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Contents
4 Michael Gorra Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey

8 Forrest Gander
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor
Philip Roth: A Counterlife by Ira Nadel
Poem
ALL TOO
10
14
Michael Tomasky
Brenda Wineapple
Can the Senate Restore Majority Rule?
The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
by David S. Brown
HUMAN
20 Choire Sicha Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
24 Sue Halpern This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
26 Mark O’Connell King Rocker a documentary film directed by Michael Cumming and written by Stewart Lee
28 Joshua Hammer Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home by Alexander Wolff
34 Sanford Schwartz Salman Toor: How Will I Know an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York City, November 13, 2020–April 4, 2021
35 Cathleen Schine Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick
38 James Oakes The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris
40 Kamran Javadizadeh The Selected Letters of John Berryman edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae,
with a foreword by Martha B. Mayou
43 Diane Johnson The Seine: The River That Made Paris by Elaine Sciolino
45 Steven Simon Turning Away from the Middle East
48 Francine Prose The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez
both translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
49 Sandra Lim Poem
C H A R L E S S E IF E
51 Adam Kirsch The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language by Ernst Cassirer
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking by Ernst Cassirer
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 3: Phenomenology of Cognition by Ernst Cassirer
all three volumes translated from the German by Steve G. Lofts, with a foreword
HAWKING
by Peter E. Gordon
57 James Walton Piranesi by Susanna Clarke HAWKING
59 Ursula Lindsey Me Too in Egypt & Morocco
The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity
62 Letters from Roy A. Black, Eugene Stelzig, and Stephen Greenblatt

CONTRIBUTORS
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Editor: Emily Greenhouse Founding Editors: Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) “Seife’s focus is not on
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
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Senior Editors: Eve Bowen, Prudence Crowther, Julie Just, Advertising Director: Lara Frohlich Andersen
Andrew Katzenstein, Gabriel Winslow-Yost but, rather, on Hawking
Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn
Maya Chung, Associate Editor; Nawal Arjini and Willa Glickman, Editorial Assistants; Pooka Paik and Lyndon Thompson, Editorial Interns; Sylvia Lonergan,
Researcher; Daniel Drake, Production Editor; Katie Jefferis and Will Simpson, Type Production; Kazue Soma Jensen, Production; Maryanne Chaney, Web Pro-
as a dazzling public image,
duction Coordinator; Michael King, Technical Director; Sharmaine Ong, Advertising Associate; Nicholas During, Publicity; Nancy Ng, Design Director; Janice
Fellegara, Director of Marketing and Planning; Janis Harden, Fulfillment Director; Andrea Moore, Assistant Circulation Manager; Matthew Howard, Editorial a cultural icon....However,
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What’s new on Ŷ Roya Hakakian: Unveiling Iran Ŷ Delphine Schrank: Horror in Honduras obscured a flawed human being.”
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nybooks.com Plus: An-My Lê and Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation, Martin Buber’s tribute to Nietzsche, and more...
basicbooks.com
On the cover: Salman Toor, Four Friends, 2019 (Salman Toor/Luhring Augustine, New York); from the Whitney’s exhibition “Salman Toor: How Will I Know,”
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3

Philip Roth: The Biography
by Blake Bailey.
Norton, 898 pp., $40.00
Here We Are:
My Friendship with Philip Roth
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 171 pp., $26.00
Philip Roth: A Counterlife
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford University Press, 546 pp., $29.95
Let’s begin with the body, the corpus to
which this six-foot-two lefty was bound.
Start with his back. In 1955 he pulled a
shift of KP on his last day of basic train-
ing and met an industrial-size kettle of
potatoes. Hefting it was a two-man job,
but the other soldier dropped his end
and left him to support its weight alone.
Something popped, and the next morn-
ing he could barely walk. Try a heating
pad, they told him, and an army doc-
tor accused him of malingering. It was
never really treated, and the pain never
went entirely away. He used a steel
back brace for a while, and in the 1970s
he sometimes needed a foam neck col-
lar; from middle age on he had to work
at a standing desk, spelling himself
with long periods of lying on the floor.
Only in 2002 did he accept the need
for surgery, but by then one disk after
another had so fully degenerated that
there wasn’t much left to save.
In 1967 his appendix burst; his father
had almost died of the same thing, and
two of his uncles actually did. Heart
disease ran in his mother’s family,
and in 1989 he himself had a quintu-
ple bypass. Eventually he had sixteen
stents and a defibrillator in his chest. A
botched knee operation in 1987 led to
insomnia that his doctor treated with
large doses of Halcion—sleeping pills
that in his case produced a panic fear
and near-suicidal depression. It was his
second fall into darkness; the first came
in 1974, and a third, in 1993, put him
into a Connecticut psychiatric hospital.
In the new century there was so much
pain, and from so many sources, that for
a few years he seemed to live on Vico-
din, a trouble all its own. “Old age isn’t
a battle; old age is a massacre”: so he
wrote in Everyman (2006), but for him
that massacre had begun long before.
Now add the scars of childhood—
though what exactly were they? Ev-
erybody has something to blame their
parents for. A mother’s smothering
love; a father’s overbearing attempts at
discipline, lest a promising son should
lose his way? Many people grow up in
families far more lacerating, suffer an
early life more fraught and anxious
and disabling than that offered by the
warm bath of his homogenous Newark
neighborhood. But he’s the one who
created Alexander Portnoy. Childhood
explains everything and nothing; it
gave him his material but not his talent.
Though maybe it also gave him his work
ethic: the will, as he said, to do the best
he could with what he had, and to do it
every day. Or perhaps childhood does
explain—explain the decisions that
led to the later wounds out of which he
made his thirty- odd books, that other
corpus to which he was chained. I don’t,
or don’t only, mean the anger and out-
rage with which he met the anger and
4 The New York Review
Philip’s Theater
Michael Gorra
Philip Roth; illustration by Johnalynn Holland
outrage of those early Jewish readers
who reacted to the stories collected
in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) as if he
were spilling family secrets that might
confirm the prejudices of the larger
society around them. That’s a problem
many writers from minority groups
run into. Richard Wright certainly did,
Ralph Ellison too, and this one would
never be done with talking back.
No, there were deeper cuts, for there
was also the mid-twentieth- century
belief that the responsible thing to do
is to accept responsibility. That’s what
defined an American man. He saw it
in his insurance agent father, he saw it
in the men who’d come back from the
war, he even saw it in the earnestness
of the 1950s literature classroom. So he
sought responsibility out. At twenty-
five he married a woman named Mar-
garet Williams, a blond midwesterner
with two neglected children from a
failed first marriage who firmly be-
lieved that the world owed her some-
thing. She was probably an alcoholic
and she was certainly unstable, and he
married her only after she tricked him
into believing she was pregnant, when
experience had already shown him that
the relationship was impossible.
He ran toward the demands of what
he knew was a nightmare, and then
three decades later he did it again: a
second marriage, to the English actress
Claire Bloom, marrying at her desire,
even though their long relationship had
been falling apart for years. He wed
only the most difficult of his many lov-
ers, and the most vengeful, and he took
his own revenge on the first of them
in My Life as a Man (1974) and on
the second in I Married a Communist
(1998). They are not his best books.
But in the immediate aftermath of each
marriage’s end, in the giddy sense that
it was at last over, well, that’s when he
wrote most freely. That’s when he fin-
ished Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), his
millions-selling ode to Onan, and then
the intoxicating, appalling comedy of
Sabbath’s Theater (1995).
“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me.
Just make me interesting.” Philip Roth
died three years ago, on May 22, 2018,
and those instructions to his biogra-
pher provide Blake Bailey with his epi-
graph. Yet how can we take him at his
word? Roth believed the facts had to
be set straight, the truth laid out, and
the public disabused of what it thought
it already knew. He wasn’t a self-hating
Jew, as some of his first critics had ar-
gued, and unlike his character Nathan
Zuckerman he hadn’t suffered a fa-
ther’s deathbed curse or been cast out
of the family for writing a scandalous
best seller. He wasn’t as one with Port-
noy, and people also needed to know
that he wasn’t the monster of selfishness
Bloom had described in her preemp-
tive memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House
(1996). He wasn’t his characters; nor
was he the character he’d been made
out to be. Ensuring that the record was
straight meant, however, that he had to
control the narrative, even though he
also knew that human life was all about
getting things wrong, and wrong again,
and other people in particular.
Roth was eighty-five when he died,
and had published his last novel, Nem-
esis, about a 1944 polio outbreak in
his native Newark, in the fall of 2010.
Two years later he let the news slip that
he considered himself retired. There
would be no new fiction, though he
continued to supervise the ten-volume
Library of America edition of his work,
which appeared under the nominal ed-
itorship of Ross Miller, a University of
Connecticut professor who had once
been his friend. Yet Miller too was now
one of those who needed to be put right.
Roth had made him his biographer, but
around the start of 2010 he took the
job away, troubled by Miller’s failure
to make much progress, to interview
the older friends who had begun to die.
What especially disturbed him, though,
was the line of questioning Miller had
begun to adopt. He found it traitorous
in its sympathy for Bloom, and in re-
tirement wrote several hundred pages
of what he called “Notes on a Slander-
Monger” in rebuttal. He also left a few
hundred more of “Notes for My Biog-
rapher,” a point-by-point response to
Bloom’s memoir. Neither manuscript
has been published, and they now rest
under a thirty-year embargo.
“Ross was no villain,” Benjamin Tay-
lor writes in Here We Are, his fond and
eloquent account of his friendship with
the novelist, just an amateur, “some-
one handed a job for which he was
ill- equipped.” Bailey does have that
equipment, or most of it, and whatever
one thinks about rehabilitation the in-
terest isn’t in doubt. Still, he’s a curi-
ous figure for Roth to have authorized
as a replacement. For as Roth himself
asked at their first interview in 2012,
why should a “gentile from Oklahoma”
write his story, when his previous biog-
raphies had all been about WASP alco-
holics? Bailey began his career with a
life of Richard Yates, the author of Rev-
olutionary Road (1961), and wrote an-
other of the forgotten novelist Charles
Jackson, whose Lost Weekend (1944) is
now best recalled as the source for Billy
Wilder’s Oscar-winning 1945 film.
What really attracted Roth’s interest,
however, was Bailey’s 2009 biography
of John Cheever, a book at once tactful
and unsparing in its picture of that writ-
er’s triumph and despair. Bailey drew
skillfully upon interviews with Chee-
ver’s friends and family, and then on
his papers too, his confessional journal
above all, and the result was as fluent
a narrative as American biography can
show. I don’t think the Roth book is as
definitive. Nevertheless, it seems unas-
sailable as to fact, withholding only the
names of a few girlfriends; sympathetic
in its use of those unpublished “Notes”
but clear- eyed enough to allow for
other judgments; and quickly moving
despite its length, a coherent account
of a major American life.
Which can’t be said for the Canadian
academic Ira Nadel. His subtitle borrows
from one of Roth’s greatest novels and in
doing so implies something subversive,
an alternative to any received or official
version. Yet his reading of Roth’s life re-
sembles Bailey’s, and though he offers
a few more names and some otherwise
unrecorded anecdotes, his handling of
 Yale university press
“Timely and thought-provoking. . . .
Prestowitz provides an unsparing
analysis of how Washington’s
elite fell into the grip of their
China delusion.”—James Kynge,
Financial Times
“Rosa emphasizes the wonder of
the rose by tracing the many ways
it has shaped cultures around the
world. It is wonderfully and richly
illustrated.”—Michael Marriott, Senior
Rosarian at David Austin Roses
April 8, 2021
“A beautiful book. . . . Should be
widely read. Its delightful wisdom
and clarity underlines our culture’s
desperate need to make things
new.”—Arts Fuse
“Insightful, well-written, and carefully
researched, this is the best and most
complete biography of the notorious
gangster Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel
in print.”—Robert Rockaway, author
of But He Was Good to His Mother:
The Lives and Crimes of Jewish
Gangsters ■ Jewish Lives
yalebooks.com
“This book is indeed ‘for the moment.’
It could not be a more timely or
necessary work.”—Gabriel Schoenfeld,
American Purpose
“A provocative examination of
social constructs and those who
would alternately undo or improve
them.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Thoughtful, astute, invitingly
readable.”—Terry Teachout, drama
critic, Wall Street Journal ■ “This
is a subtle and smart work that adds
“Simon Critchley is an international
substantially to our understanding
treasure—that rare and real
of the greatest writer the world
philosopher who embraces
has known.”—Carmen Khan,
Rousseau’s ‘feeling of existence,’
Artistic Director, The Philadelphia
David Bowie’s vision of love,
Shakespeare Theater
and Philip K. Dick’s genius with
genuine wrestling and a soulful
smile!”—Cornel West
5
the narrative is awkward by compari-
son. Nadel writes that his organization
is “thematic.” In practice that means he
free-associates his way through Roth’s
work and life in a way that isn’t only
repetitive but also makes it hard to tell
just what is happening when. He does,
however, have a cameo appearance in
Bailey’s pages. Roth sued him in 2010
over what he took as a misrepresen-
tation of his personal life in an edited
volume and was willing to pay more
than $60,000 in legal fees to make him
rewrite a passage. At the time Roth’s
agent, Andrew Wylie, told Nadel that
he wouldn’t get permission to quote
from the novelist’s work in any future
book, nor could he expect cooperation
from his friends. Possibly that injunc-
tion was later lifted; in any case, Nadel
does quote, and his acknowledgments
thank a number of Roth’s friends, Tay-
lor among them. No matter; I can’t
imagine that many readers will choose
his Philip Roth over Bailey’s.
That suit—which Nadel doesn’t men-
tion—provides more evidence for Tay-
lor’s judgment that the writer could
never “get enough of getting even.” He
seemed to court insult for the chance it
gave him to fight back, and maybe that
too showed a sense of self-sabotaging
responsibility, only this time to what he
saw as the truth. Margaret Williams had
been too much for him. Even after five
years of legal separation she refused to
give him a divorce and hoped that his
advance on Portnoy’s Complaint would
make her own fortune too; he was freed
only by her 1968 death in a Central Park
car crash. “You’re dead,” he said to her
casket at the funeral, “and I didn’t have
to do it.” Nothing again would ever
keep him from having the last word.
The three years since Roth’s own
death would hardly seem long enough
to research and write an eight-hundred-
page biography, but Bailey’s interviews
with some two hundred of the novelist’s
friends, lovers, editors, and enemies—
and especially with Roth himself—go
back to 2012 (“Alfred Brendel, 7 July
2013”). Almost all of them were com-
pleted before the novelist died, and a
few of those interviewed, like Alison
Lurie, have since gone themselves.
Bailey’s work relies on those conversa-
tions far more than it does on written
documents, Roth’s manuscript “Notes”
aside. There are relatively few quo-
tations from letters here, though the
ones that there are suggest that a vol-
ume of Roth’s correspondence will be
worth having. There’s almost nothing
from a journal or diary. He didn’t keep
the kind of private record Cheever
did; he had fewer secrets and was less
introspective.
So the sense of character Bailey of-
fers is above all a social one. This isn’t
an oral history, but he does quote ex-
tensively from his interviews, and not
just with Roth. We listen as the nov-
elist’s friends think aloud and at times
second-guess themselves, hear them
describe his relation to them as much
as theirs to him. In consequence these
secondary figures become exception-
ally vivid, and that ability to animate
his minor characters seems to me Bai-
ley’s most distinctive gift. In Cheever
we got the separate voices of the man’s
three children, who each had a dif-
ferent sense of him, and so it is here.
Philip Roth comes as brightly peopled
as a Victorian novel, with detailed por-
traits of its subject’s lovers, his college
teachers at Bucknell, writer friends like
6 The New York Review
Bernard Avishai and Judith Thurman,
and the people who worked around
the Litchfield County farmhouse that
he bought in 1972, and where he spent
most of his life’s second half.
Of course this kind of research yields
other things too, and if you want to
know who gave the nineteen-year- old
Philip Roth his first blow job the an-
swer is on page 78.
B ut isn’t that the problem? The prob-
lem not with biography itself so much
as with this man’s biography? Because
we want to know these things about
him. Roth drew and smudged and drew
again the line between life and art, and
with every book it became harder to
choose between them. He liked to com-
plain that his reviewers thought he was
the only novelist in America who never
made anything up, but he also knew
that the most effective lies stick as close
to the truth as possible. Most of his
characters have an immediate source in
his own life, the women especially, and
he had the necessary “splinter of ice in
the heart,” as Graham Greene once put
it, that allowed him to turn the people
he loved into material. Himself too,
and usually in far less flattering ways.
But the particular things that happen
to those characters aren’t always so
immediately sourced, though here life
itself might play him a trick. He once
bared his chest to show an interviewer
that he didn’t have a bypass scar, un-
like his doppelgänger Zuckerman. Two
years later he did, and joked that it was
no good to him, he’d already used it.
I sometimes give my students a
handout that defines the many differ-
ences between Roth and Zuckerman,
between the real novelist and the fic-
tional one, but really there’s only one
that matters. Roth’s relations with his
own parents remained warm, and he
dedicated The Counterlife (1986) “to
my father at eighty-five.” Zuckerman’s
father, meanwhile, was supposed to
have died in the early 1970s, right after
calling his son a “bastard.” The writer
stuck a thumb in the eye of his simple-
minded critics, and yet in book after
book he welcomed that simplicity, in-
viting the very reading he disdained.
Catch me if you can, but he had al-
ready figured every angle, as if playing
three- card monte with our minds. His
whole oeuvre is a series of counter-
lives, alternate takes on the same ma-
terial, like Rembrandt’s self-portraits
or Monet’s waterlilies. And of course
The Counterlife itself provides the best
example: five versions of Zuckerman,
and so loaded with irreconcilable de-
tails that each contradicts the others.
None of them is entirely reliable, none
the norm from which the others vary.
So meaning itself becomes unstable: a
book without a bottom, and sublime.
We’re fools to go on reading Roth’s
work as if it were a disguised autobi-
ography, and The Counterlife suggests
a better way. The slippage between its
different Zuckermans makes it seem a
work of metafiction, but as we read each
section it’s as real as fiction can be. Its
dizzying effect depends, that is, on the
writing—on Roth’s craft and art and
skill, the things that most readers take
for granted. Here are a few sentences
from the opening pages of The Anat-
omy Lesson (1984), chosen almost at
random. Zuckerman here suffers from
a writer’s block in which the psycholog-
ical and the physical are as one, and no
doctor seems able to help. He wears a
neck brace, there’s a “hot line of pain”
running from his right ear to the mid-
dle of his back, and he’s treating him-
self with Valium and vodka. Sitting at
the typewriter proves excruciating, but
writing manually was no better.
Even in the good old days, push-
ing his left hand across the paper,
he looked like some brave deter-
mined soul learning to use an ar-
tificial limb. Nor were the results
that easy to decipher. Writing by
hand was the clumsiest thing he
did. He danced the rumba better
than he wrote by hand. He held
the pen too tight. He clenched his
teeth and made agonized faces. He
stuck his elbow out from his side
as though beginning the breast
Philip Roth Estate
Philip Roth, Litchfield County,
Connecticut, early 1980s
stroke, then hooked his hand down
and around from his forearm so
as to form the letters from above
rather than below.
None of these sentences is especially
notable. They’re not like Saul Bel-
low’s—they don’t demand that we look
at them, admire them. We look through
them instead, look at the things they de-
scribe, the mock-heroic bathos of that
“brave determined soul,” and then the
visual precision of that stuck- out elbow.
But look again and Roth’s little bits of
repetition will start to catch, those four
sentences beginning with “He,” three
short and one long. We don’t notice the
style and yet we do hear the voice, a
distinction the novelist himself made in
The Ghostwriter (1979), and what that
voice has to give is a propulsive sense
of rhythm and pace, the tick tick tock
of the most purely readable prose in all
American literature.
That’s one of Roth’s undersold
strengths. Here’s another. Sabbath’s
Theater opens with an account of the
long adulterous affair between its title
character and a Croatian immigrant
named Drenka Balich, an affair that
runs for better than a decade and ends
only with her death. The next 385 pages
in the Library of America edition cover
just two days—two days in the novel’s
present that also contain the entirety
of the sixty-four-year- old Mickey Sab-
bath’s life. “Flashback” is too crude a
word to describe what Roth does here.
A moment unlocks a memory that un-
locks another, allowing Sabbath to float
back to childhood and then forward to
Drenka’s deathbed, stopping along the
way to sniff in a teenager’s underwear
drawer and to remember—no, relive—
another deathbed, when his actress
first wife sat for three days beside her
mother’s corpse, unwilling to release
it to the undertaker.* Time moves and
stands still, and we barely notice as one
moment falls into another and the past
becomes wholly present. Roth didn’t
invent those moves. They go back to
the early twentieth century, to Woolf
and Proust among others. But he’s
learned from every one of their experi-
ments and does it with even more ease,
a wholly naturalized and indeed invisi-
ble body of modernist technique.
Mickey Sabbath is a repellent char-
acter, and a great one, and the novel
itself recalls Céline in its willingness to
dive down, down, down, until we laugh
at our own turning stomachs. Roth
himself believed that two of the novel’s
scenes were the best he’d ever written,
and they do indeed demand superla-
tives. One of them puts Sabbath on the
Jersey Shore, looking at his parents’
graves and then meeting his hundred-
year- old cousin Fish, a man who lives
alone and comes down the stairs but
once each day to cook a lamb chop,
and who thinks he remembers his wife.
It’s Beckett but better—better because
it’s set in the entirely recognizable so-
cial landscape of extreme old age. The
other scene is harder, a memory within
a memory, Sabbath’s recollection of vis-
iting Drenka in the hospital just before
she dies, one last time to talk, and laugh,
and remember. Only what they remem-
ber is pissing on each other, the warmth
and taste of a day of golden showers. I’d
forgotten this moment entirely, and re-
reading it made me squirm, even as I
knew their shared memory was itself a
form of joy. And that’s when I thought
of A Sentimental Education, in which
on the last page Flaubert’s middle-aged
characters recall an adolescent trip to
a brothel and know that that “was the
best time we ever had.”
Sabbath has always planned to kill
himself—only to decide, in the nov-
el’s last paragraph, that he can’t. “How
could he leave? How could he go?
Everything he hated was here.” Then
Roth flipped the sentiment around:
in American Pastoral (1997) Swede
Levov looks out at his native land
and thinks that “everything he loved
was here.” Can’t have one without the
other, I suppose, as a different Jersey
boy once sang. The unruly and the
responsible, Mickey and Swede, Dio-
nysus and Apollo, even. Roth needed
them both. Distrusted them too.
American Pastoral earned him an
overdue Pulitzer. It should have been
his second. In 1980 the judges had rec-
ommended the prize go to The Ghost-
writer, but the Pulitzer board overruled
them and instead gave it to Norman
Mailer for the 1,100-page Execution-
er’s Song. Which of them has more
weight now? Still, it took Roth a long
time to find his feet, especially for some-
one who had already won the National
Book Award, for Goodbye, Columbus,
at the age of twenty-six. That had been
his first book, with Portnoy’s Complaint
a decade later, and The Ghostwriter ten
*Roth took the incident from Bloom’s be-
havior at her own mother’s death. Unfor-
givable, and on the page unforgettable.
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7
years after that. Those are the only early
ones that count. Some of the work in be-
tween has great moments—nobody for-
gets Kafka’s whore in The Professor of
Desire (1977)—but there are also a few
dogs, like the Nixon satire Our Gang
(1971), and others that simply seem to
mark time.
Roth needed to survive the fallout
of his first marriage, he had to learn to
live with the notoriety Portnoy’s Com-
plaint brought him, and above all, as he
said in a 1987 interview, he had to find
the “confidence to take my instinct for
comedy seriously, to let it contend with
my earnest sobriety and finally take
charge.” That comedy had been there
from the start, but Roth spent years
resisting his own best gift. Only when
Nathan Zuckerman took hold in The
Ghostwriter did he finally and irrevo-
cably recognize just what kind of writer
he was.
At that point Roth entered his long
major phase, the almost unbroken
string of successes that ran until The
Plot Against America (2004) and Ev-
eryman. Just about everything in that
quarter- century matters, and here Bai-
ley’s one significant weakness as a bi-
ographer becomes apparent, one that
marked the Cheever book as well. He’s
not really a critic, and he isn’t that in-
terested in the inner life of the fiction
itself. I don’t expect him to offer a co-
herent reading of each book (Nadel
provides a lot of plot summary, far
more than we need), but I do wish he
had more to say about the product of
Roth’s long hours at that standing desk.
How did his kind of fiction fit in with
all the other kinds of American writing
going on around him—the antic prose
of Portnoy’s Complaint as set against
that of the New Journalism? When did
he realize that Zuckerman wasn’t a
one-shot? The character made a brief
appearance in My Life as a Man, but
why did Roth decide to use him again,
as The Ghostwriter’s first-person nar-
rator, and when did he know that that
book would require a sequel, and then
another, only this time written in the
third person? Or see that the aging
Zuckerman would make a superb
witness to other people’s troubles in
American Pastoral and the two books
that followed, now known collectively
as the American Trilogy? What about
his influence on younger writers?
And as I write this something else
begins to nag, and the question Roth
asked Bailey at their first interview
starts to seem relevant. The drama of
assimilation, the traditions of Jewish
comedy and storytelling from which
Roth’s own sense of performative out-
rage emerged: all that, and Newark too,
seems muted here. It comes to us with-
out the historical texture that marks
Roth’s own account of the place, the
layered sense of a milieu, at once sus-
taining and stifling, that marks even his
most minor books. Maybe that’s unfair;
still, there it is. Bailey has traced the
novelist’s every relative and their med-
ical records too, he’s defined the finan-
cial ups and downs of their immigrant
history in America, but he doesn’t have
the same grasp on this world that he
does on the reticences of Cheever’s.
What he does superbly, in contrast, is
chart Roth’s sexual and emotional life,
and map its effects on his work. Some
of this is straightforward. An English
journalist with whom he had an affair
while married to Bloom became the
model for Maria in The Counterlife,
8 The New York Review
and the haunted Faunia Farley in The judgmental, and another biographer
Human Stain had a specific source as will one day write a more prosecutorial
well. Almost all of Roth’s lovers have book. Certainly there’s a bill to draw.
a place in his fiction, and most are re- Roth was vindictive, and not just to-
membered warmly, with the exception ward Bloom; The Human Stain (2000)
of the two he married. One thing that is marred by its caricature of an aca-
surprised me was just how conscien- demic feminist, the kind of reader he
tious a stepfather he was to Margaret felt was determined to misunderstand
Williams’s young children. He taught him. He dropped editors and friends
her daughter to read, and both she and who no longer seemed useful, and he
her brother credit him with saving their was compulsively unfaithful. After the
lives; even Williams’s first husband end of his second marriage he had a
speaks well of his influence. series of short-lived affairs with ever-
But it didn’t work that way with younger women. Bailey writes that
Anna Steiger, Bloom’s daughter with he “enjoyed playing Pygmalion,” and
the actor Rod Steiger. The novelist and he treated his girlfriends generously,
the actress already knew each other too generously; a gift to one of them
slightly when they met up again in 1975, of $100,000 made me feel queasy, as
each of them now newly alone. Things though the check itself said “stick
then moved quickly, and they soon de- around.” But eventually sex was over,
cided to split their time between Roth’s even for Philip Roth, and really around
farmhouse and Bloom’s own home the time he stopped writing fiction. His
in London. Steiger was sixteen when last years were surprisingly peaceful,
the two began living together, and she despite his enduring physical pain. He
proved hostile from the start. read deeply in American history; he
Or maybe Roth was. He told one renewed his friendship with some of
story, Bloom and Steiger told different his old loves, and their companionship
ones—a family drama in which there’s helped ease his body’s passage.
no such thing as truth, only mine and
yours and yours. What seems clear is
that Steiger believed her mother had One who didn’t come back was Max-
abandoned her and resented Roth’s ine Groffsky, the daughter of a New
very existence; Bloom in turn craved Jersey glass distributor whom Roth
her daughter’s approval and treated her had used as the model for Brenda Pa-
as one whose every need must be met. timkin in the long title story of Good-
The novelist saw the intensity of the re- bye, Columbus. After graduating from
lationship between mother and daugh- Barnard she worked for The Paris Re-
ter as a threat to his peace and refused view, running the quarterly’s office in
to let the young woman live with them; the French capital, and later became
she should instead get student housing a literary agent in New York; a Lee
at the London conservatory where she Friedlander portrait from 1972 shows a
was enrolled. Bloom thought he was woman of formidable intelligence and
cruel and unyielding, everyone acted chic alike. Few of Roth’s lovers refused
badly, and it went on for a long time. to speak to Bailey; she did, in a letter
Later there were other problems. Ac- he calls “cordial but firm.” Groffsky’s
cording to Taylor, Bloom felt that some family, Bailey writes, seems to have
of Roth’s medical ills were imaginary; believed that “Goodbye, Columbus”
and Bailey describes how, at moments had “blackened” their hometown rep-
of crisis, she would break, before wit- utation, and twenty-five years later her
nesses, into great sobs of self-pity. But younger sister came up to Roth after a
she got her damning version into print lecture and laid into him, claiming that
first, and Roth thought the bad pub- the book had destroyed her family’s
licity had cost him the Nobel Prize. life.
Other more personally monstrous fig- Just what details had hurt the most
ures were luckier, with their full sto- went unsaid. Brenda’s diaphragm, one
ries emerging only after Sweden had of the first times that birth control
called; think of Derek Walcott or V. S. had provided a plot point in Ameri-
Naipaul. can fiction? The virtual illiteracy of
Some readers will wish Bailey were the Patimkin father, or the dopey,
harder on his subject, more openly basketball-playing big brother? That
AUBADE II
for Ötzi
Pulling the arrow’s shaft · from his own shoulder
· on the east ridge with · and an axe of solid
copper and · ibex meat undigested · conifer
pollen, so late spring · bearskin snowshoes · a
pouch with his firelighting kit · flint flakes and
a tinder conk · the mushroom kindling an em-
ber for hours · after he turned onto his stom-
ach · froze & thawed & froze again · for
five thousand years · what beyond pain · did
he hear as the light flickered · flickered on the
mountain’s face · what entered his body
through the ears · through the desolation of his
eyes · what did he take · for which he had no
name
—Forrest Gander
unforgettable refrigerator full of fruit?
After I had almost finished this piece
I went back, on a February morning,
to read “Goodbye, Columbus” for
the first time in almost forty years. It
hadn’t been my first Roth—that was
The Ghostwriter—but I had gone on
to it immediately, and what I remem-
ber from that initial reading is simply
how hard some pages had me laugh-
ing. Now I was laughing again. There
were earnest moments, sure, but the
young Roth had trusted his comedy.
He didn’t yet have anything to live up
to, no prizes behind him or burden of
expectations, and at the time he didn’t
see it as a major work. It was the lon-
gest thing he’d yet written, but still, it
wasn’t a novel; later he spoke of it as a
“kid’s book” and wished people would
forget about it.
It’s true that its characters are only
half-realized. Nevertheless, Roth’s en-
tire future is there. The subject mat-
ter first, Newark and sex and Jews,
money, success, and the generation-by-
generation movement out into Amer-
ican life. Then that fresh and flexible
voice, the speaking voice above all, as
one hears it in the monologue Brenda’s
traveling salesman uncle delivers near
the end of the book, the story of his life
selling light bulbs and of a girl he once
met who believed in “oral love.” And
beyond that the ambivalence. The nar-
rator, Neil Klugman, doesn’t like the
fact that Brenda has had a diamond-
shaped bump on her nose removed,
but then she’s right too in seeing him as
slightly nasty.
There’s more, though. At one point
Neil drops some papers off at Patimkin
Sink, the Newark factory where Bren-
da’s father has made his fortune, and in
seeing him there Neil recognizes “the
satisfaction and surprise he felt about
the life he had managed to build for
himself and his family.” Ben Patimkin
has left the old neighborhood behind
and moved out to Short Hills. What’s
more, he’s sent his daughter to Rad-
cliffe, and at this point it isn’t Neil but
the novel itself that’s on the man’s side.
In business, he tells the boy, “you need
a little of the gonif in you. You know
what that means?” Neil does—a point
in his favor. The Patimkin kids don’t;
in fact they might as well be “goyim,
my kids, that’s how much they un-
derstand.” But that’s the point, and it
makes the man proud. They don’t need
to know, and yet Roth himself would
always remember what a gonif was. It
was where he came from, and like all
great novelists he was a bit of one as
well, stealing other people’s lives and
fixing them on paper.
I thought of something else as I read,
too. I thought of the very last words
of American Pastoral. We’re a gen-
eration on and the money has gotten
easier in its shoes, but the hard work
remains; you may no longer live over
the shop, but you mind it all the same.
The Patimkins’ suburban house has
become Swede Levov’s gentleman’s
farm, a place now threatened by the
discord of our national life, an “Amer-
ican berserk” that condemns and re-
jects the striving, sober comfort in
which his family has its being. And yet,
“what is wrong with their life? What on
earth is less reprehensible than the life
of the Levovs?” The good son asked
such a question in book after book, and
the man who made Mickey Sabbath
always answered it with another one.
Isn’t that the problem? Q
 “[A] remarkable inquiry . . . the sort of
history that has been exceedingly hard
to tell, and therefore not often told.”
—Harvard Magazine
“In giving us back the women heroines and
images and lives that were once the heart
and soul of the oldest stories, Natalie
Frank is giving back to female readers the
right to honor and tell our own stories.”
—Gloria Steinem
“Excellent. . . .This book is a forceful
declaration of the value of science
for our democracy and a ringing call
to action for policymakers and the
American people alike.”
—Speaker Nancy Pelosi
April 8, 2021
“Extremely convincing.”
—Ilana Masad, NPR
“A valuable book for students
of geopolitics and the ever
turbulent Middle East.”
—Kirkus
“This is a book that will be read, as we
say, for information, but it’s also that
rare reference book that demands
to be dipped into for pleasure, and
devoured cover to cover.”
—Leah Price, author of What We Talk
About When We Talk About Books
“An illuminating account of how
the founding fathers worried about
the future of America.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A tour de force. As Alter demonstrates
Nabokov’s remarkably wonderful style, the
reader is dazzled by Alter’s own superb
style and literary erudition—a double gift
for those who love literature.”
—Françoise Meltzer, author of Dark Lens
“[A] careful, original, and compelling
account of how border controls
infringe the liberties of the very
citizens they aim to protect.”
—Matthew J. Gibney,
University of Oxford
9
 Can the Senate Restore Majority Rule?
Kill Switch:
The Rise of the Modern
Senate and the Crippling
of American Democracy
by Adam Jentleson.
Liveright, 325 pp., $26.95
We’ve known all along that, Joe Biden’s
pleas for “unity” notwithstanding, he
would get precious little cooperation
from Republicans. Beyond the cour-
tesy of confirming most of the new
president’s appointees—one old norm
that still obtains, more or less—con-
gressional Republicans will give Biden
nothing. And he seeks nothing. His
campaign rhetoric was driven by polls
showing that most Americans still want
to hear their politicians, especially
their president, talk about working
across party lines. But he and his team
aren’t naive enough to believe that he’ll
usher in a new age of bipartisanship.
Hence the decision to pursue a major
Covid relief bill right away and to pass
it via the reconciliation process, which
limits what can be included in the leg-
islation but requires only a majority to
pass, obviating the need to corral any
Republican votes.
The path toward passage of the his-
toric American Rescue Plan, the $1.9
trillion relief bill, also revealed that
Biden will have some difficulties with
his own party. Yes, the bill passed,
and yes, it was an enormous victory,
both symbolically and substantively.
It will provide money for vaccines and
schools, it will help the unemployed
(there are still about 10 million fewer
jobs than there were before the pan-
demic hit), and it will put money in
people’s pockets that, it is hoped and
presumed, they will reinvest in the
economy as the country opens back up.
More than that, the aid plan represents
the beginning of a potential shift to
large-scale public investment without
the overriding concern about deficits
and inflation that free-market neo-
liberalism has imposed upon much of
US economic policy-making for forty
years.
But it wasn’t easy. Those on the left
were livid that the Senate parliamen-
tarian ruled that the minimum-wage
provision be stripped from the bill
because it had no direct budgetary
impact, as required by the reconcilia-
tion provisions. And they were angry
that the Biden administration imme-
diately announced that it would not
seek to challenge the ruling, which
would have been possible: if Vice Pres-
ident Kamala Harris, in her capacity
as president of the Senate, had decided
to ignore it, sixty votes would have
been required to overrule her, mean-
ing that Biden could have muscled the
minimum-wage increase through. He
chose not to, because the administra-
tion believed—accurately, as it turns
out—that there just aren’t fifty votes
in the Senate for a $15-per-hour min-
imum wage.
The disagreement over this provision
was a snag in what has otherwise been
a pretty smooth relationship so far be-
tween the president and the Democratic
left. This is generally credited to Ron
Klain, Biden’s smart and approachable
chief of staff—a mainstream liberal
10
Michael Tomasky
Senator Chuck Schumer walking to the Senate floor through a room filled with cots in
preparation for an all-night debate in an attempt to break a Republican filibuster, July 2007
himself, but not at all contemptuous of
those to his left, as Obama’s first chief
of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was. Klain
keeps lines of communication open.
Further, on personnel and policy Biden
has been more progressive than many
expected. Here, for example, was Alex-
andria Ocasio- Cortez on Chris Hayes’s
MSNBC show on January 27, after
the new president signed a number of
environment-related executive orders
and John Kerry, Biden’s special pres-
idential envoy for climate, and Gina
McCarthy, the White House national
climate adviser, laid out their green
priorities:
Now, I’m feeling extraordinarily
encouraged. And I think that the
significance of President Biden’s
executive orders communicates a
lot. One is that it really communi-
cates that he meant what he said on
the campaign trail, that he would
make climate change a central
priority of his administration, and
that he considers it not just a na-
tional security threat, but frankly,
you know, the global matter that
it is.
Good intentions, of course, only go
so far. To satisfy the left, the adminis-
tration will need to deliver this year or
next on a long list of demands, from in-
frastructure to green jobs to immigra-
tion reform. On the minimum wage in
particular, success will probably come
by attaching it to a “must-pass” bill,
like a defense appropriation. That’s
how the last minimum-wage increase
got through, in 2007. And it may be
around $13 instead of $15. Whether the
left will accept a lower figure is unclear,
but Biden may have to try to convince
them that $13 would constitute a sig-
nificant progressive win, particularly
if it’s indexed to inflation. For a forty-
hour work week, $13 an hour would
amount to an annual salary of $26,000
(assuming two weeks of unpaid vaca-
tion). Because the increase is phased
in over time, the US minimum wage
would eventually surpass that of most
other developed nations. (France’s is at
$12.20 an hour, the UK’s is at $12.13
and slated to rise slightly in April, and
Germany’s is at $11.15.)
Mine Workers union. Today, coal-
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux
mining employs a fraction of what it
did when I was a child. Class conscious-
ness of the old New Deal sort is gone,
replaced by an anger, stoked by Fox
News and others, at the snooty elites
who want to stop burning coal and de-
stroy those jobs that do remain. During
the Obama years, the state swung hard
to the right: Republicans now control
both houses of the state legislature,
which would have been unthinkable
twenty years ago. This year, for the
first time in decades, Republican voter
enrollment outpaced Democratic, ac-
cording to figures released by the West
Virginia secretary of state’s office three
weeks into the Biden presidency.1
Sinema would seem to have less of
an excuse than Manchin for her aggres-
sive centrism. Biden carried Arizona,
however narrowly (three tenths of one
percentage point). But Republicans
control the governor’s mansion and
The left will keep up the fight over the both state houses; it’s certainly not a
minimum wage—and it should. But I blue state, though it does appear to be
would guess that Biden won’t lose many getting bluer. Sinema is a rather enig-
votes in Congress among progressives, matic figure. Once affiliated with the
so long as the administration treats state’s Green Party, she wrote a letter
them respectfully and accomplishes to the editor of The Arizona Repub-
something. While the Senate was de- lic in 2002 that included the sentence:
bating the Covid bill, Bernie Sanders in- “Until the average American realizes
troduced a stand-alone minimum-wage that capitalism damages her livelihood
amendment. It lost badly, opposed by while augmenting the livelihoods of the
some Democrats who were concerned wealthy, the Almighty Dollar will con-
that if it passed and thus was reinserted tinue to rule.” As a state senator, she was
in the overall bill, it would simply have mostly progressive, although cautious
to be removed again per the parliamen- on immigration issues. (She opposed
tarian’s verdict. In the end, Sanders the successful effort to recall GOP state
voted for Biden’s bill and praised it ef- senator Russell Pearce, a hard-line anti-
fusively, calling it “the most significant immigration figure.) When she first ran
piece of legislation to benefit working for the House, in a town-and-gown Tuc-
families in the modern history of this son district, she campaigned to the left
country.” Given that endorsement from of her two opponents, both men.
Sanders, it’s no surprise that no House Whatever motivates her—the dream
progressives voted against the bill when that the presidency may one day be
the House passed it Tuesday. hers is a safe guess—she will be a con-
Biden’s bigger problem for the fore- stant annoyance for Biden. Sinema and
seeable future emanates from the mid- Manchin have carved out for them-
dle—from Senators Joe Manchin of selves considerable leverage. If their
West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of votes are the ones that can put Biden
Arizona. They have made it manifestly over the top, when a simple majority
clear that the Biden White House will is needed during the reconciliation
have to work to get their votes. They— process, legislation can be only as pro-
Manchin especially—insist that they gressive as they wish it to be. They are
will support only genuinely bipartisan practically copresidents already.
bills and have little taste for reconcilia-
tion (though they did both vote for the
Covid bill). It is the “Byrd Rule” that M anchin had been using his leverage
restricts what can be included in recon- adroitly—until, in the final hours be-
ciliation bills, and Manchin holds the fore the Senate voted on the relief bill,
seat once occupied by Robert C. Byrd. he appeared to overplay his hand. Dem-
In fairness, Manchin’s seat is pre- ocrats had reached broad agreement
carious. Donald Trump carried West on the relief bill’s main aspects—the
Virginia last year by 39 points, his income levels to which direct payments
second-highest victory margin in the would extend, and the size and duration
country, after Wyoming. It’s a stun- of unemployment benefits—when Man-
ning number, and a formidable one for chin suddenly decided that he wanted
a statewide Democrat to contemplate. more limits on unemployment benefits.
Manchin will be up for reelection (as- He said that if people are vaccinated
suming he chooses to run) in 2024, and by the summer and ready to go back to
he must already know how many voters work, the government shouldn’t be pay-
for the GOP presidential candidate he’ll ing them to stay home. “It’d be awful for
have to persuade to vote for him, in this the doors to open up and there’s no one
era when ticket-splitting is all but dead. working,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
(Back- of- envelope calculation: proba- One Democratic source in the Senate
bly at least 80,000—more than 10 per- told me that Manchin has long been
cent of the state’s electorate.)
I grew up in West Virginia in the 1
See John Raby, “Registered Repub-
1960s and 1970s. It was a reliably Dem- licans Outnumber Democrats in West
ocratic state then, thanks in large part Virginia,” Associated Press, February
to the heavy presence of the United 11, 2021.
The New York Review
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UNIVERSITY
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April 8, 2021 11
concerned about fraud with respect to
unemployment and disability benefits.
Manchin had spoken those words on
Tuesday, March 2, and won a signif-
icant concession afterward: monthly
unemployment benefits were cut from
$400 to $300. It therefore shocked his
fellow Democrats when he said on Fri-
day, March 5, that the new numbers still
weren’t good enough. He held up the
Senate for ten hours. Even his fellow
West Virginia senator, Shelley Moore
Capito, a Republican, was perplexed.
“I have no idea what he’s doing, to be
quite frank,” she told Politico.2
In the end, President Biden called
him and talked him down. Manchin
voted for the final bill—and voted with
his fellow Democrats to oppose some
twenty Republican amendments. This
is part of a pattern; he is usually there
when his party genuinely needs him
(he opposed the repeal of Obamacare,
for example). But he knows how much
power he holds, and he will use it.
Given the nature of West Virginia
politics, he is impervious to pressure
from the left, which lacks the numbers
in the state to threaten him. Stephen
Smith, the dynamic leader of the West
Virginia Can’t Wait movement, ran a
left-populist campaign for governor in
2020 and finished a respectable second
to a more standard-issue Democrat.
Smith thinks that only a certain kind of
localized pressure could get Manchin
to support more progressive policies.
“When outsiders sprinkle last-minute
Facebook ads and action alerts on our
state, he laughs,” Smith told me. “Be-
cause they pose no credible threat. To
win, our threat must be local, fearless,
permanent, and owned by the working-
class West Virginians who’ve been
robbed by generations of politicians.”
The broader point is that the Demo-
cratic Party, which stretches from AOC
to Joe Manchin (not to mention a num-
ber of House moderates), is something
of an anachronism, dating back to the
era when both parties were ideologi-
cally diverse—when, in the Senate, the
GOP caucus included the New York
liberal Jacob Javits and the Arizona
conservative Barry Goldwater, and the
Democratic gamut ran from the Michi-
gan liberal Philip Hart to the Dixiecrat
James Eastland. Among developed
democracies, this heterogeneity was
unique to the United States. Now, as
our politics has become completely po-
larized, our parties have become more
ideologically homogenous, and more
parliamentary-style in matters of dis-
cipline. Comparative political science
will tell you that “Westminster”-like
parties don’t have Manchins and Sine-
mas—legislators vote for the party plat-
form, period. The Republican Party has
become that kind of party (although,
with Mitt Romney in the Senate, not
quite as predictably; he follows the
party line on policy but was willing to
buck President Trump). The Demo-
crats may have moved in that direction,
but there is no Manchin of the GOP.
One question of the Biden era, then—
perhaps the question—is whether this
still fairly big-tent, American-style
party can function (and deliver) in an
age when parliamentary-style disci-
pline is required. With a Senate split
50–50 and a nine-seat margin in the
2
Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine,
“‘I Have No Idea What He’s Doing’:
Manchin Perplexes with Covid Aid
Power Play,” Politico, March 5, 2021.
12
House, there is little to no room for
error. Which brings us to the issue that
the Democrats absolutely cannot avoid
confronting during this congressional
term: what to do about the filibuster.
Adam Jentleson’s Kill Switch is the
most exquisitely timed book I’ve en-
countered in years. Jentleson’s expla-
nation of the filibuster’s ignominious
roots, and of the mendacious argu-
ments made today by its defenders, is
careful and thorough and exacting.
Every senator should be forced to read
it and then reread it.
If they did, they would know that
the notion of “unlimited debate”—the
claim that the Senate is a special insti-
tution because it accommodates end-
less discussion of legislation—is a lie.
They would know that the idea that
the Senate was somehow designed to
defend the rights of the minority is also
a lie, and a particularly pernicious one,
as the filibuster was invented by John
C. Calhoun to uphold slavery and white
supremacy. They would know how the
Senate, sometimes by unhappy acci-
dent and sometimes by the malevolent
design of those who exploited its rules,
has become the graveyard of progres-
sive legislation.
Jentleson, a former aide to Dem-
ocratic senator Harry Reid, begins
Kill Switch by emphasizing that the
Founders were opponents of superma-
jorities, precisely because they gave a
minority the power of a majority. In
today’s Senate, the “cloture” proce-
dure, which ends debate and calls for a
final-passage vote, requires sixty votes,
which in essence means that forty- one
senators can block legislation. Jentle-
son demonstrates that, with very few
exceptions, “whenever proposals for
supermajority thresholds were raised
at the [constitutional] convention they
were summarily dismissed.” James
Madison, the father of the Constitution
and its leading theorist, was a firm op-
ponent of minority rule from 1787 (the
year of the convention) until his death.
“To establish a positive and permanent
rule giving such a power, to such a mi-
nority, over such a majority,” he wrote,
“would overturn the first principle of
free government, and in practice neces-
sarily overturn the government itself.”
Originally, the Senate had a rule,
called the “previous question” rule,
that held that after sufficient debate,
the president of the Senate could decide
to force a vote. It was the precursor to
today’s cloture vote—the crucial differ-
ence being that a simple majority could
then call the question. By design, debate
in the Senate was allowed to carry on,
but with firm limits. Five of the origi-
nal nineteen Senate rules placed lim-
its on debate. And a certain decorum
obtained such that senators—gentle-
men all, in those days—agreed when it
seemed about time to vote. So in 1806,
in an effort to clear away some rules that
were thought unnecessary, the Senate
ended the previous question motion.
With this stroke, there was no way
to cut off debate—but no one really
exploited this change until Calhoun,
representing South Carolina, did so
in 1841. His opposition was to a bank
bill, though the fight, as Jentleson
notes, “was really about slavery” and
the southern planters’ fear that a na-
tional bank would erode the power of
the slave states. Calhoun organized the
southern senators to speak and speak
and speak, hoping to run out the clock
until a scheduled summer adjourn-
ment. Henry Clay of Kentucky moved
to restore the previous question rule,
and Calhoun, in Jentleson’s words,
“erupted. He invoked the loftiest of
principles to cast Clay as a tyrant, and
himself as the oppressed minority
guarding Senate tradition.” The bank
bill ultimately passed, but the filibus-
ter, even though it had no name yet, was
born. 3 After an (also unsuccessful) 1848
filibuster against a bill banning slavery
in the Oregon territory, Calhoun wrote
a treatise making an unapologetic case
for minority rule, all in the name of de-
fending slavery and white supremacy.
Throughout the nineteenth century,
senators occasionally attempted re-
form. One fateful Friday in 1891, the
powerful senator Nelson Aldrich of
Rhode Island left work thinking that
he had the votes to restore the previ-
ous question rule. But his opponents—
again, chiefly racist southerners—spent
the weekend organizing, and Aldrich’s
motion failed by one vote. Another piv-
otal moment came in 1917, when Pres-
ident Woodrow Wilson, in the waning
days of the Sixty-Fourth Congress,
sought a bill to arm American mer-
chant ships. This time it was progres-
sives who filibustered, led by Wisconsin
senator Robert LaFollette, running out
the clock on the session. This inspired
Wilson’s famous remark that “a little
group of willful men, representing no
opinion but their own, have rendered
the great government of the United
States helpless and contemptible.” It
led the Senate to pass Rule 22, a formal
procedure through which to end filibus-
ters. However, whereas the old previous
question motion could be invoked by a
simple majority, the 1917 Senate de-
cided that all debate could be ended by
a two-thirds majority (reduced in 1975
to the three fifths of today). Ironically,
a majority of the committee that wrote
Rule 22 wanted the threshold to be a
simple majority, but they compromised
with the minority.
The more recent villain of the story
is master of Senate rules Richard
Russell of Georgia, like Calhoun an
avowed white supremacist. In 1949
Russell fought an attempt by President
Harry Truman’s administration to pass
an anti–poll tax bill by expanding and
strengthening Rule 22 and making it
almost impossible to change. Russell,
Jentleson writes, “had not just won a
skirmish over an obscure rule, he had
chosen the Senate’s future.”
The filibuster had chiefly been used
to block civil rights legislation. But
once the 1964 Civil Rights Act was
passed, something odd and important
happened. The filibuster lost much of
its stigma as a tool of white suprem-
acy. Jentleson quotes the CBS News re-
porter Roger Mudd, who passed away
on March 9: “The filibuster began to
lose its mystique, and without its mys-
tique it slowly became just another
run- of-the-mill legislative tactic of
delay, no longer the exclusive weapon
3
The name, incidentally, comes from
the Dutch vrijbuiter, or freebooter,
meaning privateer or pirate. “Freeboo-
ter” and “filibuster” were both names
for a kind of lawless, freelancing adven-
turer—the American William Walker,
for example, who briefly organized a
government in Nicaragua in the 1850s.
of the South.” As a result of other rule
changes, senators no longer had to ex-
ecute a real, “talking” filibuster. Now
the mere threat is enough, and it can be
made by Senate aides: “All you have to
do,” writes Jentleson, “is call the cloak-
room, tell them the senator you work
for intends to place a hold on the bill,
and the bill is filibustered.”
This dysfunctional system has been
exploited to certain degrees by both
parties, but by no one so expertly as
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McCon-
nell. Reid, Jentleson’s old boss, will be
remembered for having invoked the
“nuclear option”—that is, using parlia-
mentary procedure to change standing
Senate rules—to eliminate the sixty-
vote threshold for presidential appoin-
tees and federal judges, but he did so
only after McConnell had taken fili-
bustering to unprecedented extremes:
“By the time Reid went nuclear, half
of all filibusters against nominees in
the history of the United States were
waged by Senate Republicans against
Obama’s [appointees].”
So here we are. The Democrats’ op-
tions are not merely to maintain the
status quo or eliminate the filibuster al-
together. In mid-February the Vox legal
affairs correspondent Ian Millhiser
wrote what may be the most compre-
hensive examination of the Democrats’
options, which boil down to four: make
fewer bills subject to the filibuster, make
it harder to initiate one, make it easier
to break one, and reduce the amount of
time required to invoke cloture.4
Many observers think the Dem-
ocrats will ultimately pursue one of
these, or some other reform, like mak-
ing Republicans carry out a real filibus-
ter and hold the floor for hours. Some
who know Manchin’s thinking believe
that even he—after a few months of
watching McConnell say no to every-
thing and hearing his friend Susan Col-
lins of Maine explain to him that she’d
like to vote for such-and-such a bill but
McConnell wouldn’t let her—will come
around. On March 7, on Meet the Press,
Manchin opened the door just a crack
to reform, saying, “And now, if you
want to make it a little more painful?
Make ’em stand there and talk? I’m
willing to look at any way we can.”
Biden’s success may well depend on
it. If the administration brings us out
of the pandemic successfully, it will
generate enormous goodwill. But then
there’s the rest of the agenda: climate,
jobs, infrastructure, immigration, the
minimum wage—and most import-
ant of all, protecting voting rights and
democracy. If the Democrats can’t
stop the Republican assault on voting,
which the GOP has taken up with in-
creased ferocity this year, they will lose
future elections to the party that rep-
resents a minority in this country and
that will then further change the rules
to solidify its power.
It looks like Calhoun and Russell
all over again. Still today, the struggle
comes back to race, and to the same
debate we’ve been having since the
beginning of the republic: whether to
establish the simple democratic princi-
ple of majority rule and crush the per-
nicious lie that majority rule leads to
tyranny, when our history amply shows
that the opposite is the case. Q
—March 11, 2021
4
Ian Millhiser, “How to Fix the Senate
Without Abolishing the Filibuster,”
Vox, February 16, 2021.
The New York Review
 New this spring from Harvard University Press

