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 Sue Halpern: Who Controls Artificial Intelligence?

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Contents
4 Laura Marsh Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
6
10
16
Jorie Graham
Matthew Aucoin
Ben Lerner
Poem
The More Fraught the Better
Speak, Silence: In Search of W. G. Sebald by Carole Angier
MEDDLING
19 Fady Joudah
20 Carolina A. Miranda
Poem
Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20 /21 an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, New York City
WITH NATURE
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and Elia Alba
23 Perry Link The CCP’s Culture of Fear
26 Martin Filler Paul R. Williams: Classic Hollywood Style by Karen E. Hudson, with photography by Benny Chan
and a foreword by Michael S. Smith
Paul R. Williams by Marc Appleton, Stephen Gee, and Bret Parsons
Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View by Janna Ireland
Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story a documentary film directed by
Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy McCampbell Vance
29 Sue Halpern Atlas of AI : Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford
We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law by Simon Chesterman
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson
32 Gregory Hays The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, edited by Angus Gowland
The Empire of Depression: A New History by Jonathan Sadowsky
How to Be Depressed by George Scialabba
35 Jenny Uglow Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast by Cynthia Saltzman
37 Jerome Groopman Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty
39 Ursula Lindsey The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World by Nawal El Saadawi, translated from the Arabic
by Sherif Hetata and with a foreword by Ronak Husni
A Daughter of Isis: The Early Life of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words by Nawal El Saadawi,
translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata BE T H S H A P IR O
and four other books by Nawal El Saadawi
42 Ed Park Yi Sang: Selected Works edited by Don Mee Choi and translated from the Korean by Jack Jung,

45 Jessica Riskin
Don Mee Choi, and Joyelle McSweeney, and from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’ Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution
LIFE AS WE
edited by Jeremy DeSilva
The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Laura Bossi
MADE IT
The Natural History of Edward Lear by Robert McCracken Peck, with a foreword by David Attenborough How 50,000 Years of Human
48 Giles Harvey Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard, edited by Brigitta Olubas and with a foreword by Zoë Heller
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, with an introduction by Lauren Groff Innovation Refined—and
54 Clare Bucknell The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham Versus Edmund Curll, Redefined—Nature
Bookseller in Grub Street by Pat Rogers
57 Charles Glass Cautivos by Ariel Dorfman
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
59 Ruth Franklin In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust by Mikhal Dekel “A brilliant combination of
Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union by Eliyana R. Adler
Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag by Julius Margolin, translated from the science, natural history, and
Russian by Stefani Hoffman, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder and an introduction by Katherine R. Jolluck first-person experience. . . . Anyone
62 Letters from Christine Bednarz, Stephen Kinzer, Simon Watney, and Linda Colley
who wants to better understand
CONTRIBUTORS the future of life—human and
MATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer and conductor. His new opera, Eu- GREGORY HAYS is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University
rydice, will come to the Metropolitan Opera in November, and his book The of Virginia. otherwise—should read this book.”
Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera will be published in December. FADY JOUDAH’s fifth and most recent poetry collection is Tethered to
CLARE BUCKNELL is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is Stars.
—J E N N I F E R D O U D N A ,
writing a book about poetry anthologies. winner of the
BEN LERNER’s Gold Custody, a collaboration with the artist Barbara
MARTIN FILLER contributed to the catalog for the exhibition “On the Bloom, will be published in October.
Edge: Los Angeles Art 1970s–1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Fam- 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
ily Collection,” on view at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in Bakersfield, URSULA LINDSEY writes about culture, education, and politics in the
California, until January 8, 2022. Arab world and cohosts BULAQ, a podcast on Arabic literature. She has
RUTH FRANKLIN ’s most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather lived in Egypt and Morocco and is now based in Amman, Jordan.
Haunted Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in PERRY LINK is the Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines “Shapiro’s twin passions for
Biography. at the University of California at Riverside. His recent books include An
CHARLES GLASS is a former Chief Middle East Correspondent for Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics and a translation of the cutting-edge science and natural
ABC News. He is the author of Syria Burning and, most recently, They memoirs of the Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, The Most Wanted Man
Fought Alone: The True Story of the Starr Brothers, British Secret Agents in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State. history leap from every page. This
in Nazi-Occupied France. LAURA MARSH is the Literary Editor of The New Republic.
JORIE GRAHAM’s most recent book of poetry is Runaway. She teaches book will entertain and challenge
CAROLINA A. MIRANDA is the arts and urban design columnist at
at Harvard.
JEROME GROOPMAN is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Har-
the Los Angeles Times. She was a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in you to think in new ways about our
Visual Arts Journalism.
vard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is ED PARK is the author of the novel Personal Days. He wrote the es- role in the future of life on Earth.”
the coauthor, with Pamela Hartzband, of Your Medical Mind: How to De- say for the Criterion Collection edition of Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of
Murder. —NEIL SHUBIN,
cide What Is Right for You.
SUE HALPERN is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a regular JESSICA RISKIN teaches History at Stanford. Her latest book is The author of Your Inner Fish
contributor to The New York Review. She is a Scholar in Residence at Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What
Middlebury. Makes Living Things Tick.
GILES HARVEY is a contributing writer at The New York Times JENNY UGLOW is the author of The Lunar Men and In These Times:
Magazine. Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815, among other books. “In this brilliant new book,
Editor: Emily Greenhouse Founding Editors: Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) biologist Beth Shapiro tells the
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Contributing Editors: Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Editor-at-Large: Daniel Mendelsohn remaking much of nature
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Maya Chung and Lucy Jakub, Associate Editors; Nawal Arjini and Willa Glickman, Editorial Assistants; Sable Gravesandy and Anacaona Rodriguez Martinez, and lays out a thoughtful path
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On the cover: Yvette Mayorga, Sweet Water, After Lenardi, Giovanni Battista, sugar sculpture 16th century, 2018 (© Yvette Mayorga). The engraving on page 30 is by Grandville.
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3

Crossroads
by Jonathan Franzen.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
580 pp., $30.00
In 1972, when Jonathan Franzen was
thirteen, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat
reported that parents in his town were
worried: high school kids in Webster
Groves were spending too much time
at church. The reason was Fellowship, a
rapidly growing Christian youth group,
and its edgy leader, Bob Mutton—a
youth pastor with a “tormented Jesus”
look about him. Emulating his style, his
followers grew their hair long, dressed
in their most worn- out clothes, smoked
cigarettes, and played guitar. They
flocked to Sunday evening meetings,
where they blindfolded one another and
performed trust exercises, palpated one
another’s faces with their fingers, and
practiced radical honesty in drawn-out
sessions of uncomfortable truth telling.
A member for six years, Franzen spent
his adolescence immersed in the group.
Though Fellowship was affiliated with
the First Congregational Church, its
members rarely prayed or consulted the
Bible. They expressed their spirituality
through their actions by cultivating “au-
thentic relationships” with one another
and working with the poor. In his 2006
memoir, The Discomfort Zone, Franzen
writes of Mutton with admiration, re-
calling “his violent allergy to piousness”
and his gruff authority. But Franzen was
less interested in his message of authen-
ticity. He attended mainly for the social
scene. And, anyway, he suspected that
kids were faking openness through rote
gestures and that they used demonstra-
tions of honesty to impress one another
and gain popularity.
This could be an origin story for a
writer’s all-knowing air. In a Jonathan
Franzen novel, there is no scene, no
system, no belief that he cannot quickly
take the measure of; his compendious,
multiplot novels, with their fluency in
pharmacology and tech boosterism and
the stock market and the creeping logic
of gentrification, create the illusion that
he’s revealing the world as it really is,
stripped of its pretensions. With The
Corrections (2001), he appeared to
have articulated an undercurrent of
dissatisfaction in the richest, most pow-
erful country in the world in the decade
of its cold war victory. Sam Tanen-
haus marveled at the book’s confident
“panorama of ’90s excesses”; Michiko
Kakutani praised its evocation of the
“sullen” mood of the United States “in
the waning years of the 20th century.”
Few recent novelists have made their
readers feel smarter, and few have been
as celebrated for it.
Yet there has always been some-
thing irritable and overwrought about
Franzen’s incarnation of the social
novel. He is so intent on documenting
society’s ills that his characters often
feel like walking examples of hypoc-
risy: Chip Lambert writes the univer-
sity sexual harassment policy he will
promptly violate in The Corrections;
Walter Berglund, who stays up at night
worrying about the desecration of the
earth, soon accepts a fat paycheck
from a fossil fuel magnate in Freedom
(2010). Are people ever so transpar-
ent? In his 1996 essay “Perchance to
4 The New York Review
Are the Kids All Right?
Laura Marsh
Jonathan Franzen; illustration by Ruth Gwily
Dream,” Franzen wrote that fiction have grown apart, she still writes most
should, as Flannery O’Connor put it, of his sermons for him. Their teenaged
“embody mystery through manners.” children fall into roles recognizable
But he rarely allows his characters a from Franzen’s other books: there’s
degree of unknowability. The tempta- the black sheep, Clem; the favored
tion to lay bare their deceptions and daughter, Becky; the darkly brilliant
self-justifications is too great. son, Perry. (Nine-year-old Judson, the
Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads, is youngest, doesn’t get his own storyline.)
both a simpler and a more ambitious They seek some independence in the
book. It begins his most expansive proj- church’s youth group—run by Russ’s
ect to date, a trilogy that aims to “trace rival, the groovy youth pastor Rick
the inner life of our culture” over fifty Ambrose—but cannot quite escape the
years from 1971 to the present. But its embarrassing specter of their father.
setting has a pared-back, nothing-fancy Crossroads, as more than one char-
quality. Far from the international con- acter notes, is basically an “intense
spiracies of Purity (2015) or the shady kind of social experiment”—a hive of
think tanks and nonprofits of Freedom, “teenybopper relationship drama.” The
Crossroads revolves around a midwest- most fun writing in the book concerns
ern church and its Fellowship-like youth the group’s ideas, its social tensions,
group, called Crossroads. Perhaps at the and its kumbaya stylings: its unofficial
expense of a broader social vision, in uniform of overalls, painter’s pants,
Crossroads Franzen has narrowed his and army jackets and the sing-alongs
concerns down to a few fundamentals. to “All Good Gifts” and “You’ve Got
The questions that consume his char- a Friend.” With his “stringy black hair”
acters are those he largely dismissed in and “glistening black Fu Manchu” mus-
his own youth group days: how to act in tache, Ambrose might not pass muster
good faith, how to be genuine. as a guru in other circles, but Franzen
renders him irresistibly charismatic, as
he preaches: “Are you willing to leave
When Crossroads opens, in the passive complicity behind you?. . . Do
weeks before Christmas 1971, the fam- you have the guts to risk the active wit-
ily at the novel’s center is ready to fall nessing of a real relationship?” The
apart. The father, Russ Hildebrandt, is youth of New Prospect hang on his
a pastor at First Reformed church, in a every word, competing for his attention
wealthy white Chicago suburb, the opti- and showering him with gifts.
mistically named New Prospect Town- The group has inspired the two mid-
ship. Though he and his wife, Marion, dle children, Becky and Perry, to trans-
form their personalities. Becky once
thought herself too cool for Crossroads.
With her “platonic teen-girl hair” and
blemish-free appearance, she is “the
undisputed queen of her senior class.”
She joins the group at the urging of the
boy she likes—the tall, long-haired,
guitar-playing Tanner Evans—and
soon begins to realize how bland and
defensive her life had been before.
Perry is a more troubled kid: though
he’s been a Crossroads member for a
while, he has been mimicking virtue
in order to get people to like him; all
the while he has been running a small
business selling drugs to other kids. He
hates his behavior. He is on the verge of
a manic episode, and the thought that
he is “an evil, selfish worm” loops in his
head. His resolution is “to be good. Or,
failing that, at least less bad.”
As the children gather around Am-
brose, Russ stews in resentment. In the
first pages of the novel, we learn that he
has suffered a public “humiliation” at
the hands of his hip, younger colleague
and lost his position as an adviser to
Crossroads; though the details don’t
emerge until later, it’s clear this event
has left him shaken, lost, and a bit des-
perate. He has since turned away from
his wife and fallen for an attractive,
widowed parishioner named Frances.
Now he is sneaking around and lying.
His own actions take him by surprise:
without meaning to, he tells Frances
a “scabrous half-truth” to make him-
self look good; he brags “repellently”
about his record collection. He goes out
courting in an absurd sheepskin jacket.
Who has he become? His high-minded
son Clem is disgusted: “He was weak!
weak!” The atheist of the family, Clem
has decided to make a show of moral
courage. At the end of his first semester
of college, he resolves to give up his draft
deferment and go serve in Vietnam, like
the poorer, less fortunate young men
who have already been sent in his place.
While Marion registers the changes
in her family, she is busy with her own
experiment in honesty: she has started
to attend weekly sessions with a thera-
pist. She believes that she has been liv-
ing a lie since she married Russ, partly
because she’s never told him that she
had an abortion before she met him.
Her current existence feels unreal to
her; she has become “invisible.” There
are really two Marions, one pres-
ent and one past. (To emphasize this,
Franzen uses the sad cliché that inside
the present “fat” Marion there’s a thin
Marion waiting to get out.) Past Mar-
ion was reckless, slim, and perilously in
love with a married man.
These five dramas are so distinct
that they could be a set of five related
novels, packaged together, rather than
a single work. But a few unassuming
set pieces force the Hildebrandts into
overlapping confrontations: trust ex-
ercises at a Sunday night Crossroads
meeting; a drinks party at the senior
pastor’s house; a Christian rock con-
cert at the church. Events that should
be gently wholesome take on a menac-
ing edge—each mention of the com-
ing Crossroads Easter trip seems to
threaten disaster. The titles of the nov-
el’s two halves, “Advent” and “Easter,”
lose their promises of birth and rebirth,
and come to signify—as holidays do in
 Yale university press
“Not One Inch will be considered the
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“Julian Zelizer’s Abraham Joshua
Heschel transcends time and place.
The life of Heschel moves seamlessly
from inside the Jewish world to
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Zelizer shows how Heschel’s words,
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„ Jewish Lives®
October 21, 2021
“A necessary and worthy successor
to Paul Starr’s momentous Social
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Peter Swenson vividly portrays the
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A wonderfully readable anthology of
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—Timothy Snyder, from the foreword
„ The Margellos World Republic of
Letters
“Jo Handelsman is a national treasure,
and her clarion call warning of a
looming soil-loss catastrophe must be
heard. Add her clearly written alarm to
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Newly Emerging Diseases in a World
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“The translation is elegant and
eloquent. The essays and elucidations
are learned, lively, and hugely
illuminating. Sophus Helle is a poet, a
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—Marshall Brown, University of
Washington
5
unhappy families—a sense of looming
punishment.
T he soap opera–like plot of the novel
feels almost too gripping—a device
to propel us along in a single, weighty
inquiry: What makes people want to
be good? Religion has two main an-
swers to this: a relationship with God
and relationships with other people in
the community. Though not Franzen’s
focus, there is room for the first an-
swer in Crossroads. He shows Becky in
the moment of a born-again epiphany,
when she comprehends for the first time
that “God was pure goodness, and the
goodness had been there all along. . . .
Goodness was the best thing in the
universe, and she was capable of mov-
ing toward it.” Russ’s relationship with
God does not point him so clearly in the
right direction. He knows that he should
stop trying to seduce Frances, but the
remorse he feels about sinning brings
him closer to God, which must be good:
“Writhing with retrospective shame,
abasing himself in solitude, was how he
found his way back to God’s mercy.”
Franzen is most interested in the sec-
ond answer: the way that membership
in a group gives people a heightened
sense of what they owe one another.
Perhaps ominously, considering that the
trilogy is titled The Key to All Mythol-
ogies, the youth group inspires Perry
to formulate a “theory of how all reli-
gion worked.” He has little use for the
supernatural, though his religion is no
less miraculous for that. In his under-
standing, interpersonal relationships
hold the deepest truths about who we
are. “Along comes a leader,” he thinks,
who’s uninhibited enough to use ev-
eryday words in a new and strong
and counterintuitive way, which
emboldens the people around him
to use this rhetoric themselves,
and the very act of using it creates
sensations unlike anything they’re
used to in everyday life.
Under Rick Ambrose’s leadership,
the Crossroads kids develop a dis-
tinctive way of thinking and talking.
They sit down in pairs to tell each
other “something we really admire
about them.” They insist on being
direct (“That took real guts”) and
call bullshit on evasive politeness.
When you start “running away,”
it’s “because you’re too chicken to
face the goodness in your heart, too
chicken to take responsibility.” They
constantly seek to hold themselves
to account, including Ambrose, who
makes himself vulnerable enough to
confide that he’s “frightened by the
size and intensity” of the group he’s
created, that it could give him too
much power.
The group’s earnest tone feels lib-
erating. Perry discovers the selfless
pleasure of taking Becky’s place at
a family event so that she can see
Tanner’s band play. And for her to
accept her brother’s kindness is “a
strange sensation.” As the charac-
ters dare themselves to open up,
Franzen seems to be doing some-
thing similar as a novelist, resisting
the temptation to smirk at their
good intentions. If his earlier books
were steeped in ironic social obser-
vation, Crossroads is an experiment
in sincerity. He notes the change in
Becky as she embraces the Cross-
6 The New York Review
roads teachings: “Simply by trying to
speak honestly . . . she experienced her
first glimmerings of spirituality.”
That is not to say that all of the char-
acters act in good faith. Perry notes
how easily a commitment to radical
honesty can shade into a culture of vir-
tue signaling:
Instead of comforting a friend
with fibs, you told him unwelcome
truths. Instead of avoiding the so-
cially awkward, the hopelessly
uncool, you sought them out and
engaged with them (making sure, of
course, that you were noticed doing
this). Instead of choosing friends
as exercise partners, you (conspic-
uously) introduced yourself to new-
comers and conveyed your belief in
their unqualified worth. Instead of
being strong, you blubbered.
Franzen’s description of these dy-
namics is as close as the book gets to
commenting, even indirectly, on the
present—examining the “moral abso-
lutism” of young people without fulmi-
nating about cancel culture or current
sexual politics. Russ makes the familiar
complaint that “kids today think they
invented radical politics,” even though
“most of them have never even heard of
Eugene Debs, John Dewey, Margaret
Sanger, Richard Wright.”
Russ’s true beef with the young,
though, is that they have rejected him:
his humiliation began, we learn, at a
Crossroads meeting when he made the
mistake of greeting a girl “with a hug
that she did not return.” He didn’t re-
alize how creepy he must have looked
until it was too late. He had thought he
was simply enjoying the same rush of
openness and vulnerability as everyone
why the new
flawless birds
wired to perfection
whose beauty
song flight lift
hover settle you
cannot tell from
those not coming
back are not the
same, whose
feathertips shine
as if in the old
sunlight, whose
speckled wings
mottle further with
perfect shadow-speckle,
whose necks have
the sweet up/down
jerk of worry, whose
throat is made to
throb so slightly
as was the case
when song was
expelled why
else: “He took the risk of rapping about
his feelings, he opened himself to new
styles of music. . . . He let his hair grow
over his collar and started a beard.” As
the group turns its radical honesty on
him, you get the feeling some of these
idealistic, censorious kids are, in fact,
millennials in period dress. They won’t
stay if Russ stays, they announce. They
are no longer comfortable around him.
Crossroads is full of such humbling
reversals. Crises compound crises, and
the characters’ spiritual failures bind
them closer together. But, for the first
volume in a three-part survey of Amer-
ican culture, its vision is surprisingly
narrow, largely limited to the social
dynamics in a single church in a single
suburb. Can the inner life of New Pros-
pect tell us much about the inner life of
the whole country?
The big Easter trip in the novel’s sec-
ond half brings Franzen and his char-
acters into contact with a tradition they
never really try to understand, despite
claiming a deep connection to it. Each
year Crossroads visits the Navajo Na-
tion in Arizona to work on construction
projects with the locals. Russ acts as a
guide, having clawed his way back into
the group. On his arrival, he recalls his
first visit in the 1940s as eye-opening:
living with the Diné, he realized that
there are many ways to express spiri-
tuality. All to the good. Yet he appears
to know little about the Diné when he
romanticizes the poverty imposed on
them. “It was better to have nothing,”
Russ muses.
Better to be like the Navajos, the
Diné, as they called themselves. . . .
The Diné had nothing. In their ho-
THEY ASK ME
do they not satisfy
us, why is it
only if we shut our
eyes the trills—
you can choose
the kind of bird—are
real, they come
to our sills, they leave
unexpectedly bc we
move. . . How they
flocked up across our
fields. How
that last morning
in that world, in rising ground-
mist, in the pull of its fast
evaporation as that strange
sun rose, arms
outstretched &
laughing, out of
breath, we ran to chase them
till they dis-
appeared.
—Jorie Graham
gans, they lived with almost noth-
ing. . . . But spiritually they were
the richest people he’d ever known.
Russ is the kind of condescending
white visitor no one wants around. His
unwelcomeness does not bother him,
even when Clyde, a young Diné man,
calls out the Crossroads group for com-
ing to “have their little Navajo experi-
ence.” Russ is convinced that the Diné
are an essentially mysterious people,
and he is obsessed with their silences:
“The thing about a Navajo silence
was the sense that it could last indefi-
nitely—all day.”
Russ moves from stereotypes to
sexual fantasies. The first of these is a
flashback to the 1940s, when he learned
how to masturbate by thinking about a
fifteen-year- old Diné girl who danced
for him the night before: “He was a
white man alone among the Indians,
hearing the women sing and chant. . . .
She was like a threatening animal.”
The second is on the 1972 Easter trip,
when Russ picks a fight with Clyde in
front of Frances, who is finally showing
an interest in him; on the way back to
camp, they stop to have sex, fired up
by “the desire he’d turned on with his
taming of Clyde.”
How to read all of this? Franzen holds
Russ up as a self- centered, often craven
man. But it’s hard to tell how much
of Russ’s behavior Franzen is trying
to show from an ironic distance. How
much is a critique of Russ, and how
much is the story of his sexual awaken-
ing told for its own sake? When Franzen
describes, for instance, “the pleasure
that tore through” Russ after the girl’s
dance, he is presenting a moment of lib-
eration, without irony, at least to my ear:
“For the rest of his life, he associated
 IMPERIAL SPLENDOR:
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October 21, 2021 7

 the mesa with the discovery of secret
pleasure and permission.”
What makes this section of the novel
more than Franzen’s own “little Navajo
politybooks.com experience”? He stages several of the
novel’s most climactic episodes against
the backdrop of Diné culture but brings
Diné characters into the story only to
tell us something about the white visi-
tors: Russ’s friend Keith Durochie is
My Secret Brexit Diary there to welcome him and give him
clout with the older Diné; Clyde is there
Michel Barnier to oppose him; a council administrator
named Wanda, to defend him. In all
“One of the most experienced and this, Franzen never imagines them in
intelligent leaders in the world.” detail or gives them the complex inner
lives that he gives the Hildebrandts.
Tony Blair Franzen’s tendency to fall back on
Cloth | $35.00 sex when he runs out of ideas is not lim-
ited to the Easter trip. There is no diffi-
culty that a Franzen character can’t try
In AI We Trust to work out through adultery. Of the six
Hildebrandts, three contemplate some
Power, Illusion and Control of form of cheating and a fourth callously
Predictive Algorithms deserts his lover. It is an awkward fit
for a novelist who once wrote that he
Helga Nowotny had “come to dread the approach of sex
scenes in serious fiction.” This doesn’t
“The ‘go-to’ book for navigating the mean that Franzen avoids the subject
decades ahead.” of sex, just that he describes it in some
Michèle Lamont, Harvard University very mangled ways, full of squeamish
syntax and punctilious terminology.
Cloth | $25.00 My favorite: “He clasped her delicate
head to his chest, and his testosterone
manifested itself in his long johns.”
Nature’s Evil And a close second: “It was astonish-
A Cultural History of Natural Resources ing . . . how comprehensively his genital
nerves now felt connected to her.”
Alexander Etkind In their contortions, Franzen’s charac-
ters imagine that sex will open up new
“An utterly original blend of intellectual, vistas of meaning in their lives, though of
ecological and moral history.” course it doesn’t. He makes sex an oddly
self-serving, even solipsistic act. When
Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research Clem has sex with his girlfriend, Sha-
Cloth | $35.00 ron, she may as well be a pure abstrac-
tion: “The imperative stormed back to
life, and he unthinkingly obeyed it, with
The Palliative Society a thrust.” A major feature of Sharon’s
personality is that she’s short: “She was
Byung-Chul Han little, and female, but her thoughts were
original.” Clem marvels at being able to
“as good a candidate as any for walk around with her “impaled on him.”
philosopher of the moment.” Frances is another little woman: she
Los Angeles Review of Books wears a jaunty hunting cap and entices
Russ with coy effusions (“Why, Rev-
Paper | $16.95 erend Hildebrandt, the things you do
say,” and later, in the act, “My goodness,
Reverend Hildebrandt. You’re rather
The New Music large”). When they finally get together,
Kranichstein Lectures Franzen describes Russ’s penis enter-
ing her vagina in quarter- and half-inch
Theodor W. Adorno increments.
Bodies are unruly, but it seems un-
“magnificent” fair that Marion’s story is wholly bound
Max Paddison, Durham University up with her weight. She is introduced
as “the overweight person who was
Cloth | $45.00 Marion.” Even though she has so many
other concerns—haunted by her past
and facing the breakdown of her mar-
Correspondence riage—her central goal is to lose thirty
1939-1969 pounds. Her sister’s recent death from
lung cancer does not stop her from
Theodor W. Adorno & Gershom taking up smoking, as an appetite sup-
Scholem pressant. Struggles with body image
can be all- consuming, yet Franzen de-
“One of the most exhilarating documents scribes Marion’s as if her self-loathing
were justified. He has her “waddling”
in the entire history of twentieth-century down the street; in one scene, her hip
thought.” falls asleep because of her “heaviness.”
Peter Gordon, Harvard University “Sexually,” he writes, “there was no
angle from which a man on the street
Cloth | $45.00 might catch a glimpse of her and be cu-
rious to see her from a different angle,
no point of relief from what she and
time had done to her.”
@politybooks facebook.com/politybooks Franzen’s focus on Marion’s weight
even undercuts the form through
which she reveals her story: her weekly
8 The New York Review
therapy sessions. Her therapist has
a name—Sophie—but after being
sketched as “a chair-filling dumpling
of a woman,” she is mostly “the dump-
ling” for the rest of the novel (“the
dumpling inclined her head sugges-
tively,” “the dumpling seemed preoccu-
pied,” “the dumpling was relentless”).
In a novel so concerned with goodness,
it’s a strangely cruel play for laughs.
It’s as a historical novel, however,
that Crossroads feels most superficial.
Franzen’s champions have, possibly,
overstated his preternatural ability to
take the measure of his times. Though
he made his name as a chronicler of
turn- of-the-millennium excess, twenty
years later the concerns he voiced then
appear unusually dated. His prophecies
of decline in “Perchance to Dream” are
anything but prescient:
I saw leaf-blowers replacing rakes.
I saw CNN holding hostage the
travelers in airport lounges and the
shoppers in supermarket checkout
lines. I saw the 486 chip replacing
the 386 and being replaced in turn
by the Pentium so that . . . the price
of entry-level notebook computers
never fell below a thousand dollars.
Omnipresent TV, slightly better lap-
tops, the mechanization of yard work:
these developments, I propose, did not
prove the worst of the 1990s.
His vision of the 1970s is no more
penetrating. Crossroads is set in an
era of political corruption, strikes, and
marching social movements—though
you wouldn’t know it from the book.
Franzen makes little attempt to trace
the currents of American life today
back to their sources in an earlier era.
The Hildebrandts have a way of letting
history simply pass them by. While the
novel unfolds between December 1971
and Easter 1974, Watergate passes
with scarcely a word. Nixon is a faded
bumper sticker. Clem worries about the
Vietnam War but is never deployed—
by the time he gives up his deferment,
he is no longer needed. Russ refers to
his civil rights movement bona fides
only in passing; Marion doesn’t care for
“women’s liberation” and doesn’t want
to discuss her marriage in the language
of feminism.
The historical setting of the book
seems, at times, designed to let
Franzen avoid the toxic politics that
would envelop a story set in the pres-
ent. Certainly, it would be hard to tell a
story about a wealthy white Protestant
church in the 2020s without engaging
with its politics. But when Crossroads
takes place, the worshipers at First
Reformed haven’t yet witnessed the
ascendance of the Christian right and
its polarizing dynamics, and Franzen
doesn’t suggest anything about their
political leanings.
Instead, the novel’s version of histor-
ical consciousness is a costume drama:
the family car is a Plymouth Fury
wagon; the clothes—sheepskin jack-
ets, suede fringes—are almost charac-
ters. The details that Franzen lingers
on have a strong flavor of childhood
memory: Becky’s perfect hair, Tanner’s
soulful musicianship and “dreamboat”
looks. To read about them is a nostalgia
trip. For all its sagas and morality plays,
the past is a refuge—a time when noth-
ing mattered so much as the style of the
coolest, most enviable kids. Q
 “Ron Daniels’ insights on the essential role of colleges in a
democracy ring with particular power. He offers a compelling
history of the important relationship between higher education
and democratic values—and a path forward to strengthen both.”
—Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and
Bloomberg Philanthropies / Mayor of New York, 2002–2013

“The methods to defend democracy must be taught, and What

Universities Owe Democracy is our textbook.”
—Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative /
former World Chess Champion

“. . . a summary of the era’s most
searing lessons on race and identity,
a prism through which to understand
our nation’s fractured present,
and a roadmap for building a more
just society.”—Eric Garcetti,
mayor of Los Angeles
“Allan Horwitz—the recognized
authority on the DSM—is both
balanced and fair minded. There is
nothing else like this book.”
—Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of
The Americanization of Narcissism
“Rohit Khanna has put his finger
on the pulse of America’s health care
system, and it is irregular and
worrisome.”—Paul Beninger, MD, MBA,
Tufts University School of Medicine
“Levine and Van Pelt offer a clear-eyed
assessment of the changes—and the
potential disruption—facing colleges
and universities. An indispensable
guide to rethinking our assumptions
about learning and preparing to thrive
in a transformed educational land-
scape.”—Rafael Reif, President, MIT

“Bartoszyńska finds in Poland and
Ireland sophisticated, self-reflexive
fictions that ask—and invite us to ask—
searching new questions about what
the novel is and does.”—Caroline Levine,
Cornell University, author of Forms:
Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
press.jhu.edu
“Elephant Trails is essential reading
for anyone who cares about these
charismatic—and imperiled—
creatures.”—Janet M. Davis,
author of The Gospel of Kindness:
Animal Welfare and the Making
of Modern America
“By emphasizing Booth’s racism and
devotion to white supremacist politics,
the author challenges the widespread
notion that Booth was either simply a
madman or an overzealous Southern
partisan . . . An important and power-
ful book.”—Michael E. Woods, author
of Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen
Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the
Struggle for American Democracy
“George and Whitehouse brilliantly
diagnose America’s dementia and
prescribe a timely antidote—a society
built on empathy and equality.”
—Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, Flint
pediatrician, author of What the Eyes
Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance,
and Hope in an American City

October 21, 2021 9

 The More Fraught the Better
Matthew Aucoin
What is the nature of the relationship

Erio Piccagliani/Teatro alla Scala, Milan

between music and words, whether in
opera, song, or any other art form that
brings them together? Are they lovers,
business partners, rival siblings, mor-
tal enemies? Does one matter more
than the other, and if one dominates, is
the other thereby weakened or under-
mined? Opera’s oldest adage on this
subject asserts the primacy of music:
Prima la musica, poi le parole (First
the music, then the words). But many
a singer, coach, and composer has in-
sisted that if opera is to be experienced
not just as music but also as theater,
then clear communication of the text
ought to be the performers’ priority.
Though there is inherently tension
in any meeting of these two media,
their relationship is often described as
a kind of mutual reverence: Look how
sensitively Fauré illuminates this poetic
image with a single fragrant chord, look
how modestly the text of this Schubert
song effaces itself before the music,
and so on. But from the composer’s
perspective, the relationship is not just
one of respectful deference; it is also a
battle of wills. The music and the po-
etry should each, ideally, manifest a cer-
tain stubbornness; they should even be
somewhat at odds with each other. After
all, if the music had exactly the same
impulses as the poetry, there would be
no need for music in the first place. Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden, and Chester Kallman at a rehearsal of The Rake’s Progress, Milan, August 1951
The more fraught the relationship
between words and music, the richer the poet’s voices remain audible, even into bread. At the end of the agreed- an opera set in Hogarth’s London, in
the result can be. This paradoxical as Stravinsky refracts the light of Aud- upon term, Shadow attempts to claim sumptuously Popian verse, must have
dynamic is exemplified by the collab- en’s lines at an impossible angle, set- his wages: Tom’s soul, of course. Tom is struck Auden as a welcome return to
oration between Igor Stravinsky and ting them deliciously askew. rescued at the last moment by the grace familiar turf.
W. H. Auden on The Rake’s Progress The Rake’s Progress is loosely based of Anne’s enduring love for him. But he Auden loved opera, as he loved
(1951), Stravinsky’s only full-length on the eighteenth-century British doesn’t escape unscathed: though he myths and fairy tales, for its ability to
opera. Throughout The Rake, Stravin- painter William Hogarth’s pictorial will not be damned, from this moment cut to the bedrock of the human psy-
sky’s music and Auden’s poetry seem series of the same name, engravings forward he will be insane. che; certain operatic roles, like Don
to perpetually subvert each other, but of which Stravinsky saw at the Art In- On the surface, The Rake’s Prog- Giovanni, recur throughout his work as
the vocal writing that results from Stra- stitute of Chicago in 1947. He was at- ress seems to be, well, all surface. It psychological touchstones, ur- emblems
vinsky’s steady friction against Auden’s tracted to Hogarth’s rococo aesthetic can feel, on a first encounter, like a of essential human types. The noisy,
sharply hewn text is singularly vivid, a as well as his lavishly satirical depiction stiflingly stylized fable that risks pre- no-holds-barred spectacle of operatic
musico-poetic compound that brims of a debauched, Sodom-like London, ciosity at every turn: its rakish protag- performance was also a welcome con-
with energy and life. and he told Auden that he wanted to onist is literally named Tom Rakewell, trast to the solitary work of writing.
Some composers prefer to work with write a piece with all the trappings of and the music seems to be little more Indeed, Auden’s love of opera was
librettists they can push around, and classical-era opera. Auden, working in than a parade of self-conscious allu- founded on what he perceived to be
Stravinsky himself had displayed this collaboration with his life partner, the sions to Handel and Mozart. But The music’s fundamental difference from
tendency in his earlier theater pieces. writer Chester Kallman, was glad to Rake is much more than a period piece. his own art form, poetry—a difference
He had no compunction about order- oblige him: their libretto is an elabo- Through their loving attention to in- that he articulated, with his trademark
ing Jean Cocteau to repeatedly over- rate morality tale in brilliantly wrought tertwined details of characterization, bossiness, as a strict circumscription
haul the text for the opera- oratorio Augustan verse. harmony, and prosody, Stravinsky and of their respective functions. Music,
Oedipus Rex (1927), early drafts of At the story’s beginning, the idle Auden set themselves the daunting for Auden, was a playground of pure
which he found too “Wagnerian” and young Tom Rakewell is engaged to the task of proving that pastiche does not catharsis, while poetry was the proper
which he insisted must be simpler. virtuous Anne Trulove. One day, Tom necessarily equal parody. arena for investigations and litigations
(He commanded Cocteau to make it speaks aloud his desire to be rich. As of humankind’s duties to itself and to
“very banal!”) But he never made such soon as he does, the mysterious Nick God. He loved music precisely because
a demand of Auden, whom he came Shadow appears and informs him that When Stravinsky, acting on the he believed it to be immune to the tor-
to view as a peer. The Rake is thus a a previously unknown uncle has died recommendation of Aldous Huxley, tuous self-consciousness that was the
rare example of a major composer and and bequeathed his vast wealth to Tom. invited Auden to write The Rake’s li- daily nourishment of his writing.
a major poet engaging as equals in a Shadow offers to work as his servant bretto, he may not have known that the Though I almost always disagree
deep collaborative effort. What’s more, for “a year and a day,” after which he poet was one of the most devoted of with Auden’s delimitations—his insis-
Stravinsky’s voice as a composer and will claim whatever wages they agree opera aficionados. Auden’s one previ- tence that music is incapable of psycho-
Auden’s as a poet have certain quali- are fair. Tom unquestioningly follows ous foray into music theater had been logical ambiguity, for instance, strikes
ties in common, especially a lapidary Shadow to London, where he soon his libretto for Benjamin Britten’s op- me as absurd—the clarity of his ideas
clarity. It would be hard to find two art- forgets his commitment to Anne and, eretta Paul Bunyan (1941), which ev- about its essential nature can help us
ists with a stronger allergy to vagueness having claimed his fortune, gives in eryone involved seemed to feel, after clarify our own thinking. It is, counter-
and obfuscation; they both prefer pure, to every temptation he encounters— its premiere in New York, was best intuitively, because of Auden’s fanboy-
unfiltered sunlight to impressionistic drinking, gambling, prostitutes. swept hastily under the rug. The notion ish passion for music, and his attendant
cloudiness. One of the miracles of The Hounded by his ever-increasing guilt of two hyperliterary, fresh-off-the-boat need to strip it of its complexities and
Rake is the coexistence of their respec- and by a misguided impulse to prove his gay British expats writing a ready-for- treat it as an idealized other, that he is
tive lucidities. Both the composer’s and freedom from both passion and rational Broadway light opera about the man- an especially thought-provoking phi-
thought, Tom marries Baba the Turk, liest man in American folklore might losopher of the form.
This essay is adapted from The Impos- the bearded lady at a local circus. When sound like something out of The Pro- His theory of the prehistoric ori-
sible Art: Adventures in Opera, which he grows tired of his life with Baba, Tom ducers, and alas, the Britten-Auden gin of music, for instance, is quietly
will be published in December by Far- ruins himself by investing his fortune in Paul Bunyan is as preposterous as the revelatory. Auden proposes, in the
rar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © a bogus machine that he is convinced is phrase “Britten-Auden Paul Bunyan” essay “Some Reflections on Music and
2021 by Matthew Aucoin. capable of miraculously turning stones would suggest. The prospect of writing Opera,” that music probably did not

