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 Laurence Tribe: Justice Breyer and the Court

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Orville Schell: Ai Weiwei’s Provocations
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Contents
4 Orville Schell 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei, translated from the Chinese

9
11
Brenda Wineapple
Colm Tóibín
by Allan H. Barr
The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross
Parallel Mothers a film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar
AMBER
13 Sophie Pinkham Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film by Yuri Tynianov,
translated from the Russian and edited by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko,
with an introduction by Daria Khitrova
WAVES
Küchlya: Decembrist Poet by Yuri Tynianov, translated from the Russian
by Anna Kurkina Rush, Peter France, and Christopher Rush
and three other books by Yuri Tynianov
16 Susan Tallman Sibyl and Cyril: Cutting Through Time by Jenny Uglow
Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939 an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City
Catalog of the exhibition by Jennifer Farrell
18 Pamela Mordecai Poem
19 Paul Krugman Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze
Geopolitics for the End Time: From the Pandemic to the Climate Crisis by Bruno Maçães
21 Phyllis Rose Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West with an introduction by Alison Bechdel
25 Nick Laird Whatever You Say, Say Nothing by Gilles Peress, with texts by Chris Klatell
29 Francine Prose The Strudlhof Steps, or, Melzer and the Depth of the Years by Heimito von Doderer,
translated from the German by Vincent Kling
31 David A. Bell The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones
34 Martha C. Nussbaum Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves by Frans de Waal
Dolphin Communication and Cognition: Past, Present, and Future S C O T T R E Y N OL D S NE L S O N
edited by Denise L. Herzing and Christine M. Johnson
Deep Thinkers: Inside the Minds of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises edited by Janet Mann
Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
by Carl Safina OCEANS
The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell
37 Emmanuel Iduma At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis
White War, Black Soldiers: Two African Accounts of World War I by Bakary Diallo
OF GR AIN
and Lamine Senghor, translated from the French by Nancy Erber and William Peniston,
edited and with an introduction and annotations by George Robb
How American Wheat
38 Frederick Seidel Poem Remade the World
39 Laurence H. Tribe The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics by Stephen Breyer
Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett,
and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court by Linda Greenhouse
“After reading this
42 Letters from Eva Illouz, Anahid Nersessian, and Hillary Miller
fast-paced book, the wars,
CONTRIBUTORS
DAVID A. BELL is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the FRANCINE PROSE is Distinguished Writer in Residence at revolutions, and empires
History Department at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horse- Bard. Her latest novel, The Vixen, was published last June.
back: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. PHYLLIS ROSE’s books include Woman of Letters: The Life of the nineteenth century
EMMANUEL IDUMA is the author of A Stranger’s Pose. His of Virginia Woolf, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time,
memoir about the Nigerian Civil War, I Am Still With You, will be and Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. She is a Professor of will never seem the same.”
published next year. English Emerita at Wesleyan.
ORVILLE SCHELL is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on
— S V E N BE C K E R T,
PAUL KRUGMAN is a columnist for The New York Times and
Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of US–China Relations at the Asia Society and a former Dean of the author of Empire of Cotton
the City University of New York. He was awarded the Nobel Memo- Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He is a coauthor,
rial Prize in Economics in 2008. with John Delury, of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the
Twenty-First Century. His most recent book is a novel, My Old Home.
NICK LAIRD is a poet and novelist who teaches at NYU and FREDERICK SEIDEL’s Selected Poems was published in 2020.
Queen’s University, Belfast, where he is the Seamus Heaney Pro- “Oceans of Grain is a book of
fessor of Poetry. A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry SUSAN TALLMAN’s book with Niels Borch Jensen, No Plan At
into Bloody Sunday. All, was published in October. astounding reach and depth,
COLM TÓIBÍN is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of
PAMELA MORDECAI , a Jamaican-Canadian writer, is the au- the Humanities at Columbia. Vinegar Hill, a poetry collection, will wholly original, gripping to
thor of twenty books of poetry, fiction, and drama. A Fierce Green be published in April.
Place: New and Selected Poems will be published in May. read, and destined to
LAURENCE H. TRIBE is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor
MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Emeritus and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Har-
Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, vard. His books include American Constitutional Law, The Invis- become an instant classic.”
with appointments in the Law School and the Philosophy Depart- ible Constitution, and Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the
ment. Her new book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsi- Constitution, cowritten with Joshua Matz. —J A M E S C . S C O T T,
bility, will be published in December.
BRENDA WINEAPPLE’s books include Hawthorne: A Life, author of Against the Grain
SOPHIE PINKHAM is the author of Black Square: Adventures White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas
in Post-Soviet Ukraine. She is working on a cultural history of the Went worth Higginson, and, most recently, The Impeachers: The
Russian forest. Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.