“Extraordinary . . .
“Brooks traces all kinds of Traveling Black reveals
lines, finding unexpected how travel discrimination
points of connection . . . transformed over time
opening up new ways of from segregated trains to
looking and listening by buses and Uber rides.”
tracing lineages and call-
—Ibram X. Kendi,
ing for more space.”
author of How to
—New York Times Be an Antiracist

“Subjects the Mongols

“Erik Larson exposes the
vast gap between the
actual science underlying
AI and the dramatic claims
being made for it. This is a
timely, important, and even
essential book.”
—Peter Frankopan,
—John Horgan, author
of The End of Science
to a much-needed
re-evaluation, showing
how they were able not
only to conquer but to
control a vast empire.
A remarkable book.”
author of
The Silk Roads

“Sklansky’s bold and lucid

“Winant explores in his
informative debut the rise
and fall of Pittsburgh’s
steel industry as a micro-
cosm of America’s shift
from an industrial to a
service economy.”
—Paul Butler, MSNBC
—Publishers Weekly
analysis disrupts the old
ways of understanding
how the law deals with
race, gender, and crime,
and points to how we can
get closer to real justice.”
legal analyst and
author of Chokehold

hup.harvard.edu

April 8, 2021 13

The Last American Aristocrat:
The Brilliant Life and Improbable
Education of Henry Adams
by David S. Brown.
Scribner, 451 pp., $30.00
Family blessings are a curse, or they
can be. If you’re the grandson of an
American president as well as the
great-grandson of a Founding Father
who also happened to be an Ameri-
can president, your very name is both
an advantage and a liability. No one
knew that better than Henry Adams.
Aware that he was hardly a self-made
man—“probably no child,” he wrote,
“held better cards than he”—in The
Education of Henry Adams he spoke
with trenchant wit of the privileges
that, in a sense, had prepared him for
very little. The older he got, the more
he became aware of his own ignorance.
Or so he said.
Privately distributed in 1907 but not
commercially published until 1918, the
year Adams died, the Education won
a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in biogra-
phy for “teaching patriotic and unself-
ish services to the people.” That a book
about the failure of education would
be hailed as a teaching tool might have
amused Adams. But the Education
is certainly an American jeremiad.
It warns of unlimited, immeasurable
power that will be unleashed in the
twentieth century, far exceeding any-
one’s ability to control it. For politics
is only the “systematic organization of
hatreds,” and “practical politics con-
sists in ignoring facts.” Perhaps not
surprisingly, in the year 1999 the Ed-
ucation topped the Modern Library’s
list of the century’s best nonfiction. It’s
timely still.
Written in the third person with the
deliberate egotism of someone who
abjures egotism, as if Henry Adams
were a semifictional character, this
highly crafted story of putative failure
is actually a skeptic’s hopeful search for
“a spool on which to wind the thread
of history without breaking it.” With
an ironist’s awareness of the limits
of irony, Adams takes real pleasure
in the beauty of nature and created
things, whether the rounded, magnifi-
cent dome of the Capitol as seen from
a distance or the springtime azalea that
conveys, at least for a little while, “no
hidden horror of glaciers.”
The Education is also a memoir that
shuns revelation. “Of all studies, the
one he would rather have avoided was
that of his own mind,” Adams writes.
“He knew no tragedy so heartrending as
introspection.” But self-reflect he did,
and with a vengeance. In 1870, when
he was thirty-two, his adored older sis-
ter Louisa died a horrible death from
tetanus after she’d injured her foot in
a carriage accident. “Flung suddenly
in his face, with the harsh brutality of
chance, the terror of the blow stayed
by him thenceforth for life,” Adams
recalls. “For pure blasphemy, it made
pure atheism a comfort. God might be,
as the Church said, a Substance, but
He could not be a Person.” Such was
his education. Life was unpredictable,
often cruel. He lived through the assas-
sinations of three presidents. His wife
committed suicide.
14
A Posthumous Life
Brenda Wineapple
Henry Adams (top left) at Wenlock Abbey, England, 1873.
The woman at the right may be his wife, Marian (Clover) Adams.
He did not write of her death. In-
stead, he commissioned Augustus
Saint- Gaudens to sculpt a memorial
for her grave. Adams, inspired by con-
versations with the scholar Okakura
Kakuzǀ later curator of Asian art at
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and
by the huge Buddha he had seen in
Kamakura, Japan, was pleased with
the result: a large bronze figure of con-
templation and repose whose face is
shrouded and whose gender is obscure.
There’s no identifying inscription.
Bewildered tourists began to flock to
Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery
to see the weird thing—so many that
after Saint- Gaudens’s death, Adams
implored the sculptor’s son, “Do not
allow the world to tag my figure with
a name! Your father meant it to ask a
question, not to give an answer.” To
a baffled friend, he said, “The whole
meaning and feeling of the figure is in
its universality and anonymity.”
Though Adams struggled, albeit with
ambivalence, to break free of a per-
sonal history that was intimately tied to
that of the country, he knew he never
could. Nor can he now. In the most
recent Adams biography, The Last
American Aristocrat, David S. Brown,
a professor of history at Elizabethtown
College in Pennsylvania, depicts him
as “the beneficiary of Adams privi-
lege, Brooks wealth [on his mother’s
side], and a Harvard education” who
“wished to resume an indelible family
fiefdom.” Bitter about “civilizational
decay,” Adams “sought the knight’s
armor of a sufficiently sharpened pen”
and hankered after “the simple agrar-
ian republic, now in its death throes.”
In Brown’s telling, the Saint- Gaudens
figure represents “nothing less than a
defiantly idealized monument to the
history and traditions of a vanishing
preindustrial people.”
and self-pity, elitism and, particularly
Massachusetts Historical Society
of those inscribed during the economic
depression that followed the Panic of
1893, Jew-baiting,” Brown writes, Ad-
ams’s published letters (six huge vol-
umes) also include “a raft of arresting
observations, and readers will have
to decide for themselves if Adams’s
insights on his country and its evolv-
ing cultural apparatus outweigh his
arrogance.”
Despite his assertions of impartiality,
Brown periodically quotes from these
volatile, affectionate, frequently daz-
zling, and often crabby, bigoted letters
to portray Adams as a type of “ebbing
New England gentry” possessed of a
“congenital mental rigidity (liberally
evident as one peeked up the family
tree).” Adams, as an “heirloom aristo-
crat,” “often moaned about his family’s
lapsed status.” Accordingly, Brown
believes that Adams idealized his an-
cestral home in Quincy, Massachusetts,
which “assumed a sacred status in Hen-
ry’s youth” as “a kind of paradise lost.”
Adams is thus a patrician borne back
ceaselessly into the past; the argument
resembles the one Brown offers in Par-
adise Lost, his sympathetic biography
of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which he re-
gards Fitzgerald’s work as haunted by
“home”—that is, since his sensibility
Dividing his book into two sec- “leaned toward the aristocratic, the
tions—“Becoming Henry Adams” and premodern, and the romantic,” he’s
“Performing Henry Adams”—Brown best understood “ideologically as a
explains that the first “assays its sub- man of an older, precapitalist Right.”
ject” before the suicide of Adams’s
wife in 1885; the second takes up what
Adams called his “posthumous life.” But Adams was cagey and wielded
Those remaining thirty-three years what the critic John McWilliams
are characterized, Brown writes, by a dubbed “mock nostalgia” for the eti-
“drift of persistent travel, darkening olated, insulated New Englanders
meditations on capitalism’s quickening he knew well. Of course, he was to the
pace, and a taste for playing with per- manner born. He was the son of the
sonas” that were “‘primitive’ and skep- politician Charles Francis Adams and
tical of the automated age.” (Brown is Abigail Brooks Adams, whose father,
fond of scare quotes.) Adams nonethe- Peter Chardon Brooks, was a wealthy
less “embraced the fruits of invention,” Boston merchant. The family built a
Brown continues, “traveling in the lat- house in Quincy, near the residence
est Mercedes, the fastest Union Pacific of Adams’s grandfather John Quincy
luxury train cars, and the smoothest Adams, but spent winters in Boston.
steamships (purchasing a never-used Adams juxtaposes these two places in
ticket for the Titanic’s return voyage).” the opening chapters of the Education:
The adjectives—“latest,” “fastest,” “Life was a double thing,” he writes,
“smoothest”—suggest a certain dis- “winter and summer, cold and heat,
dain. Brown sees Adams not just as a town and country, force and freedom,
writer who “yielded a harvest as rich, marked two modes of life and thought,
complicated, and varied as any Ameri- balanced like lobes of the brain.”
can thinker at any time” but as a white Balance was precariously main-
plutocrat inexorably exercising his tained, if at all. Quincy was no “bed of
privilege. thornless roses,” Adams notes. “There
During those thirty-three years, as elsewhere a cruel universe combined
Adams completed his masterly His- to crush a child.” He tells of the summer
tory of the United States During the day when he was about six and decided
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson he didn’t want to go to school. His stern
and James Madison (1889–1891) in grandfather emerged from his study,
nine well-researched volumes, as well grabbed his hat, took the boy’s hand,
as two literary chronicles, Mont Saint and silently walked him to the school-
Michel and Chartres and the Educa- house, whereupon the boy took his seat
tion. He composed a paper arguing and his grandfather finally let go of his
for Cuban independence that was read hand and went home, never having said
to the Senate Foreign Relations Com- a word. It must have been terrifying;
mittee, helped John Hay’s widow edit certainly it was memorable.
her husband’s correspondence, and The mistake in reading Adams back-
reluctantly accepted a commission to wards, from the perspective of the later
write a memorial biography of George Education, is that you miss his earlier
Cabot Lodge, the son of his former stu- exuberance. He could be enthusiastic,
dent Henry Cabot Lodge. At the same affectionate, comic, naive, inquisitive,
time, particularly in the 1890s, Adams and unpredictable. “I belong to the
spewed an odious and depressing anti- class of people who have great faith
Semitism. “Tinctured with snobbery in this country and who believe that
The New York Review
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in another century it will be saying in
its turn the last word of civilization,”
he declared in 1877. He had graduated
from Harvard in 1858; when his father
was reelected to the House of Repre-
sentatives two years later, the twenty-
two-year- old Adams joined him in
Washington and, as a young journalist,
wrote anonymous dispatches for the
Boston Daily Advertiser. He was “un-
usually well- connected if otherwise
untried,” Brown reminds us. When
President Lincoln appointed Henry’s
father minister to the Court of Saint
James in 1861, the younger Adams
went with him to London as his private
secretary. Anxiously he awaited news
from the war, “ashamed and humili-
ated” to be sitting there when so many
of his classmates were being killed
or wounded in battle. “Our cry now
must be emancipation and arming the
slaves,” he wrote his brother Charles
Jr., who had been commissioned as an
officer in the Union Army.
Adams did not return to America
until 1868, after the Civil War had
freed the slaves, cost more than 750,000
lives, and prompted a long- overdue
debate about citizenship, which, as
Brown rightly observes, seems not to
have interested him. Instead, plagued
by the problem of vocation, Adams
informed his brother, “I do mean to
make it impossible for myself to follow
the family go- cart.” Having finished a
debunking essay on the legend of Cap-
tain John Smith and two on finance, he
launched himself as an investigative
journalist—a practitioner of “upscale
muckraking,” Brown says, but one who
would castigate the spoils system, rail-
road monopolies, money-grubbing, and
“Thank you, again, for everything you
and Vitsœ have done for us over the
years. If only each shelf could talk…”
So wrote Marta, a customer
since 2004.
Her shelving system started out
modest – and has grown over the
years. It travelled with her across
London (above), to Valencia, and now
Amsterdam. Every time she needs
help, she speaks with her personal
Vitsœ planner, Robin.
In fact, this is the fifth time she has
bought from Vitsœ … and we’re fairly
sure it won’t be the last.
Marta has been able to buy an extra
shelf or two when needed, while
Robin has replanned her shelving to
16
the gilded greed of a country where
corporations, Adams wrote, could
“override and trample on law, custom,
decency, and every restraint known
to society, without scruple, and as yet
without check.”
Brown chides Adams for ignoring
the problem of race, which he largely
did, in essays that Brown says “bristled
with self-interest.” These essays “may
have irritated congressmen and singed
a spoilsman or two,” he declares, “but
they changed nothing.” According to
Brown, Adams “sometimes indulged
in the luxury of a well-petted woe.” (In
his intelligent Henry Adams in Wash-
ington (2020), Ormond Seavey reads
these essays in light of Adams’s dedica-
tion to democratic governance.) Brown
thinks Adams was hoping for an actual
seat at the political table. Possibly, but
he wanted to continue covering Wash-
ington right in the nation’s capital,
where, according to Ernest Samuels,
his Pulitzer Prize–winning biogra-
pher, he was “the ranking censor of
Congress.”
When offered a position at Harvard
teaching medieval history—about
which he knew nothing—Adams ini-
tially turned it down. His family then
pressured him to accept the offer;
doubtless they didn’t want a muckraker
on the loose. His father hoped to be
nominated for president in 1872 as the
candidate of the Liberal Republican
Party, which opposed Ulysses S. Grant
and promised, as Missouri senator Carl
Schurz, one of its founders, announced,
a government of only the “best men”—
white men, in other words, of rectitude
and moral value (i.e., themselves) who
detested government activism, corrup-
fit her Spanish walls and her Dutch huis.
He’s even sent her more packaging to
protect her shelves when moving to
each new home.
You could say that over the years
their relationship has become one of
friendship. Marta knows she is valued
as a customer and trusts the advice
she is given.
If your shelves could talk, what would
they say?
Design Dieter Rams
Founded 1959
vitsoe.com
tion, and corporate swindles. Instead,
Horace Greeley was nominated, argu-
ably not a best man.
At Harvard, Adams’s students would
remember him as a charismatic, stim-
ulating, and sympathetic teacher who
valued collaboration instead of rote
recitation. Yet he grew impatient. “Such
a swarm of prigs as we are turning out,
all formed by prigs,” he exclaimed.
In 1872 Adams and Marian (Clover)
Hooper wed. Though no one knows
much about the marriage, Adams
marveled, “How did I ever hit on the
only woman in the world who fits my
cravings and never sounds hollow
anywhere?” By all accounts Clover
was smart, acerbic, fascinated by pol-
itics, and prone to depression. Henry
James called her “a perfect Voltaire in
petticoats.” She was the daughter of a
widowed ophthalmologist whose fa-
ther was president of the largest bank
in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Brown
writes that “in deciding to marry, he
and Clover produced a union of dynas-
tic New England names—ancient, re-
spected, but inescapably bleaching into
the background.” Yet Clover’s uncle
was then serving in the House of Rep-
resentatives, and she herself would be-
come a fine portrait photographer. As
Brown acknowledges early in his book,
Adams would “attain national recogni-
tion.” The names had not bleached.
When Adams resigned from teach-
ing in 1877, the couple left for a pro-
tracted trip to Europe, where he
conducted research for his biography
of Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born
secretary of the treasury under Jeffer-
son and Madison, and for his magnum
opus on the Jefferson and Madison
administrations. Settling in Washing-
ton with a view of the White House,
the Adamses became lifelong friends
with John and Clara Hay and Clarence
King; they named themselves “the Five
of Hearts” to reflect Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow’s circle “the Five of Clubs,”
as Patricia O’Toole notes in The Five of
Hearts (1990), her excellent biography
of the group. Hay, who had been a pri-
vate secretary to President Lincoln and
later coauthor of his biography, was
then assistant secretary of state, and
King, who had written the best-selling
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,
was director of the US Geological Ex-
ploration of the Fortieth Parallel. (Un-
beknownst to Adams or Hay, in 1887
King would pass himself off as James
Todd, Pullman porter, to become the
common-law husband of a young Black
woman, Ada Copeland.)
When Adams wrote about failure,
he was likely thinking about King, who
died in 1901 at fifty-nine, alone and
impoverished in Arizona. Failure and
power: both were subjects observed
close at hand. “Power is poison,” he
wrote in the Education. Brown spec-
ulates that once back in Washing-
ton, though, Adams may have again
been hoping for a government posi-
tion—“not that Henry would have suf-
fered the ‘indignity’ of campaigning for
a public office”; his background “sug-
gested an alternative form of service:
appointment.” In fact, Adams declined
an ambassadorship to Central America
in 1882. He said he’d prefer people to
read his books; he was busy scouring
State Department archives to produce
what would become his great history of
the early years of the republic.
He was also writing novels: a roman
à clef, Democracy (1880), and Esther
(1884). A tidy dissection of political
machinations “as congenial to its time
as a prophet to a barbecue,” as the
critic Irving Howe put it, Democracy
asks if honest government is possible
in America. This is the question posed
by the character Madeline Lightfoot
Lee. “No representative government
can long be much better or much worse
than the society it represents,” her mor-
ally challenged suitor, Senator Silas B.
Ratcliffe, replies. “Purify society and
you purify the government.” More op-
timistically, Nathan Gore, a New En-
gland diplomat, disagrees:
Democracy asserts the fact that the
masses are now raised to a higher
intelligence than formerly. . . . I
grant it is an experiment, but it is
the only direction society can take
that is worth its taking.
In the second volume of his Adams
biography, Samuels describes the novel
as a “symposium on democratic gov-
ernment.” Anonymously published,
Democracy was later rumored to be
the handiwork of Henry James, and
in 1911 Adams playfully remarked,
“Really, of course, Henry James wrote
it, in connection with his brother Willy,
to illustrate Pragmatism.”
When he’d heard of his brother’s en-
gagement, Charles had cried that the
Hoopers were “crazy as coots.” Clover’s
sister would throw herself in front of a
train, and a brother would fall or jump
out of a third-story window. Regard-
less, posterity has occasionally won-
dered if Adams was partly to blame for
his wife’s suicide, as if his omitting her
from the Education suggests callous-
ness rather than a surfeit of feeling. In
1885, reeling from the death of her fa-
ther, to whom she was devoted, Clover
swallowed potassium cyanide, one of
her darkroom chemicals. Adams was
knocked to pieces. The next year, his
father died. “I have not had the good
luck to attend my own funeral,” Adams
confided, “but with that exception have
buried pretty nearly everything I lived
for.” In a cache of letters given to the
Massachusetts Historical Society not
long ago, he beautifully expresses the
grief that in Brown’s view had become
“tiresomely mordant.” Yet his letters to
friends who suffered any kind of loss,
even that of leaving home, were consis-
tently touching. As he told Edith Roo-
sevelt, “of all earthly trials, farewells
are the worst.”
After Clover’s suicide, Adams in-
vited the artist John La Farge to join
him in Japan for five months “in search
of diversion, in search of ‘death,’”
Brown claims, adding that “Japan ac-
commodated a growing tourist indus-
try of elites” who, “perhaps aching for
Old Boston, looked to Old Japan.” To
be sure, Adams traveled in style, but his
curiosity about all religions and about
various civilizations, even when he af-
fected to despise them, was boundless:
in a word, he was curious about life.
Among the places he visited were Cuba,
Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Australia, Sic-
ily, Russia, Turkey, Greece, the Bal-
kans, Sweden, the American Rockies,
and Norway. Though Brown considers
Adams a sentimentalizer who discov-
ered in the Samoans, for instance, his
own biases, he wrote forty-page letters
The New York Review
 James Turrell
First 4 x 5 Photograph of Roden Crater, 1978
Unique photograph
22 3/4 x 34 inches, 57.8 x 86.4 cm

James Turrell
Corrected RC Site Plan, 1988–1992
Ink on printed paper
35 x 45 inches, 12.7 x 114.3 cm

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April 8, 2021 17
 to his friends describing clothes, dance,
food, and forms of worship.
Back in Washington, Adams finally
New Books for completed the study of the Jefferson
and Madison administrations, which
Garry Wills, in his illuminating Henry
History Lovers Adams and the Making of America
(2005), called the “non-fiction prose
masterpiece of the nineteenth century
in America.” Modeling his book partly
on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Adams wrote with
panache, epigrammatic wit, and bril-
liance, demonstrating how the best of
“A prize-worthy intentions run afoul of circumstance or
chance. Opening the book, moreover,
page-turner of with four chapters on the geography
tension, suspense in various parts of the country and the
and drama [that] character of people in each—including
immigrants, who arrived in America
illuminate[s] these “not for love of ease” but for work—
women in the Adams also demonstrates how inno-
vation was regarded as unsound and
larger context of how reigning conservatives zealously
America’s biggest believed that “what had ever been must
ever be.”
foreign policy Consider too the historical figures:
disaster of the the enigmatic Jefferson, the heels on
his pointy boots worn down and tor-
20th century.” tured by “the rawness of political life,”
—–Asia Times learns that his peace policy “resulted
in the necessity of fighting.” Napoleon
is “like Milton’s Satan on his throne
of state,” and Toussaint Louverture,
wise and courageous, is too much like
Napoleon, which “roused Bonaparte’s
anger.” There is Aaron Burr, “the Me-
phistopheles of politics,” and the devi-
During a pivotal ous Timothy Pickering, whose “hatred
for Jefferson resembled the hatred of
few months in Cotton Mather for a witch.” Brown
1916, Germany, praises the History for its “dismissal of
elite leadership,” its international per-
Britain, and spective, and its reckoning of technol-
America were nearly ogy, and he understandably faults its
scant attention to slavery or to women.
successful in
“History never tells us what we
ending World War I; need to know!” Adams half-joked to
it would have saved a younger historian. “Did Methuselah
suffer from rheumatism? Did Odysseus
millions of lives mind weather?” From the sidelines he
and changed the remained involved with politics, sci-
ence, and culture, whether William
course of history Jennings Bryan’s campaign for free
utterly. silver or rock formations in Polynesia,
whether architecture or baseball or
thermodynamics. He disparaged Émile
Zola, Dreyfusards, Eugene Debs, and
socialism but detested Grover Cleve-
land’s idea that “the government can
safely use the army to shoot socialists.”
He called the press “the hired agent
of a monied system, and set up for no
“A masterpiece... other purpose than to tell lies where its
[ War
of Shadows] interests are involved.”
He unofficially advised Hay when
will remind readers he served as secretary of state under
of a cloak-and- William McKinley and Theodore
Roosevelt. (Roosevelt was “pure act,”
dagger tale by Adams famously said. Less famously:
John Le Carré “If you remark to him that God is
Great, he asks naively at once how that
with an armature will affect his election.”) He contained
of fascinating multitudes, changed his mind, vacil-
lated, vented ugly spleen against Jews,
historical and encouraged children to play with
annotation.” the dollhouse he kept behind a sliding
panel. It was initially bought for the
—–The Washington Post daughter of Elizabeth Cameron, the
married woman he loved passionately
but celibately after his wife’s death.
Available in hardcover,
Adams understood the predicament
of being a writer in America:
ebook, and audiobook from
My favorite figure of the American
author is that of a man who breeds
18
a favorite dog, which he throws
into the Mississippi River for the
pleasure of making a splash. The
river does not splash, but it drowns
the dog.
Undoubtedly frustrated by the indif-
ferent response to his History and still
seeking a mode of adequate expres-
sion, Adams turned instead to differ-
ent forms—retelling, for instance, the
life of the queen of Tahiti, in her voice,
based on his interviews.
In 1904 he privately published Mont
Saint Michel and Chartres, presum-
ably for the benefit of his many be-
loved nieces. Brown describes it as a
“cognitive palate- cleansing” that al-
lowed Adams to wander “a bit deeper
into the archaic.” In addition, he writes,
its “French-centric view of the Middle
Ages,” its exclusion of Old Norse sagas,
and its omission of the Western Schism,
when popes competed for parishioners,
produced a “truncated tale” of the me-
dieval world. Comparing Mont Saint Mi-
chel unfavorably to Mark Twain’s satiric
novel A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court (1889), which it in no
way resembles, Brown assumes that in
Twain the “remnants of feudalism con-
tinue to (negatively) impact modern life;
Adams, of course, mourns feudalism.”
Yet Adams intended Mont Saint
Michel and Chartres primarily as a
spiritual autobiography. With humor
and imagination, he interprets what he
reads and sees, such as the figure of the
Virgin Mary, as representing
the whole rebellion of man against
fate; the whole protest against di-
vine law; the whole contempt for
human law as its outcome; the
whole unutterable fury of human
nature beating itself against the
walls of its prison-house.
This is a wish, a plea, a vision best sum-
marized in the poetic description of a
Gothic cathedral that closes the book:
The delight of its aspirations is
flung up to the sky. The pathos
of its self- distrust and anguish of
doubt is buried in the earth as its
last secret. You can read out of it
whatever else pleases your youth
and confidence; to me, this is all.
“I have been trying to persuade peo-
ple that I don’t come from Boston and
am a heartless trifler,” Adams once
chortled. “If I stood on Fifth Avenue . . .
and in a state of obvious inebriety
hugged and kissed every pretty woman
that passed, they would only say that I
was a cold Beacon Street aristocrat.”
That might be true. It’s also true that
we read him for his pungent prose,
that restless voice, and those finely
balanced sentences, which maintain a
delicate equilibrium in spite of doubt,
self- distrust, unaccountable loss—and
the coming century. We read him for
his tragic sense of life and his ceaseless,
sadly fallible, unfailing attempt to un-
derstand it.
At the end of the Education, Adams
learns that John Hay has died. “Now, at
least, one had not that to fear for one’s
friend,” Adams quietly laments. “It
was time to go.” But Henry James had
reminded him that the act of writing “is
still an act of life.” Adams understood.
As he said back in 1867, “a life is not
such a tremendous time to learn to ex-
press your ideas.” Q
The New York Review
 A Time of Youth new
San Francisco, 1966–1967
WILLIAM GEDNEY from
LISA McCARTY, editor

Duke
Left of Queer
DAVID L. ENG and
JASBIR K. PUAR, issue editors
An issue of Social Text (145)

The Inheritance
ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI

Trans in a Time of HIV/AIDS

EVA HAYWARD and
CHE GOSSETT, issue editors
An issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (7:4)

The Life and Times of Louis Lomax

The Art of Deliberate Disunity
THOMAS AIELLO

The Powers of Dignity

The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass
NICK BROMELL

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April 8, 2021 19

Fake Accounts
by Lauren Oyler.
Catapult, 265 pp., $26.00
Why do I feel so bad all the time is the
question asked by so many young peo-
ple today. In order to sneak a bite-size
amount of control and warm feeling for
themselves, a privileged set of young
Americans mount laborious and costly
self- care rituals. Most of these devo-
tions, along with their requisite prod-
ucts, are designed by, marketed to, and
bought by women and those of us who
travel alongside them in these matters
(some gays, some femmes, some be-
yond gender, some misandrists). They
journal quietly for a time in the morn-
ings, before or during a tea, often using
luxurious and varied colors of ink, each
hue corresponding with a feeling or a
goal. They develop their handwriting
as anxiety-practice, they tidy up as
care-work. Later they envelop them-
selves in a surround-sound atmosphere
of humidifiers and oil diffusers, texting
their group chats lengthy quotes from
the latest overdue astrological trea-
tises. In the quiet afternoons and again
finally late at night, after much washing
and rinsing, they rest under ruinously
heavy blankets.
These behaviors manifest largely
because their work conditions feel so
stupid and degrading. Also, the ed-
ucational system on which they were
told to stake their hopes and identities
was actually a one-two K–12 punch of
compliance training and debt consum-
ership. Their health care system is an
extortionist sham, their democracy a
gerrymander of grifts and kleptocra-
cies that have—until quite recently,
perhaps?—succeeded in convincing a
sizable percentage of US citizens that
they do not matter. And the previous
generation is callously distant (we’re
sorry but not that sorry!), and the men
that enough of us feel compelled to
date are dishonest and uninterested in
regularly brushing their teeth.
More irritatingly, the contents of
the phones with which they spend so
much of their time are so hilarious, so
distracting. The devices, many of them
suspect, also serve to sap the hardiness
of a self that could resist and unmake
all these other indignities.
At night, hydrated but worn through,
their edibles kick in and they fall
asleep, waking up greasily, phones in
hand. Garbage in, garbage in. Another
day, another Daily Harvest bowl.
How should a person be? Sheila Heti
asked a decade ago; how should she
carry herself, relate to others, char-
acterize her day-to- day? The answer:
like a famous person, like the most
important person in any room. As the
main character in our own Instagram
Stories and Twitter Spaces and, more
recently, Clubhouses, we should spend
each day choosing what plot-advancing
adventures we will strive for next, to
everyone’s amazement and adoration.
Applause, please!
We like to think this bad situation is
new and we absolutely should blame
Mark Zuckerberg for all of it. But what
about the cluster of the condition—
this gold-medal girl-bossing of self-
care—that is, like, you know, actually
self-harm?
20
I, Phone
Choire Sicha
Lauren Oyler; illustration by Joanna Neborsky
For nearly two decades now, people
who wanted to be writers took their
liberal arts degrees to New York City
and found demeaning work produc-
ing “content”—making written words
to accompany, impersonate, or per-
form advertising in an endless loom-
ing, which now, as in biblical times, we
call a scroll. For many of us, this had
the glamour of seeming like writing
while also appearing to be a pleasur-
able and creative alternative to a real
job, particularly for those of us with
no actual skills or qualifications. We
“normalized” such work, building a
publishing ecosystem that recognizes
only the always-unfolding creamy taffy
of content.
The frenzy for stuff—more morning
outrage snacks of lite news about human
cruelty, more service-y swipeable In-
stagram carousels, more newly edited,
less-imperialism-infused recipes, more
less-racist podcasts, more clicks, an
ever-better ranking of “unique visi-
tors” on Comscore, the better to delight
advertisers—has evolved but never
abated. So far in this millennium every
emerging writer who couldn’t crack
the refined pages of n+1, but who still
wanted something better, casually sold
a piece of her trauma for fifty bucks to
xoJane, the short-lived lifestyle brand-
cum-magazine for feminists who didn’t
want to do the assigned reading. All
the while she worked on her novel, as
if Elena Ferrante had ever passed her
days feverishly recapping Riverdale for
some Naples tourist blog, or as if Edith
Wharton wrote extended treatises de-
nouncing stale forms of the interior
decor of ballrooms. (Oh, whoops, she
did.)
The secret of becoming a writer in a
moment like this—has it always been
true?—is that attention will be paid if
you absolutely demand it. Some, de-
siring something better, writing all
clackity- clackity, rise above the chum.
For the talented who are also lucky,
the work goes beyond the shareable
and the merely readable and is judged
worthwhile. Even in this chaotic age we
can enjoy a little golden moment of lit-
erature as a treat. Now we have a large
crop of young people who are success-
ful at explaining the present moment.
They are, spicily and blessedly, not in
consensus.
Chief among those who are explica-
tors of these issues of selfhood, labor,
and cultural consumption in our time is
the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino—
if you judge by the frequency and speed
that her 2019 essay collection Trick
Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
became the object that people would
place next to their yoga mats or beet
lattes for Instagram photos. (Disclo-
sure: I have done yoga with her.) Else-
where in the truth and making-sense
department, you have the writings of
Ijeoma Oluo and Lindy West and Tres-
sie McMillan Cottom; the analyses of
Doreen St. Félix and Patricia Lock-
wood and Jenny Odell, Amanda Mull
and Lauren Michele Jackson; the mad
memes of Maddy Court; the sane rav-
ings of Cat Marnell. There are happily
many more people to read now. (And
somewhere, some of them are men.)
Also, I am leaving out the astrologers,
though at least three of those writers
would scold me for that.
And then there is Lauren Oyler. Sup-
posedly she’s the mean one.
Oyler graduated from Yale about a
decade ago; she lives in Ithaca and Ber-
lin now. She has declined, she has said,
to exploit her West Virginia upbring-
ing, an identity- condition that people
in New York media, just now becoming
accustomed to the fact that there are
Texans, probably still find exotic and
monetizable—“the implication being
that, just as I benefited from it on my
college applications, I might benefit
from it professionally,” she once wrote.
Through the kaleidoscope of recent
history, she is often said to have made
her name with criticism of America’s
next top totemic feminists: a piece
picking apart the writer and colum-
nist Roxane Gay, and a less cruel take
on Tolentino that was still treated as
a pearl- clutcher. In the case of Gay,
Oyler mostly hated the writing; with
Tolentino, she distrusted the thinking.
Was either essay genuinely brutal? It
depends on whose standards you’re
using—Gay is hilariously harder on
any number of people on Twitter in
any given week than Oyler ever was
on her—and if your standards evolved
in a liberal arts college cuddle puddle.
Oyler, on a press tour recently for Fake
Accounts, her debut novel, noted that
we’ve become accustomed to “more or
less positive criticism or only tepidly
questioning criticism,” making any sort
of severity stand out. Honestly, we’re
here for the drama, and it’s wonderful
that—in this economy!—anyone will
raise her voice at all.
The criticism of Gay appeared on
the blog Bookslut in 2014; the review
of Tolentino was published in the Lon-
don Review of Books in 2020. Between
these provocations, there was much
content. Oyler, like Tolentino, has done
her time in the Internet factory.
“This Ranking of 84 ‘Twin Peaks’
Characters Will Make You Extremely
Mad” is a 2017 Vice listicle she wrote
that placed David Lynch’s own char-
acter, Gordon Cole, in the number
one slot. “I would give myself the best
character as well,” she concludes—fore-
shadowing herself! She is the author of
“Charlie Chaplin Was a Sadistic Tyrant
Who Fucked Teenage Girls” as well as
“MILF Madness: Why So Many Men
Want to Fuck Moms.” What’s notable
here is that, while Oyler has over the
past decade refined her methods and her
outlets, she arrived stylistically intact.
Her arch blogging and her fairly ge-
neric embrace of social media were
not any kind of problem for her. “In
the two years since I went freelance,”
she wrote in 2018 in The Baffler, “I’ve
written three books”—the first two
are not novels and were written with/
for Alyssa Mastromonaco, who went
from the Obama White House to Vice
Media—
and many long essays, had two se-
rious relationships and an active
The New York Review
 Bisa
Butler
NOW OP EN

Portraits

Catalogue available at publications.artic.edu

Bisa Butler: Portraits is co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and

the Katonah Museum of Art.

Corporate Sponsor Major funding for Bisa Butler: Portraits is contributed by the Cavigga
Family Trust. Additional support is provided by The Joyce Foundation
and Darrel and Nickol Hackett. Bisa Butler. Broom Jumpers (detail),
2019. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Purchase with the Belle and
Hy Baier Art Acquisition Fund. ©Bisa Butler. Photo by Margaret Fox.

