the
date of the two equinoxes.
Santa Maria degli Angeli was the
perfect space to transform into a living
instrument, with its vast expanse of
smooth marble floor, high ceilings, and
relatively few obstructions. (One archi-
trave had to be removed.) And the me-
ridiana was as much a work of art as
a work of science, fitting for a church
built by Michelangelo over the ruined
Baths of Diocletian. Bianchini com-
missioned the painter Carlo Maratti to
design zodiac symbols in marble and
brass for the floor, patterned after the
images of the Uranometria. He embed-
ded medallions that commemorated
important events of his time along the
line, reflecting the sun’s position on
those significant days.
Bianchini returned to his meridiana
every other day for twenty-five years
to record the information it revealed
about the position of the sun. Visi-
tors witnessed him “kneeling on the
ground” in his clerical robes, “writing,
calculating,” as the sun streamed down
in a dust-flecked shaft; he took his
last notes only eleven days before his
death. His notebook records the visits
of those who came to observe the great
instrument and its designer at work,
including Queen Maria Casimira So-
bieski of Poland, who took pleasure in
watching the sun glint off a medallion
Bianchini had installed as a memorial
to her late husband.
As Heilbron’s earlier book The Sun
in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar
Observatories (1999) explains, the me-
ridiana exemplifies the religious zeal
for scientific knowledge, the pursuit
of ever more precise astrological in-
struments by the same cardinals and
popes who could not countenance a
Copernican revolution in their un-
derstanding of the stars. Bianchini
explained: “In this single instrument
not only astronomy but also sacred
chronology and the Roman Catholic
calendar may be seen independently
and united by the rays of the celestial
bodies.” The hole that he punched in
the roof of Santa Maria degli Angeli
provided testimony to the harmony of
God’s created universe, beamed down
onto the floor right beneath his feet.
In 1725, while measuring a ruined
wall that had once been part of Domi-
tian’s palace on the Palatine Hill, Bian-
chini fell through a hole. As he clung
to the edge, his servants tossed him a
measuring tape and winched him down
slowly. Bianchini was on the hill as the
head of the papal office that oversaw
Rome’s antiquities, excavations, and
ancient inscriptions, and was trying
to piece back together the great pala-
tial complex that stood ruined before
him. As he had done when writing his
Istoria universale, Bianchini proceeded
from a few foundational assumptions:
first, that good taste is eternal—the
best design principles of contemporary
Rome would have surely applied in the
first century, too—and second, that
perfect design is symmetrical. From
these axioms Bianchini recreated the
whole of Domitian’s palace, from its
ornate entrance to its plumbing, pub-
lished as the Palazzo de’ cesari. His was
a creative history that, if not entirely
accurate, brought the palace to life,
humming with hidden servants and
preening diplomats, with water flowing
into the taps and sunlight streaming
through the windows.
That same year, after some bandits
dug up an ancient tomb complex on
the Appian Way, Bianchini undertook a
study of its urns and their inscriptions.
The tomb contained the remains of
more than three thousand slaves and
free servants of Livia, the emperor
Augustus’s widow. Bianchini stud-
ied and published over two hundred
inscriptions that listed their names
and employment: here lay cleaners,
laundresses, custodians of the summer
wardrobe and those of the winter one,
doctors, midwives, women who oiled
Livia and those who massaged her or
drew her baths. Augustus employed a
man to read to him when he was suffer-
ing from sleeplessness, one to remind
him of his friends’ names when he was
suffering from forgetfulness, and one
(called a silentarius) just to shut peo-
ple up when they were bothering him.
All that dusty work with antiquities
might suggest a man more at home
in the silent company of things than
of people, but Bianchini’s historical
imagination was a sociable one: if his
Istoria universale was a form of early
cultural history, his reconstructions
of ancient Rome were experiments in
social history, imagining the lives of
slaves and empresses.
B ianchini is a delight to spend time
with, and Heilbron—the author of
an authoritative biography of Galileo,
as well as lives of the physicists Er-
nest Rutherford, Max Planck, and
H. G. J. Moseley—is an erudite and
witty guide to the monsignor’s world
and his work. Through these two schol-
ars, the doors to the most recondite
Enlightenment circles are pried open:
lens makers’ workshops, academy
35
salons, the studies of collectors and
popes. While Heilbron’s explanations
of the trigonometric method for de-
termining planetary parallax strained
the abilities of this high school physics
dropout, he nevertheless vividly de-
scribes just how exciting such work
was in its time, approaching his inge-
nious subjects with an inviting blend
of reverence and humor.
One of the great gifts of the book
is the cast of minor characters who
brightly orbit Bianchini. There is the
winningly modest Montanari; Newton
is here, valiantly attempting to identify
when Jason and the Argonauts set sail.
Lesser-known scientists appear, too.
My favorite is Maria Clara Einmart,
the daughter of an etcher and as-
tronomer in Nuremberg, who looked
Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms
A statue of the Tamil poet Tiruvalluvar, author of the Tirukkural, Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, India, 2015
The Kural:
Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural
translated from the Tamil
by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma.
Beacon, 214 pp., $24.95
Suppose you are traveling on a munic-
ipal bus in the sunbaked South Indian
city of Chennai, and you know Tamil. At
some point, overwhelmed by the sheer
density of color and form that you can
see through the window, you raise your
eyes to the board just above the driver’s
seat, where a couplet is inscribed:
Firmness of action is firmness of
mind—
All else is else
It’s like a cool breath of air from the
sea. You can only wonder at the mirac-
ulous economy of expression, and at
its slightly unnerving poetic quality.
Or the board may say:
One who lets go of any thing and
any thing is free
36
through her father’s telescope and
painted what she saw: moonscapes,
comets, and aspects of Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn. She died in childbirth at
thirty-one, but her scholarship lives on,
incorporated into Donato Creti’s gor-
geous nocturnal landscape paintings
now hanging in the Vatican galleries.
Other scientists in Heilbron’s pages
hawk wild schemes to put monumental
globes in every city square or acous-
tic tubes in scholars’ flats so they can
eavesdrop on neighbors, or designs for
carriages that might drift up to the
moon on inflatable spheres. A flock
of Jesuits advise Bianchini not to sail
to England in a boat full of Calvin-
ists, lest he drown in the company of
heretics. Charles (“I own I am a little
mad”) Wogan, an Irish Jacobite and
David Shulman
Of the pain of that thing and that
thing
The Tamil in this case is so beautiful
and so surprising that when I reread it
recently, I laughed out loud. It sounds
something like this (pay attention to
the long vowels):
yādhanin yādhanin nīngiyāl nodal
ādhanin ādhanin ilan
This Tamil form is called a kural, its
characteristic meter kural venba. There
is a sentence, sometimes compressed
to the edge of silence. Always there will
be two lines, the first with four met-
rical feet, the second with three (or
two and a half), thus creating a strong
syncopation. Alliteration and melodic
repetition are usually present. Rhyme
occurs in the opening of the two lines,
not at their end—what we call head
rhyme. The cadence, once heard, keeps
playing over and over in the mind.
The couplets quoted above are from
a classical Tamil text, the Tirukkural
boy poet, engineered a dashing escape
for a teenage princess, Maria Clemen-
tina Sobieski, so that she might marry
the Old Pretender. With the princess
imprisoned at Innsbruck through the
machinations of King George I, who
worried about her sizable dowry fall-
ing into the hands of the pretender
king, Wogan convinced her servants
to bundle her out of the castle under
cover of darkness, dressed humbly with
an apron full of jewels. Bianchini was
ready in Rome to receive her with bas-
kets of sweets.
For the scholars discussed in Heil-
bron’s book, knowing was not a mat-
ter of searching for the causes of
things. They looked and looked well,
whether through a telescope lens or
into a cavernous ancient sepulcher;
of Tiruvalluvar, by common consent
one of the greatest poets—for many,
the greatest of them all—in the two-
millennium course of Tamil literature.
The Tirukkural has 1,330 such couplets
divided into 133 thematic chapters of
ten couplets each. As we see from the
examples, they contain pithy, gnomic
statements that might be useful in
life. In South Asian literatures gen-
erally, such words of pointed wisdom
are classed as niti, which includes ad-
vice of a pragmatic nature along with
ethical maxims, observations of the
social world, and sometimes personal,
introspective flashes of insight. Niti
literature is vast, well preserved in
Sanskrit and in all the regional lan-
guages of India, and the Tirukkural
occupies a special place in it.
But the Tirukkural is not only a work
of practical wisdom. It is traditionally
divided into three sections, the first
nominally about right conduct (aram;
dharma in Sanskrit) but in fact ranging
over quasi-metaphysical topics (fate,
truth, “knowing what is real,” freedom);
they measured and described what
they saw in diagrams, in Latin and
Italian, in etchings and in paintings.
But they did not guess at what set
it all in motion. As Newton wrote, “I
feign no hypotheses.” His methods,
Bianchini averred, “can be repeated
at will by whoever loves to revere and
contemplate the workings of Divine
Wisdom in the disposition, immensity,
and motions of the heavenly bodies.”
This was a principle of reproducibility
sustained not by the scientific method
but by faith, a unifying way of seeing
that valued the principles of harmony,
symmetry, and immutability above all
.
else. As Heilbron writes, there was no
doubt in Bianchini’s mind how time
began and how it would end. All that
was left was to describe the middle.
the second mostly about politics, eco-
nomics, self-interest, and instrumental
goals (all subsumed under the expan-
sive Tamil term porul, “substance”);
and the third, possibly the most orig-
inal, about sexual desire or ecstasy
(inpam or kāmam). The second sec-
tion also includes, along with several
beautiful chapters about friendship,
some rather negative statements about
married life (couplet 901 begins, “No
virtue in craving one’s wife”) and, with
special emphasis, about the danger
of succumbing to a courtesan’s wiles.
The three divisions overlap with
but do not correspond exactly to the
pan-Indian “goals of being human”
(puruΔārtha): dharma, self-interest
(artha), and desire (kama). There is a
fourth, overriding goal, moksha (lib-
eration), that also finds its way into
the Tirukkural, though not as a topic
in its own right; living wisely will, in
theory, in itself make you free. Gen-
erations of scholars have argued that
the Tamil author was a Jain, a mem-
ber of an ancient and very influential
Indian religion outside the bounds
of Vedic, or what we now might call
Hindu, orthodoxy. The evidence for
this assertion is, however, very sparse,
resting on a few ambiguous—possibly
universalistic—couplets on nonvio-
lence, vegetarianism, and an abstract
deity who embodies wisdom.
The Tirukkural, possibly composed
around the fifth century AD , has en-
joyed continuous popularity through
the last sixteen centuries. It was often
quoted by medieval commentators on
grammatical and other formal, eru-
dite texts. It generated a very large
literature of commentaries of its own,
beginning with that of Manakkudavar
(perhaps eleventh-century) and reach-
ing a synthesis with those of the presti-
gious, still-authoritative Parimelalakar
(late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth-
century).1 Early modern authors, such
as the late-seventeenth-century gram-
S HAN KAR V INCEN T
1
For an excellent analysis of Parimelalakar’s
commentary, see Norman Cutler, “Inter-
preting Tirukkuΐa̸: The Role of Commen-
tary in the Creation of a Text,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 112,
No. 4 (October–December 1992).
The New York Review
marian Saminata Desikar, list the
Tirukkural among the three most
important Tamil books—in Desikar’s
view, probably the foremost of them
all. The work was also beloved of the
Christian missionaries who came to
the Tamil country in the last several
centuries and learned the language;
for them, this book of ethical wisdom
seemed close to Christian teachings.
I t is thus not surprising that we
have a plethora of translations of
the Tirukkural, some by missionar-
ies such as the great Constantino
Giuseppe Beschi (into Latin, but only
the first two parts; 1730), W. H. Drew,
John Lazarus, G.U. Pope, and Karl Graul
(into German, 1856), along with others
by modern Tamil writers and scholars
such as V.V. S. Aiyar and P. S. Sunda-
ram. Altogether, there are over eighty
translations, including quite a few into
other South Asian languages such as
Sanskrit, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali,
Kannada, and Telugu.
The results, however, have been
largely disappointing, and no won-
der. To translate even a single kural
couplet, bewitching in its rhythm and
packed with meaning, is a formidable
task. But we now have Thomas Hitoshi
Pruiksma’s translation, without doubt
the best ever into English. Pruiksma
has a poet’s ear, very good Tamil (he
studied with the late connoisseur-
scholar K.V. Ramakoti), and a read-
iness to take imaginative leaps. The
examples I have cited come from his
book.
In seeking to capture the texture
of the Tamil original, Pruiksma likes
dashes and ellipses:
Many die bravely on the
battlefield—few
Stand fearless before an audience
Like good in a heart that loves
grace—deception
In a heart that loves theft
What to call folly—discarding
what helps
And keeping what hurts
In most cases, the syncopation is re-
produced, and we hear some approx-
imation of the aesthetic power of the
verse. Concise but helpful notes, usu-
ally based on the medieval commen-
taries, take up seventy pages following
the translation. Stringent semantic
compression often leaves the reader or
listener puzzling over what the apho-
rism means, both in the Tamil original
and in Pruiksma’s attempt to repro-
duce its sound as well as its sense.
The sheer aural beauty of the Tamil
couplets, even before their meaning
is decoded by the listener, probably
explains the intense love Tamilians
have for this book.
Pruiksma’s translation has moments
of great brilliance. For example, from
the section on desire:
I could remember her nature and
bright warring eyes
If I forgot—but I can’t forget
A Tamil woman’s eyes are, by literary
convention, dangerous, even deadly;
English, too, speaks of a “drop-dead
beauty.” But verse 1,125 is syntactically
uneven in the original, as if mimick-
ing the lover’s crazed state, and thus
October 6, 2022
excruciating for a translator. Here is
how P. S. Sundaram, one of the best of
the modern South Asian translators