10 The New York Review

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11
originate with the ear—that is, with the
desire to imitate external sounds—but
rather with “man’s direct experience of
his own body, its tensions and rhythms.”
He draws a contrast between music and
the visual arts, which he believes are
dependent on the eye and on a desire
to represent external things. Many mu-
sicians would agree that Auden’s diag-
nosis rings true: music is the result of
an inner physical need, as dance is, and
its external realization in sound is an
aftereffect rather than a cause.
Elsewhere, however, Auden’s pre-
cepts about music are unhelpfully
reductive. “Music cannot exist in an
atmosphere of uncertainty,” goes a typ-
ical dictum. “Song cannot walk, it can
only jump.” He also asserts that the
essence of music-making is the expres-
sion of human willpower, the creation
of a “self-determined history”: “A suc-
cession of two musical notes is an act
of choice.” (He doesn’t address the
question of what makes a succession
of two notes more distinctly an “act of
choice” than a succession of two words
in a poem.) If music is an expression of
choice, then opera is “an imitation of
human wilfulness,” and opera charac-
ters are inevitably “monomaniac[s].”
With this established, Auden makes
a rule: opera “cannot present charac-
ter in the novelist’s sense of the word,
namely, people who are potentially
good and bad, active and passive.”
When certain composers and libret-
tists dare to do so—as, for example,
Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte do in
Le nozze di Figaro—Auden finds the
effort unconvincing. To me, the title
character of the Mozart–Da Ponte
Figaro is riveting precisely because of
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his self- contradictory complexities:
he can seem guileless and radiantly
jovial in one scene, hot-tempered and
dangerously susceptible to jealousy in
the next. But to Auden he is “too in-
teresting a character to be completely
translatable into music.” Rossini’s de-
piction of the same character as a “ma-
niacal busybody” is, for Auden, more
credible, since he thinks music is better
suited to giddy perpetual motion than
to psychological nuance.
Clearly Auden took a wrong turn
along the way, because he ended up
somewhere absurd: literally faulting
Mozart for the subtlety of his por-
traiture. But there’s something to be
learned from him even at his most ex-
asperatingly dogmatic. To appreciate
Auden’s achievement in The Rake’s
Progress, we must first understand his
concept of opera as proof of the irre-
ducible reality of human willpower:
“Every high C accurately struck ut-
terly demolishes the theory that we
are the irresponsible puppets of fate or
chance.” Auden believed, and needed
to believe, that human beings possess
some modicum of freedom, with all its
attendant risks and responsibilities: the
possibility of real guilt, and of real sal-
vation. In The Rake’s Progress he put
this philosophy to the test, in the me-
dium that he believed best manifested
the reality of that freedom.
Thorny philosophical questions such
as these may not sound like the sturdiest
foundation for a spellbinding evening of
theater. And indeed The Rake succeeds
only because Auden had the audacity to
clothe his ambitiously Kierkegaardian
ethical program in gaudy, borderline-
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be out of place on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
(One New York company refused to
premiere The Rake because the bearded
Baba the Turk no doubt represented
some “perverse sexuality.”)
I have a feeling, however, that if
Auden had been working alone, his
inner censor might have nixed some
of the opera’s freakier ideas, Baba in-
cluded. The aesthetic difference be-
tween The Rake’s Progress and one of
his sober poetic dramas, like The Age
of Anxiety, is that Auden found a part-
ner for this folie à deux, a collaborator
who would dare him to scale opera’s
campiest heights: Chester Kallman.
Auden met Kallman in New York in
the spring of 1939 and fell so deeply in
love that he later wrote of having expe-
rienced a “Vision of Eros.” Kallman,
just eighteen at the time, was quick-
witted and sophisticated beyond his
years, and as a native New Yorker he
was already an experienced operagoer;
he helped whet Auden’s appetite for
the art form by taking him on dates to
the Met. Their love affair splintered
when their respective ideas about fidel-
ity proved irreconcilable (Kallman had
no interest in monogamy), but their
commitment to each other far out-
lasted their erotic relationship. In the
fall of 1947, when Auden returned to
New York after his exhilarating initial
brainstorming sessions with Stravin-
sky in Los Angeles, he eagerly showed
Kallman the outline that he and the
composer had devised.
Kallman had a keen instinct for what
would and wouldn’t work onstage, and
he ventured a few criticisms. He sug-
gested, for instance, that it probably
wasn’t a great idea for Tom Rakewell
to summon Nick Shadow by yawning.
Auden’s original notion was that Tom’s
yawn, the gesture that betrayed his
idleness, could serve as his unconscious
invitation to his demon. But as Kall-
man pointed out, a yawn is unlikely to
be visible from the cheap seats in a big
opera house. Worse, it might even look
grotesque, like a failed attempt to sing.
Auden grudgingly admitted that Kall-
man was right but grumbled that he
shouldn’t “point out little flaws if you
have no idea what to put in their place.”
As it happened, though, Kallman
did have an idea: he suggested that
Tom could summon Shadow three
times over the course of the opera by
speaking three wishes, fairy-tale style.
This was an indisputable improvement.
Auden surely sensed that if he had Kall-
man by his side, he was much less likely
to repeat the mistakes that had made
Paul Bunyan unfunny and theatrically
inert. And so, without telling Stravin-
sky, Auden hired him as co-librettist.
Auden and Kallman’s two biggest
challenges, in adapting a series of
paintings into an evening-length the-
ater piece, were to transform eight tab-
leaux—eight frozen moments—into a
drama with a coherent arc, and to turn
the essentially passive figure of Tom
Rakewell, who in the paintings is al-
ways being groped or manhandled by
someone, into a dynamic character.
They did not merely overcome these
hurdles but went so far as to treat them
as the central subjects of the work: The
Rake’s two deepest themes are the
issue of free will—whether it exists at
all and, if it does, how it manifests—
and the question of what a mortal
human being’s relationship to time and
eternity ought to be.
Tom Rakewell suffers from what Em-
erson would have called a “disease of
the will.” When we first meet him, we
hear him convince himself that since
free will is an illusion (“it is not by
merit/We rise or we fall,/But the favor
of Fortune/That governs us all”), he is
justified in his laziness. This travestied
Calvinism makes Tom easy prey for
his demonic alter ego, Nick Shadow, a
role that has no precedent in Hogarth;
Auden cannily added Shadow to his
dramatis personae as the living embod-
iment of Tom’s diseased will.
Tom’s grotesque denial of his own
agency is matched by his tragically
unfulfilling relationship to time: he is
incapable of living in the present mo-
ment, though the mirage-like prospect
of future success is a constant source
of anxious glee for him. Auden once
suggested that Tom suffers from manic
depression (that is, bipolar disorder), as
Kallman did in reality: he is “a man to
whom the anticipation of experience is
always exciting and its realization in ac-
tual fact always disappointing.” Tom is
the anti-Orpheus: plagued by a shame
that he dares not face, he cannot look
back. As his regrets accumulate, he has
to sprint ever faster into his illusory
future in order to escape them. In the
end, his punishment is not hellfire but
rather confinement to an eternal pres-
ent in which he is left with nothing.
The opera’s final sequence, in which
Tom’s fate is sealed, is among the most
powerful things Auden ever wrote. A
year and a day after his term of service
began, Shadow leads Tom to a grave-
yard and announces that his time is up:
he will be damned upon the stroke of
midnight. First, however, Shadow un-
wisely decides to give him a final oppor-
tunity to save himself through a game of
chance. Shadow will draw three cards at
random; if Tom can guess all three, he
will be saved. With the help of Anne,
whose voice he hears in the distance,
Tom correctly guesses that Shadow has
cheated and drawn the same card (the
queen of hearts) twice. Shadow is fu-
rious—his prey has eluded him. Tom’s
many sins, however, do give Shadow
some “power to pain”: from this mo-
ment on, Tom will be insane. The grace
of Anne’s love can save Tom from dam-
nation, but it can’t give him the brains
that he has lacked from the beginning.
The scene shifts to Bedlam. Tom,
who believes himself to be Adonis, ir-
ritates his fellow patients with his ex-
hortations to prepare themselves for
Venus’s arrival. The Bedlamites an-
swer with a chorus that deserves a place
in Auden’s Collected Poems:
Leave all love and hope behind;
Out of sight is out of mind
In these caverns of the dead.
In the city overhead
Former lover, former foe
To their works and pleasures go
Nor consider who beneath
Weep and howl and gnash their
teeth. . . .
Banker, beggar, whore and wit
In a common darkness sit.
Seasons, fashions never change;
All is stale yet all is strange;
All are foes, and none are friends
In a night that never ends.
This chorus is a dark mirror of Aud-
en’s 1937 poem “Lullaby” (“Lay your
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13
sleeping head, my love”). Both poems
are written in trochaic tetrameter, the
four-beat meter whose crisp symme-
tries and fairy-tale connotations made
it a favorite of Auden’s. (It is also fa-
vored by Shakespeare’s Puck.) In
“Lullaby,” Auden has a vision of the
ephemerality of earthly happiness, em-
bodied by the fragile contentment of
his lover resting his head on Auden’s
arm. The poet is aware both of pres-
ence and of the transience of presence:
I’m alive right now/it’s all slipping
away. This relationship to time finds its
exact inversion in The Rake’s purgator-
ial chorus. In “Lullaby,” the moment is
fleeting but precious, and it may be pre-
served in memory, whereas the Bedlam
dwellers inhabit a boring, eternal pres-
ent. In their lifeless limbo, both mem-
ory and love are impossible: nothing is
precious because nothing can change.
The world outside, they claim, has for-
gotten them.
But this turns out not to be true:
Anne appears after all. She has come to
visit Tom and gamely plays along with
his delusion, pretending to be Venus to
his Adonis. For a moment, Tom is en-
tirely happy. Anne sings him a lullaby
and bids him a tearful farewell. When
Tom wakes up and asks where Venus
has gone, his fellow asylum dwellers
tell him that no one has been to see
him. Believing them, he is alone and
desolate.
The much-misused phrase “poetic
justice” could have been invented for
Auden: Tom, who refused to live in
the present, is finally left with noth-
ing but the present. We witness his
newly childlike relationship to time in
two iterations: total happiness, then
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total despair. He is both saved and not
saved. Love and grace are real, but not
omnipotent.
The pianist Craig Rutenberg, a men-
tor of mine, who met Stravinsky late in
the composer’s life, passed on a bit of
advice that Stravinsky had given him.
To perform The Rake properly, you
have to get two things right:
(1) Throughout the opera, every
tempo should be a dance tempo. It
should always be possible to dance
to the music.
(2) The singers should pronounce
the words with the inflections of
a native English speaker, even
when the music seems to demand
otherwise.
This second guideline is wiser than it
sounds. Generations of critics have
faulted Stravinsky’s text setting in The
Rake’s Progress, claiming that, as a
nonnative English speaker, he must not
have known what he was doing. The
prosody is awful! The stresses are in all
the wrong places!
But this criticism is founded on
a misunderstanding of Stravinsky’s
rhythmic language. The fact that a
particular syllable lands on the beat
does not mean that it needs to be ac-
cented; by the same token, a syllable
on an offbeat can be accented. What
Stravinsky achieves in The Rake is a
complete reversal, in the music, of the
expected placement of the poetry’s em-
phases, and this reversal is much too
consistent to be merely the fumbling of
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a befuddled old Russian expat squint-
ing through the Hollywood sunshine
at an incomprehensible assemblage of
foreign syllables. At every turn, if the
poetry is in a “duple” meter, the music
will be in a triple meter, and vice versa;
if a line begins on a “downbeat” (for
example, a trochee—a stressed sylla-
ble followed by an unstressed one), the
music will begin on an upbeat, and vice
versa. Indeed, Stravinsky’s treatment
of English poetic conventions in The
Rake is as canny and as lovingly irrev-
erent as his treatment of innumerable
musical forms throughout his career—
the Baroque concerto in his Violin
Concerto or symphonic form in his
Symphony in C and Symphony in Three
Movements.
The challenge for singers who essay
The Rake is to simultaneously articu-
late both the rhythm of the poetry and
the rhythm of the music. They should
pronounce the words naturally even
when the music thrashes like a bucking
horse beneath them. If they succeed,
something magical happens: you can
hear the ghost of Audenesque English
within Stravinsky’s transfiguration of
it. For this musical cubism to have its
full impact, the original object must
remain visible through its refractions.
This paradoxical effect is not unlike a
textural sleight of hand that Stravinsky
was fond of in his orchestrations: he
will frequently have a pair of instru-
ments—two clarinets, for instance—
play a phrase together, but one of the
musicians is instructed to play staccato
while the other plays legato. This cre-
ates a beguiling, impossible texture,
somehow pointillistic and seamless at
once.
Auden’s collaboration with Stra-
vinsky was perhaps the only creative
partnership of his life in which he was
not the bossy one; his reverence for
Stravinsky’s music, and the fact that
he was twenty-five years the compos-
er’s junior, largely kept him in check.
Even so, he and Kallman are unusually
prescriptive librettists: they specify not
only form (“Pantomime with Orches-
tra”) but also tempo (“Prestissimo.
Voices in canon”), and sometimes even
detailed musical instructions (“Baba’s
interjected interruptions become more
and more frequent and gradually both
faster and louder”).
The Rake owes much of its musical
dynamism to Stravinsky’s subtle refusal
of some of these formal prescriptions;
in some cases, he even subverts struc-
tural features that he had specifically
requested. The composer had insisted,
from the outset, that he wanted to write
not a Wagnerian “Musical Drama” but
“just an Opera with definitely sepa-
rated numbers.” Auden and Kallman
delivered what Stravinsky asked for:
they separated most “numbers” with
crisp, businesslike chunks of prose,
marked “recitative.” But Stravinsky
ended up resisting his own strictures,
transmuting many of these “recita-
tives” into stretches of meltingly lyrical
melody. Here, for example, is Baba the
Turk’s first appearance, in which she
imperiously orders Tom to help her out
of her carriage:
ORCHESTRAL RECITATIVE
BABA [interrupting with vexation]:
My love, am I to remain in here for-
ever? You know that I am not in the
habit of stepping from my sedan
unaided. Nor shall I wait, unmoved,
much longer. Finish, if you please,
whatever business is detaining you
with this person.
As admirers of Mozart’s operas, Auden
and Kallman probably had something
specific in mind: a series of parlando
outbursts, interrupted by slashing ges-
tures from the orchestra (“My love
[ SLASH], am I to remain in here for-
ever [ SLASH]?”). But Stravinsky takes
the opposite tack: his setting isn’t rec-
itative at all, but rather a sweetly lyrical
line in which two bassoons, warbling
voluptuously in the instrument’s pun-
gent upper register, wind around Ba-
ba’s voice like a pair of pet weasels.
One of Auden and Kallman’s most
specific prescriptions, and also one of
Stravinsky’s clearest refusals, comes
in the graveyard scene. According to
the printed libretto, many of Tom’s
and Shadow’s lines are “to be sung to
one or more ballad tunes in the tra-
ditional manner without expression.”
Much of the scene is indeed written
in ballad meter, with the standard end
rhymes. At the end of the scene, the
librettists also specify that Shadow’s
cry of despair when he loses the card
game (“I burn! I freeze!”) should be
sung to the same tune, “resuming the
ballad.”
These directions are extraordinarily
precise—Auden and Kallman seem
to want to compose the scene them-
selves. Their idea isn’t a bad one: in the
hands of a different composer (Kurt
Weill, for instance), the repeated use
of a single ballad tune might have been
eerie and effective. But Stravinsky
had other ideas. Tom’s lines are not
at all ballad-like: over an inexorable
trudging motion in the low strings, he
sings nervous little bursts of colora-
tura, lines whose elaborate ornamen-
tation seems to be a futile attempt to
delay the approaching confrontation.
Shadow’s first lines do possess a jaunty,
nursery-rhyme tunefulness, but his aria
at the end of the scene is altered be-
yond recognition; I doubt any listener
would guess that “I burn! I freeze!”
was intended to be a “ballad tune.”
Stravinsky explodes these lines into a
formidable Handelian rage aria, one
of the twentieth century’s most grati-
fyingly melodramatic pieces of vocal
writing. The trudging dotted rhythm
that had quietly undergirded Tom’s
earlier lines now erupts into a desper-
ate flailing, a helpless straining against
some hellish leash.
One of the deepest lessons of The
Rake’s Progress is that composer-
librettist partnerships, however amica-
ble on the surface, cannot and should
not be too friendly—or rather too
easy—at the level of the material itself.
Such partnerships are best treated as
playful wrestling matches, full of fric-
tion and evasion. Auden-Kallman’s
authorial voice is a strong one: a
weaker-willed composer than Stravin-
sky would simply have followed the li-
bretto’s instructions, and the resulting
work might have been perfectly charm-
ing. But the special magic of The Rake
derives from the pressure that Stravin-
sky and Auden-Kallman exert on each
other. To study it is to be reminded that
somehow, impossibly, a mutually sub-
versive relationship between music and
language does not necessarily cancel
itself out but can burst unforgettably to
life. Q
The New York Review
 “Essential for understanding the
trajectory and significance of India’s
twenty-first century politics.”
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15

Speak, Silence:
In Search of W. G. Sebald
by Carole Angier.
Bloomsbury, 617 pp., $32.00
He told friends his first novel had
been accepted for publication when
it hadn’t; he said he was “at home” in
Vienna before he’d ever gone there;
he claimed, falsely, to have directed a
play by Harold Pinter during his stu-
dent days at Freiburg; he said he was
a photojournalist for an American
magazine, which wasn’t true; “he told
Brigitte,” the wife of a friend, “that he
had six first names (not just three, his
usual claim later, which wasn’t true ei-
ther), and that he had ridden to his final
exams on a horse.” Less funny, more
disconcerting: in his master’s thesis
he quotes from two letters he received
from Adorno, but in fact Adorno sent
him only one. “The quotation from the
‘second’ letter comes, like the others,
from the first and only one. The sol-
emn footnote referencing the second
letter is a fake.” “Even as a respected
professor” he would, “after hunting in
vain for a forgotten source, throw up
his hands in despair and invent it.”
Then there is the problem of sources
in Sebald’s fiction—I mean beyond the
inevitable complaints about how he re-
purposed friends’ stories without their
blessing. (He “was so charming that
you told him everything . . . and then he
went away and wrote it.”) The “whole
of one page” of The Emigrants is taken
from the journal of a woman named
Thea Gebhardt, the aunt of Sebald’s
friend Peter Jordan (one of the mod-
els for the fictional Max Ferber), who
provided him with the journal but not
with permission to use it without cred-
iting Gebhardt as its source. The artist
Frank Auerbach, the other model for
Ferber, never forgave Sebald for taking
details of his life from Robert Hughes’s
biography, as well as reproducing, in the
German edition of the book, a draw-
ing of Auerbach’s without permission.
In Austerlitz, Sebald repurposed Susi
Bechhöfer’s experiences in the Kinder-
transport as she’d described them in a
BBC documentary and in her book Ro-
sa’s Child, which led her to publish an
objection titled “Stripped of My Tragic
Past by a Bestselling Author.”
He not only often failed to—or, on
whatever grounds, decided not to—ac-
knowledge his sources and models, but,
in interviews, he misrepresented the
real people and relationships behind
his fictions. Carole Angier, the author
of biographies of Primo Levi and Jean
Rhys, interviewed Sebald in the mid-
1990s about The Emigrants, the first
of his remarkable books to appear in
English, and which is divided into four
chapters tracing the lives of four exiles:
Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Am-
bros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. “So
the schoolteacher in the second story,
Paul Bereyter, and all the others, too,
were real people?” Angier asked. “And
these are their real stories?” Sebald
responded:
Essentially, yes, with some small
changes. . . . [The models for] Dr.
Selwyn and his wife lived a smart
country life for years. Terribly well
16
The Storyteller
Ben Lerner
W.G. Sebald; illustration by Yann Kebbi
spoken, he was, terribly well spo-
ken . . . he told me about Grodno,
sooner than I say in the story, but
very cursorily. The first time I
thought, this is not a straight En-
glish gentleman, was at a Christ-
mas party they gave. There was
this huge living room and a blaz-
ing fire, and one very incongruous
lady. Dr. Selwyn introduced her
as his sister from Tel Aviv. And of
course then I knew.
Knew, that is, that the real Selwyn was
Jewish. In The Emigrants (like Angier,
I consider it his best book), Selwyn is a
melancholy, charming, eccentric doctor
and naturalist who reveals to the narra-
tor that, while he seems thoroughly En-
glish, his family in fact emigrated from
Lithuania when he was a young child.
It is typical Sebaldian quiet that the
word “Jewish” doesn’t appear in the
chapter, but Selwyn mentions attend-
ing a cheder. “I changed my first name
Hersch into Henry, and my surname
Seweryn to Selwyn.” At the chapter’s
end, Selwyn shoots himself, becoming
the first of the many figures in Sebald’s
writing who commit suicide when a
repressed past surfaces later in life.
“Certain things, as I am increasingly
becoming aware,” the narrator muses,
“have a way of returning unexpectedly,
often after a lengthy absence.”
Early in Speak, Silence, Angier iden-
tifies the sources for the Selwyns. The
doctor, she tells us, was based on the
late Philip Rhoades Buckton, whose
family and estate she visits. Like Sel-
wyn, “Sebald’s landlord and friend in
Abbotsford was a doctor, a naturalist,
and a reserved man of old-fashioned
courtesy. He was also,” like Selwyn,
“married to a Swiss wife who was
more practical and socially ambitious
than himself; he was tall and broad-
shouldered but stooped,” as Sebald
describes Selwyn, “and he often lay
on the grass of his lawn to examine an
insect, a plant, perhaps even a blade of
grass,” which is how Sebald’s narrator
first encounters the doctor in The Emi-
grants. “And he did,” Angier says,
a few years after the Sebalds left
Abbotsford, take his own life with
a hunting rifle. In other words, he
was almost exactly like Dr. Henry
Selwyn except in the most im-
portant respect. For he not only
seemed English; he was English,
through and through. He was born
in Cheshire, not Lithuania, and he
didn’t have a Jewish bone in his
body.
Sebald’s books suggest that we are
powerless to remember adequately and
powerless to forget. Memory invari-
ably involves falsification (“And the
last remnants memory destroys” is the
epigraph to “Dr. Henry Selwyn”), and
what we repress always comes back,
often with deadly results. Repetition
is both his technique and theme; his
books are more patterned than plotted;
the way phrases and figures and events
recur at intervals enacts what he and
his characters so often describe: a ver-
tiginous sense that the past has erupted
in the present, that the dead are with
us (“And so they are always returning
to us, the dead”), that we have doubles
(“I felt as if an invisible twin brother
were walking beside me, the reverse of
a shadow,” says Austerlitz).
I have been rereading his books, but
reading Sebald for the first time feels
like rereading; we experience déjà lu
in step with his narrator’s déjà vu. In
part this is a function of Sebald’s use of
allusion and collage. His phrases, sen-
tences, even paragraphs are often lifted
from or echo other writers; a critical
cottage industry has been built around
tracking down the sources he integrates
so seamlessly into his own melancholic
voice. This means that even his nar-
rator’s most personal statements are
ghostly and choral and anachronistic
and often vaguely familiar in their very
texture. And the length of his sentences
can cause you to forget and recover
their subject several times in a single
syntactic unit; one sentence in Auster-
litz is more than seven pages long.
The sense of having read this before
is also an effect of the way he elabo-
rates motifs within and across books.
Some of these repetitions are unmis-
takable—the Nabokov figure with his
butterfly net who recurs across The
Emigrants, Kafka’s “Hunter Gracchus”
whose appearances structure Vertigo,
the star-shaped architectural pattern
that more subtly haunts Austerlitz, the
“crystalized twigs” that figure in mul-
tiple books, and so on. And on. Some
of these motifs grow a little loud. (Do
we need quite so much of Gracchus—
the hunter suspended between life and
death, who can neither be buried nor re-
stored to life, and so serves as Sebald’s
supreme figure for the impossibility of
integrating the past, of moving from
melancholy to mourning?) And some
motifs are so quiet they might not really
be motifs at all, such as the multiple
mentions of people firing guns into the
air in The Emigrants. I start to wonder,
as I make my little checks in the mar-
gins, if I’ve perceived a pattern where
there is none. Sebald probably intended
his readers to feel that doubt, given that
his narrator’s supersensitivity to coinci-
dence often shades into paranoia.
In one sense Sebald’s use and de-
piction of repetition are historically
specific, a German gentile’s reckon-
ing with the legacy of the Holocaust.
It is far from his only concern, but it’s
never far from any of his concerns. It
is the tragedy he can neither respon-
sibly “remember” (both because he
wasn’t there and because artifice risks
simplifying, supplanting the reality it
supposedly depicts) nor forget. An-
gier’s title—in addition to constituting
another Nabokov allusion—refers first
and foremost to Sebald’s commitment
The New York Review
to breaking what he called “the con-
spiracy of silence” surrounding the
Nazi past in Germany in the aftermath
of World War II. He never forgets, but
he never pretends to have arrived at a
form of remembering equal to a hor-
ror that exceeds representation; his
melancholic repetitions become a way
of addressing, and acknowledging the
complexity of addressing, the genocide
of the European Jewry.
But Sebald’s obsessive repetitions
can also threaten to undermine histor-
ical specificity. This ambiguity is built
into repetition as method: it concret-
izes and abstracts, heightens and flat-
tens, focuses attention and disperses
it, marks an event as significant at the
cost of its singularity. Even the lightest
of Sebald’s motifs, Nabokov, “the man
with the butterfly net” who appears
impossibly across The Emigrants, nec-
essarily works against the individuality
of each life that is being elegized. (This
is the point, or part of it; the figures
serve to declare artifice, to acknowl-
edge fictionality.) The repetition that is
doubling also blurs as much as it differ-
entiates: Paul Bereyter, the teacher, is
based on a teacher of Sebald’s, but he’s
also clearly based on Wittgenstein.
More generally, if history is one long
catastrophe returning in new guises,
the work of historical reckoning can
pass into a transhistorical fatalism.
This is why I can lose patience with
Sebald’s narrators’ tendency to see
only ruins, which is a way of not see-
ing forms of life and meaning-making
that have sprung and might spring up in
their midst. It’s not that it’s depressing;
it’s that it’s leveling. And this is why
I’ve always found passages like the one
that ends The Emigrants disconcerting,
all the more so for being lovely.
The narrator describes a photograph
of a workshop in the Litzmannstadt
Ghetto:
Behind the perpendicular frame
of a loom sit three young women,
perhaps aged twenty. The irregular
geometrical patterns of the carpet
they are knotting, and even its co-
lours, remind me of the settee in
our living room at home.
Even the patterns in the carpets start to
form a pattern.
The young woman in the middle
is blonde and has the air of a bride
about her. The weaver to her left
has inclined her head a little to one
side, whilst the woman on the right
is looking at me with so steady and
relentless a gaze that I cannot meet
it for long. I wonder what the three
women’s names were—Roza, Luisa
and Lea, or Non, Decuma and
Morta, the daughters of night, with
spindle, scissors and thread.
Sebald makes these three nameless
young Jewish women the Three Fates;
the gaze he can’t hold is Death’s, but
then Sebald saw Death everywhere. He
was no doubt aware of the tension be-
tween historical memory and mytholo-
gization; to an extent we could say that
is his subject here, and “here” is a work
of fiction. Still, what is on one level an
encounter with the reality of the work-
shops of Litzmannstadt is on another
level the erasure of its particularity
through the return of the Moirai.
October 21, 2021
The mythical tendency in Sebald
isn’t only doom and bad abstraction. It
is also a source of wonder and beauty—
and as close as he gets to hope. The
books are laced with little synchro-
nicities, hidden symmetries, hints of
domains beyond the rational, beyond
the merely human. (There is infinite
hope in Sebald, one might say, but not
for us.) “I’ve always thought it very re-
grettable and, in a sense, also foolish,”
Sebald told the writer Joseph Cuomo,
that the philosophers decided
somewhere in the nineteenth cen-
tury that metaphysics wasn’t a re-
spectable discipline and had to be
thrown overboard, and reduced
themselves to becoming logicians
and statisticians. It seemed a very
poor diet, somehow, to me.
Sebald collects—like a man with a but-
terfly net?—the small traces of myste-
rious orders.
But the beauty is itself double- edged.
The exquisite patterning, the archaic
involutions of syntax, the lyricism:
Does Sebald’s style reinscribe a sense
of human possibility while keeping vigil
with the dead? Or does it merely aes-
theticize catastrophe? “In his classes
on Hans Erich Nossack and Alexander
Kluge,” Angier tells us, Sebald “said
that they were the only ones who wrote
adequately of the bombing of the cit-
ies, and that their witness-messenger
style was the only possible and decent
one.” Kluge’s writing—still too little
known in the US—largely disavows lit-
erariness and instead experiments with
the flat affect and language of admin-
istration to explore modern systems
of organized destruction. Kluge’s use
of photographs almost certainly influ-
enced Sebald’s, as did his mixing of fact
and fiction and his open engagement
with both the Third Reich and Allied
firebombings. Many of the claims for
Sebald’s novelty are exaggerated—but
then those claims for novelty weren’t
made, so far as I know, by Sebald
himself.
“In his classes on Peter Weiss and
Jean Améry,” Angier continues, “he
said that ‘only from these Jewish writ-
ers can we get any real insight’ into the
experience of the victims.” With these
statements Sebald could be prepar-
ing to condemn his own work, which
he often does within his work, where he
(or at least his narrator) claims to be
continuously tormented by scru-
ples that were taking tighter hold
and steadily paralysing me. These
scruples concerned not only the
subject of my narrative, which I felt
I could not do justice to, no mat-
ter what approach I tried, but also
the entire questionable business of
writing.
There is a fine line between an illu-
minating sensitivity to historical cor-
respondence and the loss of historical
specificity; between a vigilant acknowl-
edgment of the complexity of his con-
frontations with the Holocaust and
stylized, general despair, which risks
making all tragedies fungible; between
being open to intimations of alternative
orders and paranoia (Sebald’s narrator
often feels pursued); and between em-
pathic identification with victims and
appropriation of their experience. Se-
bald’s work has been important to me
not because it solves any of these prob-
lems but because it makes them felt. To
take him seriously is to find his books
unsettling.
“If you read him without question-
ing, and are moved—that is his main
aim,” Angier writes in the preface to
her biography:
I remind you of the truth. That is
the job of the biographer. It’s why
writers don’t want biographers,
and I know Sebald wouldn’t want
me. But I would say to him, You’re
wrong. You always wanted people
to believe your stories. But they
will believe them more, not less,
when they know the truth.
I am confused by this statement in sev-
eral ways. I can’t imagine that Sebald
(or for that matter any serious writer)
would want us to read him “without
questioning,” whatever that means,
especially when Sebald, as Angier so
meticulously documents, constantly
shifts between soliciting and frustrat-
ing our confidence in the historical
veracity of his work. That his narrator
so closely resembles him, that he uses
images which, at least at first, seem
to offer documentary evidence about
the people and places in his “stories,”
that his techniques and tonalities are
more often associated with nonfictional
genres (the essay, the travelogue, re-
portage), and so on—these tactics pro-
duce truth effects he then immediately
undermines.
The narrator, say, claims to be repro-
ducing passages from his uncle’s journal
(there’s a photograph of the “agenda”),
but nobody could mistake the dream-
like prose poem that follows, whether
it draws on a real journal or not, for
anybody but Sebald. (Nobody in Se-
bald sounds like anybody but Se-
bald; he isn’t interested in a mimesis
of other voices.) In “Max Ferber,”
he describes and then reproduces a
faked photograph of a book-burning
in Würzburg; the burning itself really
happened, but “since it was already
dark . . . they couldn’t take any decent
photographs” (see illustration on page
18). This, on the simplest level, is one
of myriad warnings to the reader not
to be seduced by the supposed objec-
tivity of archival photographs. I would
feel silly multiplying examples here of
Sebald demanding that we question
text, image, him; that’s what reading
Sebald is. And surely by “stories” An-
gier doesn’t mean his stories about his
stories, his claims about his sources,
since few will “believe them more, not
less” when some of the main “truths”
revealed by her biography are Se-
bald’s misrepresentations, starting
with the way he misled her—Angier
is clear that she considers it deliber-
ate—about Philip Rhoades Buckton.
Maybe Angier means the “truth”
about Sebald’s life—that if we under-
stand the man, despite his preference
for privacy, we will then believe in the
work, “believe” in the sense of better
grasp its importance? Or does she mean
that we’ll believe more in the goodness
of his intentions? It does seem by the
end of Speak, Silence that Angier feels
she is in possession of the fundamental
“truth” of Sebald. Here I need to quote
two paragraphs from late in the book:
Scholars like Mark Anderson and
Uwe Schütte, friends like Rich-
ard Sheppard, all look back to
childhood trauma as the source
of Sebald’s troubles. Their candi-
dates are, as we know, the death
of his grandfather and his clashes
with his father. But what is more
common than the death of grand-
parents, and—especially in his
generation—clashes with one’s
father? Gertrud [Sebald’s sister] is
sure that Georg [Sebald’s father]
never seriously maltreated her
brother, as we also know. But now
we have, I think, an explanation:
normal experience was a trauma to
the child Winfried, as to the man
Max [Sebald]. His father cutting
his hair and scrubbing him, his
mother dressing and watching him,
anyone photographing him—all
were ordinary experiences, but to
him traumatic and intolerable. So
was the death of his grandfather a
trauma beyond normal loss, and so
too, therefore, was the experience
of the film about the concentration
camps, and the dawning knowl-
edge of what had happened. That
was not an ordinary experience for
anyone. Nonetheless, Gertrud and
Beate could survive it, Ursula and
Jürgen and the other friends could
survive it. But not Walter Kalham-
mer, and not Max.
So much falls into place now. His
hyperbole, for instance, so surpris-
ingly common in his subtle work,
and the basis of his melancholy
humour—it wasn’t really hyper-
bole at all. He wasn’t exaggerating
about his awful train journeys, or
his encounters with awful peo-
ple, though he played to his au-
dience’s belief that he was: it was
his experience that was extreme,
not its expression. Or his feeling,
from his schooldays on, of being
overwhelmed by work and longing
for peace. He did vast amounts of
work, always. But the feeling of
being overwhelmed came from far
more than that. It came from his
universal penetrability, his artist’s
disease.
What can “trauma” mean when it
means anything, means everything?
A struggle over a haircut, the loss of
a loved one, a train trip, having your
photo taken, your first encounter with
the shocking footage of the genocide
in which your family was complicit?
This is leveling in the extreme, every-
thing rendered interchangeable by a
supersensitivity that—if it means the
collapse of all distinctions—becomes
a species of insensibility. I lose sight of
any actual person altogether in this de-
scription; it is an intense version of the
trope (and tropes aren’t people) of the
Romantic artist whose troubles—“how
sensitive he was, how hard life was for
him, how he grew more depressive with
age”—signify the depth of his genius.
In this account Sebald becomes a Whit-
manic or even Christlike figure. “Why
was he the one to suffer for Germany,”
Angier asks, “and beyond Germany for
the whole world?”
I have trouble reconciling this
“truth” about Sebald with Angier’s
belief that he is “the German writer
who most deeply took on the burden
of German responsibility for the Ho-
locaust.” The diagnosis of this “artist’s
disease” erases both Sebald’s particu-
larity and his capacity to reckon with
17
particulars; it is the image of a per-
son who, as Angier puts it, “makes no
distinction between the herrings and the
victims of Bergen-Belsen.” I want to be
clear that I’m in no way suggesting that
Angier—a thorough researcher and
the daughter, as she says, of Viennese
Jews who fled the Nazis—is suggesting
that all catastrophe is interchangeable.
But if this is somehow Sebald’s truth,
it strikes me as a startling indictment,
not a defense of the writer. The vertigo
I feel reading Speak, Silence is that pre-
cisely where it approaches hagiography
I find it damning.
Others “could survive it”—“it” being
the knowledge of the Nazi past—but
not Walter Kalhammer, Sebald’s friend
who killed himself, and not “Max.”
But Sebald’s death in a car accident in
2001—his daughter was with him and
thankfully survived—was not a sui-
cide. Angier reports that the inquest
revealed that Sebald most likely had
a heart attack, but her account of his
life seems to require that his death be,
if not deliberate, fated; his death must
help things “fall into place.”
Early in the book, Angier recalls
how Sebald, flipping through an album
during an interview with the journal-
ist Arthur Lubow, pointed out a pho-
tograph from 1933 that his father had
taken of a fellow soldier who had died
in a car accident. Sebald told Lubow
that he first saw the photograph when
he was five and said that he had “a
hunch that this is where it all began—a
great disaster that had occurred, which
I knew nothing about.” Lubow consid-
ers this the primal scene of Sebald’s
obsessive interest in both photography
and death, but Angier asks, “Was this
the silent catastrophe he felt around
him, hidden not in the past, but the
future?” Was it, that is, a premonition
that he was meant to die in a car crash?*
Later she writes, “In some mysterious
way, Max Sebald and car accidents
were connected,” but, beyond the fact
that a crash is important in his first (un-
published) novel, the main connection
seems to be that he was a horrendous
driver, clumsy and easily distracted,
and that he’d already experienced
some harrowing near misses before his
fatal accident.
Since Angier accepts that the car
crash wasn’t suicide, the only way I
can understand her claim that Sebald
“couldn’t survive it” is if we view his
heart attack (assuming that’s what hap-
pened) to have been directly caused
by his “universal penetrability”—that
his heart literally broke or burst from
accumulated sorrow as he drove with
his daughter on that summer day. But
that is not what an inquest shows when
it shows that your arteries are “80 per-
cent occluded,” arterial disease is not
artist’s disease, and while of course
Sebald’s early death felt painfully res-
onant with the darkness of his work,
Angier seems to me to be imposing an
aesthetic pattern on the complexity and
contingency of a real life. “He didn’t
choose that death,” Angier concludes
her book, “with his daughter beside him.
But when it came to him that way, it was
what he’d always thought coincidence
was: destiny.” This sentence seems to
me disfigured by a contradictory desire
to acknowledge contingency even while
abstracting it into mythology.
*Angier describes her own specula-
tions here as “dubious,” but neverthe-
less speculates.
18
I find all this distressing because of what
I consider the (subtler) risks of pattern-
ing and mythologization within Sebald’s
work—that tension between illumina-
tion and obfuscation, between exploring
the burdens of historical memory and
aestheticizing history, of making real
people Fates or fated, which denies both
agency (that we might change, individ-
ually and collectively) and accident
(that you might get struck by lightning
without its meaning anything). Sebald,
however, was writing—for all his blur-
ring of genres—fiction, what he once
called “semi- documentary fiction,” not
biography, and despite his obsession
with historical echoes, his books refuse
closure, refuse the sense that every-
thing must, ultimately, “fall into place.”
I also find that Angier’s descriptions
of Sebald’s “truth”—that everything
A doctored photograph of a book burning on the Residenzplaz in
Würzburg, Germany, 1933; from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
was trauma, that he suffered for all
of us and died for or from his suffer-
ing—jar with the revelations and col-
locations of her patient research, those
misrepresentations I began by cata-
loging. Angier has many terms for Se-
bald’s untruths—“Sebaldian games,”
“fairy tales,” “whoppers,” and some-
times “lies.” Who cares about his fibs
about his name or exams or student
theater days? They are inconsequen-
tial and sometimes a little charming.
I’m not interested in lies he might have
told in his private life, but what about
claiming, in your graduate thesis, to
possess a second letter from a major
Jewish intellectual? Angier reports
that “Richard Sheppard, who uncov-
ered this Sebaldian joke, says that it ‘is
not a case of academic dishonesty,’ but
of ‘Max the Schelm [trickster] having
a . . . laugh at his examiners’ expense.’”
Assuming we’re not overinterpreting
an innocent mistake, is the joke funny?
If you are a young German scholar at-
tacking, as Sebald was, Carl Sternheim
(who was half Jewish, banned by the
Nazis, and died in Belgium in 1942) for
his aesthetic and moral failings, to lie
about receiving a letter from Adorno
(among other things, a Jewish refugee)
seems to me a pretty bad joke. (Stern-
heim was “hopelessly trapped in the
process of assimilation,” Sebald writes
in the English-language abstract to his
German thesis; “not only was Stern-
heim unable to create an ethically and
aesthetically valuable and independent
work, but, further [he] was forced to
reproduce the fallacies, idiosyncrasies
and prejudices of the Wilhelminian
ideology.”) I won’t go on about why I
find the “fake footnote” perplexing,
even if Sebald thought he was just trav- weaving out of disparate materials an
estying the academy in a thesis nobody artwork that will not live or die accord-
would read, but I was startled by An- ing to fact- checkers.
gier’s interpretation: Still, I agree with Angier that his not
seeking permission from Peter Jordan
But there is a last surprise, which to use language from Gebhardt’s jour-
sheds a very different light on this nal or his failure to credit Bechhöfer
strange fake footnote. Adorno was were “wrongs”—especially because of
a Jewish refugee from Nazism. his position and subject matter. “Both
Max dated the fictional second let- were wrongs,” Angier says, “against
ter from him to 17 May, which is the just those people with whom he felt
date both of Ferber’s escape from more imaginative sympathy than any
Germany and of his murdered other German writer.” The question,
mother’s birthday. And, of course, of course, is when “imaginative sym-
the day before Max’s own birthday. pathy” passes into exploitative appro-
That is, in his dissertation of 1968 priation. Certainly he could have been
he was already making a magical frank in interviews.
connection between himself and
victims of the Holocaust. Thus,
what he hid in his fake footnote Which brings us back to the “whop-
was not only a lie and laugh, but per” with which Angier’s book began—
the lie Sebald told her about Rhoades
Stadtarchiv Würzburg, Germany/New Directions
Buckton when she interviewed him.
“He had spun me a tale.” It was a tale
that traveled; Angier notes that it has
“been repeated ever since.” Will Self
repeated it when he gave the annual
W. G. Sebald Lecture in 2010. Rhoades
Buckton’s granddaughter, Tessa, at-
tended that lecture and approached
Self, who referred her to Angier’s in-
terview. Angier writes:
I can see only one answer: that he
wanted readers to believe his story,
and used me to confirm it. He
wanted us to believe that he had
known a mysteriously suffering
Englishman who turned out to be
a Jew. If he wasn’t a Jew, it would
be a quite different story.
But would it have been a different
story—assuming that “story” here
means “Dr. Henry Selwyn” in The Em-
beneath them the opposite, the ca- igrants—if Sebald had told the truth
tastrophe for which he would spend about the model for his character? Most
the rest of his life trying to atone. fictional characters are composites of
people the author knows (or thinks
The “fictional second letter” shares a she knows) and whatever alterations
date with Max Ferber’s escape—ex- the larger pattern of the work requires.
cept Max Ferber isn’t a real person, but The closer the fictional character is to
a character (albeit based on at least two an identifiable historical person, the
real people) in a work of fiction. And higher the risk of giving offense—An-
since that date is the day before Se- gier tells us that Rhoades Buckton’s
bald’s birthday, this lie about Adorno family wasn’t upset about Sebald claim-
is recuperated as a sign of Sebald’s ing he was Jewish, but about his suicide
“magical connection” to those who being “used”—or leading readers to
perished in the Holocaust. I’m unable believe you’re just calling your writing
to view Sebald’s misrepresenting his fiction to avoid getting sued.
correspondence with Adorno in order Yet it’s not obvious to me that The
to demote Sternheim as part of his Emigrants, that deftly patterned work,
atoning for the Nazi past. I don’t know would be a different book if we knew
what Sebald thought he was doing, but more about its basis in fact. Again,
if Angier is right and he felt authorized we might debate whether any blur-
to lie in his dissertation because of his ring of fact and fiction in a book that
“magical connection” to Holocaust vic- even obliquely touches the Holocaust
tims, I again see her ostensibly sympa- is morally hazardous, or whether it’s a
thetic account as an indictment. species of appropriation for a German
The questions about his right to re- writer to turn gentiles into Jews, and so
purpose the experiences (e.g., Susi on. But even these moral debates will
Bechhöfer, Frank Auerbach) and even usually feed back into aesthetic ones,
the writing of others (e.g., Thea Geb- return us to the books, not the stories
hardt) without permission or cred- behind them, because our sense of
iting them are murkier. How do you whether these costs were in some sense
acknowledge—not just in an acknowl- worth it will depend on how valuable
edgments page but in the structure of we ultimately find the artworks.
the work itself—that you have models To me, it’s the lie that risks making
and that you’ve departed from them? it quite a different story. It troubles my
Here Sebald’s purposeful destabili- sense that the books are powerful in
zation of fact and fiction, and his dra- part because they willfully but elegantly
matic alteration of the facts in question, undercut their own authority, their
within his four great books of prose fic- claims to objectivity. It might support
tion is a moral and aesthetic necessity, Angier’s assertion, in her discussion of
not some sort of failing: it foregrounds the Adorno footnote, that Sebald “lived
artifice, constructedness; it proclaims more in his imagination than in the real
that Sebald is experimenting with mak- world,” but if that renders him unable or
ing sense, making pattern, that he is unwilling to tell the difference between
The New York Review
fact and fiction, history and myth, how
can she consider him to be the German
writer who most took on the “burden of
responsibility” for German history? Or
maybe it’s not that Sebald “wanted us to
believe”; maybe he wanted to get caught,
outed, made to do public penance for
his canonization as the good German,
given his aforementioned “scruples”?
But look at how I’m now also transform-
ing trespass into atonement.
One last lie, this one better known:
Sebald told many interviewers, includ-
ing James Wood, that the image of the
boy dressed as a page that appears on
the cover of Austerlitz was a photo-
graph of a real-life architect who was
the model for Joseph Austerlitz. When
Wood examined the Sebald archive in
Marbach am Neckar in 2011, he turned
it over and saw that someone had writ-
ten the name of the English town where
it was purchased and a price: “Stock-
port: 30p.” Wood interprets all this as
Sebald’s slyly introducing “a note of the
unreliable”—not an attempt to make
us “believe his story,” as Angier has it,
but the opposite:
To register that he himself, who
was not Jewish and had only an
indirect connection to the Shoah,
was merely a survivor of the sur-
vivors—and even then only in a
figurative sense. And also perhaps
to register that the novelist who
writes, of all outrageous things,
fiction about the Holocaust cannot
have a comfortable and straight-
forward relation to the real.
It would be reassuring if Sebald’s pur-
pose—however much I think the lie he
told Angier is different from the one
he told Wood, and callous in its instru-
mentalization of Rhoades Buckton and
his family—had been to undermine his
own authority as opposed to bolstering
it, a time-release acknowledgment of
fictionality his readers must first swal-
low as fact. This seems more consistent
with the spirit of the work, but I don’t
pretend to know. If something like that
is the case, a softer version of the self-
sabotage I imagined above, then the
irony of Angier’s defenses of Sebald—
he couldn’t tell imagination from real-
ity, he desperately needed us to believe
him, and so on—is that they make his
misrepresentations seem much worse
than they were.
Toward the end of her book, Angier
enumerates some of the common crit-
icisms of Sebald’s work, noting that CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNER OF THE
many share the “objection,” which she
describes as “worthless,” that 2021 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Sebald’s portrayal of Germany’s
victims, and of all the victims, DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD
human and animal, of the mani-
fold cruelties of nature and history
is exploitative, an appropriation of
I AM THE PEOPLE by Partha Chatterjee
suffering that is not his in order to
lend his work a spurious serious-
ness. This is not a textual point, but
a personal one, about his motivation
and sincerity. It is, in other words, a
RUNNERS-UP
biographical point, made by people
who know nothing about Sebald’s CRITIQUE AND PRAXIS by Bernard E. Harcourt
biography. It would have been bet-
ter for him if they’d been right. But
they’re wrong. The unique empathy
INVENTING TOMORROW by Sarah Cole
of his work was genuine.
I’ve already written at length about
how I worry her defenses of Sebald’s
“unique empathy” threaten to hollow
out the claim for the “genuine.” I also
disagree that the question of whether
or not his “portrayal of . . .victims”
WINNER
is “exploitative” is ultimately a “bi-
ographical point” and not a textual one.
I’m not saying that Sebald’s motiva-
tions are wholly irrelevant to our sense
of his books (clearly I’ve been speculat-
ing about his intentions myself), but a
sincere belief that you can understand
or share the feelings and experiences of
others is hardly proof against appropri-
ation; that’s often how it starts.
“The difficulty and slipperiness of
empathy,” as Saidiya Hartman, who
has spoken admiringly of Sebald, puts
it, “lies in its capacity to lend to appro-
priation. In making the other’s suffer-
ing one’s own this suffering is occluded
by the other’s obliteration.” Sebald is a
significant writer not because he meant
well or had, as Angier describes it,
“mirror-touch-synaesthesia-like pene-
trability.” It’s because his formally in-
novative fictions enable us to feel the
past in the present while also acknowl-
edging the instability of memory. The
work poses but does not answer the
questions of when empathy shades into
appropriation or history into myth or a
moral reckoning into the aestheticiza-
tion of tragedy. Writing is a question-
able business. Q RUNNER-UP

CAROUSEL
RUNNER-UP
All you have been and all
you have experienced has happened to me.
I travel from my future to your past to lose
my origins. What’s the beginning?
Where? There was a loophole, and I was the camel
that went through. One hump or two?
The answers to my questions are beyond me
but I only ask questions with answers I can believe.
I have seen the world without you in it
and it’s not what you think.
In the future you will see
that it was me who gave you the order to ruin my past.
In my past you will seem wicked.
I will not accept your innocence.