April 8, 2021 21
 social life, and traveled frequently,
all while tweeting—as a rough es-
timate gleaned from the program
I use that deletes all my posts that
are older than ninety days—be-
tween two hundred and four hun-
dred times per month.
The point of the essay is how unhappy
Twitter makes all of us who use it. Yes,
but reading the above it’s hard not to
think: Well didn’t we almost have it all!
Oyler has now published a novel
about the situation of having a phone.
Knowing that Fake Accounts, about
a young content creator and social
media addict who schlepped off to
Berlin, as she did, would be read with
some squinting to determine whether
she herself was the main character,
she used the opportunity to lean in, to
build an Oyler-shaped stunt double of
a narrator—“building up this fake per-
sona that was still definitely connected
to my real self,” she told Elle. Fake Ac-
counts is her fake account.
F ake Accounts takes place at the onset
of the Trump administration. There are
pussy hats. But the psychic rupture of
the debut of the Trump times is back-
drop for a story that is mostly about
the effects of exposure to the Internet
on the self. A young nameless female
narrator meets a man named Felix in
Berlin. They shack up in Brooklyn and
settle into one of those relationships
you have when you’re young and aren’t
paying enough attention to the brevity
of life. Soon enough the narrator “dis-
covers” that Felix has a confounding
other life inside his phone. “His pass-
22
word, numerical, was long and, as far as
I could tell, random,” she writes, “and
I was only able to figure it out after
weeks of surreptitiously watching him
tap it out whenever I could, acquiring
new numbers out of sequence one by
one.”
Felix’s Instagram account is loa-
ded with the sort of anti- Semitic
Jewish-space-lasers-are-responsible-for-
wildfires George Soros–blaming mish-
mash imagery that proliferates so
handsomely on social media. His secret
passion isn’t adult babies or video game
characters doing sexy things. It’s much
more perverted. He gets off on propa-
gating conspiracies.
With this surprise, the narrator’s
status as the main character in all she
touches—her work, the Internet, her
relationship—is upended. And before
she has the chance to break up with
him, Felix dies, she’s told, in a bike ac-
cident. Oh, well:
This might have disturbed me,
but I remembered that I rejected
sentimentality for sentimentality’s
sake, and that I was in the unique
situation of being in a unique situ-
ation, with no burdensome expec-
tation for my grief or lack thereof.
Was there something to be sad
about? I had been with a person;
I had come to see him as despica-
ble; twinges of doubt about that
assessment were chalked up to
memories and hormones and ulti-
mately redoubled my certainty of
his contemptibility; now we were
no longer together. I had already
mentally separated from Felix,
who had become, I guess you could
S P R I N G 2 0 21
BIZARRE-PRIVILEGED
ITEMS IN THE UNIVERSE:
THE LOGIC OF LIKENESS
by Paul North
“At once free and rigorous,
impertinent and lucid . . .
a philosophical tour de force.”
— GE OR GE S D ID I- HUB E RM AN
ABSENTEES: ON VARIOUSLY
MISSING PERSONS
by Daniel Heller-Roazen
“Weaves scholarly rigor together
with theoretical vision . . .
Heller-Roazen is operating
at the height of his powers.”
— BE RNAD E TTE MEY LER
N E W I N PA P E R BAC K
HISTORICAL GRAMMAR
OF THE VISUAL ARTS
by Aloïs Riegl
“A crucial precedent for the
current reevaluation of
the theory and practice of
art history today.”
— BE NJAM IN B IN STOC K
DIS TRIBUT ED BY
PRIN CETON U N IVE RS ITY PR ES S
ONL INE AT Z ON EBOO K S.O R G
say, despite it seeming a little on
the nose, dead to me.
The most disgusting thing on the
Internet is what the kids now call
“cringe.” You know you’ve seen cringe
when you feel a flush of shame on be-
half of someone else, including when
you see a raw display of emotion. Such
emotions begin to roil beneath the nar-
rator’s well-moisturized carapace. “A
woman I worked with used a photo of
a pink neon sign that read ‘FEELINGS’
in all capital letters as the background
image on one of her social media ac-
counts,” Oyler writes:
FEELINGS were popular at the
time—expressing them was seen
as a kind of feminist statement, the
reclamation of an “inappropriate”
femininity previously dismissed
as frivolous or hysterical, and as
a result people were constantly
declaring (on social media) the
intensity of their emotions: about
celebrities, about television, about
heavy-handedly alluded-to roman-
tic turmoil, about pizza, about cute
animals, about deadlines. . . . I had
identified with the impulse to ex-
press profligately at times, though
I tried not to act on it, because the
people who declared their emo-
tions in this way were annoying. . . .
Now that I had actual feelings, un-
likely given the almost-laughable
originality of the situation to have
been anticipated, I could say for
certain the whole trend was ab-
surd. Feelings are nothing like a
pink neon sign at all.
Swollen with these indigestible emo-
tions, she returns to Berlin and does
absolutely nothing. The middle parts
of the book are, handily, labeled “MID-
DLE .” One part bears the description
“(Nothing Happens).” She reads Twit-
ter until there are no more tweets. She
washes her face. Her skin-care routine
is epic, but the rest of her life takes
place on her phone.
Her phone that, Oyler suggests, is
just a tarot deck of the actual psychic
ailment. Every one of us simply has,
in our liquid-glass pocket devices, an
elaborate and expensive new venue
in which to process, as they say rather
a bit too frequently, our trauma. It’s
what’s inside you that is so rotten.
“After about two weeks I woke up
one morning and decided: I needed
to meet people.” To advance her own
character arc, corrupted by betrayal
and the Internet and the soundtrack of
her E•MO•TIONs, our heroine begins
dating. On these dates she cannot stop
lying about who she is. She decides to
assume personalities based on signs
of the zodiac. Her Aries persona is a
zealous acupuncturist, obviously. The
men, though, seem unable to notice
her elaborate and under-researched
passions: “These people just wanted
to talk about themselves. They weren’t
giving me a chance to talk about my
characters.” She doubles down. She
does know who she is, probably, even
as she tells everyone she’s someone
else. It just occurred to her with some
finality that she doesn’t like herself that
much.
This is a portrait of a person made in-
credibly ill by the Internet. She may be
going mad and trying to take us down
with her. “What can we learn from lit-
erature? Sometimes things may feel
like they’ve been going on forever, but
really it’s only been about forty pages,”
she tells us around this point. She is the
kind of person who requires something
terrible to happen to her before it is
too late to do anything about who she
is. Some of us are. We’re probably the
lucky ones.
It’s now been four years since what can
seem from here the quiet and unchaotic
American days of Fake Accounts’s mo-
ment, late 2016 and early 2017. What
a golden age! By Q4 of 2020, I could
no longer reliably perform simple as-
sessments of the operations of my self,
not only deciding if I was important to
the story of my life or the story of the
lives around me but even identifying if
I was hungry. I could not reliably say if
I was sick, lonely, or resentful. This was
a skill I thought I’d mastered decades
ago, as all Gen Xers must, in our man-
datory outpatient rehab sessions. But
here I was again. All around me, oth-
ers were hitting this wall as well, each
at her own pace. Plunk, plunk, another
friend bites the dust.
Sometimes I would need to pause in
my workday to ask: Was I happy? Or
was I, instead, very sad? After a prob-
ing self- exam, I would find that I was
experiencing not an emotion but in-
stead a physical sensation, such as tooth
pain or over- caffeination, or maybe a
state that is not an emotion but an emo-
tionally tinged or hued thought (rue,
shame), as if the candle-scent chemists
from diptyque had gone full pandemic
and then shoved their latest foul cre-
ation inside me.
It has only gotten harder, the arrival
of Oyler’s book now shows us, to can-
cel the degradations of the self with the
care of the self.
I once sat in a meeting about the
meaning of self- care with a group
of young women and one straight (I
guess!) middle-aged man. The ques-
tion was: What do you do to take care
of yourself each day? “Well, I wash
my face,” the man tried. Each of the
women present related how she began
her day with a regimen of journaling
followed by a full-time-job’s worth of
emotional and physical maintenance.
I was impressed, since my basic state
is doglike torpor, and I wondered how
much suffering each of them would
experience without these practices.
Maybe they would be locked up raving
somewhere. Or maybe, freed from the
burdens of our anxieties and skin suits,
each would be running a Fortune 500
company. Which fate would be worse,
anyway? Who were we, I couldn’t help
but wonder (insert Carrie Bradshaw–
typing sound effect), behind the Korean
skin masks we showed one another?
The question of our time is not,
unfortunately, about how America
created a system of poorly regulated
militias that respond, instead of social
workers, to people in distress, or why
canned pumpkin isn’t even pumpkin,
or why we insist on carrying phones
that identify us so readily to advertisers
and the government, but: Who is the
most important person in my life—it’s
definitely me, right? Social media and
the self- care industries, colluding and
kinky partners in capitalist crime, say
you must always put yourself first. They
tell us that every other place is last.
Any life spent assessing and asserting
your ranking in this world will take you
to some truly ugly places. Q
The New York Review
 S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
A Matter of Death and Life
Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom
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—Abraham Verghese,
author of Cutting for Stone
REDWOOD PRESS
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Beau Breslin
“A fascinating work of counterfactual history.
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Fault Lines in the Constitution
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“This book zeroes in on something
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23
 Weaponizing the Web
This Is How They Tell
Me the World Ends: The
Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth.
Bloomsbury, 491 pp., $30.00
A few weeks before the pub-
lication in early February of
This Is How They Tell Me the
World Ends, Nicole Perlroth’s
disquieting account of the
global trade in cyberweapons,
multiple US government agen-
cies and major corporations
learned that they had been
hit with one of the biggest
cyberattacks in history. By all
accounts, the operation—dis-
covered in early December
by the security firm FireEye,
whose own closely guarded
hacking tools were stolen—
had been going on for at least
nine months. Hackers believed
to be agents of the Russian for-
eign intelligence service, SVR,
appear to have embedded mal-
ware into a routine software
upgrade from SolarWinds,
a Texas-based IT company.
When hundreds of the 18,000
users of the firm’s Orion net-
work management system
downloaded the upgrade, the malware
opened those systems to the hackers.
Further analysis revealed that about a
third of the victims had not been Solar-
Winds clients, and thus the hackers
must have been using other tactics in
addition to the “trojanized” Orion soft-
ware. Another point of entry may have
been a backdoor in software developed
by a Czech company called JetBrains,
run by Russian nationals, that supplies
its software testing product, Team-
City, to 300,000 businesses around the
world, one of which is SolarWinds.
In fact, as reported by The New York
Times, the hackers used multiple strat-
egies to compromise the networks of
an estimated 250 companies and fed-
eral agencies, including the Commerce
Department, the Pentagon, the State
Department, and the Department of
Justice. According to the Associated
Press, they “probably gained access
to the vast trove of confidential infor-
mation hidden in sealed documents,
including trade secrets, espionage tar-
gets, whistleblower reports and arrest
warrants.” Microsoft’s network was
also hacked, and the source code to
three of its products, including its cloud
computing service, Azure, was stolen.
None of the alarms put in place by
the government or private companies
to detect such intrusions was tripped.
In the daily White House press brief-
ing on February 17, Anne Neuberger,
the deputy national security adviser
for cyber and emerging technology,
pointed out that “the intelligence com-
munity largely has no visibility into
private sector networks. The hack-
ers launched the hack from inside the
United States, which further made it
difficult for the US government to ob-
serve their activity.”
In their analysis of the attack, se-
curity researchers at Microsoft found
that the hackers’ methods included
hijacking authentication credentials
24
Sue Halpern
Illustration by Anders Nilsen
and password spraying—testing com-
monly used passwords on thousands of
accounts at a time, hoping that at least
one would be the key that turns the
lock. Login credentials are for sale on
the dark web, as Perlroth, who covers
cybersecurity for The New York Times,
found out when a hacker she was inter-
viewing accurately relayed to her what
she thought was her own clever and
secure e-mail password. (She quickly
changed it and began using two-factor
authentication.)
Hackers can also gain entry to com-
puter systems by phishing, in which they
cast a wide net, indiscriminately send-
ing official-looking e-mails to, say, the
members of an organization or employ-
ees of a company, in an effort to trick at
least one of them into sharing login cre-
dentials or opening a document spiked
with malicious code. Spear-phishing is
similar but targeted at a particular indi-
vidual. These lucrative and disruptive
techniques were used in 2016 to gain
access to Clinton campaign adviser
John Podesta’s e-mails (which were
then archived and made searchable on
WikiLeaks) and to launch municipal
ransomware attacks like the one in Bal-
timore in 2019 that disabled the city’s
computer systems—disrupting work in
hospitals, airports, the judicial system,
and elsewhere and preventing people
from being able to pay their water bills,
parking tickets, and property taxes—
and ultimately cost the city $18.2 mil-
lion in repairs and lost revenue. (The
$100,000 ransom was not paid.)
Since 2017, when an anonymous
group calling itself the Shadow Bro-
kers stole and then released a cache of
the NSA’s most coveted hacking tools,
hackers working on behalf of nation-
state intelligence agencies and militar-
ies all over the world have had access to
a sophisticated stockpile of exploits that
they’ve used to infiltrate government
computer networks on an enormous
scale. (An exploit is typically defined
as an attack on a computer system
that takes advantage of a weakness or
error in its code.) Russia’s cyberattack
on Ukraine that year, which Perlroth
calls “the most destructive and costly
cyberattack in world history,” made use
of the NSA tools to shut down banks,
transportation services, monitors at the
site of the former Chernobyl nuclear fa-
cility, and government offices, and had
ripple effects around the globe, caus-
ing more than $10 billion in damages.
Cybercriminals and hackers have also
been aided by the theft and subsequent
release of Vault 7, an arsenal of hacking
tools developed by or for the CIA that
WikiLeaks conveniently organized and
archived.
The world’s most expert hackers
comb through computer code look-
ing for programming errors that will
provide access to computer networks.
These software glitches are called
“zero- days,” or “0- days” (pronounced
“oh- days”), because at the moment
a hacker discovers one, it’s been zero
days since the software developer has
found and fixed the flaw. As Perlroth
describes it, a zero- day shields spies
and cybercriminals with “a cloak of
invisibility,” allowing unfettered, un-
detected access to a computer network:
In that one little snippet of a soft-
ware update, you might be able to
inject code into a web server that
causes it to turn over the source
code to the voicemail applica-
tion. . . . Or you might find the gold
mine—a remote code execution
bug, the kind of bug that allows a
hacker to run code of his choosing
on the application from afar.
A recent study by Google’s Project
Zero of last year’s zero- day attacks
found that, had software vendors prop-
erly patched their known vulnerabili-
ties, 25 percent of the attacks
could have been prevented.
This Is How They Tell Me
the World Ends is a vivid and
provocative chronicle of Perl-
roth’s travels through the
netherworld of the global cy-
berweapons arms trade. If
the book’s title sounds over-
wrought, it’s because these
hacking tools can give intrud-
ers access to critical infrastruc-
ture such as nuclear facilities,
the power grid, industrial con-
trol systems, air traffic con-
trol, and waterworks, and thus
have the capacity to become
weapons of mass destruction.
But they are relatively cheap
compared with other weapons
of mass destruction, and for
sale in a market that is robust,
largely out of sight, and wel-
coming to anyone with piles of
cash at their disposal, whatever
their motivation. This is not
theoretical. Perlroth reports,
for example, that Russia is al-
ready inside systems that op-
erate US dams, nuclear power
facilities, and pipelines, giving
it the capacity to “unleash the locks at
the dams, trigger an explosion, or shut
down power to the grid.”
In 2013, Perlroth recounts, she was
summoned by her bosses at The New
York Times to be part of the small team
of journalists from The Guardian, the
Times, and ProPublica to examine and
report on the classified documents sto-
len by the former NSA contractor Ed-
ward Snowden. As she went through
them, she noticed that the documents
“hinted at a lively outsourcing trade [in
zero- days] with the NSA’s ‘commercial
partners’ and ‘security partners.’” Her
curiosity piqued, Perlroth pursued this
lead for the next seven years, unfazed
by warnings from both Leon Panetta,
the former secretary of defense and di-
rector of the CIA, and General Michael
Hayden, the former director of both
the NSA and the CIA, who told her that
“getting to the bottom of the zero- day
market was a fool’s errand.” Though
the questions she was asking were
straightforward—who was searching
for zero- days, who was weaponizing
them, and who was paying for them—
the answers, like the hackers them-
selves, were for the most part elusive.
The trade in zero- days mirrors the
expansion of digitization and connec-
tivity that has come to define much of
our lives, as well as the proliferation of
the code that powers it. In 1993, the year
that Mosaic, the first graphical browser,
was released, fewer than 15 million
people worldwide had access to the In-
ternet from a mainframe or personal
computer. Data was typically stored
locally, on disks and paper; hard- drive
capacity was severely limited. Today
there are close to five billion Internet
users—well over half of the people on
earth—and at least 30 billion Internet-
connected devices, from smartphones
to pacemakers to tractors to biometric
sensors to surveillance systems, with
127 new devices connected to the Web
The New York Review
every second. Each one of them is vul-
nerable to an attack. So are the servers
that power cloud computing, where so
much of the world’s data is stored.
In the early days of personal comput-
ing, hunting for flaws in software was the
domain of hobbyists who rooted around
software code for fun and bragging
rights, not for profit. Typically, in those
early days, when hackers alerted soft-
ware developers to the vulnerabilities in
their code, they were ignored. Perlroth
argues that Microsoft was so intent on
dominating personal computing during
the late 1990s that it intentionally over-
looked known flaws in its Internet Ex-
plorer browser that gave hackers access
to Microsoft customers worldwide. This
changed in 2001, when a bug in the
browser enabled hackers to “brick”—
render useless—hundreds of thousands
of computers across the globe and later
take hundreds of thousands of Micro-
soft customers offline. The attack’s ul-
timate target, the White House website,
was apparently able to resist it.
Then, a week after September 11,
hackers launched what was then the
biggest cyberattack in the world.
Called Nimda, it infected e-mail, hard
drives, and servers, and impeded Inter-
net traffic. “Before 9/11, there were so
many holes in Microsoft’s products that
the value of a single Microsoft exploit
was virtually nothing,” Perlroth writes.
“After 9/11, the government could no
longer let Microsoft’s security issues
slide.” Instead of turning over their dis-
coveries to the software developers to
patch, hackers began selling them, some
in a black market conducted mainly
online and others in a “gray market”
of brokers that sell, for the most part,
to governments. Suddenly software
bugs were worth something, and a new
“industry”—pecunia ex machina—was
born. Private companies like Micro-
soft, Amazon, and Apple, as well as
some government agencies, now hold
“bug bounty” competitions to encour-
age hackers all over the world to search
for coding errors, but the prize money
pales in comparison with what can be
made on the black and gray markets.
Not surprisingly, Perlroth had a hard
time getting anyone in this world to
talk to her. To acknowledge their activi-
ties is to acknowledge a business whose
principals largely would like to keep
hidden. Eventually, Perlroth tracked
down a man—she gives him the name
Jimmy Sabien—who had been a zero-
day broker in the early 2000s. He’d
pay hackers—the best, he said, were
from Israel, and many also came from
Eastern Europe—for software glitches
that his firm would parlay into exploits
that were then sold to US intelligence
services, the Pentagon, and law en-
forcement. A run- of-the-mill bug in Mi-
crosoft Windows might go for $50,000,
Sabien told her, while something more
obscure might net twice that. “A bug
that allowed the government’s spies to
burrow deep into an adversary’s sys-
tem, undetected, and stay awhile,” he
said, could go for three times as much.
(In true cloak-and-dagger style, buyers
would show up at a transaction site with
duffel bags full of cash.)
Since then, the prices have skyrock-
eted and the buyers have proliferated.
In 2013 Perlroth was told that the mar-
ket had already surpassed $5 billion.
The same year, the NSA added $25
million to its budget, apparently to
April 8, 2021
buy zero- days. More recently, Perlroth
points out, foreign governments—es-
pecially, she says, oil-rich Middle East-
ern countries, Israel, Britain, India,
Russia, and Brazil—have been willing
to match US prices, especially after
the discovery in 2010 of Stuxnet, a ma-
licious computer worm unleashed on
Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at
Natanz, which caused numerous cen-
trifuges to burn out and demonstrated,
in a very public way, the sly destruc-
tive potential of weaponized zero-
days to wreak havoc in the physical
world. (The attack is widely believed
to have been a joint Israeli-American
operation, though neither country has
claimed credit for it.) The consequence
has been an inscrutable yet escalating
arms race that appears to have no limit.
Because cyberweapons are inexpen-
sive in comparison with traditional
ordnance and are available for anyone
to discover, they have diminished the
security advantage held by countries
with outsize defense budgets. Shortly
after the Stuxnet attack, for example,
Iran mobilized what it claimed was the
fourth-largest cyber army in the world,
which then unleashed a sustained two-
year assault on forty-six American
banks and financial companies that
shut people out of their accounts and
cost those institutions millions of dol-
lars. The hackers also breached the con-
trols of an American dam. While it was
the wrong one—the hackers apparently
confused a small dam in Westchester
County, New York, with a major dam
in Oregon—it demonstrated the threat
to essential, life-sustaining infrastruc-
ture posed by weaponized computer
code. Perlroth recalls seeing a young
Iranian at a hacking conference in
Miami demonstrate how to break into
the power grid in five seconds:
With his access to the grid, [he]
told us, he could do just about any-
thing he wanted: sabotage data,
turn off the lights, blow up a pipe-
line or chemical plant by manipu-
lating its pressure and temperature
gauges. He casually described each
step as if he were telling us how to
install a spare tire, instead of the
world- ending cyberkinetic attack
that officials feared imminent.
While the prospect of mutually as-
sured destruction may keep adver-
saries from launching such an attack
on each other—General Mark Mil-
ley suggested in July 2019, during his
confirmation hearing to become head
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that if our
adversaries “know that we have in-
credible offensive capability, then that
should deter them from conducting
attacks on us in cyber”—all bets are
off with terrorists and rogue nations.
As the Department of Defense wrote
in its first “Strategy for Operating in
Cyberspace,” in 2011, “The potential
for small groups to have an asymmetric
impact in cyberspace creates very real
incentives for malicious activity.” Ear-
lier this year, for example, a hacker of
unknown origin broke into the water
supply of a city outside Tampa, Florida,
remotely commandeered the controls,
and raised the amount of lye—used
in small quantities to control the acid-
ity of drinking water—to toxic levels.
(Workers watched the attack unfold
over three to five minutes and, when
it was over, immediately restored the
chemical composition of the water.) In-
dustrial control systems, many of which
are poorly defended, have become a
preferred target of malicious actors
aiming to undermine civil society.*
Years ago, when American intelli-
gence agencies added the exploitation of
coding errors to their surveillance tool
kit, the practice must have seemed like
a systems upgrade: instead of having to
trail a suspected terrorist, for example,
one could simply hack into his phone
to acquire a comprehensive account
of where he went, who he communi-
cated with, and what they said. Instead
of having to get a warrant to tap that
phone, they could listen in on the un-
derwater fiber- optic cables that carried
Internet traffic. It’s unclear when, pre-
cisely, the US merged spying in cyber-
space with the deployment of offensive
cyberweapons, but in 2009, as the Stux-
net attack was underway, the Defense
Department’s Cyber Command and the
NSA were put under a single director-
ate. Four years later, according to doc-
uments leaked by Snowden, President
Obama directed senior intelligence of-
ficers to come up with a list of potential
cyberattack targets, including foreign
infrastructure and computer systems.
One fundamental difference between
traditional weapons and digital weap-
ons is that traditional weapons are tac-
tile objects that exist in the material
world. Digital ordnance is obscure—a
hieroglyphics of zeros and ones that be-
gins with a coding error that could have
been discovered by multiple hackers
and be stored in any number of nation-
state, criminal, or terrorist arsenals.
According to a study by the RAND
Corporation, zero- day exploits don’t
remain secret for long—about eighteen
months.
Perlroth never says how buyers like
the NSA can be sure that sellers are not
double- dealing, though she does tell
the story of an American contracting
company that, after being paid millions
of dollars to secure the DOD’s com-
puter system, subcontracted with an-
other American firm that then farmed
out the labor to coders in Russia, be-
cause they worked for cheap. The Rus-
sians were able to riddle the Pentagon’s
security software with backdoors that
opened the system to the foes it was
meant to keep out.
And then there was the broker who
believed he could tell, magically, if the
buyers of his exploits were—true to
their word—planning on using them
exclusively on bad guys. But when one
of his clients, an Italian firm called
the Hacking Team, was itself hacked,
leaked e-mails and invoices conclu-
sively showed that the Hacking Team
was supplying digital weapons to some
of the most egregious human rights
abusers on the planet, including Turkey
and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Those countries are also buying the
services of former elite NSA hackers,
lured by exorbitant salaries and luxuri-
ous lifestyles. When a former NSA em-
ployee named David Evenden moved
to the UAE in 2014 to work for the Abu
Dhabi government (under the auspices
of an American security contractor
called CyberPoint), he was told—and
he assumed—he was helping an ally
fight the war on terror. Before long he
*For more on this subject, see my arti-
cle “The Drums of Cyberwar” in these
pages, December 19, 2019.
was also tunneling deep into the net-
works of Qatar and its royals—again
under the guise of sniffing out terror-
ists—which segued into spear-phishing
human rights activists and journalists.
At the request of his Emirati bosses,
Evenden wrote what he thought was a
dummy e-mail inviting a British jour-
nalist to a fake human rights confer-
ence, just to show them how such an
e-mail could be used to collect all sorts
of personal information once the recip-
ient opened it. Unbeknownst to him, the
e-mail, which was laden with spyware
that revealed the journalist’s password,
contacts, messages, keystrokes, and GPS
location, was actually sent by his bosses.
It wasn’t until Evenden found himself,
in 2015, inadvertently hacking First
Lady Michelle Obama’s e-mails that he
quit. Subsequently, Perlroth writes:
CyberPoint’s digital fingerprints
were all over the hacks of some
four hundred people around the
world, including several Emiratis,
who were picked up, jailed, and
thrown into solitary confinement
for . . . so much as questioning the
ruling monarch in their most inti-
mate personal correspondence.
Is it naive to imagine that there could
ever be an ethics to this market? Many
of the sellers claim they are dealing in
“information,” not weapons. Many of
them are uninterested in the supply
chain that leads from them to govern-
ments that use that “information” to
spy on dissidents and journalists and
to engage in ethnic cleansing. The few
efforts in this country to impose limits
on what can and can’t be sold, and to
whom, have met with resistance, most
notably in 2015, when the Commerce
Department tried—and failed—to re-
quire a license to export cybersecurity
products. While black-market zero- day
sellers have been criminally prosecuted
under the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act, that law exempts gray-market
brokers who sell to the government.
Therein lies the hitch. As long as the
discovery and trade in zero- days can
be justified on the grounds of national
security, there will be little incentive to
regulate it. But as long as the govern-
ment is committed to stockpiling zero-
days and keeping their existence secret,
rather than revealing them in order to
get them patched, national—as well as
international—security is also at risk.
Further complicating efforts to im-
pose constraints on the sale, weapon-
ization, and deployment of zero- days
and other cyberweapons is the global
reach of digital technology, including
the Internet itself. Without interna-
tional agreements, national regulation
alone may lead to perceived or real vul-
nerabilities. But despite the potential
dangers that cyberweapons pose, the
nature of those weapons makes them
unamenable to conventional arms con-
trol treaties. How, for instance, can
cyberweapons, whose power derives
from their secrecy, be monitored? And
then there’s the problem of attribution.
Countries have gotten good at plausible
deniability. They’ve also taken to im-
personating one another, as we saw in
2019 when Russian hackers, disguised
as Iranian hackers, whose tools they’d
stolen, targeted thirty-five countries.
A more manageable strategy has
been to try to get countries to agree not
to attack hospitals, the electric grid,
and other critical infrastructure, but
25
even that has been fraught. For a brief
moment in 2015, during UN-brokered
conversations between Obama and
Chinese president Xi Jinping—in
which they agreed, in principle, to
abide by a such an accord—a limited
but essential brake on the most dan-
gerous uses of cyberweapons seemed
possible. Perlroth notes that the Trump
administration’s aggressive stance on
China, however, erased whatever fellow
feeling arose from those conversations.
In 2018, after a two-year slowdown,
Chinese hackers—who had already
stolen blueprints for the F-35 fighter
jet—resumed aggressively infiltrating
American computer networks. In early
King Rocker
a documentary film
directed by Michael Cumming
and written by Stewart Lee
In the opening moments of King
Rocker, a new documentary about
the English post-punk musician Rob-
ert Lloyd, the comedian Stewart Lee
stands at the entrance to a large shop-
ping center in Birmingham and speaks
about a work of art that used to be there
and now isn’t. The dreary commercial
space, we learn, once contained a strik-
ing piece of public sculpture by the pop
artist Nicholas Monro: a gigantic fi-
berglass effigy of King Kong, his eyes
incandescent, his arms raised in fury.
The sculpture, Lee says, was installed
there for a short time in the early 1970s,
as part of a scheme whereby British
cities were offered works of public art
for six months and then given the op-
portunity to buy them if they proved
popular. Monro’s King Kong, however,
was spurned by the people of Birming-
ham—a city, Lee tells us, with “a great
history of rejecting its culture.”
He then delivers what amounts to the
film’s thesis: “We live in a culture where
mediocrity is rewarded, and originality
and integrity are punished.” As he says
these words, there is no indication that
he is aware of what is playing on the
video billboard directly behind him—
an ad for a Comedy Central show called
Roast Battle, in which a celebrity panel
decides which of two comics is the best
at insulting the other—or that he might
want to direct our attention to it.
But of course he wants to direct our
attention to it. One of the preoccu-
pations of Lee’s remarkable standup
career has been the casting of pearls
before swine. His shows often revolve
around a comic conceit, in both senses
of the word, in which he presents him-
self as endlessly beleaguered by the in-
capacity of a significant portion of his
audience—often people he suspects
have been dragged along by friends
and would rather be at home watching
something like Roast Battle—to appre-
ciate the cleverness and subtlety of his
material.
While never anything close to a
household name, Lee has been a fairly
significant fixture of the British com-
edy scene since the mid-1990s, when
he costarred in the BBC sketch se-
26
February of this year the FBI discov-
ered that China, too, had hacked Solar-
Winds software and gained access to
data at the Department of Agriculture
and, most likely, other government
agencies. Then, about a month later, in
early March, cybersecurity researchers
discovered that since January 6, state-
sponsored hackers from China had
been using a zero- day in Microsoft’s
Exchange Server software to gain ac-
cess to the e-mail systems of around
30,000 American businesses and or-
ganizations. The hackers also installed
malware that will allow them to return
to those systems in the future. Steven
Adair, the president of Volexity, the
Old Midlands Giants
Mark O’Connell
The musician Robert Lloyd and the comedian Stewart Lee in front of Nicholas Monro’s sculpture of King Kong,
ries Fist of Fun. It was really only in
the mid-2000s, though, that he hit his
idiosyncratic stride, and the various
elements of his standup persona—cor-
uscating irony, intellectual egomania,
perverse self-indulgence—coalesced
into something uniquely sophisticated.
One of his most memorable riffs is
from Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle,
his BBC show that ran for four sea-
sons between 2009 and 2016. What
begins as a standard leftist mockery
of anti-immigrant rhetoric (“Bloody
Indians . . . coming over here, inventing
us a national cuisine”) quickly builds
toward something more virtuosically
strange.
He works his way back through
Britain’s history, applying a Brexit-
style logic to the deep past of a culture
largely formed by centuries of migra-
tions and invasions. When he gets to the
fifth century—to the “bloody Anglo-
Saxons . . .with their inlaid jewelry, and
their ship-burial traditions, and their
miserable epic poetry”—he recites sev-
eral lines, in the original Old English,
of the Anglo- Saxon poem “The Wan-
derer” before snapping back into the
pub-racist persona: “If you come over
company that detected the operation,
called it “a ticking time bomb.”
It’s too early to know how the Biden
administration will address cyber-
attacks, or if it will attempt to revive
discussions with our adversaries to limit
the use of cyberweapons. But in De-
cember, shortly after the SolarWinds
attack was discovered, President- elect
Biden pledged to “make cybersecurity
a top priority at every level of govern-
ment.” Commenting on Biden’s first call
with Vladimir Putin shortly after taking
office, in which he brought up Russia’s
likely involvement in the SolarWinds
hack, Press Secretary Jen Psaki offered
what may be a preview of the president’s
Cumbria, England; from King Rocker
here, Anglo- Saxons, learn to speak the
fucking language!” By means of dizzy-
ing infinite regress, he eventually ar-
rives at the dawn of creation, at which
point the bit dissolves into a distinc-
tively English whinging. “Reality is too
full,” he laments, Englishly. “I liked it
when there was nothing. . . . Remember
the old nothing? The old times of noth-
ing?” In its obsessive repetitiveness, its
meticulous construction, and its bit-
terly ironic presentation of a stark po-
litical point, Lee is reminiscent here of
no one so much as Thomas Bernhard.
Even without the recitation of Old
English poetry, there aren’t many
standup comics who would try this
sort of thing, let alone pull it off. Lee
habitually amplifies his own cultural
elitism for comic effect, subjecting it to
a vertiginous layering of self-reflexive
jokes. He, or the persona he sometimes
refers to as “the comedian Stewart
Lee,” is always implicating his audi-
ence in a complex arrangement of toxic
codependency.
In Content Provider, his 2018
standup special, he does a taunting
impression of exactly the kind of self-
satisfied fan he has spent much of his
approach: “His intention was . . . to make
clear that the United States will act firmly
in defense of our national interests in re-
sponse to malign actions by Russia.”
Though the evolution to cyber of-
fense was probably the inevitable corol-
lary of the global reach of the Internet,
This Is How They Tell Me the World
Ends gives a persuasive argument that
Panetta and Hayden were wrong. The
fool’s errand was not to try to get to the
bottom of the secretive zero- day mar-
ket, as they told Nicole Perlroth, but
rather to amass a sophisticated cyber
arsenal in the belief that its very exis-
tence will keep us safe. Q
—March 10, 2021
Michael Cumming
career cultivating. “You know, I think
when you’ve seen him,” he drones in
an Oxbridge monotone, “you can’t
really watch other comedians? It’s
more like art, really . . .” The stage he
occupies is scattered with hundreds of
the plastic DVD cases of other come-
dians’ standup specials he claims to
have bought for a penny online. “It’s
very depressing to think of them just
becoming a pile of worthless landfill,”
he says (insincerely), stomping about
the stage on the scattered debris of a
culture devoted to mediocrity.
Notwithstanding that bit of sublim-
inal messaging with the Roast Battle
ad, it’s disarming, then, in those early
moments of King Rocker, to see Lee
deliver his cultural diagnosis—the re-
warding of mediocrity and so on—in
such a straightforward manner. One of
the many pleasures of the film, in fact,
is seeing him unburdened of the elab-
orate ironic vestments of his standup
persona. I have over the years been a
fairly eager consumer of his content;
I received that fan impression with an
ambivalent wince of recognition. (It’s
The New York Review
uncomfortably easy to imagine my own
comparison of him to Bernhard being
delivered in that Oxbridge drone.) But
watching the documentary, it struck me
that I had never really seen him laugh
before; the most “the comedian Stew-
art Lee” ever permits himself is a smirk
or a knowing chuckle. King Rocker, on
the other hand, is filled with scenes of
Lee doubled over with simple, unironic
mirth. The reason for his laughter is
nearly always the documentary’s sub-
ject, Robert Lloyd, who takes palpable
pleasure in causing his friend and (for
the purposes of the film) confessor to
absolutely lose it.
Lloyd is clearly a witty and clever
man who is quite a lot of fun to be
around. Given how little fame he has
accrued over the decades of his ca-
reer—as frontman of the 1970s Bir-
mingham punk band the Prefects, then
of the Nightingales, which he formed in
1979—he may seem an odd choice as
the focus of a documentary. Rock docs
are often about mercurial jerks living
lives of ravishing dissolution, leaving
scattered trails of embittered sexual
partners and drummers. Or they’re
about charismatic geniuses who died
early and tragically. Lloyd, shambling
toward his sixtieth birthday in com-
fortable footwear and with a generally
sensible attitude toward life, fits neither
profile.
The closest thing to rock ’n’ roll ex-
cess the film provides is a moment
when Lee and Lloyd pay a visit to a
Birmingham car dealership where the
latter spent some nights during a brief
period of homelessness after finishing
school; he shows Lee a faucet that he
jokes about washing his penis in “if I’d
had a particularly messy wank.” The
schoolboy humor might not in itself be
particularly charming, but I couldn’t
help but laugh along at the joyful sight
of these two middle-aged English-
men stumbling about a car dealership,
wheezing with laughter at a humble
dick joke.
Though it’s often very funny, King
Rocker is not a comic rockumentary in
the mode of, say, Anvil! The Story of
Anvil, Sacha Gervasi’s 2008 film about
a Canadian hair metal band’s decades-
long resilience in the face of commer-
cial failure and critical indifference.
There’s a scene early on in which Lee
accompanies Lloyd’s band the Nightin-
gales as a guest on a BBC Radio show,
and they tell the presenter about the
genesis of the film they are making,
and which we’re now watching. Lee
had been a fan of Lloyd’s music since
his teens, and the two eventually be-
came friends. Some years ago, Lloyd
suggested they do an Anvil-style film
about his band, but Lee’s response, ac-
cording to Lloyd, was “You’re too good
for it to be a joke.”
King Rocker, which Lee made with
the television comedy director Michael
Cumming (best known for his work on
Chris Morris’s groundbreaking 1990s
current affairs satire Brass Eye), is
admiring of, and even zealous about,
Lloyd’s music and his inventive ap-
proach to writing pop songs. But while
it makes a strong and straightforward
case for his work as deserving of wider
attention, it’s at least as interested in
exploring the reasons why it hasn’t re-
ceived that attention in the first place.
(In a promotional interview for the
film, Lee has described Lloyd as “the
Jarvis Cocker that never happened,”
referring to the dapper frontman of the
April 8, 2021
Britpop band Pulp. This is not an en-
tirely outrageous comparison, in that
both singers share a certain demotic lit-
erary flair, but it does somewhat slink
around the fact that Lloyd has never
written anything like as timelessly irre-
futable an anthem as Pulp’s “Common
People.”)
Part of Lloyd’s predicament is that
he seems constitutionally resistant to
mythologization. Unlike many of his
better-known punk rock contemporar-
ies, he comes across as a person you
would actually want to hang out with:
a cool—but, crucially, not too cool—
uncle. “People could not idolize me,”
says the young Lloyd in a clip from a
1980s television interview, lounging
around on a bed in a comfortable bottle-
green wool sweater. “It is that simple,
I reckon. There’s absolutely no image
in what I do whatsoever. People could
think I was a genius or something . . .
[but] what could they copy about me?”
Lee and Cumming’s film isn’t so much
arguing that people should be idolizing
this man as asking what it means for a
musician to keep going, decade after
decade, making interesting and evolv-
ing work without any kind of sustained
mainstream recognition—or even, for
that matter, cult success, as it would or-
dinarily be defined.
The most striking example of the
Nightingales’ music in the film comes
at the end credits, with a song called
“Gales Doc.” The tune (chunky bass-
line, driving 2/4 drumbeat, serpentine
guitar riff) is fairly meat-and-two-veg,
but the lyrics are clever and funny. In
a rich, mordant monotone, Lloyd de-
livers the voiceover for an imagined
television arts show segment about the
Nightingales and their creation of the
very song we are listening to. “I met
the band in their rehearsal space,” he
intones, “and was told by group leader
Robert Lloyd that they normally write
three or four modest guitar riffs and
force them together with a single drum
pattern to begin with.” It’s the song’s
straight-faced commitment to its own
banality, deconstructing itself as it goes
along, that makes it such fun.
A lthough it wouldn’t be fair or accu-
rate to say that King Rocker is covertly
a film about Stewart Lee, there is an
obvious sense in which it expands, in
its loose and conversational way, on
some of the perennial concerns of his
standup. There is also the stubborn re-
ality of Lee’s success, which he can’t
help reminding us of even as he com-
plains about his hopelessly unapprecia-
tive audience.
One of the most memorable lines
in King Rocker is delivered by the co-
median and light- entertainment TV
host Frank Skinner. Skinner has been
a household name in the UK since the
1990s; in 1976, before Lloyd joined the
Prefects, Skinner auditioned to sing
for the band. When Lee asks him if he
ever wishes he’d stayed with them and
taken an entirely different career path,
he says he does: “I think everybody
who has mainstream success wishes
they were a cult hero, and every cult
hero wishes they had mainstream suc-
cess.” What makes the line particularly
memorable is the way it seems to res-
onate with Lee’s own peculiar predic-
ament—hovering somewhere between
mainstream success and cult hero, and
beset by both kinds of regret.
Lee’s work is often driven by an ob-
sessive scrutiny of the formal conven-
tions of standup. It flirts, as such, with
a kind of anticomedy in its central con-
ceit of a performer passive-aggressively
berating his audience for the failure of
his jokes to land. (The jokes in such
cases are, of course, always finely cal-
ibrated to not quite land, in order to
set up the real material, which is the
comic analysis of the joke’s not quite
landing.) Lee and Cumming take a re-
lated approach to the form of the rock-
umentary with King Rocker, which
casually interrogates, as it goes along,
its own shaping of the story of a life.
The King Kong sculpture provides a
kind of narrative frame; in the story
of its rejection and disappearance,
there is an obvious parallel to Lloyd’s
story.
The filmmakers are always playfully
self-aware about their own intentions
here. There’s a lovely moment near the
end of the film in which Lee interviews
the drummer and singer Fliss Kitson,
whose joining the Nightingales in 2011
kickstarted a period of renewed pro-
fessionalism and creative vigor for the
band. Lee points out that the room in
Kitson’s house they are sitting in is filled
with examples of her work as a taxider-
mist. Casually holding a stuffed weasel
in one hand, he asks her whether she
has a “particular interest in preserving
things that might otherwise have rotted
away.” When she laughs at his heavy-
handedness, he jokes, “I mean, I can
tell you what I want you to say if you
like.”
Lloyd himself deftly flits between re-
sisting and facilitating the film’s inter-
pretations of his work and life, rarely
passing up an opportunity to laugh at
Lee’s obsessive over-analysis of the
significance of various details. In the
closing section, the two men take a trip
to visit Monro’s King Kong in its new
location, on the front lawn of some-
one’s house in the country. Staring up
at the giant ape, Lee talks about how
the piece went from being rejected
to being obscure, and finally to being
respected and recognized by the cul-
tural establishment. “Everyone loves
it now,” says Lloyd. “But isn’t that so
often the case with stuff? Maybe that’ll
be the case with the Nightingales one
of these days.” Lee looks up at the
sculpture—appreciative, thoughtful, a
little too satisfied. “Is that the kind of
thing,” says Lloyd, “that you’re trying
to pull in?”
Lee agrees that it is very much the
kind of thing he’s trying to pull in,
and they both descend into delighted
laughter at the absurdity of the whole
enterprise. What makes all this self-
awareness fun, rather than irritatingly
arch, is that it seems to proceed from
the ground up, as a natural result of
both men’s personalities and sensibil-
ities, and from their relationship with
each other, which is clearly one of gen-
uine affection and mutual amusement.
It never feels imposed from a con-
ceptual height, as is so often the case
with Lee’s meticulously constructed
standup.
The film’s structure has an elegant
perversity, too, in the frequency with
which it moves from conversations with
Lloyd into talking-head interviews that
directly undercut those conversations.
The best, and most absurd, example of
this comes in that same climactic se-
quence, in which the two men take con-
templative stock of the sculpture and
of Lloyd’s career. Despite the moments
of jocular irony, there is real emotion
in the scene. Lloyd casually mentions
that he once “shared a shower” at a
West London gym with the English
actor Robin Askwith. The film then
unexpectedly cuts to Askwith him-
self, luxuriantly tanned in fluorescent
green shorts, “categorically” denying
ever having had a shower with Robert
Lloyd, and then listing, at extraordi-
nary length, people he has had show-
ers with—Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger,
David Gilmour, Madonna, Princess
Margaret, Charlotte Rampling, Bill
Wyman, Sir Tim Rice, and so on, at
truly gratuitous length—all of them a
good deal more famous than Lloyd, a
man you have to assume he has never
even heard of.
This would be a powerfully strange
scene at the best of times, and a re-
minder of the Borgesian comic poten-
tial of brute enumeration. But coming
when it does, right as the film is building
toward a touching emotional resolution
that most filmmakers would not wish to
spoil by cutting to a half-forgotten film
actor who has nothing whatever to do
the film’s subject, it seems like an act of
wayward genius.
T here is a sadness at the center of
King Rocker, which has to do less
with its immediate subject than with
its wider setting. Lee sees Lloyd as
belonging to “a distinctive strain of
postwar working- class bohemians who
have been legislated out of existence by
successive Tory governments, never to
be seen again.”
Lloyd’s career, like those of so many
postwar British artists and writers and
musicians, would likely not have been
possible without the support of social
welfare. The austerity ideology that
has taken hold of British politics since
the Thatcher years has ensured that
capital- C Culture is produced almost
exclusively by the sons and daughters of
privilege, for the simple reason that no
one else can afford the time and free-
dom necessary for a creative life. That
socioeconomic reality, formed around
a neoliberal ideology, is a wellspring of
the culture of mediocrity that Lee in-
vokes in the film’s opening moments.
Watching the performances in the
film and, later, going a little deeper into
the Nightingales’ discography, I never
found myself wondering where this
guy had been all my life. Lloyd’s music
is lyrically inventive and often catchy.
There are a lot of good songs, though
perhaps no truly great ones. The music
is at times a little reminiscent of the
Fall, at times of the Slits, and at other
times of Gang of Four. Although it
didn’t feel quite as singular to me as
the film seemed to promise, I never felt
this detracted from the potency of King
Rocker’s argument or the experience
of watching it. I didn’t feel I needed to
approach Lloyd in an attitude of rever-
ence, in other words, or to internalize
the shame of a culture that had failed
to give him his due, in order to see what
was interesting about him.
That Lloyd isn’t easy to idolize par-
adoxically gives him and his work a
power not granted to the idols—a resis-
tance to the trivial force of commodifi-
cation. King Rocker is effective and, in
the end, moving because it functions as
an impassioned, if oblique, defense of
minor figures in the cultural landscape.
It’s Lloyd’s smallness, in this way, that
makes him sort of great. Q
27
 A Ghost in the War Machine
Endpapers:
A Family Story of Books,
War, Escape, and Home
by Alexander Wolff.
Atlantic Monthly, 376 pp., $28.00
The collaboration between Germa-
ny’s industrial magnates and the Third
Reich was a story of mutual exploitation
and moral abdication. The electrical
parts manufacturer Siemens employed
thousands of slave laborers from coun-
tries occupied by the Nazis during
World War II, including female prison-
ers who were worked to death assem-
bling V-1 and V-2 rocket components at
factories inside the Ravensbrück con-
centration camp. The insurance giant
Allianz earned millions of reichsmarks
providing coverage against war dam-
age to the SS - owned firms that ran
Auschwitz and other camps, while IG
Farben, the parent company of Bayer,
manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas
used to murder millions of Jews. Many
firms benefited from the “Aryanization
program,” which allowed them to buy
expropriated Jewish businesses and
properties at bargain prices.
Then there was Merck, the pharma-
ceuticals conglomerate whose asso-
ciation with the Nazis may have been
the most lurid of them all. Founded
by an apothecary named Friedrich
Jacob Merck in the central German
city of Darmstadt in 1668, the company
began its expansion a century and a
half later: in 1826 Merck’s descendant
Emanuel Merck isolated the active in-
gredient in poppy seeds, and his lab
began to produce several drugs from
it. He advertised these as a “Cabinet
of Pharmaceutical and Chemical In-
novations.” By the twentieth century,
the company had cornered the global
market for cocaine and was mass-
producing a euphoria-inducing opioid
it called Eukodal, an early brand name
for oxycodone—later sold by Purdue
as OxyContin. (An American divi-
sion, Merck & Co., was set up in New
York in 1891.) After the Nazis came to
power in 1933, members of the Merck
family supported Adolf Hitler and the
party, some of them enthusiastically.
Like many other firms under the Third
Reich, they ran their factories with
slave labor, and some of them joined
the SS and helped to purge the com-
pany ranks of Jewish employees.
The close relationship between
Merck and the Nazis extended to the
battlefield and the bunker as well. Ac-
cording to Blitzed: Drugs in the Third
Reich (2017) by the German historian
Norman Ohler, Nazi officers provided
millions of troops with “wonder drugs,”
including cocaine and Eukodal, to keep
them euphoric and energized as they
stormed across Western Europe and
Russia.* Hitler himself began receiving
daily doses of Eukodal in 1943 from his
personal physician, Dr. Theodor Mo-
rell, who called him “Patient A.”
After an assassination attempt in
July 1944 left the Führer in pain from
a perforated eardrum and other inju-
ries, an ear, nose, and throat specialist
*See the review in these pages by
Antony Beevor, March 9, 2017.
28
Joshua Hammer
Alexander Wolff’s father, Nikolaus (second from right), cleaning his pistol, with his German army unit during World War II
named Erwin Giesing kept his spirits
up with a daily cocaine swab on his
nasal and throat linings, while Morell
continued to administer Eukodal. The
drug cocktail, writes Ohler, was “the
classic speedball: the sedating effect
of the opioid balancing the stimulating
effect of the cocaine.” The treatments
continued every day for months and
may have amplified Hitler’s megalo-
mania and self- delusion as the Allied
armies advanced on Germany and tens
of millions of soldiers and civilians per-
ished. An air attack in September 1944
destroyed the Merck factory in Darm-
stadt, killed hundreds of slave labor-
ers who had been denied access to the
company’s bomb shelters, and forced
the Führer to go cold turkey during the
last days of the war.
The American writer Alexander
Wolff had a vague awareness of his
family’s connections to Hitler’s fa-
vorite drug supplier. His paternal
grandmother, Elisabeth Merck, was
the great-granddaughter of Emanuel
Merck, his great-uncles served on the
company board, and his father held a
small financial stake in the company
that helped pay for Alexander’s sum-
mer camps and university education.
But it wasn’t until four years ago, when
Wolff began to track down German rel-
atives, pore through company archives,
and read Ohler’s best-selling book,
that the full dimensions of his family’s
involvement with Merck and the Nazis
came into focus.
He learned of his distant cousin
Mathilde Merck, known as “Tante
Tilla,” a fanatical party member who
wrote admiring letters to Heinrich
Himmler and patronized an SS insti-
tute dedicated to racial “science.” His
great-uncle and company director Wil-
helm Merck joined the SS in 1933 and
rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer,
or captain, urging employees to “trust
in our Führer” and in Germany’s “un-
defeatable army.” The company made
secret deals with the Third Reich to re-
purpose hydrogen peroxide for use as
fuel for rockets, torpedoes, and planes.
Then there were the Wehrmacht-
energizing wonder drugs that rolled
off the company’s production lines,
the main source of the Merck clan’s
fortune. “To hear Ohler tell it,” Wolff
wryly observes in Endpapers: A Fam-
ily Story of Books, War, Escape, and
Home, his revelatory, riveting, and
deeply moving account of his fami-
ly’s involvement in Germany’s recent
history, “my ancestors not only con-
tributed to Hitler’s descent into that
psychological bunker of madness and
delusion. They also profited from it.
Some truly awful shit indeed.”
The Merck story, however, is only a
sideshow to Wolff’s central narrative in
Endpapers, which focuses on the dra-
matically divergent paths taken by his
paternal grandfather and father during
the Nazi years. Elisabeth Merck’s first
husband, the author’s grandfather Kurt
Wolff, became the country’s most il-
lustrious publisher during the Wei-
mar era. But as a descendant of Jews
on his mother’s side and a supporter
of “degenerate” writers such as Franz
Kafka, Heinrich Mann, and Joseph
Roth (some of whom were Jewish), he
faced mortal danger when Hitler came
to power.
In early 1933 Kurt fled with his sec-
ond wife into exile, first in Italy, then
France, then the United States, where
he founded Pantheon Books in New
York City, notably publishing Boris
Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and a
memoir by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
He left behind in Germany a teenage
son and daughter from his marriage
to Elisabeth, who were one genera-
tion further removed from their Jew-
ish ancestry and thus able to pass the
bloodline test established by the 1935
Nuremberg Laws. Nikolaus Wolff, Al-
exander’s father—known to everyone
as Niko—joined the Hitler Youth,
served in the Luftwaffe on the east-
ern front, surrendered to US troops
in 1945, and became a prisoner of war.
Three years later, the twenty-four-year-
Alexander Wolff
old boarded a ship and joined his father
in America.
Kurt resettled in Switzerland in the
1950s, homesick for European culture,
disillusioned by the publishing world’s
internecine politics, and never com-
fortable in American society; he died
when Wolff was six years old. Niko, a
research chemist at DuPont, Xerox,
and RCA, kept largely mum about his
years in Hitler’s army, and his son was
reluctant to broach the subject. Wolff
grew up in suburban Rochester, grad-
uated from Princeton (we were in the
same class but barely knew each other),
became a star writer for Sports Illus-
trated, wrote books about basketball
and other sports-related subjects, and
settled with his wife and two children
in a farmhouse in Vermont. But the
past kept nagging at him, he writes in
the introduction to Endpapers:
I wanted a better sense of the
European chapters in the lives of
my forefathers and the bloody pe-
riod in which they unfolded. I was
moved more than anything by a
nagging sense of oversight—a feel-
ing that I had failed somehow in
not investigating my family’s past.
Germans of my generation grilled
their elders about National Social-
ism, asking parents and grandpar-
ents, aunts and uncles, what they
had known and what they had
done. . . . A broadly held willing-
ness to take up and work through
questions of guilt, shame, and re-
sponsibility, known as Vergangen-
heitsaufarbeitung, or “working
off the past,” has since become a
marker of modern Germany.
His sixtieth birthday presented Wolff
with an occasion to embrace that long-
delayed investigation. In 2017 he took
a buyout from his employer of thirty-
six years, left the house in Vermont,
and moved with his family for a year
to Kreuzberg, a vibrant, multicultural
neighborhood in central Berlin. Wolff
was plunging into German society at
The New York Review
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April 8, 2021 29
a critical moment: two years earlier,
Chancellor Angela Merkel had opened
Germany to what would become a
wave of 1.2 million refugees from
Syria and other war-torn and econom-
ically blighted countries in the Middle
East and Africa, and the country was
trying to integrate them just as Pres-
ident Donald Trump was slamming
shut America’s doors on immigrants.
All around Wolff, Germans were en-
gaged in an unprecedented social ex-
periment; at the same time, a backlash
from right-wing nationalists such as
the Alternative für Deutsch-
land party, which gained its
first seats in the Bundestag that
year, threatened to bring down
Merkel and undo her controver-
sial initiative.
Wolff cast his eye on both
contemporary Germany and
his family’s turbulent road
through the twentieth century,
from the vantage point of a city
that stands on the fault lines
of Germany’s recent past. “In
good and in evil, Berlin is the
trustee of German history,” the
late Federal Republic president
Richard von Weizsäcker said in
1983, “which has left its scars
here as nowhere else.” The year
that Wolff spent in Germany
served as a kind of reckoning:
an exploration of his family’s
bargains with the Nazis, a re-
flection on inherited guilt and
its imperatives, and a contem-
plation of the ways that postwar
Germans have attempted to
expiate the horrific deeds and
moral blindness of their elders.
The life of Kurt Wolff exemplified
Germany’s cultural flowering between
the world wars, as well as the dark cur-
rents that pulled the country toward
barbarism. He was born and grew up
in Bonn, the son of Leonhard Wolff, a
conductor and organist at the city’s larg-
est Lutheran church, and Maria Marx,
the daughter of two baptized Jews who,
Wolff writes, “could trace their Jewish
roots as far back as records were kept.”
The Wolffs were prominent members
of the Bildungsbürgertum, Germany’s
haute bourgeoisie, dedicated to “life-
long learning and a cultural patrimony
of art, music, and books.” As a teen-
ager, Kurt was sent to São Paulo to
learn banking, the trade practiced by
many of his ancestors, but he returned
after six months to throw himself into
his true calling: book publishing.
After a brief stint at a small publish-
ing house, he founded the Kurt Wolff
Verlag in Dresden in 1913 and rapidly
established himself at the forefront of
Germany’s literary avant-garde. (He
was also a prolific and brilliant writer
himself, as the many excerpts from
his diaries and letters that Wolff in-
cludes here attest.) He championed
Kafka, published translations of the
Nobel Prize–winning Indian novelist
Rabindranath Tagore, and, following
the Great War—in which he served,
with enthusiasm at first but then with
growing horror and disillusionment—
popularized pacifist authors such as
Heinrich Mann.
Yet looming behind the publish-
er’s rapid rise was the shadow of Ger-
man anti- Semitism. Wolff extricates
a story, unknown to his grandfather,
about Kurt’s maternal great-uncle
30
Moritz von Haber, a Jew from Baden
who converted to Catholicism and in
the early 1800s attained prominence
as the banker to King Charles X of
France. Haber’s discarding of his Jew-
ish identity offered scant protection
against mobs roused to violence by a
pair of duels in which he and his sec-
ond mortally wounded their Christian
opponents. Chanting “down with the
Jews,” a crowd set fire to von Haber’s
mansion, and he was hounded, impris-
oned, and ultimately expelled from his
hometown. “Kurt and Moritz shared
Kurt Wolff and his first wife, Elisabeth Merck; paintings by Felice Casorati, 1925
one thing,” Wolff writes, foreshadow-
ing the cataclysm that would uproot
von Haber’s great-grandnephew. “Both
believed they enjoyed all the rights of a
citizen of a constitutional state, only to
discover that they didn’t.”
Kurt thrived during the early years
of the Weimar Republic. But the hy-
perinflation of the early 1920s left him
in a financially precarious state, forcing
him to sell his collection of first edi-
tions to stay solvent. In the spirit of the
times, he was a rake and a philanderer,
fathered an illegitimate child, and di-
vorced his wife to marry his secretary,
Helen Mosel, who would remain his
loyal companion and copublisher until
the end of his life. Then came the rise
of the Nazis, which Kurt watched with
alarm, and the couple’s desperate flight
from Germany two days after the burn-
ing of the Reichstag in February 1933.
“These are madmen. Pack!” he told his
wife after listening to Hermann Göring
ranting on the radio that night. (Two
months later, students on Berlin’s Be-
belplatz, egged on by Hitler’s Brown-
shirts, publicly burned thousands of
books, including many from the Kurt
Wolff Verlag.) “How had Kurt known
to flee?” Wolff wonders:
How would anyone know when to
take such an irrevocable step, so
shot full of capitulation and fore-
closure? “Deciding whether to get
out today or whether you’ve still
got until tomorrow,” Bertolt Brecht
would write, “requires the sort of
intelligence with which you could
have created an immortal master-
piece a few decades ago.” What-
ever it was—self-preservationist
genius or some primal survival
instinct—Kurt, now with Helen,
would call on that intuition again
and again.
For six years Kurt and Helen lived in
a comfortable limbo in France (where
their son, Christian, was born) and
Italy. All that changed suddenly, how-
ever, when the Nazis invaded Poland.
Declared enemy aliens, the couple was
interned in a camp in southern France,
and when the Nazis broke through the
Maginot Line in June 1940, they be-
came fugitives under the Vichy puppet
regime. Wolff has pieced together this
period in remarkable detail, capturing
the fear, desperation, and helplessness
of a literary titan who found himself
reduced to a victim, dependent on the
goodwill of a few heroic people. Chief
among them was Varian Fry, a young
Harvard graduate who, as the repre-
sentative in Marseille of the New York–
based Emergency Rescue Committee,
worked tirelessly to obtain exit papers
and US entry visas for prominent Jews
and other Nazi targets, including Han-
nah Arendt and Max Planck. Wolff
retraces his grandfather’s escape with
cinematic tension, culminating in a trek
across the Pyrenees and a transatlantic
journey from Lisbon in the fall of 1941.
It was a voyage, Wolff notes, that would
determine his own American destiny:
Of all the advantages to cascade my
way—white, male, goy, firstborn,
only son, birthright American,
upper-middle- class childhood, Ivy
League legatee—few served me
better than the grace from which
so many good things followed:
that, seventeen years before my
birth, my grandfather found a
place on Varian Fry’s list.
While Kurt struggled to build a new
life and career in New York, his son
Niko was coming of age in Nazi Ger-
many. Elisabeth Merck’s second hus-
band, Hans Albrecht, a prominent
obstetrician and Nazi Party mem-
ber, helped him obtain a document
known as a Nachweis, covering up his
Mischling—part-Jewish—identity and
attesting falsely to his pure Aryan an-
cestry. In 1940, drafted into the Reich
Labor Service, a supporting force for
the Wehrmacht, he joined the German
troops who invaded Ukraine, Belarus,
and Russia in Hitler’s Operation Bar-
barossa and were responsible for the
deaths of innumerable Jews:
At the time of the Germans’ inva-
sion of the Soviet Union, my father
was a grunt, barely twenty-one. He
drove a truck, delivering maps and
photographs, as he told me and his
letters home attest. He was in some
oblivious limbo, I’d long wanted to
reassure myself, neither directly in-
volved in atrocities in the east nor
party to the dawning aware-
Wolff Estate/Bavarian State Portrait Gallery, Munich
ness of them back home. But
he had been in Ukraine, an
occupying soldier taking and
following orders. What those
orders might have included, I
now knew.
Wolff approaches this period
with clear- eyed rigor, sifting
through the evidence, neither
ruling anything out nor jump-
ing to conclusions. Implicit in
his inquiry lies the question:
Could his father, through Nazi
indoctrination, a momentary
impulse, pressure from fellow
soldiers and commanders, or
some combination of the three,
have committed war crimes?
Initially Wolff accepts the stan-
dard view of Operation Bar-
barossa, according to which it
was exclusively the SS that car-
ried out Hitler’s extermination
campaign, but later he comes to
the painful recognition that or-
dinary troops were involved in
the mass killings as well:
In those letters home, one of the
few gruesome things Niko shared
is a scene in Kharkov from mid-
November 1941: the corpses of ten
or so locals killed by the Germans,
dangling from the balcony of a
building, each hung with a sign
in Cyrillic lettering listing their
crimes. “There were more as we
drove on,” he wrote. “There are still
many partisans in this city who blow
up buildings, kill soldiers, or engage
in other sabotage. Thus these dras-
tic measures of discouragement.”. . .
But my father surely saw other
things that he chose not to tell a
mother he knew struggled to adapt
to the real world. Family letters and
conversations with relatives lead me
to believe he had secrets to keep.
Wolff never does learn what atroci-
ties, if any, his father committed during
the war. Niko sailed to the US aboard
the SS Ernie Pyle in August 1948. His
decision to emigrate lay partly in an
opportunity waiting for him across the
Atlantic: his father had pulled strings
and gotten him enrolled in the Ph.D.
program in chemistry at Princeton.
But it also rested on the determina-
tion of this veteran to distance himself
from the moral reckonings of postwar
Germany.
T he question of German guilt, both
individual and collective, continues
to haunt Alexander Wolff as he dives
deeper into his family history. Some of
the strongest passages of Endpapers
capture the emotional arguments be-
tween Kurt and his daughter Maria,
Niko’s sister. Living in the flattened
The New York Review
university city of Freiburg with her tod-
dler son in 1946, Maria describes in a
letter to Kurt in America the terror of
cowering in a bomb shelter in Munich
during an Allied air raid:
The tinkling of glass. The smell
of rubble and fire. Then quiet.
After a few seconds it begins all
over again. In between, the heavy-
caliber weaponry, howling. You
crouch there like a target with an
arrow trained at it, an arrow that
bores into your heart.
She argues forcefully that the suffering
of German civilians in the last years of
the conflict has made them victims of
Hitler as well. Her father, however, is
not so willing to let her or his country-
men off the hook:
The Germans unleashed the dogs
of hell upon the world—hatred,
wickedness, evil, cruelty—so that
all of Europe is infected and sick,
and another boomerang lands
back whence this plague came. . . .
A fresh start for the Germans
is possible only by acknowledg-
ing our immense guilt. Thomas
Mann is right: all of us are covered
in blood and shame. We must ac-
knowledge this fact, no ifs, ands,
or buts, and accept it unreservedly.
This is the task for the present and
the future. God has kept us alive
to address this problem, and only
the prospect of its solution gives
the next generation hope for a
life worth living. . . . In this light
children will grow up to be better,
more responsible people.
The Germany that Wolff encounters
in 2017 is still dealing with that moral
burden. In his travels across Berlin, he
comes face to face with both the public
and private symbols of expiation. He
visits his relative Marion Detjen and her
husband, Stephan, a history professor
and radio journalist, respectively, who
live a short walk from the Olympic Sta-
dium, a neoclassical colossus designed
by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer—and
now the venue for Bundesliga soccer
matches featuring rosters of dazzling
ethnic diversity. The Detjens have turned
their apartment into a way station for
the dispossessed from the world’s most
devastated countries—Syria, Yemen—
helping them recover from the trauma of
their forced flight and launch new lives
in Merkel’s Germany. At Tempelhof
Airport, another National Socialist–
designed facility, Wolff’s wife, Vanessa,
finds volunteer work in hangars that have
been repurposed as temporary quarters
for recently arrived refugees. “Those
reinforced roofs designed to support ‘ra-
cially pure’ Germans now shelter several
hundred mostly dark-skinned people,”
Wolff notes, “housed here until they can
find a proper home, every one of them a
guest of the German government.”
And there are smaller, no less power-
ful symbols, such as the Stolpersteine:
small concrete cubes embedded in the
sidewalks in front of pre-war apartment
buildings, each topped by a brass plate
inscribed “in recitative simplicity”
with the name of a Jew who lived there
and the dates of his or her deportation
and murder. Since the German artist
Günter Demnig laid his first Stolper-
stein in Cologne in 1992, to commemo-
rate Himmler’s Auschwitz deportation
order fifty years earlier, more than
75,000 have been dedicated in Ger-
many and half a dozen other countries.
(In my own neighborhood, Wilmers-
dorf, the center of Berlin’s pre-war
Jewish population, dozens of plaques
glint from the sidewalks of almost
every residential street.) “The power
of the Stolpersteine,” Wolff notes, upon
confronting one during a walk through
his neighborhood of Kreuzberg, “lies in
their subtle obtrusiveness”:
Whereas you must consciously
make a destination of immured,
monochromatic gravestones in a
cemetery, stumbling stones glint
up at you throughout the open
city, nuggets in the creek bed. To
read an inscription you bend at the
waist in a kind of bow of respect.
As memorials go, Stolpersteine
derive an animating power from
being a work in progress, as tens
of thousands of Berliners are yet to
be memorialized.
In the decades after he departed
his shattered homeland, Alexander
Wolff’s father did his best to assimilate
into American life—proudly flying the
flag on Memorial Day and the Fourth
of July, completing the New York
Times crossword puzzle each morn-
ing, driving a late-model Ford Mustang
and Ford Fairlane around suburban
Rochester. Having been a cog in the
Nazi war machine, he now seemed to
bend over backwards to “stand up for
democracy,” Wolff writes, and he re-
sponded with indignation and outrage
to authoritarian-style abuses and other
bad government behavior in his ad-
opted country. After Richard Nixon
carried out his Saturday Night Mas-
sacre during the Watergate scandal in
1973, Wolff recalls, his father angrily
likened the move to a criminal action
by the Gestapo. Yet his continued ret-
icence about the war years persuaded
his son that he was hiding a dark se-
cret, and that when he died of cancer in
2007, he was still haunted by the land
he had left behind.
The country from which Niko Wolff
fled remains haunted as well, though in
its unflinching acceptance of responsi-
bility for the Nazis’ epic crimes, it has
emerged as a model for the rest of the
world. Wolff’s book draws to a close
with an image of the Reichstag, in the
former heart of the Third Reich, its
glass dome rising “translucent and in-
surmountable” over the city, a vision of
transparency and democracy. “A year
in Berlin let me see up close modern
Germany’s enshrinement of history in
the public square; her civic vigilance
and, yes, humility,” he writes. “For all
this I returned to the United States
with great respect for today’s version of
Kurt and Niko’s native country, and be-
lieving that Americans can learn much
from it.” Wolff lands back in Amer-
ica in July 2018, midway through the
Trump years, amid a surge of home-
grown nativism and bigotry. It is a re-
minder of the forces that his father and
grandfather confronted in much darker
times, and of the fragility of even the
most stable and democratic societies.
“To move beyond the brutal history of
the twentieth century,” Wolff writes,
“is work that citizens the world over are
called to do.” Q