of the Tirukkural, handles this verse:
I can’t recall her bright eyes—
We recall only the forgotten!
The idea is there in the italics and
the exclamation point, but the poem
has turned into a laconic paraphrase;
and even that has to be read over a
few times before we understand it.
Pruiksma, on the other hand, has re-
produced the Tamil conjunction of two
verbal forms of forgetting: marappin
marappariyen, “if I forget, (but) I can’t
forget. . . .” He also rightly goes for a
counterfactual conditional clause: “I
could remember . . . /If I forgot.” All this
faithfully conveys the lover’s state of
mind, wavering happily between hal-
lucination and fact.
Inevitably, there are places where I
differ from Pruiksma’s choices. Just
two couplets before the last example,
the lover says:
Image be gone from my eye—
there isn’t
Any room for the brow I love
It’s as if the remembered image of the
beloved has sunk deep, maybe perma-
nently, into the speaker’s eyeball (karu-
mani in Tamil), displacing any fresh,
living vision of her. But does any En-
glish speaker obsess over his beloved’s
brow? Do we even remember what a
brow is? And the Tamil original in any
case probably refers to the bearer of
that brow, tirunutal, a possessive com-
pound, as the modern commentators
take it. I’d replace “brow” with “per-
son.” The eyeball, by the way, is black,
thus infinitely spacious, rather like a
kural couplet, though all that space
is now taken up by the mental image
of the beloved.
And what are we to make of couplet
1,221, addressed by the lonely lover to
the evening hour, malai, cruelest of all
the hours of the day?
You are not evening but the lance
that ends wives—
Time—live long
At least one dash too many. And can
a lance end wives? Actually, there may
not be any lance, unless, like certain
commentators, we stretch the word
for time or moment, velai, to be a per-
sonified, second-person vel, “spear.”
The association is natural enough,
but the grammar is off. I’d prefer “the
time that ends lives” to the lance and
wives. The final two words of blessing
are meant ironically, as a curse upon
nightfall.
T hose familiar with Tamil litera-
ture will think of another poem
about evening, from the ancient an-
thology Short Poems (perhaps AD sec-
ond century, the time of the Sangam,
a mythic academy of Tamil language
and literature):
The sun departs, the sky
turns red, the ache
becomes sharp. Light fades.
The jasmine blooms.
That’s what everyone calls
“evening”—
and they’re all wrong.
When the cock crows in the wide
town
and night turns to dawn—that,
too,
is evening. Even high noon
is evening
for the lonely.2
Very much in the same vein, Tiruval-
luvar has given us an entire chapter
on the devastating evening hours. As
many have pointed out, the Tirukkural
couplets in general are replete with
intertextual references to earlier Tamil
poems and, specifically in this third
section, to the classic scenario of Tamil
love, the Sangam-period poems of
akam, the interior landscape (in A. K.
Ramanujan’s felicitous translation).3
Occasionally the couplets add a new
twist to the old akam themes of long-
ing, sometimes patiently, sometimes
desperately, as in the nicely translated
couplet 1,225 in the same chapter as
couplet 1,221. Again the lover/beloved
is speaking:
What evil did I do the evening—
what good
Did I do the dawn
Simple, lucid, and moving, like the
Tamil original. Even the dash fits in
well. We should note the introspective
voice, the inner dialogue of the mind
with its rhetorical questions, its sad-
ness or despair. The chapter preceding
this verse explores lovers’ dreams:
I sleep—he lies in my arms—I
wake—
He’s back in my heart
It’s as if all the pain of separation,
distributed unevenly throughout the
cosmos, had been condensed into a
few syllables. The only bit missing in
the English is the final word of the
Tamil couplet, a dangling nonfinite
verb, viraintu (rushing). Waking, she
remembers he’s not there. It hits her
in a flash. She still loves him, but he
may never come back. He quickly, too
quickly, slips from her dreaming mind
into her broken heart.
This mode of painful awareness and
self-scrutiny is salient throughout the
section on love. Sometimes it is stated
starkly, in a way reminiscent of the
early Tamil poetic grammars of love:
arāa idumbaitt’ en nenju
Unceasing pain is what I have in
my heart
This is the second, resonant line in
a couplet from a chapter on mental
turmoil and cognitive dissonance. In
Pruiksma’s translation:
My heart is endless heartache—it
fears not having—
And having—fears losing
Can anyone fail to identify with these
words?
Of course, the Tirukkural offers mo-
ments of fulfillment, of remembered
or imagined sexual delight. One might
even say that the entire, rather atyp-
2
Milaipperun Kantan, in Kuruntokai, verse
234 (my translation).
3
The Interior Landscape: Classical Tamil
Love Poems (1967; New York Review Books,
2014).
ical love sequence of part 3 ends on
a happy note: the final chapter of the
book concerns the inimitable joys of a
lovers’ tiff. But it’s hard for this poet
to shake off the shadowy side of inti-
macy; he seems to know it too well, as
when the speaker addresses her own
heart:
Heart—seeing that his heart is his
Why aren’t you mine
Taken together, in the sequence we
now have (thanks to the commentator
Parimelalakar), the couplets from the
section on love and desire constitute
a strange, elliptical progression, from
the moment the lovers first catch sight
of each other to their celebrated and
necessary quarrels after marriage.
This sequence can, with some effort,
be squeezed into the narrative struc-
ture that has been extracted from the
oldest Tamil love poems or, with even
greater effort, into the pan-Indian San-
skrit division of love into two phases:
sambhoga (love fulfilled in body and
mind) and vipralambha (love in sep-
aration). Not surprisingly, the latter
category exceeds the former by far, in
sheer quantity and also in intensity, in
both the Tamil and Sanskrit literary
traditions.
Parimelalakar superimposes on this
categorical distinction the standard
Tamil sequence of kalavu, literally
“stolen love” before marriage (sadly,
the all-too-brief and only really happy
moment in the lives of the prototypi-
cal lovers), and karpu, “domestic love,”
with its unrelenting tensions as well
as its sometimes stable pleasures (ar-
guing and sulking). The great scholar
of Tamil François Gros has beautifully
explicated these overlapping notions
in the introduction to his excellent
French translation of the section on
desire.4
But the medieval commentator’s val-
iant attempt to make sense of the way
the twenty-five chapters of this section
unfold is mostly beside the point. We
would do better to read these chapters
as some sort of performative drama
in several voices, including that of the
poet-narrator himself, describing the
subtle shifts in feeling and percep-
tion on the part of lovers in a long-
term, passionate relationship. There
are many unspoken gaps and brood-
ing silences in these couplets; I am
tempted to say that the two people,
with all their torments and ecstasies,
communicate primarily through the
gaps. In any case, like all premodern
Tamil poetry, the Tirukkural verses
were certainly composed in order to
be sung aloud to an audience capa-
ble of deciphering and relishing them,
though we cannot know today what the
original circumstances of performance
may have been.
T here is, however, another kind of
commentary that helps us under-
stand the Tirukkural and its putative
author or compiler. What can be said
about the poet who has given his name
to this book of maxims and variations
on the great themes of ethics, power,
and love? The Tamil literary tradi-
tion produced a complicated story
about Tiruvalluvar, first attested, in
part, in a tenth-century collection of
4
Le Livre de l’amour de Tiruva̸̸uvar (Paris:
Gallimard, 1992).
37
fifty-three poems about the Tirukku-
ral, the Tiruvalluva-malai, or Garland
[of Poems] on Tiruvalluvar. This collec-
tion contains an endlessly cited verse
attributed to the poetess Auvaiyar,
supposedly the poet’s sister, who says
that each kural verse contains all the
seven cosmic oceans squeezed into
an atom. (Her colleague Idaikkadar
says each verse has crammed all the
oceans into a tiny, perforated mustard
seed.)
The Garland on Tiruvalluvar also
describes the ultimate moment of
canonization for any classical Tamil
book: a voice from heaven orders the
palm-leaf manuscript of the Tiruk-
kural to be placed on a wooden plank
floating in the Golden Lotus Tank at
the famous Minakshi temple in the city
of Madurai. This plank was infinitely
expandable, capable of making room
for any true poet, but no sooner were
the Tirukkural palm leaves put there
than the plank shrank dramatically,
thereby dumping all other poets (there
were forty-nine of them) into the tur-
bid waters of the tank, since none of
them could compare with this book’s
author. The critical plank of the Tamil
Academy was for centuries the unfal-
sifiable gold standard for excellence
in Tamil.
Out of this tenth-century kernel, the
biography of Tiruvalluvar grew into
a set of somewhat baffling popular
narratives—a trenchant form of oral
literary criticism. According to ver-
sions in both Tamil and colonial-period
English, Tiruvalluvar was the son of a
Brahmin father, Bhagavan, and a Dalit
(at the bottom of the social hierarchy)
mother, Ati. (Ati-bhagavan, the “first
lord,” is mentioned in the very first
couplet of the Tirukkural.) The par-
ents’ marriage was troubled from the
beginning: Bhagavan flees from his
new bride out of fear of pollution but
eventually agrees to stay with her on
condition that any babies born to them
will be abandoned at birth. (God, says
Bhagavan, will care for them.) They
have seven children, four girls and
three boys (like the four-plus-three
metrical feet in a kural verse).
(Tiru)Valluvan (later honorifically
called Tiruvalluvar) is the seventh,
born in Mylapore (today a prestigious
neighborhood in Chennai and home
to a great temple). He is nursed by a
weaver, then adopted, first by a peas-
ant woman from the agricultural Vel-
lala group, then by a Dalit couple, and
then he is sent back to the Vellalas
(or, in some versions, returned to the
weavers). Finally, after various other
family adventures, as a young man
he becomes a weaver in Mylapore,
where he makes a name for himself
as a sage. He marries Vasuki, from a
peasant family, after she passes the
bridal test of producing a meal of rice
out of grains of sand. He has a close
friend and soulmate, Elelasingan, a
merchant seaman, who prompts him
to compose his literary masterpiece.
Elela also has a part to play in Ti-
ruvalluvar’s last rites. The aged poet
has left instructions that his body be
removed from the village and cast
away, but Elela and other disciples
decide that he should be buried in a
golden coffin. The poet awakes from
death and protests. The coffin is
abandoned in the bushes, but crows,
vultures, and other animals that come
into contact with the corpse turn into
gold.
38
This story is less bizarre than it
might seem.5 It has a lot to tell us
about how the Tirukkural was per-
ceived over the centuries. (Tiru)val-
luvan is the title of ritual specialists
who serve some Dalit subcastes—also,
it seems, a name for the low-caste
drummer who works as the village
herald and announcer. Tiruvalluvar
is not the only great Tamil poet said
to have been a drummer; we have a
similar story about Kamban, the au-
thor of the Tamil Ramayana, another
masterpiece of Tamil letters. Metrical
poetry is a lot like varying drumbeats.
But the most striking theme of the
folk narrative is the poet’s mixed par-
entage and unstable history of adop-
tion by families high and low. He is
part Brahmin and part Dalit, thus unit-
ing the two ends of the social scale,
but he is not without a link to the
middle-range Vellala agriculturists, the
backbone of medieval Tamil society,
and his alter ego is an urban merchant
mariner. It is as if the tradition wanted
to be sure that the Tirukkural emerged
from the entire range of castes and
professions and thus embodied values
that could be affirmed by everyone.
Tamil literary critics never tire of em-
phasizing the universalist streak in
this book of wisdom.
But that streak has a specific rela-
tion to the sociality of the so-called
left-hand castes—those groups of ar-
tisans, merchants, and others who are
not tied to the land but belong, rather,
to the mobile world of the city, with
its face turned toward international
seaborne trade and also toward het-
erodox religions, like Buddhism and
Jainism, carried throughout South Asia
and beyond by wandering monks and
holy men. Weavers are a left-hand
group par excellence, and composing
poetry is often explicitly compared
to weaving (the same Sanskrit verb
serves both meanings). In the mélange
of adoptive and biological parentage
this poet experiences, according to
the story, we can see a definite drift
toward the left-hand domain, where
universalist values are deeply rooted
and where we also find the peripatetic
magician-saints and alchemists who
may belong to no well-defined religious
community. Tiruvalluvar, alive or dead,
belongs with these free-spirited, non-
conformist, visionary wizards. There
is no magic as potent as a riddlelike,
half-elliptical, immortal kural verse.
W e will have to leave Tiruvalluvar’s
legendary life at that, though
there is much more that could be
said about it. There is, however, one
thing more, a major characteristic of
these mantra-like verses that tends,
for some reason, to be ignored by mod-
ern critics and commentators. Works
of moral maxims usually suffer from
an excess of normativity. They are,
in a word, moralistic. That is why so
many of them are rather boring. Even
pragmatic advice on how to live one’s
life can easily fall into a precious, pon-
tificating mode. Niti texts in all the
South Asian languages regularly ex-
hibit this trait, which is not entirely
absent from the first two sections of
the Tirukkural, on ethics and power.
5
See Stuart Blackburn, “Corruption and
Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and
Tamil Literary History,” Modern Asian Stud-
ies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May 2000).
The same could be said about Hellenis-
tic wisdom literature and the biblical
Book of Proverbs.
But the wisdom aphorisms in the
Tirukkural are in many cases uncon-
ventional, even unsettling, as the bi-
ographical tale would lead us to expect.
Embedded in chapters rich in flashes
of exquisitely phrased yet somehow
familiar aperçus are what sound like
highly personal and creative ways of
thinking:
It serves only virtue say those who
don’t know—but love
Is friend to wrong too
He who proclaims the faults of
others will have
His best faults proclaimed
It takes a translator of Pruiksma’s
talent to catch the sharp jab of this
last verse. It’s all too easy to turn a
witty kural into a platitude. Here is
P. S. Sundaram’s version of the same
couplet; he catches the bland meaning
without the wit:
A slanderer invites a searching
censure
Of his own faults.
Occasionally, the poet inserts a sly hint
to see if we are still listening:
Fortune fed up with the envious
consigns them
To her wayward sister
Fortune is the goddess Lakshmi, whose
appropriately named elder sister is
Alakshmi (Misfortune). Envy thus is
not a deadly sin, as it is in the Chris-
tian West, but rather a foolish mistake
that inevitably exacts revenge on the
envious. One could see this kural as
expressing the pan-Indian theory of
karma—the idea that every act, in-
cluding mental acts, has ongoing 