—Fady Joudah

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

October 21, 2021 19

 ‘Who Designs Your Race?’
Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21
an exhibition at El Museo
del Barrio, New York City,
March 13–September 26, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Rodrigo Moura,
Susanna V. Temkin, and Elia Alba.
El Museo del Barrio,
331 pp., $35.00 (paper)
In 1925 the Mexican philosopher,
writer, and former education minister
José Vasconcelos published an essay
that was as consequential as it was ab-
surd. “La raza cósmica” (“The Cosmic
Race”) was an esoteric meditation on
the future of civilization, which helped
shape the way race is viewed in Latin
America to this day. Its premise is that
history is a lengthy struggle between
Latin and Anglo- Saxon cultures; this
conflict continued in the New World
with Spain and England’s enterprises
there. In the future, he argued, this
struggle would be resolved by the ar-
rival of the so- called fifth race, which
would emerge from the Americas as a
hybrid of all other races—Black, white,
Indigenous, and Asian.
Sounds good? Well, this is where
Vasconcelos goes off the rails. The
fifth race would settle in the Ama-
zon, where they would build a utopia
called Universópolis, from which they
would deploy their armies to “educate
peoples for their induction into knowl-
edge.” This “final” race, “a race made
with the treasures of all those before
it,” would be singularly beautiful, he
wrote, because “the very ugly will not
procreate.”
“La raza cósmica” might seem like a
detour into the Mexican bizarre. And,
in many ways, it is. One of Vasconce-
los’s many cockamamie theories is that
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
are the long-lost descendants of the
inhabitants of Atlantis. But the essay’s
broader idea proved influential, putting
forward a pan–Latin American identi-
ty—“Latinidad”—based on the figure
of the mestizo, a person of mixed race.
(In Latin America mestizo mostly de-
scribes people who are of European
and Indigenous descent.)
Vasconcelos was hardly alone in
promoting the idea of mestizaje. He
was part of a wave of nineteenth- and
twentieth- century artists, intellectu-
als, and political leaders across Latin
America who in the hybrid figure of the
mestizo found a unifying narrative for a
fractious continent. Vasconcelos, how-
ever, was particularly well positioned
to popularize the idea: as an educator,
politician, and public intellectual, he
shaped pedagogies and built libraries
at a time when Mexican culture was
reverberating throughout Latin Amer-
ica in the aftermath of the revolution
(1910–1920). He also commissioned
Diego Rivera to paint a series of mu-
rals depicting aspects of Mexican cul-
ture and history at the National Palace
and the headquarters of the Ministry
of Public Education in Mexico City.
These show the violent subjugation of
Indigenous people by the Spanish; they
also present the mixed-race society that
emerged as a result. One panel at the
National Palace shows conquistador
Hernán Cortés beside the Indigenous
woman Malinche, who carries their
20
Carolina A. Miranda
Nyugen E. Smith: Bundlehouse Borderlines No. 6 (_emembe_), 2008
mixed-race child on her back. Rivera
was far more realistic than Vasconce-
los in revealing the violence that was
the source of so much mestizaje, but
his murals—lasting artistic achieve-
ments—nonetheless promoted the idea
of an all-encompassing mestizo identity.
Vasconcelos’s reach even extended
north to the United States. In the 1960s
“La raza cósmica” was seized upon by
Chicano artists and activists who were
intrigued by the politics of the Mexican
Revolution and Vasconcelos’s notion of
a collective identity. In this setting, an
embrace of mestizaje became a state-
ment of affirmation, and “la raza,”
a phrase used colloquially among
Mexican-Americans when referring to
themselves, was popularized as a ral-
lying cry, appearing in the names of
newspapers and art and activist orga-
nizations, its central concept of hybrid
and in-between states represented in
countless murals, paintings, and prints.
This included imagery that, like Ri-
vera’s, tackled colonization and all that
followed. A 1974 print by the Texas-born
artist Amado M. Peña, for example,
who is of Mexican and Yaqui ances-
try, shows three heads fusing into one,
under which is written “MESTIZO.”
Others engaged these concepts more in-
directly. In his fantastical paintings, the
late Los Angeles artist Gilbert “Magu”
Nyugen E. Smith
Luján created imaginary landscapes
that feature Western and Indigenous
architectural forms, as well as nods to
Southern Californian car culture. “Viva
La Raza” (Long Live the People), an
expression popularized by the Chicano
civil rights movement and emblazoned
in many murals, became a shorthand
for empowerment. When the Mexican-
American performer Kid Frost rapped
“This is for La Raza” on MTV in the
early 1990s, before bouncing lowriders
and cityscapes with Chicano murals,
he owed a sliver of intellectual debt to
Vasconcelos.
To this day, Latinidad—the spacious
container of pan–Latin Americanism—
remains the dominant way of under-
standing identity in Latin America
and, by extension, Latino identity in
the United States. Yet politically, cul-
turally, and artistically, the term is los-
ing its usefulness, fractured by all that
it holds and all that it has erased.
In the 2020 US presidential election
Donald Trump received a higher pro-
portion of the so- called Latino vote
than he had in 2016, leading much of
the media to (belatedly) realize that
Latinos are not a monolithic group and
may be affected by some of the same
issues of race, class, and economic self-
interest that shape the US electorate
as a whole. “If we want to understand
how Latinos vote,” wrote the New York
Times opinion editor Isvett Verde last
November, “we should start by retiring
the word ‘Latino’ entirely.”
Last year’s Black Lives Matter up-
risings brought further scrutiny to the
ongoing debate about who exactly is in-
cluded in the meaning of “Latino.” In
2018 #LatinidadIsCancelled became
a popular social media hashtag after
the Afro-Indigenous artist and writer
Alan Pelaez Lopez, who is from Mex-
ico, used it in an Instagram post. Pelaez
Lopez made note of the ways this catch-
all identity favors European culture at
the expense of Black and Indigenous
representation. To be Latino in the
popular imagination is to exhibit some
combination of (light) brown skin and
speaking Spanish. Pelaez Lopez’s point
was revived this summer in the contro-
versy over the casting of Lin-Manuel
Miranda’s movie musical In the Heights,
which favored fair-skinned Latino leads
for a story set in Washington Heights,
a historically Afro-Dominican neigh-
borhood. (In response to accusations of
colorism, Miranda apologized: “I hear
that without sufficient dark-skinned
Afro-Latino representation, the work
feels extractive of the community we
wanted so much to represent with pride
and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of
this community, we fell short.”)
But obscuring Blackness and Indi-
geneity is at the very root of Latini-
dad, which privileges an identity that,
though mixed, is always firmly rooted
in the European. Vasconcelos said as
much in “La raza cósmica.” He may
have rhapsodized about mestizaje,
but he by no means viewed the exist-
ing races as equal. He celebrated the
Christian evangelization of Indige-
nous people, which he claimed brought
them out of “cannibalism into relative
civilization” in just “a few centuries.”
(And, as Mexico’s secretary of educa-
tion, he disapproved of teaching Indig-
enous schoolchildren in their native
languages.) He described Asians as
“reproducing like mice.” In the utopia
he envisioned, Black people would be
completely absorbed into the new fifth
race—i.e., disappeared through misce-
genation. Vasconcelos is clear that his
cosmic race is less a true hybrid than
a mixture in which a lot of Spanish in-
cludes a few dashes of other races.
In truth, in Latin America, identity
is not one, but many: Black, white, In-
digenous, Asian, mestizo, and various
permutations thereof—with ethnicity,
language, sexuality, gender, and na-
tional identities also critical to deter-
mining how individuals see themselves.
As in the US, systemic racism has kept
those who aren’t fair-skinned or those
who don’t acculturate on the margins.
The UN Refugee Agency’s human
rights reports on Latin America are
primers in the disenfranchisement of
Black people and the dispossession of
Indigenous people from their lands.
But you don’t need to read bureaucratic
reports to figure that out. Simply tune
your television to a Spanish-language
channel—you’ll see who is held up as
the ideal. Latinidad as a concept may
be predicated on mestizaje, but in prac-
tice it is bound by whiteness.
The New York Review
All of this makes it a fraught time to
organize an exhibition around Latino
identity. Which aspects of our tangled
histories do you highlight, and which
will remain hidden? In its newly recon-
ceived triennial exhibition, El Museo
del Barrio in New York City smartly
embraces these long-running argu-
ments instead of papering over them
with some idealized vision of Latini-
dad. “Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21”
finds artists rattling notions of identity
rather than trying to uphold them. This
begins the moment you walk through
the door, with an installation titled
Who Designs Your Race?, a participa-
tory work by Collective Magpie, a duo
made up of MR Barnadas (who is of
Peruvian and Trinidadian origin) and
Tae Hwang (who is Korean-American).
The piece takes the idea of a govern-
ment census and transforms it into an
exercise in perception. Barnadas and
Hwang surveyed nearly four hundred
participants about how they perceive
their identity in different situations.
(Anyone, not just Latinos, could take
the survey.) For example:
I feel Latino/a/x
Not at all
Just a little
Somewhat
Moderately
Quite a lot
All the time
Respondents were then asked to ar-
ticulate exactly when and where they
felt this way. (You can take the survey
yourself at theracesurvey.com.)
Collective Magpie created dia-
grammatic representations of some of
the more memorable (and poetic) re-
sponses. “I feel Hispanic when clicking
forms,” reads one thought bubble. “I
feel Cuban when I am homesick,” reads
another. “I feel Black when I listen to
music.” It is identity as a constantly
shifting Cubist perspective, not a fixed
point. There are no absolutes, no Uni-
versópolis, no colorless fifth race, only
identity as a fluid state.
That fluid state informs “Estamos
Bien” as a whole. The show, as the
accompanying catalog notes, offers
a broad approach to “the concept of
Latinx,” using a word that is still being
defined. While the terms “Latino”
and “Latina” still predominate in the
United States, “Latinx” has emerged
as a way of doing away with the gender
binary, as well as any preconceived no-
tions about what is considered Latino.
I identify as Latina and often use
“Latino/a” in my writing. But I employ
“Latinx” when it’s preferred by an in-
dividual or an institution, or when I
want to convey aspects of identity that
are not adequately captured by existing
terminology. (And for the record, I am
a fair-skinned mestiza of Peruvian and
Chilean descent.)
In a conversation published in the
catalog, the Dominican-American art-
ist and independent curator Elia Alba,
who helped organize the triennial ex-
hibition, describes “Latinx” as not an
identity to be worn but “a destination
or space where I can connect with all
my brothers and sisters of Latin Amer-
ican and Caribbean descent.” It’s a
definition I find poignant and expan-
sive. It also perfectly suits the nature of
the exhibition, which contains loosely
arranged works that tackle notions of
October 21, 2021
identity in many ways. The forty-two
artists and collectives represented
explore landscape, the body—both
human and political—and formal ques-
tions of artmaking. (It ain’t a triennial
unless the art is commenting on itself.)
A pair of galleries show Latinx art-
ists in dialogue with Western art his-
tory, but subverting it too—with color,
craft, inexpensive materials, and the
ebullient ethos of rasquachismo. The
term comes from the word rascuache,
Mexican and Central American slang
that means something of little value.
Rasquachismo refers not to a particu-
lar style or aesthetic but to a point of
view—that of the underdog. It’s “an
attitude rooted in resourcefulness and
adaptability,” writes the cultural critic
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in his 1989 Billy Wilder Green with Milk
essay on the subject. It puts a high Dancing on the Edge and Sugar
value on “making do”—recycling what When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups
might otherwise get thrown away. And JOSEPH MCBRIDE
it parallels the ways African-American ROBERT HELLYER
assemblage artists have breathed new
“Who would have guessed that the
life into discarded materials. At “Es-
American heartland had a penchant
tamos Bien,” rasquachismo is in the for green tea (served with milk and
room. sugar) before World War II and
The Mexican-American artist Yvette that U.S. tea drinkers contributed
Mayorga embraces excess and Latin to the ubiquity of ‘sencha’ in
American rococo in electric, candy- modern Japan? This engagingly
colored works that borrow from the written, delightfully illustrated, and
flamboyant cakes that are a staple of stimulating book brings a lost world
Mexican bakeries (see illustration of ‘teaways’ to light.”
on the cover of this issue). She paints —Kristin Hoganson, author of
not just with brushes but with the pip- The Heartland: An American History
ing bags used to ice cakes. In electric
pinks, gleaming whites, and sparkling
gold, she renders contemporary still
lifes inspired by seventeenth- century
Dutch vanitas paintings, in which a
skull is artfully arranged on a table
with flowers and books. Her versions,
however, contain lacy images of lap-
tops and cell phones, brilliant jewels
and acrylic nails, as well as an embed-
ded text referring to US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement that reads
“FICE ,” for “fuck ICE .”
Mayorga’s work, to some extent, bor-
rows from the techniques of the Cali-
fornia artist Wayne Thiebaud, who in
the 1960s began to paint cakes that
exude an uncanny degree of cake-ness
because they were painted in the same
way a cake might be frosted: with broad What Are the The Harlem Uprising
strokes and rich texture. Mayorga takes Chances? Segregation and Inequality in
the techniques of a highly ornate style Why We Believe in Luck Postwar New York City
of cake decoration and uses them to
capture Latinx states in the US, includ- BARBARA BLATCHLEY CHRISTOPHER HAYES
ing anxieties around deportation. “An immersive chronicle of the July
“Witty in tone. Psychology and
Far sparer is a pair of works by the 1964 uprising in New York City’s
neuroscience professor Blatchley
Dominican-American artist Yanira takes an impressive and accessible Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant
Collado, who engages the visual lan- look at luck and humans’ refusal neighborhoods over the police
guage of minimalism in her work. Out to accept randomness. Those killing of a Black teenager . . .
of jabón de cuaba, a soap often found wondering why they’ve never A powerful reminder that it takes
in Dominican homes, she has crafted a managed to buy a winning lottery ‘great force’ to bend the moral arc
pair of geometric sculptures. One is a ticket would do well to start here.” of the universe toward justice.”
rectangular prism, the other a flat, tri- —Publishers Weekly —Publishers Weekly
angular piece that rests on the floor like
a two- dimensional pyramid. The trian-
gle is a remarkable work. Collado has
dexterously united dozens of smaller
pieces of soap triangles together to
create a pattern that is reminiscent of
quilt-making. Household soap, a prod- COLUMBIA
uct that invokes women’s labor, nods to
a form of women’s craft. Quilting is an UNIVERSITY
art form, moreover, that is produced
with needle and thread, tools that are PRESS
“rich with underdog cultural associa-
tions,” as the art historian Susan Tall- CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU
man recently wrote in these pages.*
Jabón de cuaba is perhaps best CUPBLOG.ORG
known under the brand name Hispano,
*“Knowing How,” The New York Re-
view, August 19, 2021.
21
the Spanish word for “Hispanic.”
“Hispanic” means, literally, related
to Spain; it was the term used by the
Nixon administration in the 1970 cen-
sus, the first that counted Latinos as a
standalone group in the United States.
The word carries layers of association,
and seeing a soap named “Hispano” in
a US exhibition brings to mind the con-
flation of Latinos with domestic labor.
Collado’s installation evokes not
only work but magic and enchantment.
Cuaba soap is used in the Dominican
Republic for spiritual cleanses; if some-
one puts a hex on you, you can use the
soap in a counterspell. In a conversa-
tion published in Bomb magazine in
2019, Collado said that she sees ele-
ments of her work as “a protective of-
fering,” the veiled symbols within them
“linked to a group of people who may
have experienced a loss or uprooting.”
Migration, the city, land, and the
arbitrary nature of borders: these all
emerge as central to the
space called Latinx.
Nyugen E. Smith, an
artist with roots in Haiti
and Trinidad and To-
bago, creates works that
explore the emotional
connections people can
form with a place and
the subjective ways those
places are mapped. On
view in “Estamos Bien”
is Smith’s 2018 painting
Bundlehouse Borderlines
No. 6 (_emembe_ ), which
features an image of His-
paniola (Little Spain),
the island shared by Haiti
and the Dominican Re-
public (see illustration on
page 20). Smith creates
his map paintings using
soil from the location he
is depicting—a gesture
of yearning, as well as a
way of literally embed-
ding a place into a map.
That’s about as literal as
it gets, because the artist also includes
invented cartographic symbols—say, a
pair of putti playing trumpets before
an upside- down pig—and he rotates
the island ninety degrees, rendering
the geography unrecognizable. Haiti
and the Dominican Republic, gener-
ally presented side-by-side, are now
seen with the Dominican Republic
on top. It’s a telling position. The two
countries have a famously contentious
relationship, with the Dominican Re-
public regularly enacting racist, anti-
Haitian policies and Haitians serving
as underpaid, undocumented laborers
in Dominican cane fields.
But the real revelation is Smith’s work
in sculpture. His “bundlehouses”—two
of which are on view—are architectonic
structures crafted from scraps of card-
board, fabric, and other urban flotsam,
which are then perched on wooden legs.
Inspired by the improvised architecture
of shelters in refugee camps, Smith has
been producing these at various scales
since 2005. Some are large enough for
a person to enter, while others, like the
ones at El Museo del Barrio, fit com-
fortably on a pedestal. Tiny versions
of these also materialize as patterns in
his map paintings. Influenced by nkisi,
protective sculptures from Central Af-
rica, they are architecture infused with
an animist spirit—buildings that pro-
22
tect but that also look like they could
get up and saunter away. The bundle-
houses conjure migration (forced and
otherwise) as well as exile, evacuation,
and homelessness. If Latinx is a space,
it is one that can be carried and depos-
ited wherever you go.
Other artists address geography on
an urban scale. The Los Angeles art-
ist Patrick Martinez creates works that
are less paintings than they are archi-
tectonic reimaginations of the city he
inhabits. The artist, who is of Indige-
nous, Mexican, and Filipino descent,
creates large-scale, multimedia paint-
ings that evoke the façades found in
Latino working- class neighborhoods
at a time of rampant gentrification in
the city. These are works—made with
ceramic tiles, window grates, and LED
lights flashing advertisements for face
masks—that carry the weight of Los
Angeles and conjure the frantic dia-
logues between century- old Spanish re-
vival architecture, commercial signage,
murals, and graffiti.
Joey Terrill: A Bigger Piece, 2008
The Salvadoran-American artist
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, who also
lives in LA, takes rubber casts of the
ficus trees that shade many of the city’s
sun-blasted streets—among them,
Central American neighborhoods like
Pico-Union and Westlake. Trees are
already repositories of environmental
memory; Aparicio memorializes them
further. After taking a cast, he unfurls
the rubber and presents it like a tapes-
try—hung on a wall or suspended from
the ceiling. Their material nods to the
work of Robert Overby (another Ange-
leno), who took latex casts of buildings
and presented them in galleries like
architectural ghosts. Aparicio, how-
ever, uses his rubber casts as canvases
for paint, textiles, and objects he finds
in the street. A particularly majestic
example is El Ruido del Bosque Sin
Hojas/The Sound of the Forest With-
out Leaves (2020), which is fringed
with broken bottles he collected from
friends and family. Approach the piece
in the museum and you can practically
feel the city crunch beneath your feet.
His works pay tribute to Los Ange-
les; they also refer to the ravages of US
foreign policy in his parents’ native El
Salvador. In the early 1980s, during the
civil war, the US-trained military used
incendiary weapons to burn down for-
ests that sheltered insurgents. Those
trees are gone, but Aparicio will not let
us forget.
It’s in the work relating to the body
that you feel the beating heart of “Esta-
mos Bien,” prodding the boundaries of
sexual identity and gender roles, using
self-representation to shatter bland no-
tions of Latinidad.
The show includes three deeply af-
fecting canvases by the Los Angeles-
based artist Joey Terrill, who is
Chicano. Since 1997, Terrill has
worked on a series of sumptuous still
lifes that feature achingly ripe fruits
alongside sexually suggestive com-
mercial products and name-brand HIV
medications. In paintings such as Black
Jack 8 and A Bigger Piece, both from
2008, we see hard-bodied men pre-
senting themselves for inspection amid
images of a fruit cocktail and breakfast
cereal. Multimedia elements—such
as fragments of kitschy wallpaper and
old candy wrappers—add a touch of
rasquachismo. It’s a mordant intersec-
tion of sex, death, and consumerism at
the turn of the twenty-first century—a
memento mori that also functions as
memento vivire. The works depict Ter-
rill’s own journey: the artist has lived
with HIV for four decades.
Far more somber is the record of the
performance piece staged by Cuban-
born artist Carlos Martiel. Martiel is
known for difficult, endurance-based
pieces that comment on the ways Black
people have been marginalized and de-
humanized by colonialism. In one 2013
piece at the Nitsch Museum in Naples,
Italy, he stood nude in a gallery, his
bare skin pierced by dozens of threads
that connected to points on two walls—
one that stood before him and the other
behind. I saw a video of that work at
an exhibition of Caribbean art at the
Museum of Latin American Art in Los
Angeles in 2017 and was both terrified
and riveted by it—a man rendered un-
able to move by the threads that tugged
at him in opposing directions.
At El Museo, Martiel dipped himself
in the blood of people who have been,
in the artist’s words, “discriminated
against, oppressed, and marginalized
by Eurocentric . . . discourse”—Black,
Native, Indigenous, queer, and trans-
gender. He then proceeded to stand
on a sparkling white plinth inside the
museum for several hours. El Museo
was closed because of the pandemic,
so the performance took place in an
empty gallery; the piece, titled Monu-
ment I, now exists in video form. But
it’s the plinth, which is also on view,
that is truly poetic: absent Martiel’s
body, it bears only the bloody imprint
of his feet, and speaks to current de-
bates about the nature of monuments
and our legacies of slavery, genocide,
and violence.
“Estamos Bien” was organized by
Elia Alba in collaboration with Su-
sanne V. Temkin, a curator at El Museo,
and Rodrigo Moura, its chief curator.
The show represents a reimagination of
the museum’s regular artist survey,
“The (S) Files,” which was held seven
times between 1999 and 2013. That
show focused primarily on emerging
artists in the greater New York region.
Now it has been reborn as an expansive
triennial that includes Latinx artists,
both emerging and estab-
Joey Terrill
lished, from across the
United States and Puerto
Rico.
“Estamos Bien” was
originally scheduled to
go on view in 2020 but
Covid-19 pushed its open-
ing to the spring of 2021,
during a pandemic that is
not yet over, in the after-
math of a global uprising
in support of Black lives,
as well as an election that
resulted in white suprema-
cist violence. In a show that
includes Puerto Rican art-
ists—both from the island
and in diaspora—there
is also the specter of an-
other catastrophe: Hur-
ricane Maria, the 2017
storm that left thousands
dead and laid bare the
ways US rule has strangled
the island’s autonomy and,
by extension, its ability to
recover from disaster.
The title of the show, in fact, is in-
directly inspired by the hurricane. On
view in the galleries is one of Candida
Alvarez’s “air paintings”—double-
sided works on canvas that are sus-
pended like laundered sheets from a
free-standing structure in the center
of a room. Alvarez is a Brooklyn-
born painter of Puerto Rican origin,
known for creating works that feature
abstracted figures and forms in fe-
cund riots of color. For the triennial,
she presents a painting that could be
a bird’s- eye view of Puerto Rico in
the aftermath of Maria (or Louisiana
in the wake of Ida): swaths of watery
blues and muddy browns surround
a green patch on which is written
the hopeful phrase estoy bien (I am
good).
The words, which are also the title of
the piece, were Alvarez’s response to
questions about how she felt after the
hurricane (an event that coincided with
the death of her father). The phrase—
and the painting—suggest a stubborn
resilience: I am good. I am here. I
am alive. The phrase “estamos bien”
expands Alvarez’s title to the plural
“we”—and winks at a song of the same
name by Puerto Rican reggaetonero
Bad Bunny. It is, the curators write in
the catalog, a “rallying cry.” And a bit
of hope in turbulent times. Q
The New York Review
 The CCP’s Culture of Fear
A celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, July 2021
Roughly two thousand years ago, the
arrival in China of Buddhism from
India brought major changes not only
to China’s belief systems but to many
aspects of its daily life. Buddhism’s ap-
proach on the whole was gentle, and
indigenous Chinese versions of it even-
tually flourished. Zen was a Chinese
invention. Then, beginning about two
hundred years ago, the only compara-
bly large foreign cultural influence on
China began with the arrival of British
gunboats on the Chinese coast. This
was more disturbing. To China the
West seemed to say, “Catch up or per-
ish.” How to modernize became a Chi-
nese obsession that led to many things,
including the fevered contortions that
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
has put the country through over the
past seventy years.
One way to measure China’s urge
to transform itself is to note how often
the word new has been used by Chi-
nese leaders. In 1902 the concept of
the “new citizen” took hold in Liang
Qichao’s New Citizen Journal. Twenty
years later the May Fourth Movement
came to be known as the New Culture
Movement. In 1934 Chiang Kai-shek
launched his New Life Movement. The
Communist takeover in 1949 was the
advent of New China, and the Cultural
Revolution in the late 1960s touted a
“new socialist man.” After Mao Ze-
dong died in 1976, the next few years
were called “the new period.” Today,
Xi Jinping’s watchword is “Socialism
with Chinese Characteristics for a New
Era.” It is important to note that new
in these cases never refers to the same
thing; each is a new new.
The tragedy of CCP policies in China
can be seen as arising from excessive
zeal for shortcuts. More successful East
Asian transitions to the modern world,
such as those in Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan, have done better by going
October 21, 2021
Perry Link
step-by-step. Impatient for global pre-
eminence, the CCP has rushed ahead
several times and crashed. The Great
Leap Forward in the late 1950s, which
followed Mao’s plans for “surpassing
Britain and catching up with America,”
ended in the starvation of 30 million or
more people. Cultural Revolution de-
mands such as “make revolution in the
depths of your soul” and “love Chair-
man Mao more than your parents”
were intended as magical paths to a
new human nature that China would
exemplify for the world, but in fact they
were a body blow to Chinese culture
whose consequences have lasted until
today. Deng Xiaoping’s one- child pol-
icy, intended in the late 1970s to jump-
start a modern economy, led by the late
2010s to problems in labor supply and
elder support sufficiently severe as to
require abrupt reversals.
Xi Jinping’s recent flights of fancy
suggest the same pattern. Some of
his claims resemble Mao’s of the late
1960s: the East is rising over the West;
China is a new model for the world; the
Great Leader is correct by definition;
Chinese people everywhere can iden-
tify with the New China and feel proud.
During the “scar” years after the Cul-
tural Revolution, Chinese intellectuals
and officials were virtually unanimous
in saying that nothing like it could hap-
pen again. At the time, I believed them.
Now, I’m afraid I don’t. Cyber versions
of Cultural Revolution “struggle ses-
sions” have already appeared. A return
of the Cultural Revolution, adapted for
the new era, is certainly possible.
In appraising the history of the CCP,
it is important to distinguish between
members who joined out of idealism
in its early years and those who joined
out of self-interest after the mid-1950s.
Eloquent memoirs by people like Li
the aim was to achieve unquestioned
Roman Pilipey/ EPA - EFE /Shutterstock
power in as broad an area as possible.
The Red Turbans in the fourteenth
century, the White Lotus at the end
of the eighteenth, the Taipings in the
mid-nineteenth, and the Communists
in the twentieth shared these elements:
an egalitarian ideology that in fact con-
cealed a hierarchical, exploitative, and
highly secretive ruling structure, which
in turn featured a magical, semidivine
leader at the top who possessed some
kind of tianshu (heavenly text) that
prescribed how to live and also offered
promises of ideal worlds to come.
In the 1980s, when I first heard the
term liumang zhengfu (gangster gov-
ernment) used to refer to the CCP
regime, I thought I was hearing hy-
perbole from people who were suffer-
ing under it. But in later years, I often
heard it from even-tempered veterans
of the CCP movement who originally
had been supporters. And the term fits.
The CCP runs on hierarchical power,
on personal loyalties that are outside
the law, and on ruthless pursuit of pri-
vate interests that employs pretense,
manipulation, and, where “necessary,”
lethal force. It is more like the mafia
than a modern government. I hesitate
to use words like “mafia” or “gangster,”
because some readers will simply con-
clude that “Link is an extremist” and
Shenzhi, Wei Junyi, Liu Binyan, Fang stop reading. Aware of that cost, I use
Lizhi, Zi Zhongyun, and others show them anyway. There are also costs, in-
how young people were drawn to the deed greater ones, to sheltering readers
party for its announced goals (includ- from difficult truths.
ing free speech and democracy) in It is worth noting that the “heavenly
the 1930s and 1940s and risked their texts” of peasant rebel groups have
careers and even their lives to join. often had foreign origins. The foreign-
In 1991 the journal Yanhuang chun- ness added to their mystical aura and to
qiu (China Through the Ages) began the charisma of the semimagical leader
carrying reminiscences by these now- who promoted them, and it could lend
elderly people, detailing how the CCP credibility to their promise of a coming
had misled them in their early years. heaven on earth. The Red Turbans and
Since they were time-honored revolu- White Lotus magic texts were about the
tionaries, the regime could not easily Maitreya Buddha, a bodhisattva from
shut them up. But the journal was sup- distant India who had achieved com-
pressed in 2016. plete enlightenment and could preach
When the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, the pure dharma for all to hear. The
who later became a well-known dissi- Taipings’ exotic religion was an odd
dent, went to Peking University in the form of Christianity according to which
fall of 1952, his dormitory building was the magic leader, Hong Xiuquan, was
not yet ready. He and his classmates the younger brother of Jesus Christ,
had to sleep and do their physics home- and his followers could go to Heaven.
work on a gymnasium floor. Still, Fang For Mao, the Marxist classics similarly
was rapturous. He “felt a glow inside” were foreign, a touch magical, and pre-
and competed with his girlfriend to see dicted a coming paradise on earth. Sta-
who could join the Communist Party lin gave Mao much practical support,
first. The distinguished journalist Liu too, and that was vital; the “heavenly
Binyan, similarly smitten in the early texts” of Marxism were a useful bonus.
1950s by the idea of a new society, was Mao duly placed himself in the Marx-
working hard to bring it about when, ist pantheon: Marx, Engels, Lenin,
abruptly, the government labeled him Stalin, Mao. He was a “great Marxist
a “rightist.” Startled, his first reaction thinker.” He borrows some Marxist
was to think: My goodness! I must be terms, to be sure, but how much Marx
a rightist and not realize it. Chairman did he read? In the last few years I have
Mao cannot be wrong. I’ll have to look been working on a detailed biography
inside myself, dig this problem out, and of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize
correct it. winner who died in 2017 while serving
Experiences like this eventually led a lengthy prison sentence for “incite-
ardent young CCP followers to see ment of subversion of state power.” To
another distinction: that between the me it is obvious that Liu read Marx far
core of the party and themselves. They more conscientiously than Mao ever
began to realize that they had radically did.
misperceived Mao. No modern social-
ist, indeed not a modern leader of any
kind, Mao had more in common with Mao’s unstinting interest was in
the charismatic leaders of peasant re- power. Before 1949 his CCP and its army
bellions in earlier Chinese dynasties. escaped the Kuomintang government,
For those adventurers, as for Mao, evaded the brunt of a Japanese attack,
23
and then defeated the Kuomintang in
a civil war. Ends justified means
throughout. Capture a city by starving
150,000? If it works, do it. After 1949,
eliminate counterrevolutionaries—sev-
eral million? Fine. Mao actually estab-
lished quotas, by district, of people to
be killed. Moreover, his goal, from be-
ginning to end, was not power for the
CCP but power for himself. Mao began
outmaneuvering and purging rivals in
the 1930s and continued doing so into
the 1970s.
The Great Leap Forward, some-
times taken in the West to have been
a utopian effort to bring communism
to the Chinese countryside, was, for
Mao, something very different. It was a
(failed) strategy to overproduce in agri-
culture and to use the surplus harvests
and freed-up labor to support heavy
industry, which he desired in order to
increase his might. While millions of
Chinese farmers starved in the result-
ing famine, Mao shipped grain to the
Soviet Union in exchange for know-
how—not only in construction but,
very likely, in atomic bomb technology.
A fine example of how the outside
world has misperceived Mao’s motives
is the lore that has grown up around
the phrase “women hold up half the
sky.” Mao has been seen as a feminist,
an egalitarian, a leader in progres-
sive thought. Nonsense. The evidence
of his extreme disrespect for women
could not be clearer. And in fact, Mao
did not say, “Women hold up half the
sky.” He said, “Women can hold up
half the sky.” His implication was that
they were not yet holding up half, but
could: they could get out of the house,
go into the fields, go into the factories,
and work, alongside the men, to push
the Mao project forward. (By the way,
Mao’s words became a set phrase and
extremely common. In Chinese, no one
doubts that the word “can” is there. )
One of the most devastating results
of the campaigns of late Maoism, from
1957 to 1976, was the hollowing out
of the idealistic language of the early
1950s. Phrases like “serve the people”
turned into dead words, but one still
had to mouth them and moreover had
to do it “correctly.” That made system-
atic pretending necessary. Manipula-
tion of ideological language became
an important life skill. At the extreme,
during the Cultural Revolution, peo-
ple were required to attend “study
sessions” in which they took turns at
biaotai (display of a viewpoint). View-
points were presented as one’s own but
scrutinized by others for hints of di-
vergence from “correctness.” Finding
flaws in someone else’s presentation
could earn one credit.
Contemporaneously with this lan-
guage shift came a dramatic shift in
reasons people joined the CCP. Chinese
society now offered a single ladder of
success; joining the party was the first
step toward almost anything. Idealism
was passé. It had been replaced by im-
itation idealism, which worked so long
as the imitation was done “correctly.”
During the decade after the death
of Mao, an interesting countercurrent
in this trend appeared. Some people
who, despite everything, were still in-
spired by ideals decided to join (or re-
join) the party, not because they saw it
as a vehicle for their ideals but because
it was the only gateway through which
to try to make a difference. Fang Lizhi,
who had been expelled from the party
in the late 1950s, rejoined in the late
24
1970s on this principle and urged his
graduate students, most of whom were
good-hearted young physics geeks, to
do the same. His reasoning? The Com-
munist Party runs our society whether
we like it or not. We have no choice but
to adjust to this fact—just as we have
no choice but to adjust to the weather.
What we can do is to get inside the
party and try to make it less awful than
it otherwise would be.
During the 1980s Chinese intellec-
tuals sought dialogue with the party.
Certain leaders—Hu Yaobang, Zhao
Ziyang, Hu Qili, Tian Jiyun, and oth-
ers—showed themselves to be relatively
liberal-minded and would sometimes
even listen to voices in society. But this
pattern ended with the massacre of
pro-democracy demonstrators on June
4, 1989. Not only were liberal intellec-
A propaganda poster of President Xi Jinping, Beijing, March 2018
tuals so disgusted that they no longer
had an appetite for dialogue, there
now was no one in the leadership with
whom to have it. Hu Yaobang had died
and the other reform-minded leaders
were either imprisoned or frightened
into silence.
In the late 1980s popular complaints
about guandao corruption—by which
officials who have control of facto-
ries, mines, and other “work units”
use their political power to divert
public resources toward private ends
and thereby gain enormous unearned
profits—were circulating in society
and became the grounds for many of
the protests in the streets. In the post-
massacre 1990s, as the top leaders
dropped even the pretense of inter-
acting with society, they turned to a
pillaging of the Chinese economy that
resembled guandao but dwarfed it.
High-ranking officials lopped off great
chunks of the economy—electricity, IT,
banking, shipping—and placed control
in the hands of their own families, who
then raked in stupendous wealth. This
pattern seeped downward as they es-
sentially said to those under them, “We
give you license to plunder as long as
you prevent ‘trouble’ by keeping the lid
on in your area.”
It is important to understand why
the CCP, having become as cynical and
materialist as it is today, still needs
ideology. The pretense of “socialism”
remains highly conspicuous in party
rhetoric even though Marx, were he to
return to earth, would find the claim
baffling. Why do it? Certainly not for T he domestic function of socialist ide-
nostalgia. Broadly speaking there are ology in China is different, although
two reasons—one for international pur- in one respect it is akin to the interna-
poses and the other for domestic ones. tional function. When Chinese peo-
To present the label “socialist” to ple who live far from the corridors of
foreigners—among many of whom power behold the shining ideology’s
the term resonates warmly, or at least ponderous claims of glory and correct-
neutrally—is effective. Foreigners are ness amid seas of red-and-gold pomp,
generally unaware of the mafia-like they tend, as do foreigners who hear
nature of the CCP and cannot see how phrases like “Chinese socialism” and
it diverges utterly from the socialist “the two sides,” to accept the assertion
claim to put group interests above in- that “we are legitimate.” Inside the
dividual interests. (By such a crite- system, though, ideological language
rion, Taiwanese society is much more has another function. Mao’s “Serve
“socialist.”) The CCP can use the term the People,” Deng’s “Four Principles,”
“socialist” on the international scene Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents,” Hu
to instill a sense of moral equivalence Jintao’s “Scientific Development Doc-
between itself and democratic govern- trine,” Xi’s “Socialism with Chinese
ments. It can say: “‘The two sides’ have Characteristics for a New Era”—as
‘different systems,’ so mutual respect well as many less prominent examples
is needed. You speak for your people too numerous to list here—are pieces
one plays on a political chessboard in
Greg Baker/AFP /Getty Images
order to get what one wants. The mean-
ing of the chess pieces is not nearly as
important as the act of playing them
correctly, and such acts are important
because they declaim one’s loyalty to
power.
Phrases that originate from present-
day leaders are naturally more im-
portant than earlier phrases, but the
linguistic pedigrees reach as far back
as Mao—and it has to be that way, be-
cause the party’s claim to legitimacy
also reaches back to Mao. The lineage
of top-leader thought is an ideological
third rail that must not be touched. It
is hard to say whether the CCP regime
actually would collapse if the line were
broken, but it is easy to say that every
ruler since Mao has feared that this
would be the case.
In the CCP’s system, advancement in
an official career depends overwhelm-
ingly on the views of one’s superior.
But when a superior wants to punish
someone, he or she still needs formal
through democracy and we represent reasons, which can be such things as
ours through socialism.” The huge fact “corruption” (even if arbitrarily de-
in the background—so huge that peo- fined), sexual misbehavior (even if in-
ple don’t see it—is that the CCP does vented), failure to meet quotas or to
not represent the Chinese people. It “maintain stability,” or—and here is
represents a group that seized power in where ideology is vital—evidence that
1949 and holds it still. To imply moral one’s speech has been “incorrect.” A
equivalence between “the two sides” is correct performance in the language
soft-spoken fraud. game is more important than what
This point was on display (although a person actually thinks, and every-
unnoted by many Westerners) in An- one knows that missteps can bring
chorage, Alaska, in March 2021, when punishment.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken There is a spectrum of punishments
sat across a table from Yang Jiechi, that begins with police “visits” to dis-
officially presented as director of the cuss whether your future wouldn’t be
Central Foreign Affairs Commission better if you didn’t say or do certain
of China. There were “the two sides”— things; then proceeds to subtle threats
as symbolically clear as they could be. that, for example, your children might
Each man had to guard his words—not not get into the schools that you like;
only for what they meant in the room and then to the harsh end of the spec-
but for what they would sound like to trum: 24-7 monitoring, house arrest,
audiences back home. But who were prison, torture, death. In the society
the audiences? Here the two cases di- at large, knowledge of this spectrum of
verged radically. Blinken had to have in punishment creates a generalized fear
mind the possible reactions of the US that induces self- censorship. By “fear”
media, of other US politicians (includ- here, I do not mean a sharp pang of
ing in the opposition party), and, ulti- panic. Because the hazards are so con-
mately, of American voters. In short, stant and unchanging, people get used
he had to look diffusely in several di- to them and just avoid them—rather
rections, including downward. Yang, as a hiker steps around boulders on
by contrast, peered upward, and not a mountain path. We might speak of
diffusely in the least. His crucial audi- “fossilized fear.” It does not need to be
ence was a single person, Xi Jinping. sharp in order to be effective in guiding
He was in Anchorage to say what Xi behavior.
wanted to be said in Anchorage. Peo- Western social scientists sometimes
ple who know Yang personally have use survey research to try to uncover
told me that he did not sound like his popular thought in China. On many
normal self at the meeting. He sounded topics this is possible, if done carefully.
rehearsed. I would be surprised if im- But on political topics, especially about
portant passages in Yang’s statements support for the CCP, it is not. Fossilized
were not dictated directly by Xi. fear plays too big a part—as does the
The New York Review
twin problem of bad information about
what the CCP actually does. We might
recall Fang Lizhi’s comparison of the
presence of the CCP to the presence
of the weather. “Do you support it?”
comes as an odd question.
T he years 2002 to 2008 saw the rise
and fall of the most hopeful democracy
movement in China since 1949. Infor-
mally known as the Rights Defense
Movement or Citizens Movement, it
was different in nature from the efforts
in the 1980s to engage in dialogue with
the CCP elite and to effect change from
the top down. The 1980s had ended
with rejection and a massacre. Now,
the idea was to work from the bottom
up. Activists went among the people
and listened to their problems; then
helped them, using the Internet, to es-
tablish that other people shared their
complaints; then often succeeded in
exposing miscreant officials; and even-
tually were able, at least sometimes,
to use the pressure of public opinion
to change behavior and even to bring
about new laws.
This approach owed something
to precedents from Václav Havel in
Czechoslovakia and Adam Michnik
in Poland, but most of the strategy and
tactics were homegrown. The Citizens
Movement had no formal structure or
appointed leaders. Its activists included
Liu Xiaobo, Wen Kejian, Liu Junning,
Ai Xiaoming, Teng Biao, Hu Jia, Cui
Weiping, He Weifang, Liu Di, Yu Jie,
Xu Zhiming, Wang Yi, Zhang Zuhua,
Pu Zhiqiang, Guo Yushan, Guo Fei-
xiong, and many others. The movement
ended in December 2008 when Liu
Xiaobo, who was the titular sponsor of
Charter 08, a blueprint for democratic
society that the group had produced,
was taken from his home by police and
never returned. Signers of the charter
were “invited to tea,” and Charter 08
was expunged from the Chinese Inter-
net and all state media.
This happened under Hu Jintao,
who headed the CCP from 2002 until
2012. Hu succeeded in keeping a lid
on society, but problems arose during
those years. A wealth gap, cronyism in
business, and environmental problems
all worsened, and popular protests (re-
corded by the police as “masses inci-
dents”) increased sharply in number.
At the top, within the powerful Stand-
ing Committee of the Politburo, Hu
reputedly was a leader by consensus,
allowing the committee’s eight other
members to manage their own baili-
wicks while Hu jockeyed at the center.
A widespread view among Chinese
intellectuals was that, near the end of
Hu’s term, he was “passing the flower
to the beating of a drum.” (The refer-
ence is to a game in which people sit in
a circle and pass a flower from one to
the next while a drum beats; whoever
holds the flower when the drum stops
beating “loses” and has to sing a song
or accept some other punishment.) The
image was a way to portray Hu’s appar-
ent longing to get out of the hot seat.
My impression of Xi as he came to
power in 2012 was that, after elbowing
his rival Bo Xilai aside, he had a strong
sense that something had to be done
to respond to the country’s problems.
Passing a flower was not it. But what
could he do? A man of limited intellect,
not well read, and with little knowledge
of the outside world, Xi could imagine
nothing beyond going back to Mao’s
model, which at least he knew. So he
opted for the recentralization of power,
the building of a personality cult, the
stoking of a crude nationalism, harsh
repression at home, and a chip on the
shoulder abroad. Given the political
culture that I have sketched in this
essay, these steps could meet with ini-
tial success even if guided by a medio-
cre hand.
Will the Xi juggernaut succeed? The
problems are that Xi is no Mao, in ei-
ther intelligence or charisma, and the
society that he rules is better informed
and much more sophisticated than the
one Mao ruled. When Xi’s Ministry
of Foreign Affairs announces a “Re-
search Center for Xi Jinping Thought
on Diplomacy” and another called
“Research Center for Xi Jinping Eco-
nomic Thought,” do intelligent people
really go rushing to study “thought”
that lies inside Xi’s mind, waiting to
be appreciated? Of course not. People
in the Mao era, whether in enthusiasm
or in pain, took Mao’s commands to
heart; in Xi’s case, the conformity is a
mere shell.
In the short run, the most frighten-
ing possible outcomes for the Xi jug-
gernaut are two: that it will fly or that
it will crash. Successful flight would be
bad news for the Chinese people and
for the people of the world. No one
needs a model of technofascism that,
with its facial recognition software and
DNA registration, goes beyond what
even Orwell imagined. On the other
hand, a crash would also be bad news,
at least for a time. It would bring chaos
and likely bloodshed. One of the major
accomplishments of the decades-long
CCP rule is that it has obliterated all
structures in society that might replace
it. Whatever happens, I see no grounds
for optimism in the short run.
Chinese civilization has survived
paroxysms of tyranny before, however,
and in the long run it will likely do so
again. Mao admired the first emperor
of Qin (ruled 221–206 BCE) and the
second emperor of Sui (ruled 604–618
CE). Like Mao, these two unified the
realm, ruled by “legalism,” drafted
corvée workers and soldiers (Mao did
this in the 1930s and 1940s), assembled
large armies, and eventually earned
reputations for “burning books and
killing scholars.” Qin, Sui, and the CCP
all built Great Walls (be they stone ones
or a Great Firewall in cyberspace), and
all launched campaigns against Cen-
tral Asian peoples (Xiongnu, Uighurs).
There are other parallels, some better
than others, but neither Qin nor Sui,
despite their scorching violence, killed
Chinese humanism. One might fear
that Xi has technology to help him,
while Qin and Sui did not. But I agree
with the China scholar Minxin Pei,
who has argued that, with or without
high tech, the crux of tyrannical be-
havior still lies within the human mind,
not in machines. Notions of “proper
behavior”—for example, that people
in superior social positions have du-
ties to be fair to people in lower ones
and are subject to moral criticism from
bystanders if they are abusive—are
deeply embedded in Chinese culture.
Such values have, despite everything,
survived Mao, and will outlast Xi
Jinping. Q
—September 22, 2021