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“…a characteristically bold "This book will be at the "This is the Dylan Studies “…deeply researched, “Can democracy keep pace
and sweeping assault on center of the discussion we all need…” sensitively analyzed, and with technology? Yes, says
the key tenets of American for years to come.” beautifully written…” Joshua Fairfield, but only if we
Jonathan Lethem
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author of Our Malady Harold H. and Virginia law itself.”
Martha Crenshaw,
Stanford University and Anderson Professor of History, Edward Castronova,
Wesleyan University Northwestern University Indiana University

April 8, 2021 31
 MY OLD HOME
by Orville Schell

A sweeping historical novel of exile

following a father and son from the
rise of Mao Zedong in 1949 to the
Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989,
as they are swept away by a relentless
series of devastating events.

PRAISE FOR MY OLD HOME:

“Absorbing, perceptive, heartbreaking, Orville Schell’s epic

novel is a devastatingly true and moving portrait of what
two generations of educated Chinese have experienced
through the ordeal of the revolution and throes of reform.
It is also a meditation on exile that plumbs, with rueful
humor, the existential dilemma of living “in-between”
China and America, a paean to the “cultural mongrels”
who, in their search and struggle for belonging and dignity,
are aided by the transcendental power of music.”
—Jianying Zha, The New Yorker, author of Tide Players

“Schell has put a lifetime of hope, sorrow, and wisdom

about China into this remarkable book. The result is an
epic and deeply moving story that few other people could
have written.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

“A dazzling novel that is sweeping in its historical canvas

PUBLISHED BY PANTHEON BOOKS
and intimate in its psychological insights. The gripping
narrative paints a granular, searing portrait of China
under Communist rule, lived through magnetic charac-
ters and indelible scenes. Schell is an elegant craftsman,
renowned scholar, and a virtuoso. The result is a splendid
mosaic which deeply moves and informs the reader, evoking
both the distinct and the universal.”
—Winston Lord, former US Ambassador to China

32 The New York Review

 “Can the world understand China? Intimately? With a lifetime of Published in Memory of
diligent non-fiction to his credit, Orville Schell now joins Albert
Camus in the faith that ‘fiction is the lie through which we tell Baifang Schell (1955–2021)
the truth.’ The adventure succeeds, and we get some lovely original
metaphors to boot.” To Whom This Book
—Perry Link, author of An Anatomy of Chinese
Is Dedicated.
“Enormously informative and illuminating, My Old Home vividly
depicts the human impact of the Cultural Revolution and its
aftermath. From the riveting first sentence, the writing is intensely
powerful and vivid, the characterizations complex, and the
pictures of China in that era eye opening as Schell guides us across
the US-China divide through the experience of a young man torn
between two cultures.”
—Elaine Pagels, Princeton University,
author of The Gnostic Gospels

“Schell’s novel is a masterpiece. He has an amazing command

of Chinese history, culture, daily life, as well as music and even
downtown San Francisco!”
—Ezra Vogel, Harvard University,
author of Deng Xiaoping

“Schell astounds us with a novel of epic scope and pinpoint detail, This remembrance was organized by Baifang’s friends:
revealing his depth of heart and the full heartbreak of the present
moment. Masterful…. Writing with humor and startling sensuali- Adam and Arlie Hochschild John and Margaret Thornton
Alice Waters Jonathan Spence and Annping Chin
ty, Schell invests his real-life and imagined personae with yearning,
Amanda Urban and Ken Auletta Julia Carnahan
daring, and his own irrefutable integrity.” Amy Tan and Lou Demattei Karl and Ching Eikenberry
Andras Szanto Kevin Rudd
—Peter Sellars, director, Nixon in China Aryeh and Yvette Neier Larry Diamond
Andrew J. Nathan Larry Friedlander
Brigitte Lacombe Laura Chang
Burr Heneman and Lexy Rome Laura D. Tyson and Erik S. Tarloff
Carl and Marni Crook Leah Thompson
Carol Christ Leon Botstein
Chauncey Shey Li Chenjian and Christy Shue
EARLY REVIEWS FOR MY OLD HOME: Chen Leiji and Chen Lin Lynn Glaser
Clifford Ross Mark Danner and Michelle Sipe
Damian Woetzel Meryl Streep
“Schell has spent a lengthy career immersed in Chinese history David and Kyoko Gelber Michael Pollan and Judith Belzer
David Breashears Michael Tilson Thomas and Josh Robison
and culture, and it shows in his exacting depiction of the tumult
David Fanning and Renata Simone Mimi Haas
that defined Chinese society in the late twentieth century. But David Shambaugh and Ingrid Larsen Neil Docherty
his commitment to authenticity…gives way to a universal tale of David Teece Ouyang Bin
Deirdre English and Wayne Herkness Paul Gewirtz
displacement and loss.” Derek Shearer and Sue Toigo Perry Link
Doug Hamilton Peter and Cathleen Schwartz
—Booklist, starred review Edward Wong and Tini Tran Peter and Mathea Tarnoff
Elaine Pagels and Alan Trist Peter Sellars
Elizabeth Economy Shoko Kashiyama
“Schell’s sweeping historical epic charts the coming-of-age of a Eric Karpeles and Michael Sell Song Huaiyun
young Chinese man in his search for identity, belonging, and love Evan Osnos and Sarabeth Berman Susan Jakes and Jeff Prescott
Frances McDormand and Joel Coen Susan Meiselas
across two continents…each setting is infused with such animated Gary and Meg Hirshberg Susan Shirk
detail that they all seem to come alive. Schell similarly renders Geoffrey Cowan and Aileen Adams Susie and Mark Buell
George and Tamiko Soros Timothy and Danuta Garton Ash
Little Li’s beloved works of classical music with such tender
Geremie R Barmé Tom and Margot Pritzker
specificity that the pages almost sing…. An ambitious journey Hal and Ruth Newman Tom Brokaw
through history that captivates with its spectacular scenery.” Howie Schmuck Tom Engelhardt and Nancy Garrity
Irena Gross Wang Yannan and Wang Zhihua
—Kirkus, starred review István Rév and Judit Szira Winston and Bette Bao Lord
James and Deb Fallows Wu Tong
Janet Ross Ye Wa and Joe Esherick
“Gripping…a rollicking ride.” Janet Visick Yo-Yo Ma
Jerome L. and Thao Nguyen Dodson
—Publishers Weekly, starred review John Delury
John Pomfret and Zhang Mei

April 8, 2021 33

Salman Toor: How Will I Know
an exhibition at the Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York City,
November 13, 2020–April 4, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition published
by Paper Chase, 20 pp., $39.00 (paper)
The spirit and appearance of Jesus
Christ and of Pinocchio, two figures
who are rarely found in the same sen-
tence, both can be felt in Salman Toor’s
paintings, currently the subject of a
show at the Whitney Museum of Amer-
ican Art. These deliciously painted and
mostly small-to-medium-size pic-
Young and in Love
Sanford Schwartz
their privacy invaded by policemen;
one, leaning in, shines a bright light at
them. And in The Smokers, some men
outside what might be a gay bar, clearly
happy and assured in being together,
don’t see a wary-looking policeman
who is coming their way. Toor does not
shy away from private moments, either.
Bedroom Boy gives us a nude young
man on a bed who is taking a photo-
graph of himself with a smartphone,
while in Sleeping Boy a male nude,
adorned with jewelry and languorously
stretched out on a voluptuous mound of
Vuillard could make the colors of a
room into part of a picture’s story.
A wall label at “How Will I Know”
calls the paintings “cartoony,” and a
cartoon style partially explains the
elongated and seemingly boneless na-
ture of the bodies we see (and their
noses). Hands, elbows, and arms in
particular can be rubbery, though
they are nevertheless at home with the
rhythmic curves of the nearby forms.
But cartoons do not account for the
liquid, restless, and quietly luscious na-
ture of Toor’s oil-paint surfaces.
dering troubadours in an operetta. One
of them is capturing their romance with
his smartphone. There is a possibility,
though, that the figure coming down
the steps, who is probably our main
man and who eyes the lovers as he de-
scends, is imagining them. The thought
gives the picture a second life, and it
occurs to the viewer because other pic-
tures have a dreamlike uncertainty, too.
This is the case with Tea, one of
Toor’s most engrossing works. In it, a
young man comes upon his family (or
so we assume) having tea at a table. We
believe that this man is the fellow

Salman Toor/Whitney Museum of American Art/Luhring Augustine, New York

tures, done in the past few years,
seem to follow the doings and
observations of one young man,
though many of the figures in the
scenes, which might be set in a bar,
on a stoop, or in an apartment, are
young men who resemble one an-
other in build. They are willowy
and they often sport scraggly dark
hair. Many exude a gentleness and
sweetness, a demeanor that, along
with the shoulder-length hair of
some of them, recalls the young
Christ in certain canvases by Rem-
brandt. Oddly, most have long and
pronounced noses, which can make
us think of Pinocchio even if it is
hard to see a link between Carlo
Collodi’s mischievous, mishap-
prone boy hero and the “boys,” as
Toor calls them in his titles.
But then surprising associations
with current and past artists, and
an unusual predilection for a single
color, are also part of the rich and
quirky experience that is Toor’s exhi-
bition. Entitled “How Will I Know,”
which derives from the popular
Whitney Houston song of the same
name, it is the first museum show of
a relatively young artist who has been
exhibiting in New York in recent years
but who seems to be barely known even
by viewers who keep up with the latest
developments. This makes all the more
substantial what Toor—who was born
in Pakistan in 1983, came to this coun-
try for college, and has lived since 2006
in New York City—has accomplished.
His subject in the broadest sense is
gay life: its pleasures, tensions, small
moments, and realizations. The fif-
teen paintings in the show are loosely
structured around our young man, who
is dark- complexioned (and whom we
might think of as the artist). In a few
pictures he is merely one of the fig-
ures in the scene, some of whom also
have brown skin, though others appear
white. In other works he has the pres-
ence more of the protagonist. Whatever
this character’s significance, Toor’s
pictures form a kind of overview of the
situations that many gay men enjoy or
endure. Four Friends, for instance, pres-
ents two young men dancing in a city
apartment. Our man, who is wearing
light-colored pants and doing the twist,
stands out in the dimly lit, largely green
room, while two other friends snuggle
on a nearby sofa. Puppy Play Date takes
us into another living room, where two
rather thin young men watch as their
dogs are entangled with each other.
Elsewhere, Toor looks at the haz-
ards of being openly gay in some cir-
cumstances. Car Boys gives us two
fellows in a car at night who have had
34
Salman Toor: Bar Boy, 48 x 60 inches, 2019
bedding—a male odalisque, in effect— Whether he is showing blue jeans, a
has fallen asleep with a nearby com- martini glass, or a person’s hair, Toor
puter on, light streaming forth from it. makes it seem as if he has brushed it
in just a moment before. If he wants to
show light descending from a lamp, he
What makes these pictures distinc- paints it in so many white, vertical, par-
tive and absorbing is that while homo- allel strokes. If our sleeping nude has
sexuality is hardly new to art, Toor hairy legs, black flecks here and there
brings a sense of soft-spoken, ingenu- will suffice. Every aspect of a given pic-
ous, everyday intimacy to this material ture seems to breathe a little. Even walls
that feels new. At the same time, for all look as if they have a pulse, and with
his contemporary candor about show- certain figures—say, the shy, Christlike
ing men in love with each other, and young man at the door in The Arrival—
despite the up-to-the-minuteness of the light in the background, coalescing
the smartphones and computers that around his head, forms a kind of halo.
his characters regularly use, Toor’s way There are unexpected notes in many
of painting is familiar. It is a kind of of the pictures. One of the cops in
straightforward representational art— Car Boys, for example, has a big belly,
one that, to my eye, seems to echo as- which he sticks toward the boys in the
pects of classic French painting. car. This ought to be menacing, but his
The young man at the right side of threat is mitigated by the un- cop-like
The Smokers, for example, who wears way he frames his paunch, with his
a hat and looks questioningly up into hands turned backwards on his hips. (It
the scene, recalls one or two similar put me in mind of a matriarch coming
observers in paintings by Renoir. The out of her kitchen to survey the feast
sometimes swarthy fellows in Toor’s she has made for her family.)
pictures, with shawls over their shoul- Stoop, a five-foot-high vertical paint-
ders and kerchiefs around their necks, ing, makes us pause and wonder what
could be stepping out as well from Dela- it is about. It shows a young man de-
croix’s Middle Eastern hothouse world. scending the steps of the sort of anony-
In its romantic celebration of sensuality, mous downtown rowhouse that suggests
Sleeping Boy also has more life in it than the era of the Ashcan School artists. A
Delacroix generally achieved. And the dropped ice cream cone is melting on
mysterious prevalence of green—green the sidewalk and a cat is in the window.
on the walls and floors and suffusing ta- At the base of the steps there are two
bles and lampshades—made me think men who are lovingly touching each
not only of Vuillard’s green-filled 1891 other. With their costumed appearance,
interior The Flowered Dress but of how they need only a guitar to become wan-
we have been following all along,
except that his hair, which gener-
ally has had a roughened look, is
now plastered down and parted.
He stands ramrod straight, perhaps
acting out being brave, or at least
impassive. He faces his parents and
two sisters, and the way he seems to
have materialized out of the wall be-
hind him makes one wonder whether
the scene might be his dream.
Each of the family members is
registering another feeling, and
Toor’s sense of characterization,
done with the slightest means, is
amazing. One sister, looking at her
brother, is noncommittal but might
be quietly happy for him. Her sis-
ter, her eyes down, probably wishes
the moment were over. Father (or
possibly a visitor) is turned inward
and not connecting with anyone.
Mother is beautifully realized. She
has been part of the tea party and
is now reaching out for the fruit. To
see her son, who has just arrived,
she also turns toward him, which
means she is seeing him sideways.
It is a particular twist that indicates
that she is in two camps at once.
Her body language says either “Dear,
here you have come” or, coolly, “Oh, it
is you.” Her turned body, with its impli-
cation of strife, encapsulates the entire
moment. Inventing it, Toor joins the
company of Mark Greenwold and Eric
Fischl, long-standing masters of pictur-
ing familial and domestic crises.
Bar Boy takes viewers aloft in an-
other way. At four feet high by five feet
across, it is the largest work in the show
and a feat of planning and design. The
bar boy is presumably the fellow who
stands by himself in a space in the cen-
ter, communing with his smartphone,
which beams light out at him. On either
side are people, primarily men, who are
conversing, looking into one another’s
eyes, sleeping, biding their time, or
about to kiss. Most of the picture is in
shades of green, and our eyes eat up
Toor’s phenomenal skill in two things
at once: making one color have such
variety, and creating some sixteen sep-
arate figures, almost all his or her dis-
tinctly own person, with bodily shapes
and haircuts to match.
The only weak link is the young man
with the phone. As the picture’s center-
piece, he is a little lacking in presence,
and the space around him feels blank.
But if this section of the picture is not
quite right artistically, it possibly adds a
note to the show as a whole. Maybe our
man is being carried along by “How
Will I Know” and, traveling on the
song’s wavelength, has left this scene
entirely. Q
The New York Review
 The Struggle and the Scramble
Antiquities
by Cynthia Ozick.
Knopf, 179 pp., $21.00
During a 1971 debate on feminism at
Town Hall in Manhattan, immortal-
ized in Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pen-
nebaker’s documentary Town Bloody
Hall (1979), a small, ladylike person
stands up to ask the moderator, Nor-
man Mailer, a question. It is in regard
to something she says he wrote in The
Prisoner of Sex, to wit: “A good nov-
elist can do without everything but the
remnant of his balls.” Gently, to howls
of laughter, she says, “For years and
years I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer,
when you dip your balls in ink, what
color ink is it?” The tone is a perfect,
respectful deadpan, the rhythm lilting,
the facial expression the picture of faux
innocence. This is Cynthia Ozick.
Ozick is known as a deeply intelli-
gent writer of essays, short stories, and
novels, but that Town Hall moment
captures something else essential about
her work. Her subjects—Judaism, the
Holocaust, the Diaspora, Israel, and
the near sanctity of literature—were
not the most fashionable pursuits in
the Seventies and Eighties, when pop
culture and poststructuralism came
dancing through the gates of literature.
I was somehow convinced over the
years that I had read Ozick and found
her work, while admirable, heavy and
dense—too conservative politically
and religiously. But it turned out I had
never read Cynthia Ozick. Ever.
I discovered this just a few years ago
when, following up a footnote in a book
about Jewish humor, I came across an
early essay, “Toward a New Yiddish,”
in which Ozick, with her characteris-
tic moral seriousness and sparkling,
almost playfully provocative excess,
declares her “revulsion . . . against what
is called, strangely, Western Civiliza-
tion.” I have been trying to catch up
with her ever since.
How could I have missed “The Hole/
Birth Catalogue,” her devastating, hi-
larious 1972 essay in Ms. magazine?
Thirty years ago [a sixty-year- old
widow] spent six hours expelling an
infant out of her hole via powerful
involuntary muscular contractions.
She did it in a special room in a big
building. It was a rod-bearing in-
fant, which afterward grew to be
somewhat under six feet in height,
dressed itself in two cloth tubes
cut off at the ankles, and by now
has spurted semen up a number of
human holes; having settled down
in a house in California, it has in-
seminated one hole three times.
The [widow]. . . thinks of herself
as the grandmother of Linda, Mi-
chael, and Karen. Which is to say:
she thinks of herself as a hole; the
Ur-hole, so to speak; and that is
very interesting.
Yes, that is very interesting. As is The
Puttermesser Papers (1997). How had I
never read these tales of Ruth Putter-
messer, a lawyer sunk in the bureau-
cracy of the New York City Department
of Receipts and Disbursements, who
becomes mayor and creates a sexually
April 8, 2021
Cathleen Schine
insatiable girl golem? It is arguably,
among its many other charms, the best
book about the city since Robert Ca-
ro’s The Power Broker.
Or the exquisite essay “The Seam of
the Snail,” a celebration of her lavishly
imperfect Russian-Jewish mother, that
slides into the writer’s reckoning with
her own talent? “Out of this thinnest
thread,” she writes,
Cynthia Ozick, Paris, 2005
this ink-wet line of words, must rise
a visionary fog, a mist, a smoke,
forging cities, histories, sorrows,
quagmires, entanglements, lives
of sinners, even the life of my
furnace-hearted mother: so much
wilderness, waywardness, plen-
itude on the head of the precise
and impeccable snail, between the
horns. (Ah, if this could be!)
Ozick’s nonfiction is sharp, layered,
earnest, and extremely funny. Her es-
says on Sontag or Updike or Roth or
Gass or Trilling ought not to resonate
as they once did, but following Ozick’s
arguments about decades- old literary
controversies is an urgent, exhilarating
experience. Perhaps it is her under-
standing of how language holds in its
arms both our souls and our wits, the
imagination and the intellect, that in-
fuses her nonfiction with this pulse of
necessity. In an essay called “Metaphor
and Memory,” Ozick recalls a reading
she nervously gave before a group of
doctors: “Here among the doctors, the
redemptive ardor of literature begins
to take on a vanity. How frivolous it
seems, how trivial—vanity of vanities!”
She reads them a story that is “part par-
able, part satire, outfitted in drollery
and ribaldry . . . drenched, above all, in
metaphor.” But the doctors object to
the story and to metaphor itself:
Frivolity. Triviality. Lightness of
mind. Irrational immateriality.
Baubles. To talk in metaphor to would be inexplicable sometimes if
serious men and women . . . is to considering only the subject. A man
disengage oneself from the capac- who thinks he is the son of Bruno
ity to put humanity before plea- Schulz? A scholar of an eighth- century
sure. . . . It is to cut oneself off from heretical Jewish sect? Yet The Messiah
the heat of human pity—and all for of Stockholm (1987) and Heir to the
the sake of a figure of speech. Glimmering World (2004) are as tense
as airport paperback thrillers. No mat-
The redemptive ardor of literature, ter what the topic, Ozick’s prose urges
one of Ozick’s recurring themes, does the breathless reader along, her love of
language rolling excitedly through her
Franck Ferville/Agence VU/Redux
sentences like an ocean wave.
Ozick’s new novel, Antiquities, moves
softly, with a tenderness and quiet in-
timacy that settle on a most unlikely
Ozick character: Lloyd Wilkinson
Petrie, an elderly WASP lawyer. The
novel is in the form of a memoir, writ-
ten in 1949, about his childhood board-
ing school during the late nineteenth
century and his friendship with an in-
triguing Jewish boy named Ben-Zion
Elefantin. You might expect Elefantin
to overtake the writer’s imagination:
Ozick was raised in the northern Bronx
by Russian Jewish parents; she was
a brilliant student at Hunter College
High School when it was an all-girls
school, a recipient of four years’ train-
ing there to lose her Bronx accent, and
the only girl in Lionel Trilling’s grad-
uate seminar at Columbia (one other
quickly quit); she has long been a vehe-
ment defender of the State of Israel; she
is, in short, a fiery and implacable New
York Jewish intellectual of the golden
age of New York Jewish intellectuals.
Yet this is Lloyd Petrie’s book, not Ben-
Zion’s, and though the novel centers on
someone as far from Ozick as imagin-
able, it feels intensely personal. Short
and swift and elegant, it is also as rich
not give up easily, however. Nor does and as complicated as any of Ozick’s
the figure of speech. In Ozick’s eyes creations.
they are bound together, they harmo- The Westchester boarding school,
nize, they are the chant, the symphony, which Ozick endows with an almost
the beat that gives life meaning. This mythical presence, is called the Temple
is one source of her literary power, Academy for Boys. The word “temple”
and it animates both her fiction and holds two histories, both of them dear
nonfiction. to Ozick. Petrie’s dry explanation of
In the introduction to Art & Ardor, the contrasting meanings is an exam-
a collection of essays that came out in ple of her sly, glancing humor: “It has
1984, Ozick talks of the “struggle and always been a matter of pride for us,”
scramble,” the “unashamed print-lust” the stuffy old Petrie reports, “that the
involved in the composition and publi- Academy’s physical plant was con-
cation of these pieces. She calls the ac- structed on what had been the prop-
tual writing of essays “predictable, . . . erty (a goodly acreage) of the Temple
a journey of obligation within borders, family, cousins to Henry James; it was
not an adventure,” but she doesn’t from these reputable Temples that the
mean it: Academy gleaned its name.” Alas, he
feels compelled to note, the name has
Essays know too much. led to some confusion. The building
Except sometimes. Knowledge has sometimes been mistaken for a
is not made out of knowledge. “Mormon edifice.” Petrie finds this
Knowledge swims up from in- “risible,” but “most unfortunate was
vention and imagination—from the too common suspicion that ‘Tem-
ardor—and sometimes even an ple’ signified something unpleasantly
essay can invent, burn, guess, try synagogical.”
out, dig up, hurtle forward, suc- A portrait of James hangs in the
cumb to that flood of sign and chapel of the school, and its classrooms
nuance that adds up to intuition, are named after letters of the Greek al-
disclosure, discovery. phabet, but books and scholarship are
secondary to sports at the spartan and
Fiction, on the other hand, “is all snobbish Temple Academy. It is the
discovery,” and hers is raucous, unex- domain, primarily, of well-to- do boys
pected, passionate, and wildly origi- from New York families who don’t
nal. Everything I have read (and I am want them around. The conditions are
still reading) hurtles forward with the primitive—communal cold showers,
force of anticipation and intellectual rooms called “cells”—and the empha-
surprise. The suspense of her work sis is on breeding and class: “We all
35
remember the sacking of the headmas-
ter from Liverpool due to his inade-
quate accent.”
The Temple School, which “saw its
last pupil thirty-four years ago,” has
been converted into apartments for
alumni who became trustees. Petrie
lives there with the seven other surviv-
ing trustees, each of whom has agreed
to “produce an album of remembrance,
a collection of small memoirs meant to
stand out from the welter of the past—
seven chapters of, if I may borrow an
old catchphrase, emotion recollected
in tranquility.” Yet for Petrie, such
recollections are anything but tran-
quil. Petrie’s temperament, his loneli-
ness—a widower, he is estranged from
his son—all of his narrow triumphs
and disappointments seep through
his formal, fustian locutions, beads of
shining, damp condensation that have
gathered on a long, dry life.
Petrie is an antiquity among antiqui-
ties. Even his tripartite name suggests
an earlier era, and it is deeply important
to him. It is the banner of his bloodline,
which leads, never mind how circu-
itously, to William Matthew Flinders
Petrie, “knighted by the Queen, and
more broadly known as the illustrious
archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie.” In
1880, after only three months of mar-
riage, Lloyd’s father leaves his bride,
with no warning or explanation, in
order to find Sir Flinders at an archae-
ological excavation in Egypt. When he
returns a few months later, he “admira-
bly” resumes “his place in the firm and
at her side.’”
Lloyd, who learns of this “scandal”
much later from his mother, refers to
Sir Flinders as Cousin William, as
his father had, though “it is difficult,”
Lloyd admits in his fastidiously un-
derstated and revealing way, “to judge
when a cousin of a certain distance be-
comes rather more of a stranger than a
relation, but in my father’s view there
were reasons for his feelings of close-
ness.” “Feelings of closeness” and their
absence is one of the stories this novel
tells. The husband who abandons his
bride with no explanation is deeply
moved to have Sir William, who ex-
isted in real life and whose photograph
adorns the novel’s frontispiece, sign his
little notebook “From Petrie to Petrie”
to prove their connection.*
Lloyd has almost no relationship
with either of his parents. When he
goes home from school for his fa-
ther’s funeral, “which chanced also
to coincide with my tenth birthday,”
his mother coldly hands him a bag of
Egyptian artifacts her husband brought
back from his “perfunctory escapade,”
telling her son, “Here are your father’s
toys.” And he is sent back the same day
with his bag of shards and statuettes.
The “toys” are clay antiquities, the
“assemblage of ancient oddities” over
which his father used to brood in the
evenings. Lloyd keeps them hidden,
secret. They are a cache of meaning, a
link to both his father and his lineage.
They are, really, the solitary boy’s only
connection to anything.
*The historical Sir Flinders Petrie, an
accomplished archaeologist, had his
own ideas about preserving antiquities.
He was buried in Jerusalem, but he had
made provision to have his head re-
moved and taken to the Royal College
of Surgeons, where it resides in a large
glass jar.
36
Until, that is, a new student arrives,
a boy with the preposterous name of
Ben-Zion Elefantin. Ben-Zion’s “com-
plexion was what I believe is called
olive, of the kind known to character-
ize the Mediterranean and Levantine
peoples.” The boy’s hair is the red of
Mediterranean clay and his accent
seems to hold bits of every language
in it. That and his name guarantee he
will be ostracized by the boys at Tem-
ple Academy. But during the time set
aside for sports, which neither of them
likes, he and Petrie begin playing chess
together. Intimacy, Petrie recalls,
was slow in coming, and was never
wholly achieved. He was unnatural
in too many ways. The abundance
of his uncut hair, for instance; not
only its earth-red yet unearthly
color, but what I suspected might
be a pair of long curls sprouting
from the temples, each one hidden
behind an ear and lost in the over-
all mass.
Petrie sometimes hears Ben-Zion
through his bedroom door, his “un-
natural voice, . . . somehow mysteri-
ously archaic, or (I hardly know my
own meaning as I tell this) uncannily
ancestral.”
In Petrie’s father’s time, no Jews
were admitted to Temple Academy.
But by the time Lloyd attends, the new
humanistic headmaster has admit-
ted half a dozen Jewish boys. Petrie
keeps his distance in order not to be
“shunned” by the other boys. “There
is always, I believe, a kernel of truth in
these commonplace disparagements,”
Petrie writes of the “satirical or other-
wise jesting comments on the Hebrew
character.” “For instance, in my own
Academy years I saw for myself how
inbred is that notorious Israelite clan-
nishness.” Petrie, though clearly un-
used to self-reflection, does always try
to be fair, a result one suspects of his
legal training, and he adds:
It has . . . since occurred to me that
this unseemly huddling may have
been the result, not the cause, of
our open contempt. To speak to a
Jew would be to lose one’s place in
our boyish hierarchy.
But the lonely ten-year- old Petrie is
fascinated by Ben-Zion, drawn to him
with a force he does not understand;
even now, as an old man looking back,
he senses danger in their friendship.
Though there are faint suggestions of
homoeroticism throughout the novel,
Lloyd’s fear seems more spiritual than
physical. Something in this friendship
unsettled the emotionally cut- off boy,
and just the memory of Ben-Zion res-
urrects unrestrained emotion that
threatens the cut- off man.
Petrie is also battered by the distrac-
tions of daily life, both big and small.
The domestic staff is drifting away
to better-paying jobs; the academy’s
money has run out and the trustees
must find new places to live; the summer
is unbearably hot; someone maliciously
spills ink on Petrie’s typewriter keys,
and his hands are afflicted by tremors.
And then, Petrie relates with some dis-
approval, one of the other trustees takes
a fall. He “lurched downward, his legs
snarled in the legs of the walker, and
fell in a twisted heap of elderly limbs.”
When he dies, another trustee whom
we realize—even through the oblique
innocence of Petrie’s narration—is the
deceased man’s longtime lover hangs
himself from one of the lavish chande-
liers. The antiquities are crumbling.
And so the memoir starts and stops,
“hiatus upon hiatus,” and the memoir-
ist apologizes:
The reader will, I trust, understand
why I must eke out my memoir in
these unsatisfying patches. In part
it is simple fatigue. The tremor in
my left hand has somehow begun
to assert itself in my right hand
as well, hence my typing becomes
blighted by too many errors.
The understanding reader is, of course,
held in suspense: “Once again I have
been reviewing these reflections, only
to increase my despondency. All is
maundering, all is higgledy-piggledy,
nowhere do I find consecutive logic.”
Petrie’s writerly despair, the possibility
that he will not finish the memoir, pro-
pels the novel forward:
The attentive reader (if by now
such reader there be) is my wit-
ness; only see how I have too long
put off the telling of it, and how
can I tell it even now . . . ? Can I
reach out my fingers to capture a
cloud, a vapor, an odor?. . . I must
try. But no, it cannot be done; not
by me, and who else is there?
Perhaps only Ozick could make the
completion of an old man’s ten-page
school memoir a dramatic necessity.
Perhaps only she would think to do so.
In a discussion of Thomas Hardy in
Art & Ardor, Ozick wrote, “Suspense
occurs when the reader is about to
learn something, not simply about the
relationship of fictional characters, but
about the writer’s relationship to a set
of ideas, or to the universe.” Ozick’s
own relationship to the universe is a
fiercely historical and literary one. In
an essay called “Pear Tree and Polar
Bear: A Word on Life and Art,” she
writes:
Inventing a secret, then reveal-
ing it in the drama of entangle-
ment—this is what ignites the will
to write stories. . . . The secrets
that engage me—that sweep me
away—are generally secrets of in-
heritance: how the pear seed be-
comes a pear tree, for instance,
rather than a polar bear. Ideas are
emotions that penetrate the future
of coherence—in particular the
idea of genesis. You cannot have
Philip Roth without Franz Kafka;
you cannot have Kafka without
Joseph the dreamer. You cannot
have William Gass without Walter
Pater; you cannot have Pater with-
out Pindar.
As for life, I don’t like it. I no-
tice no “interplay of life and art.”
Life is that which—pressingly, per-
sistently, unfailingly, imperially—
interrupts.
Life interrupts creativity, interrupts
writing. In the first two essays of Art
& Ardor—“Justice (Again) to Edith
Wharton,” which originally appeared
in Commentary in 1976, and “Mrs.
Virginia Woolf: A Madwoman and
Her Nurse,” which ran in Commentary
in 1973—her concerns are less for a
woman’s place in the world than for a
writer’s place in literature if that writer
is a woman and being interpreted as
a woman. Ozick jealously and fero-
ciously guards a writer’s prerogative to
be judged, despite their sex, as a writer.
I mention the dates of both these es-
says for two reasons. First, even when
Ozick observes a specific cultural mo-
ment fifty years in the past—second-
wave feminism; Harold Bloom and the
not so New Criticism; the relationship
between Black and Jewish writers like
Ralph Ellison and Irving Howe—her
work is blazingly alive. Open any of
her collections or stories or novels and
the time and place seem to be not just
the 1970s or Stockholm or the Bronx,
but that wondrous, expansive time and
place, Cynthia Ozick’s brain. The dates
also draw our attention to her femi-
nism, an imperative undercurrent in all
her work, which challenges so much of
second-wave feminism in all its 1970s
glory and absurdity.
In her magnificently meandering
essay on Wharton—a review of R.W. B.
Lewis’s 1975 biography that also takes
on the very art of biography—Ozick
rejects the idea that a “life” can re-
veal an artist for similar reasons. Just
as the label “woman” shouldn’t define
or confine a woman writer, so the life
of a woman writer cannot define her.
The furs and muffs and carriages, the
pitiful mad husband, the Pekingese,
the posed photographs, the gardens,
the mansions, her monetary patronage
of Henry James, even a newly revealed
adulterous affair—they tell us noth-
ing but the outer details of a society
woman’s passage through her moneyed
world.
“The real secret in Lewis’s biography
is devoid of sex, lived or imagined,”
Ozick argues, “though its centerpiece
is a bed; and it concerns not the woman
but the writer.” On a visit to Berlin,
Wharton flew into a rage because the
bed in her hotel room was not posi-
tioned properly. It was not until the bed
had been moved to face the window that
she was satisfied. She “worked in bed
every morning and therefore needed
a bed which faced the light,” the biog-
rapher explains, then moves on. Ozick
writes, “Either the biographer can
stand up to this moment—the woman
revealed as writer—or the book falls
into the drifting ash of ‘a life.’” Both
Wharton’s self-mythologizing and
Lewis’s careful biography, Ozick says,
leave out what is the real story, the real
life of Edith Wharton: “the window-lit
bed.” That is where the life of Edith
Wharton the writer took place, and
that, Ozick says, was her true life.
In the essay on Woolf, Ozick writes,
“Classical feminism as represented by
Virginia Woolf meant one thing only:
access to the great world of thinking,
being, and doing.” She again refuses to
reduce the writer to the prescriptions
of her life, wrenching Woolf away from
her family’s intense but limited per-
spective and away from the feminists
who would make her an “avatar” in “the
style of Sylvia Plath.” The occasion is
Quentin Bell’s biography of Woolf, the
personal, family provenance of which,
Ozick says, has reduced Woolf to the
madwoman of the family. Which, of
course, she was. But as in Lewis’s biog-
raphy of Wharton, the life of the genius
has obscured the genius: “She was an
artist; she schemed, and not through
random contractions or inflations of
madness, but through the usual meth-
ods of art: inspired intellection, the
The New York Review
breaking down of expectation into lu-
minous segments of shock.”
Lloyd Petrie is no Virginia Woolf, but
he is driven by a need to write the story
of his one true friend. In a tender scene
hazy with homoerotic potential, Ben-
Zion and Lloyd lie on the floor, their
skinny legs entwined, caught up in a
silent timelessness. Later in the novel,
Petrie mentions with contempt his
son’s interest in the philosopher Mar-
tin Buber, but as a boy he experienced
with Ben-Zion a decidedly Buberesque
moment of transcendent connection:
And now, the two of us prone
on the floor among the nubbles
of dust, breathing their spores, I
seemed to be breathing his breath.
Our bare legs in the twist of my fall
had somehow become entangled,
and it was as if my skin, or his own,
might at any moment catch fire.
Ben-Zion now, at last, begins to tell
his secret, his story, the origins of his
name, his own ancestry—a story that
began in ancient times on an island on
the Nile, when a small group of Jews
became separated from Moses and
built their own temple, isolated and
eventually shunned by the authorities
in Jerusalem:
He spoke with a rhythmic rapidity,
almost as if he were reciting, half by
rote, some time-encrusted liturgical
saga. It had no beginning, it prom-
ised no end, it was all fantastical
middle, a hallucinatory mixture of
languages and implausible histories.
Ozick’s work often touches on the
dilemma for Jews attempting, or for-
getting, to preserve their history while
navigating the Diaspora: the orphan
Lars searching for his lost legacy in The
Messiah of Stockholm, for example, or
exiled Professor Mittwisser obsessively
researching the Karaites in Heir to the
Glimmering World, or the hilariously
materialistic Soviet cousin in The Put-
termesser Papers. In Antiquities Ozick
gives us one more wandering Jew and
his obscure history: Ben-Zion’s tale
sounds far too fanciful to be true, but it
is in fact the story of a real fifth- century
Jewish community, lost and then exiled
on Elephantine Island in the Nile.
Lloyd has heard of the island. His fa-
ther wrote about it in his notebook, the
one with Cousin William’s autograph,
describing it as “littered with the ves-
tigial ruins of Forgotten worship.”
Ben-Zion is a vestige of those vestigial
ruins. His origins, he says,
for reasons of rivalry and obfus-
cation have been omitted from
the Books of the Jews. . . . We Ele-
fantins remain outcasts from the
history of our people. . . . We have
been as a people scattered and few,
and worse: forgotten, as if we never
were.
To be erased by history, to be for-
gotten—these are obvious Jewish con-
cerns. We see that for Petrie, seventy
years later, they are also the concerns
of old age. His own memory is fail-
ing, too, but he has not forgotten Ben-
Zion’s words: “On the contrary: they
remain for me akin to a burning bush,
unquenchable.”
Lloyd Petrie, proud of his stony de-
meanor, a privileged Episcopalian
from a long line of privileged Episco-
palians, is not an obvious Ozick hero.
Yet Petrie, so unlike her fantastical,
feverish creations from The Messiah
of Stockholm, The Pagan Rabbi, or
The Puttermesser Papers, is oddly, or
at least unexpectedly, one of the rich-
est and most personal of Ozick’s char-
acters. The intimacy we feel is stirred
partly by our inclusion in Petrie’s strug-
gle to write his memoir. The act of
memory is an act of creation, and his
responsibility as a writer to say what
must be said weighs heavily on him. He
is tortured by the consciousness that
what he writes, what he knows, what
he comes to understand, will crumble
like the books of Greek and Latin and
German poetry left to the school by the
headmaster, who is himself long dead.
Overly conscientious to the point of
unconscious honesty, Petrie is burning
with pain and curiosity. He mentions
his wife and son only in passing. His
one love seems to have been his secre-
tary, and his cherished reminder of her
is her old typewriter, another antiquity
in this novel of people and things that
have survived as symbols of another
time. Yes, he is a crotchety fossil. Yes,
he is a shallow snob and a cold fish.
Yes, he married his wife because she
got pregnant. He has no understanding
of, and no respect for, his son and his
frivolous, unremunerative Hollywood
pursuits in “film entertainment.” He is
anti- Semitic in word and thought if not
in deed. But the delicacy with which
Ozick reveals his unhappiness and his
emotional need allows her to transcend
simple satire. He is an imperfect man,
fully embraced by the author, and his
predicament is to have grown old. Hav-
ing done so, he stands at the far edge of
his life; to see anything at all, he must
turn and look back. “I think incessantly
of death,” he writes, “of oblivion, how
nothing lasts, not even memory when
the one who remembers is gone. And
how can I go on with my memoir, to
what end, for what purpose?”
Ozick knows to what end. She knows
there is a relationship that begins within
the writer and flows to the words she
writes and on to her readers. “Relation
is reciprocity,” Buber wrote in I and
Thou. Ozick is a writer of relation and
reciprocity. She is a writer of wild and
spacious and daunting imagination, of
unyielding sensitivity to the absurdities
of life and to its pain, so much pain.
In her 2006 collection of essays, The
Din in the Head, she wrote:
When a thesis or a framework—
any kind of prescriptiveness or
tendentiousness—is imposed on
the writing of fiction, imagination
flies out the door, and with it the
freedom and volatility and irre-
sponsibility that imagination both
confers and commands.
Freedom and volatility and irrespon-
sibility conferred and commanded by
imagination—this is a wonderful de-
scription of Ozick’s own writing, to
which should be added playful intelli-
gence, comic wisdom, eloquent abun-
dance, the knife edge of economy, the
lightness of irony, the weight of history,
and finally an overarching passion—
no, let’s call it love—for words in all
their delicacy and power. Q