upon the actor and his or her world,
creating the world this person inhabits
not merely in the present lifetime but
also in future ones. But it seems to me
that Tiruvalluvar, here and elsewhere,
is not simply calling up the theory of
karmic retribution or reward. Rather,
he is telling us something of how the
human mind works vis-à-vis others
and, no less, upon itself. He seems to
know what envy feels like and how
much it hurts. He is interested in the
uneven processes of thinking and in
the inner cost we pay for our worn-out
habits of feeling.
A few syllables may imply an entire
ethical psychology:
If one loves oneself do not think
Even the least wrong
Loving here is from kātal (fierce de-
sire). One can feel fierce desire for one-
self—it’s a good thing to feel—but
only if that self is free from wrong-
doing in mind and deed. The wider
implication is that harming another
rebounds on the harmer, as Marcus Au-
relius says: “Has someone hurt you? He
hurts himself.” On a good day I think,
or at least hope, that this notion could
be true. There is an affinity, or a shared
sensibility, uniting Marcus and Tiru-
valluvar despite the vast temporal and
spatial distance between them.
And then there are the lyrical
touches, as befits a great Tamil poet.
My favorite is:
The fertile and windswept world
stands witness—those
With compassion do not suffer
The Tamil original is even more
beautiful:
allal aru̸ā̸varkk’ illai va̸i
va̼ankum
mallal mā ñālam kari
The couplet ends with the rare word
kari (witness, proof). And the world is
not only fertile but also elegant and
ravishing (mallal), which rhymes with
the opening word, allal (suffering). The
meter gently moves the reader from
everyday sorrow to a revelation of the
wonder that only compassion, arul or
aruludaimai, can trigger. Does com-
passionate empathy for another, and
maybe also for oneself, really free one
from suffering? It’s a good question.
The poet calls the entire universe as
his witness to an experience he must
know from inside.
As Archana Venkatesan remarks in
her excellent introduction to Pruiks-
ma’s translation, a humane capacity
for compassion is one of Tiruvalluvar’s
favorite themes. It may even define, for
him, the human being—a potentially
compassionate creature. This topic
extends to an entire chapter on veg-
etarianism, which begins:
He who eats flesh to fatten his
own—how
Can he embody compassion
For Tiruvalluvar, compassion, at its
core, entails unstinting generosity,
another major theme:
Nothing more bitter than death—
but death is sweet
If one cannot give
We find a variation on this heartbreak-
ing statement, this time configured
around the term oppuravu (harmony,
generosity, kindness):
They live who know kindness—all
others are placed
Among the dead
Wisdom, then, of Tiruvalluvar’s
idiosyncratic, appealing kind, is really
about living, or rather, aliveness,
perhaps the most elusive of human
goals—far more elusive than, say,
wealth or power or cleverness or even
good loving. This poet thinks alive-
ness comes from compassion as well
as from what Pruiksma translates as
“letting go,” an unusual but precise
equivalent to the Tamil turavu, usu-
ally said to mean renunciation, a heavy
and overly abstract term. And since
we started on the Chennai bus with
a couplet about letting go, I think we
can end by listening to it again and
then adding the closing, paradoxical
couplet from the same chapter, a tour
de force in both Tamil and Pruiksma’s
English:
One who lets go of any thing and
any thing is free
Of the pain of that thing and that
thing
Hold to the hold of one who holds
.
nothing—to hold nothing
Hold to that hold
The New York Review
 The Slow-Motion Coup
Today is not the end. It’s just the
beginning.
—Donald Trump, January 6, 2021
1.
Our political End Times glitter with
surreal scenes—the green-tinted
shock and awe unleashed over Bagh-
dad, the “Brooks Brothers warriors”
rioting at the Miami election bureau,
the jetliner piercing the Manhattan
skyscraper—and beneath the un-
earthly beauty of the Capitol dome
that frigid January day, I gazed in
wonder at the latest of them: the heav-
ing bodies in their winter clothes, the
dark-uniformed, club-wielding police
falling back before the phalanx of fists
and bicycle racks and flagpoles, and,
floating over the straining limbs, the
swirls and eddies of bear spray and
tear gas in nauseous yellow and green.
Was it all a grotesque mirage? Is this
what revolution really looks like? And
yet we know now that from this phan-
tasmagoric tableau a vital piece was
missing: he was meant to be there.
Donald J. Trump’s essential advan-
tage is to be always underestimated:
treated as a narcissistic fop, a de-
ranged and ignorant bull in the china
shop of American governance. True,
he knows little and refuses to learn
more because he is certain he knows
all. True, he flaunts his narcissism
and mythomania with petulant and
unflagging pride. But for all that, he
is a connoisseur of grievance and re-
sentment and outrage, and a master at
shaping from these lucrative political
emotions a creative and motivating
message. Could anyone accuse him of
failing to comprehend the politics of
spectacle? Could anyone doubt that he
would have known how to shape this
fantastic scene of “the people” seiz-
ing back their government into a full-
fledged camera-ready extravaganza?
Scarcely an hour before and a couple
miles away—just as I was shuffling
off the Ellipse with my half-frozen,
flag-wielding fellows to march up
Constitution Avenue toward the Cap-
itol, where, the ranting president had
vowed to us, “I’ll be there with you!”—
Trump was climbing into the Beast,
the presidential limousine. When the
driver took the wheel to return his pre-
cious cargo to the White House, Trump
grew instantly irate. “I’m the fucking
president!” he screamed to his Secret
Service protectors. “Take me up to the
Capitol now!”
They had refused, of course, and
went on refusing, even after the en-
raged president seized one of the
agents at the throat. Or so White
House aide Cassidy Hutchinson re-
counted to the January 6 committee,
unleashing a cascade of furious deni-
als. Did the president really respond
to this thwarting of his will with vi-
olence? Perhaps the better question
to have explored was: What would
the president have done had those
Secret Service agents obeyed? How
would that day have unfolded? For it
is clear that he had some plan, clear
that what was intended to seem an im-
promptu visit to the Capitol had been
well thought out, at least for Trump.
October 6, 2022
Mark Danner
Illustration by Paul Davis
“Cass, are you excited for the sixth?”
Rudy Giuliani had asked Hutchinson
as they left the White House four days
before. “It’s going to be a great day.”
Why? she asked. “We’re going to the
Capitol. It’s going to be great. The
president is going to be there. He’s
going to look powerful. He’s going to
be with the members. He’s going to
be with the senators.”
He’s going to look powerful. In his
mind’s eye, did Trump see himself
descending from the Beast amid the
welter of bodies outside the Capitol,
to the wild cheers of the beefy men
pummeling the police—and turning
from their violent work to howl and
slam their gloved hands together or
raise their fists—and to the shouts
of noncombatants arrayed in their
Trumpian finery milling about the
Books Drawn on
for This Essay
Landslide:
The Final Days of the
Trump Presidency
by Michael Wolff.
Henry Holt, 312 pp.,
$29.99; $18.99 (paper)
The Steal:
The Attempt to Overturn
the 2020 Election and the
People Who Stopped It
by Mark Bowden
and Matthew Teague.
Atlantic Monthly,
312 pp., $28.00
Capitol lawn? There in his chic black
overcoat he would have waved, smiled,
thrust his fist in the air as the tens
of thousands of his faithful, far and
near, raised their voices in a bloodcur-
dling roar. And finally, after shaking
scores of hands, taking a few selfies,
and perhaps offering an inspiring word
or two through a megaphone, he would
have led the crowd up the steps, as the
cheers rose deafeningly and the little
screens of the cell phones held aloft
conveyed him making his triumphant
way up to the domed temple in thou-
sands of miniature images.
For had the president chosen to
stride up those steps, who would have
dared stop him? His followers would
have fallen in behind him and the Cap-
itol police would have fallen away be-
fore him and he would have breached
How to Stop a Conspiracy:
An Ancient Guide to
Saving a Republic
by Sallust, translated
from the Latin and with an
introduction by Josiah Osgood.
Princeton University Press,
195 pp., $16.95
One Damn Thing After Another:
Memoirs of an Attorney General
by William P. Barr.
William Morrow, 595 pp., $35.00
Too Much and Never Enough:
How My Family Created the
World’s Most Dangerous Man
by Mary L. Trump.
Simon and Schuster,
225 pp., $28.00; $17.99 (paper)
the doors himself, his gold-orange hair
shining beneath the mythic white
dome in the crisp cold sunlight of that
historic January day.
I s that how Donald John Trump,
forty-fifth president of the United
States, had imagined it? And if so,
what did he then intend? Would he
have led his chanting, flag-waving fol-
lowers through the ceremonial doors,
past the looming statues, down the
marble hallways, and into the Senate
chamber, there to face squarely his
white-haired, stalwart vice-president,
poised in frozen shock on the dais?
With his Senate supporters gathered
around their victorious leader, shaking
his hand, pounding him on the back,
would President Trump have smiled up
at Mike Pence, held out his famously
small hand, and demanded the certif-
icates certifying the electoral votes of
the “stolen” election? And would Pence,
a man who had shown himself until
this very day to be one of the most
obsequious public officials in American
history, have dared refuse? And then
perhaps, in a dramatic gesture for his
rowdy minions and the senators and
the congressmen and the television
cameras and the whole world watch-
ing, Donald Trump with his own two
hands would have torn those tokens
of legitimacy asunder.
We may well never know, of course,
what exactly Trump had planned for
his momentous visit to the Capitol that
day. We do know that this dramatic vis-
itation was to be the last in a series of
attempts—involving false declarations
on election night, forged electoral cer-
tificates, insinuating telephone calls
with state legislators and secretaries
of state, consultations with margin-
ally unbalanced conservative lawyers,
and endless, merciless pressure on the
hapless vice-president (“You can either
go down in history as a patriot or you
can go down in history as a pussy”)—
to overthrow the results of the elec-
tion. Eight weeks after election day,
after his vice-president’s betrayal, the
final betrayal of all the Deep State be-
trayals of his four years in office (“He’s
thrown the president under the bus!”
a red, white, and blue–clad woman,
eyes glued to her phone as we marched
up Constitution Avenue, shouted out
to us), Trump found himself with no
choice but to seize power personally,
at the head of thousands of rabid fol-
lowers, some of them armed. (“They’re
not here to hurt me,” he had shouted
before his speech, when he learned
they were being stopped at the gates.
“Let my people in!”) It would be
beautiful, unforgettable. It would be
a true and decisive victory over the
Deep State. It would be his March
on Rome.
Or perhaps his Beer Hall Putsch.
Who can say? Would Pence, however