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October 21, 2021 25

 Hollywood’s Master Builder
The Robert Norman Williams house, Ontario, California; designed by Paul Revere Williams, 1947
Paul R. Williams:
Classic Hollywood Style
by Karen E. Hudson, with photography
by Benny Chan and a foreword
by Michael S. Smith.
Rizzoli, 240 pp., $65.00
Paul R. Williams
by Marc Appleton,
Stephen Gee, and Bret Parsons.
Angel City, 204 pp., $60.00
Regarding Paul R. Williams:
A Photographer’s View
by Janna Ireland.
Angel City, 223 pp., $50.00
Hollywood’s Architect:
The Paul R. Williams Story
a documentary film directed by
Royal Kennedy Rodgers and
Kathy McCampbell Vance
Revisions of the modern architectural
canon have been going on for almost
as long as modern architecture itself.
But our perceptions of what constitutes
excellence in the building art and who
should get credit for it have shifted
considerably of late. Beginning in the
1970s there was a move away from the
standard definition of Modernism as an
unadorned machine aesthetic and to-
ward a broader purview that included
many of the lesser-known Modernist
variants that flourished simultaneously
with its most familiar manifestation—
the reductive International Style.
More recently, closer attention has
been given to neglected issues of gen-
der and race. Among the reputations
that have benefited most from the
growing insistence that we expand
the canon beyond the white, male,
European-American roster that dom-
inated critical discourse throughout
the twentieth century has been that of
Paul R. Williams, the Los Angeles–
based African-American architect
whose five- decade career was astound-
ingly prolific (he produced some three
thousand designs, in contrast to Frank
Lloyd Wright’s eleven hundred) and
incomparably emblematic of its cul-
26
Martin Filler
tural milieu. Better than any of his
architectural peers, Williams defined
the Golden Age of Hollywood in built
form and channeled its glamorous but
breezy spirit in designs that allowed his
private clients and the general public
to participate in fantasies akin to those
spun out by the great movie studios.
The fact that a Black man could
have accomplished so much in the lily-
white world of midcentury American
architecture seems no less remarkable
now than it did when he was still ac-
tive six decades ago. Williams declined
to attend the opening, in his parents’
hometown of Memphis, of his St. Jude
Children’s Research Hospital of 1959–
1962 (the pet charity of the comedian
Danny Thomas, an LA client and close
friend for whom he did the job free of
charge) because he refused to face the
humiliations then routinely inflicted
on people of color in the South. The
architect finally saw his completed de-
sign—an innovative but cost- efficient
Space Age composition of five radial
two-story wings projecting from a cir-
cular core—during its tenth anniver-
sary celebrations, well after the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 banned the public
discrimination that had kept him away.
Williams believed in giving his cli-
ents what they wanted rather than what
he wanted, and though he could turn
out first-rate Modernist designs on re-
quest—such as his superb Robert Nor-
man Williams (no relation) house of
1947 in Ontario, California—most peo-
ple preferred other styles. His eclectic
design ethos ran an encyclopedic gamut
from stolid Tudor and romantic Span-
ish Colonial to exotic Orientalism and
the lightweight neo- Georgian hybrid
now known as Hollywood Regency,
and as a result he has not been taken
seriously as a high-style architect with
a readily identifiable aesthetic all his
own. His heyday coincided with both
the careers of European architects who
came to California before World War
II, including Rudolph Schindler, Rich-
ard Neutra, and Albert Frey, and the
Case Study House program of 1945–
1966, which drew on such American-
born experimentalists as Charles and
Ray Eames, Craig Ellwood, and Pierre
Koenig. They perfected a new easy-
living aesthetic that led to the nation-
wide acceptance of modern domestic
architecture, and their futuristic inge-
nuity made Williams’s approach look
old-fashioned and insubstantial.
Today’s reawakened interest in this
prodigious shapeshifter is reflected in
the acquisition of his archive last year
by the Getty Research Institute and
the University of Southern California
School of Architecture, which jointly
purchased it from the architect’s fam-
ily for an undisclosed sum. The trans-
action was overseen by Williams’s
granddaughter and principal advo-
cate, Karen E. Hudson, who has writ-
ten three books on him that initiated
a much-needed reappraisal.1 (In 1992
his business papers, which were stored
for safekeeping in a South Central LA
bank he remodeled, were destroyed
when rioters burned the building after
four LAPD officers who had brutally
beaten Rodney King were acquitted.
Fortunately, Hudson had earlier re-
moved Williams’s drawings and plans
to use for a publication she was pre-
paring, and thereby saved his visual
records.)
Two handsome monographs have
also recently been issued. Paul R.
Williams, by Marc Appleton, Ste-
phen Gee, and Bret Parsons, is part
of their twelve-volume series Master
Architects of Southern California
1920–1940 and reproduces black-and-
white period photographs of his houses
that first ran in The Architectural Di-
gest, the regional precursor of today’s
glossy decorating magazine.2 If the il-
lustrations of immaculate interiors in
1
Paul R. Williams, Architect: A Legacy
of Style (Rizzoli, 1993), The Will and
the Way: Paul R. Williams, Architect
(Rizzoli, 1994), and Paul R. Williams:
Classic Hollywood Style (Rizzoli, 2012,
new edition 2021).
2
See my “A Gilded Age at Architec-
tural Digest,” NYR Daily, November 4,
2018.
Cameron Carothers
this survey resemble publicity stills of
Hollywood movie sets from 1930s and
1940s romantic comedies, then Janna
Ireland’s Regarding Paul R. Williams:
A Photographer’s View has a film-noir
feeling. This impression arises from
the moody atmosphere of Ireland’s
black-and-white images—antithetical
to the sun-blasted, washed- out tonali-
ties so characteristic of Southern Cal-
ifornia (as evoked in Stephen Shore’s
much-admired LA color photos of the
1970s)—and an elegiac air that suf-
fuses these faded beauties in their gen-
teel decay.
Although there can be no question-
ing Williams’s cultural significance and
the justness of his now being accorded
a higher place in twentieth- century ar-
chitecture than he was upon his death,
in 1980 at age eighty-five, he was by
no means the first important African-
American architect. That distinction
belongs to Julian Abele (1881–1950),
the chief designer in the Philadelphia
atelier of Horace Trumbauer, which
created such grand civic set pieces as
the Acropolis-like Philadelphia Mu-
seum of Art of 1916–1928. Hired by
Trumbauer in 1906, Abele, a highly
adept Classicist, was relegated to the
back office at a time and place when
it was deemed impossible to present a
Black man as a professional to white
clients. But whereas Abele was intent
on closely adhering to the rules of Clas-
sicism and did so expertly, Williams
had no such interest, as is evident in his
carefree play with traditional design el-
ements that better suited the informal
Los Angeles way of life.
By 1923, the year Williams set up
his practice there, racial attitudes had
improved enough for him to become
the first Black person admitted to the
American Institute of Architects. He
served as his firm’s public face, albeit
in a part of the country far less bound
by social and racial rigidities than Phil-
adelphia. Yet he was always sensitive
to the unease some white people might
feel in dealing with him and was quick
The New York Review
to realize when a potential client had
not known he was Black until they
first met. Thus he taught himself how
to draw upside down so that he could
remain behind his desk and make con-
ceptual sketches for those who might
be uncomfortable sitting side by side
with him.
Williams’s wide-ranging job roster
makes it difficult to summarize his
stylistic traits, but the preponderance
of houses he designed in the Holly-
wood Regency mode allow certain
generalizations. Typical Williams de-
sign touches include full-height entry
porticoes supported by attenuated
columns that flout the height-to-width
ratios prescribed in Classical archi-
tecture; second-story windows that
project above the eaves like quizzi-
cal eyebrows, again contradicting the
Classical edict that they should lie well
below a parapet; and expansive façades
that betray a cheery disregard for the
well-balanced proportional formulas
devised by the ancient Greeks. Their
Golden Section has had no writ in the
Golden State.
If the operative principle underlying
Williams’s architecture was pure plea-
sure, who could object to that in mid-
century America, which was about to
reach its apex of prosperity? Present-
day nostalgia for that halcyon era is
confirmed by the premium prices that
buyers now pay for documented Wil-
liams projects. (His Jay Paley house of
1935–1936 in Beverly Hills was put on
the market in 2020 for $75 million.) But
demand has outstripped supply, and
spurious attributions abound (as they
once did for alleged Stanford White
houses on the East Coast). To fill the
void, shrewd contractors now concoct
pastiches they market as “in the man-
ner of Paul Williams,” imitations that
reaffirm the sincerest form of flattery.
Paul Revere Williams was born in Los
Angeles in 1894 to striving middle-
class parents who had recently moved
from Memphis because they hoped the
climate would relieve the tuberculo-
sis from which they suffered. Unfor-
tunately, both died within four years,
but Paul had the good fortune to be
adopted by a family that encouraged
him to achieve whatever high goals he
set for himself, and he responded with
extraordinary self-confidence and drive.
As Hudson explains in Hollywood’s
Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story,
an informative documentary directed
by Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy
McCampbell Vance, he had to piece to-
gether his architectural education from
a variety of sources, since the usual
methods that led to professional accred-
itation—which included enrollment in a
university school of architecture or ap-
prenticeship under an established prac-
titioner—were then closed to Blacks.
He received his primary training in
engineering from USC, which now
proudly bills itself as his alma mater.
Early on Williams learned to deal
with discriminatory social conventions
so that he could advance himself in
spite of them. As he wrote in a 1937
American Magazine article, “I Am a
Negro”:
Of course I know I cannot be ac-
cepted socially by whites. I have
no desire to be, for I firmly believe
that the Negro, in order to break
down the racial barriers which af-
October 21, 2021
fect his business success, should
be ever careful in preserving the
social barriers that set him apart.
Williams was more candid years later:
in a private memoir he wrote for his
“One of the finest memoirs of
grandson, he admitted bitterness at not
being able to live in the same neighbor-
the Algerian national revolution—
hoods where he built houses for white
clients.
fascinating, moving, and a delight
Perhaps the most telling example of
persistent real estate prejudice in his
to read from start to finish.”
work was the fieldstone- clad ranch- —HUGH ROBERTS, EDWARD KELLER PROFESSOR OF NORTH AFRICAN
style house he built in the Bel-Air AND MIDDLE EASTERN HISTORY, TUFTS UNIVERSITY
section of Los Angeles in 1954 for the
lawyer and jurist David W. Williams
(also no relation), who fifteen years
later would be appointed the first Black
federal judge west of the Mississippi.
As a pioneering civil rights attorney,
David Williams had been part of the
NAACP team headed by Thurgood
Marshall that challenged the legality
of racially restrictive covenants, which
were declared unconstitutional by
the US Supreme Court in 1948. How-
ever, the architect and his client knew
that other, indirect means were used
to keep Blacks out of predominantly
white areas. In order to buy the land
he wanted, David Williams pretended
to be from another city and conducted
all his negotiations over the telephone
to avoid being seen by the seller. The
ploy succeeded. (Two years earlier, the
architect had been able to build a house
for himself in LA’s Lafayette Park after
restrictions on Blacks living there had
ended.)
Unlike the majority of African-
Americans, who backed the Demo-
cratic Party during Franklin Roosevelt’s
presidency, Paul Williams became a
Republican, then the dominant polit-
ical power in Southern California. To
be sure, his politics were more racially
progressive than those of the right-wing
Republican movement that burgeoned
in nearby Orange County, and he cam-
paigned with the moderate Nelson
Rockefeller during his abortive attempt
to wrest the 1964 Republican presiden-
tial nomination from the conservative
Barry Goldwater. But in his certitude
that to get along you had to play along,
Williams—impeccably courteous, soft-
“The story of a generation…
spoken, and well tailored—wasn’t alone )OXHQWO\WUDQVODWHGE\>0RNKWHßÖV@ZLGRZWKHZULWHU
among high-achieving Blacks. The vir- DUWLVWDQGDFWLYLVW(ODLQH.OHLQ0RNKWHßÙ
tuoso vibraphonist Lionel Hampton
was another avid Rockefeller supporter,
—ADAM SHATZ, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AT THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
and in return for his electioneering in
the Black community the four-term
New York governor facilitated the “Lively and moving…Narrated with
construction of the musician’s Lionel
Hampton Houses, a low- and middle- generosity, eloquence, and candor.”
income apartment complex in Harlem.
—BEN EHRENREICH, AUTHOR OF THE WAY TO THE SPRING
AND DESERT NOTEBOOKS
Despite the obstacles Williams faced,
he enjoyed the steady patronage of
LA’s liberal-minded show business “[An] eyewitness account of a
community. The Hollywood stars for
whom he designed and remodeled revolutionary’s disillusionment
houses included Cary Grant, Tyrone
Power, and Barbara Stanwyck. Ronald ZLWKWKHUHYROXWLRQWRIUHH$OJHULDQRWRQO\IURP)UDQFH
Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman, EXWIURPLWVRZQODFNRISROLWLFDOHQOLJKWHQPHQWÞ
bought a Williams house in Beverly
Hills from a previous owner; Reagan $QLQWHOOLJHQWFKURQLFOHÙ —KIRKUS REVIEWS
and his second wife, Nancy Davis, were
given a wedding reception in another
Williams house, owned by their friends
William Holden and Brenda Marshall.
OTHER PRESS
He had three commissions from Lu- otherpress.com
cille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the last a va-
cation retreat in Rancho Mirage, near
Palm Springs, on a lot that Arnaz, a
compulsive gambler, won in a poker
game. Many of Williams’s patrons
27
worked offscreen, such as the director
Otto Preminger, the lyricist Yip Har-
burg, and a number of studio executives.
The most publicized of all his houses
was the swinging bachelor pad he de-
signed for Frank Sinatra in 1955 on a
dramatic hilltop site in the newly de-
veloped Trousdale Estates section
of Beverly Hills. Sinatra, a longtime
Democrat before he switched to the
Republican Party in 1972, unhesitat-
ingly hired a Black architect, having
long championed civil rights causes and
countless Black musicians. Williams
received enormous national exposure
when Sinatra welcomed the TV cam-
eras of Edward R. Murrow’s Person to
Person show into his home a year after
it was completed.
The Sinatra house has been de-
scribed as Japanese Modern, though
it owes rather less to the Classical ar-
chitecture of that country than did the
turn- of-the- century designs of Wright
and Greene & Greene, or indeed any
number of Midcentury Modern archi-
tects on the West Coast. Its low-slung
rooflines and clustered pavilions con-
formed to Trousdale Estates’ zoning re-
quirement that single-story structures
preserve distant views. And though its
flow of open-plan spaces had a some-
what East Asian quality heightened by
a leitmotif of stylized fretwork screens,
it brought to mind The King and I more
than Katsura. The house survived until
2006, when it was razed to make way
for what one local historian called “the
ten-millionth muddleterranean mess to
dot the Hills of Beverly,” a fate that has
befallen much of Williams’s residential
oeuvre.
In addition to his many domestic
commissions, he also designed two
favorite restaurants of film industry
insiders: a remodeling of Chasen’s in
West Hollywood, which was enlivened
by Williams’s red-leather-upholstered
booths, beloved by the stars (Rea-
gan’s is preserved in his presidential
library), and Perino’s in the Mid-
Wilshire district (which was used as a
location for Frank Perry’s 1981 Joan
Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest).
Williams’s main dining room at Peri-
no’s was a brilliant bit of show- biz
mise- en- scène, as I recall from my
visits there before it closed in 1986.
This windowless high- ceilinged oval
rotunda, in a vaguely classical French
mode with two concentric rings of
curve- crested oval banquettes up-
holstered in apricot velour, provided
unobstructed sightlines from every
seat in the house and acknowledged
that no one loves seeing celebrities
more than other celebrities. The own-
ers of both establishments also asked
Williams to design houses for them,
Alexander Perino in 1945 and Dave
Chasen in 1953.
Another preferred hangout for Hol-
lywood machers was the Polo Lounge
at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which Wil-
liams remodeled as part of his ongoing
series of renovations at the 1912 Span-
ish Colonial landmark after World
War II. With his faultless sense of what
was required in each job, Williams ar-
ranged the Polo Lounge—for decades
the premier power-breakfast locale
among movie dealmakers—around
a meandering biomorphic floor plan
with tables carefully positioned so that
guests could be seen but not overheard.
He also added the hotel’s four-story
Crescent Wing of 1949 (named for the
adjacent Crescent Drive, not its shape),
28
a Modernist slab that suavely harmo-
nizes with the original revivalist archi-
tecture. And Williams figuratively put
his signature on the building with a
new Beverly Hills Hotel logo in his own
bold handwriting, a distinctive flourish
still in use today.
This was a classic Williams “re-
model” (to use the peculiar SoCal lo-
cution for remodeling). He skillfully,
thriftily, and superficially gave passé
properties a refreshed aura while
leaving the old buildings behind his
interventions largely intact. He re-
peated this successful strategy with
later renovations such as the Ambas-
sador Hotel in Hollywood and the El
Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, which
likewise gave his clients the maximum
bang for their buck. His trick of plac-
ing an eye-filling Modernist cynosure
El Mirador Hotel, Palm Springs, California; remodeled by Paul Revere Williams, 1952–1953
at a building’s main entrance to divert
attention was exemplified by the dra-
matic mushroom-shaped canopy he
positioned at the Ambassador’s front
door and the lengthy, swooping porte
cochere he appended to the façade of
El Mirador.
In 1951 Williams was asked to de-
sign the tomb of Al Jolson, the pop-
ular entertainer known as “the king
of blackface” for his hallmark min-
strel routine, which he memorialized
by singing “My Mammy” in the first
feature-length talking picture, Alan
Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927). Jol-
son was buried at Hillside Memorial
Park Cemetery in Culver City, the ver-
itable Père-Lachaise of Hollywood’s
Jewish community. He was given the
place of honor atop a steep slope at the
center of the Stripped Classical mauso-
leum building Williams had designed
in 1937.
To immortalize Jolson the archi-
tect erected a seventy-five-foot-high
circular- domed marble pergola sur-
rounded by six Streamline Moderne
pilasters, and inserted a five-tier,
120-foot-long waterfall to cascade
down the incline in front of it. If the
effect is outrageously theatrical and
grandiose, then so was Jolson him-
self, who is depicted here in a life- size
bronze statue that mimics his familiar
stage pose: down on one knee with
arms outstretched, pleading to be
loved. This funerary extravaganza also
incorporates the ultimate LA status
symbol—its own dedicated parking
area.
Understandably, Williams was the Neutra). After World War II he was re-
go-to man for the few Black entertain- sponsible for Nickerson Gardens of 1955
ers at the time who earned enough to in Watts, the largest public housing de-
commission a custom- designed house. velopment west of the Mississippi with
But they, like the architect, faced se- 1,066 units. And his Berkeley Square
vere restrictions on where they could subdivision of 1955 in Las Vegas, which
live, no matter how much money they comprised 148 privately owned houses,
made. Bill Robinson, the tap dancer, also had a strong social component: it
actor, and singer best known by his was the first development of its sort cre-
nickname Bojangles, was the highest- ated specifically for Blacks, who again
paid Black performer in the US for de- felt the sting of housing discrimination
cades. In 1943 he had Williams design as they migrated to work in the boom-
a modest neo- Colonial house for him ing desert gambling mecca.
in what is now the Exposition Park sec- Williams’s belief that well- designed
tion of Los Angeles near the USC cam- houses should be within the reach of
pus, a neighborhood unencumbered by all Americans prompted him to pub-
race covenants. lish two books of plans that he was
Two houses commissioned by radio happy to have copied by others. The
performers represented opposite ends Small Home of Tomorrow (1945)
of the racial spectrum. In 1937 Wil- presents thirty- eight stylistically var-
liams built one for Eddie “Rochester” ied schemes—with far-flung names
such as the New Orleans, the Riviera,
Julius Shulman/J. Paul Getty Trust/Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
and the Shangri-la Cottage—while
New Homes for Today (1946) offers
thirty-three more, with options that
range in size from a compact 940
square feet to an expansive 2,950
square feet. These charmingly evoc-
ative publications, which encapsulate
the longing that housing- deprived
Americans had for homes of their
own in the postwar years, have been
reissued in facsimile editions that
convey a palpable sense of Williams’s
irresistible salesmanship. 3
In 2017, thirty-seven years after his
death, Williams was awarded the Gold
Medal of the American Institute of
Architects, its highest accolade, and
joined such preeminent recipients as
Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright,
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbus-
ier, Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn. Wil-
liams’s award came three years after
it was also posthumously bestowed on
Julia Morgan (1872–1957), the first
woman admitted to the École des
Beaux-Arts in Paris, best known for
Anderson, Jack Benny’s comedian side- designing California’s Hearst Castle.
kick and one of the best- compensated If the belated recognition of Morgan
Black performers in America. It is still and Williams was an attempt to diver-
owned by his family, who, following sify the AIA Gold Medal laureates, it
Anderson’s instructions to use it for hasn’t helped much, for apart from
charitable purposes, rent portions to them (as well as the Chinese-American
out- of-work entertainers. In the follow- I. M. Pei and the Japanese architects
ing year the architect created one of his Kenzo Tange, Tadao Ando, and Fumi-
larger residential designs for the white hiko Maki), the 117-year- old award has
comedic actor Charles Correll, who since been given exclusively to white
played the Black title character Andy men and just one other woman—De-
on the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show from nise Scott Brown, honored in 2016 with
1928 to 1960. The series featured an her partner and husband, Robert Ven-
all-white cast who affected thick Black turi. Yet this imbalance shouldn’t be
dialect accents and bumbled through surprising, since only 2 percent of reg-
harebrained get-rich- quick schemes istered architects in the US today are
that inevitably failed. A TV sitcom Black. And while the number rises to
version with an all-Black cast ran 17 percent for women, that too seems
from 1951 to 1953, and though it was scandalous, considering that as re-
broadcast in reruns until 1966, was at cently as 2018 women comprised 46
last taken off the air after civil rights percent of students in American ar-
groups decried its gross caricatures and chitecture schools, indicating a huge
demeaning stereotypes—complaints fall- off between higher education and
that had been raised about the radio professional practice.
version as early as 1930. The perseverance and achievement
Williams also maintained an abid- of Paul Revere Williams remain in-
ing commitment to public housing. He spiring, and in retrospect appear as
assisted Hilyard Robinson (a fellow audacious as the corrective social
African-American architect) on the goals of the early Modern Movement
exemplary Langston Terrace Public in architecture. This gifted American
Housing project of 1937 in Washing- original’s embrace of widely divergent
ton, D.C., which was sponsored by the formal solutions for different func-
New Deal’s Public Works Administra- tional purposes presaged the freer ap-
tion. Nearer to home in Los Angeles proaches that took hold in architecture
are his 400-unit Pueblo del Rio Public only after his death, and he now can be
Housing of 1941–1942 in the Central- seen not as a case for special pleading
Alameda neighborhood and the 184- but a fearless forerunner of even more
unit Hacienda Village Housing Project liberating attitudes yet to come. Q
of 1942 in Watts (for both of which he
3
was part of a design team along with Hennessey + Ingalls, 2006.
The New York Review
 The Human Costs of AI
Atlas of AI :
Power, Politics,
and the Planetary Costs
of Artificial Intelligence
by Kate Crawford.
Yale University Press, 327 pp., $28.00
We, the Robots?:
Regulating Artificial Intelligence
and the Limits of the Law
by Simon Chesterman.
Cambridge University Press,
289 pp., $39.99
Futureproof:
9 Rules for Humans
in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose.
Random House, 217 pp., $27.00
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence:
Why Computers Can’t
Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 312 pp., $29.95
In 2015 a cohort of well-known scien-
tists and entrepreneurs including Ste-
phen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve
Wozniak issued a public letter urging
technologists developing artificial in-
telligence systems to “research how to
reap its benefits while avoiding poten-
tial pitfalls.” To that end, they wrote,
“We recommend expanded research
aimed at ensuring that increasingly ca-
pable AI systems are robust and bene-
ficial: our AI systems must do what we
want them to do.”
More than eight thousand people
have now signed that letter. While most
are academics, the signers also include
researchers at Palantir, the secretive
surveillance firm that helps ICE round
up undocumented immigrants; the
leaders of Vicarious, an industrial ro-
botics company that boasts reductions
for its clients of more than 50 percent
in labor hours—which is to say, work
performed by humans; and the found-
ers of Sentient Technologies, who had
previously developed the language-
recognition technology used by Siri,
Apple’s voice assistant, and whose
company has since been folded into
Cognizant, a corporation that provided
some of the underpaid, overly stressed
workforce tasked with “moderating”
content on Facebook.
Musk, meanwhile, is pursuing more
than just AI- equipped self- driving
cars. His brain- chip company, Neura-
link, aims to merge the brain with ar-
tificial intelligence, not only to develop
life- changing medical applications for
people with spinal cord injuries and
neurological disorders, but, eventually,
for everyone, to create a kind of hive
mind. The goal, according to Musk, is
a future “controlled by the combined
will of the people of Earth—[since]
that’s obviously gonna be the future
that we want.”
It turns out, then, that the most sig-
nificant takeaway from a letter warning
of the potential dangers of artificial
intelligence might be its insistence
that AI systems “must do what we
want them to do.” And what is that?
Even now, just six years later, that list
is too long to catalog. Most of us have
October 21, 2021
Sue Halpern
‘Data Pools’; a geolocation spoofing project by Adam Harvey and Anastasia Kubrak
that virtually relocated people’s phones to the pools of Silicon Valley CEO s, 2018
encountered scripted, artificially in-
telligent customer service bots whose
main purpose seems to be forestalling
conversations with actual humans. We
have relied on AI to tell us what tele-
vision shows to watch and where to
dine. AI has helped people with brain
injuries operate robotic arms and de-
cipher verbal thoughts into audible
words. AI delivers the results of our
Google searches, as well as serving
us ads based on those searches. AI is
shaping the taste profile of plant-based
burgers. AI has been used to monitor
farmers’ fields, compute credit scores,
kill an Iranian nuclear scientist, grade
papers, fill prescriptions, diagnose var-
ious kinds of cancers, write newspaper
articles, buy and sell stocks, and decide
which actors to cast in big-budget films
in order to maximize the return on in-
vestment. By now, AI is as ambient as
the Internet itself. In the words of the
computer scientist Andrew Ng, artifi-
cial intelligence is “the new electricity.”
In 2017 Ng summarized his vision
in a valedictory post on the blogging
platform Medium announcing his res-
ignation from the Chinese technology
company Baidu. “The industrial revo-
lution freed humanity from much re-
petitive physical drudgery,” he wrote.
“I now want AI to free humanity
from repetitive mental drudgery, such
as driving in traffic.” If freeing peo-
ple from that sort of mental drudgery
seems trivial in the face of, say, climate
change and other current and impend-
ing global calamities, its real value
will be to stakeholders in a global au-
tonomous car market that is expected
to grow to more than $809 billion
this year and $1.38 trillion by 2025.
Adam Harvey/Anastasia Kubrak
hold in one hand, with lithium at
their core.
Calling those networked comput-
ers “the cloud” is a perfect example
of what Crawford sees as “the stra-
tegic amnesia that accompanies sto-
ries of technological progress.” While
the metaphor invokes an image of
data floating weightlessly in the sky,
the reality is that the cloud takes up
hundreds of thousands of acres of
terrestrial real estate, typically lo-
cated where electricity is cheap. (The
world’s largest data center, as of 2018,
in Langfang, China, covers 6.3 million
square feet, the equivalent of 110 foot-
ball fields.) Cheap, of course, is a rel-
ative term. A study from researchers
at McMaster University found that, if
unchecked, the computing industry as
a whole could account for 14 percent
of all greenhouse emissions by 2040—
“about half of the entire transportation
sector worldwide.”
Some of this carbon intensity has
been driven by the belief that ever-
bigger datasets are essential to train
machine learning algorithms in order
to create workable AI systems. (Ma-
chine learning is a kind of artificial
intelligence, in which algorithms sort
through enormous amounts of data
using statistical methods to make clas-
sifications and predictions; the assump-
tion is that more data delivers more
accurate outcomes.) When research-
ers from the University of Massachu-
setts Amherst calculated the carbon
Overall, according to a report from emissions required to build and train
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, AI could a single natural language processing
add up to $15.7 trillion to the global system—which teaches computers to
economy by 2030. interpret and use everyday language—
Such unbridled growth is not with- they determined that it was around five
out other, less compensatory conse- times the lifetime emissions of the av-
quences. As Kate Crawford’s trenchant erage American car.
Atlas of AI demonstrates again and
again, artificial intelligence does not
come to us as a deus ex machina but, In the early days of what we now think
rather, through a number of dehuman- of as digital computing, natural lan-
izing extractive practices, of which guage processing was the holy grail of
most of us are unaware. Crawford, a artificial intelligence. It is central to what
senior researcher at Microsoft and a has become known as the Turing test,
cofounder of the AI Now Institute at a method of determining if a machine
NYU, begins her tour of the AI uni- has achieved human-level cognition,
verse in Silver Peak, Nevada, look- derived from the British mathematician
ing at the “open, iridescent green Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing
ponds” of brine pumped out of North Machinery and Intelligence.” In its sim-
America’s largest lithium mine. Lith- plest formulation, the test posits that we
ium—the “li” in “li-ion” batteries—is will know that machines have achieved
an essential ingredient in our digital real intelligence once people are unable
lives. Without it there are no laptop to figure out if they are conversing with
computers, no smart watches, no cell a human or a machine.
phones. Leaving aside the inadequacy of the
“The term ‘artificial intelligence’ Turing test to actually determine in-
may invoke ideas of algorithms, data, telligence, as well as its reductive un-
and cloud architectures,” Crawford derstanding of what intelligence is, it’s
writes, “but none of that can function indisputable that natural language pro-
without the minerals and resources cessing systems have made tremendous
that build computing’s core compo- strides, especially in the past few years.
nents.” She adds: It’s now possible to have a rudimentary
exchange with Amazon’s Alexa device,
Many aspects of modern life have though there is a good chance that Al-
been moved to “the cloud” with exa’s answers will be wildly off the
little consideration of these mate- mark or inane. (Also, Alexa has begun
rial costs. Our work and personal to initiate conversations, almost always
lives, our medical histories, our to promote some aspect of Amazon-
leisure time, our entertainment, related commerce; to wit: “You may be
our political interests—all of this running low on Stash Irish breakfast tea.
takes place in the world of net- Would you like to reorder?”) Google
worked computing architectures Translate can take words and phrases
that we tap into from devices we from Hmong, say, and switch them into
29
Serbian—a triumph, but again, one with
varying degrees of success.
Recently, the Open AI research in-
stitute released GPT-3, an updated
iteration of its natural language pro-
cessor. The acronym stands for Gen-
erative Pre-trained Transformer. It is
“pre-trained” because its algorithms
have already sorted through something
like 570 gigabytes of text, finding the
most statistically significant clusters of
words. With only a few prompts, GPT-3
is able to write short stories and essays.
Not long after it was released, I asked it
to compose an essay with the title “The
Future of Humanity.” If one did not
read the result too closely, it appeared
to address the subject with an uncanny
degree of sophistication. That’s be-
cause it was, essentially, a collection of
words and phrases one might expect to
see in such an essay. Strung together,
though, they were vacuous:
There was a time when the fu-
ture was certain. That time is now
reaching its conclusion. The pres-
ent, like everything else, will soon
come to an end. . . . We are on the
brink of a technological revolution
that has the potential to eradicate
human suffering while simultane-
ously bringing an end to our exis-
tence as a species.
Natural language processors like GPT
are trained on millions of documents and
datasets scraped from the Internet, in-
cluding Wikipedia and the entire cache
of emails seized from Enron employ-
ees during the bankruptcy proceedings
against the company, which were later
released online by the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission. Like pretty
much everything on the Internet, they
became fair game for machine learning
research. In addition to raising ques-
tions about the privacy implications of
sharing personal correspondence with-
out consent, Crawford asks readers to
consider other, sometimes subtle, ram-
ifications of training AI systems in this
way, since those systems will reflect the
linguistic norms of their sources. “Text
archives were seen as neutral collections
of language, as though there was a gen-
eral equivalence between the words in a
technical manual and how people write
to colleagues via email,” she writes.
If a language model is based on the
kinds of words that are clustered
together, it matters where those
words come from. There is no neu-
tral ground for language, and all
text collections are also accounts
of time, place, culture, and politics.
It’s a crucial point, and one that begins
to get at the ways that AI training mod-
els can replicate entrenched social and
cultural biases.
Bias is a complicated term, and it’s a
useful one to keep in mind when trying
to understand how AI systems operate.
For developers building machine learn-
ing systems, “bias” refers to the task they
are building the AI to address, such as
playing chess or making restaurant res-
ervations. In that situation, it’s neutral.
More typically (and colloquially), it not
only describes AI systems that perpetu-
ate prejudices and trade on stereotypes
but also suggests how they got this way.
Machines only know what they know
from the data they have been given.
Historical data, for example, has the
built-in problem of reflecting and re-
30
inforcing historical patterns. A good
example of this is a so- called talent
management system built a few years
ago by developers at Amazon. Their
goal was to automate the hiring of po-
tential software engineers with an AI
system that could sort through hun-
dreds of résumés and score them the
way Amazon shoppers rate products.
The AI selected the highest scorers
and rejected the rest. But when the
developers looked at the results, they
found that the system was only recom-
mending men. This was because the AI
system had been trained on a dataset
of Amazon résumés from employees
the company had hired in the past ten
years, almost all of whom were men.
In his surprisingly lively examination
of AI regulation, We, the Robots?, the
legal scholar Simon Chesterman points
to an audit of another résumé-screening
program that found that “the two most
important factors indicative of job
performance . . .were being named
Jared and having played high school
lacrosse.” Bias can be inadvertently in-
troduced into AI systems in other ways,
too. A study that looked at the three
major facial recognition systems found
that they failed to identify gender just
1 percent of the time when the subject
was a white male. When the subject was
a darker-skinned female, however, the
error rate was nearly 35 percent for two
of the companies, and 21 percent for the
third. This was not a mistake. The algo-
rithm builders trained their algorithms
on datasets composed primarily of peo-
ple who looked like them. In so doing,
they introduced bias into the system.
The consequences of these kinds
of errors can be profound. They have
caused Facebook to label Black men as
primates, they could cause autonomous
vehicles to fail to recognize a woman
with dark skin crossing the street, and
they could lead the police to arrest
the wrong man. In fact, last year The
New York Times reported on the case
of Robert Williams, a Black man who
got a call from the Detroit police while
he was at work, telling him to report
to the police station to be arrested. At
the station, Williams was taken into an
interrogation room, where detectives
showed him three grainy photographs.
These turned out to be surveillance
photos from a store where someone had
stolen nearly $4,000 of merchandise.
The person in question was a heavy-
set Black man, like Williams. But that
is where the similarities ended. How
had the police department’s computer
identified Williams? Through a match
between the grainy surveillance photos
and Williams’s driver’s license photo.
In this case, a badly trained facial rec-
ognition system was used to arrest an
innocent man and toss him in jail, even
though there was no physical evidence
connecting him to the crime.
Databases used by law enforcement
include about 641 million driver’s li-
cense and ID photos from twenty- one
states. In many states, personal infor-
mation collected by municipal agencies
like the Department of Motor Vehicles
is for sale to third parties and can then
be incorporated into commercial facial
recognition systems. Crawford points
out that mug shots, too, have been fair
game: “A person standing in front of a
camera in an orange jumpsuit, then, is
dehumanized as just more data,” she
writes.
And like a tightening ratchet, the
faces of deceased persons, sus-
pects, and prisoners are harvested
to sharpen the police and border
surveillance facial recognition sys-
tems that are then used to monitor
and detain more people.
Artificial intelligence systems are
now a staple of the criminal justice sys-
tem. In some jurisdictions, like Los An-
geles, AI helped determine where the
police should patrol, a determination
that is often made on the basis of where
the most crimes are committed. That
might sound reasonable, but sending
more police to patrol those neighbor-
hoods has resulted in more people being
arrested for nonviolent, minor offenses.
It becomes a self-reinforcing loop: the
more crime, the more police; the more
police, the more crime—and on and on.
Then, once someone is arrested, a judge
may use risk assessment software in de-
ciding if they should go to jail and for
how long. If the arrestee lives in a high-
crime neighborhood, they are much
more likely to get jail time, because the
algorithm is not simply assessing their
propensity to commit another crime—
which, of course, it cannot know—it is
looking at the criminal records of an
aggregate of people with similar back-
grounds and characteristics.*
Judges, prosecutors, and parole
boards who use these kinds of risk as-
sessment tools often believe that they
are fairer than decisions made by hu-
mans, failing to see that, in reality, the
assessments have been made by the
humans who designed these AI systems
in the first place. Additionally, as Ches-
terman notes, a Canadian study
of lawyers and judges . . . found that
many regarded [risk assessment]
software . . . as an improvement
over subjective judgment: though
risk assessment tools were not
*A 2016 ProPublica study of more
than seven thousand arrests in Brow-
ard County, Florida, found that the
county’s AI system was twice as likely
to label Black defendants future crim-
inals than whites. One of the ques-
tions it used to assess risk was “Was
one of your parents ever sent to jail
or prison?,” thus perpetuating mass
incarceration.
deemed especially reliable predic-
tors of future behaviour, they were
also favoured because using them
minimized the risk that the law-
yers and judges themselves would
be blamed for the consequences of
their decisions.
Other kinds of bias are even more
subtle. Many AI systems are propri-
etary. Shielded behind intellectual
property laws, they are often opaque,
even to the people employing them.
They are similarly inscrutable to the
population at large. Consider credit
scores: for most of us, this is a number
lurking in the background, not just of
our financial lives but of what our fi-
nancial lives lead to, like mortgages
and spending limits on credit cards. In
the past, a credit score was typically a
reflection of how conscientiously one
paid bills and settled debts. Now there
is talk of enhancing this with “alter-
native” data, culled from social media
and the Internet.
There is no way to know where all
the data is coming from, if it’s accu-
rate, how it’s weighted, or whether the
algorithmic engine powering the sys-
tem is relying on data that itself repli-
cates historical prejudices, like where
someone lives or where they went to
college. Moreover, while it may be il-
legal in certain circumstances to ask
for some personal information, like
gender, algorithms can be riddled with
assumptions—made by their human
authors—such as that an elementary
school teacher is female or a commer-
cial pilot is male. They may also use
one variable as a proxy for another,
such as zip code for wealth or surname
for race and ethnicity.
Not long ago, the online insurance
company Lemonade posted a series of
tweets “explaining” how the company’s
algorithms assess claims. As reported
by the website Recode, Lemonade
maintained that it collected more than
1,600 data points on each user, but
didn’t say what those data points
are or how and when they’re col-
lected, simply that they produce
“nuanced profiles” and “remark-
ably predictive insights” which
help Lemonade determine, in ap-
parently granular detail, its cus-
tomers’ level of risk.
Risk, here, actually refers to the com-
pany’s level of risk, which it aimed to
mitigate by requiring customers mak-
ing insurance claims to submit videos
that its AI “carefully analyzes . . . for
signs of fraud,” including “non-verbal
cues.” The Twitter thread concluded
that Lemonade’s AI was responsible
for the company making more money
in premiums than it had to pay out in
claims.
Lemonade’s use of video to assess
a client’s truthfulness is part of a new
trend involving the use of AI to “read”
human emotions. Ostensibly, “affective
AI” can scan a face and “know” how
a person is feeling. One of the leaders
in this field, a company called Affec-
tiva, claims it is “humanizing technol-
ogy.” Pitching its service to companies
that hope to gauge consumer interest
in their products, Affectiva says that
it can measure a person’s moment-by-
moment micro-facial expressions as
they view an advertisement, using “the
world’s largest emotion database,” and
The New York Review
correlate these microscopic twitches
with human attributes like trustwor-
thiness and attentiveness. Affective AI
systems are now used by airport screen-
ers to “identify” terrorists, universities
to assess student engagement, corpora-
tions to weed out job candidates.
How does the AI know if someone is
bored or grief-stricken or euphoric? Af-
fective AI is rooted, first, in an assump-
tion that there is a shared taxonomy of
facial expressions, and second, in the
idea that that taxonomy can be trans-
lated into a numerical system. Is this
specious? At least one study, from the
University of Maryland, has shown that
Black faces are more likely than white
faces to be classified by AI as angry.
And, of course, there’s the surveillance
issues that this raises, and the many ways
surveillance leads to self- censorship and
the curtailment of self-expression.
T his, though, is not usually what peo-
ple fear about artificial intelligence.
More often it’s replacement—that AI
will supersede us intellectually, or that
it will take our jobs. The concern about
employment is not misplaced. Accord-
ing to a team of economists from MIT
and Boston University, automation has
been subsuming jobs faster than it is
creating them. Another study, from the
forecasting firm Oxford Economics,
predicts the loss of 20 million jobs to au-
tomation by 2030. The prospect that we
will soon work for our machines, and
not the other way around, is already the
norm at Amazon warehouses, where
humans are, in Crawford’s words,
“there to complete the specific, fiddly
tasks that robots cannot.” But even
before Amazon’s unprecedented dehu-
manization project, AI developers were
reliant on legions of underpaid scut
workers to tag audio clips and label im-
ages, among other things. “Exploitative
forms of work exist at all stages of the
AI pipeline,” Crawford writes,
from the mining sector . . . to the
software side, where distributed
workforces are paid pennies per
microtask. . . . Workers do the re-
petitive tasks that backstop claims
of AI magic—but they rarely re-
ceive credit for making the systems
function.
AI is cannibalizing the white- collar
sector, too. A study from Wells Fargo
estimates that as many as 200,000 fi-
nance jobs will disappear in the next
decade. AI now reads legal documents
with a speed and accuracy unmatched
by its human counterparts, generates
corporate reports, and is responsible
for hiring, assessing, and firing workers.
AI is also moving into creative fields
like musical composition. Aiva (Arti-
ficial Intelligence Virtual Artist) has
learned music theory from a database
of classical compositions, produces its
own sheet music, contributes to movie
soundtracks, and is the first AI to be of-
ficially designated as a composer, with
its own copyright under the France and
Luxembourg authors’ rights society.
But the years ahead won’t all be
about loss, as Kevin Roose points out
in his ultimately genial assessment of
the prospect of our coexistence with
automated and artificially intelligent
machines, Futureproof: 9 Rules for
Humans in the Age of Automation.
Aside from the potential savings from
the added efficiencies and reduced
October 21, 2021
labor costs associated with automa-
tion, which may or may not be passed
along to consumers but will certainly
accrue to corporations and their own-
ers (among them, the richest person in
the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos),
there will be new jobs in fields that don’t
yet exist. Cognizant, the company that
supplied Facebook with content moder-
ators, imagines some of them to be “per-
sonal data brokers,” “augmented reality
journey builders,” and “juvenile cyber-
crime rehabilitation counselors.” And
then there’s this: The Wall Street Jour-
nal recently reported that Pepper, a hu-
manoid robot created by the SoftBank
group in Japan, was so incompetent at
the various jobs for which it was tasked,
among them Buddhist priest and nurs-
ing home attendant, that the company
stopped making it, which suggests that
some humans may not be obsolete yet.
The other fear—that AI systems will
acquire human-level intelligence and
eventually outwit us—remains, thus
far, the stuff of science fiction. True,
AI can perform certain functions more
quickly and accurately than people, but
that is hardly a measure of intelligence.
In the estimation of the computer scien-
tist and AI entrepreneur Erik J. Larson,
“As we successfully apply simpler, nar-
row versions of intelligence that benefit
from faster computers and lots of data,
we are not making incremental prog-
ress, but rather picking low-hanging
fruit.” His thoughtful new book, The
Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why
Computers Can’t Think the Way We
Do, makes a convincing case that ar-
tificial general intelligence—machine-
based intelligence that matches our
own—is beyond the capacity of algo-
rithmic machine learning because there
is a mismatch between how humans and
machines know what they know. Human
knowledge is diverse, as are our capaci-
ties. Our intelligence derives from the
range of our experiences and thrives,
at times, on the irrational, the seren-
dipitous, the spiritual, the whimsical. In
the estimation of the French machine
learning scientist François Chollet, Lar-
son writes, “Your brain is one piece in
a broader system which includes your
body, your environment, other humans,
and culture as a whole.”
By contrast, even machines that
master the tasks they are trained to
perform can’t jump domains. Aiva, for
example, can’t drive a car even though
it can write music (and wouldn’t even be
able to do that without Bach and Bee-
thoven). AlphaGo can best the most ac-
complished Go player in the world, but
it can’t play chess, let alone write music
or drive a car. Machine learning sys-
tems, moreover, are trained on datasets
that are, by definition, limited. (If they
weren’t, they would not be datasets.) As
Larson notes, the real world—the one
we inhabit and interact with—gener-
ates data all day long: “Common sense
goes a long way toward understanding
the limitations of machine learning: it
tells us life is unpredictable.” AI can’t
account for the qualitative, nonmea-
surable, idiosyncratic, messy stuff of
life. The danger ahead, then, is not
that artificially intelligent systems will
get smarter than their human creators.
It’s that by valorizing these systems
without reservation, humans will vol-
untarily cede the very essence of our-
selves—our curiosity, our compassion,
our autonomy, our creativity—to a nar-
row, algorithmically driven vision of
what counts. Q
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A new graphic novel from Dash Shaw
During the Civil War, many Quakers were caught between
their fervent support of abolition, a desire to preserve the
Union, and their long-standing commitment to pacifism.
When Charles Cox, a young Quaker from Indiana, slips
out early one morning to enlist in the Union Army, he
scandalizes his family and his community.
Leaving behind the strict ways of Quaker life, Cox is
soon confronted with the savagery of battle, the cruelty
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31