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April 8, 2021 37
 Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?
The Last Slave Ships:
New York and the
End of the Middle Passage
by John Harris.
Yale University Press, 300 pp., $30.00
In the fall of 1853 Salvador de Castro Jr.,
a leading Cuban slave trader, traveled to
Manhattan to arrange an expedition to
West Central Africa to buy slaves and
transport them for sale in Cuba. There
he met with José Antunes Lopes Lemos,
an experienced Brazilian slave trader
who had transferred his operations to
New York City after Brazil ended its
slave trade in 1850. Lemos was one of
about a dozen Portuguese and Brazil-
ians who made New York a center of the
last decade of the Atlantic slave trade.
Because everything they were doing
in the city was illegal—the US had
outlawed the slave trade in 1808—the
Cuban and Brazilian slave traders took
great pains to obscure their activities,
something that was relatively easy to
do in the bustling port of Lower Man-
hattan. They hired an intermediary,
William Valentine, who in turn hired
a German immigrant, James Smith,
as captain. Smith went up to Boston,
where he purchased the Julia Moul-
ton, a two-hundred-ton vessel built by
Tengue and Hall, shipbuilders in New-
castle, Maine, in 1846. In New York
Smith claimed that he owned the ship,
which he did not. Castro and Lemos
stocked it with lumber as well as enough
food and water to cross the Atlantic and
return, and Smith told customs officials
that they were bound for Cape Town,
which they were not. Though he later
denied it, Smith said he was a US citi-
zen, which enabled the Julia Moulton to
fly the American flag on the high seas.
This would protect it from British ef-
forts to suppress the slave trade, which
Parliament had prohibited in 1807. (By
the 1850s the US was the only country
that still refused to sign a treaty allow-
ing British cruisers to intercept slav-
ing vessels sailing under its own flag.)
Once at sea, the crew used the lumber
to build a platform to hold slaves below
deck, covered the hatches with metal
grilles to create a maritime prison, and
headed for Ambrizette, a slaving port
on the coast of West Central Africa.
Ambrizette generally trafficked in
people enslaved in the Kingdom of
Kongo, and most of the captives on the
Julia Moulton were likely from Kikongo-
speaking communities. Sometimes in-
dividuals were enslaved in violent wars
between different African groups; oth-
ers were the victims of conflicts and
pressures within their own communi-
ties. They were sold to pombeiros—itin-
erant traders—and taken by canoe or
marched to the coast from as far as 250
miles inland. There they were shackled,
branded, and caged in wretched pens to
await embarkation.
Some 664 Africans were sold to the
Julia Moulton, mostly men and boys.
The crew worked swiftly to avoid detec-
tion by the British navy, transferring the
captives to the ship as soon as it arrived
on the coast. Once onboard they were
stripped naked; the men were sent below,
while the women and children—less
likely to rebel—were kept on deck. As
if all the misery they had suffered were
not enough, the nightmare known as
38
James Oakes
‘Capture of a Slaver off the Coast of Cuba’; engraving from The Illustrated London News, 1858
the Middle Passage was about to begin.
During the day the four hundred men
packed into the slave deck sat on one
another’s legs; at night “they lie down
upon the deck, on their sides, body to
body,” according to the captain. Such
conditions were notoriously conducive
to disease, and the Julia Moulton was
no exception. About a quarter of the
captives died, 150 in all, mostly men,
most likely from gastrointestinal mala-
dies such as dysentery.
The ship was destined for Cuba, which
by the 1850s was the last major importer
of enslaved Africans in the Americas.
(Of the approximately 226,000 slaves
illicitly transported in that last decade,
164,000 went to Cuba.) In mid-June
1854, after forty-five days at sea, the
Julia Moulton approached Trinidad
de Cuba, a port on the southern coast
of the island. On a signal sent by Cap-
tain Smith, Cuban traffickers sent out
launches to ferry the slaves and crew
members ashore. The Cubans then ran
the Julia Moulton aground and set it on
fire, destroying the evidence of its igno-
minious final voyage.
At that point things went awry. For a
brief moment in 1854 authorities in Ma-
drid decided to crack down on illegal
slave trading, making an alliance with
Britain in hopes of fending off US im-
perial designs on Cuba. The governor
of Cuba, the reformist captain general
Juan de la Pezuela, arrested and im-
prisoned several of the island’s leading
slave traders in Havana, and deposed
some corrupt local officials.
The 490 Africans disembarked from
the Julia Moulton were intercepted
by Spanish authorities at San Carlos,
a sugar estate near the port. But the
emancipados, as they were known,
were not quite emancipated. Instead,
they were auctioned off to local sugar
planters for five-year contracts.
Meanwhile, Captain Smith and the
crew returned to New York. Once there,
the first mate, angry at not having been
paid, ratted out the captain to the district
attorney. Smith was tried, convicted,
and sentenced to two years in prison
for violation of an 1800 law that made
it a crime for US citizens or residents
to participate in the foreign slave trade.
The trial was a major scandal, produc-
ing most of the documentation we have
about the voyage of the Julia Moulton.
John Harris tells this story midway
into his impressively researched new
book, The Last Slave Ships: New York
and the End of the Middle Passage.
Among its many virtues is a too-modest
subtitle. Manhattan is only part of the
story. Harris’s description of the “trian-
gular trade” takes readers seamlessly
from Cuba to New York to West Cen-
tral Africa to Cuba and back to New
York (with an early side trip to Brazil).
Harris raises, if only implicitly, some of
the biggest questions historians have
asked about the fraught relationship
between capitalism and slavery. This is
a small book about big things.
In his classic study Capitalism and
Slavery (1944), Eric Williams posited a
historic reversal of fortune brought on
by the American Revolution. Through-
out most of the eighteenth century,
Williams argued, the profits from slav-
ery and the slave trade proved crucial
to financing the early stage of the Brit-
ish Industrial Revolution. But when
Americans secured their indepen-
dence, they broke free from Britain’s
imperial trade restrictions, undermin-
ing their efficacy. British capitalists
quickly became converts to free trade
and began denouncing the West Indian
“monopoly” for using mercantilist pro-
tections to keep the slave economies
artificially afloat. In Williams’s telling,
the capitalists turned against slavery
out of cupidity rather than humanity.
This two-part story has come to be
known as the Williams thesis, and al-
though it has provoked decades of de-
bate it has largely survived, albeit in
somewhat modified form. Most schol-
ars now agree that slavery and the
slave trade were integral, though not
Look and Learn/Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images
necessarily indispensable, to British
economic development in the eigh-
teenth century. And most agree that
the world’s first abolitionist movement
emerged in both the US and Britain as
a consequence of the American Revo-
lution, especially in the 1780s, though
not necessarily because capitalists
began assailing slavery.
What the Williams thesis could not
explain was the dramatic revival of
slave economies in the first half of the
nineteenth century. No doubt some-
thing changed in the late eighteenth
century, but it was not simply a case
of capitalists suddenly turning against
slavery. Rather, as Leonardo Marques
points out in his exceptional survey of
US efforts to suppress the slave trade,
the Age of Revolution created a con-
tradictory world that simultaneously
encouraged and abolished slavery.1
On the one hand, the American Rev-
olution dealt a severe blow to slavery
in the United States. One state after
another abolished slave trading, and
in the 1790s the US became the first
nation to begin actively suppressing
it. In the northern states slavery itself
was being abolished, some of the first
abolitions in world history. From these
would emerge a politically active com-
munity of free Blacks who went on
to become leaders in the antislavery
movement. At the same time, the new
nation committed itself to restricting
slavery’s expansion, setting the stage
for the eventual admission of five more
free states into the Union. Call this the
invention of “the North.” But slavery
in the plantation states in the South
was also shaken by the Revolution.
During the War of Independence tens
of thousands of slaves escaped to the
British, never to be returned to slavery.
Tobacco and indigo plantations suf-
fered devastating declines that in turn
1
Leonardo Marques, The United States
and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the
Americas, 1776–1867 (Yale University
Press, 2016).
The New York Review
prompted a wave of manumissions, and
with it the creation of free Black com-
munities in the upper South.
Those emancipatory tendencies were
soon checked, in part by forces un-
leashed by the Revolution itself. The
rapid economic development of Brit-
ain and the United States produced an
explosion of consumer demand for the
products of slave labor, notably sugar,
coffee, cocoa, and above all cotton,
which resulted in an increased demand
for African slaves. Thus the decades
after the American Revolution wit-
nessed human history’s first sustained
efforts to destroy slavery, beginning in
the northern United States and Haiti,
and at the same time the dramatic re-
vival of slavery—a “second slavery”—
in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the
southern United States.
All attempts to shut down the At-
lantic slave trade operated within this
contradiction. The history of the slave
trade in the United States is, then, a
story of significant moves to suppress
it in the face of determined efforts to
evade the laws against it. Harris’s book
nicely illuminates both of these tenden-
cies. The slave trade, he notes, “became
indelibly marked by efforts to stop it.”
In 1794 and again in 1800 Congress
made it a crime for American crews or
ships to participate in the foreign slave
trade. The US banned all slave imports
in 1808, and between 1818 and 1820
the US defined slave trading as piracy,
subject to the death penalty. There-
after violations were rare, and few en-
slaved Africans were smuggled into the
United States.
But that did not end US participa-
tion in the slave trade. The American
shipbuilding industry was becoming
the envy of the world, and vessels built
in US shipyards—the famed Baltimore
clippers, for example—came to domi-
nate Atlantic trade, including the illicit
slave trade. And there were always
Americans willing to break the law by
serving as captains and crew on illegal
slaving voyages.
In the commerce between the US,
Africa, and the slave plantations of
Brazil and the Caribbean, two of the
three legs of the triangle were techni-
cally legal. American crews and ships
could trade freely with West Central
Africa, or with Brazil, for example.
But once the Americans reached their
destinations, they could sell both their
cargo and their ships to local slave trad-
ers who completed the third, illegal leg
of the triangle—transporting enslaved
Africans to the Americas—under for-
eign auspices. Some American diplo-
mats and consuls fumed at the brazen
evasion of American law, while others
turned a blind eye. Part of the problem
was that closing down the slave trade
was never the main priority of US offi-
cials, which was to safeguard the legal
commerce of American citizens.
Still, the screws on the slave trade
were steadily tightening. The French
began suppressing it in earnest in the
1830s. In 1842 the Webster-Ashburton
Treaty with Britain required the US to
beef up its Africa Squadron to more
credibly combat illegal American trad-
ing. A few years later the Portuguese
stepped up their efforts to suppress
slave trading in West Central Africa,
as did the British. In 1850, in part due
to pressure from the British navy, Bra-
zil finally took effective measures to
April 8, 2021
end its own slave trade. Leading Bra-
zilian and Portuguese traders fled to
Cuba, but in 1854 the reformist Pezuela
hounded them off the island, and they
fled again, this time to New York City.
The dozen or so Brazilian and Portu-
guese traffickers in Lower Manhattan,
known as the Portuguese Company,
relied on the distinct advantages of
their different partners. Cuban plant-
ers were avid buyers of enslaved Af-
ricans and had the means to finance
the ventures. They also enjoyed polit-
ical connections that protected them
from local authorities during episodic
crackdowns. The Cubans in turn relied
on the Brazilians as investors but also
for their extensive connections to slave
traders in West Central Africa. The
traders living in West Central Africa
were likewise essential, not only as the
suppliers of slaves but as owners of the
“cargo” who were liable for the great-
est losses if a voyage somehow failed.
And by the late 1850s a substantial per-
centage of them did fail, thanks in large
part to the increasingly intense efforts
to suppress the trade.
In New York the Portuguese dis-
guised their ownership of ships such as
the Julia Moulton by working through
American intermediaries, paying US
citizens to make “straw” purchases of
ships and supplies, and hiring “dummy”
US captains who could legally sail the
ships under the American flag. By then
the busiest port in the hemisphere,
New York was home to merchants with
trading partners everywhere, includ-
ing Cuba and West Central Africa. It
was also a place where Spanish gold
could be laundered through reputable
financial institutions and reinvested in
nominally American ships engaged in
seemingly legal commerce.
Despite the illegality of the slave
trade, the authorities responsible for
policing it faced a number of obstacles.
Harris believes that suppression was
hindered by the US’s unwillingness to
sign a treaty with Britain that would
allow its navy to intercept slave ships
flying the American flag, on the grounds
that it would be, in the words of a former
American naval officer, “contrary to na-
tional honor and national interests.” But
the record of such treaties was hardly
encouraging. The slave trade to Cuba
and Brazil flourished despite the sup-
pression treaties signed by Spain, Portu-
gal, and Brazil, whereas the slave trade
to the US was effectively shut down
without any such treaty. Before the
1850s most illicit slave ships flew under
Spanish, Portuguese, or Brazilian flags,
notwithstanding the treaties allowing
the British to board such vessels.
The increasing use of the US flag in
the Cuban slave trade of the late 1850s
forced the British to rely on a network
of spies to expose the true ownership of
vessels traveling with bogus American
papers. If they could not legally board
US ships, the British could at least pro-
vide the US Navy with documentation
of illicit slave trading. One such spy was
Emilio Sanchez, a Cuban-born com-
mission merchant in New York who
combined deep knowledge of the ship-
ping business in the city with reliable
family connections in Cuba. Sanchez
was both ingenious and discreet. Well
known in Lower Manhattan’s merchant
community, he gathered information
by scouring the commercial press with
a knowing eye and by striking up ca-
sual conversations with acquaintances.
He used a cipher to pass along informa-
tion to Edward Archibald, the British
consul in New York. Between 1859 and
1862 Sanchez provided the British with
information on 77 percent of the slave
voyages in the Atlantic basin.
Despite the efforts of savvy spies and
persistent prosecutors, shutting down
the trade proved difficult. One prob-
lem was that US statutes did not have
“equipment clauses” that would have
made it easier to convict traders on the
basis of evidence that vessels were being
fitted out for slave trading. Because
US law criminalized slave trading by
Americans, indicted immigrants often
claimed they had not been naturalized.
Some even pretended in court that they
could not speak English. Ships of con-
victed slavers were sold rather than de-
stroyed and were often repurchased by
the very slavers from whom they had
been confiscated. As a result, as War-
ren Howard demonstrated long ago,
the majority of the slave traders who
were prosecuted were never punished.2
Politics also intruded. A succession
of Democratic administrations made
minimal efforts to enforce America’s
treaty obligations. In the 1850s proslav-
ery expansionists argued that the only
way to suppress the slave trade was to
wrest the island of Cuba from Spain.
What good could the US do, Democrats
asked (quite disingenuously), so long as
Cuba was ruled by a reactionary mon-
archy that tolerated the barbaric trade?
The effect, Harris believes, was to un-
dermine the will to prosecute traders
or enforce suppression treaties.
The more potent political challenge
came from the antislavery Republican
Party. Politicians like New York sen-
ator William Seward assailed Dem-
ocrats for trying to shift the blame to
Spain when the real problem was that
a “Slave Power,” operating through the
Democratic Party, controlled all three
branches of the federal government.
Seward and other Republicans intro-
duced bills that would strengthen the
hands of prosecutors, but they routinely
failed in the Democratic- controlled
Congress. In numerous speeches be-
ginning in 1854 Abraham Lincoln
called for more aggressive federal sup-
pression of the slave trade, as did the
1860 Republican Party platform.
Under increasing pressure from Re-
publicans, Democratic president James
Buchanan beefed up US naval patrols
off the African coast and in the Carib-
bean, resulting in the capture of twenty
slaving vessels in 1859–1860. But those
were also the peak years of the Portu-
guese Company’s activity, so although
more slavers were captured, more than
ever got through.
All that changed in 1861 when Re-
publicans took the White House and
control of both houses of Congress.
Soon after Lincoln became president,
his administration negotiated a sup-
pression treaty with Great Britain that
was easily ratified by the Senate in early
1862. At least as important was the ad-
ministration’s aggressive prosecution
of slave traders, focusing in particular
on New York City. The most conspic-
uous result was the conviction of Na-
thaniel Gordon, a ship captain who had
2
Warren S. Howard, American Slavers
and the Federal Law, 1837–1862 (Uni-
versity of California Press, 1963).
been illegally trading in slaves for more
than a decade. Despite an 1820 statute
prescribing the death penalty for such
crimes, no slave trader had ever been
sentenced to die. Gordon’s prosecution
had been initiated under the Buchanan
administration, but Lincoln, deter-
mined to make an example of him,
resisted all entreaties to spare Gor-
don’s life. The effect was immediate.
His execution in 1862 sent members of
the Portuguese Company scurrying to
close down their business and flee the
country. US participation in the slave
trade was effectively shut down.
For a few years Cuban traders, with
Spain’s support, continued to traffic in
enslaved Africans. But the combined
pressure from Britain and the US left
Spain and Cuba increasingly isolated.
Conservative reformers in Cuba, hop-
ing to resist foreign intervention and
protect slavery itself, began to suppress
the illegal slave trade in earnest. Fi-
nally, liberal reformers in Spain with-
drew their country’s support, and thus
the 350-year- old Atlantic slave trade
came to an end.
The tale told in The Last Slave Ships
could easily seem like a relatively minor
footnote to the much older and much
larger history of the Atlantic slave
trade. A handful of renegade slave
traders, on the run from Brazil and
Cuba, managed to revive their business
in New York for a few short years be-
fore being run out of yet another town.
“The midcentury trade,” Harris ac-
knowledges, “had always been in some
ways fragile.” But what makes his book
so valuable is his ability to use this last
dark era of the slave trade as a window
onto a much wider world of interna-
tional diplomacy, imperial arrogance,
criminal conspiracy, financial shenan-
igans, and political conflict.
It is this last point that deserves par-
ticular attention. Harris is that rare
historian who revels in complexity and
contradiction and yet manages to also
write a clear and gripping narrative.
There are obvious villains in this story,
but the heroes are never entirely heroic.
Without doubt the British used their
considerable diplomatic and military
muscle to lead the world in the sup-
pression of the slave trade. But at the
same time, Harris notes, “the British
themselves aided the traffic indirectly
by selling slave trading goods on the
African coast and by importing vast
amounts of Cuban sugar.”
The same could be said of the United
States. Its textile manufacturers and
consumers constituted a seemingly in-
satiable market for the products of slave
labor, and its government committed it-
self to a system of free trade. Together,
these two great forces of capitalist de-
velopment created powerful incentives
to keep alive the commerce in enslaved
Africans. And yet the United States
was also the first nation in history to
pass legislation designed to suppress the
slave trade and, in the face of a rapidly
expanding cotton economy, the federal
government effectively shut down the
importation of slaves by 1820. “The
United States,” Harris aptly concludes,
“proved to be critical to both the slave
trade and its eventual suppression.”
One other conclusion seems unavoid-
able. The slave trade did not die on its
own; it had to be killed. It took sus-
tained political opposition to overcome
the powerful economic incentives that
kept the slavers in business. The same
could be said of slavery itself. Q
39
 ‘The Roots of Our Madness’
Kamran Javadizadeh
The Selected Letters

Terence Spencer/ LIFE /Getty Images

of John Berryman
edited by Philip Coleman and
Calista McRae, with a foreword
by Martha B. Mayou.
Belknap Press/Harvard
University Press, 726 pp., $39.95

In the early morning hours of Decem-

ber 6, 1962, having broken his ankle,
afraid that he was on the verge of a
more general breakdown, the poet
John Berryman woke up in a hospital
bed. He was forty- eight years old, a
year into his third marriage, a new fa-
ther for the second time. From bed he
transcribed his dream:

First, at vast party I was giving,

Randall said “You’ve just got to
stop writing these pseudo-poems.
Come back & write real ones and
we’ll all be with you.” Many guests
about—all heard—but not said for
them: to me, sincerely, and I felt
that he was right—all my work
was a stupid farce. I promised
never to write again—even grate-
ful to him—but no one was sat-
isfied; I must die. Only question:
method—& to leave the party
unnoticed.

The “pseudo-poems” that had so

gravely disappointed this nightmare
version of Berryman’s friend, the poet
and critic Randall Jarrell, were in fact
sections of a long poem that Berryman
would eventually collect and publish as
The Dream Songs (1969). He had been
writing them since 1955; by the time of
his nightmare, he had begun to share
them with friends and to present them
publicly at readings. A few had already
appeared in print. Now, his dreams
were telling him, the price of their fail-
ure would be his death.
The poems record the dreamlife of a
character named Henry, who was, ac-
cording to Berryman, “a white Amer-
ican in early middle age.” Henry was a
dream version of his maker, Berryman’s
avatar and effigy. When Elizabeth
Bishop read 77 Dream Songs (1964),
the first book-length installment of the
project, she confided to Robert Lowell,
“Some pages I find wonderful, some
baffle me completely.” It’s not hard to
see why. Like dreams, the poems are
full of associative leaps and bursts of
intense feeling, jarring shifts in per-
spective and setting, sudden entrances
and exits of dimly lit characters. Those
characters address Henry with a mix-
ture of intimacy and hostility, literary
allusion and slangy babytalk. Most baf-
flingly, in many of the Dream Songs,
Henry speaks and is spoken to as
though he were a blackface performer
(called Mr. Bones) in a minstrel show.
Just over a decade ago, I visited the
Berryman archive at the University of
Minnesota and held in my hands the
transcript of his hospital nightmare
about Jarrell. What I didn’t realize at
the time—and what I know now from
reading Berryman’s Selected Letters—
was that this haunting bit of inner life
had taken a circuitous route to the
archive, passing through other hands
before it returned to Berryman’s and,
decades later and in an institutional
setting, reached mine. Three days after
he’d transcribed his dream, Berryman
placed it in an envelope along with a
letter to Jarrell himself: “One night-
mare in the 2nd hosp. was abt you—I
wrote it out & enclose it—may I have
it back?” What a strange thing to do, I
now think, to put the dream in the mail
and send it to the waking version of the
man whose judgment had troubled his
sleep, and how like Berryman to do it.
To read The Dream Songs is to feel the
prickly thrill—and also, at times, the
tedium and discomfiting imposition—
of receiving, unsolicited and without
explanation, a casual friend’s dreams
in the mail.
Or on the telephone. At around
the same time, Berryman regularly
sought out another friend, the novel-
ist Ralph Ellison, who later explained
the odd routine to one of Berryman’s
biographers:
During the period he was writing
Dream Songs I grew to expect his
drunken (sometimes) telephone
calls, in the course of which he’d
read from work in progress. . . . I
can’t recall how many such calls
there were, but usually he wanted
my reaction to his uses of dialect.
My preference is for idiomatic ren-
dering, but I wasn’t about to let
the poetry of what he was saying
be interrupted by the dictates of
my ear for Afro-American speech.
Besides, watching him transform
elements of the minstrel show
into poetry was too fascinating.
Fascinating too, and amusing was
my suspicion that Berryman was
John Berryman, Dublin, 1967
casting me as a long- distance Mis-
ter Interlocutor—or was it Mister
Tambo—whose temporary role
was that of responding critically
to his Mister Bones and Huffy
Henry.1
It’s an extraordinary scene: a white
poet summoning the author of Invisi-
ble Man as a disembodied voice, enlist-
ing a Black novelist as silent guarantor
of authenticity in an elaborate racial
masquerade. As Ellison intuited—and
as was also true in the correspondence
with Jarrell—the psychodramas into
which Berryman projected his friends
replicated the dreamlike dialogues
within his poems. In both his poems
and his social life, what Berryman
was rehearsing was the production of
a self. From Jarrell, Berryman sought
the critical authority that could assure
him that his “pseudo-poems,” and thus
the life from which they sprang, were
“real”; from Ellison, Berryman wanted
the black background against which his
flickering identity, his ghostly white-
ness, could become visible, coherent,
and powerful.
Peculiar as it may have seemed, ghastly
as it was, Berryman’s minstrelsy was
also typical of the form’s history. In his
landmark book Love and Theft (1995),
Eric Lott argued that, from the 1830s
on, blackface minstrelsy gave white
1
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison,
edited by John F. Callahan and Marc
C. Conner (Random House, 2019), pp.
922–923.
working- class performers a way to tap
into the insurrectionary potential hid-
ing within their fantasies of blackness
while simultaneously reasserting their
supremacy over the Black people who
were the objects of their racist mim-
icry. Blackface thus not only lent itself
to the brutalization of Black people; it
also played an essential part in the con-
struction and consolidation of its par-
ticipants’ whiteness.
Those projects were linked. Over the
course of the twentieth century, as ac-
tual blackface performances (largely
but never entirely) receded from the
American stage, minstrelsy’s legacy
seeped into the culture, so that, for in-
stance, Jim Crow, once the most famous
character of the minstrel stage, became
the name for the legal system that gov-
erned the racial segregation of Ameri-
can life. By the middle of the twentieth
century—a period coterminous, not
incidentally, with the civil rights era—
the white performer in blackface was
nowhere and everywhere. He lurked
behind Elvis Presley’s uncanny chan-
neling of the blues, Norman Mailer’s
description of the postwar hipster as
a “white Negro,” John Howard Grif-
fin’s darkening his skin and touring
the South for his book Black Like
Me. Berryman’s minstrelsy at once
sits alongside these contemporary ex-
amples and—anachronistically, scan-
dalously—draws the source of their
artifice to the surface. Henry doesn’t
dream that he is Black. He dreams that
he’s a white man in blackface.
That kind of literary posturing, in
which a provisional identification with
the markers of blackness allows the

40 The New York Review

white writer to identify with a figure
whom he can also discipline and dis-
avow, has had a long history. T. S. Eliot
and Ezra Pound, a generation or two
older than Berryman, addressed each
other in letters with nicknames plucked
from Uncle Remus (Eliot was “Old Pos-
sum,” Pound “Brer Rabbit”) and chan-
neled the undercurrents of minstrelsy
to help stage the cultural upheavals that
we have come to associate with mod-
ernism. In an early draft of The Waste
Land, for which Pound served as ad
hoc editor, Eliot ventriloquized lyrics
from the minstrel songbook: “Meet me
in the shadow of the watermelon vine/
Eva Iva Uva Emmaline.” Those lines
did not make it into the finished poem,
but ragtime, jazz, and the vestiges of
the minstrel tradition on which those
popular musical forms drew did: out of
that tradition emerges, for instance, the
“Shakespeherian Rag” that echoes in
the poem’s chaotic soundscape. As the
scholar Michael North and others have
shown, moments like these, in which
white writers used dialect associated
with stereotypical notions of racialized
others, were central not only to the
private correspondence of Eliot and
Pound or to the composition of a single
poem but rather to the very formation
of Anglo-American literary modern-
ism, whose legacy dominated the insti-
tutions in which Berryman learned to
be a poet.
After World War II, Pound had be-
come institutional in another sense:
held in St. Elizabeths, a federal insane
asylum, for thirteen years, avoiding
treason charges for his fascist wartime
radio broadcasts. In 1947 Berryman
wrote to him there and described the
way the literary landscape had changed
since Pound and his cohort had come
onto the scene:
Thirty years ago the (“intellec-
tual”) public knew nothing, at
present it is only too damned
apparently-familiar with every-
thing—among others, with all of
you. . . . There is a whole school of
now-academic criticism to be bro-
ken down also (Ransom Winters
Tate Blackmur Warren), which I
am convinced is stifling talent.
In his final parenthetical, Berryman
rattles off the names of prominent New
Critics, a loosely affiliated group of
writers who developed the ideas of El-
iot’s early essays into an understanding
of literature—particularly poetry—as
a formal craft that could be divorced
from the lives of its makers and the his-
tory from which it emerged. Berryman
had come to believe that the New Crit-
ical approach, which had taken as axi-
omatic Eliot’s claim that poetry should
be “impersonal,” was a dead end for
poetry. “It seems to me,” Berryman
told an interviewer, “on the contrary
that poetry comes out of personality.”
When he invented Henry, Berry-
man felt as though he had landed upon
a way to reclaim modernism’s poetic
energy unburdened by the orthodoxy
that constrained its latter- day, mid-
century adherents. Minstrelsy may
have seemed to him, four decades after
The Waste Land, like a means by which
he could upset the “stifling” status quo
that Eliot had unwittingly, even para-
doxically, prefigured, but it reinscribed
another. No matter the liberating po-
tential Berryman saw in it, inevitably,
as Saidiya Hartman has written, “the
April 8, 2021
donning of the blackface mask reiter-
ated racial subjection.”2
Such a possibility did not seem to
worry the early reviewers, all of them
white, of 77 Dream Songs. In The New
York Times John Malcolm Brinnin
called Mr. Bones “perhaps the very last
minstrel in the stranded Tom Show of
the universe,” before judging the book
“strictly in terms of technique . . . a
knockout.” Lowell reviewed the vol-
ume in the pages of this publication. To
Berryman’s horror, his friend mistook
Mr. Bones for another character in the
poem, rather than as another name
for Henry (“he does not understand
it AT ALL ,” Berryman complained).
Lowell’s misunderstanding may have
been born of some ambivalence about
minstrelsy, but in the end he deemed
both the book and its use of dialect
a success: “Henry’s queer baby talk
was at first insufferable to me, and yet
I soon surrendered to the crazy joy,
the wildly personal use of minstrel
language.”
For Adrienne Rich, writing in The
Nation, Berryman’s diction (“half
Uncle Tom, half baby talk”) had al-
lowed him to write “private history
without self-photography”—to be, in
other words, personal and impersonal
at once. “Within the flexibility and in-
ventiveness of Berryman’s diction,”
she wrote, “almost anything seems
possible.” (Berryman was delighted.)
Five years later, writing about the
newly complete edition of The Dream
Songs, Rich expanded on her earlier
praise:
Some streak of genius in Berry-
man told him to try on what he’s
referred to as “that god- damned
baby-talk,” that blackface dialect,
for his persona. No political stance
taught him, no rational sympathy
with negritude. For blackface is the
supreme dialect and posture of this
country, going straight to the roots
of our madness. A man who needs
to discourse on the most extreme,
most tragic subjects, has recourse
to n[-----] talk.
Rich spelled out that final slur; after
all, she might have felt like she had re-
course to it just as Berryman had had
recourse to the “talk” that it named.
(The same slur also appears twice in
Berryman’s Selected Letters, though
on both occasions Berryman is quoting
other sources.) What gave Berryman’s
“streak of genius” unfettered access to
“the roots of our madness” was white-
ness, the identity whose contours were
invisibly—and yet sharply—drawn by
the first-person plural (“our madness”)
that so casually claimed it.
In Playing in the Dark Toni Morri-
son wrote about such literary descen-
dants of blackface performance:
Just as entertainers, through or by
association with blackface, could
render permissible topics that oth-
erwise would have been taboo,
so American writers were able to
employ an imagined Africanist
persona to articulate and imagi-
natively act out the forbidden in
American culture.
2
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjec-
tion: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
in Nineteenth- century America (Ox-
ford University Press, 1997), p. 32.
Such role-playing both perpetuated
the exclusion of actual Black writers
from the “vast party” (to use Berry-
man’s dream phrase) of American lit-
erature and nursed an anxiety at the
heart of whiteness itself. And though
Ellison may have played along with
Berryman’s long- distance casting, he
understood, all along, what motivated
its demands. By the time he received
Berryman’s drunken phone calls, Elli-
son had published this sentence about
blackface minstrelsy, its antecedents,
and its heirs: “Out of the counterfeiting
of the black American’s identity there
arises a profound doubt in the white
man’s mind as to the authenticity of his
own image of himself.”3
Berryman would likely have read
“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,”
Ellison’s essay in which that sentence
appears, when it was first published
in Partisan Review in the spring of
1958—he had a poem in the same issue.
He would therefore have had Ellison’s
diagnosis in mind later that year, as he
drafted some of the earliest sections
of The Dream Songs in which Henry
appears as Mr. Bones.4 Berryman
had read, in Carl Wittke’s Tambo and
Bones (1930), his primary source for
the history of minstrelsy, that “Bones”
was traditionally one of the two “end-
men” in a minstrel show (the other was
“Tambo”; they were so named for their
instruments, knocking bones and tam-
bourine); endmen typically played for
the broadest, most buffoonish kind of
racist humor. When Mr. Bones appears
in The Dream Songs, he is usually ac-
companied by an unnamed friend (pre-
sumably, if not Tambo, then, as Ellison
had speculated, the Interlocutor, the
show’s host and straight man), who in
turn eggs him on and chides him for his
excesses.
Minstrelsy, in other words, supplied
Berryman with a ready-made, racial-
ized structure within which he could
stage the dramas typical of confessional
poetry, which tried to unsettle the “sti-
fling” decorum of midcentury poetry.
Berryman resented the “confessional”
label, but it makes sense to think of
The Dream Songs alongside Lowell’s
Life Studies (1959), W. D. Snodgrass’s
Heart’s Needle (1959), Anne Sexton’s
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960),
and Sylvia Plath’s posthumous Ariel
(1965). For all of these poets’ many
differences, and notwithstanding the
craft that went into each of their vol-
umes (these were far from artless con-
fessions), the books tend to follow a
similar arc: the wayward poet makes
a putatively shameful disclosure about
his or her life, usually involving some
breakdown of the nuclear family (the
given family of childhood, the made
one of adulthood, or, often, both), only
3
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (Ran-
dom House, 1964), p. 53.
4 Berryman nor Benn in the text of Citi-
We can know when some of the Dream
Songs were composed because Berry-
man dated many of his drafts and in-
cluded others in letters. When Ellison
later reprinted “Change the Joke and
Slip the Yoke” in Shadow and Act, Ber-
ryman responded by giving Mr. Bones
the following lines in Dream Song 119,
whose manuscript is dated October 15,
1964: “Shadow & act, shadow & act, /
Better get white or you’ get whacked, /
or keep so- called black/& raise new
hell.”
to have the form within which they
make that disclosure, the well-made
lyric poem, lead them back, by poem’s
end, into the boundaries of respectable
domesticity.
The Dream Songs “flash and yearn”
with all the wild and incoherent inten-
sities of Berryman’s dreamlife, but the
volume’s final two poems, tellingly,
return Henry first to a confrontation
with his absent father and then to a re-
union with his own “heavy daughter.”
For Berryman as for the other confes-
sional poets, the poet’s psyche, seem-
ingly on the brink of falling apart, is
reconstituted at the end of the book.
“My house,” proclaims Henry in the
final Dream Song, “is made of wood
and it’s made well.” What Berryman’s
example helps make visible is the ex-
tent to which that well-made domestic
architecture, aligned as it was with the
period style, had always been part of
the historical production of whiteness.
It was, in Berryman’s own estima-
tion, a dangerous game. Dream Song
53 ends by (nearly) quoting the Ger-
man poet Gottfried Benn: “Gottfried
Benn /said:—We are using our own
skins for wallpaper and we cannot
win.” For Berryman as for Benn, that
image was meant to evoke the heroic
peril of making one’s art coextensive
with one’s life. If modernism had de-
manded impersonality in art, what
Berryman sought was a restoration of
poetry to the scale of the self. What
made that gamble possible was that the
skin in question was white. Any proj-
ect in which one’s identity could seem
both particular, grounded in one’s life,
and also sufficiently universal or cul-
turally representative to command the
attention of the reading public seemed
to require the (usually unspoken) logic
of whiteness, which staked its claim not
as one racialized identity among oth-
ers but instead as a kind of neutral and
unmarked—and therefore universally
“human”—position.
Berryman was central to the per-
sonal turn that American poetry took
in the middle of the twentieth century.
And yet more than any of his peers, he
made the racialization of that turn—
and the whiteness of the lyric tradition
for which confessionalism seemed the
culmination—explicit. Berryman’s in-
fluence is today most apparent in the
work of Black poets (among them Mi-
chael Harper, Wanda Coleman, Kevin
Young, Tyehimba Jess, and Tiana
Clark), who have directly responded to
him and who see most clearly the vio-
lence encoded in his chosen form. Half
a century after the publication of 77
Dream Songs, as she thought through
the possibility of writing, as a Black
woman, from the point of view of a co-
herent and representative “I,” Claudia
Rankine returned to Berryman and
Dream Song 53: “The pronoun barely
holding the person together. / Someone
claimed we should use our skin as wall-
paper knowing we couldn’t win.” Ran-
kine’s silent citation (she names neither
zen, though she lists The Dream Songs
in her book’s bibliography) makes clear
the extent to which the very idea of a
lyric subject, an “I” whose interiority
the poem presents, had been premised
on the whiteness of that “I.” For Ran-
kine, if lyric was to avoid the replica-
tion of white supremacy, it would have
to expand its sense of who, in the first
place, could count as “someone,” and it
would have to dismantle the cloistered
41
form of the confessional lyric. “Don’t
lean against the wallpaper,” Rankine
enjoins her reader, “sit down and pull
together.”5
Rankine also helps us see what ani-
mated the anxiety at the heart of Ber-
ryman’s autobiographical poem. If, as
Berryman worried in his nightmare
about Jarrell, these Dream Songs were
“pseudo-poems” and not the real thing,
that was because they took what was
essential to lyric poetry, the construc-
tion of an “I,” and rendered it as antic
performance. The poet’s self, projected
onto a stage, threatened to flicker out
of view. Was there no one behind the
curtain? To present the self as Berry-
man does—to enlist, in particular, the
scripts of minstrelsy in order to render
the “I”—was to manufacture a ghost,
to make a body that both was and
wasn’t there, a grinning skeleton whose
white bones signified at once solidity
and a deathly kind of absence.
Take the hair-raising Dream Song
26, which Berryman drafted in the fall
of 1958 and which assumes the form,
from beginning to end, of a dialogue
between Henry (as Mr. Bones) and his
unnamed interlocutor.6 Henry speaks
first, and the interlocutor interrupts him
with a question in lines 2 and 3 (dashes
indicate changes in speaker). Henry
refers to himself in the third person
as he answers the interlocutor’s ques-
tions; that grammatical oddity signals
what becomes by the end of the poem a
spectral detachment from the speaking
self. I can’t think of many other poems
with a twist ending quite like this one, a
final line that so unnervingly makes the
whole fiction of the poem—that there is
a live body at the other end of the line—
shimmer and dissolve:
The glories of the world struck
me, made me aria, once.
—What happen then, Mr Bones?
if be you cares to say.
—Henry. Henry became
interested in women’s bodies,
his loins were & were the scene
of stupendous achievement.
Stupor. Knees, dear. Pray.
All the knobs & softnesses of, my
God,
the ducking & trouble it swarm on
Henry,
at one time.
—What happen then, Mr Bones?
you seems excited- like.
—Fell Henry back into the
original crime: art, rime
besides a sense of others, my God,
my God,
and a jealousy for the honour
(alive) of his country,
what can get more odd?
and discontent with the thriving
gangs & pride.
5
See also my “The Atlantic Ocean
Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Ran-
kine, Robert Lowell, and the White-
ness of the Lyric Subject,” PMLA, Vol.
134, No. 3 (May 2019).
6
Berryman liked to play coy about the
identity of the interlocutor. At a read-
ing a decade later, he joked, “I know his
name, but the critics haven’t found out,
yet. We must leave something for the
professors to do, don’t you think so?
How otherwise can an assistant profes-
sor become an associate professor?”
42
—What happen then, Mr Bones?
—I had a most marvellous piece
of luck. I died.
What begins in the first line as a
standard account of poetic vocation
(the poet “struck” into song by beauty)
quickly descends, in response to the
friend’s needling (“What happen then,
Mr Bones?”), into a taxonomy of Hen-
ry’s lusts. His waywardness is racial-
ized, his broken grammar, even as it
coincides with a certain grandiloquent
tone and diction, made to seem a symp-
tom of the hapless, leering energy of
his blackface persona: “All the knobs
& softnesses of, my God, /the duck-
ing & trouble it swarm on Henry.”
This white fantasy of hypersexualized
blackness becomes the form through
which Henry’s (and, behind them,
Berryman’s) appetites get expressed
and out of which his artistic ambition
grows. That racialization is both li-
cense and sentence; in the poem’s last
line, the first appearance of an “I,” we
realize that this voice has been reach-
ing us from beyond the grave. Black-
face was, for Berryman, a form of
necromancy.
Berryman was haunted by death—
by the memory of his father’s suicide,
when he was only twelve years old,
and by the premonition of his own.
As early as 1953, when he separated
from his first wife, Eileen Simpson,
he wrote her a long and deeply de-
pressed letter, describing his intentions
methodically:
What I am going to do is drop off
the George Washington bridge. I
believe one dies on the way down
but I don’t wish anyway to hit any-
one or be splattered on the pave-
ment, and in case my body is not
found nobody has the bore & cost
of burial.
One can hear Berryman, a scholar of
Shakespeare, dramatizing his own de-
spair in the style of a dying soliloquy:
Don’t sell my typewriter, it’s worth
nothing, have it broken up; the
new ribbon is worth 88¢, or was
this morning, which is why I am
not dining tonight; for twenty-five
years I wrote badly on it, and for
a few months well, and I loved it
well; break it up.
A decade later, in a Dream Song, he
wrote:
The cold is ultimating. The cold
is cold.
I am—I should be held together
by—
but I am breaking up
and Henry now has come to a full
stop—
vanisht his vision, if there was, &
fold
him over himself quietly.
Break the typewriter up, break up the
man who sat before it—for the “I”
whom he had made there could not be
held together, try as Berryman might.
“Henry’s parts,” he announced in an-
other Dream Song, “were fleeing.”
On a cold morning in January 1972,
Berryman ended his life by stepping
over the railing of the Washington Av-
enue Bridge and falling onto the frozen
banks of the Mississippi River, which thought—mistakenly—that blackface
cuts through the campus of the Uni- granted him access to the musical genre
versity of Minnesota at Minneapolis, of the blues.) Weeping blurs his vision
where he’d lived and taught for seven- but Henry also blurs in an intransitive
teen years—and where he’d invented sense: shimmering between states, pro-
Henry. Over those years Berryman had jecting himself into the dreamlife of
held tenaciously to life, held to it even whiteness, the paradoxically brown and
in the face of the twinned afflictions putatively dry room from which, for the
of depression and alcoholism. In his time being, he could try to think—and
writing, that tenacity produced a weird send his words to us.
coupling of intensity and distance— “I’ve never met Berryman, that I
not only in the poems, which reached know. One has the feeling a 100 yrs.
readers, even while Berryman was still from now that he may be all the rage,
alive, as from a ghost, but also in the or a ‘discovery’—hasn’t one?” So spec-
letters, which could make desperate ulated Bishop in 1962, again in a letter
demands on their recipients. In 1959, to Lowell. From where I sit today and
nearing the finalization of his divorce write—six decades after Bishop’s pre-
from his second wife, Ann Levine, he diction, four decades before it comes
sent her a typescript of a Dream Song due—such a future seems unlikely.
I doubt that Berryman will be suffi-
ciently forgotten in order to be redis-
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
covered, but it also seems improbable
that his racial politics will allow him
ever again to take center stage. Berry-
man’s blackface was far from incidental
to his poetics; rather, his reliance on its
formal structure reminds readers today
(and, presumably, readers tomorrow)
of just how white, and therefore how
exclusionary and impoverished, con-
fessional poetry, his own included, ul-
timately could be.
He may have turned to blackface
dialect in an attempt to break free of
midcentury poetry’s stifling decorum,
but its use tethered his greatest poem
to the ground of whiteness, which
gave him the bed from which he could
dream. Yet Bishop gets something right
about Berryman’s wild ambition and
anachronistic talent. Dreaming as a
Self-portrait by Ralph Ellison, 1941
white man in blackface held out a mi-
rage of timelessness; it seemed to offer
that he never published. He signed the Berryman the ability to hold together
poem “John ex-Henry House” and a self that threatened to fall apart, to
added the postscript, “I thought I had address himself, from an apparent po-
abandoned the poem, when this came. sition of coherence and stability, to a
I may not write any more.” The poem past by which he had been wounded
arrived as a letter to a lost love, and yet and to a future that he meant to haunt.
it reaches us now as ars poetica, Berry- I suspect Berryman would have been
man’s letter to a world that he felt had pleased by Bishop’s judgment; what he
neglected him: wanted was to be discovered “100 yrs.
from now.”
Three blue rooms, & one brown, Such ambition had dire implica-
where he thinks, tions for Berryman’s present—and for
only from his typewriter blurts ours. Among the most heartbreaking
sound, letters in this collection are the ones
here’s Henry free, addressed to Berryman’s son, some of
with none of his beloved wives them written before their recipient was
around, old enough to read. When Paul Ber-
no telephone, no friend for miles. ryman was four years old, his father
Quite so. began a long letter to him by confess-
ing, “I haven’t seen you in so long, I
Why then is Henry weeping like don’t know how you talk or what you
a child can understand.” Two years later, he
& feeling out of his mind included half a dozen Dream Songs in
or desperate in it, in it? a letter to Ann, Paul’s mother, and sug-
The wooden desk hurts. Miles? gested that she read them to him: “He
Here’s a new wound. might like the sound, though he won’t
Has he been tried & found understand much.”
wanting, Those gestures were, of course,
tried & found wanting? meant for Ann as much as for Paul, but
they were also addressed to Berryman’s
Murdered he, long, a love of dreamlife, where the injuries of his past
someone who, could find their restitution in his fantasy
alone, cared about Henry, of a posthumous future. A few months
& he cared back? later, just before Paul turned seven,
Wood, tears, a raw breast, the Berryman wrote: “I would expect you
blue of the sea to keep my letters, so that you can read
in the other rooms where he’d them when you are older. It is a source
drown of pain to me, still, that I have no letters
only he blurs & thinks. from my father, who died when I was
twelve.” Like these letters to his son,
Berryman writes from the blue in The Dream Songs were themselves ad-
a few different senses: from depres- dressed to the future, ours and the one
sive states, in a profane mode (he to come, in which they’ll reach readers
“works blue”), and as though from no- who will recognize their author only
where, from out of the blue. (He also too well. Q
The New York Review