surprisingly firm he had held to the
Constitution those last few days, have
dared oppose the president and his
merry band in the Senate chamber?
And if Pence had not managed to
perform his “ministerial” role, could
the election have been certified for
Joseph R. Biden that appointed day of
39
January 6? And if the election couldn’t
be certified, would the matter have
been thrown into the House of Rep-
resentatives, where Democrats held
a majority of seats but Republicans,
crucially, controlled a majority of the
state delegations, which the Found-
ers in their wisdom had decided would
be the deciding measure? If all the
Republican-controlled delegations
voted for Trump, the House would
have chosen him as the country’s next
president. Biden could have appealed
to the Supreme Court, but could the
Court, with six Republican votes, have
been depended upon to render dispas-
sionate justice, any more than it had
managed to do twenty years before?
It is shockingly easy to imagine how
the events of January 6, with just a
tiny detail altered—a Secret Service
agent, say, who was not quite so deter-
mined in opposing a screaming com-
mander in chief—could have worked
out quite differently and produced a
reelected President Trump and furious
Democrats marching in the streets.
Would the triumphant president have
called out the military to quell those
crowds, as he had tried to do the pre-
vious spring during the Black Lives
Matter protests? Would the senior of-
ficers—as “nonpolitical” as they pride
themselves on being—have dared to
disobey?
All counterfactuals, of course, are
submerged beneath the relentless
forward march of what actually hap-
pened. Still, however much we want to
relegate the events of January 6 to the
realm of the near-missed catastrophe,
our politics remain imprisoned in a
series of events unfolding from that
day. The coup did not end on January
6 or even in the early hours of January
7, when Congress finally certified the
election of the new president. Today
this unfinished chain of cause and
effect—call it a slow-motion coup—
continues to unfold before the country.
The coup drives news coverage. The
coup elects candidates. And the coup
has already gone far toward leaching
from our democracy the one element
indispensable for a peaceful politics:
the legitimacy of our means of confer-
ring power. By launching and leading
his slow-motion coup, Donald Trump
has led the country into an unfamiliar
and darker world. We don’t know how,
or if, we will emerge.
2.
Thanks to Trump, election past is elec-
tion future. To think about the 2020
election is to think about the 2024
election. To look back at the attempted
steal is to ponder the steal to come.
To tens of millions of Americans “the
Steal” is what the former president
tried and failed to achieve. To tens
of millions of other Americans “the
Steal” is what the current president
did achieve. Whatever it is, the Steal is
a living myth that actively shapes our
world. Across the country more than
a hundred Republican candidates are
running on it—at least fifty-seven of
them were present at the Capitol that
day—and some of them will likely win.
Conceived in the fertile and aggrieved
mind of Donald Trump, the Steal has
captured the imagination of tens of
millions and threatens to attain a kind
of perfect reversed reality the next
time we go to the polls to choose a
president.
40
It is in the nature of the Big Man
that he imposes his mind upon the
people. His obsessions are not private.
The former president’s obsession that
he won the 2020 election in a landslide
and that his victory was stolen from
him is now the obsession of millions.
That there is little or no evidence for
it makes no difference. That he may
not believe it himself does not matter.
What matters is the Big Man’s perfor-
mative certainty, which has become his
followers’ certainty. Their certainty
makes it a political fact.
Because of the Big Man’s certainty,
states are passing laws restricting who
can vote and changing who has the
power to judge which votes count. Be-
cause of it, millions of those who voted
in 2020 will find it harder to vote in
2022. Because of it, candidates who
deny the legitimacy of the last elec-
tion—and, by extension, of the system
itself—are winning the nominations of
their party for governor and secretary
of state and representative and sena-
tor, and if they are raised to power they
will act accordingly during the election
to come. And all these historic changes
began not with evidence or with facts
but with a living, growing obsession in
the Big Man’s mind.
Between the Big Man’s mind and
his mind-melded supporters cower
the Republican political elite. “What
is the downside for humoring him for
this little bit of time?” an unnamed
“senior Republican official” inquired
of Washington Post reporters shortly
after the 2020 election. “He went
golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s
plotting how to prevent Joe Biden
from taking power on Jan. 20.”* Per-
ilous as it is to evoke certain political
eras, one must go back to Paul von
Hindenburg and other titans of the
late Weimar Republic to find an elite
that so perfectly embodies feckless-
ness, cowardice, and folly. In one of
the unintentionally funny passages in
Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump
Presidency, Michael Wolff tells us that
Senator Mitch McConnell’s “view of
Trump was as virulent as the most
virulent liberal’s view”:
Trump was ignorant, corrupt, in-
competent, unstable. Worse, he
called into question the value and
seriousness of every aspect of Mc-
Connell’s Machiavellian achieve-
ment—what good was power if you
had to share it with people who
had no respect for it?
Share? McConnell voted to acquit
Trump in his second impeachment
trial, even as he denounced him from
the Senate floor, then weeks later—
after the polls were in—slavishly
pledged to support “the president”
if he ran again in 2024. The majority
leader saw his dearest political am-
bitions founder when the “ignorant,
corrupt, incompetent, unstable” presi-
dent, whom McConnell and his cronies
had “humored” for nearly two months,
preferred to rave to Georgia voters
about his stolen presidency rather
than urge them to come out to vote for
their Republican Senate candidates,
thereby losing the Senate runoffs on
*Amy Gardner, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey,
and Emma Brown, “Top Republicans Back
Trump’s Efforts to Challenge Election Re-
sults,” The Washington Post, November 9,
2020.
January 5 and unceremoniously de-
moting the crafty Machiavellian to
minority leader. Had Trump’s coup
the next day seemed to be succeeding,
can anyone imagine that McConnell
would have stood against him? Who
is humoring whom?
M cConnell and his fellow Repub-
lican officials and donors fear
Trump because they fear his voters,
particularly the mobilized base that
worships him. While many of these
elites act out of rank opportunism,
the more strategic-minded profess
to believe that Trump is essential if
the Republicans are to have a chance
at regaining power in their present
incarnation: a white-nationalist pop-
ulist party with a rich business-class
appendage, which increasingly finds
itself holding its nose at the stench of
the white unwashed. The donor class
may be embarrassed by the canaille—
and by Trump himself—but it knows
the party could not win without their
voices and their votes. Senator Lindsey
Graham, who in slithering his way from
savagely denouncing Trump in 2016 to
shamelessly currying favor with him
since has marked out a path many Re-
publican leaders have followed, is one of
the few willing to say this forthrightly:
Can we move forward without
President Trump? The answer is
no. I’ve always liked Liz Cheney,
but she’s made a determination
that the Republican Party can’t
grow with President Trump. I’ve
determined we can’t grow without
him.
Though the statement is characteris-
tically misleading—Cheney has made
it clear she believes Trump threatens
the country and the Constitution—
Graham is saying the quiet part out
loud: only Trump can guarantee to
maintain or hope to increase the par-
ty’s appeal to lower-middle-class and
working-class whites, and in so doing,
Graham went on, “make the Republi-
can Party something that nobody else
I know can make it. He can make it
bigger. He can make it stronger. He
can make it more diverse. And he also
could destroy it.”
That last point is crucial. But bet-
ter to say: He could destroy us. For
Graham’s voice here is that of the Re-
publican elite, whom Trump delights
in making tremble with his every de-
risive shout of RINO ! (Republican in
Name Only). There is personal fear of
Trump’s violent supporters but also an
acknowledgment of and even attrac-
tion to the harsh male dominance he
embodies, so critical to the success-
ful autocrat. “You know what I liked
about Trump?” Graham asked a crowd
of laughing, nodding Republicans. “Ev-
erybody was afraid of him, including
me. . . . But here’s one thing I can tell
you about him. Don’t cross him. Don’t
you miss that?”
By virtue of his iron hold on the
base, Trump represents both an unpar-
alleled opportunity and an existential
threat to the Republican Party. His
power is in part a negative one: he can
prevent the party from winning. And if
crossed he has made it clear he would
have no compunction about doing
exactly that. He reminds traditional
Republican leaders of that power and
his willingness to use it not only by
his frank and unapologetic narcissism
but by enacting and reenacting rituals
of vengeance, most recently upon those
Republicans—including Cheney—who
dared vote to impeach him. By per-
forming these public blood sacrifices,
and by issuing revitalizing endorse-
ments to those who are obsequious
enough in seeking them, he reminds
the party of his dominance and keeps
all but the most heroic and reckless
would-be dissenters firmly in line.
3.
That the Steal came fully formed
from the president’s mind and grew
thanks to the fear and negligence of
the politicians who thought they could
“humor” him, that such a demonstra-
bly false idea is now, as a firmly held
belief of half the American electorate,
a dominating strain in American his-
tory—that these astonishing events
could come to disfigure the public life
of the United States testifies to the
decadence of the country’s traditional
hierarchies of power and information.
It testifies also to the sheer animal
spirits of the media beast Donald
Trump, who still effortlessly dominates
the news cycle, seizing the spotlight
from his successor even as President
Biden manages to pass historic legis-
lation. By virtue of Trump’s embod-
ied grievance, his shamelessness,
and his daring and skill at shaping
a narrative—and then, when it is
debunked, shaping another—Trump
proves himself victorious, again and
again, in attracting and holding eye-
balls, which are the golden currency
of our age. That American politics was
destined to be absorbed by television
and the communication and enter-
tainment media it spawned could be
foreseen as far back as John F. Ken-
nedy, but the “reality star” Donald
Trump is this new world’s first grand
apotheosis.
The question, as I write, is whether,
having absorbed politics and one of
our two parties, the Trump Reality
Show can absorb the legal system as
well. Eighteen months after launch-
ing the only coup d’état in the nation’s
quarter-millennium history, Trump re-
mains the odds-on favorite to become
the Republican nominee in 2024. Yes,