The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton,
edited by Angus Gowland.
London: Penguin Classics,
1,324 pp., £40.00
The Empire of Depression:
A New History
by Jonathan Sadowsky.
Polity, 228 pp., $35.00
How to Be Depressed
by George Scialabba.
University of Pennsylvania Press,
146 pp., $27.50
The Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le
Fanu is now best known for two works:
the Gothic novel Uncle Silas and Car-
milla, the first great tale of a female
vampire. Of his other writings, the one
most often encountered is an 1871 story
called “Green Tea.”
Like several other Le Fanu stories, it
is taken from the supposed casebook
of a German physician resident in En-
gland, Martin Hesselius. Hesselius is
approached at a party by a clergyman,
the Reverend Mr. Jennings, who has
heard of his open-mindedness about
supernatural phenomena. After an
extended and uneasy flirtation, the
clergyman reveals his problem. He is
haunted by a small, immaterial black
monkey with fiery red eyes, of “un-
fathomable malignity.” This vision, it
emerges, has been brought on by over-
consumption of green tea. That sub-
stance, if consumed in excess, wears
away at the boundaries that separate
our world from other, darker ones.
At first the monkey seems weak:
“Dazed and languid,” “sullen and
sick.” But over time it grows more ag-
gressive. It disturbs Jennings at prayer.
It prevents him from preaching to his
congregation, squatting upon the Bible
in front of him so that he cannot read it.
It whispers enticements to harm others,
or to harm himself. Sometimes it will
absent itself for as long as two or three
months, but it always returns: “It is pre-
vailing, little by little, and drawing me
more interiorly into hell.”
Hesselius assures the haunted Jen-
nings that he can help. He instructs
the clergyman to summon him at once
whenever the monkey next appears.
He then departs for a suburban inn,
to meditate on the case “without the
possibility of intrusion or distraction.”
When he returns to his lodgings the
next morning there is a letter from Jen-
nings: the monkey is back. Rushing to
the house, Hesselius finds he is too late:
the unfortunate clergyman has cut his
own throat.
I first read the story some decades
ago. I was impressed then by its slow
buildup, its nocturnal atmosphere, its
unsettling evocation of other realms.
Like Le Fanu himself, both Jennings
and Hesselius are readers of the Swed-
ish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who
thought there were many more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamt of
in anyone’s philosophy.
It did not occur to me until I reread
it recently that “Green Tea” is—quite
transparently—a story about depression.
Those who have experienced the disease
will recognize Jennings’s sufferings. As
32
A Mind in Pain
Gregory Hays
Illustration of trepanning from an anatomical treatise by the Italian physician
Guido da Vigevano, 1345. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton lists trepanning
as one of the treatments for melancholia, ‘to let out the fuliginous vapors.’
an embodiment of the condition, Le Fa-
nu’s monkey deserves to be ranked with
Poe’s raven, Churchill’s black dog, and
the errant planet that collides with Earth
in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia.
“Melancholia” is presumably what
Le Fanu would have called the disease.
(The psychiatrist Adolf Meyer endorsed
“depression” in an influential 1904 ad-
dress, but the older term maintained its
dominance into the 1930s.) In premod-
ern medicine, melancholy, or black bile,
was one of the four basic substances—
humors—produced by the body; the
others were blood, phlegm, and yellow
bile or choler. Everyone has all four hu-
mors, but not always in equal measure.
Where one is dominant, the person’s
temperament is said to be sanguine,
phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic.
These are not illnesses but traits, like
being outgoing or left-handed.
An unhealthy excess of black bile,
however, leads to an actual disease, mel-
ancholia. A work attributed to Hippo-
crates defines it as chronic sadness or
anxiety. But ancient melancholia was
not always identical with modern de-
pression. The set of scientific Problems
falsely credited to Aristotle makes it
sound more like bipolar disorder. Ra-
bies was a form of melancholia, and
work, fictional or not, that mixes satire
Musée Condé, Chantilly, France/ PHAS /Universal Images Group/Getty Images
(including satire of itself) with “exhaus-
tive erudition.” Thus Moby-Dick is an
anatomy of whaling, The Compleat An-
gler an anatomy of fishing, The Name
of the Rose an anatomy of the Middle
Ages, and Tristram Shandy an anatomy
of nothing in particular.
Burton’s library of more than 1,700
volumes was reconstructed in a 1988
study by the American scholar Nico-
las Kiessling. It runs alphabetically
from a work on the Antichrist by Rob-
ert Abbot to a Latin verse comedy by
the Dutch humanist Jacobus Zovitius.
Along the way it takes in virtually ev-
erything else: natural history, medicine,
theology, travel, current events, classical
authors, astronomy and astrology, magic
and witchcraft, letters, sermons, plays,
emblem books, religious controversy,
scholarly polemics, and (as Burton
often ends such catalogs) “what not?”
From these volumes and others,
Burton wrote, assembled, constructed,
gleaned, edited, amassed, compiled,
and curated his own work. The Anat-
omy falls into three “partitions,” as the
author called them. The first covers the
causes and symptoms of melancholy,
the second treatments and cures. The
third deals with two special cases: love-
sickness (here Burton claimed to be
“a Contemplator only”) and religious
despair.
The causes of melancholy as Bur-
ton lists them are Borgesian in their
diversity. They include original sin,
venison, anger, excessive solitude, de-
mons, standing water, exile, cabbage,
too much sex, not enough sex, the stars,
milk and milk products (except asses’
milk), the death of loved ones, fruit,
professional jealousy, constipation,
envy, and shellfish. The roster of reme-
dies is no less diverse, taking in borage,
ancient sources describe delusional mel- seasickness, farting, candles, friend-
ancholics who believed themselves to ship, looking at maps, listening to music,
be roosters or pieces of pottery. (“Keep watching historical reenactments, ram’s
away, you’ll break me!” shouts one.) The brains cooked with spices, a hot Turk-
special connection of depressive melan- ish drink called Coffee (“named of a
cholia with scholars and intellectuals is berry as black as soot, and as bitter”),
attributed to Rufus of Ephesus, a Greek bloodletting, precious stones, the colors
doctor active around 100 AD. Only frag- green, red, yellow, and white; and—for
ments of his On Melancholy survive, women—sewing and embroidery.
but he influenced Galen, and through It is easy to dismiss the Anatomy as
Galen the idea made its way into the backward-looking. Burton’s view of the
mainstream of European culture. human body was still basically Galen’s,
For English readers, melancholy is as mediated by early modern authori-
inextricably linked with the name of ties like the Italian polymath Girolamo
Robert Burton. Burton’s biography is Cardano, the French physician André
outwardly uneventful. Born in 1577 du Laurens (Burton’s “Laurentius”),
and educated at Oxford, he spent most and the Swiss professor of medicine
of his life there, as a fellow and librarian Felix Plater. This creaky intellectual
of Christ Church College. He served as model was already starting to crumble
rector to a parish on the outskirts of the under the assaults of Andreas Vesalius
town and enjoyed the income from sev- and William Harvey. In the same way,
eral other such positions as the gift of Burton’s inherited ideas concerning the
patrons. Like all Oxford fellows before relation between body and mind were
1882, he was a bachelor. He wrote at about to be swept aside by Descartes.*
least two plays, one of which survives.
But his major work was The Anatomy
of Melancholy.
An anatomy is a vast anthology, an *Lately the pendulum has swung back.
Jennifer Radden’s Melancholic Hab-
omnium-gatherum of facts, specula-
its (2016) argues that Burton’s view
tions, quotations, and anecdotes, a book of mind and body as inextricably en-
made of books. It was from Burton that twined anticipates modern theories of
Northrop Frye drew the title of his cognition and that the Anatomy still
Anatomy of Criticism (1957), as well as has much to offer researchers in the
his definition of the form: a ramshackle mind sciences.
The New York Review
 Yet Burton is no mere antiquarian.
The Anatomy finds room for Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics and the habits of the
basilisk, but also for the discoveries of
Galileo and Kepler, the Jesuit Matteo
Ricci’s reports from China, the voyages
of Drake and Cavendish, and Dutch
and English expeditions to Greenland
and Nova Zembla. From his study
in Oxford, Burton made himself the
Herodotus of despair. Like Herodotus,
he is at his best in his digressions: on
demons, on the ideal commonwealth,
on the misery of scholars. A long fanta-
sia imagines an aerial voyage to survey
the wonders of nature, ranging in the
process from the Caspian Sea to Cal-
ifornia, from the diversity of national
traits to debates on the carrying capac-
ity of hell.
The more of the Anatomy one reads,
the harder it becomes to say what its
real subject is. Burton’s melancholy
sometimes seems identical with depres-
sion, and those who live with the dis-
ease will recognize his melancholics:
“Dull, heavy, lazy, restless, unapt to
go about any business.” But the more
capacious ancient definition sometimes
reappears: we hear of “a gentleman at
Siena in Italy, who was afraid to piss,
lest all the Town should be drowned.”
His resourceful doctors convinced him
that the town was on fire and only he
could put it out. (Perhaps they were
readers of Rabelais.)
In trying to define melancholy Bur-
ton sometimes found himself describ-
ing madness or folly in general, “the
one being a degree to the other.” This
slippage is clearest in the playful in-
troduction, “Democritus Junior to the
Reader.” (Democritus was proverbially
the laughing philosopher, as Heraclitus
was the weeping one.) The more ex-
pansive definition reemerges in a long
digression on consolation in the second
partition and dominates in the third. In
these sections “melancholy” extends its
reach until it becomes virtually coex-
tensive with unhappiness. To assuage
it we need not Galen and his followers
but those advocates of moderation and
sanity, Seneca and Horace.
For Burton, in fact, to describe mel-
ancholy was to describe the world. His
book, accordingly, became a mirror of
the world, a memory palace the size of
the British Museum, each page filled
like an aristocrat’s cabinet with “pleas-
ant pieces of perspective, Indian Pic-
tures made of feathers, China works,
frames, Thaumaturgical motions, ex-
otic toys, &c.” (Note that final “&c.,”
as characteristic of Burton’s prose as
Beckett’s “worse” or Hemingway’s
“commence to.”)
The first version of the Anatomy ap-
peared in 1621, two years before the
First Folio of Shakespeare. It went
through five editions in Burton’s life-
time; a sixth appeared posthumously,
in 1651. Burton rarely rewrote any-
thing, and he deleted little, so most of
his changes were additions: new orna-
mental synonyms, new authorities, new
illustrative quotations, slotted in wher-
ever they seemed to belong. The work
grew by a process of accretion, like a
coral reef.
The standard scholarly version of the
Anatomy is now the six-volume Clar-
endon Press edition published from
1989 to 2001: a complete set will run
you over $2,000. Unsurprisingly, most
readers have continued to encounter
October 21, 2021
Burton in Holbrook Jackson’s 1932
Everyman’s Library edition (reprinted
in 2001 by New York Review Books).
Jackson aggressively modernized spell-
ing and incidentals, turned Burton’s
copious marginal citations into end-
notes, and left some of the racier Latin
passages untranslated.
Angus Gowland’s new Penguin Clas-
sics edition is based (like Jackson’s) on
the posthumous sixth edition. It ben-
efits, however, from the labors of the
Clarendon team—not least because it
can take their version for granted and
focus instead on the general reader.
Gowland has pruned Burton’s own
notes, while keeping them with the text,
where they belong. The losses are made
good by more than two hundred pages
of new annotation. He has preserved
characteristic typographic features of
the original: more italics, heavier cap-
italization, and authorial notes keyed
to letters (a, b, c, etc.). Though spell-
ing is still modernized, the result feels
much more like reading a seventeenth-
century book.
What would an updated Anatomy of
Melancholy look like? Perhaps some-
thing like Jonathan Sadowsky’s The
Empire of Depression. Sadowsky is a
professor of the history of medicine
at Case Western Reserve. His book is
a roughly chronological survey of the
modern disease, our understanding of
it, and its changing treatments. Though
neither a Galenist nor an Anglican
priest, Sadowsky reminds one in many
ways of Burton: wry, practical, hu-
mane, sometimes slightly maddening in
his open-mindedness and suspension
of judgment.
As Sadowsky shows, depression still
holds many mysteries. Indeed, virtu-
ally everything we know about it is
open to debate. It seems fitting that one
of the major ancient texts, the pseudo-
Aristotelian Problems, was written
in question form. “Why is it that. . . ?”
begins each chapter, to which the au-
thor floats tentative hypotheses (“Is it
because. . . ?”). A doctor quoted in Wil-
liam Styron’s 1990 memoir Darkness
Visible compared depression research-
ers to Columbus: “America is yet un-
known; we are still down on that little
island in the Bahamas.”
In Shoot the Damn Dog (2008),
the British journalist Sally Bramp-
ton describes her own experience of
depression:
I look at the sandwich, at the
perfect half circle my teeth have
formed. I must eat, I know, but it
seems such a laborious process, to
pick up the sandwich, to bite, to
chew, to swallow.
I get up and look out of the win-
dow. People are walking briskly up
and down the road. I try to imag-
ine what I would do, if I were out
on the street. Where would I be
going? I can think of nowhere.
The newsagent’s, perhaps, to buy a
newspaper. Have I read a newspa-
per today?
I used to write for the newspa-
pers. Almost all of the nationals,
in fact. What was it I had to say? . . .
I am somebody who can’t leave
her bedroom, somebody who can’t
walk across a road to buy a news-
paper. I start to cry. I hate crying. I
hate these tears that come, unbid-
den, at any time of day.
We recognize the symptoms: list-
lessness, absence of appetite, lack of
purpose or ambition, loss of interest
in activities previously enjoyed, with-
drawal from others, frequent weeping.
Has this condition always been with
us? A case can be made that it has. The
desert fathers of late antiquity knew
a listless spiritual despair they called
acedia. Burton’s readers battled mel-
ancholy. Baudelaire, in nineteenth-
century Paris, suffered from “spleen.”
But is acedia the same thing as melan-
choly? Is melancholy interchangeable
with spleen? Are any or all of them
identical with Brampton’s depression?
Does the disease attack indiscrim-
inately, or are some groups especially
vulnerable? Burton addressed himself
primarily to men; today, depression
seems to strike women disproportion-
ately. Or is it that women are simply more
willing to seek help? Depression has
sometimes been thought to afflict white
people more than minorities. But does
that merely reflect other inequities—in
access to health care, for example? It
would be no surprise if depression were
underdiagnosed in African-Americans,
whose relationship with the medical es-
tablishment has been marked by racism
on one side and distrust on the other.
As Sadowsky notes, “European slavers
created stereotypes of carefree Black
people, immune from melancholy and
mental illness.” (Only whites were intel-
ligent enough to be depressed.)
For their part, some African ob-
servers have also seen depression as a
purely European complaint. Counter-
evidence seems easy to find, at least at
first glance. Speakers of Punjabi recog-
nize a depression-like condition called
“sinking heart.” Nicaraguans and Hai-
tians speak of “thinking too much,”
and the African Shona language has
a similar idiom. But again, do these
all name the same thing? Or is men-
tal illness culturally specific, at least
to some degree? Can a German suffer
from sinking heart or a Peruvian from
thinking too much?
If there is a cultural component to
melancholia, is it subject to cultural
trends? That seventeenth- century En-
gland was fascinated by the disease
seems clear, not least from the success
of the Anatomy itself. Was Burton
teaching his readers how to be mel-
ancholy, as Freud taught his how to
be neurotic? Burton himself was alive
to the possibility: he warns the mel-
ancholic reader to skip the section on
symptoms, “lest he disquiet or make
himself for a time worse.”
In our own society rates of depres-
sion seem to be increasing, perhaps
even to epidemic levels. But are they, or
are we just getting better at diagnosing
the disease? Or has the definition of
depression been expanding—the sort
of “diagnostic drift” we saw already in
Burton? Is the industry that has grown
up to treat depression extending its
reach, as empires are prone to do?
Where is the line between “normal”
sadness and depression? There is no
customs office, no formal frontier. We
may be grieving a parent’s death, feel-
ing blue about a breakup, dealing with
stress at work. From the train we watch
the utility poles flick by until we real-
ize, speeding through a station, that the
border is already behind us. We are in a
new country, its language strange, even
its alphabet unfamiliar.
The first signs can be easy to miss.
Styron spoke of “a vaguely troubling
malaise, a sense of something having
gone cockeyed in the domestic uni-
verse.” The Scottish poet Edwin Muir
imagined Hölderlin’s descent into mad-
ness in a similar way:
What made the change? The hills
and towers
Stood otherwise than they should
stand,
And without fear, the lawless
roads
Ran wrong through all the land.
But how far off-kilter do things have to
be before it’s time to call the doctor?
And then, of course, there is the
ultimate question: What causes de-
pression? Freudian analysts had one
answer. As Freud’s colleague Karl
Abraham first hypothesized, and as the
master himself showed in Mourning
and Melancholia, the disease grew out
of anger at others (often the mother),
turned inward toward the self. More
recent approaches emphasize the role
of loss: of a parent, perhaps, or of con-
trol over one’s environment. On either
reckoning, depression could be treated
through counseling: some form of
psychoanalysis or cognitive behavior
therapy.
The mid-twentieth century brought
a new understanding—in some ways a
throwback to Burton’s humoral mel-
ancholy. Now depression arose from
an imbalance in brain chemistry. This
had the happy effect of turning it into
a “real” illness, devoid of stigma and
potentially treatable, like diabetes or
high blood pressure. And treated it
was, with a battery of new drugs, of
which Eli Lilly’s Prozac was the most
celebrated. Depression may be weary-
ing, flat, and stale, but it is far from un-
profitable, at least for pharmaceutical
companies.
If depression is caused by a chemi-
cal imbalance, what causes the imbal-
ance? Heredity can contribute, as can
substance abuse. Styron blamed his
own episode on overuse of the sleep
drug Halcion, coupled with alcohol
withdrawal. To the traditionally abused
substances—alcohol and drugs—we
might add Twitter, Facebook, and Ins-
tagram. Overindulgence in such things
now has its own name: “problematic
social media use,” or PSMU.
Situational factors play a part as well.
Trauma and abuse, unsurprisingly, are
damaging to one’s mental health. This
is bad news for Native Americans,
LGBTQ people, and other marginal-
ized groups. Also unhelpful is poverty.
Here the arrival of Covid has offered
something of a natural experiment. At
the initial peak of the pandemic, in De-
cember 2020, 42 percent of respondents
to a US Census Bureau survey reported
symptoms of anxiety or depression, up
from 11 percent in 2019. The arrival
of stimulus checks correlated with a
significant drop in such reports. How
much of the country’s mental health
deficit would be addressed by a saner
health insurance system or a univer-
sal basic income? Not all, perhaps, but
surely some.
As Sadowsky stresses, these factors
can interact with and reinforce one an-
other. Here Le Fanu seems strangely pre-
scient. His clergyman’s distress is caused
by a demonic force, yes, but one en-
abled by situational components (lone-
liness and overwork), genetic factors
33
(a “hereditary suicidal mania”), and
substance abuse (too much green tea).
The tea, we are told, disrupts the equi-
librium of a cerebral fluid, “spiritual,
though not immaterial,” which nor-
mally circulates through our brains:
This fluid being that which we have
in common with spirits, a conges-
tion found upon the masses of [the]
brain or nerve . . . forms a surface
unduly exposed, on which disem-
bodied spirits may operate.
Disembodied spirits aside, this is oddly
reminiscent of modern accounts of se-
rotonin deficiency, which drugs like
Prozac counteract.
Another treatment, electro-convulsive
therapy (ECT), has been revived in re-
cent years. Pioneered in the 1940s, ECT
later fell into disrepute, tainted by the
kind of abuse depicted in One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Its premise was
a theory that schizophrenia and epilepsy
were incompatible, so one could relieve
the former by inducing the seizures
typical of the latter—like welcoming
harmless blacksnakes into your crawl
space to keep out copperheads. No one
now believes the theory, yet the treat-
ment seems to work anyway, not only for
schizophrenia but for major depression
and bipolar disorder.
None of these methods is without
drawbacks. Talk therapy takes time
and the talk is anything but cheap.
ECT patients often report memory loss.
Drugs seem to bring benefits, but not
to everyone—and only in the right dos-
age, which varies by individual. Many
have significant side effects, including
sexual dysfunction. Some, ironically,
can actually increase suicidal ideation,
especially in young users. For mild and
moderate depression, placebos are
nearly as effective. This makes “effec-
tiveness” a fraught question; herbal
remedies don’t really cure your cancer,
but if Saint-John’s-wort or acupunc-
ture makes you feel less depressed,
then your depression has in fact been
relieved.
As Burton dispassionately con-
cluded, “there is no Catholic [i.e., gen-
eral] medicine to be had: that which
helps one, is pernicious to another.”
Many modern practitioners would
endorse his plea for a comprehensive
approach:
They take a wrong course that
think to overcome this feral pas-
sion by sole Physic; and they are
as much out, that think to work
this effect by good advice alone,
though both be forcible in them-
selves, yet . . . they must go hand in
hand to this disease.
Burton claims that he studied melan-
choly to assuage his own case: “I write
of melancholy, by being busy to avoid
melancholy.” Scholars have suggested
that his unusually long time-to- degree
at Oxford—nine years from matricu-
lation to BA—might conceal a depres-
sive episode. That remains conjecture.
Unlike Montaigne, whom in other re-
spects he so much resembles, Burton
reveals little of himself.
This is unusual. Nondoctors who
write about depression typically do so
because they have experienced it, and
in discussing it they naturally draw on
their own experience. In Speaking of
Sadness (1996), the sociologist David
34
Karp argued that a basic part of com-
ing to terms with depression involves
the creation of an internal narrative
that incorporates the illness and resit-
uates the sufferer’s identity in relation
to it. Fittingly, his book begins with an
account of his own struggles with the
disease.
This characteristically modern
genre—the depression memoir—is the
subject of Sadowsky’s final chapter. Of
early examples, the most influential
was Styron’s Darkness Visible, which
recognizably set the pattern for succes-
sors: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Na-
tion (1994), Jeffery Smith’s Where the
Roots Reach for Water (1999), Bramp-
ton’s Shoot the Damn Dog, and many
more.
I have called the form “characteristi-
cally modern,” but it has recognizable
ancestors, from De Quincey’s Confes-
sions of an English Opium-Eater to
Plath’s The Bell Jar. And its ultimate
model is far older than that. Styron’s
book invokes epic antecedents: its title
is drawn from Milton, and it ends with
the last line of Dante’s Inferno (“And
so we came forth, and once again be-
held the stars”). Like Dante’s, Styron’s
story is a catabasis: the narrative of a
descent into hell.
The catabasis can be traced back to
Homer’s Odyssey, if not further, but
the most influential example occurs
in the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid.
There the Roman hero Aeneas, guided
by an uncanny priestess, the sibyl,
descends to the underworld. Ferried
across the river Acheron, he makes
his way through the world of the dead,
where he meets figures from mythology
and from his own past. He encounters
monsters and other denizens of the un-
derworld. He hears the cries of sinners
being tortured. Finally, he is reunited
with the shade of his father, who lays
out a new path for him.
Consciously or not, depression mem-
oirs tend to follow this pattern. The
account often begins with the first
onset—the descent. Here the focus
is on the author’s own experience. At
some point a therapist may appear, a
sibyl to guide one through the jour-
ney. The heart of the book is devoted
to exploration and sightseeing: the au-
thor reviews various scientific theories,
discusses famous sufferers of the past,
and surveys treatments. There may be
a reckoning with family trauma. Ulti-
mately the depression lifts and the pro-
tagonist emerges with new insight—the
book you hold in your hands.
There are many depression memoirs,
but few depression diaries. The reason
is obvious: people in the throes of deep
depression are in no condition to write
about it. One might call this the para-
dox of melancholy. As a subject it has
proven fertile for art, from Dürer’s Me-
lencolia I to Milton’s “Il Penseroso,”
from Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” to
the films of Bergman and von Trier.
Yet the actual experience of depression
makes it impossible to paint, write, or
make films—difficult, even, to get out
of bed or take a shower. Any account
of the experience must be constructed
later and with hindsight. It is thus poten-
tially a falsification, creating structure
where none exists, significance where
none is to be found. When Vergil’s Ae-
neas exits hell, he leaves through the
ivory gate, by which false dreams make
their way to the upper world.
At first glance George Scialabba
seems to have found a way around this
problem. As a Harvard student in the
late 1960s, Scialabba was a member
of the conservative lay Catholic or-
ganization Opus Dei, which he left in
1969. They had pushed him to go to
law school; he wanted to get a Ph.D.
instead. He enrolled at Columbia but
soon dropped out, precipitating his first
depressive episode.
He spent the next few decades in
low-level administrative jobs back at
Harvard while working as a freelance
reviewer for The Village Voice, The
American Prospect, and other jour-
nals. (He is now a contributing editor at
The Baffler.) His beat for most of this
time has been politics and society, par-
ticularly the role of public intellectuals.
If you wanted a balanced leftist assess-
ment of the new book by Chomsky,
Hitchens, or Christopher Lasch, Scia-
labba was the man to call. His reviews
have been collected in various volumes,
most recently Low Dishonest Decades:
Essays & Reviews, 1980–2015. His lat-
est book, How to Be Depressed, is dif-
ferent from any of them.
Burton’s method was accumulation:
he aimed to encompass melancholy
by collecting and sorting everything
anyone had ever said about it. As we
have seen, he says little about himself.
Scialabba, by contrast, is a minimalist,
but a deeply personal one. How to Be
Depressed has various components: a
short introduction, an interview with
the Boston radio host Christopher
Lydon, brief “Tips for the Depressed”
(in glossary form). But the heart of
the book, more than three quarters
of the whole, is the second section,
“Documentia.”
This consists, quite simply, of the
memos and treatment records created
over the years by Scialabba’s doc-
tors and therapists, and made avail-
able to him under federal law. He has
changed the doctors’ names (sometimes
amusingly: “Trigg Clifton,” “Jeffrey
F. Parsnip,” the gloriously epic “Juan
Durendal”). Occasionally he expands
an abbreviation. But otherwise the
records appear verbatim. While Scia-
labba’s name is on the cover, he is the
author of most of the book only in an
extended sense. With Burton, he can
say “’tis all mine, and none mine.”
The narrative reflects periods of medi-
cal treatment, so it is discontinuous. As
if turning the dial on a radio, we pick
up the signal from various episodes.
From the initial crack-up in 1969–1970
we skip to 1981 (a bad year), then to
1986. For the next decade, section ti-
tles tell the tale: “Intermittently Hope-
less,” “The Knot of Anxiety,” “Pieces
of Life.” There is a gap in the late
1990s and only scattered entries from
the early 2000s. In 2005 Scialabba has
another bad episode and is briefly hos-
pitalized. He is back in the hospital
again in 2012 and once more in 2016.
The final entry, in April of that year, is
a routine notation: “Discharged from
unit without incident.”
Extending over nearly a half century,
the notes recapitulate the history of
modern approaches. Talk therapy gives
way to psychopharmacology as the doc-
tors tinker with an endless parade of
medications: lithium, Parnate, Prozac,
Effexor, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Ativan.
During the 2005 episode Scialabba tried
ECT, with at least temporary success.
There is also a noticeable shift in
the style of the entries. The thoughtful
paragraphs of the early records turn
briefer and more telegraphic: “A sort
of bill of lading,” Scialabba calls them,
aimed only at “handing you expedi-
tiously on to the next provider.” The
change presumably reflects heavier
caseloads as well as growing fear of
litigation.
Threaded through the book are
uniquely American concerns with
health insurance. As Scialabba notes,
he had a sympathetic employer and a
strong union. But money worries keep
creeping in: “Because of financial con-
straints the patient would like to close
his chart.” “I indicated that I would be
very willing to help him arrange [psy-
chotherapy] on a sliding-scale basis
that he could afford.” “He’s not sure
if [a new therapist] is a Blue Cross
provider, or if she would accept insur-
ance.” For most Americans, “between
you and your doctor” always means
“between you, your doctor, and the in-
surance company.”
The insurance industry influenced
Scialabba’s treatment in less overt ways
too. Insurers want to see evidence of
improvement. That can push doctors
toward quick fixes: drugs over talking,
cognitive behavioral therapy over tra-
ditional analysis. It can also persuade
them to see progress that isn’t there.
The successive editions of the Diag-
nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) define not only what
counts as depression, but what insurers
will reimburse for.
Scialabba takes pains to absolve his
doctors and therapists from blame.
All seem sympathetic to his suffering;
all seem to be doing their best to help.
Yet the gap between physician and pa-
tient feels vast, as vast as that between
Hesselius and Jennings. “Likes to write
and has several published pieces,”
notes a doctor in mid-2012 of the au-
thor of What Are Intellectuals Good
For? (2009) and The Modern Predic-
ament (2011). Scialabba’s readers, of
course, are at not one but two removes
from his experience. Through the doc-
tors we receive and process his reports
(“He tells me that his moods have not
been as good in the past week,” “He
says that things are much worse . . . and
that he’s suffering intensely”). But the
reality remains out of reach.
The roots of Scialabba’s depression
remain unclear. The session notes reg-
ister stress at work, financial concerns,
ups and downs in relationships, but
nothing very out of the ordinary. There
was some family history (both his par-
ents were depressive) and a difficult
relationship with his mother. Scialabba
himself repeatedly cites his crisis of
faith and departure from Opus Dei—a
modern variation on the religious de-
spair described in Burton’s closing
chapters. If we see depression as grow-
ing out of loss, the loss here was not of
a parent but of certainty and metaphys-
ical structure, of an at-homeness in the
world.
Here one can perhaps begin to
see links between How to Be De-
pressed and Scialabba’s other writings.
Throughout his career Scialabba has
been fascinated by “modernity.” The
modern condition, as he sees it, is one
of enforced doubt, an expulsion from
a garden that we yearn to reenter but
cannot—not if we’re intellectually hon-
The New York Review
est, anyway. His own departure from
Opus Dei can be seen as an epitome
of this broader trauma. (Burton would
have understood this; his account of
melancholy’s causes begins with the
Fall of Man.)
Scialabba has spent most of his ca-
reer watching his country fall apart:
grandiose adventurism abroad, wealth
concentrated in ever fewer hands,
meanness and cruelty exalted as civic
virtues. Somehow he has not given up
Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy
Plunder:
Napoleon’s Theft
of Veronese’s Feast
by Cynthia Saltzman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
317 pp., $30.00
In the spring and summer of 2021
the Metropolitan Museum in
New York and several museums
in Europe confirmed that they
will send back to Nigeria some
of the many bronzes looted by
British forces from Benin City in
1897. Museums and official bod-
ies in Britain, the Netherlands,
Germany, Belgium, and France
are now taking steps toward re-
turning artifacts from former
colonies. In Britain, arguments
also continue about the return
of the Elgin Marbles to Greece;
some have suggested the creation
of a Spoliation Advisory Panel,
similar to the one that deals with
works stolen by the Nazis.
Art looted in war, impounded
by rapacious regimes, or sold in
dubious or forced transactions has a
significance greater than their aesthetic
or monetary value. Often they embody
the history, culture, and even spiritual
values of a society, which makes their
removal more traumatic. This is poi-
gnantly relevant to Napoleon’s greatest
art “theft,” as Cynthia Saltzman calls
it in Plunder: the transfer of Paolo Ve-
ronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana
from Venice to the Louvre in 1797–
1798. Feasts were traditional subjects
for monastic refectories, and for over
two centuries this great painting, com-
pleted in 1563, had graced one wall of
Andrea Palladio’s austere refectory in
the Benedictine abbey of San Giorgio
Maggiore, on an island in the Venetian
lagoon.
As the damp of the lagoon quickly
damaged frescoes painted directly onto
plaster, local artists preferred to work
in oil on canvas, becoming renowned
for their mastery of color. After Ve-
ronese arrived in 1551 from Verona
(from which he gained his name), he
both learned from and competed with
the great masters Titian and Tintoretto.
Saltzman traces Veronese’s secular and
religious commissions and describes
his practice in illuminating detail, not-
ing his favored pigments as well as his
skilled draftsmanship and composition.
The Wedding Feast at Cana presented
daunting practical challenges. To as-
semble the canvas, which is 22.2 by 32.6
feet, Veronese’s assistants cut six long,
October 21, 2021
hope of progress, and the battered opti-
mism of his other books is all the more
moving when read in light of this one.
As he likes to say, quoting Jefferson,
“We are never permitted to despair of
the commonwealth.” Yet despair seems
a wholly rational response to much of
the past forty years. In Burton’s view,
the melancholy of individuals could
reflect a broader disorder: “Kingdoms,
Provinces, and politic bodies are like-
wise sensible and subject to this dis-
Jenny Uglow
Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) in the Louvre, October 2020.
It was seized by Napoleon’s forces in Venice and taken to Paris in the late 1790s.
heavy strips of linen, stitching them to-
gether so tightly, Saltzman writes, that
“the 724-square-foot canvas would
have appeared to be a single piece of
cloth.” Then it was nailed to its wooden
stretcher and primed with gesso.
On this vast surface, Veronese cre-
ated a religious painting that was also
a tribute to the rich life of Venice.
It shows a banquet on a terrace, set
against classical architecture, with a
crowd of life-size guests, musicians,
and servants, all dressed in the highest
of fashion. Veronese brilliantly cap-
tured the cosmopolitan and commer-
cial background of the sea-girt city,
displaying its wealth “in silver and gold
plates, glass goblets, musical instru-
ments, and ravishing clothes, made of
Venetian silk: fabric woven in Venice,
from threads spun and dyed in Ven-
ice.” The colors shine: “dusky reds,
blues made of powdered lapis lazuli,
oranges, evening yellows, greens, and
whites”—a luxurious, worldly display.
Reproduced in prints, The Wedding
Feast at Cana was acclaimed across
Europe, especially in France: Louis
XIV tried to buy it and was rebuffed,
and Denis Diderot called it “one of the
most beautiful pieces in the world.”
In August 1793 the Louvre—before
the French Revolution a palace of the
Bourbons—was opened as the Musée
Français, displaying the former royal
ease.” For a government that seems
helpless to pass laws, defend itself
against domestic enemies, take action
against mass shootings, or, increas-
ingly, even deliver the mail, depression
is a tempting diagnosis.
Scialabba’s depression is no meta-
phor, though. Taken as a whole, it re-
calls Veronica Wedgwood’s verdict on
the Thirty Years’ War: “Confused in its
causes, devious in its course, futile in its
result.” His experience, painstakingly
collections to their new owners, the
people. Soon more works were added,
appropriated from churches, monaster-
ies, convents, and the estates of dead or
exiled aristocrats. Then France’s revo-
lutionary government looked abroad,
recognizing the power of art as a sign
of status and its seizure as a subtle tool
to crush the spirit of conquered states.
After the defeat of Austria by the revo-
lutionary armies in the Low Countries
in 1794, 150 works were carted to Paris,
including paintings by Rubens from
Antwerp cathedral. The rhetoric was
not of capture but of liberation. As the
artist and soldier Luc Barbier explained
to the National Convention, master-
pieces “soiled by the gaze of servitude”
were now “delivered to the home of the
arts and of genius, the land of liberty
and equality, the French Republic.”
Two years later, in May 1796, when
Napoleon Bonaparte was campaigning
in northern Italy, he asked the Direc-
tory—the governing committee of the
First French Republic in Paris—to
“send me a list.” Within days the Direc-
tory issued firm instructions to acquire
works of art and gave him permission
to appoint experts “to research, collect,
and ship to Paris the objects of this sort
that are the most precious.” The autho-
rized pillaging began. The Directory’s
demand is a rare example of plunder
as official state policy, although loot-
ing had always accompanied warfare
and conquest—the bronze horses that
recorded, is not remotely glamorous.
He has been to hell, many times, but
emerged with no unexpected insights,
nor any confidence that he will not re-
turn there. The only comfort he has to
offer is that depression, if it does not
kill you, will eventually lift—at least
for a time. “If the patient do not array
himself on the side of the disease,”
asserts Doctor Hesselius, “his cure is
certain.”
But sometimes the monkey wins. Q
Ludovic Marin/AFP /Getty Images
stood proudly on St. Mark’s
Basilica were seized by the Ve-
netians after the sack of Con-
stantinople in 1204.
No commander ordered to
bring back the finest art in Italy
could ignore Venice, which, as
Saltzman says, “dazzl[ed] Grand
Tour connoisseurs.” Venetians
trembled when Napoleon headed
for Milan, since their territory
on the mainland stretched to the
borders of the Duchy of Milan,
ruled by the Hapsburgs. For a
time, clinging to a fragile official
neutrality, Venice appeared safe.
But the Arsenal, the city’s fa-
mous naval facility, lacked ships
to fend off invaders, and there
was no protection except the sea.
Anxious envoys dealt with
curtly by Bonaparte sent back
admiring, alarmed reports of a
restless, volatile young soldier,
furiously energetic, quick to take
offense, proud of his logistical
skill, yet profoundly romantic in
his sense of his own destiny. His
personal life seemed romantic too: he
had been married for less than a year
to the beautiful Josephine de Beauhar-
nais, widowed when her first husband
was guillotined in 1794. Josephine had
been imprisoned herself, a fact some-
times used to explain her extravagance.
“The bills from her dressmaker (she
owned more than nine hundred dresses)
would also exceed those of Marie-
Antoinette,” Saltzman notes briskly.
In her earlier books, Portrait of Dr.
Gachet (1998), on the painting by Van
Gogh, and Old Masters, New World:
America’s Raid on Europe’s Great
Pictures (2008), Saltzman showed her
ability to interpret different webs of art,
commerce, politics, and personal ambi-
tion. In Plunder, she moves with envi-
able ease and clarity between periods
and narratives, examining the place of
Veronese in the life and art of sixteenth-
century Venice, the rise of Napoleon
two hundred years later, and the later
fate of the plundered art. Her research
is meticulous but her style is light, enliv-
ened by acute sketches of minor charac-
ters: the crowded scene of The Wedding
Feast at Cana could almost be a model
for the book’s structure.
The only aspect that detracts from
the book is the poor reproduction of
carefully researched pictures: its black-
and-white images are hard to decipher.
But this is hardly the author’s fault, and
35
the suspenseful narrative and wealth of
detail are compensation. We feel the
force of Napoleon’s unstoppable prog-
ress and the zeal with which he turned
the Directory’s orders into a personal
project. In plundering Italy, Saltzman
writes, the Louvre
would be his collaborator. The
Paris museum would distract eyes
from the bloodshed and casualty
counts, disguising his ruthlessness
with the brilliance of its collections
and transmuting that ruthlessness
into glory.
By late May 1796, having entered
Milan and captured the Duchy of
Modena, home of the legendary art
collection of the d’Este dukes, French
forces were in the Veneto. On June 1,
after impatient disputes between Na-
poleon and harassed Venetian emissar-
ies, Venice surrendered Verona. Then
Napoleon turned south, entering the
Papal States. In the subsequent armi-
stice Pius VI agreed to deliver to the
French Republic a hundred “paintings,
busts, vases or statues,” and soon the
team of experts, chosen by the Lou-
vre’s director, Lazare Carnot, set to
work. They included the painter Jean-
Simon Berthélemy and the sculptor
Jean- Guillaume Moitte; two botanists,
Jacques-Julien de Labillardière and the
enterprising director of the Jardin des
Plantes, André Thouin; as well as two
acclaimed “natural philosophers,” the
chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet and
the mathematician Gaspard Monge. In
Rome, the commissioners’ long list of
desired objects ranged from Raphael’s
last painting, The Transfiguration, to
the Apollo Belvedere, arousing protests
even from Paris against the removal of
classical statues.
The first Roman foray ended
abruptly due to renewed fighting in
the north, but within a year the French
were back. Anticipating the hoard of
art, in February 1797 Napoleon wrote
to the Directory as if he were reporting
a victory in the field:
The commission of experts has
reaped a good harvest in Ravenna,
Rimini, Pescara, Ancona, Loreto
and Perugia which will be sent to
Paris. That, together with what we
have from Rome, will mean that
we have everything that is a work
of art in Italy, save for a small num-
ber of objects in Turin and Naples.
Not quite everything—so far Venice
remained untouched. But on May 3,
1797, Napoleon declared war on the
Venetian Republic. Six days later,
panicked by shots fired, as it turned
out, by its own departing soldiers, the
Great Council rushed through a vote
to abolish the ancient republic and
create a new provisional state under
French rule. On May 16, as seven thou-
sand French troops arrived in the la-
goon, Bonaparte dictated a treaty from
Milan whereby Venice would pay a
heavy fine, provide ships, and surren-
der “twenty paintings and five hundred
manuscripts.”
Berthollet, an expert in chemical
dyeing and silk manufacture, would be
a crucial figure in Venice, as he not only
spoke fluent Italian but had worked for
the Duc d’Orléans and had a labora-
tory in the Palais Royal, home of the
supreme Orléans collection, packed
with Titians, Tintorettos, and Verone-
36
ses. Before his fellow commissioners
arrived he dashed through the city as
if following a guidebook, listing paint-
ings in the Doge’s Palace, churches, and
monasteries. The list was then handed
to the restorer Pietro Edwards, inspec-
tor general of Venice’s public pictures,
who had been ordered to advise the
French. Edwards read it with horror:
it included three Tintorettos, three Ti-
tians, and six major works by Veronese,
including The Wedding Feast at Cana
and the smaller Feast in the House of
Simon in the monastery of San Sebas-
tiano. These works, and others like the
beautiful Bellini altarpiece Madonna
and Child Enthroned, framed in a stone
arch in the church of San Zaccaria, were
fixed in their architectural settings.
Removing them amounted to vandal-
ism. Edwards tried to prevent this by
warning diplomatically that they were
already in a “dangerous state,” but his
protests only made things worse, as the
French swapped one Tintoretto for yet
another enormous Veronese, The Feast
in the House of Levi in the refectory of
the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
Saltzman’s vivid account of the re-
moval and transport of the paintings
forms a gripping catalog of carelessness
and complicated logistics. The canvases
from Rome and elsewhere had been
already rolled up and carried away in
jolting, precarious carts. In Venice, the
size of the Feasts, in particular, made
the task still more difficult. As work-
men separated The Wedding Feast at
Cana from its wooden stretcher in the
monastery of San Giorgio, it suddenly
ripped along a horizontal row of nails
hidden beneath the paint, probably
put there by earlier Venetian restor-
ers when the canvas began to sag. As
the heavy canvas fell, a second row ap-
peared, and then a third. Lines of large
nail holes ran through the blue sky at
the top, along the balustrade in the
middle, and through the crowd below.
The dismantling of the Venetian
paintings took three weeks. Then they
were wrapped around cylinders and
packed into specially made crates. At
the last moment, Napoleon, now back
in Paris, ordered the shipment of the
four bronze horses from St. Mark’s, as
well as the winged bronze Lion of Saint
Mark that stood atop a column in front
of the Doge’s Palace and the Doge’s
ceremonial barge, the bucintoro (which
was chopped up for its gold). The crates
of pictures, stowed on an armed frigate,
were shipped to Toulon and then taken
by barge to Paris, up the Rhône and the
Saône Rivers and through a network of
canals. Once unloaded, the Italian tro-
phies, including natural history speci-
mens and manuscripts as well as many
of the works of art and the horses of
St. Mark’s, were paraded through the
capital in a special Fête de la Liberté,
“to trumpet [Napoleon’s] Italian vic-
tories and proclaim France heir to the
Roman Empire.”
In July 1798, when The Wedding
Feast at Cana arrived at the Louvre,
one room, the Salon Carré, was al-
ready hung with paintings from Parma,
Piacenza, Milan, Modena, Cento, and
Bologna. In November, a new exhi-
bition unveiled eighty-two additional
paintings taken from Venice, Rome,
and other cities, including works by
Caravaggio and Mantegna, nine Ra-
phaels, and twelve Veroneses. But not
The Wedding Feast at Cana, which
was still being restored. At this point,
the Louvre’s Administrative Council
made the drastic decision to unstitch
the central seam, divide the huge can-
vas, and mount the two parts on sepa-
rate stretchers. As the workmen cut it,
paint shards fell to the floor. Stabilizing
the canvas and painting over the join
would give restorers continuing work.
However hard they tried, The Wedding
Feast at Cana, no longer shining in its
pure Palladian setting, lost its double
identity as an object of devotion and an
encapsulation of Venetian power and
artistic genius.
In November 1799, a month after
his return from campaigning in Egypt
and the Levant, Napoleon became
one of the three consuls whose provi-
sional government signaled the end of
the Directory and, many said, the end
of the Revolution. By the end of the
year, at the age of thirty, he became
First Consul, with complete author-
ity over France. Napoleon had never
shown much personal interest in art,
but he certainly understood its power
as propaganda.
A subtheme of Saltzman’s account is
the developing iconography of his rise,
beginning with the heroic Bonaparte on
the Bridge at Arcola by Antoine-Jean
Gros, far from accurate (Napoleon with-
drew, fell in a ditch, and had to be pulled
out by his troops) but still “an early icon
of Romanticism.” After the Italian cam-
paigns of 1799 and 1800, Jacques-Louis
David, commissioned by Charles IV
of Spain, painted Bonaparte Crossing
the Alps at Grand- Saint-Bernard with
his billowing cloak on his “wild-eyed
rearing horse” (he actually crossed on a
mule). In 1804, when Napoleon became
emperor, Gros’s Bonaparte Visiting the
Plague- Stricken in Jaffa showed him as
both hero and savior, “capable of some-
how rescuing not only French soldiers in
Egypt but also the French nation, even
if it were in a state of mayhem and de-
struction.” The series was completed
by David’s lavish, idealized Coronation
(1808). Seeing this, Napoleon asked the
painter to alter it to show the pope, who
had been summoned forcibly to Paris,
raising his hand in blessing, a demand
that David resisted, depicting him in-
stead slumped, as if in defeat.
The pillaged collection in the Louvre
offered Bonaparte a different form of
propaganda: it was an opportunity to
pose as an art-loving intellectual and
“Enlightenment leader,” while ignor-
ing shocked murmurs of plunder. The
display in the Salon Carré was soon
amplified by that of the Grande Gal-
erie, a corridor a quarter of a mile long,
its dark green walls covered with a stag-
gering 950 paintings, “many of them
masterpieces.” The Galerie joined the
Louvre to the Tuileries, where Napo-
leon was based, and he and Josephine
had no qualms about asking for works
for their own quarters. Josephine in
particular was outraged when a request
was denied. “We are battling inces-
santly with our neighbors,” one Louvre
official said. Every day the Bonapartes
“demand the most expensive paintings;
it is necessary to give up something and
already Raphael’s Holy Family has left:
you can imagine our regret.”
The choice increased when more
works arrived after the defeat of Prus-
sia in 1806. And in 1810, when Na-
poleon, having divorced Josephine,
married the Austrian princess Marie-
Louise, his grand processional ended
with a promenade down the Grande
Galerie to the Salon Carré, where
the ceremony was held in a specially
erected chapel. The Salon Carré was
where The Wedding Feast at Cana
hung in splendor, but now, on the em-
peror’s furious orders, defying all ad-
vice, it was stripped of pictures so that
tiers of seating could be built for those
in attendance. Once more the great
Veronese was moved; once more it was
perilously reassembled.
Four years later, Napoleon abdicated
and left for Elba. Louis XVIII took the
throne and the Napoleonic empire was
dismantled, but all requests for the re-
turn of works of art were brushed aside
by the Louvre’s director, Dominique-
Vivant Denon. After Napoleon’s re-
turn and the final, resounding French
defeat at Waterloo, the second Treaty
of Paris in 1815 still took no account of
the looted art. The issue was pressed by
the Austrian foreign minister, Klemens
von Metternich: Venice was now under
Austrian rule and the first step, he in-
sisted, must be the return of the bronze
horses to St. Mark’s.
The British, however, seemed inter-
ested less in restoration than in claim-
ing masterpieces for themselves, having,
Prime Minister Lord Liverpool wrote,
“a better title to them than the French,
if legitimate war gives a title to such ob-
jects.” The Duke of Wellington, who
saw art less as a trophy than a weapon,
argued that removing the plundered
works would “remind the French that
‘Europe is too strong for them.’” The
sculptor Antonio Canova campaigned
tirelessly for the return of works taken
from Italy. In the end, however, while
many—including the horses—did make
their way back, The Wedding Feast at
Cana did not. Denon claimed that it
was so frail that if the Austrians tried to
transport it, “they might as well destroy
it,” which ensured that it stayed in Paris.
It would, however, be moved again,
to places of safety during the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870 and World War
II. Today, in its heavy gold frame, it
adorns the end wall of the great Salle
des États in the Louvre, whose blue
walls are “lined with a breathtaking
flight of some forty Venetian High Re-
naissance paintings, each framed in
gold,” including “eight Titians, three
Tintorettos, and nine Veroneses”—a
tribute, Saltzman says, to the French
love affair with Italian art.
The Hague Convention on the Laws
and Customs of War of 1899, restated
in 1907, proscribed the plunder of
art and required respect for cultural
works. This did not stop the Nazis,
whose demands for restitution of works
taken in 1794 were the beginning of
“an art-looting project on a scale that
outstripped Napoleon’s,” Saltzman
tells us. After the war the 1954 Hague
Convention banned the “theft, pillage
or misappropriation of, and any acts
of vandalism directed against, cultural
property” and insisted that all property
taken illegally should be returned. By
2019 the convention had been ratified
by 133 countries. But as Plunder demon-
strates, and as the current arguments
about colonial acquisitions show, the
issues of pillage and the problems of res-
titution have a deep, entangled history:
many objects will never be returned to
their rightful owners, and the complex
and painful discussions around the sub-
ject will continue, without a doubt, for
many years to come. Q
The New York Review
 What Does the Microbiome Do?
Gut Feelings:
The Microbiome and Our Health
by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty.
MIT Press, 538 pp., $27.95
We live life with companions. Some,
like parents, are present from our mo-
ment of birth; others are met at school
or work and become friends or spouses.
These companions influence our behav-
ior and emotions, and so contribute to
our physical and mental health. But as
Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show
in Gut Feelings, we also live life with an
invisible companion: the microbiome,
the trillions of microbes (bacteria, fungi,
viruses, and occasionally protozoa and
parasites) that inhabit our gastrointesti-
nal tract and reside in our upper airway
and skin. The products of these micro-
organisms are thought to modify the
workings of our genes (a process called
epigenetics) and to directly affect the
functioning of our vital organs.
The microbiome is introduced to
newborns through vaginal microbes
during labor and then through ma-
ternal feeding, and it can change in
composition; it may aid our physical
growth, emotional balance, and cogni-
tive development, as well as the matu-
ration of our immune defenses. It may
also become injured or dysfunctional,
contributing to the rise of inflamma-
tory disorders like Crohn’s disease or,
some even speculate, neuropsychiatric
syndromes like depression and autism.
Yet despite the possibility that the
microbiome plays such a crucial part
in human biology, we typically live in
ignorance of its effect on our lives.
Gut Feelings is a detailed and scientif-
ically rigorous survey. Fasano, a pediat-
ric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts
General Hospital and professor at Har-
vard Medical School and Harvard’s
T. H. Chan School of Public Health,
and Flaherty, the director of commu-
nications at Mass General’s Center for
Celiac Research and Treatment, scru-
pulously assess the many studies on the
microbiome and human health with an
echoing drumbeat of conditional terms,
cautioning the reader that research in
rodents may not be replicable in hu-
mans, and that correlations found in
human populations or individual pa-
tients ultimately may not prove caus-
ative. Such caveats distinguish this book
from popular works on nutrition that
make exaggerated claims about how
manipulating the microbiome can treat
a variety of illnesses. Gut Feelings, by
contrast, gives readers a clearer sense of
the current state of medical knowledge.
Last February two reports appeared
in the journal Science that moved re-
search on the microbiome an important
step forward. One report was from the
Sheba Medical Center at Tel HaSho-
mer, Israel, the other from the Hill-
man Cancer Center at the University
of Pittsburgh. Both concerned clinical
trials on manipulating the microbiome
October 21, 2021
Jerome Groopman
Illustrations by Jason Logan
in patients with metastatic melanoma.
Until recently, melanoma that had
metastasized widely in the body was
almost always fatal. But over the past
decade a therapy was developed that
causes immune cells to attack cancers,
resulting in the survival of between
20 and 40 percent of patients. (The
researchers who provided the ground-
work for this treatment were awarded
the Nobel Prize in 2018.) Conversely,
some 60 to 80 percent of melanoma pa-
tients treated with immune therapy do
not benefit from it. There is little else
doctors can do for many of them.
Earlier studies indicated that the gut
microbiome affects the maturation and
functioning of rodents’ immune sys-
tem; further research suggested that
it could somehow make mice more
responsive to immune therapy against
cancers. In human patients, certain
groups of gut bacteria were associated
with improvement from immune ther-
apy, but these correlations were incon-
sistent in different published studies.
A study concerning fecal microbiota
transplantation (FMT)—which involves
transferring gut microbes from one host
to another—found that immune ther-
apy was more effective in mice that had
received FMT from melanoma patients
who responded to the treatment when
compared with mice that had received
FMT from patients resistant to it.
Laboratory mice used in such exper-
iments are typically inbred, genetically
homogeneous, and of the same age,
and they lack any history of illness or
trauma; human patients are genetically
diverse, are of various ages, and have
many physiological differences, some of
which result from prior trauma like sur-
gery, concurrent medical conditions, or
toxic treatments such as chemotherapy.
Could a microbiome-based interven-
tion overcome some patients’ resistance
to a potentially lifesaving treatment?
The research groups in Israel and
Pittsburgh conducted clinical trials of
Toronto Ink Co.
FMT in melanoma patients who had
not responded to repeated courses of
immune therapy. Ten patients were en-
rolled in the Israeli study, sixteen in the
American one. While there were some
differences in the protocols of the two
trials, they had similar strategies: to
obtain samples of the gut microbiome
of people who had clearly benefited
from immune therapy for melanoma,
and then transfer their microbes into
resistant patients. In Israel one patient
withdrew from the study; of the remain-
ing nine, one showed complete disap-
pearance of all the metastases, and two
others showed significant shrinkage but
not full disappearance. In these three
patients, who had received FMT from
the same donor, immune cells were ac-
tively invading their metastases—a sign
that the therapy was now working. In
Pittsburgh, the cancer of one resistant
recipient completely disappeared after
FMT, two patients’ cancers shrunk sig-
nificantly, and in three the cancer didn’t
shrink but stopped growing. All these
positive results were sustained for more
than twelve months. The FMT procedure
caused no harm in any of the patients.
Despite the relatively small num-
bers of participants in the trials, they
provide a proof of principle: a certain
microbiome can overcome resistance
to potentially lifesaving immune ther-
apy. The next steps for researchers are
clear: treat larger numbers of such mel-
anoma patients; refine the protocols to
benefit a greater proportion of patients;
see if FMT can overcome resistance to
immune therapy in patients with other
types of cancer, like lung cancer and
lymphoma; and try to identify which of
the hundreds of species in the micro-
biome instruct a cancer patient’s im-
mune system to respond to the therapy.
About two months after these arti-
cles were published in Science, another
noteworthy advance on the microbiome
appeared. Here the issue was how to
help children suffering from severe mal-
nutrition in the developing world. Dr.
Jeffrey Gordon and his team at Wash-
ington University School of Medicine
in St. Louis have studied the microbi-
omes of malnourished children with the
hope of identifying how an “injured”
microbiome limits their growth and de-
velopment. In April the New England
Journal of Medicine published the re-
sults of a randomized trial in the Mir-
pur district of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The
trial, led by Gordon’s group, compared
the effects of two therapeutic foods.
One, termed “ready to use,” is the cur-
rent nutritional supplement used to treat
millions of malnourished children glob-
ally; it includes rice, powdered milk, and
lentils. The other was an experimental
concoction composed of chickpeas, ba-
nanas, soy flour, and peanuts. Gordon’s
team had previously shown that the con-
coction could facilitate the growth of
stunted mice whose intestines had been
colonized with stool samples obtained
from a malnourished child, suggesting
that this food alone could remedy the
deficiency of the child’s microbiome,
without the use of FMTs.
In the Dhaka trial, moderately or
severely malnourished children ran-
domly received either the standard
ready-to-use therapeutic food mix or
the concoction that was designed to
target the microbiome and had aided
the rodents. One hundred eighteen
children completed the study. For chil-
dren twelve to eighteen months old,
two important criteria for growth1 were
clearly superior in the children who
had received the experimental concoc-
tion. In addition, blood tests showed
that those children had higher levels of
plasma proteins, which are involved in
bone growth and in the development of
the central nervous system. Important
questions remain, particularly whether
the measured benefit to the children’s
growth will continue, whether the pre-
dicted improvement in their neural
development will come to pass, and
exactly which components of the mi-
crobiome are targeted by the successful
supplement. But again, a proof of prin-
ciple was made: the gut microbiome is
relevant in childhood malnutrition, one
of the most urgent global health issues,
and the current standard dietary inter-
ventions can be made far more effective.
Gut Feelings provides readers with
the rich historical background to the
recent papers in Science and the New
England Journal of Medicine. Fasano
and Flaherty write:
The use of FMT to treat a variety
of human diseases, mainly gas-
trointestinal problems, dates back
1
Weight-for-age and weight-for-length z
score. Z score, the standard deviation
above or below the mean, is used by
WHO and other groups for children at
the extremes of the weight spectrum.
37
 to fourth- century China, where
“yellow soup” was used in cases
of severe food poisoning and diar-
rhea. By the sixteenth century, the
Chinese had developed a variety
of feces- derived products for gas-
trointestinal complaints as well as
systemic symptoms such as fever
and pain. Anecdotal reports sug-
gest that Bedouin groups consumed
the stools of their camels as a rem-
edy for bacterial dysentery. Italian
anatomist and surgeon Fabricius
Acquapendente (1537–1619) fur-
ther extended this to a concept he
called “transfaunation,” the trans-
fer of gastrointestinal contents from
a healthy to a sick animal, which has
since been applied extensively in
the field of veterinary medicine. In-
terestingly, many animal species are
found to naturally practice copro-
phagy, a sort of self-administered
FMT, leading to a greater diversity
of microorganisms in their intestine.
FMT was first accepted by Western
medicine in 1958, as a treatment for
pseudomembranous colitis, a severe
form of diarrhea caused by the bacte-
rium C. difficile. This treatment seemed
like a logical application of FMT prac-
tices that had been around for centu-
ries, and it was the only successful use
of FMT in the West until this year.
As Fasano and Flaherty explain, em-
pirical findings suggest that the rising
incidence in the developed world of
inflammatory disorders like Crohn’s
disease and pediatric food allergies
might be tied to changes in the micro-
biome: “The gut microbiome in people
from industrialized countries seems to
contain 15 to 30 percent fewer species
when compared with the gut micro-
biome of people from non-Western
nations.” One possible explanation for
this, proposed by Dr. Martin Blaser,
an eminent infectious diseases spe-
cialist at Rutgers, is that widespread
use of antibiotics has damaged par-
ticular bacterial species of our ances-
tral microbiota. This alteration in our
microbiome might impede our immu-
nological, metabolic, and cognitive de-
velopment, setting the stage for chronic
inflammatory disorders.2
Blaser further posits that the inter-
play of the microbiome and our genes
affects our bodies’ ability to suppress
inflammatory maladies when they do
appear. This, Fasano and Flaherty
write, “may hold the key to under-
standing how a potential genetic pre-
disposition to a particular disease may
become an actual clinical outcome in
any given person.” In addition to antibi-
otics, diet can alter the gut microbes, as
seen in some studies comparing hunter-
gatherer populations with urban dwell-
ers who eat many processed foods.
But Fasano and Flaherty again em-
phasize that findings supporting Bla-
2 This complex biology, and our ig-
See Martin J. Blaser, Missing Mi-
crobes: How the Overuse of Antibi-
otics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues
(Henry Holt, 2014); and Michael Spec-
ter, “Germs Are Us,” The New Yorker,
October 22, 2012.
38
ser’s hypotheses are inconclusive, and
they refrain from endorsing the theory:
We might never settle the question
of the extinction of ancient mi-
crobes versus lifestyle adaptation.
But it becomes fairly obvious that
the gut microbiome of rural pop-
ulations that embrace a sustain-
able lifestyle, meaning that they
live only on products from their
immediate natural environment,
is substantially different from the
gut microbiome composition of
people living in industrialized
countries. Determining whether
these differences are the cause of
the current epidemic of chronic in-
flammatory diseases, or the conse-
quence of these diseases, or merely
an epiphenomenon, remains one
of the most thought-provoking
challenges faced by scientists in-
terested in the role of the human
microbiome in health and disease.
The microbiome changes not only
from person to person but throughout
an individual’s lifetime, and researchers
are faced with its daunting complexity.
Humans have approximately 23,000
genes, but, Fasano and Flaherty write,
“we are the product of the coevolution
of our genome with the metagenome
(the gene array from our microbiome),
which contains from 100 to 150 times
more genes than we do.” The expression
of these genes can be affected by what
people eat and are exposed to in their
environment, making it even harder
to gain a proper understanding of just
how the microbiome interacts with the
rest of our bodies and how it can be
manipulated.
Moreover, Fasano and Flaherty high-
light the complexity of our microbiome
by challenging the very concept of what
constitutes a “normal” population of
GI organisms:
The aim of finding a “normal” mi-
crobiome by sequencing the micro-
organisms at any human site—for
example, the gut—is probably not a
useful goal. Many microbiome sci-
entists are now convinced that there
is no such thing as a normal micro-
biome. By the time the sequencing
is completed, the site’s ecosystem
could be very different in that in-
dividual, subject to the influence of
environmental and other factors.
They note that viruses reside in the gut
and can transfer genes from one bacte-
rium to another, creating “even more
variability in the function of a specific
site’s microbiome over time, even if
the composition of the microbiome re-
mains the same.”
norance of it, have not restrained
producers of “natural” remedies like
probiotics—bacteria-rich foods, such
as yogurt and kombucha, that are said
to improve the functioning of the micro-
biome. Probiotics are a multibillion-
dollar industry, and there is shocking
negligence in how these products are
marketed. Fasano and Flaherty high-
light arguments made by Claudio de
Simone, a pioneer in the field of probi-
otics, who asserts that regulators in the
EU and the US fail to take into account
the complex composition of probiotics
products, which are living microbes and
thus biologically dynamic, vary widely
among species and strains, and may
interact differently with one another.
These concerns call into question the
safety and reliability of probiotics, and
are particularly acute among “vulnera-
ble populations,” such as patients with
suppressed immune systems or those
whose medications could be rendered
less effective by probiotics.
Fasano and Flaherty write (no doubt
drawing on Fasano’s experience as a
professor of pediatrics), “It is now rare
to see children in clinic who have not
been exposed to probiotics.” He and
Flaherty warn that
the wide use of probiotics, without
clear indications and formulations,
may jeopardize this potentially
effective tool to modify the micro-
biome’s composition and function
to support immune health and gut
barrier integrity or to treat spe-
cific inflammatory processes. . . .
Because humans are not made
genetically and biologically equal,
we cannot generalize the use of
any given probiotic formulation as
beneficial to everyone’s health.
Rigorous studies support Fasano and
Flaherty’s criticisms. Two reports in the
November 22, 2018, issue of the New
England Journal of Medicine featured
clinical trials of probiotics.3 One tested
infectious diarrhea in children brought
to the emergency department and found
that the administration of a probiotic did
not prevent the development of mod-
erate to severe gastroenteritis within
fourteen days. The other study used an
over-the- counter probiotics prepara-
tion available in the United States and
showed no benefit compared to a pla-
cebo in limiting diarrhea and vomiting,
the number of unscheduled health care
visits, or attendance at day care. “While
these results cannot be generalized to
other probiotic strains or preparations,”
Fasano and Flaherty write, “they do
show that we have far to go in elucidating
which probiotics might provide benefits
in which patients and clinical settings.”
The appeal of manipulating gut mi-
crobes in lieu of traditional drug thera-
pies is clear: it is a supposedly natural
and presumably nontoxic intervention
that might be able to address unmet
clinical needs. This has spawned
claims, based on scant empirical data,
about using the microbiome to treat
autism or severe depression. Gut mi-
crobes produce molecules like sero-
tonin and dopamine that act on the
brain, but this doesn’t mean they can
be readily harnessed therapeutically.
Nonetheless, scores of biotech com-
panies have been launched to produce
therapies exploiting gut bacteria for
disorders ranging from schizophrenia
3 resistance to a potent cancer therapy and
Stephen B. Freedman et al., “Multi-
center Trial of a Combination Probiotic
for Children with Gastroenteritis,” and
David Schnadower et al., “Lactobacil-
lus rhamnosus GG versus Placebo for
Acute Gastroenteritis in Children.”
to Parkinson’s disease. Recently, the
biotech company Seres announced
the failure of a clinical trial involving
microbiome therapy for a signature
inflammatory disease of the bowel,
ulcerative colitis. This was a profound
disappointment and cast a pall over
other efforts in the field. Patients and
their families are understandably des-
perate for new approaches to treating
these conditions, making them vul-
nerable to unscrupulous uses of fecal
transplants that are not proven by rig-
orous clinical trials.
Fasano and Flaherty depict people as
the product of two coevolving genomes,
but they rightly acknowledge that so-
cioeconomic factors, “including health
disparities and poor access to health
care,” can negatively affect the microbi-
ome. They warn against attributing too
many illnesses to bad microbial health;
we can’t ignore poverty, discrimina-
tion, air pollution, lack of access to
nutritious foods, and other societal ills
that influence diet and behavior, since
these too can be major contributors
to chronic diseases, like obesity and
asthma, that disproportionately affect
underprivileged communities.
What then should be done to advance
the study of the microbiome? Fasano
and Flaherty begin their answer to this
question by detailing its current pitfalls:
Growth in this field is challenged
by the narrow focus of individual
studies, small sample size, lack of
standardization, and, most import-
ant, cross-sectional study design
comparing patients affected by any
given disease to matched healthy
controls.
Again, they note that comparing pa-
tients’ microbiomes rests on the as-
sumption that “healthy subjects, by
default, harbor a ‘normal microbiome’
considered as an ideal target to main-
tain health. However, there is no clear
understanding of a ‘normal’ microbi-
ome.” Each individual likely develops a
microbiome that is healthy for that per-
son but might not be for someone else.
If this is true, then aiming to remedy
chronic inflammatory disorders, like
Crohn’s disease, by manipulating the
microbiome will have to be done in a
personalized rather than generic way.
The studies in melanoma patients
and in malnourished children appeared
after Gut Feelings was written, and they
provide a pathway to progress. They
show that despite the daunting biologi-
cal complexity of the microbiome, well-
designed clinical trials based on even an
incomplete understanding of it can yield
interventions that dramatically improve
human health and ameliorate illness. It
is doubtful that every such well-designed
clinical trial will succeed; indeed, ad-
vances in science often are built on fail-
ure. But the studies’ results—overcoming
boosting weight gain in severely mal-
nourished children—show how much
can be gained by viewing the microbi-
ome as our companion in health and
well-being. Q
The New York Review