The Seine:
The River That Made Paris
by Elaine Sciolino.
Norton, 370 pp., $26.95; $17.95 (paper)
I live in the center of Paris, a hundred
yards from the Seine. Every day I walk
along it, or cross one of the bridges that
link the Left Bank to the Right. As
someone who grew up along the Mis-
sissippi, I almost require the sight of a
dirty brown stream to feel normal and
happy, and thus am the ideal reader for
Elaine Sciolino’s well-researched book
The Seine: The River That Made Paris,
which will tell the reader all there is
to know about it. Rivers have always
symbolized escape, but these days in
Paris, its free flowing taunts. No one
can travel to the US, itself riddled with
the coronavirus, or to any of the other
countries whose borders are closed.
I had planned to take my husband’s
ashes back to California; he died of
Covid-19 last March, one of the earliest
victims, infected in a French hospital.
There are worse places to mourn than
Paris, for the moment suitably gray and
frightened, as if a mortuary veil were
concealing the city’s usually joyous face.
On the surface all seems normal. The
winter array of Gala apples, the mo-
rilles, pleurotes, and trompettes de la
mort are in the markets; the buses run.
But restaurants and bars are closed. The
biannual sales are on, but no one buys.
Theaters are dark. There are no tourists,
only a handful of Parisians at a time,
masked and tentative on their errands or
walking their dogs. A curfew has been
inflicted for 6 PM, reminding old people
of life during World War II, when night
streets were empty, and stirring the defi-
ance of the young, undeterred by hefty
fines for breaking the rules.
The general moroseness mirrors my
own state of mind. I am hardly the only
one to find that the Seine has the im-
memorial power of the pathetic fallacy,
symbolizing or reflecting human emo-
tions. It probably had the same power
for Napoleon and Caesar, and even
Vercingetorix. Right now the river is
angry, slapping over the banks, drown-
ing the benches where in better times
people sit in peaceful contemplation.
Sciolino’s book furnishes a potpourri
of details to reinforce the elegiac mood.
For instance, near the seldom-visited
village of Châtillon-sur-Seine is the
lavishly decorated, five-foot-high Vix
vase, a cauldron of hammered bronze
made in Greece and found in the sixth-
century tomb of a Celtic princess. She
tells us it weighs almost a quarter-ton
and could hold three hundred gallons
of wine. People have speculated that
it may be a treasure that Herodotus
described in detail, forged by Spartan
smiths for King Croesus of Lydia.
Is Sciolino’s look at the Seine a travel
book that tells you where to go, what
to see, what to avoid; or is it a history?
Some of both. The river arises far from
Paris, in a “forgotten corner of Bur-
gundy” near a village called, naturally,
Saint-Germain-Source-Seine. The spot
is marked by a Napoleon III–era statue
of a river nymph. An intrepid and con-
scientious reporter, Sciolino goes to
look at it, talks to Antoine Hoareau,
the enthusiastic leader of the Friends
of the Sources of the Seine, and drinks
April 8, 2021
We’ll Always Have Paris
Diane Johnson
Paul Cézanne: On the Quai de Bercy in Paris, circa 1875–1876
the water bubbling from springs in a
swampy field. “Pesticides?” she asks. “It
is very good and fresh,” he reassures her.
Perhaps there’s a question of audience
for Sciolino’s compilation of history and
anecdote about the Seine: experienced
consumers of books about Paris will al-
ready know many of the stories she tells,
for instance how the Eiffel Tower came
to be built, and how it was intended to
be torn down but finally wasn’t. On
the other hand, there is an abundance
of esoteric detail for readers who want
depth about places they hope to visit.
She says that on display in the Atelier
Lorenzi, in the riverside suburb of Ar-
cueil, is a death mask of a beautiful un-
known corpse. That “the best view of
the Seine estuary is found atop Mont-
Joli, outside Honfleur,” the harbor town
across from Le Havre. And that the
Seine’s bargemen inspired La Houppe-
lande, a 1910 play that in turn inspired
Puccini’s opera Il Tabarro, a grim
Frankie and Johnny story set among
these rough characters who transported
river cargo and lived on their boats.
She has quite a lot about bridges. I
can see three at the end of my street:
the Pont des Arts, the Pont du Car-
rousel, and the Pont Neuf—the “new”
bridge, the oldest one in Paris, strad-
dling the Ile de la Cité. Cities on riv-
ers are enabled by bridges, mankind’s
way of asserting itself over water, lit-
eral impediments that can alter history.
Think of the possible damage to urban
life and morale if General Dietrich von
Choltitz had followed Hitler’s orders to
blow up the bridges of Paris.
The Pont des Arts is where lovers
attached padlocks until 2015, when
the collective weight became so heavy
it began to sag and the locks had to
be removed. Sciolino talks to Richard
Overstreet, maker of brilliant pho-
tographs of numerous Seine bridges
that, in her words, “seduce you with
the practical grace of their beauty.”
He shows her the “underbelly of the
Belle Époque Pont Alexandre III,”
everyone’s favorite, with its exuberant
gilded statuary, elaborate streetlamps,
and “magnificent crisscrossing and in-
tricate braiding of trusses and girders.”
Hamburger Kunsthalle
She includes a photograph of one of the
details and another of the Passerelle
Simone- de-Beauvoir, a steel footbridge
(engineered by my son-in-law Jean-
François Blassel) in a less monumental
part of the city. The book is punctu-
ated by maps and photographs. There’s
Émile Zola with a camera, there’s
Audrey Hepburn on a bateau mouche
river cruise, and even a painting by
Renoir—unfortunately none in color.
From her book I hoped to learn (and
did) the answer to a question I’ve long
had: Why does nobody swim in the Seine
in Paris? Farther downriver the water is
safer, but I’d like to take a dip near my
apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement.
She tells us it would be poison. The City
of Paris constructs a beach, complete
with sand and umbrellas, along its banks
in the summer—but the water is too dirty
for swimming. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor
of Paris, has pledged to clean it up.
Meantime you can fish—though the
fish are inedible, tainted with arsenic
and other toxins. A recent report in The
New York Times identified the growing
popularity of angling in the Seine and
the Canal Saint-Martin among young
people, strictly catch-and-release. With
cleanup efforts there are more than
thirty species where before there were
only five. I have not seen people fishing.
Fish are less endangered than the bou-
quinistes, the booksellers, so pictur-
esquely lining the quays, about whom
Sciolino reports in detail, their dimin-
ishing numbers no doubt related to the
decline of reading. Unlike Sciolino, I
haven’t made friends with any of them.
Apart from its power as a metaphor,
a river is a vital artery nourishing a na-
tion’s economy, a vibrant synecdoche
for its life and history, often connected
to a founding myth (Romulus and
Remus are saved from the Tiber, Moses
is fished out of the bulrushes of the
Nile) and often the organizing princi-
ple of a narrative. We can think of V. S.
Naipaul and Joseph Conrad on the
Congo, Mark Twain and Simon Raven
on the Mississippi, Henry David Tho-
reau on the Concord and Merrimack,
V. S. Pritchett “Down the Seine,” The-
odore Roosevelt braving the Amazon,
Claudio Magris on the Danube. The
river Floss was central to George El-
iot’s The Mill on the Floss, as it drowns
poor Maggie Tulliver. The Seine, in
Sciolino’s presentation, to me feels
more occasional and domestic, more
like a picnic in a Caillebotte painting.
Though sometimes it has “run red
with blood”: in 1572, during the wars of
religion that racked France for nearly
forty years, Catholic conspirators at
the instigation of Catherine de’ Medici
organized the Saint Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre of Protestant Hugue-
nots and threw the victims’ bodies into
the Seine. During World War II, as the
Allied forces moved toward the city,
the Nazis planned a bloodbath, which
luckily was thwarted by the German
commander’s reluctance to carry out
his orders. In 1961, in the so- called
Paris Massacre, Algerians demon-
strating against the Algerian War were
beaten to death by the French police
and drowned in the Seine. Hundreds
of bodies washed up in the weeks af-
terward, though the killings were of-
ficially unacknowledged for decades,
and the official death toll was three.
Despite its sometimes lurid history,
as a subject the Seine lets Sciolino
down in one respect. She has done dis-
tinguished work in far more difficult
and far-flung places, for instance Iraq
and Iran, where she faced convoluted
political and religious situations and
even personal danger, as she recounts
in her book Persian Mirrors: The Elu-
sive Face of Iran (2000). The complex-
ities of the Seine’s hydraulic locks or
the fascination of a group fresco in the
Rouen city hall do not rise to those of
the nearly decade-long Iran–Iraq War
or of Iran’s nuclear program.
Sciolino has made her home in Paris
since she was first posted here by The
New York Times in 2002. Almost every
English-speaking writer who has lived
in France has found a way of writing,
usually in appreciation, about some as-
pect of French geography, economy, his-
tory, or generally the country’s central
place in the world of culture—a book
is often a justification for continuing to
live here. The city is home to numbers
of foreign journalists who have found
ways of staying on when their assign-
ments were over.* For some it’s a retire-
ment decision; for others it has meant
giving up or changing jobs, or marrying
a French person. (I came as a trailing
wife, when my husband took a job di-
recting an NGO based here.) Perhaps
it was in the spirit of staying that Scio-
lino hit upon the immutable Seine as a
subject. She could equally have chosen
the Loire, with its châteaux, its wine,
the death of Leonardo—but the Seine
serves perfectly, timeless and variable.
What is it about France that has long
captured the American heart? The
American appetite for books about
France seems inexhaustible. Amazon
lists more than 80,000 of them, more
*Elizabeth Bard, Mary Blume, David
Downie, Charles Glass, Janet Hul-
strand, Jake Lamar, the late Polly Platt,
Alan Riding, Mort Rosenblum, Harriet
Welty Rochefort, Edmund White—just
to name a few. John Baxter!
43
 than 50,000 about Paris, 184 about
the Seine—not all written by Ameri-
cans, but most of them are. To be fair,
there are nearly as many books about
London, but this is less surprising in
view of the Anglo- oriented nature of
American education. I can think of at
least a dozen friends who have recently
written books about aspects of Paris
or France. My own effort (Into a Paris
Quartier) was commissioned by the Na-
tional Geographic Society for a series
of short books by writers about where
they live. I took that to mean Paris and
plunged bravely in, but it soon became
clear that I had to limit myself not just
to the Sixth Arrondissement, where I
live most of the year, but to my corner
of the Sixth, Saint- Germain- des-Prés.
Sciolino, in an earlier book, The Only
Street in Paris (2015), solved the prob-
lem of Paris abundance by focusing just
on her street, the rue des Martyrs.
Susan Sontag wrote in a preface to
Steven Barclay’s useful A Place in the
World Called Paris (1994) that no place
else has offered such a feast of fulfill-
ments: “Exile’s Paris, drinker’s Paris,
artist’s Paris, student’s Paris, champion
moviegoer’s Paris, sexual quester’s
Paris. . . .” Sontag herself embraced
some of these specialties—although,
not much of a gourmet, she left out din-
er’s Paris. There is a utilitarian side to
this sort of travel book, that researches
for your use the charms and dangers of
somewhere you might go; Sciolino’s fits
that category.
But many Anglophone books about
France incorporate another narrative,
usually some sort of personal quest
for solace or self-improvement, some
belief in the mythology of a place that
fits into the life of the traveler who
wants to become an artist (like Mary
Cassatt or Joan Mitchell) or learn to
cook (Richard Olney, M. F. K. Fisher,
Julia Child, Alice Waters). The roots
of our admiration for French culture
date to the American Revolution, when
France was our ally against the British.
A number of our founders—Thomas
Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for
example—lived in Paris and had close
friendships with the French.
At the time of the Revolution, there
was a strong tradition of American
women who could afford it going to
France to have their dresses made,
and such informal exchange over the
centuries continued: learning the lan-
guage, looking at art, attending the
Cordon Bleu. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the eager consumers of French
culture who flocked to Paris were likely
to be men, not young women, Isabel
Archer notwithstanding. David Mc-
Cullough’s excellent book The Greater
Journey: Americans in Paris (2011)
focuses on figures like James McNeill
Whistler, Stanford White, Augustus
Saint- Gaudens, and Henry James—
young men who went to Paris because
that was the center of their world of
art and culture, and returned to influ-
ence American public sculpture, lit-
erature, and architecture. On my part
of rue Bonaparte, or around the cor-
ner, have lived Thomas Jefferson and
Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, Ernest
Hemingway, John Jay, James Fenimore
Cooper—the street gets eight pages in
Americans in Paris (1984), Brian Mor-
ton’s helpful guide to who lived where.
Paris has long served as a place to
escape to. Since the 1920s African-
American writers, musicians, and
performers—James Baldwin, Chester
44
Himes, Coleman Hawkins, Josephine
Baker—have sought relief from the
racism they found in the US. Many
American writers bought into the be-
lief that some magic infusion of cre-
ativity awaited them in Paris: Gertrude
Stein, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
James Jones, and their literary avatars
like Hemingway’s Jake Barnes and
Henry James’s Chad Newsome. New-
some wanted to get away from stuffy
upper- class New England; Miller
wanted sex and adventure—and “to
write.” More recently, for people like
me, the distractions of French muse-
ums and markets, and having to learn
French, mean that instead of writing
you have to spend time devising ways
just to live, for instance buying things
for which the words are the same in En-
glish and ordering two of them—deux
oranges—thus avoiding the need to
remember whether to say un orange or
Diane Johnson next to the Seine, Paris, 1999
une orange. Biftecks, brocolis, carottes.
Many books about France begin by
saying something that Sciolino says
only at the end of her tour of the Seine:
“Like so many Americans, I felt as if
I already knew the city, as if I owned
it. I had studied French history. I had
read about Paris in novels and seen it
in paintings. I had heard songs about
April in Paris and loving Paris in the
springtime and the fall. I had watched
movies.” Sciolino is recapitulating the
experience of many Americans but
especially, it seems, of young Ameri-
can women of the last seventy years.
The traditional American junior year
abroad had long been a custom for well-
bred young American men, but at some
point it became available to women.
Thousands of girls have come to study
at a French or Paris-based American
institution, ideally to live and eat with
a French family—though this boarding
arrangement is becoming less common,
as the French are not so hard up as they
were in the 1950s—travel around the
Continent, and generally experience
life in a foreign country, an exhilarat-
ing and liberating period for most of
them, though shattering for some. For
students out from under parental eyes,
French cultural advantages included
alcohol (during Prohibition), racy the-
ater and cabarets, museums, cuisine
and fashion not found at home, and, by
the 1950s, premarital sex.
One entertaining account is Alice
Kaplan’s Dreaming in French (2012),
on the junior years abroad of Jacque-
line Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag,
and Angela Davis. All three young
women found it a formative experi-
ence, though they were not there at
the same time. Sontag explored the
arcana of French philosophy, Davis
of radical politics. Jackie Bouvier, ex-
ploring culture, lost her virginity in
a French elevator (though it was to
a fellow American; at least it wasn’t
in the back of a Chevy at home). All
three perfected their French. Kaplan
explains, “France was the place where
they could become themselves, or pro-
tect themselves from what they didn’t
want to become, as products of their
families, their societies.” Despite in-
creasing freedoms everywhere for
daughters, American parents still felt
more comfortable sending their girls to
Paris than, say, Cairo or Kirkuk.
All the same, today’s college graduates
have considerably branched out. One of
my daughters married a Frenchman (the
engineer) and lives here in Paris, but my
sons went to China and Japan to study;
they speak Japanese and Mandarin, and
married women who grew up in Asia.
There are nuances in our Ameri-
can attitude to France. Is there a tinge
Miriam Berkley
of envy of France’s long history and
cultural norms, a note of malice and
glee, of schadenfreude, in the ways
the American press reports on strikes,
fires, and floods, and anything else that
seems to go wrong in France? Only
envy could explain the patronizing ges-
ture of Donald Trump brushing imagi-
nary dandruff off Emmanuel Macron’s
immaculate shoulder while taking in
his military parade. But the bond and
sympathy are real, and the American
horror at the attack on Charlie Hebdo,
or the fire in Notre Dame, was heartfelt.
We all have the hope that some other
culture can fill in our shortcomings.
Sciolino’s book and all the others con-
tain in their encomiums the implicit
wish, or hope, or recommendation that
America could take France’s example
and be better than it is. Henry Adams
put his finger on it, writing in his autobi-
ography, “Being in no way responsible
for the French and sincerely disapprov-
ing them, he felt quite at liberty to enjoy
to the full everything he disapproved.
Stated thus crudely, the idea sounds
derisive; but, as a matter of fact, several
thousand Americans passed much of
their time there on this understanding.”
An American living in Paris, I have
found, never becomes French but in-
stead even more American than before,
perhaps more conscious than Ameri-
cans at home of our national qualities
and shortcomings. When I think of my
own future without my companion of
fifty years, do I see myself as an Amer-
ican citizen in good standing in the
undeniably beautiful San Francisco,
or as a foreigner here, in a creaking
seventeenth- century apartment, where
I can walk along the river to the movies
and don’t need a car? It’s the dilemma
that keeps me awake at night, though I
think I know the answer. Q
The New York Review
 Turning Away from the Middle East
The Biden administration will not have
a lot of time for the Middle East. Its
foreign policy agenda will more likely
be shaped by the looming question of
how to come to grips with Xi Jinping’s
China. The Middle East, with the sig-
nificant exception of Iran, poses no
plausible serious challenge to US inter-
ests. There is also a lack of resources
and opportunities to advance them.
This is in part a legacy of the decades-
long war in Iraq, which cost trillions
of dollars and exhausted US ground
forces, while compromising Ameri-
ca’s international reputation; regime
change in Libya, which prompted the
return of thousands of jihadists and a
civil war that immiserated the country;
and the Syrian civil war, which Wash-
ington prolonged and intensified by
inadvertently supplying jihadists with
potent weaponry. And in part this
turning away from the Middle East re-
flects changes in the oil market: the US
is the world’s largest producer of fos-
sil fuels, the cost of renewable energy
is dropping sharply, electric vehicles
dominate new production in the auto-
motive sector, and the effects of global
warming are lending urgency to a shift
away from oil.
By the end of Obama’s second term,
the lingering illusions that led to those
consequences in Iraq, Syria, and Libya
had dissipated. In 2016, Obama, appar-
ently referring to what he had called a
“shit show” in Libya, told one senator,
“There is no way we should commit to
governing the Middle East and North
Africa. That would be a basic, funda-
mental mistake.”1
One suspects that he already held
this view by the middle of his first term,
as the Arab Spring was imploding,
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Net-
anyahu collaborated with the Republi-
cans to humiliate him before two joint
sessions of Congress, and the Arab
Gulf states made it known that they
considered him unreliable, even feck-
less. Obama had earned this battering
by saying things out loud that everyone
knows but are not supposed to be said:
that Israeli settlements in the West
Bank are an obstacle to peace with the
Palestinians; that the border between
Israel and a Palestinian state should be
based on the June 1967 armistice line
and adjusted through land swaps; that
the Saudis must “find an effective way
to share the neighborhood and insti-
tute some sort of cold peace”; and that
US interests were shifting toward the
Pacific, requiring it to “rebalance” its
diplomatic and military commitments
accordingly.
In the 2012 presidential election Mitt
Romney, his Republican opponent,
claimed that Obama had “thrown Is-
rael under the bus” and “disrespected”
it, even as the White House produced a
stream of fact sheets showing that mil-
itary assistance to Israel had reached
record levels during his first term.
(Those levels would be exceeded in
his second term.) As it turned out, the
Middle East—even the image of Israel
flattened by the Democratic bus—was
not a major factor for Jewish voters,
1 and Emirati war in Yemen. The real
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doc-
trine,” The Atlantic, April 2016.
April 8, 2021
Steven Simon
University students protesting American and Iranian intervention in Iraq,
Basra, January 8, 2020
who voted for the two parties in more
or less the same ratio as they had in
previous elections. The lesson for
those who noticed was that most Jew-
ish voters were not going to be swayed
by policy toward Israel. The sensible
approach for the White House was to
go along with Israeli requests for aid
that Congress would grant anyway,
as long as Israel did not undermine
US strategic interests by, for instance,
bombing Iran while the US, the per-
manent members of the UN Security
Council, and the EU were negotiating
limits on its nuclear program. On stra-
tegic matters, the White House gets to
decide.
In some ways, Trump continued
Obama’s Middle East policy. The lat-
ter had delegated the peace process to
John Kerry on the assumption that it
would be fruitless. Trump’s approach
was predicated on the same insight,
and he developed the idea of an eco-
nomic peace between Israel and Pal-
estinians on the West Bank, financed
by the Gulf states, that would not re-
quire political concessions neither side
was prepared to make. The Palestinian
leadership, isolated within the Arab
world and repudiated by Trump, would
finally awaken to the inevitability of
compromise or, if one prefers, surren-
der. This was known as the Kushner
plan, after Trump’s son-in-law Jared,
who drafted it.
Despite some over-the-top admi-
ration for the dictatorial instincts of
Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el- Sisi,
and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mo-
hammad bin Salman, Trump’s posi-
tion toward these governments was not
markedly different from his predeces-
sor’s. The Obama administration had
pushed large-scale arms sales to both
countries through Congress despite the
opposition of its own party, maintained
close contact with the Saudi govern-
ment, helped the Saudis arm Syrian
rebels, and collaborated in the Saudi
issue dividing Obama and Saudi Ara-
Essam al-Sudani/Reuters
bia was the nuclear deal with Iran. For
the Saudis, this was in the category of
original sin, an indelible stain that no
amount of diplomacy could rinse out.
In 2014 Trump derided Obama’s
catering to Saudi Arabia’s defense-
related requests, tweeting, “Saudi
Arabia should fight their own wars,
which they won’t, or pay us an abso-
lute fortune to protect them and their
great wealth- $ trillion!” This attitude
shifted as Saudi capital bailed out bad
investments by the Trump-Kushner
clan. Trump acknowledged his depen-
dency as early as 2015: “Saudi Arabia,
I get along with all of them. They buy
apartments from me. They spend $40
million, $50 million. Am I supposed to
dislike them? I like them very much.”
There were two Trump initiatives that
reshaped the situation in the Middle
East now faced by the Biden admin-
istration. In 2018 Trump withdrew
the US from the nuclear agreement
with Iran. In addition to reimposing
sanctions against Iran that had been
suspended under the deal, Washing-
ton imposed other punitive sanctions
under laws relating to terrorism and
human rights. After about a year, Iran
began to activate dormant centrifuges
and enrich uranium by a small per-
centage above that allowed by the deal.
Tehran has now limited access to IAEA
inspectors and enriched some uranium
to 20 percent, a major advance toward
weapons-grade fuel. These symbolic
steps were meant to put pressure pri-
marily on the Europeans to defy the
threat of secondary US sanctions that
deterred them from trading with Iran.
This ploy proved largely ineffective,
and Iran, as a result, has few options
for selling its oil, the main source of
government revenue.
The US withdrawal from the agree-
ment failed to compel Iran to enter into
negotiations over a broader and more
restrictive one. As the Trump adminis-
tration drew to a close, the US and Iran
remained at a standoff. In late Decem-
ber the Pentagon sent a nuclear subma-
rine armed with 154 cruise missiles into
the Gulf and staged two deployments
of B-52 bombers to the region. This
came amid fears of impending Iranian
retaliation for the killing of Iran’s Quds
Force commander, Qassim Suleimani,
in January 2020 in a US drone strike
and of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a scientist
who oversaw the country’s nuclear ef-
forts, in November 2020, presumably
by Israel. Fakhrizadeh’s assassination
was widely interpreted as a spoke in
the wheels of renewed talks between
the Biden administration and Tehran.
Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khamenei,
in a December 16 speech, made it clear
that Iran would not rise to the bait.
Four days later, twenty- one rockets
landed in the huge American diplo-
matic compound in Baghdad. Accord-
ing to a Trump tweet, the missiles came
from Iran, but US Central Command
attributed the launch to a “rogue”
Iranian-backed militia. The national
security cabinet met at the White
House on December 23 and finalized
options that were to be presented to
Trump. Dire warnings from the White
House soon followed, yet cooler heads
prevailed.
Biden was Obama’s point man on
Iraq, and Tony Blinken, the new sec-
retary of state, was Biden’s point man.
They understand Iraq and its problems
well and know many Iraqi politicians.
Unlike Trump, who regarded Iraq as
enemy territory and believed its peo-
ple to be in thrall to Iranian clerics,
Biden has a more nuanced view and is
likely to avoid taking steps that weaken
the Baghdad government’s credibil-
ity by infringing on its sovereignty or
demonstrating callous disregard for
Iraqi lives, as Trump did by pardoning
the Americans convicted of murdering
seventeen civilians in 2007. Biden’s ad-
visers were also directly involved in the
Iran nuclear talks, so unlike Trump’s,
they have intensive experience negoti-
ating with Iranians.
The other event that reshaped the
Middle East during the Trump adminis-
tration was the signing of the Abraham
Accords by the United Arab Emirates
(UAE) and Israel, then by Bahrain, a
Saudi client state; Sudan; and Morocco,
which has long-standing informal ties
with Israel. Precisely how these ac-
cords have recast the landscape Biden
inherited is unclear. Like US- Soviet
arms control agreements of a bygone
era, they reflect and codify existing
realities rather than create new ones.
Israel has sought a diplomatic foothold
in the Gulf since the mid-1990s, when
it opened a trade office in Doha, the
capital of Qatar, during the false dawn
of the Oslo Accords between Israel and
the Palestinians, and the Emiratis be-
came more receptive to Israel with the
ascent of a new generation of leaders
unshackled from a reflexive allegiance
to the Palestinian cause. Although
both Israel and the UAE have guarded
their security ties carefully over the
years, Americans doing business in the
UAE have often bumped into Israelis
thought to have defense or intelligence
connections. There have been hiccups
in the relationship, but on the whole it
45
has worked, while being something of
an open secret.
Both countries perceive Iran as an
enemy but also feel threatened by the
Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is an
offshoot of that organization, which
makes the Brotherhood especially
suspect in Israeli eyes. And as a trans-
national group advocating both democ-
racy of a limited sort and Islamic law,
the Brotherhood is anathema to the
UAE, which is attempting to secular-
ize while maintaining an authoritarian
system. But the UAE is not looking for
a war with Iran and will not be eager
to host Israeli forces determined to
fight one. Given that Israeli and Emi-
rati interests before the signing of the
Abraham Accords were largely ad-
dressed through tacit arrangements,
the explanation for the UAE’s motive
probably lies in the threat posed by Is-
raeli annexation of parts or all of the
West Bank. The UAE understood that
Israel would defer this in return for
diplomatic recognition. There was also
the question of money. An experienced
investor explained to me that the trade
relations made possible by the Abra-
ham Accords will make many Israelis
rich and many Emiratis richer. Accord-
ing to Israel’s finance ministry, formal
trade between the countries will grow
from virtually nothing to $500 million
in a few years. This is not earthshak-
ing, but if the UAE is able to acquire
major Israeli tactical systems, such as
the Iron Dome anti-missile launcher,
the number could be much higher. In the
meantime, Israeli tourists, long ex-
cluded from visiting much of the Arab
world, have descended on the malls of
Dubai in large numbers.
The Trump administration offered
incentives to the Arab countries to sign
the Abraham Accords. To the UAE,
it was acquisition of the F-35 stealth
aircraft. Typically, this would not have
been possible because the planes would
undercut Israel’s qualitative military
edge, which is guaranteed by US do-
mestic law. Trump also appears to have
offered the prospect of sophisticated
Growler electronic warfare aircraft
and long-range Reaper drones. Prime
Minister Netanyahu privately assured
Trump that the sale of F-35s would
not be an issue, but Benny Gantz, the
“alternate” prime minister, and Israeli
military and intelligence officials chal-
lenged Netanyahu on this. Leading Re-
publicans and Democrats in the Senate
and House unsuccessfully opposed the
sale because of the threat the aircraft
could pose to Israel. The controversy is
puzzling because the UAE and Israel
have signed a peace treaty and have no
plausible differences that might lead
either to abrogate it. The only explana-
tion is suspicion about the possibility of
a coup in the UAE that would put an
enemy of Israel on the throne, but this
is a vanishingly remote contingency.
Morocco was persuaded to sign the
accords by a shocking reversal of the
US position on Western Sahara, a ter-
ritory Morocco has claimed for years
in defiance of the wishes of the tribes
living there. After long insisting that
the status of the territory had to be
negotiated, the US endorsed Rabat’s
control of it. Washington won over
Sudan by dropping it from the US list
of state sponsors of terrorism. Bah-
rain, nominally independent of Saudi
Arabia, signed the accords with the
presumed tacit approval of the crown
prince, since King Salman’s opposition
46
to a treaty with Israel in the absence
of progress on Palestinian rights has
blocked his freedom of action.
The Biden administration therefore
needs to figure out how best to restore
the pre-Trump status quo with Iran,
what if any benefits it can extract from
the Abraham Accords, whether to ad-
just its military and diplomatic posture
in the Persian Gulf, and what to do
about Syria, which Turkey, Iran, Israel,
Russia, the US, and an assortment of ji-
hadists are picking apart while its pop-
ulation starves.
Biden has declared his intention to
reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran nuclear
deal is known. He could leverage the
economic pain that Trump imposed
on Iran by insisting that Tehran con-
sent to discuss a follow- on agreement
that would curtail its “malign activi-
ties” in the region and its production of
ballistic missiles, while extending the
duration of its nonpermanent obliga-
tions beyond the period stipulated by
the JCPOA. Iran has already rejected
direct talks with the US to revive the
current agreement but, the administra-
tion’s thinking goes, it might be suffi-
ciently eager for sanctions relief that
talks about future talks would be seen
as a small price to pay.
The fact is, follow- on negotiations
would entitle Iran to raise issues of its
own. When the US brings up its ballistic
missile capability, Tehran will no doubt
point to the UAE’s F-35s and offer to
consider limitations on Iranian mis-
siles in return for corresponding limits
on the UAE air force. US accusations
of malign activities in Syria will be met
with the observation that Iran is help-
ing Syria at its government’s request;
who, the Iranians will ask, invited the
US? And what right does the US have
to seize Syrian oilfields and hand them
to Delta Crescent Energy LLC , an ob-
scure American firm? Who backed a
brutal Saudi air campaign in Yemen?
Who violated Iraqi sovereignty by kill-
ing a senior Iranian official visiting
Iraq? Iranian negotiators would also
observe that most arms- control agree-
ments have a sunset provision and that
the US has an impressive track record
of withdrawing from them.
The lyrics of this opera have already
been written; an endless performance
devoid of crescendos would suit Ira-
nian negotiators perfectly well, and
confronting Iran on these contentious
issues would placate some American
and Israeli critics of the JCPOA. Since
many of its provisions do not expire
until 2030 and others sunset in 2025,
after the end of Biden’s first term, both
sides have time to temporize. The Ira-
nians will be especially cautious, since
Trump has already suggested that he
may be the Republican presidential
candidate again in 2024. They will
not kid themselves that whatever they
agree to with Biden will survive past
his term in office.
If, however, the Biden administra-
tion succeeds in preventing Iran from
developing nuclear weapons, it would
reduce the risk of a regional war and
nuclear proliferation on the Arab
side of the Persian Gulf. Iranian ma-
lign activities are not a threat to the
United States, but they trouble some
of its friends, particularly Israel and
Saudi Arabia. These activities include
attacks on Saudi oil facilities; occa-
sional launchings of Iranian missiles
by Houthi rebels at Saudi Arabia, pre-
sumably in response to Saudi airstrikes
(although the Saudis would argue that
the Houthis started the tit-for-tat at-
tacks); entrenching Shi’a militias in
Syria, used mainly by the government
as cannon fodder in a fading civil war;
and attempting to transfer advanced
missiles to Lebanese Hezbollah.
Nearly all these provocations were
made possible by US blunders or those
of its allies, and all have proven difficult
to reverse militarily. Iran’s grip on Leb-
anon originated in a failed US-Israeli
war against Syria in the early 1980s. Its
presence in Iraq was made possible by
the wars against Saddam Hussein from
1991 to 2003 and the ensuing conflict
there. Iran’s involvement in Yemen was
made possible by a Saudi and Emirati
effort to roll back Houthi gains in a
civil war that ravaged the country. Its
engagement in Syria was a function of
Iran’s dependence on Damascus for
diplomatic support, resupply of Leb-
anese Hezbollah, and of course the
threat posed by jihadists. Arming and
training of rebels by the US and Gulf
Arabs made intervention a more ur-
gent necessity for Tehran.
The Biden administration lacks the
strategic incentive and domestic polit-
ical support to dislodge Iran from its
various regional footholds, which will
continue to galvanize opposition to the
nuclear agreement. Given constraints
on the administration and the needs
of the countries where Iranian influ-
ence has become entrenched, it would
seem logical to mobilize Arab capital
and simply outspend Iran, which is eco-
nomically weak and organizationally
challenged. Iran can support militias,
but these states need stabilization and
reconstruction assistance in addition to
direct investment. Tehran can organize
soup kitchens and build small schools
in the war-torn Syrian city of Deir
al-Zour, renovate a couple of power
stations that other contractors were
blocked from bidding on because of US
sanctions, and even ship discounted oil
to Syria if it can penetrate the US block-
ade, but it cannot rebuild the country’s
energy grid, replace its health care sys-
tem, reconstitute its housing stock, and
resuscitate its transport sector.
The Gulf states have the resources
and motivation to do this. Ironically,
investment aimed at crowding Iran out
of Syria and alleviating a humanitar-
ian crisis is currently blocked by US
sanctions against non-American enti-
ties engaged in financial transactions
in Syria. The UAE and Saudi Arabia
are already shoveling cash to the Assad
government, which can’t use it for in-
vestment because of sanctions. If Arab
clout in Syria grew, Iranian influence
would diminish over time.
Iraq could benefit from investment in
its agribusiness, industrial, and oil sec-
tors; Yemen desperately needs invest-
ment in infrastructure and desalination
capacity—it is out of water—and while
Iran can supply the Houthis with mis-
siles and rockets, it cannot meaning-
fully improve the quality of life for
Yemenis. Lebanon is in a state of pro-
found crisis caused by the collapse of a
banking sector structured as a pyramid
scheme. Its reconstitution will be a se-
rious challenge, and Iran has no capac-
ity to prevent Lebanon from going over
the precipice. A regional initiative of
this kind could take US- Saudi relations
in a productive direction, while chip-
ping away at the rationale for armed
conflict with Iran.
Alternative approaches either carry
the risk of escalation with Iran or en-
tail a break with the Saudis, regardless
of the administration’s stated intention
to avoid a “rupture” with Riyadh. Ei-
ther course of action would be contro-
versial in Washington. Despite disgust
at the crown prince, mainly among
Democrats, since the murder of his
critic Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in
2018, the Saudi connection throws off
too much cash to derail. In 2019 US
trade with Saudi Arabia was about $39
billion. In 2015, the last year employ-
ment data were available, sales of US
goods and services to Saudi Arabia
supported 165,000 American jobs. This
activity has strengthened an already
strong business constituency for close
US- Saudi ties The kingdom has rein-
forced this base of support by spending
over $37 million lobbying in Wash-
ington; funded, along with the UAE,
a multimillion- dollar think tank; and
invested more than $1 billion in the US
tech sector, while endowing universi-
ties and hospitals.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national secu-
rity adviser, has rightly repudiated the
“blank check” Trump handed to Mo-
hammad bin Salman, which implicitly
condoned murder, kidnapping, domes-
tic repression, the siege of Qatar, and
indiscriminate bombing of Yemeni ci-
vilians, but the inertia of the US- Saudi
relationship will impede meaningful
change. The Biden administration has
restricted its communication with Saudi
Arabia to King Salman and refused to
talk to the crown prince, initiated a re-
view of arms sales, cut off US support
for Saudi operations in Yemen, and
taken the Houthis off the US list of ter-
rorist organizations. It has also released
a redacted version of the intelligence
assessment that the crown prince was
deeply involved in Khashoggi’s murder.
Yet according to The New York
Times, “the Biden administration
stopped short of directly penalizing
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
calculating that the risk of damaging
American interests was too great.”
Biden explained on February 4:
Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks,
UAV strikes, and other threats from
Iranian-supplied forces in multiple
countries. We’re going to continue
to support and help Saudi Arabia
defend its sovereignty and its terri-
torial integrity and its people.
He did not mention that the US was
currently seeking new bases in Saudi
Arabia, probably to get out of Iranian
missile and drone range, which would
make this a particularly inopportune
moment to anathematize the crown
prince. Advocates of harsher action
think it would coalesce internal Saudi
opposition to his accession to the throne
upon his father’s death. If nothing else,
this view shows the supernatural stay-
ing power of regime change fantasies.
But some congressional Democrats do
not think the administration has gone
far enough, and prominent journalists,
include the Times’s Nicholas Kristof
and The New Yorker’s Robin Wright,
have denounced Biden for giving the
crown prince a pass.
Under the Biden administration the
US-Israeli relationship will shed the
The New York Review
excesses it acquired under Trump,
who appointed as ambassador David
Friedman, a Trump Organization
lawyer strongly supportive of settlers
and annexation of occupied territory.
Biden has already reversed policies
that stripped Palestinians of aid and
diplomatic access in Washington, and
he likely won’t have to confront Israel
on the question of annexation as long
as Jerusalem sees value in perpetuating
the Abraham Accords. Security assis-
tance is locked in throughout Biden’s
first term by the ten-year Memorandum
of Understanding signed by Obama
in 2016. Side payments requested by
Israel might be granted if Congress
senses political dividends, and Israel
has already asked for a compensatory
package that would offset the alleged
impact of F-35 sales to the UAE on Is-
rael’s military advantage. For the most
part, the systems Israel wants to buy
with US assistance—such as refueling
tankers, vertical landing and takeoff
aircraft, and a bunker-busting bomb
that is too heavy for any Israeli plane
to carry—would be needed for it to at-
tack Iran. This might presage a future
request for strategic bombers, the sale
of which is currently prohibited by a
US-Russian arms control treaty.
Relations between Israel and the Pal-
estinian Authority will not be improved
early in the Biden administration, if at
all, because Israel is holding elections
on March 23, amid the wreckage of the
center-left Blue and White party and
the emergence of a right-wing chal-
lenger to Netanyahu, Gideon Sa’ar.
Netanyahu faces criminal charges that
will soon consume much of his time,
but this does not seem to have alien-
ated his base. Since whoever wins will
not pursue a peace agreement with the
Palestinians, Biden’s advisers are un-
likely to enmesh the White House in
yet another push for a peace process.
At this juncture, the bureaucrats who
had dominated the peace process for a
generation are all gone. The new gen-
eration is more skeptical of the process
and the viability of a two-state solu-
tion, even if they still think it would be
better than the obvious alternatives.
Thus, at least in relation to this US in-
terest, the outcome of the Israeli elec-
tion won’t matter much to Washington
policymakers. Right-wing parties will
win two thirds to three quarters of
Knesset seats, no Israeli government
will back a return to the JCPOA, and
even Benny Gantz, the Blue and White
party leader, spoke favorably about
annexation.
On US-Iran relations, Netanyahu
came out swinging soon after Biden’s
election, warning the president- elect
that “there can be no going back to
the previous nuclear agreement.” He
reprised his denunciation of Obama’s
nuclear diplomacy, delivered to a joint
session of Congress in March 2015.
Since then, Israel has coarsened and
toughened the tone and substance of
its opposition. Netanyahu recently
warned that “with or without an agree-
ment we will do everything so [Iran is
not] armed with nuclear weapons.” He
was underscoring the astonishing pub-
lic statement of Lieutenant General Avi
Kochavi, Israel’s chief military officer,
to the effect that Israel could respond
to US reentry into the JCPOA by attack-
ing Iran because “anything resembling
the current agreement is bad and must
not be permitted.” The former Israeli
air force chief Amos Yadlin, who heads
April 8, 2021
a think tank generally regarded as left
of center, has just echoed this notion
in an article cowritten with an Emi-
rati analyst.2 There are countervailing
voices in Israel, primarily retired intel-
ligence officials and army officers, but
opponents of the JCPOA dominate the
discussion. They will enjoy the warm
welcome of congressional Republicans,
who are looking forward to using them
once again as a political wrecking ball.
There is little Biden can do to counter
this aggressive campaign, though it
is clear he will try. The US airstrike
against Iran-backed militia camps in
Syria on February 25 was a gesture to
those who claim the nuclear deal does
Joe Biden; drawing by Tom Bachtell
nothing to interdict or punish Iran’s
malign activities, such as the militia
attack against a US installation in Iraq
on February 15. Official US statements
explained the strike as a signal of the
administration’s intention to protect
American lives and deter Iranian ag-
gression. Sources in Syria indicated
that the US aircraft buzzed the tar-
geted location repeatedly before re-
leasing their bombs, to give residents
the opportunity to get out of the way.
Trump also attacked Iranian-backed
militia groups within Iraq, not a step
that Biden would likely take. Syria,
however, is a multilateral free-fire zone
and therefore a less awkward punching
bag.
Despite this attempt to control esca-
lation by avoiding a strike on Iraqi terri-
tory, keeping the scope proportional to
the provocation, and apparently seek-
ing to avoid casualties, a US base in Iraq
came under retaliatory fire on March 3.
This has created expectations among
observers of a US response and given
opponents of the JCPOA an opening to
press their claim that US declarations
of interest in rejoining the agreement
only embolden Iran. The implication
is that any US response should be di-
rected at Iran itself. It has therefore be-
come important for the administration
to put some distance between Tehran
and these attacks by dropping the old
designation “Iran-backed militias” in
favor of “Shia-backed militias.” JCPOA
opponents cravenly and cynically de-
nounced this as craven and cynical,
while the Twittersphere ignited with
hilarity. The underlying question, how-
2
Amos Yadlin and Ebtesam al-Ketbi,
“The United States Must Move For-
ward, Not Back, on Iran,” Foreign Af-
fairs, January 27, 2021.
ever, was serious and hard to answer:
Are the militias that attack US bases in
Iraq following Iranian orders, or even
subject to Iranian influence?
In any case, it seems scarcely likely
that this effort to balance attacks on
these militias against the need to keep
Iran motivated to reenter compliance
with the JCPOA will work. Oklahoma
Republican senator Jim Inhofe, author
of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global
Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your
Future, declared on February 1 that
a return to the JCPOA is a nonstarter.
Saying that “the original Iran deal,
after all, was a gift to the Iranian re-
gime,” he laid out the principles for
a new deal that would be acceptable
to Republicans. It would involve the
participation of Israel and Arab Gulf
States, have no sunset clauses, include
no provision for enrichment, and end
Iranian development of ballistic mis-
siles and regional meddling. In other
words, congressional Republicans will
not support any deal that could actu-
ally be negotiated with Iran, and some
Democrats may well embrace this posi-
tion. As a purely executive action, US
participation in the JCPOA will remain
a fragile proposition.
The Israelis, meanwhile, appear to
have reversed their previous insistence
that a new agreement encompass re-
gional security concerns; they now say
that these should be dealt with sepa-
rately from nuclear issues. This must
have caused whiplash in Washington.
The Israelis, paradoxically, also seem
to be taking a relaxed attitude toward
Iran’s ability to race for a bomb. To jus-
tify a rapid return to the JCPOA, Biden
administration officials have said that
Iran could make enough fuel for a
weapon very quickly in the absence of
diplomatic progress. The Israelis have
countered that rapid assembly of the
fuel for a deliverable warhead might be
possible, but it would still take Iran a
couple of years to make one, so why the
rush to return to talks?
Biden says the US will not resume
negotiations or relieve sanctions until
Iran is back in compliance with the
existing agreement; Javad Zarif, the
Iranian foreign minister, maintains
that Iran will not resume compliance
until the US has lifted sanctions. Most
observers think the stakes are high
enough for both parties to find a way
back to the negotiating table. There
are many options available, including a
partial lifting of Trump- era sanctions,
or an IMF loan, in return for a partial
return by Iran to full compliance. Iran,
after the US airstrike in Syria, rejected
direct talks with the administration, but
other formats would work nearly as well.
In her confirmation hearing Wendy
Sherman, Biden’s nominee for deputy
secretary of state and a lead negotiator
of the JCPOA, adopted the language of
her tormenters, stressing that the “the
facts on the ground have changed, the
geopolitics of the region have changed”
and suggesting that the JCPOA would
have to be revised to reflect this new
world. She gave no sign that the admin-
istration would drop Trump’s “maxi-
mum pressure” sanctions in advance
of Iran’s return to full compliance. As
Democratic progressives noted, Sher-
man sounded as though she were repu-
diating the deal she had negotiated and
strenuously defended. But co- opting
her adversaries’ rhetoric was probably
the safest course in a highly volatile sit-
uation. In June Iran will hold presiden-
tial elections that will probably result
in the replacement of Hassan Rouhani
with a hard-liner hostile to the nuclear
deal. Timing is therefore an issue.
As for Syria, Blinken has expressed
his regret at Obama’s having failed to
stanch the civil war that has cost hun-
dreds of thousands of lives and forced
the migration of half the country’s
population, saying “it’s something that
I will take with me for the rest of my
life.” The question is how Blinken’s
regret will shape US policy. Remorse
over George H.W. Bush’s incitement
and abandonment of Iraqi Shias in
1991 filled Paul Wolfowitz and others
with regret that later drove them to-
ward a second war with Saddam Hus-
sein. Thus far, Blinken has spoken of
more energetic US diplomacy aimed
at a political transition in Syria. This is
all to the good, but leaves unanswered
how US policy will address the welfare
of the Syrian people during this transi-
tion, which could take years. Does the
US pulverize Syrian society with sanc-
tions, as it did in Iraq between Desert
Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom?
Or does it roll back current sanctions
to allow reconstruction and stabili-
zation operations to be conducted by
non-Americans even though they will
in effect benefit a murderous regime?
This is a profound ethical challenge
that Biden will have to navigate.
The new administration will be as-
sailed from the right and the left. On
one side there will be the primacists
insisting on American leadership. Pri-
macy and leadership in foreign affairs
are fine things in principle, but they are
not cost-free, and the administration
will need to think about what it is will-
ing to pay for them and whether they
are even attainable. On the other side
is the campaign against “endless wars”
that appear to have finally ended, at
least in the Middle East. Even the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
has mused publicly about closing or
shrinking the American presence in
Manama, the site of the headquarters
of the navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.
And as troops are drawn down from
Iraq and Afghanistan, the numbers of
support personnel in the Persian Gulf
will also diminish.
In Congress there is bipartisan inter-
est in repealing the 2002 Authorization
for the Use of Military Force (AUMF),
which authorized the president “to de-
fend the national security of the United
States against the continuing threat
posed by Iraq.” Because both ISIS and
Iran have a presence in Iraq and pose
a threat to the US, the 2002 AUMF
could be used to justify military opera-
tions in Syria and the killing of Qassim
Soleimani. Revision of the 2001 AUMF,
which authorized the war on terror, is
also under consideration.
Republicans were not notably in
favor of this when Trump was presi-
dent. Their interest in hamstringing
Biden practically glows in the dark.
The support of Democrats reflects
pent-up frustration with the forever
wars and a reluctance to see the Biden
White House distracted by skirmishes
overseas when there is much to do
at home. And they must surely hope
that whatever constraints they apply
to Biden will apply as well to his Re-
publican successors. Hope springs
eternal. Q
—March 10, 2021
47