the indictments and court cases are
coming. But are they destined to be
transformed into new and ever more
enthralling episodes? Will they bolster
his popularity and the resonance of
his anti–Deep State message even as
he faces the country from the dock?
Will he undermine the rule of law with
the same ease as he undermined the
legitimacy of the government?
For all its garish effectiveness, much
of the show’s script is not new. In The
Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020
Election and the People Who Stopped
It, Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague
quote the candidate at a rally in Col-
orado in 2016:
They even want to try and rig the
election at the polling booths,
where so many cities are corrupt.
And you see that. . . . And voter
fraud is all too common. And then
they criticize us for saying that. . . .
Take a look at Philadelphia . . . take
a look at Chicago, take a look at
Saint Louis. Take a look at some of
these cities where you see things
happening that are horrendous.
The New York Review
 The Steal, like so many of Trump’s
more resonant master-fables, vibrates
with all the most potent elements of
his politics of resentment. The sys-
tem is rigged. Everywhere you look
the “others”—blacks, immigrants, city
dwellers—pillage and usurp and steal.
And no matter how plain and obvious
these facts are, “political correctness”
means that no one dares say them out
loud. Except me, that is.
Small wonder that when defenders
of “the system” argue the case with
facts—You claim the election was sto-
len? Show us the evidence!—they get
nowhere. Bowden and Teague point to
one study of fraud in American vot-
ing, by the very conservative Heritage
Foundation, that over the last thirty
years “listed only widely scattered
instances committed by members of
both political parties, capable of in-
fluencing—and even then only in rare
instances—local elections results.”
Since November 2020, all the recounts,
audits, and court cases—more than
sixty of the latter—have found the
same: the election was sound. More
than sound: given the pandemic, it
was a kind of miracle. It doesn’t mat-
ter. Even in 2016, write Bowden and
Teague, Trump’s charge
resonated with those who feared
big government, the growing num-
ber and power of minorities, the
whole modern drift of American
society. Drawing on antiquated
stereotypes from the era of Tam-
many Hall, Trump especially
stressed corruption in big cities,
where Democrats ruled and the
population was heavy with African
Americans.
Which is to say that the Steal is a
perfect microcosm of Trump’s politics
of resentment: The very system is cor-
rupt. With the help of minorities and
illegal immigrants, the swamp and the
Deep State rule. Beneath the elaborate
façade constructed with endless in-
ventive mendacity by the mainstream
media lies a tangle of political and
sexual conspiracies that account for
the mystifying collapse during the last
three or four decades of the world of
the white working and lower-middle
classes: the stagnation of wages, the
emptying out of midwestern manu-
facturing, the outsourcing of jobs to
China and elsewhere, the financial and
housing collapse of 2008, the opioid
crisis, the rise of the tech and Wall
Street billionaires.
Add to that any number of deeply
fraught “cultural issues,” among
them the state recognizing same-sex
marriages, schools teaching children
frankly about gay and trans people,
and colleges opening women’s sports
to trans athletes. The Steal of 2020 is
only the latest example of the rigged,
corrupt, perverse system ruthlessly
rising up to defend itself against the
attack waged upon it by that fearless
and solitary warrior, Donald J. Trump.
The Steal, like all his keystone nar-
ratives, validates the legitimacy and
destiny of Trump himself.
I f the reality show candidate and his
media magic seem new, the deep
grievances and societal dislocations
that make his populism so effective
most assuredly are not. Four decades
of nearly stagnant wages and the
October 6, 2022
wildly disproportionate distribution
of the fruits of the country’s growth
are plain for all to see. So is the vast
and unpunished corruption exposed by
the financial collapse of 2008. History
has shown how populism feeds on cor-
ruption and unaddressed grievance. “A
longing for money and power took hold
of citizens,” Josiah Osgood remarks in
How to Stop a Conspiracy, his new edi-
tion of the Roman historian Sallust’s
The War Against Catiline (circa 42 BC ),
“and the moral inversion began.”
Greed taught arrogance and cru-
elty; ambition made men deceit-
ful. . . . The powerful “few” felt
more than ever that the state was
theirs to dominate. In desperation,
the ordinary citizens, oppressed
with debt, were willing to embrace
a dubious champion like Catiline.
Nor is Trump the first American
leader who has schemed to manipulate
the aggrieved populace to gain perma-
nent power. Osgood quotes Alexander
Hamilton’s appraisal of Aaron Burr,
the brilliant, unscrupulous rogue and
would-be American emperor who came
within a whisker of the presidency.
Burr’s “private character,” Hamilton
wrote,
is not defended by his most partial
friends. He is bankrupt beyond re-
demption except by the plunder of
his country. His public principles
have no other spring or aim than
his own aggrandizement. . . . If he
can he will certainly disturb our
institutions to secure himself per-
manent power and with it wealth.
He is truly the Catiline of America.
This American Cataline, of course,
went on to murder Hamilton.
The struggle between the force of
individual personality, however dis-
reputable, and the limiting power of
institutions fascinated Hamilton and
his colleagues. Among other things,
alas, these last years have taught
Americans the shortcomings of the
Founders’ attempt to shape institu-
tions impervious to aspiring dictators.
Perhaps the effort is destined to fail
in any political system designed for
fallible human beings. Sallust offers
in his Catiline an unforgettable por-
trait of the deranged and almost ir-
resistible schemer, corrupt, alluring,
concupiscent, indefatigable, his com-
plexion pale, his eyes bloodshot. This
electric blend of attraction and repul-
sion rings uncomfortably familiar, as
does the tale of the leader’s troubling
traits disrupting the institutions of
the country he rules. “So strong was
the disturbance within him,” Osgood
tells us, “that it could not be contained.
It spilled out and engulfed the whole
Republic.”
4.
It is the conviction of his followers
that they know Trump well—that they
know him personally. At his raucous
rallies it is hard not to feel that he
is showing you his true self, for not
only his wit and his anecdotes but his
aberrant personality—his narcissism,
his mendacity, his endless preening—
are on full and unbridled display. He
flaunts his neuroses. They are what
make him entertaining. Because of
this, reading the memoirs of those who
have worked for him can be an oddly
disjointed experience. Each begins by
hoping the real Trump will be differ-
ent. And day by day each gradually and
reluctantly comes to know someone
we already do. The real Trump is the
Trump all can see, and his neuroses
are what now drive our history. The
most important of these, of course, is
the deep and obsessive anxiety about
losing. William P. Barr, his last attor-
ney general, tells us in his memoir
One Damn Thing After Another that
he “doubted the President could ever
admit to himself that he lost the elec-
tion,” because
in his cosmos, a “loser” was the
lowest form of life. Shortly after
the election he was already per-
suading himself, and his followers,
that the election had been stolen.
The Internet was awash with un-
supported conspiracy theories
and outright falsehoods, which
the President was all too ready
to repeat. His ever-hovering cir-
cle of outside advisers—experts
in telling him what he wanted to
hear—were feeding him a steady
diet of sensational fraud allega-
tions. These were presented to the
President, and publicly, in such de-
tail and with such certitude as to
sound—at first—very convincing
and troubling.
The Steal was born not of evidence
but of a neurotic inability to accept
defeat. Even the most casual viewer
of one of Trump’s rallies can’t fail to
notice how central this inability is
to how he views the world. Mary L.
Trump, a clinical psychologist and
niece of the former president, attri-
butes this obsession and much else in
his strange personality to the influence
of his “high-functioning sociopath” fa-
ther, Fred Trump, the self-made real
estate tycoon from Queens who in ef-
fect raised—or, in her view, failed to
raise—Donald after his mother fell ill:
Fred’s fundamental beliefs about
how the world worked—in life,
there can be only one winner and ev-
erybody else is a loser (an idea that
essentially precluded the ability to
share) and kindness is weakness—
were clear. Donald knew, because he
had seen it with [his older brother]
Freddy, that failure to comply with
his father’s rules was punished by
severe and often public humiliation,
so he continued to adhere to them
even outside his father’s purview.
Not surprisingly, his understanding
of “right” and “wrong” would clash
with the lessons taught in most el-
ementary schools.
Unmanageable in his private school,
Trump was eventually sent to the New
York Military Academy, where disci-
pline was harsh. He thrived there, for
life at NYMA reinforced one of
Fred’s lessons: the person with
the power (no matter how arbi-
trarily that power was conferred
or attained) got to decide what was
right and wrong. Anything that
helped you maintain power was by
definition right, even if it wasn’t
always fair. [Emphasis added]
In Mary Trump’s analysis, Donald had
been intentionally shaped to succeed
“A PRECISE, TREMENDOUS
AND BEAUTIFUL BOOK.”
—Maria Stepanova
Living Pictures refers to the parlor game
of tableaux vivants, in which people
dress up in costume to bring scenes
from history back to life.
Barskova, one of the most admired and
controversial figures in a new genera-
tion of Russian writers, first made her
name as a poet; she is also known as
a scholar of the catastrophic siege of
Leningrad in World War II.
In this book, Barskova writes with caustic
humor and wild invention about trau-
mas past and present, historical and
autobiographical, exploring how we
cope with experiences that defy com-
prehension. She writes about her rela-
tionships with her adoptive father and
her birth father; about sex, wanted
and unwanted; about the death of a
lover; about Turner and Picasso; and,
in the final piece, she mines the histor-
ical record in a chamber drama about
two lovers sheltering in the Hermitage
Museum during the siege of Leningrad
who slowly, operatically, hopelessly,
stage their own deaths.
“A haunting and magnificent debut
fiction collection. . . . This beautiful
attempt to reconstruct the lives of
the lost, blended with an account
of a new life built from the rubble,
deserves a wide readership.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
LIVING PICTURES
Polina Barskova
Translated by Catherine Ciepiela
Introduction by
Eugene Ostashevsky
Paperback • $17.95
IN PERSON EVENTS WITH
POLINA BARSKOVA
Monday, September 26th, 7:30pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, New York
With Masha Gessen and
Catherine Ciepiela
Register at
www.greenlightbookstore.com
Saturday, October 22nd, 6pm
Globus Books
332 Balboa St, San Francisco