The Egyptian writer, doctor, and ag-
itator Nawal El Saadawi passed away
in Cairo on March 21, 2021, at the
age of eighty-nine. Despite decades of
threats, lawsuits, censorship, and disre-
gard, she had never been able to leave
permanently a city that was, she wrote,
the nightmare of being hunted
down, besieged, imprisoned, the
pulsations of love, the pain of de-
feat, the exhilaration of resistance,
the falling down then standing up
again and again and again in a
struggle that has no end.
I interviewed El Saadawi in 2004. I
was a twenty-five-year- old journalist
who had read a few of her books. She
was one of the best-known Arab fem-
inists in the world but a marginalized
figure in her own country—banned by
the authorities from government posts
and media appearances, railed at by Is-
lamists, at odds with much of the Egyp-
tian public because of her criticism of
practices such as veiling, polygamy, un-
equal access to divorce and inheritance
for men and women, and female genital
mutilation.
In our interview, El Saadawi de-
nounced the Iraq War and insisted that
“the veil is not Islamic at all.” She was
funny, opinionated, and—as I had been
warned—a bit full of herself. “I could
have been a prime minister, or the min-
ister of health,” she declared. What
struck me was the extent to which such
a formidable figure had been sidelined
by history and the extent to which she
did not accept it.
El Saadawi’s mother once said, “You
can throw our daughter Nawal in the
fire and she will come back safe.” She
seems to have adopted this as her credo;
her fearlessness and unshakable belief
in herself (sometimes bordering on
egocentrism) were her defining traits.
All her life El Saadawi was someone
who could not hold her tongue, who
sought an audience and then reveled
in making it uncomfortable by telling
unpleasant truths. She wrote dozens of
books, including novels and plays that
skewered male religious authority and
exposés and polemics that detailed the
worst abuses and inequalities Egyptian
and Arab women faced. There was
probably nothing she hated more than
being silenced.
El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the
village of Kafr Tahla, in the Nile Delta.
This was the hometown of her for-
midable peasant grandmother Sittil
Hajja, an illiterate widow who spared
no effort to ensure that her son Sayed
Saadawi, Nawal’s father, received an
education. Sayed, who was cultured,
kind, and open-minded (for his time),
married the youngest daughter of an
impoverished family from the Otto-
man aristocracy and became an offi-
cial in the Ministry of Education. He
opposed British control of Egypt—
London propped up the Egyptian
monarchy and managed the country’s
economy and military despite hav-
ing granted it formal independence in
1922. As a result he spent many years
in the provincial town of Menouf and
was passed over for raises, promotions,
and transfers.
October 21, 2021
In the Fire
Ursula Lindsey
Nawal El Saadawi, Cairo, September 2015
In her three-part autobiography (the
first two volumes of which are available
in English as A Daughter of Isis and
Walking Through Fire), El Saadawi
writes about both her parents with
great affection. She admired her father
and his sense of principle, and never
stopped trying to impress him. And
she adored her mother, Zaynab, who
died of cancer at forty-five after hav-
ing nine children. Her memories of her
mother—of her smell, her laughter, the
way she taught Nawal to swim and to
write—are suffused with deep sadness
and a sense of injustice:
She owned nothing, had no money.
According to divine and to human
law, her children, including me,
were her husband’s property. So,
I never carried the name of my
mother. Her name was buried with
her body and disappeared from
history.
F rom a young age, El Saadawi, the
family’s second child, was determined
not to disappear. The preferential treat-
ment of her older brother, Tala’at, was
her first experience of gender discrim-
BOOKS BY NAWAL EL SAADAWI
DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
A Daughter of Isis:
The Early Life of Nawal
El Saadawi, In Her Own Words
translated from the Arabic
by Sherif Hetata.
Zed, 354 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Walking Through Fire:
The Later Years of Nawal
El Saadawi, In Her Own Words
translated from the Arabic
by Sherif Hetata.
Zed, 292 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Hidden Face of Eve:
Women in the Arab World
translated from the Arabic
by Sherif Hetata and with a
foreword by Ronak Husni.
Zed, 446 pp., $18.95 (paper)
David Degner/Getty Images
ination. Why, although she ran faster
than him and was better than him at
school, was Tala’at given so much atten-
tion, spared chores and tiresome rules
and prohibitions? El Saadawi also no-
ticed the way domestic servants, young
girls her age, were treated—beaten,
made to sleep on the floor and eat
leftovers. One girl who worked in the
household ran off and was never found;
another became pregnant and was sent
away. El Saadawi’s grandmother pro-
claimed, “A boy is worth fifteen girls at
least.”
El Saadawi figured out early that ed-
ucation was her best chance to escape
the life prescribed for her. She excelled
at school and dreamed of becoming
a writer; she started keeping her first
journal at age ten, the day after she
drove away a suitor by spilling a tray
of coffee on him. Eventually, she won
her parents over to the idea that she
should continue her studies rather than
get married. It helped that Tala’at was
an academic disappointment, more in-
terested in music than school. “I had to
have a brother who was a failure to be-
come an object of interest,” she wrote
later. Her family did not consider liter-
ature a career, so in 1948 she enrolled
Woman at Point Zero
translated from the Arabic
by Sherif Hetata and with a
foreword by Miriam Cooke.
Zed, 142 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Memoirs from the
Women’s Prison
translated from the Arabic
by Marilyn Booth.
University of California Press,
204 pp., $29.95 (paper)
The Fall of the Imam
translated from the Arabic
by Sherif Hetata.
Saqi, 240 pp., $14.95 (paper)
in the Faculty of Medicine at Cairo
University.
In medical school, El Saadawi no-
ticed how disrespectfully and roughly
the doctors treated poor patients.
When exam results came in, they were
hung in the entrance of the school, and
she and her classmates “would dis-
cover all of a sudden that the sons of
our professors were all geniuses, since
their names always came at the top of
the list.” Students were taught nothing
about sex, the clitoris, or the hymen, or
the practices related to them.
El Saadawi would encounter these
practices while running a rural health
unit in her native village. This was
one of the initiatives of Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s socialist regime, which re-
placed the monarchy and the British
after the Free Officers’ coup of 1952.
El Saadawi witnessed the physical and
psychological harm done by the daya,
the traditional midwife who was called
upon to affirm girls’ virginity on their
wedding nights (by puncturing their
hymens with her finger and producing
blood) and to practice genital cutting
on young girls.
Female genital mutilation, or female
circumcision (as it’s called in Arabic),
is practiced in many West and East
African countries and some Middle
Eastern ones. It predates Islam but has
acquired religious justification from
Muslim authorities. In Egypt, it con-
sists of removing all or part of the cli-
toris with a razor. The rationale for it is
to reduce a woman’s sex drive and thus
the risk that she will engage in dishon-
orable sexual conduct. A girl who has
not undergone the procedure may be
viewed as “loose” and not a good mar-
riage prospect.
El Saadawi was circumcised at age
six. She wrote about it more than once.
In The Hidden Face of Eve (1977), she
recounts being snatched from her bed
one night and dragged to the bathroom
by strangers who clamped a hand over
her mouth, spread her legs, and “cut
off a piece of flesh from my body.” She
cried for her mother, but
the worst shock of all was when
I looked around and found her
standing by my side. Yes, it was
her, I could not be mistaken,
in flesh and blood, right in the
midst of these strangers, talking
to them and smiling at them, as
though they had not participated
in slaughtering her daughter just a
few moments ago.
The Hidden Face of Eve was one
of several books El Saadawi wrote in
the 1970s that made her reputation as
a feminist firebrand. She had already
had a number of clashes with the au-
thorities. She was forced to leave the
rural clinic after trying to help a young
woman from the village who was said to
be possessed by evil spirits; El Saadawi
discovered that she was being raped and
abused by her husband. The woman
was nonetheless forced to return to
him and killed herself. El Saadawi was
transferred back to Cairo because, she
writes, a male colleague had reported
her: “Dr Nawal El Saadawi . . . had ex-
hibited a signal disrespect for the moral
39
values and customs of our society and
had incited women to rebel against the
divine laws of Islam.”
In her 1969 book Women and Sex, El
Saadawi criticized the preoccupation
with female virginity and the double
standards it imposes, writing, “Can
honor possibly be an anatomical fea-
ture that some human beings are born
with and some not? And if the hymen
is evidence of a woman’s honor, what is
evidence of a man’s?” The book led to
her dismissal from a post at the Min-
istry of Health and to the closure of
Health, a magazine she had founded.
In 1975 El Saadawi published the
novel Woman at Point Zero, the melo-
dramatic story of Firdaus, a prostitute
and murderer ostensibly based on a
woman El Saadawi had met while vis-
iting a prison. Firdaus is less a real
person than a composite of female
suffering and resilience through whom
El Saadawi indicts Egyptian society.
Toward the end of the book, Firdaus
reflects:
All women are victims of decep-
tion. Men impose deception on
women and punish them for being
deceived, force them down to the
lowest level and punish them for
falling so low, bind them in mar-
riage and then chastise them with
menial service for life, or insults,
or blows.
Now I realized that the least de-
luded of all women was the prosti-
tute. That marriage was the system
built on the most cruel suffering
for women.
El Saadawi herself married and di-
vorced three times. This was fairly un-
usual, given the pressure on women not
to expose themselves and their fam-
ilies to the shame of divorce, and the
fact that getting one in Egypt generally
requires a husband’s consent (whereas
men can divorce their wives unilater-
ally). El Saadawi, as usual, defied social
norms; she entered her marriages with
doubts and misgivings but embraced
her divorces with joy. She describes her
first divorce as “a glimmering, shining
moment in my life,” and says of her
second, “I could see the word ‘divorce’
creeping over the horizon like the light
of dawn.”
Her first husband, Ahmed Helmi,
with whom she had a daughter, was a
fellow medical student who partici-
pated in guerrilla attacks on British
forces stationed in the Suez Canal
Zone. But after the 1952 coup, he be-
came disillusioned with politics, ad-
dicted to drugs, and violent. One night
he tore up many of El Saadawi’s photo-
graphs and papers and tried to strangle
her. With her father’s support, she was
able to get a divorce by returning her
dowry and giving up any alimony.
Her second marriage was a love-
less one to a prominent lawyer. In her
memoirs she recounts how he threw
the draft of one of her books out the
window. She jumped after it, ending
a pregnancy that she had already at-
tempted to terminate. When she told
him she wanted to end the marriage,
he said, “It will be easier for you to see
the stars at noon than to have a divorce,
dear doctor.” She grabbed a scalpel
from her purse and advanced on him in
a cold fury, terrifying him so much that
he conceded.
40
El Saadawi’s third marriage was
to Sherif Hetata, a fellow doctor and
writer and a Communist who had spent
thirteen years in prison before they met
in the 1960s. They had a son, and the
union was a happy and supportive one;
Hetata produced admirable transla-
tions of almost all of her works. None-
theless, El Saadawi divorced him in
2010, after forty-six years of marriage,
when she discovered he was having an
affair. In 2015 she told an audience,
“The marriage laws do not encourage
men to respect women. . . . Marriage
does not suit a women with dignity.”
When it is based on her experience
and her fieldwork, El Saadawi’s writing
is very powerful. It is easy to see why it
caused such a furor and had such an im-
pact on female readers across the Arab
world. In The Hidden Face of Eve, she
Nawal El Saadawi at the inaugural meeting of the Egyptian Women
Writers’ Association, Cairo, 1970
describes the education of a girl in
Arab society as “a slow process of an-
nihilation, a gradual throttling of her
personality and mind.” She notes that
Islamic scholars considered it women’s
responsibility to provide men with all
the material comforts they needed to
pursue religion and knowledge, while
assuming that women were unworthy
of such pursuits themselves. She takes
apart the traditional claim that men’s
authority over women flows from their
responsibility as providers, pointing
out that women are actually exploited,
unpaid laborers within the family.
As El Saadawi became an outspo-
ken dissident at home, she also became
famous outside Egypt. She remains
among the most widely read Arab
women writers in the West, where one
of her books is often the first and only
work by an Arab feminist that college
students encounter. Yet some of the ed-
itorial choices made in presenting her to
a Western audience—choices that seem
to downplay her criticism of capitalism
and to emphasize the suffering of Arab
women—have been called into question.
“Chapters in the Arabic edition like
‘Woman’s Work at Home’ and ‘Arab
Woman and Socialism’ are omitted from
the English translation, which includes
instead an entire chapter on female cir-
cumcision, the treatment of which is far
more limited in Arabic,” notes Ronak
Husni in her foreword to The Hidden
Face of Eve, without explaining who
made these decisions or why.
It is common for Western feminists to
focus on the plight of Arab and Muslim
women while paying considerably less
attention to the ways Western military,
political, and economic interventions
contribute to the unequal world those
women live in. The idea that Muslim
women need liberating or saving has
even been used to justify military inter-
ventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. On
the other hand, it is common for Muslim
conservatives and Arab nationalists to
try to silence local feminists by accusing
them of being traitors to their culture
who are playing to foreign audiences.
El Saadawi, in her preface to The
Hidden Face of Eve, is at pains to em-
phasize that discrimination against
women in the region is driven by eco-
nomic and political factors—including
“foreign exploitation of resources”—
more than cultural and religious ones:
I firmly believe that the reasons for
the lower status of women in our
Nawal El Saadawi
societies . . . are not due to Islam,
but rather to certain economic
and political forces, namely those
of foreign imperialism operating
mainly from the outside, and those
of the reactionary classes operat-
ing from the inside.
She is irritated by women in America
and Europe whom she views as conde-
scending and unaware, but in trying to
make a valid point she goes too far, cre-
ating unconvincing equivalences:
Women in Europe and America
may not be exposed to surgical
removal of the clitoris. Neverthe-
less, they are victims of cultural
and psychological clitoridectomy.
“Lift the chains off my body, put
the chains on my mind.”
El Saadawi’s politics were shaped by
the struggle against colonialism. As a
teenager, she participated enthusiasti-
cally in mass protests against the British
presence in Egypt. Like most Egyptians
her age, she volunteered to fight in 1956
when France, the UK, and Israel tried to
reoccupy the Suez Canal, which Nasser
had nationalized. She traveled as a med-
ical volunteer to the Suez zone during
the Six-Day War in 1967 and to Palestin-
ian refugee camps in Jordan in 1968. Yet
she did not blindly support her own gov-
ernment. In her memoir she describes
attending conferences put on by the new
Nasserist regime. “The faces of the men
sitting high up on the platform did not
indicate in any way that they were there
to serve the people,” she observes.
The ruling classes in Egypt at all
stages could not bear young people
who organized for a cause. They
could be used when needed. After
that they had to be suppressed,
called back to the house of obedi-
ence like a recalcitrant wife.
Here and elsewhere in her writing,
she emphasized the connection be-
tween patriarchy, political authoritar-
ianism, and religious fundamentalism.
Her politics were radical and utopian;
mostly she engaged in denunciation.
In The Hidden Face of Eve, she argues
that “women can only become truly lib-
erated under a socialist system where
classes have been abolished and where,
furthermore, the systems and concepts
and laws of patriarchalism have been
completely eradicated.” Such a system,
she suggested, was being ushered in by
revolutionary movements in Iran, Al-
geria, and Palestine.
In 1981 President Anwar Sadat—who
had made peace with Israel, aligned
Egypt with the US, and opened the
economy to foreign trade and invest-
ment (and rampant corruption)—was
facing great discontent at home. In re-
sponse he had nearly 1,600 prominent
politicians and intellectuals, including
El Saadawi, arrested, and he shut down
many political parties and newspapers.
El Saadawi’s time in prison was cut
short by Sadat’s assassination on Oc-
tober 6 of that year, after which many
political prisoners were released by his
successor, Hosni Mubarak.
In Memoirs from the Women’s
Prison (1983), El Saadawi gives a de-
tailed account of her arrest, interro-
gations, and months of incarceration,
during which she wrote in secret using
an eyebrow pencil and toilet paper. As
usual, she is a keen and sympathetic
observer of the lower- class women
she met: Nabawiyya, a female warden
who is just trying to get by; Fathiyya,
a murderer who is widely respected by
the other inmates; and Dhuba, a prosti-
tute who cleans the political prisoners’
cell (class distinctions remain firmly
in place). These women agree that
“behind every woman who’s entered
prison there’s a real son of a bitch. Fa-
ther, husband, brother, uncle, cousin.”
El Saadawi is also a sharp observer of
the various forms of male authority—
apologetic, disingenuous, blustering,
hypocritical—that she faces.
But she has notably little to say about
her fellow political prisoners, who in-
cluded other prominent women writers.
When she does describe them, it is crit-
ically; the most space is given to Bod-
uur and Fawqiyya, one an Islamist and
the other a Communist, “both equally
humorless, doctrinal and hypocriti-
cal.” Although El Saadawi talks about
the camaraderie of prison, she doesn’t
credit any of her fellow prisoners with
insights or initiatives; she is always the
one who leads, who has good ideas, and
who squares up bravely against police-
men, wardens, and prosecutors.
Many prison memoirs present the ex-
perience as a form of painful education.
But the main thing El Saadawi seems
to learn, again and again, is the extent
of her own indomitable will and moral
superiority. She was undoubtedly a re-
markable person, and yet her emphasis
on her remarkableness can become a
form of blindness. In her prison mem-
oir, she is so focused on her own expe-
rience that she gives almost no sense of
what Sadat’s actions meant for others
The New York Review
or of the larger political background;
one almost gets the sense that the en-
tire crackdown was aimed at Nawal El
Saadawi.
This is related to another aspect of
El Saadawi’s writing (one that may
explain her particular appeal to West-
ern audiences): its focus on individual
exceptionalism. Her feminism almost
always appears intuitive, personal, and
unique; it has little collective or his-
torical dimension. El Saadawi rarely
mentions writers or thinkers who have
contributed to her understanding of
feminism or socialism; she seems to
have no role models or peers she ad-
mires. Other people, other women,
never seem to teach her anything, ex-
cept negatively. Her stories, whether
they are autobiographical or fictional
(her victim-heroines often read as ide-
alized stand-ins for the author) center
on the repeated revelation of the iniq-
uity the female narrator faces and of
her strength as she stands alone in the
face of it.
In Memoirs from the Women’s
Prison, El Saadawi recounts being in-
terrogated and asked to reread one of
her offending articles:
At some point, I forgot that I was
the author, and I was filled with ad-
miration for whoever had written
it. Suddenly, I remembered that
I was the author, and the thought
filled me with pride and self-
admiration.
This seems tongue-in- cheek. But when
talking about her mission as a writer,
El Saadawi’s tone is most often dead
serious:
The pen is the most valuable thing
in my life. My words on paper are
more valuable to me than my life
itself. More valuable than my chil-
dren, more than my husband, more
than my freedom.
I prefer my place in prison to
writing something which has not
originated in my mind.
It is perhaps not surprising that the more
El Saadawi felt targeted and alienated
from her society, the more she clung
to her own myth. Self-aggrandizement
may have been a defense mechanism.
In 1987 El Saadawi published The Fall
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Is-
lamic extremists in Egypt carried out
a number of terrorist attacks against
tourists as well as public officials and
intellectuals. El Saadawi discovered
that she had been put on a hit list be-
cause of her writing. The same govern-
ment that had closed the offices of the
Arab Women’s Solidarity Association,
which she had founded, forced her to
accept police protection. El Saadawi
and Hetata chose to leave the country
instead; she took a position at Duke
University.
It is there that she wrote the first
two volumes of her autobiography, the
best of her books. Whereas many of
the others seem to have been dashed
off in inspiration or anger, El Saadawi
takes her time in these lengthy, reflec-
tive volumes. She vividly conjures her
childhood and youth in the Egyptian
countryside and in Cairo, sketching
teachers, relatives, neighbors, and
schoolmates in wonderful detail. She
shows us herself as a young woman
who is impulsive, optimistic, hungry
for attention, full of an “anger [that]
had never stopped accumulating in me
since the day I was born.”
After four years at Duke, El Saadawi
and Hetata returned to Cairo. She con-
tinued to receive international prizes,
honorary degrees, and accolades, and
to make statements that were deemed
scandalous, such as that certain rituals
of the hajj, the holy Muslim pilgrimage
to Mecca, had pagan origins. As a re-
sult of such remarks, in 2001 she was
the target of a particularly malicious
legal maneuver known as a hisba case,
in which a plaintiff takes legal action
on behalf of other members of the
Muslim community to protect them
from moral harm. An enterprising con-
servative lawyer sought to divorce El
Saadawi from Hetata without either of
their consent, on the grounds that she
was an unbeliever. (The case was dis-
missed.) She was also sued after writ-
ing a play, God Resigns at the Summit
Meeting (2006), in which she staged a
debate between the deity, the devil, and
prophets of different faiths.
In 2004, at age seventy-three, El
Saadawi announced a run for presi-
dent but ultimately withdrew, citing
restrictions on her campaign. She sup-
ported the Arab Spring protests, and
like so many secular Egyptian intellec-
tuals, she also supported the protests
against the Muslim Brotherhood gov-
to decline but has hardly been eradi-
cated: rates among girls aged fifteen to
nineteen dropped from 97 percent in
1985 to 70 percent in 2015. The degree
of sexual violence Egyptian women SILK CHIFFON SCARVES
face—including from the authorities— FROM ENGLAND
is rampant and shocking.* Meanwhile, These luxurious 71" x 22" scarves are beau-
El Saadawi’s hopes that Arab countries tifully made to the highest standards—the
would see a wave of political, economic, hems are hand rolled and sewn, not machine
and personal liberation have been dis- stitched. Because they are silk chiffon, they
appointed, to say the least. can easily be tied in a variety of ways; each is
At its best, El Saadawi’s writing is large enough to wear as a light shawl.
bracingly honest, a deep and passion-
ate exploration of her particular female
experience. In a chapter of her mem-
oirs entitled “Killing the Bridegroom”
she recounts telling her grandmother,
“I will never marry!” only to hear,
“Marriage is your destiny like all girls.
It is God’s will, O daughter of my son.”
The little girl does not know exactly
what God, marriage, or a husband is,
but they are linked in her imagination:
“To me, a bridegroom was like one of RENAISSANCE MANUSCRIPT
the dolls which my mother made out of SILK CHIFFON SCARF
the remains of cloth.” In her dreams, The flower motifs on this beautiful scarf are
God also appears to her taken from an exquisite Renaissance manu-
script. The blossoms cover the central area
in the form of one of these dolls, of the scarf; on each end is a wide border of
flowers, buds, leaves, and berries, in satu-
dressed in a dark suit, with the red
rated shades of blue, pink, and green. In
fez on his head and the two black
Europe during the Renaissance, the faithful
beady eyes shining wickedly in
looked to nature for spiritual enlightenment
the night. He used to hide in the and to guide their contemplation of the
shadow of the clothes-stand, then divine. In illuminated manuscripts made
move out slowly from behind it. during the period, intricately painted flora
was often represented as an aid to prayer
God pursues her in her dreams, and and prized for its religious symbolism and
she and her little sister pursue knowl- medicinal value.
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when the bridegroom beats the bride,
they punish him by taking off his pants
and cutting open his belly with scissors,
looking for the piece of flesh between
his legs.
El Saadawi describes the world the
girls live in, the two sides of the fam-
ily, in Cairo and in the village of Kafr
Tahla. Already she senses that every-
where one thing is the same, a message
she reads in the eyes of others: “I felt
it in my body like a shiver of cold: I
had been born a female in a world that BOOK OF HOURS
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The sumptuous imagery on this scarf is based
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on illustrations found in copies of the book
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of the Imam, a dystopian novel set in an
Islamic dictatorship. It is a sort of Arab
Handmaid’s Tale, although it has none
of Margaret Atwood’s tight focus and
plausibility; instead, it grows muddled
and grandiloquent, floundering under
the weight of its dreamlike imagery.
The heroine is the illegitimate daugh-
ter of the Imam, a revered political and
religious leader:
His desire to possess things was
like a chronic disease, like a great
hunger, and he had an unlimited
faith in God’s power, in what He
could do for him. He developed
a patch of rough blue skin on his
forehead from repeated prostra-
tion, and in his right hand he held
a rosary of yellow beads for all to
see, testimonies of his devotion to
God. Over his right buttock hung
a sword, encased in a long sheath,
and over the left buttock he held
his hand, hiding the hole in his
trousers.
ernment and its violent overthrow by
the military. In 2018 she claimed she
had personally seen Hillary Clinton
give money to young people in Tahrir
Square so that they would vote for the
Brotherhood—repeating the common
conspiracy theory that the US govern-
ment actively supported the Islamist
movement.
Reading El Saadawi’s books and
memoirs, one is struck by how daring
they still are; I doubt they could be
published in Egypt today. This is an-
other way of saying that one is struck
by how few of the changes El Saadawi
called for have been implemented. The
unfair laws she decried—the ones that
discriminate against women in mat-
ters of inheritance, marriage, and di-
vorce—remain in place, despite a few
minor reforms. The practice of female
genital mutilation, after decades of
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with it.
This remarkable chapter moves flu-
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comes when El Saadawi uncharacteris-
tically admits failure:
When I was a child I could not
tell who was lying to me, who was
drawing an image of me which
was not myself, not the original.
Throughout the years of my life I
wrote trying in vain to abolish the
distance between the image and
the original, for letters, words on
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October 21, 2021 41