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
by Mariana Enriquez, translated from
the Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Hogarth, 187 pp., $27.00
Things We Lost in the Fire
by Mariana Enriquez, translated from
the Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Hogarth, 202 pp., $24.00
There are writers for whom the dead
refuse to stay buried, and it may be that
some ghosts are especially insistent
with authors from countries where, not
all that long ago, tens of thousands of
people were murdered or disappeared.
In the short stories of Mariana En-
riquez, a journalist and fiction writer
from Argentina, the restless dead are
all too eager to return as unwelcome re-
minders of the legacy of late-twentieth-
century political violence—and of the
horrors occurring now in South Amer-
ica’s former dictatorships.
In Enriquez’s new story collection,
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed—and
in her earlier collection, Things We
Lost in the Fire (first published in En-
glish in 2017)—her gothic fantasies are
unsparing and grotesque; there’s can-
nibalism, necrophilia, murder, mad-
ness, posthumous decay. Yet because
the fiction is so alive, the experience of
being in her world is enjoyable. Some
credit must go to Megan McDowell,
who has translated both of Enriquez’s
collections into excellent English, nim-
bly switching from the lyrical to the
idiomatic, the metaphysical to the ob-
scene. So the slangy Spanish term “un
garronazo” (which might be translated
as “a screwup”) appears here as “a
clusterfuck.”
What’s remarkable is the assurance
of Enriquez’s voice, which makes her
most outrageous inventions seem co-
herent and convincing. Details—an
insect, a dog, a cigarette—that may at
first seem randomly chosen reverberate
through a story, reappearing in unex-
pected ways. These recurrences create
a kind of substructure, giving her sto-
ries the “inner consistency” that, ac-
cording to J. R. R. Tolkien, is necessary
to persuade readers to suspend their
disbelief long enough to accept the re-
ality of an imagined world more fantas-
tic than our own.
Like their author, many of Enriquez’s
characters live in Buenos Aires: not the
tourist fantasy of tango lessons, prime
beef, and leafy boulevards, but a gritty,
polluted metropolis with cavernous class
divisions. Most of her characters are girls
and women, and many of her stories are
told in the first person. Camped on the
shores of toxic rivers, they live among
people who are starving, drug-addicted,
brutalized by the police. Meanwhile, in
dusty Argentine backwaters, the city
girls’ country cousins—chain-smoking,
boy-crazy risk-takers—have been driven
nearly feral by unfocused lust and teen-
age ennui.
Enriquez has an uncanny ability to
channel the manic hilarity and imagi-
nation of groups of teenage girls:
At that age there’s music playing in
your head all the time, as if a radio
were transmitting from the nape of
your neck, inside your skull. Then
one day that music starts to grow
48
Living with Saint Death
Francine Prose
Alessandra Sanguinetti: Camilla, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1999;
from The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams.
The first volume in a planned trilogy of Sanguinetti’s work, it was originally published
in 2010 and will be reissued by MACK this spring.
softer, or it just stops. When that
happens, you’re no longer a teen-
ager. But we weren’t there yet, not
even close. . . . Back then, the music
was at full blast and it sounded like
Slayer, Reign in Blood.
“Our Lady of the Quarry” is narrated
in the collective voice of the group,
tracking the girls’ growing impatience
with their “grown-up” friend Silvia,
already an adult, who lets them smoke
weed and meet boys at her apartment
but annoys them with her greater wis-
dom and experience:
If one of us discovered Frida
Kahlo, oh, Silvia had already vis-
ited Frida’s house with her cousin
in Mexico, before he disappeared.
If we tried a new drug, she had al-
ready overdosed on the same sub-
stance. If we discovered a band we
liked, she had already gotten over
being a fan of the same group.
We see, as the girls cannot, how lonely
Silvia must be, so we’re hardly sur-
prised when she commits what is, for
them, an unforgivable sin. She begins
a romance with a mutual friend, Diego,
whom the younger girls also desire.
What rankles them most is that Diego
hasn’t chosen them, with their perfect
bodies so obviously superior to Silvia’s
chunky legs, flat ass, and broad hips.
The wildest of the girls asks a plas-
ter statue of a naked red woman with
black nipples to curse Silvia and Diego,
and her prayer conjures up a pack of
snarling, ferocious dogs. None of the
characters in these stories take curses
lightly, especially when malevolent
magic borrows its power from the com-
bined forces of Spanish colonial Ca-
Alessandra Sanguinetti/Magnum Photos
to be really real, we’d have to go
on TV or to the newspapers, and
we’d be famous and everyone in
the world would love us.
It’s a joke, the hope that locating, via
the Ouija board, two of the tens of thou-
sands of people kidnapped by the Ar-
gentine military might prove to be an
instant ticket to celebrity stardom. The
narrator thinks the plan is a little cold-
blooded, but the girls give it a try. Nearly
all of them know someone, or know of
someone, who disappeared, and they
meditate on the vanished to encourage
Julita’s parents to get in touch.
In “The Inn,” from Things We Lost
in the Fire, two friends, Florencia and
Rocío, take revenge on the owner of a
small hotel by stuffing its mattresses
with chorizo sausages and hoping that
when they start to stink the business
will be ruined. Ultimately, their esca-
pade shines a light on the mysteries of
friendship and sex, but meanwhile we
learn that, under the dictatorship, the
inn was a police academy. Presumably
the odor of putrefaction was symboli-
cally if not actually present before the
girls’ attempt to punish the innkeeper
for firing Rocío’s father—a tour guide
whose sole offense was mentioning
the hotel’s former incarnation, thus
prompting some tourists to ask about
“disappearances, torture, whatever.”
In a 2018 interview on Lit Hub, En-
tholicism, Afro-Brazilian religion, and riquez noted that “political violence
savvy local witches. Especially feared leaves scars, like a national PTSD.
is the popular cult of San La Muerte, The military here launched the stuff
of nightmares: they disappeared peo-
Saint Death—a skeleton with its ple, common graves, bones uniden-
scythe. The figure was repeated in tified.” In her fiction, the bodies are
different sizes and materials, some- never buried very deep. The Dangers
times in rough approximations, of Smoking in Bed begins with “Angel-
others carved in detail, with deep ita Unearthed,” a story narrated by a
black eye sockets and a broad grin. young woman who is visited by a dead
infant. The narrator, as a child, had dug
Sneaking into haunted houses, swim- up some bones in her family’s garden
ming in abandoned, perilous quarries, and brought them to her father:
Enriquez’s teenage girls long for an en-
counter with the supernatural, if only to He said they were chicken bones,
test their magical powers—and to break or maybe even beef bones, or else
up the tedium of their days. But the five they were from some dead pet
Ouija board fanatics in “Back When someone must have buried a long
We Talked to the Dead” have a more time ago. Dogs or cats. He circled
urgent and, in their opinion, practical back around to the chicken story
reason for their obsession with the let- because before, when he was little,
ter board and the whizzing planchette my grandma used to have a coop
spelling out messages from the beyond: back there.
Everyone knew Julita’s parents The remains turn out to have be-
hadn’t died in any accident: Julita’s longed to the grandmother’s baby sis-
folks had disappeared. They were ter, “sibling number ten or eleven,”
disappeared. They’d been disap- who—ten years after her grave was dis-
peared. We didn’t really know the turbed—materializes in the narrator’s
right way to say it. Julita said they’d apartment:
been taken away, because that’s
how her grandparents talked. . . . I walked around behind her and I
Julita wanted to find them with saw, hanging from the yellowed re-
the board, or ask some other spirit mains of what I now know was her
if they’d seen them. She wanted to pink shroud, two rudimentary little
talk to them, and she also wanted cardboard wings that had chicken
to know where their bodies were. feathers glued to them. Those
Because that question drove her should have disintegrated after all
grandparents crazy, she said; her these years, I thought, and then I
grandma cried every day because laughed a little hysterically and told
she had nowhere to bring flowers myself that I had a dead baby in my
to. Plus, Julita was really some- kitchen, that it was my great-aunt
thing else: she said that if we found and she could walk, even though
the bodies, if the dead told us judging by her size she hadn’t lived
where they were and it turned out more than three months. I had to
The New York Review
 definitively stop thinking in terms of
what was possible and what wasn’t.
The narrator muses that she has finally
(sort of) satisfied her father’s desire for
a grandchild, but it isn’t until the mute
ghost hands her “a photo of my child-
hood home, the house where I had found
her little bones in the backyard” that she
understands what the baby wants: to be
taken back to her burial spot. When she
tries to fulfill that request, she realizes
that leaving a dead child is not necessar-
ily easier than abandoning a live one.
Many of the stories involve a fraught
relationship between a woman and a
child. Sometimes the child is living,
sometimes dead, sometimes a hallu-
cination; the borders between these
states can be porous. Real or not, the
children are poor and are likely to ar-
rive on the doorsteps of the middle-class
urban romantics who occupy beautiful,
half-ruined homes in dangerous neigh-
borhoods. In Things We Lost in the Fire,
the narrator of “The Dirty Kid” forms a
tentative alliance with a boy who lives
on the sidewalk outside her house—a
fragile friendship ended when the boy’s
ill, drug-addled mother rages at her for
buying ice cream for her son.
In The Dangers of Smoking in Bed,
“Kids Who Come Back” begins in a nat-
uralistic vein, with a woman who works
in an archive listing the missing children
of Buenos Aires, a pointless and “con-
stantly expanding report without the
capacity to inspire action.” Her friend
is a journalist who has made a career of
reporting on trafficked kids, and whose
high-minded crusade is, Enriquez sug-
gests, a subtler form of exploitation:
There was something in the terri-
ble journeys of these girls—mostly
girls, though he also investigated
cases of missing boys—that led
him to write special-feature essays,
long and detailed, that were much
commented on and brought con-
gratulations from his bosses, and
even salary raises.
Gradually, the narrative shifts into an-
other mode and becomes a love story
about one of the missing kids, some of
whom have large social media follow-
ings, though it’s not clear who updates
the posts. The MySpace page of the
vanished girl is thorough and specific:
She’d completed the information
requested with a strange mixture of
truth and macabre fantasy: she was
a fan of heavy metal and horror
movies. She called herself “Vaga-
bond of the Night,” described her-
self as “the worm that lives in every
death,” and claimed to be 103 years
old. She’d left the space for “About
me” blank, and for “Who I want to
meet,” she’d put “Everyone.”
The children begin returning at the
ages they were—wearing the same
clothes they wore—on the day they
went missing:
Lorena Lopez, a girl from Villa
Soldati who had run away from
home with a taxi driver, and had
been five months pregnant when
she left. She appeared in the rose
garden at Chacabuco Park, five
months pregnant. She’d been miss-
ing for a year and a half. The gyne-
cologists confirmed that it was her
first pregnancy.
April 8, 2021
Reading this, I vaguely remembered the city’s putrid smell, “like a dead dog not by a right-wing military but by the
streaming at least two TV series—the rotting beside the road.” Her friend Ju- insatiable, inhumane greed of the tour-
French and American versions of The lieta, with whom she’s staying, claims ist industry and neighborhood gentri-
Returned—that involved children and that the mentally ill talking to them- fication. The problem is no longer just
teenagers returning from the dead. But selves on the streets “aren’t people, South America’s past; it’s the global
those families were middle-class, living they’re not real. They’re like incarna- present—a suggestion that compels us
in pleasant towns; the series focused tions of the city’s madness, like escape to acknowledge that these horrors and
on the families’ happiness, confusion, valves. If they weren’t here, we’d all kill injustices aren’t limited to a remote
and delicate readjustments. The ghosts each other or die of stress.” A Catalan country during a distant era.
in Enriquez’s stories are the spirits of acquaintance explains that a neighbor- The women who witness these rev-
poor kids: abandoned, hungry, poten- hood bar is named after the madam of elations and visions are so damaged
tially unruly. a brothel who had a child with an an- by the harsh realities around them—
In “The Cart,” urban class warfare archist, killed by Franco; after her son and the malevolence of the supernat-
weaponizes the occult. When an elderly was beheaded by a cart on Las Ram- ural—that no amount of medication
vagrant is bullied by the neighborhood blas, the city’s main shopping street, can make them eat, get out of bed, or
drunk, he leaves behind his grocery cart, the madam carried a headless doll with stop seeing apparitions. In “The Well,”
which casts an evil spell on the neigh- a neck made from the dead boy’s skin an adventurous child named Josefina
borhood: jobs are lost, bank accounts when she did her weekly marketing. turns paranoid, paralyzed by anxiety,
empty themselves, burglaries and mur- Later, during a girls’ night out, Julieta mistaking the braying of a nearby don-
ders multiply. Everyone goes broke. The makes a series of confessions to Sofia, key for the voice of “the Mule Spirit,
only family immune to the plague of spiraling from horror to horror. While the ghost of a dead woman who’d been
misfortune is the narrator’s. Her mother, trying to get pregnant the previous year, turned into a mule and couldn’t rest,
a physical therapist whom everyone she had become convinced that she was and who went out to gallop at night.”
thinks of as a doctor, was the one person being watched by helicopters dispatched She hears a dead child crying and can’t
to defend the vagrant. But eventually the by a commando unit in charge of kid- go near the river because she’s afraid
escalating violence turns even them into napping children. Now she believes that dead bodies will float to the surface.
prisoners in their own home, and they Barcelona is overrun and controlled by As it turns out, Josefina’s illness is
experience the harsh truth of the adage an army of trafficked or murdered kids the result of a curse that caused her—
that no good deed goes unpunished. who won’t let anyone leave the city: the only reasonably healthy member
of a pathologically phobic family—to
Kids who fell off balconies after liberate her frightened loved ones by
All the stories in Things We Lost in their junkie mothers left them taking on their fears. The onset of her
the Fire are set in South America. The there. Kids who had keys hung condition is sudden and extreme:
Dangers of Smoking in Bed ventures round their necks at three, four
further afield. “The Lookout” takes years old. Kids who murdered taxi There was the time she’d been in a
place in Ostend, on the Belgian coast, drivers and died of overdoses, who bathroom stall and seen bare feet
where a hungry, aggressively territo- whored themselves out, went look- walking over the tiles, and a class-
rial ghost proves that malevolent spir- ing for crack. . . . mate told her it must be the suicidal
its aren’t restricted to Argentina. The The kids were unhappy, they nun who’d hung herself from the
point of view switches between that of don’t want anyone to go, they want flagpole years before. It was use-
the ghost—“The Lady Upstairs”—and to make people suffer. They suck less for her mother and the princi-
a lovelorn young woman who comes to you in. When you try to leave, pal and the school counselor to tell
stay at the hotel that the phantom has they make you lose your passport. her that no nun had ever killed her-
claimed as her domain. Or miss your plane. Or the taxi self in the schoolyard; Josefina was
“Rambla Triste” transports the reader crashes on the way to the airport. already having nightmares about
to Barcelona, where, after watching a the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Christ’s
girl collapse in the street, a visiting Ar- It’s another sort of dictatorship, in open chest that bled and drenched
gentine woman named Sofia can’t shake which the power of evil is unleashed her face in blood, about Lazarus,
pale and rotting as he rose from a
tomb among the rocks, and about
angels that tried to rape her.
Only rarely do we meet an adult who
PASTORAL reminds us of Enriquez’s high-spirited
adolescents, experimenting with nec-
romancy and dying of boredom in the
When you called, I would come running, all my tags jingling.
provinces. One of these is Natalia, in
You’d grab a hank of my hair, and that would block out every thought.
“Spiderweb” (from Things We Lost in
the Fire), a recognizable older version
Our bodies swelled and stank in the heat, of the teenagers daring one another to
and we caved to it all day, under a cloud of flies. do something entertaining. The story’s
title offers fair warning to readers who
I dreamt of strung pheasants in old paintings, a horse fear the various insects swarming its
of thick paste biting my arm. I dreamt of nothing. pages. Shrieking chicharras—“horrible
creatures, spectacular flies with pulsat-
Sticky and hungry, we were like bad-tempered children who stay out ing green wings, and smooth, black eyes
too long in the rain. They feel lonely but have no language for it. that seem to look right at you”—have
descended on Corrientes, the Argen-
tine town where the narrator is visiting
You once gashed your head open. My leg twisted beneath me
her aunt and uncle. She has come to
at a serene new angle. Our greed was largest, and most generous. introduce them to her husband, Juan
Martín, a spoiled rich guy she married
With the sun high behind us, we weren’t two but four, in haste and already despises. Juan
our shadows playing ahead of us in the melting summer grasses. Martín’s cranky, privileged bossiness
and whiny complaints seem especially
We became almost ugly with use, our questions traveling too fast, repellent under the pitiless gaze of
no one stopping to answer. The cat looked into our faces through Natalia, the narrator’s free-spirited,
sleepy slits. chain-smoking cousin:
My husband didn’t like Natalia. He
I dreamt that I died. You weren’t even very sad: you touched
didn’t find her physically attrac-
my face, it was already cold. And cold was beyond understanding.
tive, which was practically insane
on his part—I had never seen a
—Sandra Lim woman as beautiful as her. But on
top of that, he looked down on her
because Natalia read cards, knew
home remedies, and worst of all,
communicated with spirits. “Your
49

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Veering from the crude to the elegant, the wise to the funny,
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cousin is ignorant,” Juan Martín
told me, and I hated him. I even
thought about calling Natalia and
asking her to give me a recipe for
one of her potions, even a poison.
But I let it go, like I let every petty
little thing pass while a white stone
grew in my stomach that left very
little room for air or food.
The narrator, her husband, and her
cousin take a road trip to neighboring
Paraguay, to purchase the traditional
handwoven “spiderweb” lace that Na-
talia buys and sells for a living. We
know that the trip won’t go well. Two
scenes expand the ill-starred adven-
ture beyond the confines of a moribund
marriage dying in Natalia’s cramped,
sweltering Renault.
In the first of these scenes, Juan
Martín and the women watch some
Paraguayan soldiers harass a waitress.
Fearing they will assault her,
Juan Martín got up and I could just
imagine what was going to happen.
He was going to yell at them to
leave her alone; he was going to
play the hero and then they would
arrest all three of us. They would
rape Natalia and me in the dicta-
tor’s dungeons day and night, and
they would torture me with electric
shocks . . . and maybe they would
kill Natalia quickly, for being dark,
for being a witch, for being inso-
lent. And all because he needed
to be a hero and prove who knows
what.
Natalia dissuades Juan Martín from
Sensini, whose son Gregor (named
after the hero of Kafka’s Metamor-
phosis) has vanished into the “dim
corridor in which the shadowy masses
of Latin America’s terror were shift-
ing imperceptibly.” “Sensini” is simply
told, straightforward, almost spare,
while in “Spiderweb” the rubble of the
dictatorships is more lushly overgrown
with tropical flora, like one of Martin
Johnson Heade’s eerily luminous jun-
gle landscapes.
Over time I’ve noticed that many of
my students, however thoughtful and
smart, are unfamiliar with the histor-
ical background against which these
stories are set. Except for a few inter-
national students and human rights
majors, these otherwise astute young
people know nothing, or almost noth-
ing, about the Chilean despot General
Augusto Pinochet or about the Ar-
gentine junta dropping prisoners from
helicopters into the ocean. It’s not that
they’re incurious, but for some reason
much of what happened during the
1970s and 1980s—especially interna-
tionally—was not part of their high
school curriculum.
I’ve grown hesitant to combine a
literature class with a history lesson,
if only because I have come to value
those moments when politics doesn’t
hijack the conversation. But in this
case it’s seemed useful to provide
some background, since the problems
of Latin America were at least partly
engineered by the United States. If my
students don’t know what happened
in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and
Central America, they certainly don’t
know about our part in it, and how can


 


Available from bookstores, comics stores and www.nyrb.com
FINDING THE RAGA
AN IMPROVISATION ON
INDIAN MUSIC
Amit Chaudhuri
Paperback • $17.95
Also available as an e-book
VIRTUAL EVENTS WITH
AMIT CHAUDHURI
Tuesday, April 13th
Hosted by Community Bookstore
For details visit
www.communitybookstore.net
Monday, April 26th
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For details visit
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Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
taking a stand that is morally correct
“Supple, intricate and uncompromising,
full of delicate observation and insight,
Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga immerses
us in the rigorous beauty and cosmology of
Indian classical music. It is also a loving
memoir about relationships and places,
dedication and vocation.” —Geoff Dyer
Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is
also a musician, trained in the Indian classical
vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist
and singer in the American folk music style. He
has recorded his experimental compositions
extensively and performed around the world.
A turning point in his life took place when, as a
lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far
from his family’s native Calcutta, he began, con-
trary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian
classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles
that transformation and how it has continued
to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri
listens to and makes music but how he listens
to and thinks about the world at large.
Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian
music, the book is also a meditation on the dif-
ferences between Indian and Western music and
art-making as well as the ways they converge in
a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a
twentieth-century Western art movement but as
a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at
once immemorial and extraterritorial.
“A syncretic work that draws on a great variety
of Western and Indian sources and genres, com-
bines memoir and musicology, and reads like an
essay. . . [Chaudhuri’s] chronicle, like a raga, is
a wonderful exposition of becoming.” —Booklist
Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and
cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with
the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri
demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging,
challenging, and enthralling body of work.
we know who we are as a nation unless
but naive, and the women detest him we understand what we’ve done?
for his ignorance and his compliance. In the 2018 Lit Hub interview, En-
Later, some truckers discuss a riquez was asked if she thought that the
haunted stretch of the highway. One US was in danger of becoming a violent
describes running down an old woman regime:
and stopping to help, only to find that
her body had vanished; when he re- Well I don’t think America is head-
ports the accident to the police, no ing there, thankfully, even with an
one seems surprised. “They told me irresponsible president. The thing
that the military had built that bridge, is that America contributed to or
and they’d put dead people in the ce- created certain horrors in coun-
ment, people they’d murdered, to hide tries where it launched its fucked
their bodies.” “Spiderweb” ends with up foreign policy. Like, say, Op-
yet another disappearance, a mystery eration Condor in Latin America,
that Enriquez declines to solve for where it gave help with intelligence
us or for her characters, though the and resources to dictatorships.
story hints at solutions, so that we may
find ourselves repeatedly returning Last fall, twelve of my fourteen students
to it, each time hoping that one more had never heard of Henry Kissinger,
reading will provide a conclusive let alone Operation Condor, or of how
explanation. Kissinger helped shape US foreign pol-
icy during those destructive decades.
I’ve been grateful to Mariana En-
In the past few years, I’ve taught riquez for using these stories about
“Spiderweb” to my Bard College un- bugs, a miserable marriage, a provin-
dergraduates, together with Roberto cial beauty, a spooky vision seen from
Bolaño’s “Sensini.” Both stories fea- an airplane, a hot blond truck driver,
ture disappearances and are haunted and many unexplained disappearances
by the specter of late-twentieth-century to illuminate dark historic truths. One
Latin American history; they comple- can read these stories as pure, high lit-
ment each other in ways that enable us erary gothic horror, Latin American
to see the stories in a clearer light. surrealism in the age of Twitter. But
Translated by Chris Andrews, “Sen- surely ghost story means something
sini” is told in the voice of a young else for a writer from a country where
writer, a penniless exiled Chilean liv- thousands of people vanished into thin
ing in Spain. The narrator corresponds air. And once you see the background,
with an older exiled Chilean author, it’s difficult to unsee it. Q
New York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.

50 The New York Review


The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Volume 1: Language
by Ernst Cassirer, translated from
the German by Steve G. Lofts,
with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon.
Routledge, 313 pp., $84.95
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Volume 2 : Mythical Thinking
by Ernst Cassirer, translated from
the German by Steve G. Lofts,
with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon.
Routledge, 334 pp., $84.95
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Volume 3 : Phenomenology
of Cognition
by Ernst Cassirer, translated from
the German by Steve G. Lofts,
with a foreword by Peter E. Gordon.
Routledge, 606 pp., $84.95
(The three volumes are available
as a set for $200.00.)
The appearance of a new English
translation of Ernst Cassirer’s The Phi-
losophy of Symbolic Forms marks the
culmination of an unlikely intellectual
revival. Cassirer’s three-volume mag-
num opus, first published in Germany
between 1923 and 1929, was translated
into English by Ralph Manheim in the
1950s, when its author’s reputation was
in decline. For a long time thereafter,
it didn’t seem the book would ever
need retranslating. Interwar German
thought exercised an enormous influ-
ence in the late-twentieth-century US,
from Martin Heidegger’s existential-
ism to the critical theory of the Frank-
furt School to the Marxist mysticism of
Walter Benjamin. But the apocalyptic
radicalism that made these thinkers
so fascinating—the product of a pe-
riod that felt like, and in a sense really
was, the end of the world—is absent in
Cassirer.
Instead, The Philosophy of Sym-
bolic Forms focuses unfashionably on
the power and progress of the human
mind. Drawing on an exceptionally
wide range of sources—in linguistics,
anthropology, religion, psychology,
math, and physics, as well as philoso-
phy—Cassirer argues that the classic
Aristotelian definition of the human
being as a rational animal is wrong, or
at least incomplete. Instead we should
think of ourselves as “symbolic ani-
mals,” since ratiocination is only one
expression of the human instinct to
think in symbols.
Art, myth, and language are also
forms of thinking, Cassirer insists, just
as much as philosophy and science.
“Each of them creates its own symbolic
configurations, which if not of the same
kind . . . are, nevertheless, equal as to
their spiritual origin,” he writes in the
introduction to the first volume. “None
of these configurations can simply be
reduced to, or derived from, the others;
rather, each of them . . . constitutes its
own aspect of the ‘actual.’”
The three volumes of The Philoso-
phy of Symbolic Forms focus on lan-
guage, myth, and science respectively,
offering fascinating, if necessarily frag-
mentary and speculative, accounts of
how each develops in the direction of
increasing freedom and universality.
This essentially affirmative view was
“out of tune with its time,” as Peter E.
April 8, 2021
The Symbolic Animal
Adam Kirsch
Ernst Cassirer, New Haven, Connecticut, 1944
Gordon writes in his preface to the new
edition. Yet Cassirer knew the dark-
ness of the time as well as anyone. Born
in 1874, he became a leading figure in
German philosophy before World War
I, though his Jewishness kept him from
being appointed to a professorial chair
until 1919. But his academic career was
cut short in 1933, when the Nazis, as
one of their first acts, prohibited Jews
from teaching in universities.
Cassirer and his wife quickly fled the
country, and he spent the next dozen
years as an émigré, moving from post
to post in England, Sweden, and fi-
nally the US. He was teaching at Co-
lumbia when he died of a heart attack
on the street near 116th and Broad-
way in April 1945, one day after FDR.
Cassirer was laid to rest in a Jewish
cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey—a
destination the German mandarin
could never have imagined.
His work found some admirers in
this country, most notably Susanne K.
Langer, whose Philosophy in a New
Key (1941) built on his idea of art and
myth as nonsemantic forms of thought.
By the turn of the century, however,
Cassirer had almost vanished from the
consciousness of the American intel-
lectual public—especially compared
with Heidegger, who became ever
more fascinating as his history of Nazi
involvement came into clearer view.
Then, in the 2000s, the tide began to
turn. In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Phi-
losopher of Culture (2008), Edward
Skidelsky wrote semi-ironically of the
“Cassirer industry” that had already
sprung up in Germany. Skidelsky’s
book was followed in English by Gor-
don’s magisterial Continental Divide
(2010), a detailed analysis of a storied
1929 debate between Cassirer and
Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland. In
2013 Emily J. Levine’s Dreamland of
Humanists proposed that the Frank-
furt School had a rival in a “Hamburg
Eric Schaar/Fortune/Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
the first blow against Cassirer’s stand-
ing as a major thinker. Hardly any ac-
count of Cassirer fails to mention their
Davos debate; it is a high point of Eilen-
berger’s book, where it’s described very
much in the style of a boxing match.
(“Body blows. Heidegger was now
cornered.”) Beyond the philosophical
issues, the debate is biographically sig-
nificant because of how starkly the two
men’s fates diverged a few years later.
In April 1933, the same month that
Cassirer was stripped of his profes-
sorship at the University of Hamburg,
Heidegger was appointed rector of the
University of Freiburg, tasked with
bringing it into alignment with Nazi
principles. An enthusiastic supporter of
Nazism, whose “inner truth and great-
ness” he lauded, Heidegger presided
over the purge of Freiburg’s Jewish fac-
ulty, including his principal mentor, the
philosopher Edmund Husserl. In light
of this history, the fact that Heidegger
was widely seen to have won the debate
at Davos raises important questions. If
Heidegger the Nazi is a more profound
and significant thinker than Cassirer,
who was a prominent defender of the
Weimar Republic, what does that tell
us about the relationship between phi-
losophy and politics, between profun-
dity and morality?
As Gordon shows in Continental Di-
School” centered on Cassirer and vide—which includes a full transcript
Erwin Panofsky, both of whom did re- of the debate—the Davos encounter
search in that city’s Warburg Library. focused on the proper interpretation of
Kant, not an obviously dramatic sub-
ject. But to the young people in the au-
T he renewed interest in Cassirer dience, it was clear that what was really
has led to new editions and transla- at stake was the fate of an intellectual
tions of his work, including several by generation. Otto Friedrich Bollnow,
Steve Lofts, who has now translated a student of Heidegger’s who helped
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. transcribe the speakers’ remarks, re-
It has even begun to trickle down into called years later:
popular intellectual history. Wolfram
Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians One sensed the encounter between
(2018), a best seller in Germany that two ages: one, an inheritance that
appeared in English last year, is a fast- had come to its ripe unfolding, was
paced group portrait of four thinkers embodied in Cassirer’s imposing
who “reinvented philosophy” in the form, and, over and against him,
1920s: Heidegger, Benjamin, Cassirer, the embodiment in Heidegger of
and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It’s safe to a new time, breaking out with the
say that a similar book written twenty consciousness of a radically new
years ago would not have included Cas- beginning.
sirer in that company.
Yet even the scholars who helped re- The antagonists were well cast. Cas-
vive interest in Cassirer can be reticent sirer, fifty-four, was at the height of his
about making claims for his achieve- authority as an interpreter of science
ment. In his preface, Gordon warns and culture in the Kantian tradition; he
that “certain features of Cassirer’s would publish the concluding volume
work have grown antiquated and un- of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
persuasive,” particularly his belief in later that year. Heidegger, thirty-nine,
cultural progress, which is “altogether was already established as the leader of
intolerable.” Skidelsky writes that he the postwar generation, thanks to the
began his book intending to make “a pioneering existentialism of his book
plea for Cassirer’s continuing impor- Being and Time (1927). Bringing the
tance, a protest against decades of ne- two together was intended to strike
glect,” but that as he delved deeper he sparks. The International Davos Con-
realized that “the problems facing Cas- ference, an academic colloquium de-
sirer’s enterprise were far more serious signed to foster international dialogue
than I had initially supposed.” He even after World War I, was only in its sec-
speculates that the roots of the Cassirer ond year, and its organizers hoped the
revival are “more political than philo- Cassirer-Heidegger debate would help
sophical,” particularly in Germany, them repeat the success of the inaugu-
which is “in desperate need of figure- ral meeting, when Albert Einstein was
heads who are cosmopolitan in outlook the headliner.
yet distinctively German in intellectual The intellectual difference between
style. Cassirer fits the bill perfectly. the two men was compounded by the
That he was Jewish and an enemy of social, political, and even physical con-
Heidegger also helps.” trasts. Cassirer—tall, white-haired,
The last point is particularly ironic, and patrician-looking, the product of
because it was Heidegger who struck an affluent and culturally prominent
51

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52
family—was a perfect standard-bearer
for the philosophical establishment.
But the students in the audience re-
sponded much more to the combative
charisma of Heidegger, who grew up
poor in a rural Catholic family and
liked to present himself as a man of
nature rather than culture. At Davos,
Gordon writes, Heidegger made time
to go skiing; he enjoyed causing a sen-
sation by showing up in the hotel lobby
in a ski suit instead of evening wear.
Intellectually, Cassirer exemplified
the German Jewish embrace of Bil-
dung—moral and cultural education.
The heroes of German humanism were
touchstones of his thinking—Kant,
Goethe, Humboldt. He was immensely
erudite, in literature and science as well
as philosophy, and wrote about every-
thing from Zoroastrianism to Renais-
sance mysticism to Einstein’s theory of
relativity. The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms rests on the idea that the history
of culture offers the best way to grasp
the essential freedom and creativity of
the human spirit.
For Heidegger, on the other hand, it
was necessary to master the Western
intellectual tradition primarily in order
to throw off its dead hand. His think-
ing aimed at recovering a more primal
and authentic sense of being, which he
thought had been buried under 2,500
years of philosophical rationalism. As
he wrote in Being and Time:
Taking the question of Being as our
clue, we are to destroy the tradi-
tional content of ancient ontology
until we arrive at those primordial
experiences in which we achieved
our first ways of determining the
nature of Being.
Cassirer and Heidegger’s clash over
the interpretation of Kant exposed this
profound difference in temperament
and worldview. For Cassirer, the Kant-
ian idea that the human mind creates
its own world through the use of sym-
bols was an essentially hopeful one. At
Davos, he argued that this creativity is
what allows human beings to achieve a
kind of transcendence: “The spiritual
realm is not . . . metaphysical. . . ; the
true spiritual realm is just the spiri-
tual world created from [man] himself.
That he could create it is the seal of his
infinitude.”
To Heidegger, this sounded like
the kind of complacent humanism he
despised. If there was anything his
thought insisted on, it was human fin-
itude—the way our experience of the
world is defined by mortality, anxiety,
and nullity. “It is only possible for me
to understand Being if I understand
the Nothing or anxiety,” he argued at
Davos. Skating close to open insult,
he contrasted “the lazy outlook of a
man who merely uses the works of the
spirit” with the genuine philosopher,
who is intent on “throwing man back
into the hardness of his fate.”
According to the transcript, at one
point in the debate a member of the
audience intervened to observe that
“both men speak a completely different
language.” Reading The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms alongside Being and
Time shows the truth of the remark.
Cassirer and Heidegger think about
some of the same problems, but they
have very different ideas about what
thinking means and sounds like.
Both books are formidably com- and into the prehistoric past, Cassirer
plex, but Heidegger offers a shock of argues that language and myth, too,
recognition that Cassirer does not, be- develop in the direction of ever-greater
cause even his abstractions are rooted abstraction and universality. As forms
in concrete, familiar experiences. He of symbolic thinking, they demonstrate
analyzes the philosophical meanings that “in every attentive glance into the
of things like using a hammer, read- world, we are theorizing.”
ing a newspaper, or feeling anxious. As one would expect from a trilogy
The difference is perfectly illustrated of books written over a decade, The
by the two thinkers’ approaches to the
theory of signs, a central topic for both.
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms isn’t
tightly constructed; it’s less the unfold-
In the first volume of The Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms, the section “The
ing of a system than a series of obser-
vations and arguments. Much of the
General Function of Signs” discusses book is devoted to an exposition of the
ideas on the subject from Galileo, findings of various linguists, anthropol-
Leibniz, Humboldt, Goethe, Kant, and ogists, and psychologists, few of them
the physicist Heinrich Hertz. In Being remembered today. Indeed, because
and Time, the section “Reference and so much of Cassirer’s analysis depends
on then-current research—on every-
Private archive of Dr. H. Ritter/Documentation Library Davos
thing from agglutinative grammar to
indigenous religious rites to the causes
of aphasia—it is vulnerable to obso-
lescence to a degree that’s unusual for
philosophy.
But the basic insight of The Psychol-
ogy of Symbolic Forms is one that con-
tinues to inform the humanities today.
The categories we use to understand the
world aren’t a passive reflection of the
way things really are; rather, we ac-
tively create systems of meaning that
evolve over time. As Cassirer puts it in
the second volume:
Objects are not “given” to con-
sciousness in a rigid, finished state,
nakedly in themselves but . . . the
relation of representation to the ob-
ject presupposes an independent,
Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, spontaneous act of consciousness.
Davos, Switzerland, 1929
Cassirer’s symbolic forms can be seen
Signs” analyzes the function of a car’s as a precursor to Michel Foucault’s dis-
turn signal: courses and epistemes—ways of orga-
nizing knowledge that shape what we
Motor cars are sometimes fitted believe and how we act. (Gordon ob-
up with an adjustable red arrow, serves in his preface that Foucault was
whose position indicates the di- “quite familiar” with Cassirer’s work.)
rection the vehicle will take—at
an intersection, for instance. The
position of the arrow is controlled The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is
by the driver. most interesting and rewarding when
Cassirer engages in his own archaeol-
This was written in the mid-1920s, ogy of knowledge, trying to imagine his
when the automobile was roughly as way into systems of thought that now
new as cell phones are today. Cassirer appear hopelessly strange. What does
knew far more than Heidegger about it mean, for instance, when a language
the era’s cutting-edge science, such as has no single vocabulary for counting
relativity and quantum mechanics, but but uses different terms depending on
Heidegger gives a better sense of living the kind of objects being counted? This
in and thinking about the contempo- is the case, Cassirer writes, with the
rary world. This is the power of exis- “language of the Fiji Islands,” which
tentialism, which insists that our own uses different words to designate ten
lived experience is the necessary start- canoes, ten fish, or ten coconuts. Why
ing point for thinking about ethics and did the Roman augurs believe they
metaphysics. could tell the future by observing
Cassirer’s thought belonged to an- which quadrant of the sky a bird flew
other tradition: neo-Kantianism, the into? In what sense should we under-
school that had dominated academic stand the Rigveda, the ancient Hindu
philosophy in Germany since the 1870s. scripture, when it says that the cosmos
The neo-Kantians sought to reinterpret was made from a dismembered human
Kant’s ideas about knowledge and re- form?
ality in light of new developments in A simple response would be to dis-
science, and Cassirer’s early work con- miss these as the errors and super-
tributed to this project. In Substance stitions of humankind’s infancy. But
and Function (1910), he argued that “cognition does not master myth by
modern mathematics and physics, with exiling it beyond its borders,” Cassirer
their highly abstract and unintuitive writes. Such symbolic forms are worthy
methods, give a new dimension to the of serious attention because they are
Kantian idea that our minds don’t sim- active constructions of the mind, no
ply make pictures of things that already less than, say, Protestantism or quan-
exist “out there.” Rather, we construct tum mechanics. At the same time,
reality by understanding it in progres- Cassirer is no relativist. Early symbolic
sively more complex ways. forms—and, like most Europeans of
In The Philosophy of Symbolic his time, he tends to think of ancient
Forms, Cassirer extends this project Babylonians and “natural peoples”
to include culture as well as the sci- in the twentieth century as similarly
ences. Looking back through history “early”—are important because they
The New York Review
show the human mind slowly winning
its way from confusion to clarity.
Over the course of the three volumes,
Cassirer develops an account of that
process. At the dawn of human con-
sciousness, he proposes, concepts that
appear fundamental and inescapable
to us were still unknown. People had
no firm sense that physical objects are
located in uniform, three- dimensional
space. They didn’t think of time as a
line extending backward into the past
and forward into the future. They
didn’t distinguish clearly between sub-
ject and object, what happens “in here”
and “out there.” Similarly blurred were
distinctions such as part and whole,
cause and effect, alive and dead. With-
out such categories to structure the
world, human experience formed a sin-
gle, overwhelming whole, a stream or
flood of feelings and impressions.
Yet as far back as we can see into
the history of consciousness, human
beings have made efforts to master
this flood by imposing form and struc-
ture on experience. A crucial term in
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is
“cut” or “incision”: symbolic thinking
often involves cutting the undifferenti-
ated world into comprehensible parts.
Cassirer borrows the image from Plato,
who wrote in the Phaedrus about the
art of dividing ideas into natural classes
by cutting them “at the joints,” like a
skillful butcher.
What makes Cassirer a distinctively
twentieth-century thinker is his belief
that the world offers no such joints to
cut along. The only divisions that exist
are the ones we impose, and we can
choose to make them in any number of
ways. For Cassirer, linguistic diversity
is evidence of this freedom, since he
believes (as most linguists since Noam
Chomsky have not) that differences be-
tween languages reflect different expe-
riences of the world.
One of Cassirer’s most important
examples is counting. He observes
that some African and Australian lan-
guages have numbers for one and two
but refer to all higher quantities simply
as “many.” In Semitic languages, “the
numerals [Zahlwort] for one and two
are adjectives, whereas the rest [of the
numbers] are abstract nouns.” Modern
Indo-European languages have a sin-
gular and a plural, but ancient Greek
and Sanskrit also had a “dual” number
for nouns and adjectives, used for pairs
of things or people.
Cassirer sees these linguistic traces as
evidence that human beings developed
counting not to enumerate objects but
to express a distinction between selves.
The first symbolic cut was the one be-
tween “I” and “you,” recognizing that
people have separate minds. After this
division was secured in language by
the numbers one and two, it took a fur-
ther conceptual leap to refer to “he” or
“she”—the third person, for which the
number three was required. Counting
“detaches only gradually” from this
subjective basis, Cassirer writes, which
explains “the particular role played by
the number three in the language and
thinking of all peoples.”
Only with the appearance of number
four and beyond does language move
from designating people to counting
objects, which requires an indefinite
series of numbers and thus opens up
the possibility of real mathematical
thinking. Counting thus offers Cassirer
a perfect example of the mind’s move-
ment from the immediate, tangible,
and subjective to the abstract, concep-
tual, and objective, which is the trajec-
tory of all symbolic forms.
A similar progress can be traced in
the world of myth. To early human
beings, places, objects, and animals
appear “expressive,” with values and
intentions of their own. That’s why
they must be fought with magical rites
or appeased with sacrifices. Polytheism
marks a step forward from this early
mythical stage, as the personalities
that once belonged to things are now
transferred to the gods who watch over
them—the god of the sea, the god of the
sun, and so on. But the gods of polythe-
ism are still understood as beings sim-
ilar to us, with bodies and desires, like
the quarreling deities of the Iliad.
The crucial incision in this realm was
made by Greek philosophy and biblical
monotheism, which transformed God
from a personality into an ethical and
metaphysical principle. Cassirer refers
several times to the myth of Er in book
ten of Plato’s Republic, in which the
soul awaiting reincarnation is told by
the Fates that its destiny is in its own
hands:
Your daemon or guardian spirit
will not be assigned to you by lot;
you will choose him. . . . Virtue
knows no master; each will pos-
sess it to a greater or less degree,
depending on whether he values
or disdains it. The responsibility
lies with the one who makes the
choice; the god has none.
In these lines, we can see the mythic
idea of fate being transformed into the
religious idea of free will and ethical
responsibility.
For Cassirer, this change is parallel
to the transformation of counting into
mathematics, and of naming into lan-
guage. But the mind’s trajectory toward
abstraction doesn’t look like progress to
every observer. For Heidegger, the orig-
inal sin of philosophy is precisely what
Cassirer regards as its greatest achieve-
ment: replacing humanity’s primal, nu-
minous sense of Being with an objective,
calculating rationalism. In his essay “The
Question Concerning Technology,”
Heidegger argues that this way of think-
ing, which he calls Gestell or “enfram-
ing,” “endangers man in his relationship
to himself and to everything that is.”
This is the real Cassirer-Heidegger
debate, and it goes far beyond what they
discussed at Davos. Is free reason the
highest human accomplishment or
the source of nihilism and alienation?
Do we want thought and culture to
keep progressing in the same direction,
or to turn back toward their origins?
These questions continue to divide us
in the most fateful ways; today as in the
1920s, they aren’t just philosophical
but political. Perhaps the most timely
insight of The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms is that earlier strata of symbolic
thought never fully disappear; even in a
scientific age, people are prone to mag-
ical, mythical thinking. As Cassirer
writes, “Science arrives at its own form
only by expelling every mythical and
metaphysical component from itself.”
But “the battle, which theoretical cog-
nition believes it has won for good, will
continually break out anew.” Q