www.globusbooks.com
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
41
in this harsh world by Fred, who,
having destroyed his firstborn son—
Mary’s father, who died of alcoholism
at age forty-two—resolved to encour-
age “the killer” in his second:
[Donald] took what he wanted
without asking for permission not
because he was brave but because
he was afraid not to. Whether
Donald understood the underly-
ing message or not, Fred did: in
family, as in life, there could be
only one winner; everybody else
had to lose. Freddy kept trying
and failing to do the right thing;
Donald began to realize that there
was nothing he could do wrong,
so he stopped trying to do any-
thing “right.” He became bolder
and more aggressive because he
was rarely challenged or held to
account by the only person in the
world who mattered—his father.
Fred liked his killer attitude, even
if it manifested as bad behavior.
Every one of Donald’s trans-
gressions became an audition for
his father’s favor, as if he were
saying, “See, Dad, I’m the tough
one. I’m the killer.” He kept piling
on because there wasn’t any resis-
tance—until there was.
A loser cannot also be a killer.
Trump’s conviction on this matter is
no secret. That he would refuse to ac-
knowledge his loss and resist leaving
office voluntarily was prophesied by
Michael Cohen, his ex–fixer and law-
yer, among others who know him well.
What was less easy to predict were
the complex mechanisms of feckless-
ness and ambition that led most of
the leaders and officeholders of one of
America’s two major political parties
to humor the president in his fantasy
about the Steal—and that led tens of
millions of voters to believe it in turn,
and to elect politicians who profess
to believe it as well. It is a tale that
would be marvelous, if it didn’t pose
so grave a threat to the country and
its institutions.
C entral to the tale is a peculiar kind
of court politics. In every adminis-
tration the courtiers rise and fall ac-
cording to the favor of the sovereign.
The principles animating this vary
from administration to administra-
tion, but Trump’s staffing was unprec-
edented in its volatility—unheard-of
numbers of officials at senior and mid-
dle levels were hired and fired—and its
personalism. A courtier rose by pleas-
ing Trump and pleased him by giving
him what he wanted, which was almost
always something that pushed against
the government’s customary practices
and often against the country’s laws.
Against the tireless will of Trump,
the so-called Deep State—the perma-
nent bureaucracy and its allies among
political appointees—pushed back.
Those officials who helped Trump
push back against it in his turn drew
his favor and advanced. Those who
acted too blatantly to restrain him—
like the famous “adults in the room,”
two of them prominent generals,
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: 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, $135. 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. Copyright © 2022, NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Nothing in
this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. The cover date of the next issue will be October 20, 2022.
42
who surrounded him at the start of
his administration—were one by one
defenestrated. Over time, the process
gradually exhausted and winnowed out
those willing to oppose the president
in defense of normal practices, prin-
ciples, and laws.
Because of its inherent dynamic
(Trump —thoroughly uninterested in
learning how to be “presidential”—
remained Trump), those willing to
serve him in high positions had to
develop complicated survival strate-
gies, both to avoid giving the president
what he wanted in the most egregious
cases and to justify their compliance
when they felt they had to act in a
way they knew they shouldn’t. Much
of Barr’s book, like many of the Trump
memoirs, offers a kind of extended aria
on this theme.
Following the 2020 election, this
process accelerated. Only a bedrag-
gled group of compliant survivors re-
mained in the White House, and their
numbers diminished by the day. And
even they were increasingly ignored by
a president who began to take most
of his counsel from “outside advis-
ers”—Barr’s despised “clown show”
of Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis,
and John Eastman. At the best of times
Trump was difficult to “manage.” “It
was hard to hold Trump’s attention,”
Wolff remarks, “when he wasn’t the
one talking.” Barr writes:
It had always been difficult to keep
him on track—you had to put up
with endless bitching and exercise
a superhuman level of patience,
but it could be done. After the
election, though, he was beyond
restraint. He would only listen to a
few sycophants who told him what
he wanted to hear. Reasoning with
him was hopeless.
By this relentless process of elimi-
nation, Trump gradually constructed
around himself a circle of “advisers”
who increasingly reflected back to him
his own views, however outlandish. To
“agree” with him in the cause of pre-
venting some larger harm to come was
perilous. Those who believed there was
“no harm” in “humoring” Trump were
treading a well-worn track traversed
by hundreds throughout his life. Wolff,
who has spent a career reporting on
dominating personalities and their
handlers in the worlds of money and
the media, is deft in describing these
moments, with a satirical touch that
nearly makes one forget the gravity
of it all:
But the president suddenly went
from sourness to delight. And in-
spiration! . . . They could just use
Covid as a reason to delay the
election. “People can’t get to the
polls. It’s a national emergency.
Right?” He looked around to ev-
erybody for their assent—and for
congratulations on his great idea.
There was often a small moment
of silence and a collective intake
of breath whenever Trump, with
alarming frequency, went where
no one wanted to go or would
have dreamed of going. The reac-
tion now was somewhere between
gauging Trump’s being Trump,
with everybody understanding
that nine-tenths of what came
out of his mouth was blah-blah
and recognizing that here might
be a hinge moment in history and
that he really might be thinking
he could delay the election. If the
latter, then there was the urgent
question of who needed now, right
now, to go into the breach?
A reluctant [Chief of Staff Mark]
Meadows did: “Mr. President, there
isn’t any procedure for that. There
would be no constitutional prec-
edent or mechanism. The date is
fixed. The first Tuesday. . .” Mead-
ows’s sugary North Carolinian
voice was tinged with panic.
“Uh-uh. But what about—?”
“I’m afraid—no, you can’t. We
can’t.”
“I’m sure there might be a way,
but . . . well . . .”
Trump, as so often, did not give up on
the idea. He simply looked for more
agreeable interlocutors—Chris Chris-
tie, for example, the former governor of
New Jersey, whom he saw at a debate
prep session the next week:
“I’m thinking about calling it off,”
said Trump, as though without
much thought.
“The prep?” said Christie.
“No, the election—too much
virus.”
“Well, you can’t do that, man,”
said Christie, a former US attor-
ney, half chuckling. “You do know
you can’t declare martial law.”
Christie followed up: “You do know
that, right?”
It was both alarming and awk-
ward that he might not.
On the afternoon of January 6, Chief
of Staff Mark Meadows sat outside the
White House dining room, scrolling
desultorily through the texts on his
phone, while Pat Cipollone, the White
House counsel, desperately pushed
him to get up and confront Trump.
The president of the United States had
returned from his speech at the Ellipse
and, having failed in his attempt to
get to the Capitol—for quite awhile
he refused to take off his overcoat,
convinced he would still persuade
his Secret Service detail to take him
on his triumphant mission—now sat
glued to the television, watching as
thousands of his followers sacked
the seat of Congress. Transfixed
by the scenes of carnage, the com-
mander in chief refused to pick up
the phone.
“We need to go down and see the
president now,” shouted Cipollone,
according to Cassidy Hutchinson.
“He doesn’t want to do anything,
Pat,” a beaten-down Meadows replied.
“Something needs to be done,” Cipol-
lone shouted, “or people are going to
die and the blood is going to be on
your fucking hands. . . . They’re liter-
ally calling for the vice-president to
be fucking hung.”
“You heard him, Pat,” Meadows said.
“He thinks Mike deserves it.”
What could be the harm in humoring
Donald Trump?
5.
In our nation’s 246-year history,
there has never been an individ-
ual who is a greater threat to our
republic than Donald Trump.
—Dick Cheney, August 4, 2022
The former vice-president’s blunt as-
sessment comes as a shock, and yet it
needs only a minute or two of ponder-
ing to realize that Dick Cheney, a man
who, whatever you think of him, knows
as much about power and its exer-
cise as any contemporary American,
speaks a stark truth. By attempting
a half-dozen or so plots and con-
spiracies between the election and
Biden’s inauguration, Trump commit-
ted a grave crime against the state.
He plotted to overthrow the govern-
ment, and he very nearly succeeded.
And after committing this crime in
full view of the country—the crime
for which Cicero and his fellow Roman
senators executed Catiline—Trump
not only walks free but remains the
undisputed leader of the Republican
Party with a chance, whether he is
under indictment or not, to retake
the presidency.
Is that likely to happen? No. But it
is possible it will happen. And that it
remains a possibility is deeply dis-
quieting. Trump has done his fellow
Americans the service of showing
them how vulnerable their vaunted
system of government really is. For
all their concern about tyranny, the
Founders put in place a mechanism
to remove a criminal president that
has proved, in the face of strong party
loyalties, to be laughably impotent.
And in a country supposedly of laws,
not of men, the laws’ workings have
shown themselves to be, in the face
of a genuine emergency, ponderously
slow, allowing a leader who tried il-
licitly to seize power to prepare quite
openly to take power again. History
offers notable examples of dictators
who have come to power through elec-
tions, but it is hard to think of one who
.
attempted to cling to power through
a coup and failed—and to whom the
polity, in its blithe unconcern, offered
the chance to try again.
—This is the first of several articles
on the Slow-Motion Coup.
The New York Review
 The Classifieds
BEAUTIFUL, BRIGHT EYED TORONTO BASED lady in
KHU ÀW V VHHNV JHQWOHPDQ IRU D GHHSO\ ORYLQJ ODVWLQJ
The Classifieds UHODWLRQVKLS5HSO\ZLWKELRSKRWRLQFRQÀGHQFHPhoebe@
seiclub.com.
To place an ad or for other inquiries:
,QTXLULHVRUFODVVLÀHG#Q\ERRNVFRP
ADVICE SERVICE THERAPEUTIC SERVICES
LOOKING FOR THE UNFILTERED TRUTH? Send Mai HANDS-ON LESSONS IN ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE for
your questions about your relationships at home, school, EDODQFH PRELOLW\ ZHOOEHLQJ (OL]DEHWK +XUZLWW &HUWLÀHG
work, and more at PDLWKHXQÀOWHUHGWUXWK#JPDLOFRP Teacher. www.betterATbeing.com.
email: classified@nybooks.com INTELLIGENT, ACCOMPLISHED, GAY MANVOLPÀW
You may also place an ad through our DQGDWKOHWLFVHHNVVLPLODUDJH²NXL2259@gmail.com.
FURNITURE WANTED TRAVEL
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:
60¢
NYR Box Number
The New York Review of Books
 FRPZ\QFRRSHU#JPDLOFRP
435 Hudson Street, Suite 300
New York, NY 10014-3994