Yi Sang: Selected Works
edited by Don Mee Choi
and translated from the Korean by
Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Joyelle
McSweeney, and from the Japanese
by Sawako Nakayasu.
Wave, 232 pp., $25.00 (paper)
Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite (2019)
unfolds in two of the most memora-
ble domestic spaces in recent cinema:
the Kim family’s squalid apartment,
on a Seoul street prone to fumigation
and floods, and the tech entrepreneur
Nathan Park’s sleek modernist man-
sion, which the grifting Kims infiltrate.
In a delirious twist halfway through
the movie, Bong reveals that the Park
home, like similar structures built
within living memory of the Korean
War, has a “secret [bunker] where you
can hide in case North Korea attacks
or creditors break in.” (Neither Com-
munists nor capitalists can be trusted.)
Parasite imagines contemporary Korea
as a haunted house, where rigid lines—
between haves and have-nots, the
present and the past—are broken in
shocking fashion.
The mansion was designed and orig-
inally inhabited by a world-famous
architect, Namgoong, who left Korea
after the place was sold to the Parks
some years earlier. The fictional Nam-
goong perhaps figures as Bong’s alter
ego: the absent, godlike designer of the
drama and chaos unfolding on-screen.
Parasite and its structures came force-
fully to mind recently as I read a new
English-language collection of work by
Yi Sang, Korean literature’s perpetual
enfant terrible. Yi Sang was not only
a cutting- edge writer but a working
architect, and his oeuvre teems with
dark rooms, mirror worlds, and other
uncanny spaces.
In 1929, at age nineteen, Yi Sang won
a contest to design the cover of a mag-
azine for Japanese architects in Korea.
Two years later, his first poetic se-
quences appeared in that publication,
with industry-appropriate titles like
“Solid Angle Blueprint” and “Bird’s
Eye View.” The poem “Movement”
suggests Gertrude Stein vanishing into
an Escher print:
I climb up above the first floor to
the second floor to the third floor
to the rooftop garden and look
to the south and there is nothing
there and look to the north and
there is nothing there and so I go
down from the rooftop garden to
the third floor to the second floor
to the first floor . . .
Still others use the language of geom-
etry and physics—grids, equations, an
“azimuthal study of numbers,” even
actual shapes—to disorienting effect.
Logical statements collapse into non-
sense or sorcery. The mostly mathe-
matical “Memorandum on the Line
3” ends with a glimpse of the reader’s
blown mind: “The brain opened into
a circle like a folding fan, then rotated
completely.”
A more tangible space opens up in
Yi Sang’s best-known story, “Wings,”
published when he was twenty-six, less
than a year before his death. The unre-
liable narrator resides with his wife in
42
A Poet’s-Eye View
Ed Park
Yi Sang (left) with the novelist Pak T’ae-wǂn and the poet Kim So-un, Seoul, circa 1936
room 7 of House No. 33, where “eigh-
teen households live side by side,” the
residents “young as blossoms.” Though
he notes the building’s similarity to a
“house of pleasure,” his insight stops
there. The layout of the couple’s pad
limits true knowledge of his marriage:
“The sliding door dividing the room in
half symbolized my destiny,” he reflects,
and his wife berates him if he sets foot in
her territory. At the end of this Poe-like
tale, upon realizing his wife is turning
tricks, he flees home (or the brothel),
tears through the streets of Seoul, and
heads for the roof garden of the Western-
style Mitsukoshi department store, from
which he does or doesn’t jump.
“Have you ever seen a stuffed ge-
nius?” quips the narrator at the start of
“Wings.” Yi Sang’s ghost might claim
such status today, if only we could agree
on what we’re seeing. He is at once
enigmatic outlaw and culture hero,
whose work crystallizes the anxieties of
Korea under Japanese rule in the first
half of the twentieth century. Though
he is chiefly known as a poet, his hard-
to- categorize prose—in the form of
autofictional stories (“Encounters and
Departures”), impressionistic essays
(“Ennui”), and playful nightmares
(“Deathly Child”)—is also revered.
A top prize for South Korean fiction,
established in 1977, bears his name.
Recipients include Han Kang, whose
Wave Books
Man Booker Prize–winning novel The
Vegetarian (2007) was sparked by a line
from Yi Sang’s notebooks: “I believe
that humans should be plants.” That a
single dusty sentence could help conjure
a feminist landmark seventy years later
is a testament to his peculiar talent.
In America, there have been two
notable gatherings of translations and
commentary. In 1995 Walter K. Lew
edited a lavish seventy-page portfolio of
Yi Sang’s poetry, prose, and visual art
for the first issue of Muae, a short-lived
“journal of transcultural production.”
For Lew, Yi Sang’s “architechtonically
precise pieces” drip with forbidden sex-
ual content, and the accompanying ac-
ademic critiques are aptly provocative,
teasing out the horny in the cryptic.1 In
2002 Myong-Hee Kim translated fifty-
five of his poems and stories (which she
likens to essays) in Crow’s Eye View:
The Infamy of Lee Sang, Korean Poet.
(The title uses an alternate angliciza-
tion of his name.) For her, his life was
essentially tragic, his interior quests
akin to those of Franz Kafka.
1 2
For example, Ma Kwang Soo decodes
the numerals 1 and 3 (in the 1934 Yi
Sang poem beginning “Thirteen kids
make a mad dash down the street”)
as a penis and a “female’s breasts and
buttocks.” The digits’ presence in an
earlier poem, which repeats the equa-
tion “1+3,” therefore represents sexual
congress.
Now there is a generous Selected
Works, edited by the poet Don Mee
Choi. Although it doesn’t include
“Wings” or “Encounters and Depar-
tures” (both of which are excerpted in
the earlier books), it fills in other parts
of the portrait. In “Yi Sang’s House,”
an essay included in the book, Choi
calls his output a form of “literary re-
sistance to the Japanese colonial rule,”
his stories “essentially colonial fairy
tales.”2 She connects his plight with
her own relationship to English and the
United States (of which South Korea,
after World War II, has been a “neocol-
ony”), and casts his work as a precursor
to her poetry, especially her National
Book Award–winning collection, DMZ
Colony (2020).
The sheer range and convoluted pub-
lishing history of Yi Sang’s work make
any selection a challenge. Chronology,
language, and genre get tangled—a fit-
ting mess for a writer who refused to
behave. His brief life was one of contra-
diction, scandal, and puzzling swerves.
He was born Kim Hye-kyǂng in 1910,
barely a month after the Korean em-
peror had signed over the kingdom to
an ascendant Japan. Korea remained a
Japanese colony until the end of World
War II, meaning the poet’s entire life
was spent as a man without a country.
His father became a barber after los-
ing three fingers while working as a
printer for the Royal Palace—a perfect
symbol for the amputation of Korean
sovereignty.
At three, Kim Hye-kyǂng was ad-
opted by his father’s older brother,
who was childless—a not uncommon
practice of the time. (His birth par-
ents went on to have two other chil-
dren.) His uncle’s wealth enabled him
to attend elite schools. At sixteen, he
entered the prestigious Gyeongseong
Technical College (later part of Seoul
National University) to study architec-
ture. He was one of just two Koreans
in his grade. According to Myong-Hee
Kim, at a sixty-year reunion a Japanese
classmate remembered him as “always
being at the top of his class,” as well as
a cut-up who made everyone laugh.
A vertiginous exchange in the
memoir-story “Encounters and De-
partures” gets at this double identity.
Someone named Kin Sang hails the
narrator: “It’s been a long time, Kin
Sang.” The narrator explains that “he
addressed me as Kin Sang because, in
truth, Yi Sang is also Kin Sang.” The
doubling makes eerie sense, as “Kin”
was Japanese for his birth name, Kim.
(“Sang” is close enough to the Japanese
“san” to render this as “Mr. Kim.”) In
life, he was Korean but not Korean, a
son but not a son. At school, the instruc-
tion was in Japanese: “With the tuition
my parents paid, I only learned words
they don’t understand.” After gradua-
tion, he worked as a draftsman for the
Japanese governor-general’s office, “fo-
The omission of “Wings” and “En-
counters and Departures” is curious.
Perhaps their first-person depictions
of men married to prostitutes make
them harder to classify as colonial fairy
tales—though the exploitation is less
clear-cut than it first appears. (Henry
H. Em, in Muae, sees “Wings” as an
“anti- colonial allegory.”)
The New York Review
cus[ed] on the urbanization of the colo-
nial capital”—Seoul, or Gyeongseong,
renamed Keijo. 3 It was at once a practi-
cal career path and a literal embedding
into the imperial structure.
At Gyeongseong, Kim Hye-kyǂng
took the pen name Yi Sang. His rea-
sons are unclear. Jack Jung, the excel-
lent translator of most of the Korean
material in Selected Works, notes that
Kim signed a yearbook with this han-
dle in 1929, and cites a theory that it
was “to honor a gift given to him by
a fellow painter friend at the same
school . . . a painter’s box made out of
plum wood.” Korean names tradition-
ally have a second spelling in Chinese,
beyond the phonetic one in the Korean
alphabet; the theory proposes that the
specific Chinese characters for yi and
sang correspond to “plum tree” and
“box.” The friend in question, Gu Bon-
woong, would have been one of just a
few fellow Koreans at the school. Might
the new name secretly acknowledge
their shared heritage? Another the-
ory, elegant if unprovable, was devised
by Walter Lew in Muae: Jean Cocteau
was popular in Japan, regularly dis-
cussed in journals that the young Ko-
rean cineaste was aware of. Could it
be that when Cocteau’s Le sang d’un
poète (The Blood of a Poet) was shown
in Seoul circa 1930, Kim Hye-kyǂng
saw the title as “Lee Sang, a poet,” and
adopted it to honor one of his heroes?
A simpler explanation lies in the
name’s Korean homophone: yisang—
strange. “Everything was strange to
me,” confesses the deluded narrator
of “Wings.” And nearly everything
Yi Sang wrote is strange to the gen-
eral reader, from his math- driven
early poems (written in Japanese) to
the confounding late prose (including
the claustrophobic “Spider & Spider
Meet Pigs,” originally printed without
spaces between words). Even his pasto-
ral sketch “A Journey into the Moun-
tain Village” is a paean to modernism,
the urbane voice impatient to connect
with technology and culture: “I dream
about a city girl who looks like the logo
of Paramount Pictures.”
Part of the strangeness comes from
Yi Sang’s swift intake of foreign matter.
His writing is sprinkled with allusions
to Oscar Wilde and Maxim Gorky, Al
Capone and the Jean Arthur caper Ad-
venture in Manhattan. He kept tabs on
Japanese practitioners of the literary
school Shinkankakuha (“new sensibil-
ities”) and was receptive to the avant-
gardes out of Europe: Futurism, Dada,
and Surrealism. His project was to take
these continental models and their Jap-
anese adaptations and find space for a
uniquely Korean consciousness.
In 1931 Yi Sang contracted tubercu-
losis while working at a building site.
During the six years left to him, his
poetry turned into a hall of mirrors,
with all manner of body horror lurking
around the corner. Limbs sprout limbs,
cups resemble skulls, razored- off arms
form a candelabra, and lungs develop
appendicitis; demonic dolls, prosthetic
legs, paper tombstones, and bungled
suicides accumulate. “My body’s flesh
is now never at home,” he wrote in
3
For more on Yi Sang and architecture,
see Yoon Jeong Oh, “Yi Sang à Paris:
Art of Repetition and Improvisation in
2010 Paris/Seoul,” Journal of Korean
and Asian Arts, Vol. 1 (Spring 2020).
October 21, 2021
1933. Verse was his “autographed obit-
uary.” A self-portrait from this time
shows him gaunt and stubbled, with
“wild, bird’s nest–like hair.”
In “This Kind of Poetry” (1933), he
works TB into a symbol. With wide
gaps like gasps, he revisits the fateful
site where disease befell him:
While digging ground for
construction I found a big
stone and looking at it made
me think it was shaped like
something from before
Workers carry the stone to the side of
a road. Overnight, it dissolves in the
rain. Yet he can’t shake its presence,
writes a strangely romantic ode to it,
feels the pain anew in his words. “This
kind of poetry,” he concludes, “I just
wanted to rip it apart.” TB becomes the
weather of his life, colonizes the lungs
Wave Books
‘Poem No. 4’ by Yi Sang; from
‘Crow’s Eye View,’ 1934
of his poems. “I have swallowed up all
the painful pronunciations,” he writes
in “Fortunetelling.” The speaker of
“Path” is practically immobilized:
My story is this suffocating walk.
My coughs are the punctuating
marks made by my shoes. . . . I
walk for about a page. . . . After
loud laughter, a pungent ink is
spilled over my taunting face.
Along with sickness, sexual obses-
sion defined Yi Sang’s remaining time.
In 1933 his illness worsened, and he
quit his job at the governor-general’s
office, going to a hot springs to re-
cuperate. This experience kicks off
“Encounters and Departures,” which
begins like noir: “I’m twenty-three, it’s
March, and I’m coughing up blood.”
While convalescing, “Yi Sang”
meets a kisaeng (a courtesan typically
accomplished in music, poetry, and
dance) named Kǎm-hong—also the
name of the kisaeng who consumed
him in real life. From the beginning,
they misjudge each other. Kǎm-hong is
twenty- one but the narrator thinks she
looks “sixteen, nineteen at the most”
and behaves with the maturity of a
thirty- one-year- old; she thinks the nar-
rator might be as old as forty, although
he sometimes acts like a boy of ten. He
tries to pass her off to others (including
a character assumed to be his friend
Gu, of plum-wood box fame); when
they finally sleep together, “the force of
passion seemed to hold back the blood
in my lungs.”
Is this love? The narrator doesn’t pay
Kǎm-hong. “It didn’t bother me when
I caught a glimpse of their shoes side
by side on the doorstep of the place,”
Yi Sang writes of her clients—a scan-
dalously complacent attitude that he
later turned on its head in “Wings.”
Kǎm-hong moves with him to Seoul,
where they “blissfully cuddled together
in marriage,” though in actuality they
never officially wed. In real life the pair A new translation of a
ran a teahouse called Jebi (Sparrow), a novel by the great 20th-century
hangout for writers and artists, which French writer Jean Giono
lasted until 1935. His novelist friend
Pak T’ae-wǂn captured the milieu in fic-
tion: “Jobless types are sitting around
on cane chairs, talking, drinking tea,
smoking cigarettes, and listening to re-
cords.” According to Myong-Hee Kim,
Pak noted that Jebi was “furnished
with tables and chairs half the normal
size,” with a single painting on the wall:
Yi Sang’s self-portrait.
“Encounters and Departures” elides
the Jebi venture, jumping to the cou-
ple’s breakup in 1935. In between—
specifically, the summer of 1934—is
when Yi Sang rose to the height of his
literary powers, fueled by his unortho-
dox ménage and the camaraderie of the
literary group Kuinhoe (Circle of Nine),
formed in 1933. With the help of fellow
members Pak T’ae-wǂn and Yi Taejon,
he serialized in the Chosun Central The south of France, 1950: A solitary
Daily newspaper what became his sig- vagabond walks through the villages,
nature work, “Crow’s Eye View”—a towns, valleys, and foothills of the re-
proposed series of thirty poems (only gion between northern Provence and the
fifteen of which were published) that he Alps. He picks up work along the way
claimed to have chosen from a sea of two and spends the winter as the custo-
thousand. Unlike his previous “Bird’s dian of a walnut-oil mill. He also picks
Eye View” sequence, these were written up a problematic companion: a card-
in Korean rather than Japanese.4 sharp and con man, whom he calls
The first “Crow’s Eye View” poem “the Artist.”
appeared on July 24. It begins cine-
matically: “13 children speed toward The action moves from place to place,
the way,” in Jack Jung’s translation. and episode to episode, in truly pi-
Are they running to or from some- caresque fashion. Everything is told
thing? The poet reports “The 1st child in the first person, present tense, by
says it is scary,” a line that repeats with the vagabond narrator, who goes un-
the second, third, and fourth child, named. As always in Jean Giono, the
all the way up to the thirteenth. As in language is rich in natural imagery and
“Movement,” Yi Sang takes the reader as ruggedly idiomatic as it is lyrical.
through every step; here, the effect is
“Shifting between lived-in details and
menacing. The relentless classification
a sense of alienation, this novel is
continues: “Among 13 children there
frequently hypnotic and always
are scary children and scared children
compelling.” —Kirkus, starred review
and they are all they are.” The number
13 isn’t unlucky in Korean culture, but
it might as well be after this poem. THE OPEN ROAD
The next day two more installments Jean Giono
were published—a pair of verbal vor- A new translation by Paul Eprile
tices. The first starts, “When my father Preface by Jacques Le Gall
dozes off beside me I become my fa- Paperback • $16.95
ther and I become my father’s/father On sale October 12th
and even then my father is my father”;
the other, “The one who fights is thus The Open Road is the October selection of
the one who hasn’t fought and the one the NYRB Classics Book Club.
who fights has also been the one who
doesn’t fight.” Each set of five lines ALSO BY JEAN GIONO
ends with a dash, multiplying to infin-
ity, as if the poet has put a mirror be-
fore a mirror—twice.
Readers waited three days (July
28) for the next weird set. “Poem No.
4” announces that there’s a “Problem
concerning the patient’s face,” and
then presents eleven rows of digits,
0987654321, cut diagonally by a string
of dots and printed backward. 5 A diag-
nosis sits at the bottom (“0:1”), given HILL • MELVILLE • A KING ALONE
4 A COMMUNITY BOOKSTORE AND
Both sets of poems also contain com-
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
plex Chinese characters, which were
commonly used in Korean works; they VIRTUAL EVENT
would have been “legible, but differ- Thursday, November 11th, 5pm ET
ent” to Japanese readers, according to With Edmund White,
the translator Sawako Nakayasu. Paul Eprile, and Bill Johnston
5 Register at communitybookstore.net
Before the signoff is a short phrase
(two Chinese characters: 以上), left
untranslated by Jung but which Lew
renders “As above.” My father trans-
lates it as “That’s all,” and notes that in
Korean, the characters are pronounced
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com
“yi sang”—a homophonic mirroring to
mirror the square of reversed numerals.
43
by “primary doctor Yi Sang.” “Poem
No. 5” is also graphically bizarre. Im-
mediately below the line “This is an old
tale of a man collapsing before a short,
fat god” is a rectilinear drawing, its left
side imploding, the two stubs resolving
into arrows.
“Poem No. 6,” a fractured fairy tale
with a “birdie parrot” and “2 horsies,”
appeared on the last day of July. “Is this
little girl gentleman Yi Sang’s bride?”
the parrot (I think) asks. Yi Sang is
banished, his frail body knocked off its
“axis.” The word “sCANDAL” appears,
in strangely capitalized English, as
though lit from within. “Poem No. 7”
(August 1) appears relatively straight-
forward, albeit with dots separating the
high- Symbolist sentences. But Yi Sang
was back to being yisang in “Poem
No. 8,” literally an experimental poem,
complete with a table of instruments
and variables (“Silver mirror [=] 1,”
“Temperature [=] Nonexistent”). The
narrator of “Poem No. 9” (“Muzzle”)
feels sweat pool in “the ecstatic valley
of my fingerprints” as the barrels of two
guns enter his body, one in each end.6
Six more poems followed, with more
mirrors and broken bodies and bul-
lets. After “Poem No. 15,” the newspa-
per halted publication of “Crow’s Eye
View,” heeding its outraged readers.
“Stop this madman’s ravings!” one de-
manded. Another threatened to burn
the poems in front of the office. Yi Sang
drafted a scathing letter that never ran:
“Why do you all say I’m crazy? We are
decades behind others, and you think
it’s okay to be complacent? . . . I pity
this wasteland where I can hear no
echo for my howl!” He’s the bringer of
light, castigating his ungrateful audi-
ence. “I won’t ever try something like
this again,” he sighs, adding ironically,
“I will study quietly for a while, and in
my spare time try to cure my insanity.”
In Korean lore, the crow has pro-
phetic powers, and a three-legged
version (samjogo) appears in ancient
symbology. But it’s conceivable that Yi
Sang was looking outside Korea for a
title. The scholar Yoon Jeong Oh notes
that the visionary Swiss-born architect
Le Corbusier was featured in a 1929
issue of the architecture magazine for
which Yi Sang designed a cover that
same year—which went on to publish
his first poems.7 Born Charles-Édouard
Jeanneret, Le Corbusier took his pro-
fessional name from the French word
for crow or raven—an all-seeing crea-
ture for a new age.
When Yi Sang titled this series of
poems “Crow’s Eye View,” he might
have meant to align himself with Le
Corbusier, able to take in and recon-
figure the literary landscape just as
the architect could transform a city.
His “madman’s ravings” could be
sketches for a new mode of conscious-
ness. The strange lines of his aborted
project resonate with the declarations
Le Corbusier set down soon after in
Aircraft (1935): “THE EYE NOW SEES
IN SUBSTANCE WHAT THE MIND
FORMERLY COULD ONLY SUBJEC-
TIVELY CONCEIVE . . . . MAN WILL
6 says—add cream to coffee and it smells
In Muae Lew reads this as a homosex-
ual threesome, and locates a strand of
queerness running through Yi Sang’s
writings, including “Poem No. 15,”
which chillingly ends (in Jung’s trans-
lation), “It is a great crime to seal up
two humans who cannot even shake
hands.”
7
See Yoon Jeong Oh, “Yi Sang à Paris.”
44
MAKE USE OF IT TO CONCEIVE
NEW AIMS. CITIES WILL ARISE OUT
OF THEIR ASHES.”
As public furor mounted over “Crow’s
Eye View” in the summer of 1934, Yi
Sang’s skill as a visual artist was on dis-
play in a different newspaper. Pak T’ae-
wǂn’s A Day in the Life of Kubo the
Novelist was serialized in the Chosun
Chungang Daily from August 1 to Sep-
tember 15, accompanied by twenty-
eight striking illustrations by Yi Sang
under the pseudonym Hayung.8 At first
blush, they resemble movie storyboards.
Bits of Korean, Chinese, and English
lettering (“COME HERE”) ornament
some panels. Yi Sang found ways to
render the pleasures and cacophony of
the city, and also make heroic the main
character’s mission—at once everyday
and grandiose—to write something.
The first image depicts a hand holding
a pen, in between a woman’s face and
a pair of shoes, all of it floating above
sheets of paper that resemble building
façades, or façades that resemble paper.
Pak was born in Seoul in 1909 to a
“significantly Westernized family,” ac-
cording to his son, and was apprenticed
to Yi Kwang-su, Korea’s first major
modernist writer. (Yi helped draft the
Korean declaration of independence,
which was read aloud at mass demon-
strations on March 1, 1919.) While still
in high school, Pak translated Ernest
Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield.
Like his mentor, he went to Tokyo to
further his education and immerse
himself in the city’s cultural life, but re-
turned to Korea after a year and a half.
Pak’s novella has a sunny plotlessness
that’s a joy to read: Mr. Kubo, a twenty-
six-year- old still living with his mother,
sets out one morning to wander the city.
He runs into friends, falls into reveries,
engages with dogs that don’t like him.
He’s a highly relatable modern type:
artistic and self- doubting, torn between
tradition and his individual needs, out-
wardly pleasant and inwardly judgmen-
tal (“Kubo feels a strong impulse to
regard all people as mental patients”).
He grows neurotic about his lackluster
love life and his health: “Of course, the
problem wasn’t just Kubo’s left ear. He
hadn’t much confidence in his right ear
either.” We get a crow’s- eye view of his
stream of consciousness, the comedy
occurring at a slight elevation.
The state of being a writer and not
writing weighs on Kubo. He justifies
talking to a painter because “a novel-
ist requires all kinds of knowledge”;
though he has no set destination, he’s
moved to “go somewhere . . . for the
sake of my writing.” At one point, a
friend praises Joyce’s Ulysses, and
though our hero sniffs that “novelty
alone is not a just cause for praise,” A
Day in the Life itself is an underappre-
ciated Eastern response to that colos-
sal novel—the floating life compressed
into a single day.
In Yi Sang’s “True Story—Lost
Flower,” a nine-part suite that pays
homage to his Circle of Nine pals, he
winks at Pak: “Mr. Kubo the writer
like rat piss.” Yi Sang himself is cap-
tured movingly in Pak’s pages. Kubo
stops by the poet’s teahouse and the two
8 with burning hope and ambition.
Sunyoung Park’s translation of Pak’s
book (Asia Publishers, 2015) doesn’t
include Yi Sang’s drawings, but they
can be seen in Muae.
dine on oxtail soup despite the heat. He
wanders solo and returns hours later,
at which time he’s accosted by a for-
mer classmate (now in insurance), who
grills him on how much money novelists
make. To Kubo’s relief, his poet friend
appears. The “poor novelist” Kubo
considers their poverty: “In times like
these, even running a small teahouse
isn’t easy. Three months unpaid rent.”
They have a night on the town with
some barmaids, but Kubo is overcome
with sadness, fretting over his mother
and his writing. He departs with every
author’s famous last words: “Tomor-
row . . . from tomorrow, I’ll stay home,
I’ll write . . .” “Write a good novel,” his
friend says, “with real sincerity,” and
the book ends on a hopeful note.
“Encounters and Departures” de-
scribes a final brief reunion between Yi
Sang and Kǎm-hong, as the writer and
the kisaeng drink and sing songs from
the northwest and southwest—areas
that, less than twenty years later, were
separated by the DMZ across the 38th
Parallel. (To be precise, the songs are
from Yongbyon, the area today known
to house North Korea’s nuclear facil-
ity.) Is it too much to see this north/
south medley, or the demarcated pros-
titute’s room in “Wings,” as harbingers
of the country’s division? “Encounters
and Departures” ends with exhilarat-
ing abruptness, as Kǎm-hong launches
into an unfamiliar tune: “It is but a
dream to deceive . . . /Set fire to your
shadowy heart—”
In 1936 Yi Sang’s sister eloped with
her lover to China; in “A Letter to My
Sister,” never sent but published as a
magazine article, he admires her brav-
ery in leaving without seeking parental
approval. Shortly after, he married Pyǂn
Tong-rim, the sister of a friend. But by
year’s end he had impulsively moved
from Seoul to Tokyo alone—the only
time he ever went abroad. In a scabrous
essay on the Japanese capital, he vents
about the rackety spirit and bad smells
of his surroundings, complaining that
“people with barely functioning lungs
like myself have no right to live in this
city.” To punctuate his disappointment,
he defecates in a public toilet while re-
citing the names of Korean friends who
boasted about visiting Tokyo.
Though the essay didn’t appear in
his lifetime, one can imagine Yi Sang
broadcasting such sentiments in con-
versation, attracting police attention.
In February he was jailed on the vague
charge of “thought crime,” and his tu-
berculosis worsened behind bars. Re-
leased after a month, he died on April
17, 1937, a day after both his father and
grandmother passed away. His wife
brought his ashes back to Korea, but
their whereabouts are unknown.
The shape of Yi Sang’s brief life feels
fated: an architect leaves home and
dies in a foreign land. A product of
Japan as well as Korea—someone who
could make his Japanese classmates
laugh—he is martyred for his ethnicity.
In his essay “After Sickbed,” he writes
in the third person about intimations
of immortality upon first coming down
with TB :
As he was getting nearer to his
biological death, his heart filled
His consciousness recovered. He
felt throttled by an energy that
he hadn’t tasted in a long time. . . .
Though his body became more
and more emaciated, he was sure
that his body was made of iron. It
could never die.9
Improbably but inevitably, his legacy
lives on. Like Keats in the previous
century, Yi Sang died of tuberculosis
in his mid-twenties with a lifetime of
promise cut short. Like the American
horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (who
died just a month before Yi Sang), he
was a writer of such charisma that al-
though he never published a book of
his own, his loyal friends burnished his
legacy. The Circle of Nine resolved to
“gather his blood-stained manuscripts
and present them to the new genera-
tion the poet wanted so desperately to
be friends with,” in the words of Kim
Kirim, whose book of poems Yi Sang
had edited and designed.
According to Myong-Hee Kim,
there was once a rumor that Yi Sang’s
brother-in-law, Pyǂn Tong-uk, fled
to North Korea with a trove of un-
published poetry—perhaps the two
thousand verses from which Yi Sang
selected “Crow’s Eye View.” Yi Sang’s
widow flatly denied this: “My brother
could not have possessed any poems
unknown to me.” The fantasy that
hundreds of heretofore unseen poems
might emerge in North Korea is irre-
sistible: the poet attaining an afterlife,
like the secret existence he sometimes
pictured on the other side of the mirror.
Or perhaps his story was being
conflated with the fate of his artistic
brother-in-arms, Pak (or Park) T’ae-
wǂn. Thirteen years after Yi Sang’s
death, just before the Korean War
erupted in June 1950, Pak traveled north
with a literary delegation. The war pre-
vented his return. Did he mean to defect
all along? According to his son, Daniel,
the invading North Korean army forced
Pak’s wife, still in the South, to work
for a Communist organization, which
landed her in jail after the war. Pak
T’ae-wǂn continued his literary career
in the North, writing historical novels.
He never returned to the South, where
his books were banned into the 1980s,
and died in 1986. His wife in Seoul—
Daniel’s mother—was released from
her life sentence after five years, a shell
of her former self.
“Is the ending to the story good
enough as it stands?” Mr. Kubo once
asked himself. If you believe in the
transmission of genius, Pak T’ae-wǂn’s
legacy has a modern- day finale, just
as a cutting from Yi Sang’s notebook
reached out across the decades and
found flower in Han Kang’s The Veg-
etarian. Because what happens next is
that Daniel’s sister, Pak So-young, mar-
ries a man named Bong Sang-gyun, a
graphic designer. They have four chil-
dren, the youngest of whom goes on to
direct the first foreign-language film to
win the Oscar for Best Picture, seventy
years after his grandfather disappeared
in the North—a haunted-house story
called Parasite, about an architect who
has left the country. Q
9
It occurs to me now, having read and
learned about Yi Sang for many years,
that his illness and his profession are
not irrelevant to my fascination. My pa-
ternal grandmother died of TB the year
after Yi Sang did, when my father was
only two, and my paternal grandfather
worked in the construction business in
the 1930s. I dedicate this essay to their
memory.
The New York Review
 Nature’s Evolving Tastes
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Got Right and Wrong About
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edited by Jeremy DeSilva.
Princeton University Press,
258 pp., $27.95
The Origins of the World:
The Invention of Nature
in the 19th Century
an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay,
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Catalog of the exhibition
edited by Laura Bossi and
translated from the French
by Valentina Baslyk,
Jill Corner, and others.
Gallimard, 384 pp., $55.00
The Natural History of Edward Lear:
New Edition
by Robert McCracken Peck,
with a foreword by David Attenborough.
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227 pp., $29.95 (paper)
“The wholesale murders going [on]
now in Paris are heartrending.”
Charles Darwin received this news in a
letter from the paleontologist Vladimir
Kovalevsky, dated May 28, 1871, the
final day of a week known since as the
Semaine sanglante. Two months earlier,
socialist revolutionaries in the French
National Guard had seized the capi-
tal and declared a social- democratic
government, the Paris Commune. The
young Third Republic government
had moved to Versailles. Now the
Versailles army, having defeated the
Communards, was summarily execut-
ing hundreds of people, lining them up
against stone walls and shooting them.1
Today, along walls in the Luxembourg
Gardens and Père Lachaise cemetery,
you can still see the bullet holes.
Darwin had just published The De-
scent of Man, and Selection in Relation
to Sex. After hesitating for more than a
decade, he had applied his evolutionary
theory to humans. But the book was
undergoing a “fiery ordeal,” as he said,
and looked in danger of becoming an-
other victim of anti- Commune outrage.
An anonymous reviewer for The Times
ominously connected Descent with the
ideas of the Revolution- era French nat-
uralist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, author
of the first fully elaborated evolutionary
theory. Look, the reviewer insinuated,
where that irreligious, materialist the-
ory had led: to revolution, Jacobinism,
regicide, the Terror! From the Revolu-
tion onward, conservatives in France
and abroad had identified Lamarckism
with political radicalism. The Times
reviewer now accused Darwin, like
Lamarck, of promoting “disintegrating
speculations” that undermined moral
authority and social order, loosed “the
tempests of human passion,” and un-
leashed the “most murderous revolu-
tions.” In France, history was repeating
1 Times’s to Darwin’s book. Though his
The Communards also conducted sum-
mary executions of political prisoners,
but Versailles outdid them by at least
a couple orders of magnitude. See John
Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death
of the Paris Commune (Basic Books,
2014), chapter 11.
October 21, 2021
Jessica Riskin
Gabriel von Max: Abelard and Heloise, circa 1900–1915
itself; for Darwin to publish his book
“at such a time” was “more than unsci-
entific—it is reckless.”
French politics had haunted Dar-
win from the start. The momen-
tous idea that living forms emerged
over time through a process of self-
transformation had originated not only
in the writings of French Enlighten-
ment authors such as Lamarck, but in
those of Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus
Darwin. The elder Darwin had been a
doctor, naturalist, poet, libertine, abo-
litionist, republican, and admirer of the
revolutionaries in France, for whom he
wrote some heroic verses in 1791. But
Charles Darwin, who had spent his ca-
reer struggling to domesticate the idea
that life had emerged by a natural, grad-
ual process, disavowed any inheritance
of revolutionary or Francophile ten-
dencies. “I quite agree with you about
the savage brutality of the Versailles
army,” he responded carefully to Kova-
levsky, “but on the other hand I must
think that the Communists have made
themselves everlastingly infamous.”
Still, in English polite society the idea
of evolution continued to sound sus-
piciously French, carrying a sulfurous
whiff of Jacobin revolution, to which
the spring of 1871 added communism.
The reviewer for the Pall Mall Ga-
zette was more sympathetic than the
review was also anonymous, the author
revealed himself to be the politician
and journalist John Morley, who wrote
to Darwin in commiseration: “I don’t
know whether you are indignant or
amused at writers who call you reck-
Jack Daulton Collection
less for broaching new doctrines . . . at
a time when Paris is aflame, and we
have republican meetings in the Old
Bailey.” (The republican meeting in
question had actually taken place at St.
James’s concert hall, a less alarming
venue than the criminal court.) Morley
didn’t accuse Darwin of sowing chaos,
but he did think Darwin went too far
in another respect. Morley’s complaint
concerned Darwin’s theory of “sexual
selection,” in which animals choose
mates based on their ideas of beauty,
and these choices, accumulating over
generations, produce striking features
such as the peacock’s tail. While some
animal features such as peacock feath-
ers or the nightingale’s song might seem
beautiful, Morley objected, what about
the macaw with its “harsh screeching”
and “horrible contrasts of yellow and
blue”?
What’s wrong with yellow and blue?
That would’ve been my reaction, but
Darwin just explained that he thought
animals had their own senses of beauty,
not necessarily corresponding to
human tastes. “When an intense colour
or two tints in harmony, or a recurrent
and symmetrical figure, please the eye,
or a single sweet note pleases the ear,
I call this a sense of beauty,” Darwin
wrote to Morley. “If the blue and yel-
low plumage of a Macaw pleases the
eye of this bird, I should say that it had
a sense of beauty, although its taste was
bad according to our standard.”
The principle of sexual selection led
to what Darwin called a “remarkable
conclusion”: animals can direct evo-
lutionary change. Animal and human
qualities, from courage to colorful or-
namentation to a capacity for music,
had originated in “the exertion of
choice, the influence of love and jeal-
ousy, and the appreciation of the beau-
tiful in sound, colour or form.” Darwin
ascribed to animals something like cul-
ture, and to animal culture, a transfor-
mative power.
Few today would associate The De-
scent of Man with communism, but it
remains politically fraught for other
reasons. Arguing that human beings
descend from earlier forms of life, Dar-
win invokes characteristics he ascribes
to “the so- called races” of humans,
which differ from one another, he says,
in innumerable ways, including ap-
pearance, constitution, lung and skull
capacity, convolutions of the brain,
temperament, and “intellectual facul-
ties.” A vehement abolitionist, Darwin
described the “revolting” and “heart-
sickening atrocities” of slavery seen on
his travels as making his “blood boil”
and his “heart tremble.” In Descent he
presents an extended scientific argu-
ment against the idea of human races
as distinct natural kinds, and for the
fundamental sameness of all humans.
Nevertheless, Darwin also uses
phrases such as “the lowest savages”
and “the higher races.” He refers to
John Edmonstone, a taxidermist from
Guyana who taught him during his
time at the University of Edinburgh, as
“a full-blooded negro with whom I hap-
pened once to be intimate.” Observing
that “civilised nations” always tend to
overwhelm “barbarians,” he calmly
predicts that the “civilised races of man
will almost certainly exterminate, and
replace, the savage races throughout
the world.” Also, while acknowledging
that some writers doubt there is any
inherent difference between the men-
tal powers of men and women, Darwin
writes that men seem plainly smarter,
surpassing women in every discipline.
How should we read these passages
today? This question recurs through-
out A Most Interesting Problem: What
Darwin’s “Descent of Man” Got Right
and Wrong About Human Evolution,
edited by the paleoanthropologist Jer-
emy DeSilva. Together with ten col-
leagues, DeSilva courageously takes up
this perennially red-hot founding text
of his discipline. Agustín Fuentes, an
anthropologist, contributes the chapter
on race, affirming that “yes, Darwin
was racist” but also “a good scientist.”
The good scientist prevailed over the
racist sufficiently, Fuentes writes, for
Darwin to get certain important things
right (for example, that humans are
the product of evolution and that all
humans are fundamentally the same),
providing hope for the future of evolu-
tionary theory.
To say that Darwin was “racist” but
also “a good scientist” designates a
combination of evil and good in his
work but doesn’t illuminate it. “Rac-
ist” and “scientist” are words alien to
the mid-nineteenth century; they aren’t
false in application to Darwin, but they
aren’t quite right either. “Scientist”
came into general usage around the
turn of the twentieth century and refers
45
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The rails on the bank began to hum, and a switch engine, picking up
cars in the neighboring yards, puffed along the bank. Burgess felt
himself caught suddenly round the neck and before he knew what
was happening landed violently on his back. He struggled to free
himself, but Bob gripped his throat with one hand and snatched the
revolver from his pocket with the other. It was all over in a minute.
The rattle of the train drowned the sound of the attack, and when
Nellie ran back to urge them on Burgess was just getting on his feet
and Bob had vanished.
“I couldn’t stop him—he grabbed the gun and ran,” Burgess
explained. “He must have jumped on that train.”
“Poor Bob!” She sighed deeply; a sob broke from her. Her arms went
around Burgess’s neck. “Poor Bob! Poor old Bob!”
The locomotive bell clanged remotely. It was very still, and Mr.
Webster G. Burgess, president of the White River National Bank,
stood there under a canal bridge with the arms of a sobbing girl
round his neck! Under all the circumstances it was wholly
indefensible, and the absurdity of it was not lost upon him. Drake
had bolted, and all this scramble with the ex-convict and his
sweetheart had come to naught.
“He’ll get away; he was desperate and he didn’t trust me. He didn’t
even wait for the money Gordon sent me!”
“Oh!”—she faltered, and her breath was warm on his cheek—“that
wasn’t Drake!”
“It wasn’t Robert Drake?” Burgess blurted. “Not Drake?”
“No; it was Bob, my stepbrother. He got into trouble in Kentucky and
came here to hide, and I was trying to help him; and I’ll miss Robert
—and you’ve spoiled your clothes—and they shot at you!”
“It was poor shooting,” said Burgess critically as the red feather
brushed his nose; “but we’ve got to clear out of this or we’ll be in the
patrol wagon in a minute!”
It was his turn now to take the initiative. His first serious duty was to
become a decent, law-abiding citizen again, and he meant to effect
the transformation as quickly as possible. He began discreetly by
unclasping the girl’s arms.
“Stop crying, Nellie—you did the best you could for Bob; and now
we’ll get out of this and tackle Drake’s case. When that wagon that’s
coming has crossed this bridge we’ll stroll over to Senate Avenue,
where my car’s waiting, and beat it.”