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The New York Review

Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke.
Bloomsbury, 245 pp., $27.00
The phrase “surprise best seller”—
often applied to more or less any
book that achieves some commer-
cial success despite not being by John
Grisham, Nicholas Sparks, or James
Patterson—can rarely have been used
more accurately than it was about
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange
and Mr. Norrell (2004). Certainly, it’s
hard to think of another thousand-
page, densely plotted, heavily foot-
noted debut novel about magicians in
Regency England that went on to sell
more than four million copies, to be-
come a Time Book of the Year, and to
inspire a TV miniseries, any number of
obsessive fansites, and a board game.
Even Neil Gaiman, an early cham-
pion of Clarke’s, whose one regret
about the novel is that it wasn’t twice
as long, thought it “would be too un-
usual . . . for the general public.” Not
only did Clarke appear to take the exis-
tence of magic for granted, but she gave
its specifically English form a back-
story spanning seven hundred years—
which is where all those footnotes came
in. Among other things, this included a
race of malevolent fairies who had the
regrettable habit of kidnapping mortals
into Other Lands. But the magic was
also ingeniously interwoven with his-
tory of a more recognizable kind. The
Duke of Wellington, for example, still
defeated Napoleon. It’s just that he did
so with the help of Jonathan Strange’s
handy ability to move rivers and tem-
porarily shift Brussels to the middle of
America.
Inevitably, after the book’s success,
Clarke’s fans (and presumably her
publishers) were soon clamoring for a
sequel—and at first she seemed happy
to oblige. “The next book will be set
in the same world,” she told one inter-
viewer. “I feel very much at home in the
early nineteenth century and am not in-
clined to leave it.” In the meantime, as
her readers waited, 2006 brought The
Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of
eight short stories, seven of which had
previously been published—mostly in
the 1990s—with the eighth expanding
on an untypically short footnote in Jon-
athan Strange. The collection had its
moments, especially the title story that
first alerted Gaiman to Clarke’s talent
in 1992. On the whole, however, these
apprentice works did feel like appren-
tice works. The magic, kidnapping fair-
ies, and Other Lands were already in
place, but without the solid anchoring
in the nonfairy world that made Jona-
than Strange so full-bodied.
And then there was silence.
An early sign as to why came in 2007
when, answering questions on a blog
duly called The Friends of English
Magic, Clarke mentioned that she had
been “dogged by ill-health for two years
now and it’s holding up progress on any
new work rather seriously.” Yet only in
recent interviews has the extent of her ill
health become apparent. After collaps-
ing at a friend’s house in 2005, Clarke
began suffering from a debilitating dis-
ease that has continued with varying
severity ever since. Precisely what the
disease is her doctors have never estab-
April 8, 2021
Infinite Quarantine
James Walton
Susanna Clarke, Derbyshire, England, 2016
lished, but the symptoms are a combi-
nation of exhaustion, nausea, cognitive
impairment (aka brain fog), depression,
social anxiety, and agoraphobia.
For years, writing was somewhere
between tortuous and impossible, and
even when her symptoms eased, an-
other book on the scale of Jonathan
Strange remained out of the question.
So it was that Clarke decided to “sim-
plify what I was asking of myself.” The
result is the comparatively slim Pira-
nesi, which might, I suppose, disap-
point some Jonathan Strange fans (and
board-game players) because it is not
the longed-for sequel. Although only
until they read it—since what Clarke
has served up instead is a quietly daz-
zling novel of abiding and intriguing
peculiarity.
Admittedly, the opening pages de-
mand some patience from the reader,
as we’re plunged into its extraordinary
setting without anything in the way of
handholds. “When the Moon rose in
the Third Northern Hall I went to the
Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining
of three Tides,” begins the narrator in
the first of the carefully labeled jour-
nal entries that make up most of the
novel—in this case, “entry for the first
day of the fifth month in the year the
albatross came to the south-western
halls.” “The Beauty of the House is im-
measurable,” the entry concludes, “its
Kindness infinite.”
From there, the nature of the setting
does become clearer—although no less
odd: an unfailingly uppercase House
of vast, never- ending Halls, Vestibules,
and Staircases, all full of Statues, and
with its own tidal Ocean on the first
floor. It’s also, as far as the narrator is
concerned, the World.
The House has three Levels. The
Lower Halls are the “Domain of the
Sarah Lee
Tides,” the Upper Halls “the Domain
of the Clouds,” and the Middle Halls
“the Domain of birds and of men.”
But, as it turns out, of just two men—
the second being “the Other,” who
calls the first, the narrator, Piranesi
(“Which is strange because as far as
I remember it is not my name”) and
meets him twice a week for hour-long
briefings on what Piranesi has found
during his journeys of exploration.
How the Other knows enough about
the celebrated eighteenth- century Ital-
ian etcher of labyrinthine prisons to
have come up with such an appropriate
name is one of many things we don’t yet
know. But one thing we do is that the
Other believes “there is a Great and
Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere
in the World that will grant us enor-
mous powers once we have discovered
it.”
Luckily, Piranesi doesn’t mind—or
even notice—that the quest for this
Knowledge is left entirely to him. Re-
garding himself as a scientist of scrupu-
lous empiricism, he travels from Hall to
Hall, cataloging the Statues, calculat-
ing the Tides, and recording everything
he sees with a solemn sense of respon-
sibility that borders on the comically
prissy. In between his investigations
he contentedly fishes for food, talks to
birds, and tends the bones of the only
thirteen other people he imagines can
have ever existed. (“Possibly there have
been more,” he characteristically clari-
fies, “but I am a scientist and must pro-
ceed according to the evidence.”)
Meanwhile, our initial sense that the
Other mightn’t be the trusty friend Pi-
ranesi believes him to be is definitely
not banished when we first encoun-
ter him at one of those twice-weekly
meetings. For one thing, he’s too busy
tapping on what is seemingly a mobile
phone to say hello. (“I do not mind,”
says his ever-loyal helper. “I admire his
dedication to his scientific work.”) For
another, he’s curiously anxious that Pi-
ranesi might be harboring memories he
shouldn’t. “Do you remember Batter-
Sea?” he asks—which Clarke’s fellow
Brits will readily identify as the Lon-
don neighborhood of Battersea.
In subsequent meetings, the Other
is less amicable still. Even Piranesi
is reluctantly shocked to hear his be-
loved House described as “just endless
dreary rooms all the same, full of de-
caying figures covered with bird shit.”
(Given the Other’s choice of his cohab-
itant’s name, it’s worth remembering
that Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s pris-
ons were unambiguously nightmarish.)
To his horror, the Other tells him that
somebody is about to arrive who means
them harm. This new enemy—whom
Piranesi calls 16, as in the House’s
sixteenth- ever occupant—“is opposed
to everything . . .you and I think is valu-
able. . . . And that includes reason.”
As the strangeness deepens, Pira-
nesi has what he considers a revelation
from the House itself that they should
abandon the search for the Secret
Knowledge. Yet when he plucks up the
courage to suggest this to the Other,
he’s told that he’s said the same thing
many times before. Being inordinately
proud of his memory—including of all
7,678 Halls he’s visited—Piranesi finds
this hard to credit. But then he reads
his older journals and realizes they’re
full of things he’s not only forgotten
but now can’t understand, among them
such “nonsense words” as “university.”
There are also the notes he appears
to have made for a lecture on a late-
twentieth- century academic named
Laurence Arne- Sayles, who believed
that “the world was constantly speak-
ing to Ancient Man,” and, more con-
troversially, that the “dialogue between
the Ancients and the world was not
simply something that happened in
their heads; it was something that hap-
pened in the actual world.” (“One sen-
tence puzzles me,” Piranesi reflects.
“The world was constantly speaking to
Ancient Man. I do not understand why
this sentence is in the past tense. The
World still speaks to me every day.”)
Reading on, he further learns that
Arne- Sayles felt these “lost beliefs and
powers constituted a sort of energy”
that “must have gone somewhere. This
was the beginning of his most famous
idea, the Theory of Other Worlds. . . .
Somewhere . . . there must be a passage,
a door between us and wherever magic
had gone.” Equipped with this theory,
Arne- Sayles had gathered a group of
acolytes and developed a way for them
to enter these Other Worlds. He was
imprisoned in 1997 after a man named
James Ritter was found behind a fake
wall in his house in a state of physi-
cal and psychological collapse—even
though Ritter claimed he’d spent the
last eighteen months in “a vast build-
ing with great rooms and statues and
staircases.”
To say that what follows is an unrav-
eling wouldn’t be wrong exactly. But it
might imply something far more linear
than Clarke gives us: a beautifully mod-
ulated series of drip-feed revelations in
which, most of the time, we’re slightly
57
ahead of Piranesi but a long way from
understanding what’s going on.
Eventually the truth emerges. Pira-
nesi was once Matthew Rose Sorensen,
a scholar writing a book on “trans-
gressive thinking,” particularly that
of Laurence Arne- Sayles. As Piranesi
discovers (by reassembling a torn- out
section of his journals that he finds
in one of the Halls), in 2012 Matthew
had interviewed Valentine Ketterley, a
former Arne- Sayles disciple, at his Bat-
tersea home. Despite his skepticism,
Matthew agreed to let Ketterley per-
form the ritual for accessing the place
where the Ancients’ lost magic has
gone—and found himself in the House.
Faced with this, even Piranesi is
forced to recognize that the Other is
Valentine Ketterley and has been lying
to him all along. The reason they meet
only twice a week is that the rest of the
time Ketterley is back in Battersea,
aware that if he stays in the House too
long, amnesia will claim him as well:
“The Other had needed someone—a
slave!—to live in these Halls and col-
lect information about them; he dares
not do it himself in case the House
makes him forget.” Yet even then the
House remains precious to Piranesi.
When 16 finally tracks him down and
explains that she’s a police officer
named Raphael who has entered the
House with Arne- Sayles’s help and has
come to take him home, he delivers
one of the book’s most telling twists.
“I am home,” he says. He also refuses
to accept that he is Matthew anymore,
because “I haven’t got his memories.”
“Who are you?” asks Raphael. “If
you’re not him.” “I am the Beloved
Child of the House,” he replies.
In the event, Raphael does persuade
him to return to Matthew’s family, and
the two leave the House hand in hand,
heading for a world that he’s alarmed
to learn contains a lot of people. (“‘As
many as seventy?’ I asked, deliberately
choosing a high, rather improbable
number.”) But he continues to revisit
his old dwelling place, sometimes with
Raphael, who loves the House too, and
once with James Ritter, who weeps
with happiness to see it again. The final
sentence is a perfectly judged reprise of
“The Beauty of the House is immea-
surable; its Kindness infinite.”
So what on earth to make of this
haunting but perplexingly slippery
novel? At one point we’re warned by
Piranesi—and possibly Clarke—that
the House shouldn’t be seen as “a sort
of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be
interpreted.” Yet, readers being what
they are, this naturally feels like a chal-
lenge—and the fact that the quest for
straight allegory is obviously doomed
only encourages our minds to scuttle
off in several different directions in
search of the book’s meaning (as you
may notice in the rest of this review).
One, of course, leads to spotting the
parallels with Clarke’s previous fiction,
which bristles with arrogant scientist-
magicians, labyrinths, and amnesia-
producing fairy enchantments leading
to Other Worlds. This time, though,
there are three big differences. First,
there are no fairies. Second, the set-
ting is the present day. Third and most
important, Piranesi—unlike the kid-
napped mortals in Jonathan Strange—
is happy in his Other World. Their
place of exile was called Lost-hope. His
is positively Edenic, with the moment
58
when he and Raphael leave the House
echoing the end of Paradise Lost—in
which, you may remember, the arch-
angel who explains how the world was
created is called Raphael.
In fact, there are closer parallels with
a favorite book from Clarke’s child-
hood that brought her some comfort
during the worst of her illness. In The
Magician’s Nephew, the first of C. S.
Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, the children
Polly and Digory are sent into another
world by Digory’s villainous uncle An-
drew. His surname—uncoincidentally,
I would suggest—is Ketterley and, like
his Piranesi namesake, he comes from
“an old Dorsetshire family.” The two
men’s motives are eerily similar. Uncle
Andrew wants the children to explore
the Other World on his behalf in case it
proves dangerous, or impossible to es-
cape from. “Men like me, who possess
hidden wisdom, are freed from common
rules,” he explains, just as Arne- Styles
and Piranesi’s Ketterley might do. One
place the children find is Charn, where
“vast rooms opened out of one another
till you were dizzy with [its] mere size.”
(“Lewis meant this to be an utterly
desolate place,” Clarke has said in an
interview, “but I always rather liked
it.”) Another is the Wood Between the
Worlds, which causes them to forget
they’ve ever been anywhere else.
But Lewis’s influence may be even
stronger on Piranesi’s themes than on
its narrative. Above all, there’s his idea
of “chronological snobbery,” which he,
in turn, owed to his friend Owen Bar-
field, whose name appears in Matthew’s
notes on transgressive thinking.1 Bar-
field defined chronological snobbery as
the belief that “intellectually, humanity
languished for countless generations in
the most childish errors on all sorts of
crucial subjects, until it was redeemed
by some simple scientific dictum of the
last century.” In the 1995 film Owen
Barfield: Man and Meaning—available
on YouTube—he can be seen still he-
roically smoking a man- of-letters pipe
in his late nineties and expounding fur-
ther. “People in the past . . . didn’t think
like us at all,” he says. “Participation
between the human mind and the nat-
ural world was something which people
took for granted as happening.”
Clarke has said that this notion,
which Barfield called “original par-
ticipation,” is something she “tried to
describe . . . in Piranesi’s attitude to
the House” (where, don’t forget, the
World speaks to him every day). And
of course it underlies the thinking of
Arne- Styles, who in one scene briefly
and anonymously visits the House. “My
first great insight happened when I re-
alised how much humankind had lost”
when it no longer “communed with riv-
ers and mountains,” he tells Piranesi:
My contemporaries did not un-
derstand this. They were all en-
amoured with the idea of progress
and believed that whatever was
new must be superior to what was
old. As if merit was a function of
chronology!
For this reason, his method for entering
the Other Worlds involves returning to
a place or mental state in a time “be-
1
Lewis’s The Allegory of Love was ded-
icated to Barfield, “wisest and best of
my unofficial teachers,” and The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe to Bar-
field’s daughter, Lucy.
fore the iron hand of modern rational-
ity gripped one’s mind.”
Is Clarke suggesting that Barfield
and Arne- Styles are right in a way some
readers might find disconcertingly lit-
eral? That the retreat to the purely
human has been a terrible loss? The
answer, I think, is a firm “possibly”—
although for her the Other World into
which the lost magic has disappeared is
apparently fantasy fiction. There is, she
once said, “something we [fantasy writ-
ers] do so much better than the literary
fiction people. Literary fiction sticks
resolutely to the human. But the world
seems to me so much bigger than that.”
It’s this opposition to the reductive
nature of contemporary science that
presumably leads Clarke to emphasize
that so many of her magical charac-
ters—Mr. Norrell, Jonathan Strange,
virtually everybody in Piranesi—are
themselves scientists. After all, the di-
vision between science and the super-
natural hasn’t always been as rigid as
it’s recently become—more recently,
in fact, than we sometimes think. The
early-twentieth- century telecommuni-
cations pioneers—Guglielmo Marconi
(radio), Alexander Graham Bell (tele-
phone), John Logie Baird (television),
Thomas Edison (phonograph)—all be-
lieved to a greater or lesser extent that
their devices might one day contact the
dead. “If this is ever accomplished,”
Edison said, “it will . . . be not by . . .
so- called mediums, but by scientific
methods.”
A nother way, then, of reading Pi-
ranesi is as a meditation on the lim-
itations of modern rationality. From
an orthodox perspective, Piranesi is
wildly misguided to believe the Other’s
warning that 16 is opposed to reason.
Yet Raphael’s rationality proves, at the
very least, insufficient to explain what
he has experienced.
At the same time, you could make
a case that Piranesi—a book that’s
defiantly both/and throughout, rather
than either/or—is also a study of the
unconscious, the traditional alternative
explanation for the supernatural. In a
recent BBC series, The Romantics and
Us, Simon Schama argued that the Ro-
mantics explored the unconscious long
before Freud did, and that in this they
owed a heavy debt to none other than
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the first art-
ist “to open up the door to this parallel
world” with his “fantastical images” of
prisons “etched from his dreams,” rep-
resenting “chambers of the mind.”2
In particular, Schama traced Pirane-
si’s influence on Coleridge, who, like
Barfield, believed in the imagination
as a truth-bearing faculty. (If Clarke
didn’t want us to think of Coleridge,
why would her Piranesi have an encoun-
ter with an albatross so significant that
he named a year for it?) According to
Schama, as Coleridge investigated the
unconscious through poetry and lauda-
num, he also realized that a potential
side- effect of entering it too deeply was
insanity. But then again, “very few Ro-
mantics at one stage or another didn’t
think they were going mad.”
With that came the Romantic idea
of a link between madness and cre-
ativity, another long-standing theme of
2
Piranesi, who has long fascinated
Clarke, receives passing mentions in
both Jonathan Strange and The Ladies
of Grace Adieu.
Clarke’s. In that very first story, “The
Ladies of Grace Adieu,” we’re told
that magicians “are all a little mad.” In
Jonathan Strange, we hear that the old
magicians “held madmen in a sort of
reverence and thought they knew things
sane men did not.” Later, Strange him-
self deliberately opts for insanity by
the simple method of drinking a tinc-
ture made from a dead mouse in order
to enter the land of Faerie. Is Piranesi
mad, as the police and his family think
after he has left the House? And if he
is, has that given him privileged access
to hidden truths? Again, these ques-
tions are left to dangle tantalizingly for
our consideration.
All of this still leaves two characteris-
tics of Piranesi that you mightn’t expect
in a novel about a wicked magician-
scientist sending someone into an en-
chanted world of infinite halls: it’s both
topical and autobiographical.
Part of the topicality is, needless to
say, Covid-related, now that Piranesi’s
housebound isolation has been shared
by the rest of us. But at a time when we
tend to live in our famous echo cham-
bers of like-minded people, his semi-
comic belief that the place he happens
to inhabit is nothing less than the whole
world—and his inability to imagine
anything existing outside it—also
strikes a contemporary chord.
As for autobiography, when Clarke’s
illness worsened in the 2000s, she
stopped contacting her agent, who re-
members thinking “it was as though
she’d been captured into the land of
Faerie . . . as if she had been taken away
from us.” Clarke herself has said that “I
wrote a long book in which there was
this sort of enchantment, and then fell
into this strange enchantment myself,”
adding jokingly (I think) that “You
really shouldn’t annoy fairies, or write
about them—they don’t like it very
much.” Toward the end of writing Pira-
nesi, she also realized that “I (a person
living a very confined life) was writing
a story about a man who couldn’t leave
his house”—admitting that the realiza-
tion was weirdly belated. 3
But if the book is a suitably subcon-
scious version of her plight, it’s quite
a consoling one. For a while, her re-
sponse to the illness was anger at all
that had been stolen from her. But then
“you learn to take pleasure in what is
available to you”—which is “more how
Piranesi thinks. He thinks his life is full
of marvellous things.” As time passed,
she even felt “contained in a shell of
illness, almost protected . . . against the
world.”
In 1962 Shirley Jackson—another
writer with agoraphobia, and accord-
ing to the jacket of her first book “a
practicing amateur witch”—published
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
(a title that would have suited Pira-
nesi pretty well). In it, two sisters are
surrounded by hostile neighbors, until
they decide to shut out the world com-
pletely. For Jackson’s biographer Judy
Oppenheimer, the novel was “almost
a paean . . . to agoraphobia”—and al-
though it might be an exaggeration to
say the same about Piranesi, it wouldn’t
be a wild one. Q
3
Seekers after the subconscious roots
of Piranesi might also note the resem-
blance of the placename “Battersea” to
that of Buttershaw in Yorkshire, where
Clarke went to school—and where she
“set about systematically disappearing”
and “made a sort of ghost of myself.”
The New York Review
 Me Too in Egypt & Morocco
On July 1, 2020, Nadeen Ashraf, a
twenty-two-year- old student at the
American University of Cairo, noticed
that a 2018 post by a fellow student to an
unofficial university-related Facebook
group had been removed. The post had
warned about another student, Ahmed
Bassam Zaki, a young man from a rich
and powerful family who sexually ha-
rassed and blackmailed young women,
and it had garnered many comments,
including by other female students who
corroborated its allegations. Its author
hadn’t known where else to share it,
and now it was gone. Ashraf also knew
that a female classmate had recently ac-
cused Zaki of harassment on her own
social media account but had taken
down the post when his family threat-
ened legal action.
Incensed, Ashraf created an Insta-
gram account, named it Assault Police
(i.e., a police force against assault), and
listed some of the numerous allegations
against Zaki. The next morning she
discovered that her account had thou-
sands of followers; dozens of women
contacted her to share their stories of
being assaulted by Zaki.
Assault Police went viral. Ashraf
continued to gather testimonies about
Zaki, more than 150 of them. They in-
cluded accounts of rape and chilling
voice messages that he had left on the
phones of women he had assaulted,
in which he called them whores and
threatened to expose them if they
didn’t accede to further sexual de-
mands. Zaki was twenty- one and had
apparently been harassing, assaulting,
and blackmailing women since he was
a teenager. He had attended a num-
ber of elite schools in Cairo; when al-
legations against him first surfaced in
2018, he threatened to kill himself and
then transferred to a business school in
Barcelona.
Ashraf and other volunteers who
joined her in managing the Assault
Police account urged women who
wanted to file charges against Zaki to
come forward, promising to put them
in touch with lawyers who could assist
them. The Egyptian media began cov-
ering the story. Within a week, Zaki
was arrested, and on September 1 he
was charged with three counts of sex-
ual assault against underage women
and multiple counts of blackmail and
harassment. The National Council for
Women (NCW)—an official body made
up of prominent women from academia,
government, and civil society whose
president is appointed by President
Abdel Fattah el- Sisi—also strongly en-
couraged women who had been victims
of sexual assault to come forward, as-
suring them that it would protect them
and help them file charges. The NCW
received four hundred complaints in
the week after Ashraf launched As-
sault Police. Other feminist organiza-
tions also received calls from women
wanting to talk about sexual assault
they had experienced. The Egyptian
cabinet approved a new law that for the
first time shielded the privacy of vic-
tims of sexual violence.
In Egypt—and other countries in
the Arab region—victims rarely report
rape, because doing so exposes them to
intense social stigma, the threat of vio-
April 8, 2021
Ursula Lindsey
Reda Abdelrahman: Woman, 2014
lence, and the risk of jail. Police ques-
tion them about their sexual history and
behavior and discourage them from
filing charges, when they don’t treat
them as suspects who may be charged
themselves under broad laws that crim-
inalize an array of “immoral” behavior.
Victims may be shunned, blamed, and
punished by their families, especially
by male relatives who consider them-
selves dishonored. Very few women are
willing to go through this ordeal. Need-
less to say, this climate of fear, shame,
and victim-blaming is what a predator
like Zaki took full advantage of.
Last summer, young women, activ-
ists, and survivors of sexual assault
in Egypt felt they might finally have
a chance to change things. The Egyp-
tian political environment has been
deeply repressive since the military
took over in 2013 from an Islamist gov-
ernment and launched a relentless, vi-
olent crackdown on freedom of speech
and assembly. But as one woman who
enthusiastically supported the online
campaign told me, activists chose to
collaborate with state institutions, such
as the office of the public prosecutor
and the National Council for Women,
hoping they would gain legitimacy and
political cover: “We knew we were tak-
ing risks but didn’t think that we could
be seen as calling for anything really
radical.”
Zaki’s prosecution has been de-
scribed as Egypt’s Me Too moment—
an outpouring of stories that women
had bottled up for years. But it was also
just one chapter of a long local struggle,
comprising countless campaigns and
initiatives to tackle harassment, sex-
ism, and violence against women. The
early protests of the Arab Spring in
2011 marked a high point for women’s
participation in public life, but their
aspirations weren’t taken seriously by
any political forces. In the chaos and
repression that followed, women faced
Reda Abdelrahman
terrible violence: the army subjected
some detained female demonstrators to
a “virginity test” (a medically discred-
ited vaginal examination to ascertain if
the hymen is intact). Sisi, then a mem-
ber of the military council governing
the country, explained the practice as
a means of protecting the army against
unfounded accusations of rape. “The
girls who were detained were not like
your daughter or mine,” another gen-
eral said at the time. “We didn’t want
them to say we had sexually assaulted or
raped them, so we wanted to prove that
they weren’t virgins in the first place.”
Women were also sexually assaulted
by mobs in the middle of protests (a
phenomenon that activists organized
against, showing incredible personal
bravery to protect women in Egypt’s
public spaces). Female activists and
journalists have been arrested, killed,
and brutalized alongside their male
colleagues.
In December Zaki was sentenced to
three years in prison for blackmail and
harassment; he is still facing additional
charges of rape, attempted rape, and
drug possession. In the meantime, the
online movement that had focused on
his crimes was galvanized to take fur-
ther action. In late July Ashraf made
public a number of allegations about an
incident in a room at Cairo’s posh Fair-
mont Nile City Hotel, in 2014. After a
large party held elsewhere in the hotel,
a number of young men had reportedly
raped an unconscious young woman
who had been given the date-rape drug
GHB. They also wrote their initials on
her body and filmed the attack, possi-
bly to blackmail the eighteen-year-old
victim; the video was circulated among
their friends. The men, some of whose
names and pictures were posted online
by others in the following days, were all
the sons of rich and prominent families;
their fathers include a soccer coach and
a steel tycoon.
After publicizing the case, Ashraf
received death threats. She temporarily
suspended Assault Police, but other ac-
counts sprang up to continue publiciz-
ing the case. On August 4 the Fairmont
Hotel rape victim, whose identity has
not been made public, filed an official
complaint. Several witnesses—both
men and women—came forward to
support her account. On August 24 the
public prosecutor issued warrants for
the arrest of nine men. By that time,
seven of them had fled the country. The
two remaining in Egypt were arrested.
Three more were caught in Lebanon
and extradited at Egypt’s behest.
And then the case took a terrible
turn. Just days after the arrest war-
rants were issued, witnesses began to
disappear. After a few days of panic, it
became clear that security forces had
been rounding them up, holding them
incommunicado, and interrogating
them. They were forced to hand over
phones, electronic devices, and pass-
words. Material from their personal
accounts subsequently appeared in sto-
ries in government- connected media
that smeared them as participants in
“sex parties.”
It was also used to turn them into
suspects. They were forced to undergo
drug tests, and the men were subjected
to anal exams to ascertain if they were
homosexuals (a common practice in
Egypt that has been widely condemned
by human rights organizations).
Ahmed Ganzoury, a well-known
event planner whose company had put
on the Fairmont party, was one of those
taken into custody. So was Seif Bedour,
a young man who was with a female
witness when security forces showed
up at her house and who accompanied
her to the police station to lend moral
support. (Bedour was fourteen when
the Fairmont party took place and had
no connection to it.) He and Ganzoury
were reportedly held in the same jail
cell as the accused rapists.
Another person who had come for-
ward offering to testify and was then
arrested was Nazli Moustafa Karim,
who was once married to one of the
rapists and was therefore accused of
seeking “revenge” on her ex-husband.
On the basis of leaked personal vid-
eos and images and salacious rumors,
Karim’s personal history was subjected
to relentless scrutiny by the Egyptian
media.
Ganzoury, Bedour, and Karim have
finally been released, but they are
banned from leaving the country and
could face charges of drug use, de-
bauchery, misusing social media, and
working to damage the image of the
Egyptian state. Now everyone—those
who were accused of rape and those
who provided testimony against them,
as well as innocent bystanders like
Bedour—has been lumped into the
category of the accused. The “reve-
lations” that have been leaked to tab-
loids and online commentators have
cast the story not as a gang rape but as
the scandalous behavior of the coun-
try’s gilded youth. When, in the days
after the witnesses’ arrests, panicked
activists tried to get in touch with the
National Council for Women, its mem-
bers didn’t answer their phones. The
59

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60
council has made no comment on the ment has been brutally smothered, in
case since. Morocco a similar movement seems
The sudden blowback stopped the to have been hijacked by the authori-
online movement in its tracks and ties to serve their own ends. During
terrified women who had reported as- the Arab Spring, protests in Morocco
saults, as well as activists and members were quickly contained by the monar-
of the LGBTQ community, who feared chy, which held a referendum in 2011
yet another crackdown. (“Debauch- on political reforms and allowed more
ery” is the charge commonly leveled open, competitive elections. But the
against gay people in Egypt, since ho- promised reforms failed to material-
mosexuality is not explicitly criminal- ize, and the authorities now appear to
ized.) The woman I spoke to who had be using dubious accusations of sex-
supported the online campaign against ual crimes as a weapon against jour-
sexual assault was riven by guilt. She nalists, protesters, artists, and civil
worried that by encouraging victims society organizations. This amounts
to come forward, she had put them in to what Hicham Mansouri, a journal-
jeopardy. “It feels like we handed these ist who was convicted on what he says
people over and in some cases handed were trumped-up charges of adultery
ourselves over,” she said. “Everything and operating a brothel in 2015, calls a
we were afraid of has happened, it is “sexual strategy” of repression. Man-
as bad as we were afraid it could be. . . . souri says police broke into his house
How can we tell women to ever come when he was there in the company of
forward again?” a woman and filmed them after forcing
The fact that those who hoped for a them to undress.
reckoning with sexual violence and im- In recent years, several gang rapes
punity have now been “terrorized into have made headlines in Morocco. Ac-
silence,” as a friend in Cairo described tivists launched a social media cam-
it, probably suits those in power. The paign called Masaktach (I Will Not Be
military regime and the security ser- Silent) to publicize how common sexual
vices in Egypt, still obsessed by the violence is in women’s daily lives. Rape
specter of the Arab Spring, are inher- is considered a source of shame for vic-
ently hostile to online mobilization tims and their families, and reporting
and to the idea of powerful men being it remains a difficult, confusing, and
held accountable. Meanwhile, Egypt’s degrading process. In 2019 a nation-
nearly all-male legislature and judiciary wide survey found that in the previous
are always eager to monitor the most twelve months, less than 3 percent of
banal forms of self- expression, and the the victims of sexual violence had filed
behavior of women in particular. a complaint. Sex outside of marriage
Last summer, for example, several is still a crime according to Moroccan
young female TikTok personalities were law; women rarely report rape because
convicted of “offending family values” if they can’t prove their case, they risk
under a new cybercrimes law and given being prosecuted themselves. Official
prison sentences. Their crimes seemed statistics from 2018 show that 1,008
to consist in little more than posting rape cases went to court. A report from
videos of themselves in sexy outfits or 2011 showed that in cases of violence
dancing. (Class has played a part in their and sexual assault against women, of-
cases: because the “TikTok girls” came fenders were arrested only 1.3 percent
from modest backgrounds and used of the time and indicted in 1.8 percent
their videos to make a living, they have of the cases.
received little sympathy, whereas what Powerful men continue to enjoy near
the public found particularly shocking impunity when it comes to sexual vio-
about the Ahmed Bassam Zaki and lence. Morocco’s best-known pop star,
the Fairmont cases was that they in- Saad Lamjarred, has been accused
volved young people from prominent of rape at least three times; when he
families, as well as elite institutions was arrested in France in 2016, Mo-
and venues.) When another TikTok rocco’s King Mohammed VI paid for
influencer, seventeen-year- old Menna his legal counsel. At the same time,
Abdel Aziz, used her social media plat- high-profile cases of sexual assault
form to share that she had been beaten have been brought repeatedly in recent
and raped, investigators at first brought years against government critics, who
charges against her—for “misusing so- were often already targeted by nega-
cial media, inciting debauchery and of- tive media campaigns and an array of
fending family values”—as well as the criminal charges (such as money laun-
alleged rapists. (The charges against dering, insulting the state and religion,
Abdel Aziz were finally dropped.) or supporting terrorism).
The Egyptian writer Yasmin El- Three journalists are currently de-
Rifae argues that at the heart of the tained or under investigation for sex
government’s response is a need to as- crimes. One of them is Omar Radi, an
sert constant control: independent investigative journalist
who has covered political corruption.
Over and over, statements by the I met Radi when I lived in Morocco;
prosecutor and the Justice Minis- he was a guest lecturer in a journalism
try open and close with the need program I ran there. With his unruly
to protect social values and family hair, leather jacket, and uncompromis-
morals. Why is the priority the pro- ing views, he impressed my students as
tection of these abstracted ideas, the archetypal rebellious, crusading
rather than individuals? Or is the reporter. He had made a documentary
point to remind us that, in the end, about the Hirak, a protest movement
our bodies and our sexualities are that broke out in Morocco’s northern
not our own?1 Rif region in 2016 and has been vio-
lently repressed by the government.
In 2019 he was accused of “insulting a
There is more than one way to achieve magistrate” for a tweet that criticized
control. If in Egypt a Me Too move- Lahcen Tolfi, a judge who had upheld
twenty-year jail sentences for Hirak ac-
1 tivists. In March 2020 Radi was given a
“Inherent Guilt: Menna Abdel Aziz
four-month suspended sentence in the
and the Victims of Ahmed Bassam
Zaki,” Mada Masr, July 20, 2020. case.
In June 2020 newspapers around
the world published the results of an
Amnesty International investigation
showing that Radi and others had been
the targets of hacking by the Moroccan
government, which used spyware from
an Israeli company that grants “com-
plete access to a phone’s messages,
emails, media, microphone, camera,
calls and contacts.” The Moroccan
authorities reacted with furious deni-
als; they challenged Amnesty to prove
that they had hacked Radi’s phone
and claimed that they were facing an
“unjust international defamation cam-
paign.” Four days after the allegations
were made public, Radi was called in
for questioning by the police. Over the
course of the summer, he was sum-
moned twelve times, for interrogations
that each lasted six to nine hours. Radi
denounced his interrogations as ha-
rassment for his journalism and struck
a defiant, sarcastic tone. “Apparently I
am spying on behalf of every EU coun-
try that has ever given me a visa,” he
tweeted. “And by talking on the phone
to the press officers of the embassies
of these countries. Undeniable proof.”
The transcripts of his interrogations
would one day “be exposed in an art
gallery.”
Human Rights Watch estimates that
three news sites with close connections
to the Moroccan government and secu-
rity services—ChoufTV, Barlamane,
and Le360—published 136 articles
attacking Radi, his family, or his sup-
porters between June 7 and September
15. Sites such as these, many of which
are headed by former state media of-
ficials and believed to be financed by
businessmen close to the king, have an
uncanny ability to predict charges that
have not yet been brought, and their
cameramen are often present at the
scene of arrests. They specialize in ven-
omous smear campaigns against dissi-
dents, and they have access to details
about ongoing police investigations
and personal information that could
only be obtained through surveillance.
Over one hundred independent Mo-
roccan journalists recently signed an
open letter condemning this “slander
media.”
The accusations against Radi are
based on intercepted messages be-
tween him and Dutch diplomats, with
whom he appears to have discussed the
situation in the Rif, and on his consult-
ing work, such as an agreement with
the British firm G3 (Good Governance
Group) to conduct a corporate due
diligence investigation of a Moroccan
company that one of G3’s clients was
considering investing in. Radi’s contact
at G3 was a retired British intelligence
officer named Clive Dare Newell, who
has worked in the private sector since
2011; hence the accusation that Radi
was engaged in espionage on behalf
of “agents of a foreign authority.” A
fellowship that Radi received from
the Geneva-based Bertha Foundation
to conduct an investigative journalism
project on land expropriation in Mo-
rocco is the basis of a charge of receiv-
ing funds to carry out “an activity or
propaganda that could shake the loy-
alty that citizens owe to the state and
the institutions of the Moroccan peo-
ple.” As Human Rights Watch points
out, none of the information Radi gath-
ered or shared appears to be classified.
He was nonetheless taken into custody
on July 29, on suspicion of espionage
and harming national security. To these
The New York Review
highly questionable accusations, a new
and shocking one was added: rape.
On the night of July 12–13, Radi and
several other journalists at the indepen-
dent news site Le Desk chose to work
and sleep at the house of the site’s edi-
tor, Ali Amar, due to Covid-19 curfew
restrictions. Hafsa Boutahar, a young
woman who worked on public relations
and advertising for the site, also spent
the night. Boutahar, Radi, and another
colleague, Imad Stitou, all crashed
on couches in the large living room.
According to both Radi and Boutahar,
at about 2 AM, Radi texted Boutahar,
“Shall I come or you come?” She re-
sponded, “Come when I’m finished.”
That’s where their accounts di-
verge. According to Boutahar, she just
thought Radi wanted to join her for a
conversation; instead he forced himself
violently upon her, choking her and
covering her mouth. Radi denies the
charge, saying their encounter was en-
tirely consensual. Before being taken
into custody, he prepared a statement
that was published on his father’s Face-
book page, calling the accusation “ma-
licious” and “a set-up,” and its timing
far from “an innocent coincidence.”
Imad Stitou, who was first questioned
by police as a witness and whose tes-
timony supported Radi’s version of
events, has now been accused of com-
plicity in the rape. Boutahar granted
several interviews to news sites close
to the regime, repeating her version
and discussing how difficult it had been
for her to come forward. When subse-
quently contacted by other media out-
lets, she said she could not comment
on an ongoing investigation. Radi has
been held in solitary confinement and
his requests to be released pending his
trial have been denied.
The rape charge was greeted with
consternation. It gave genuine pause
to Radi’s supporters, and to those who
doubted it was true, it signaled the
lengths the regime was willing to go
to settle scores with its enemies. Ac-
tivists were torn between their support
for freedom of the press and their sup-
port for a presumed victim of sexual
assault. Many have kept their doubts
private, out of genuine confusion but
also fear that they could be targeted by
smear campaigns and investigations.
Those who have continued to stand by
Radi have been attacked online and in
pro-government media outlets as rape
apologists and hypocrites. But no one
is suggesting that rape allegations—
against dissidents or anyone else—
shouldn’t be seriously investigated. The
question is not any one woman’s cred-
ibility—it is the credibility of a system
that is known to engage in defamation,
surveillance, and politically motivated
trials and is now repeatedly targeting
its enemies with sexual assault charges,
while making little effort to fight sexual
violence generally.
That is the point made by the array
of human rights and press freedom or-
ganizations that have rallied around
Radi. The Moroccan Association for
Human Rights (AMDH), the coun-
try’s most important grassroots human
rights organization, has supported him.
Human Rights Watch has published a
detailed report on his case, noting:
Morocco has a history of arresting,
prosecuting and imprisoning in-
dependent journalists, activists or
April 8, 2021
politicians on questionable charges
of sex outside of wedlock or sexual
assault. Some of these trials have
been widely denounced as politi-
cally motivated and failing to guar-
antee due process for all parties.
Some activists have been targeted not
with legal charges but with the dissem-
ination of the details of their intimate
lives. Recently, a prominent Moroccan
economist and human rights activist,
Fouad Abdelmoumni, revealed that
he had been secretly videotaped hav-
ing sex in his home; the recordings
were sent to dozens of his relatives and
friends. Abdelmoumni is a lifelong dis-
sident who has been jailed several times
and has been vocal in his denunciation
of the lack of democracy in Morocco.
He has said that he believes only the
Nadeen Ashraf, a student at the American University of Cairo who started
an Instagram account listing allegations that another student had assaulted
and blackmailed numerous women, September 2020
state had the motivation and the means
to install the sophisticated equipment
required to film in his home, and that
the recordings were made in order to
silence him.
One of those who have spoken out to
defend Radi is Afaf Bernani, a young
woman who was directly involved in a
highly politicized rape case and whose
story also helps explain the skepticism
surrounding the charge against Radi.
She wrote in an opinion essay in The
Washington Post:
It may come as a surprise to hear
that I—as a Moroccan woman and
as someone who has experienced
the unfortunate realities of sexual
harassment in Morocco—am skep-
tical of these charges. While sexual
assault and abuse of any kind are
abhorrent and always deserves se-
rious investigation, there is good
reason to believe that such allega-
tions are being exploited for polit-
ical purposes. Why? Because I’ve
seen that happen myself.2
On February 24, 2018, the twenty-six-
year- old Bernani was called in for ques-
tioning by Morocco’s judicial police.
Bernani worked at Akhbar al-Youm,
Morocco’s top independent newspaper,
whose publisher, Taoufik Bouachrine,
2
“Morocco Must Stop Using Sexual
Assault Allegations to Silence Dis-
sent,” The Washington Post, August
24, 2020.
had been arrested the day before in a she denied this, she was still forced to
police raid on his office. Bouachrine attend Bouachrine’s trial, which was a
and his newspaper had been in trouble media circus and an ordeal for the fe-
with the authorities since its creation in male witnesses. “We were humiliated
2009. Like everyone else at the publica- in front of our mothers and fathers,
tion, Bernani was wondering what the we couldn’t enter and exit the court in
latest accusations against him would dignity,” Bernani told me. “They de-
be. scribed my body in front of a million
When she arrived at the police sta- cameras.”
tion, Bernani was led to a room where Of the fifteen women listed as victims
an officer, she told me, “ordered me to of Bouachrine, two former employees
sit down and start talking. ‘Tell us ev- of his have been willing to share their
erything,’ he said, ‘we already know the stories with the press. They describe
truth.’ He was yelling and hitting the their boss keeping them in the office
table. And I didn’t know what he was late and making unwanted physical ad-
talking about,” Bernani remembers. “I vances. During the trial, which was not
didn’t know why I was there, I didn’t open to the public, Bernani says that
know what this truth was.” she and four other women denied being
Akhbar al-Youm is one of the only harassed at all, while four women testi-
media outlets that reports on cor- fied against Bouachrine. Other women
ruption, a persistent complaint in a who had been listed as victims didn’t
appear in court. Bernani and other
Sima Diab/The New York Times/Redux
witnesses had to be dragged to court;
at one point she hid at a friend’s house,
and the police cut the water and elec-
tricity to force them out. Another wit-
ness was arrested and forced to appear
after being found hiding in the trunk of
a car.
Bouachrine was sentenced to fifteen
years in prison. Since then, two other
journalists at Akhbar al-Youm have
been prosecuted for alleged sexual
misconduct. In 2019 Moroccan po-
lice arrested a young female reporter
named Hajar Raissouni as she left her
gynecologist’s office. Raissouni, who
was about to get married, was accused
of having sex outside marriage and of
having an abortion. Her doctor, her fi-
ancé, and other staff at the clinic were
arrested along with her. She was forced
to undergo a gynecological examina-
tion and to answer questions about her
sex life. Raissouni had been covering
country where there is great inequal- the Hirak movement in northern Mo-
ity and the makhzen (the network of rocco. She also comes from a political
prominent businessmen, families, and family: her cousin Youssef is secretary-
officials close to the royal family) mo- general of AMDH ; her uncle Soulei-
nopolizes the economy. Bouachrine man Raissouni is the editor of Akhbar
was famous for his lacerating editorials al-Youm; another uncle is a prominent
attacking politicians and even Moroc- Islamist. Raissouni was convicted but
co’s all-powerful but largely absentee pardoned by the king after a domestic
king, who spends much of his time at and international outcry. She and her
lavish overseas properties (he recently husband live in Sudan now; in a recent
bought an €80 million mansion in interview, she said of her forced exam:
Paris). Bouachrine was also report- “I was raped by the Moroccan state.”
edly close to Abdelilah Benkirane, the In that interview, Raissouni noted
leader of the Islamist Justice and De- that she left the country because she
velopment Party and Morocco’s former was afraid “of the Moroccan state’s
prime minister, whom the monarchy revenge,” but that “now it’s my uncle’s
and its allies considered dangerously turn.” After Bouachrine’s arrest, Sou-
popular and whom they successfully leiman Raissouni took over as possibly
sidelined in 2017. the country’s most read and most dar-
The charges against Bouachrine in- ing op- ed writer. He called out by name
cluded rape, attempted rape, abuse of Abdellatif Hammouchi, the country’s
power for sexual purposes, and human “super- cop,” head of both the national
trafficking. The evidence was fifty vid- security and the domestic intelligence
eos of him with various women, which agencies and one of the most powerful
the police said they found in his of- figures in the country. In an editorial
fice and which they claim he recorded in May 2020 he criticized the security-
himself. Bouachrine and his lawyers minded response to the Covid-19 pan-
maintained that the videos had been demic, noting that more people had
manipulated, that he was not recogniz- been arrested for violating the curfew
able in them, and that he had not re- in Morocco than had been tested for
corded them. the disease.
Bernani was one of many women In May Raissouni was arrested
who were called in by the police to give based on a Facebook post written by
testimony in connection with the case. Adam Mohamed, the pseudonym of a
She says she spent eight hours at the young LGBTQ activist. The post does
police station, having her deposition not name Raissouni but gives enough
taken and being pressured to accuse details to make his identity clear. The
Bouachrine, which she refused to do. young man got to know Raissouni’s
She told me that the next day, she was wife, Khoula, when she was doing
shocked to see media reports that she preliminary interviews with him for a
was one of his victims. Even though documentary film; he claims Raissouni
61

“Everyone who reads Walser
falls in love with him.”
—Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
Little Snow Landscape, in addition to
being a representative offering of Robert
Walser's short prose, forms a kind of
novel, however apparently plotless, from
the vast, unfinishable work Walser was
constantly writing as one of literature's
most original, multifarious, and lucid
practitioners.
“This charming edition of his short
stories and essays by the Swiss
writer Walser is a testament to the
author’s virtuosity. . . . In reading
these short pieces, translated with
mastery and attention to emotional
nuance, one is struck by the
author’s abiding good nature and
boundless sympathy for his milieu.
Walser enthusiasts will find much to
love here.” —Publishers Weekly
“A quality of bruised optimism marks
the writings of Robert Walser, a
melancholia verging weirdly (or is it
comically?) on messianism. . . Walser
concentrated now on small, strange,
intimate—what, exactly? Stories?
Essays? Fables? Memoirs? Travel
writings? In his translator’s note,
Tom Whalen, who has selected
sixty-nine pieces (only three have
appeared in English before), lists all
of these genres and more: a mis-
chievous diversity, held together by a
uniform but highly ambiguous tone.”
—Brian Dillon, 4Columns
LITTLE SNOW
LANDSCAPE
Robert Walser
Translated by Tom Whalen
Paperback • $15.95
Also available as an e-book
Little Snow Landscape was the March
2021 selection of the NYRB Classics
Book Club.
ALSO BY ROBERT WALSER
JAKOB VON GUNTEN
BERLIN STORIES
A SCHOOLBOY'S DIARY AND
OTHER STORIES
GIRLFRIENDS, GHOSTS, AND
OTHER STORIES
Available from booksellers or nyrb.com
62
tried to sexually assault him in 2018 in
the couple’s home. Like Radi, Rais-
souni was held in detention for months
before his trial, which just began, on
charges of rape, kidnapping, and of-
fense to public decency. Also, like Radi,
the “slander press” had long hinted at
scandals and sexual crimes that were
about to be unveiled. Radi was accused
in an article of being a rapist a month
before the alleged assault on Boutahar.
ChoufTV threatened Raissouni with
arrest days before it happened—and
was there to film it when it did.
The Moroccan authorities, Bernani
says, have figured out that to accuse
someone of a sex crime is an effective
“symbolic assassination.” It strips its
targets of international solidarity and
makes them pariahs in their own com-
munities, shunned by friends and fam-
ily who are either embarrassed or afraid
to be associated with them. Bernani
knows this firsthand. After she accused
the police of falsifying her statement,
she was countersued for defaming the
police and sentenced to six months in
jail. Her involvement in the trial left her
isolated, she says, as friends and family
cut off contact with her. “I knew if I
went to jail, no one would visit me,” she
told me. She fled to Tunisia, where she
resides today. “Nobody should come
and claim that the state is defending
women. It only defends its own politi-
cal interests,” Bernani told me. “It uses
women’s bodies.”
LETTERS
GLAD TO BE HERE
To the Editors:
I enjoyed Tim Flannery’s review of The
Genesis Quest by Michael Marshall [NYR,
December 3, 2020], but find his concluding
comments in one sense too optimistic and
in another too pessimistic.
He is overoptimistic in drawing the con-
clusion that “we are on the brink of creat-
ing life from nonliving matter,” at least if he
means creating it from prebioticly available
components. There’s actually still no con-
sensus on any of the fundamental questions,
e.g., how the building blocks of RNA (the
first carrier of heredity) formed, how they
were joined together (the results with clay
notwithstanding), how the building blocks
of protein got strung together, and how
RNA and protein wound up together inside
membranous compartments. Nor is there
agreement even on whether these steps
came before or after a metabolic system
somehow emerged to generate new parts.
Most of the competing ideas proposed over
the years are still on the table, and each
camp continues to neglect the work of oth-
ers. I know whereof I speak—I’ve been in
the field for twelve years, go to all the major
conferences, and try to follow the litera-
ture from all camps. (An outstanding, up-
to-date overview of the origin-of-life field
can be found in a series of “primer” talks
organized by the Astrobiology division of
NASA—available on YouTube.)
Flannery goes on to say that “there is
something rather deflating about much
of the science that has gotten us this far,”
and that “the cumulative effect is to re-
duce our understanding of what life is to
chemical interactions.” At one level, life is
indeed reducible to a network of chemical
reactions. For some of us (maybe mostly
chemists), this perspective neatly unifies
the animate and inanimate worlds. For ev-
B oth Egypt and Morocco present
themselves in Western capitals as de-
fenders of women’s rights. President
Sisi recently raised the quota of seats
reserved for women in the senate from
ten to twenty, and in 2018 Morocco
passed a new law on violence against
women, which critics say is largely
cosmetic because it specifies few
mechanisms, standards, or resources
to facilitate actual reporting. Both re-
gimes also present themselves as bul-
warks against Islamic extremism and
as modernizing governments that must
appease the conservative tendencies of
their societies.
But in the cases described above,
women and men have been targeted
and failed not by Islamists or society
but by state institutions. Autocratic,
paternalistic, paranoid regimes don’t
act as a brake on misogyny; more often
than not they are imbued with it, and
they manipulate it as a way to maintain
their authority. Selective prosecutions,
accompanied by smear campaigns
in government- controlled media and
leaks of private information obtained
through surveillance, amount to a
weaponization of sexual shame and so-
cial stigma. When authoritarian states
treat women in rape cases as suspects
or pawns, forcing them to shut up or to
speak up: they undermine trust in the
legal system. This lack of impartial-
ity and credibility is to the detriment
of both accusers and accused, and to
eryone, it should enhance the sense that
life is a remarkable phenomenon, for at
least two reasons: (1) The particular set of
reactions involved has a continuous history
going back over 3.5 billion years. (2) These
reactions are localized in an exquisitely or-
ganized structure. As noted above, we have
virtually no understanding of how this orga-
nization emerged. It’s entirely possible that
it arose only once in the whole universe.
These observations should lift, not deflate,
our appreciation of being here.
Roy A. Black
Affiliate Professor
Department of Chemistry
and Bioengineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
PESTILENCE & THE BARD
To the Editors:
I very much enjoyed Stephen Greenblatt’s
authoritative review of Maggie O’Farrell’s
novel Hamnet [NYR, January 14]. How-
ever, I was surprised that Greenblatt did
not point out one egregious factual error
about the Bard in the book. In her author’s
note, O’Farrell writes, “The Black Death or
‘pestilence,’ as it would have been known in
the late sixteenth century, is not mentioned
once by Shakespeare in any of his plays or
poetry.” Not so fast, Ms. O’Farrell!: there
is indeed a mention of the plague near the
end of Romeo and Juliet, when Friar John
lets Friar Laurence know that the message
he was supposed to carry to Romeo in
Mantua was not delivered because he and
another friar were “visiting the sick,” and
“the searchers of the town,/Suspecting that
we both were in a house/Where the infec-
tious pestilence did reign,/Sealed up the
doors and would not let us forth,/So that
my speed to Mantua was stayed” [act 5,
scene 2]. So there you have it: “pestilence”
and quarantine, something the young poet
the fight against sexual violence gen-
erally (including within activist and
progressive circles, where it is as called
for as anywhere, and where the issue
has been legitimately raised in recent
years).
This is the point being made by
Khmissa, a new Moroccan feminist
collective that calls for defending both
women’s rights and political freedoms.
Its founding statement is signed by
Bernani, Hajar Raissouni, and other
prominent Moroccan women activists
and artists. It begins:
As Moroccan women, we strongly
condemn all forms of sexual vio-
lence. We call for the end of impu-
nity for those implicated in cases
of rape, harassment, and abuse:
they are not above the law.
We also condemn the politicized
instrumentalization of women’s
bodies and their rights to attempt
to settle scores with critics of the
state.
To speak out like this now takes par-
ticular courage. But Samia Errazouki,
a friend of Radi’s who previously
worked as a journalist in Morocco and
also signed the statement, says she had
no choice: “We have all experienced
sexual violence in some way, shape, or
form. We cannot rely on the state to
carry out justice on our behalf.” Q
—March 11, 2021
witnessed in London during the plague
visitation(s). Given the fact that this trag-
edy about the star-crossed lovers is per-
haps Shakespeare’s most popular play, one
known to most high school students, this is
not a misprision that O’Farrell should have
committed!
Eugene Stelzig
Professor of English Emeritus
SUNY Geneseo
Geneseo, New York
Stephen Greenblatt replies:
Eugene Stelzig is correct to remember the
pestilence in Romeo and Juliet, not to men-
tion Mercutio’s “A plague on both your
houses.” The more carefully you look, the
more you see constant allusions in Shake-
speare to the dread disease. “Thou art a
boil,” Lear tells his daughter Goneril, “A
plague sore, or embossed carbuncle/In my
corrupted blood.” “Here’s gold,” the mis-
anthropic Timon of Athens offers his visi-
tor, “Be as a planetary plague, when Jove/
Will o’er some high-viced city hang his
poison/In the sick air.” “Boils and plagues/
Plaster you over,” Coriolanus sneers at the
plebeians; “that you may be abhorred/Far-
ther than seen, and one infect another.” Et
cetera.
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U. of Penn, post-doc
Stanford. Co-
discovered human
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