 TIME TO WRITE YOUR MEMOIR? Ghostwriting by New
BEAUTIFUL VIBRANT LADYORYHVWKHDUWVLQKHUÀWIXQ
VVHHNVJHQWOHPDQDJHGZKRDOVRORYHVWKHDUWV
for love, laughter, and romance. Reply with bio/photo in
FRQÀGHQFH3KRHEH#VHLFOXEFRP
LIKE 1950S MUSIC?/HW·VUHPLQLVFHDQGFRQQHFW,W·V7ZL
light time. Los Angeles man, 78. mullisen@sbcglobal.net.
WIDOWED MARGRAVINE SEEKS RESPITE from
coterie of sycophants. Enclose your most prurient poem.
lasciviousmargravine@gmail.com.
PERSONAL SERVICES
&$//'$1,(//(·6&+$7/,1( All credit cards and debit
FDUGV DFFHSWHG 3HUVRQDO DQG SULYDWH GLVFUHHW FRQYHUVD
tions. (773) 935-4995.
Sell your
property
in the


INTERNATIONAL RENTALS
PARIS (SQUARE BERLIOZ—9TH ARR.), Fiber+, 3BR/2Bth,
EHDXWLIXOIXOOÁRRUFRQGRWKÁHOHYDWRUZZZSDULVÁDWXFRP
Tel: (415) 922-8888.
EXPERT-LED CULTURAL TOURS: archaeology/gastron-
BUYING MID CENTURY omy/walking in Britain, Croatia, Greece, Ireland, Italy and
DESIGN FURNITURE Turkey. Gulet cruises and charters. Multi-award-winning
1950s–1970s Danish, French, Italian Modern, www.petersommer.com.
Herman Miller, Knoll, Memphis.
Noted designers sought: Eames, Wegner, Juhl,
Nakashima, Ponti, Noguchi.
Open Air Modern (718) 383-6465 The New York Review is pleased to support this
info@openairmodern.com organization that encourages communication
with incarcerated people throughout the US:
ARTS
INTERVIEWS WITH ARTISTS AND WRITERS. Can PrisonFriendship is a pen-pal service dedicated
the truths of nature be rendered only through falsehoods? to providing a platform for incarcerated people
5HÁHFWLRQV RQ PDWHULDOV DEVWUDFWLRQ DQG PHDQLQJ to build genuine connections with individuals
www.LanguageAndPhilosophy.com. outside of the criminal justice system. For more
information on becoming a pen pal, please visit
BOOKS prisonfriendship.com or contact the PF Staff by
GOOD TIMES ARE HERE! Good fortune is yours! Today mail at PrisonFriendship LLC, PO Box 24481,
is your lucky day! Google The Poetry of Alabaster Bosoms Dayton, OH 45424.
compiled by Kevin Joy.
WWW.TETRALEMMA.ORG.
:5,7(5·66(59,&(6
EDUCATIONAL CONVERTING YOUR DOCTORAL THESIS for publica-
INFRINGEMENTS ON THE RIGHTS OF INTROVERTS tion? Skilled developmental editor, reasonable rates. www.
are brought to light in “Education Fads versus Individual
5LJKWVµRQWKHZHE
SKGWRERRNFRPDQGUHZUHZULWLQJ#JPDLOFRP
I EDIT FICTION, NONFICTION, MEMOIR, and poetry man-
XVFULSWV6L[W\ÀYHERRNV,¶YHHGLWHGKDYHEHHQSXEOLVKHG
in the last nine years. Free consultation. www.wyncooper.