IV
The policemen had been pried out of the ice and the search
continued, though the spirit seemed to have gone out of it. The
scouting party had scattered among the grim factories along the
railway tracks. Bob had presumably been borne out of the zone of
danger and there was nothing more to be done for him.
They waited to make sure they were not watched and then crawled
up the bank into Vevay Street. The rapidly falling snow enfolded
them protectingly. Now that life had grown more tranquil Burgess
became conscious that the scratch above his left ear had not ceased
tingling. It was with real emotion that Webster G. Burgess reflected
that he had escaped death by a hairbreadth. He meant to analyze
that emotion later at his leisure. The grazing of his head by that
bullet marked the high moment of his life; the memory of it would
forever be the chief asset among all his experiences. There was a
wet line down his cheek to his shirt collar that he had supposed to be
perspiration; but his handkerchief now told another story. He turned
up the collar of his buttonless ulster to hide any tell-tale marks of his
sins and knocked his battered cap into shape. Glancing down at
Nellie, he saw that the red feather had not lost its jauntiness, and
she tripped along placidly, as though nothing unusual had happened;
but as they passed opposite the Murdock house, where a lone
policeman patrolled the walk, her hand tightened on his arm and he
heard her saying, as though to herself:
“Goodby, house! Goodby, dad and mother! I’ll never be back any
more.”
Burgess quickly shut the door of the tonneau upon Nellie; he had
cranked the machine and was drawing on the chauffeur’s gauntlets,
which he had found in the driver’s seat, when the druggist ran out
and accosted him.
“Hello, Miller! Seen anything of my chauffeur?”
“I guess he’s out with the police,” the man answered excitedly;
“they’ve been chasing a bunch o’ crooks over there somewhere. Two
or three people have been shot. There was a woman mixed up in the
scrimmage, but she got away.”
“Yes; it was a big fight—a whole gang of toughs! I took a short dash
with the police myself, and fell over a dead man and scratched my
ear. No, thanks; I’ll fix it up later. By-the-way, when my man turns up
you might tell him to come home—if that harmonizes with his own
convenience.” He stepped into the car. “Oh, has the plumber fixed
that drain for you yet? Well, the agent ought to look after such things.
Call me up in a day or two if he doesn’t attend to it.”
It was rather cheering, on the whole, to be in the open again, and he
lingered, relishing his freedom, his immunity from molestation. The
very brick building before which he stood gave him a sense of
security; he was a reputable citizen and property owner—not to be
trifled with by detectives and policemen. A newspaper reporter whom
he knew jumped from a passing street car, recognized him and
asked excitedly where the bodies had been taken.
“They’re stacked up like cordwood,” answered Burgess, “over in the
lumber-yard. Some of the cops went crazy and are swimming in the
canal. Young lady—guest of my wife—and I came over to look after
sick family, and ran into the show. I joined the hunt for a while, but it
wasn’t any good. You’ll find the survivors camped along the canal
bank waiting for reenforcements.”
He lighted a cigarette, jumped in and drove the car toward home for
half a dozen blocks—then lowered the speed so that he could speak
to the girl. He was half sorry the adventure was over; but there yet
remained his obligation to do what he could for Drake—if that person
could be found.
“You must let me go now,” said Nellie earnestly; “the police will wake
up and begin looking for me, and you’ve had trouble enough. And it
was rotten for me to work you to help get Bob off! You’d better have
stayed in the house; but I knew you would help—and I was afraid
Bob would kill somebody. Please let me out right here!”
Her hand was on the latch.
“Oh, never in this world! I have no intention of letting the police take
you—you haven’t done anything but try to help your brother, like the
fine girl you are; and that’s all over. Where’s Drake?”
Her gravity passed instantly and her laugh greeted his ears again.
He was running the car slowly along a curb, his head bent to hear.
“Listen! Robert telephoned just as I was leaving the office. I told him
to keep away from the house. When I saw you in the bank I knew
Bob was here, but I thought he’d be out of the way; but he wouldn’t
go until dark, and I would have telephoned you but I was afraid. I
really meant to tell you at the house that Robert wasn’t there and
wouldn’t be there; but Bob was so ugly I made you go with us,
because I wanted your help. I thought if they nailed us you would pull
Bob through. And now you don’t really mind—do you?” she
concluded tearfully.
“Well, what about Drake? If he’s still——”
She bent closer and he heard her murmurous laugh again.
“I told Robert I’d meet him at the courthouse—by the steps nearest
the police station—at seven o’clock. That’s the safest place I could
think of.”
Burgess nodded and the machine leaped forward.
“We’ve got ten minutes to keep that date, Nellie. But I’m going to be
mighty late for dinner!”

V
As Nellie jumped from the car at the courthouse a young man
stepped out of the shadows instantly. Only a few words passed
between them. Burgess opened the door for them and touched his
hat as he snapped on the electric bulb in the tonneau. Glancing
round when he had started the car, Burgess saw that Drake had
clasped Nellie’s hand; and there was a resolute light in the young
man’s eyes—his face had the convict’s pallor, but he looked sound
and vigorous. On the whole, Robert Drake fulfilled the expectations
roused by Gordon’s letter—he was neatly dressed, and his voice and
manner bespoke the gentleman. One or two questions put by the
banker he answered reassuringly. He had reached the city at five
o’clock and had not been interfered with in any way.
As they rolled down Washington Street a patrol passed them,
moving slowly toward the police station. Burgess fancied there was
dejection in the deliberate course of the wagon homeward, and he
grinned to himself; but when he looked around Nellie’s face was
turned away from the street toward the courthouse clock, to which
she had drawn Drake’s attention as the wagon passed.
“Are you and Nellie going to be married? That’s the first question.”
“Yes, sir; it’s all on the square. There’s a lawyer here who got me out
of a scrape once and he helped me get the license. If you’ll take us
to a minister—that’s all we want.”
“Oh, the minister will be easy!”
“Now,” he said as they reached his home, “come along with me and
do exactly what I tell you. And don’t be scared!”
The evening had been full of surprises, but he meant now to cap the
series of climaxes, that had mounted so rapidly, with another that
should give perfect symmetry to the greatest day of his life. They
entered the house through a basement door and gained the second
floor by the back stairs. Nora, his wife’s maid, came from one of the
rooms and he gave her some orders.
“This is Miss Murdock. She’s just come in from a long journey and I
wish you would help her touch up a bit. Go into Mrs. Burgess’s room
and get anything you need. Miss Murdock has lost her bag, and has
to be off again in half an hour; so fix up a suitcase for her—you’ll
know how. It will be all right with Mrs. Burgess. How far’s the dinner
got? Just had salad? All right. Come with me, Drake.”
In his own dressing room he measured the young man with his eye.
Mindful of Gordon’s injunction that Drake might be picked up by the
police, he went into the guest-room, tumbled over the effects of the
Bishop of Shoshone and threw out a worn sackcoat, a clerical
waistcoat and trousers, and handed them to his guest.
Webster G. Burgess prided himself on being able to dress in ten
minutes; in fifteen on this occasion he not only refreshed himself with
a shower but tended his bruises and fitted a strip of invisible plaster
to the bullet scratch above his ear. His doffed business suit and
ulster he flung into the laundry basket in the bathroom; then he went
into the guest-room to speak to Drake.
“It was bully of you to stand by Nellie in her trouble!” said Drake with
feeling. “I guess you came near getting pinched.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” remarked Burgess, shooting his cuffs with the
air of a gentleman to whom a brush with the police is only part of the
day’s work.
“Nellie told me about it, coming up in the machine. I guess you’re a
good sport, all right.”
Webster G. Burgess was conscious of the ex-convict’s admiration;
he was not only aware that Drake regarded him admiringly but he
found that he was gratified by the approbation of this man who had
cracked safes and served time for it.
“Nellie is a great girl!” said Burgess, to change the subject. “I believe
you mean to be good to her. You’re a mighty lucky boy to have a girl
like that ready to stand by you! Here’s some money Gordon asked
me to give you. And here’s something for Nellie, a check—one
thousand—Saxby will cash it for you at New Orleans. Please tell
your wife tomorrow that it’s my wife’s little wedding gift, in token of
Nellie’s kindness in keeping me out of jail. Now where’s that
marriage license? Good! There’s a bishop in this house who will
marry you; we’ll go down and pull it off in a jiffy. Then you can have a
nibble of supper and we’ll take you to the station. There’s a train for
the South at eight-twenty.”
Nellie was waiting in the hall when they went out. Nora had dressed
her hair, and bestowed upon her a clean collar and a pair of white
gloves. She had exchanged her shabby, wet tan shoes for a new
pair Mrs. Burgess had imported from New York. The mud acquired in
the scramble through the lumber-yard had been carefully scraped
from her skirt. Voices were heard below.
“They’ve just come in from dinner,” said the maid, “Shall I tell Bridget
to keep something for you?”
“Yes—something for three, to be on the table in fifteen minutes.”

Mrs. Webster G. Burgess always maintains that nothing her husband

may do can shock her. When her husband had not appeared at
seven she explained to her guest that he had been detained by an
unexpected meeting of a clearing-house committee, it being no
harder to lie to a bishop than to any one else when a long-suffering
woman is driven to it. She was discussing with the Bishop of
Shoshone the outrageously feeble support of missionaries in the
foreign field when she heard steps on the broad stair that led down
to the ample hall. A second later her husband appeared at the door
with a young woman on his arm—a young woman who wore a hat
with a red feather. This picture had hardly limned itself upon her
acute intelligence before she saw, just behind her husband and the
strange girl, a broad-shouldered young clergyman who bore himself
quite as though accustomed to appearing unannounced in strange
houses.
The banker stepped forward, shook hands with the bishop cordially,
and carried off the introductions breezily.
“Sorry to be late, Gertie; but you know how it is!” Whereas, as a
matter of fact, Mrs. Burgess did not know at all how it was. “Bishop,
these young people wish to be married. Their time is short, as they
have a train to make. Just how they came to be here is a long story,
and it will have to wait. If you see anything familiar in Mr. Drake’s
clothes please don’t be distressed, I’ve always intended doing
something for your new cathedral, and you shall have a check and
the price of a new suit early in the morning. And, Gertie”—he looked
at his watch—“if you will find a prayerbook we can proceed to
business.”
Mrs. Burgess always marveled at her husband’s plausibility, and now
she had fresh proof of it. She blinked as he addressed the girl as
Nellie; but this was just like Web Burgess!
The Bishop of Shoshone, having married cowboys and Indians in all
manner of circumstances in his rough diocese, calmly began the
service.
At the supper table they were all very merry except Nellie, whose
face, carefully watched by Mrs. Burgess, grew grave at times—and
once her eyes filled with tears; her young bridegroom spoke hardly
at all. Burgess and the bishop, however, talked cheerfully of old
times together, and they rose finally amid the laughter evoked by one
of the bishop’s stories. Burgess said he thought it would be nice if
they all went to the station to give the young people a good sendoff
for their long journey; and afterward they could look in at a concert,
for which he had tickets, and hear Sembrich sing.
“After a busy day,” he remarked, meeting Nellie’s eyes at one of her
tearful moments, “there’s nothing like a little music to quiet the
nerves—and this has been the greatest day of my life!”

VI
The president of the White River National Bank was late in reaching
his desk the next morning. When he crossed the lobby he limped
slightly; and his secretary, in placing the mail before him, noticed a
strip of plaster above his left ear. His “Good morning!” was very
cheery and he plunged into work with his usual energy.
He had dictated a telegram confirming a bond deal that would net
him fifty thousand dollars, when his name was spoken by a familiar
voice. Swinging round to the railing with calculated deliberation he
addressed his visitor in the casual tone established by their intimacy:
“Hello, Hill—looking for me?”
“Nope; not yet!”
Both men grinned as their eyes met.
“Has the charming Miss Murdock been in this morning?” asked the
detective, glancing toward the tellers’ cages.
“Haven’t seen her yet. Hope you’re not infatuated with the girl.”
“Only in what you might call an artistic sense; I think we agreed
yesterday that she’s rather pleasing to the jaded eyesight. See the
papers?”
“What’s in the papers?” asked the banker, feeling absently for a
report a clerk had laid on his desk.
“Oh, a nice little muss out on Vevay Street last night! The cops made
a mess of it of course. Old Murdock’s son Bob shot a constable in
Kentucky and broke for the home plate to get some money, and I’d
had a wire to look out for him when I was in here yesterday. He
handled some very clever phony money in this district a while back. I
went out to Vevay Street to take a look at him—and found the police
had beat me to it! The cash Nellie drew yesterday was for him.”
“Of course you got him!”
“No,” said Hill; “he made a getaway, all right. It was rather funny
though——”
“How funny?”
“The chase he gave us. You don’t mean you haven’t heard about it!”
Burgess clasped his hands behind his head and yawned.
“I’ve told you repeatedly, Hill, that I don’t read criminal news. It would
spoil the fun of hearing you explain your own failures.”
“Well, I won’t bore you with this. I only want you to understand that it
was the police who made a fluke of it. But I can’t deny those
Murdocks do interest me a good deal.”
He bent his keen eyes upon the banker for a second and grinned.
Burgess returned the grin.
“I’ve got to speak before the Civic League on our municipal
government tomorrow night, and I’ll throw something about the
general incompetence of our police force—it’s undoubtedly rotten!”
The detective lingered.
“By-the-way, I nearly overlooked this. Seems to be a silver card-
case, with your name neatly engraved on the little tickets inside. I
picked it up on the ice last night when I was skating on the canal. I’m
going to keep one of the cards as a souvenir.”
“Perfectly welcome, Tom. You’d better try one of these cigars.”
Hill chose a cigar with care from the extended box and lighted it.
Burgess swung round to his desk, turned over some letters, and then
looked up as though surprised to find the detective still there.
“Looking for me, Tom?”
“No; not yet!”
 THE CAMPBELLS ARE COMING
I
It is not to be counted against Mrs. Robert Fleming Ward that at
forty-five she had begun to look backward a little wistfully and
forward a little disconsolately and apprehensively. She was a good
woman, indeed one of the best of women, loyal, conscientious and
self-sacrificing in the highest degree. But she was poignantly aware
that certain ambitions dear to her heart had not been realized.
Robert Fleming Ward had not attained that high place at the
Sycamore County bar which had been his goal, and he seemed
unable to pull himself to the level with Canby Taylor and Addison
Swiggert who practiced in federal jurisdictions and were not
unknown to the docket of the United States Supreme Court.
Even as Mrs. Ward was a good woman, so her husband Robert was
a good man and a good lawyer. But just being good wasn’t getting
the Wards anywhere. At least it wasn’t landing them within the
golden portals of their early dreams. To find yourself marking time
professionally and socially in a town of seventy-five thousand souls,
that you’ve seen grow from twenty-five thousand, is a disagreeable
experience if you are a sensitive person. And Mrs. Ward was
sensitive. It grieved her to witness the prosperity flaunted by people
like the Picketts, the Shepherds, the Kirbys and others comparatively
new to the community, who had impudently availed themselves of
Sycamore County’s clay to make brick, and of its water power to turn
the wheels of industries for which the old-time Kernville pioneer
stock had gloomily predicted failure.
The Picketts, the Shepherds, the Kirbys and the rest of the new
element had builded themselves houses that were much more
comfortable and pleasing to the eye than the houses of the children
and grandchildren of the old families that had founded Kernville
away back when Madison was president. The heads of the
respective brick, box, match, bottle, canning, and strawboard
industries might be deficient in culture but they did employ good
architects. The Wards lived in a house of the Queen Anne period,
which it had been necessary to mortgage to send John Marshall
through college and give Helen a year at a Connecticut finishing
school. The Wards’ home had deteriorated to the point of dinginess,
and the dinginess, and the inability to keep a car, or to return social
favors, or belong to the new country club weighed heavily upon Mrs.
Ward.
Her husband, with all his industry and the fine talents she knew him
to possess, was making no more money at forty-seven than he had
made at thirty-five. She was a little bewildered to find that socially
she had gradually lost contact with the old aristocracy without
catching step with the flourishing makers of brick and other articles
of commerce that were carrying the fame of Kernville into new
territory. And as Mrs. Ward was possessed of a pardonable pride,
this situation troubled her greatly. They had been unable to send
John to the Harvard Law School, but he had made a fine record in
the school of the state university, and his name now appeared
beneath his father’s on the door of the law office on the second floor
of the old Wheatley block, which had been pretty well deserted by
tenants now that Kernville boasted a modern ten-story office
building.
John Ward was a healthy, sanguine young fellow who had every
intention of getting on. Some of the friends he had made in law
school threw him some business, and it was remarked about the
courthouse that John had more punch than his father, and was
bound to succeed. Half way through the trial of a damage suit in
which the firm of Ward & Ward represented a plaintiff who had been
run down by an inter-urban car, the senior Ward was laid up with
tonsilitis, and John carried the case through and won a verdict for
twice what the plaintiff had been led to believe he could possibly get.
Helen Ward was quite as admirable and interesting as her brother.
The finishing school had done her no harm and she returned to
Kernville without airs, assumptions or affectations, understanding
perfectly that her parents had done the best they could for her. She
was nineteen, tall and straight, fair, with an abundance of brown hair
and blue-gray mirthful eyes. The growing inability of her mother to
maintain a maid-of-all work, now that Kernville’s eligibles for
domestic service preferred the eight-hour day of the factories to
house work, did not trouble Helen particularly. She could cook, wash,
iron, cut out a dress and sew it together and if the furniture was
wobbly and the upholstery faded she was an artist with the glue-pot
and her linen covers on the chairs gave the parlor a fresh smart look.
The humor that was denied their parents was Helen’s and John’s
portion in large measure. They were of the Twentieth Century, spoke
its language and knew all its signs and symbols. They were proud of
each other, shared their pleasures and consoled each other in their
disappointments, and resolutely determined to make the best of a
world that wasn’t such a bad place after all.
John reached home from the office on a day early in January and
found Helen preparing supper.
“Great scott, sis; has that last girl faded already!”
“Skipped, vamoosed, vanished!” Helen answered, looking up from
the gas range on which she was broiling a steak. “The offer of a
dollar more a week transferred her to the Kirby’s, where she’ll have
nothing to do but cook. The joke’s on them. She’s the worst living
cook, and not even a success in hiding her failures.”
“I hope,” said John, helping himself to a stalk of celery and biting it
meditatively, “I hope the Kirbys suffer the most frightful tortures
before they die of indigestion. Haven’t invited us to the party they’re
giving, have they?”
“Not unless our invitations got lost in the mails. And I hear it’s going
to be a snappy function with the refreshments and a jazz band
imported from Chicago.”
“Look here, sis, that’s rubbing it in pretty hard! I don’t care for myself,
but it’s nasty of ’em to cut you. But in a way it’s an act of reprisal.
Mother didn’t ask Mrs. Kirby and Jeannette to the tea she threw for
that national federation swell just before Christmas. But even at that
——”
“Oh, don’t be so analytical! We’re an old family and mama refuses to
see any merit in people whose grandparents didn’t settle here before
the Indians left. And as we haven’t the money to train with the
ancient aristocracy, we’ve got to huddle on the sidelines. Pardon me,
dear, but that’s a pound of butter you’re about to sit on! You might cut
a slice and place it neatly on yonder plate.”
“Snobbery!” said John, as he cut the butter with exaggerated
deliberation;—“snobbery is a malady, a disease. You can’t kill it;
you’ve got to feed it its own kind of pabulum. It’s as plain as daylight
that we’ve got to do something to get out of the hole or we’re stuck
for good.”
“We might bore for oil in the back yard,” said Helen, scrutinizing the
steak. “If we struck a gusher we could break into the country club
and buy a large purple limousine like the Kirbys.”
“My professional engagements don’t exhaust my brain power at
present, and I’m giving considerable thought to ways and means of
improving our state, condition or status as a family of exalted but
unrecognized merit.”
“You’re doing nobly, John! Tom Reynolds told me they were talking of
running you for prosecuting attorney. That would give you a grand
boost. And there’s Alice Hovey,—I understand all about that, John. I
think you’re mistaken about the Hoveys not liking you.”
“Ah, Alice!” he exclaimed mockingly. “Papa and mama Hovey have
quite other ideas for Alice; no penniless barrister need apply! But I
won’t deny to you that I’m pretty keen about Alice, only when I go to
the house the fond parents create a low temperature that is distinctly
chilly. Listen to me, Helen,” he went on with an abrupt change of
tone. “You and Ned Shepherd were hitting it off grandly when
something happened. He’s a fine chap and I rather got the idea that
you two would make a match of it.”
“Oh no!” she protested, quickly but unconvincingly as she transferred
the steak to the platter.
“His family’s trying to switch him to Sally Pickett. He hasn’t been
here lately, but you do see him occasionally?”
There were tears in her eyes as she swung round from the range.
“I’ve got to stop that, John! I’m ashamed of myself for meeting him
as I’ve been doing—walking with him in the back streets and letting
him talk to me over the telephone when mama isn’t round. I didn’t
know——”
“Well, I just happened to spot you Monday evening, and I meant to
speak to you about it. Not exactly nice, sis. I’m sorry about the whole
business. Ned’s really a manly chap, and I don’t believe he’ll be
bullied into giving you up.”
“All over now, John,” she answered with badly-feigned indifference.
“Well, the course of true love never did run smooth. Father and
mother have done their almighty best for us, but changes have come
so fast in this burg they haven’t been able to keep up with the
procession. Father misses chances now and then, as in refusing the
Pickett case when the State went after him for polluting the river with
refuse from his strawboard mill. Dad thought the prosecution was
justified and foolishly volunteered to assist the State as a public duty.
Pickett lost and had to spend a lot of money changing his plant; so
he’s knocked us whenever he got a chance.”
“That’s just like papa. I only wish we could do something really
splendid for him and mama.”
“We’re going to, sis,” said John confidently. “Take it from me we’re
going to do that identical thing. Now give me the potatoes and the
coffee-pot. Precede me with the bread and butter. There’s mother at
the front door now. Step high as to the strains of a march of triumph.
We’ll give a fine exhibition of a happy family, one for all and all for
one!”

II
Mrs. Ward, detained by a club committee meeting, began to
apologize for not getting home in time to assist with the supper.
“Oh, John did all the heavy work! And we had a fine talk into the
bargain,” Helen replied cheerfully.
As her father was tired and didn’t know the latest domestic had
departed hence, she went on with an ironic description of the frailties
and incapacity of that person and pictured the gloom of the Kirbys as
they ate her initial meal. Mrs. Ward had brought the afternoon mail to
the table. She was the corresponding secretary of a state federation
which used the mails freely. She ate in silence, absorbed in her
letters, while her husband praised Helen’s cooking.
Ward found a real joy in his children. It was not lost upon him that
they were making the best of circumstances for which in a somewhat
bewildered fashion he felt himself responsible. Their very kindness,
their disposition to make the best of things, hurt him and deepened
his growing sense of defeat. John began talking of a case they were
to try shortly. He had found some decisions that supported the
contention of their client. They were explaining it to Helen, who
teased them by perversely taking the opposite view, when they were
silenced by an exclamation from Mrs. Ward.
“Here’s news indeed! This is a note from Mrs. Campbell, the Ruth
Sanders who was my best friend at school,—Mrs. Walter Scott
Campbell,” she added impressively, looking round at them over her
glasses. “It’s short; I’ll just read it:
“Dearest Iphigenia:—
(“You know the girls at Miss Woodburn’s school always
called me Iphigenia—due to a stupid answer I once gave
in the literature class.)
“It’s so sweet of you to remember me year after year with
a Christmas card. The very thought of you always brings
up all the jolly times we had at Miss Woodburn’s. We
parted with a promise to meet every year; and I have
never set eyes on you since we sat side by side at the
closing exercises! The class letter doesn’t come around
 any more, but your children must be grown up. Mine are
very much so and getting married and leaving Walter and
me quite forlorn.
(“Her daughter Angela married into that Thornton family of
Rhode Island—or maybe it was the Connecticut branch—
who are so terribly rich; made it in copper; no, I believe it
was rubber.)
“Don’t be startled, but Mr. Campbell and I are planning to
go to California next month, and as we have to pass right
across your state, it seems absurd not to stop and see
you. I’ve looked up the timetables and we can easily leave
the Limited at Cleveland and run down to Kernville. Now
don’t go to any trouble for us, but treat us just as old
friends and if it isn’t convenient to stay with you for a night
—we just must have a night to gossip about the old days
—we can put up at the hotel. We shan’t leave here until
February 17, but wishing to acknowledge your card—I
never can remember to send Christmas cards—I thought
I’d give you fair warning of our approach. Always, dear
Iphigenia, your affectionate,
Ruth.”
“That’s a charming letter!” Helen volunteered, as her mother’s gaze
invited approval of Mrs. Campbell’s graciousness in promising a visit.
“She must be lovely!”
“Ruth was the dearest of all my girlhood friends! When she had
typhoid and her family were in Europe I was able to do little things for
her;—nothing really of importance—but she has never forgotten. She
was so appreciative and generous and always wanted her friends to
share her good times!”
All their lives John and Helen had heard their mother sing the
praises of Mrs. Walter Scott Campbell, née Sanders, until that lady
had assumed something of the splendor of a mythical figure in their
imaginations. She had been the richest girl in the Hudson River
school Mrs. Ward had attended, and she had married wealth. The
particular Campbell of her choice had inherited a fortune which he
had vastly augmented. When occasionally a New York newspaper
drifted into the house Mrs. Ward scanned the financial
advertisements for the name of Walter Scott Campbell set out in bold
type as the director of the most august institutions.
“I suppose——” Mrs. Ward’s tone expressed awe in all its
connotations;—“I suppose Mr. Campbell is worth fifty million at the
lowest calculation. I met him years ago at one of the school dances.
He was quite wild about Ruth then, and they were married, John, just
a year before we were. I still have the invitation, and Ruth sent me a
piece of the wedding cake. And from the photograph she sent me at
Christmas two years ago, I judge that time has dealt lightly with her.”
“Campbell’s one of the most important men in Wall Street,” Ward
assented. “One of his institutions, The Sutphen Loan & Trust,
financed the Kernville Water Power Company, a small item of course
for so big a concern. Campbell probably never heard of it.”
“Well, men of his calibre usually know where the dollars go,” said
John, whose wits were functioning rapidly.
“Of course we simply can’t let them go to the hotel,” continued Mrs.
Ward; “the Kipperly House is a disgrace. And if Ruth hasn’t changed
a lot in twenty-six years she’ll accept us as she finds us. Our guest-
room needs redecorating, and we can hardly keep the jackets on the
parlor furniture right in the middle of winter; and the bathroom
fixtures ought to be replaced——”
She paused, seeing the look of dejection on her husband’s face. He
was well aware that all these things were old needs which the
coming of important guests now made imperative. Mrs. Ward
carefully thrust the note back into its envelope. John exchanged
telegraphic glances with Helen. His eyes brightened with the stress
of his thoughts but he buttered a bit of bread before he spoke.
“Well, mother,” he began briskly, “I’m sure we’re all tickled that your
old friend’s coming. I can just see you sitting up all night talking of
the midnight spreads you had, and how you fooled the teachers.
Now don’t worry about the house—you or father, either; I’m going to
manage that.”
“But, John, we mustn’t add to your father’s worries. I realize perfectly
that we’re in debt and can’t spend money we haven’t got. Ruth was
always a dear—so considerate of every one—and we’ll hope it’s me
and my family and not the house she’s coming to see.”
“That’s all right, mother, but this strikes me as something more than
a casual visit. I see in it the hand of Providence!” he cried eagerly.
“If they carry a maid and valet as part of their scenery we’re lost—
hopelessly lost!” Helen suggested.
“Oh, not necessarily!” John replied. “We’ll stow ’em away
somewhere. In a pinch, you and I can move to the attic. Anyhow,
we’ve got a month to work in. When we begin to get publicity for the
coming of the rich and distinguished Campbells, I miss my guess if
things don’t begin to look a lot easier.”
“But, John,” his mother began, shaking her head with disapproval,
“you wouldn’t do anything that would look—vulgar?”
“Certainly not, but the Sunday Journal’s always keen for news of
impending visitors in our midst, and no people of the Campbells’
social and financial standing have ever honored our city with their
presence. The president of the Transcontinental did park his private
car in the yards last summer, but before the Chamber of Commerce
could tackle him about building a new freight house he faded away.”
“Walter Scott Campbell is a director in the Transcontinental,”
remarked Mrs. Ward. “I happened to see his name in the list when I
looked up the name of the company’s secretary to send on the
resolutions of the Women’s Municipal Union complaining of the vile
condition of the depot.”
“Such matters are never passed on in the New York offices,” Ward
suggested mildly. “Our business organizations have worked on the
General Manager for years without getting anywhere.”
“Just a word, from a man of Mr. Campbell’s power will be enough,”
replied John spaciously. “For another thing the train schedule ought
to be changed to give us a local sleeper to Chicago. We’ll stir up the
whole service of the Transcontinental when we get Walter here!”
“Walter!” exclaimed Mrs. Ward, aghast at this familiarity.
“Better call him Walt, John, to make him feel at home,” suggested
Helen.
“The directors of the Water Power Company want to refund their
bonds. I suppose Mr. Campbell could help about that,” Ward
remarked, interested in spite of himself in the potentialities of the
impending visit.
“But it would be a betrayal of hospitality,” Mrs. Ward protested, “and
we mustn’t do anything to spoil their visit.”
“Oh, that visit’s going to be a great thing for Kernville! It grows on me
the more I think of it,” said John loftily. “It’s our big chance to do
something for the town. And the Campbells can’t object. They will
pass on, never knowing the vast benefits they have conferred upon
mankind.”
“Your imagination’s running away with you, John,” said his father.
“With only one day here to renew their acquaintance with your
mother they’ll hardly care to be dragged through the factories and
over the railway yards.”
“While mother and Helen are entertaining Mrs. Campbell, we’ll
borrow the largest car in town and show Walter the sights. And it will
be up to us to prove to him that Kernville’s the best little town of the
seventy-five thousand class in the whole rich valley of the
Mississippi. All Walter will have to do will be to send a few wires in a
casual manner to the right parties and everything the town needs will
be forthcoming.”
“But why should we worry about the town when it isn’t worrying
particularly about us?” asked Helen as she began to clear the table.
“I don’t quite follow you either,” said his mother. “You can’t, you really
mustn’t——”
“Such matters are for the male of the species to grapple with. You
and Helen arrange a tea or dinner or whatever you please, making