York Times best-selling author-biographer. 
ROME: SPACIOUS, CLASSIC APARTMENT in congenial www.jackieaseditor.com.
neighborhood near major sights and subway. Two bed-
PERSONALS
NYC GAY MAN: smart/heart, accomplished/aspiring
URPDQWLFVHQVXDOH[HUFLVHGH[RUFLVHGOHIWSUDJPDWLF·µ

rooms, two baths, internet, elevator, air conditioning, quiet.
ZZZFDVDFOHPHFRPOP#FDDFROXPELDHGX
WRITEBYNIGHT: WRITE BETTER, right now. Book
coaching, critique, editing, agent research, publication as-
ST GERMAIN LAST FLOOR, agreeably furnished, view,

 sistance. Achieve your literary goals. All writers, all genres.
)UHHFRQVXOWDWLRQdavid@writeby.
140lb, 84, seeks gay man, near! nonsmoker! for dates & elevator. nicusit3@gmail.com.
possible long-term mutual affection. anonmanxx@gmail.com.

LESBIAN MATCH—Attractive, active, fun, accomplished,
VACATION RENTAL 
AND



professional woman in her 40s seeks woman aged 30s–40s
for loving, lasting, romantic relationship. Reply with bio/
SKRWRLQFRQÀGHQFHPhoebe@seiclub.com.
MISCELLANEOUS
SAVING THE PLANET = 1 + 1.,·YHJRWWKHEOXHSULQW-XVW A CURRE N T LIST IN G
64, MALE, EUROPEAN, NYC resident. Healthy, athletic need funding. www.ecoideaman.com. To advertise a gallery
ZLWKDWUHPHQGRXVMRLHGHYLYUHVHHNVIHPDOHWRIRU
or museum exhibition in
an emotionally intelligent, romantic, and sensual relation-
ship. To share the arts and traveling. pedrerabarsa75@
PUBLICATION 





’s
outlook.com. WWW.FUTUREVIEWS.CO. 3ULQFHVV 'LDQD %UHDNGDQFH Galleries & Museums Listing,
%UH[LW8QLYHUVLW\)HHV,QÀQLW\3ROOXWLRQ6ROXWLRQWKHODPS please contact Sharmaine Ong at
FANTASY ROLE PLAYING PARTNER SOUGHT. Man post that saved the world, the mistake about zero. Enjoy
seeks woman. Friends describe me as intellectual, artsy, the magazine!
gallery@nybooks.com
FUHDWLYHÀWIXQORYLQJHGXFDWHGDQGVH[\NYR Box 68515. or (212) 293-1630.
ACTIVE, FIT, RETIRED PHYSICIAN, 75. Bookish but not
MARKETPLACE
QHUG\:LGHUDQJLQJLQWHUHVWV,HQMR\DUWUHDGÀFWLRQDQG
KLVWRU\DVZHOODVHQMR\ÀOPWKHDWHUPXVLFGLQQHUVZDONV
and travel. Seeking woman with similar interests for what-
ever develops. idfmd@outlook.com.

WARM-HEARTED, ATTRACTIVE, slim, frisky, fun, smart

World’s Finest Eye Cream

AIRBRUSH
woman seeks lively 70ish man for movies, theater, con- a “selections” product in Oprah magazine
certs, travel, hikes, walks, dinner (I like to cook), and seren-
dipity. sfbay2023@gmail.com. EASTERN SHORE, MD 9$&$7,216  5(75($76 3UL
YDWH([TXLVLWH0DQRU+RXVHRQ$FUH3UHVHUYHG)DUP
ATTRACTIVE, INTELLIGENT, CURVY BLONDE in her Chestertown. www.thorntonestate.com.  KRXUV IURP 3KLO
fun, bright-eyed 40s, seeks gentleman 30s–50s for love, DGHOSKLD  :DVKLQJWRQ '& 3KLO +RRQ 'XNH · phil@
ODXJKWHUDQGURPDQFH5HSO\ZLWKELRSKRWRLQFRQÀGHQFH hoonlaw.com.
Phoebe@seiclub.com.
REAL ESTATE
Eye Refining Treatment
DATING FOR BOOK LOVERS. Find a date that loves
books. Join free. www.booklovers.dating.
Airbrush Eye Cream reduces
puffiness right away, especially
GAY MAN happy–loves life–optimistic–giving–caring–
creative–cultural explorer–cherishes diversity–healthy– when cold. Promotes new collagen
active–Manhattanite–solvent–widower, 70. SEEKS gay man
for a loving, lasting relationship. river2river2ny@gmail.com. which reduces fine lines and
PAIR OF UNREPENTANT QUEERS (one pansexual Asian
wrinkles. Reduces dark circles, is
SXQN IHPPH  RQH FXUO\KDLUHG QRQELQDU\ ÁkQHXU IRXQG
love in these pages. Seeking Covid-negative company to
soothing, hydrating and promotes a
FRPSOHWHWKHKDWWULFNEHHQOLJKWHQLQJJHQHURXVÁH[LEOH
spirited. wulfandcub@gmail.com.
Compare to: youthful healthy glow!
La Mer Eye Balm @ $200
Shiseido Solution LX @ $130
Hypo-allergenic and natural containing
 

 
 La Prairie Swiss @ $240 emu oil serum, green tea extract, aloe vera,

 
RURAL CLASSICAL MUSIC VENUE in Western WA for
sale. Vintage barn performance hall is surrounded by lawn,
collagen and elastin.
Go to: nybooks.com/customerservice JDUGHQVDQGDUWLVWV·FDELQV)LIW\DFUHSURSHUW\KDVKLJK Reg $68 Use am & pm for best results and the jar
historic value; forest/stream are land trust protected. Cur-
Renew subscription • Check account status rent owner would prefer to work with buyer to build on its Now only $39.99 will last about 3 months!
over 30-year musical heritage. Call (206) 240-8324.
Change address • Make a payment
Renew a gift • Change auto-renew status SUBLET Use 40% discount code: 
 at
Report missing/damaged issue www.dremu.com
SAN FRANCISCO. Quiet, high tech, furnished, 700 sq. ft.
Cancel with refund JURXQG ÁRRU DUHD  EGUP VKRZHUEDWK SULYDWH HQWUDQFH or call 800-542-0026 and get free shipping.
ZDVKHUGU\HUGLQLQJDUHDORXQJHUHIULJHUDWRUGHFNÀUHSLW
Yr, $2,000./mo. heart.failure@icloud.com.
Open 7 Days

October 6, 2022 43
WATCH

GREAT

CINEMA
LUCA GUADAGNINO
I AM LOVE,

Start streaming free for 30 days

mubi.com/nybooks