Editor: Emily Greenhouse Publisher: Rea S. Hederman

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Columbia University
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On the cover: Kristina Tzekova, Sea dance, 2016. The illustrations on pages 9 and 10 are by Leanne Shapton.
The New York Review of Books (ISSN 0028-7504), published 20 times a year, monthly in January, July, August, and September; semi-monthly in February, March, April,
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3
 The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei
A shelf in Ai Weiwei’s Beijing studio, with studies for artworks and a photo of him smashing a ceramic table with a hammer, February 2012. Additional photographs
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
by Ai Weiwei, translated from
the Chinese by Allan H. Barr.
Crown, 380 pp., $32.00
As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sor-
rows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the
chronicle of modern China for which I’d
been waiting since I first began studying
this elusive country six decades ago.
What makes this memoir so absorb-
ing is that it traces China’s tumultu-
ous recent history through the eyes of
its most renowned twentieth- century
poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei,
now equally renowned in the global
art world. It guides us from Chiang
Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s,
through Mao Zedong’s revolution in
the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the “re-
form era” of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s
and Xi Jinping’s current Leninist res-
toration, explaining how, as Ai Weiwei
writes, “the whirlpool that swallowed up
my father upended my life too, leaving a
mark on me that I carry to this day.”
After studying in Paris, Ai Qing re-
turned home in 1932. However, before
the decade was out, he’d begun to have
one malefaction after another inflicted
on him by Chiang’s and then by Mao’s
regime. First, his strong views on the
importance of intellectual and artistic
independence got him accused by the
Nationalists of “damaging the republic”
and sentenced to six years in prison. In
1938, during the Japanese occupation,
he’d written in On Poetry (时轮):
Poetry today ought to be a bold
experiment in the democratic
spirit, and the future of poetry
is inseparable from the future of
democratic politics. A constitution
matters even more to poets than
to others, because only when the
right to expression is guaranteed
can one give voice to the hopes of
people at large. . . . To suppress the
4 The New York Review
Orville Schell
by Clifford Ross appear in the online version of this article at nybooks.com.
voices of the people is the cruelest
form of violence.
When he was released from jail in
1941, he fled to Yan’an, Mao’s Commu-
nist redoubt in China’s desolate north-
west. But this so-called “liberated area”
hardly proved the “paradise of equality,
freedom, and democracy” for which he’d
hoped, and soon his free-spirited ideal-
ism put him at cross-purposes with Mao
as well. Ai Weiwei recounts how his fa-
ther naively argued with Mao that liter-
ature and art cannot be “a gramophone
or a loudspeaker for politics” but must
instead find “expression in their truth-
fulness.” Unfortunately he had no way of
knowing that Mao was just then readying
a major political “rectification campaign
(整风运动)” against “incorrect thought
(错误思想)” that would make self-
expression among Communist intelli-
gentsia as taboo in the arts as in politics.
In fact, Mao’s 1942 treatise, The
Yan’an Forums on Literature and Art,
which formed the basis for this move-
ment, has guided the party’s quest for
ideological unity ever since its publica-
tion. Under its shadow, writes Ai Wei-
wei, “everyone sank into an ideological
swamp of ‘criticism’ and ‘self- criticism’”
in which the bourgeois tendencies of
his father’s art marked him indelibly as
being politically unreliable.
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, just as a
high tide of Maoist political campaigns
was upending every aspect of Chi-
nese life. When the previous year Mao
launched the Hundred Flowers Cam-
paign encouraging intellectuals to speak
out, Ai Qing did exactly that. But when
Mao halted the campaign as suddenly
as he’d started it and launched the Anti-
Rightist Campaign pillorying the very
critics he’d just emboldened, Ai Qing
paid grievously for his frankness. After
being dubbed a “counter-revolutionary
bourgeois rightist” and “an enemy of so-
cialism,” he was dismissed from all his
positions and expelled from the party,
so that even old friends began avoid-
ing him. Then, like half a million other
intellectuals, he was “sent down (错误
思想)” to the Great Northern Wilder-
ness (北大荒) along the Russian border
to a “reform through labor (劳动改造
队被)” brigade that was part of Mao’s
sprawling version of Stalin’s Gulag. Ai
Weiwei, then only two, accompanied
him, while the rest of the family came
later. He would spend the next two de-
cades with his father, in effect a juve-
nile political prisoner in internal exile.
After Mao launched the Great Leap
Forward in 1959 to reorganize rural
China into “people’s communes (人
民公社)” and precipitated one of the
worst famines in Chinese history, the
Ai family was moved for further “re-
molding” to a still more godforsaken
place of exile: Xinjiang, China’s west-
ernmost desert province. There they
were remanded into the hands of the
Xinjiang Military District Produc-
tion and Construction Corps (新疆生
产建设兵团), the same paramilitary
apparat that is today building “reedu-
cation camps” for Muslim Uighurs. In
this “Little Siberia” they were assigned
to the wretched settlement of Shihezi,
which was filled “with other political
outcasts whose only solace was forget-
ting.” But even here Ai Qing tried to
continue writing poetry. However, be-
cause he’d been branded a “rightist”
and no editor dared publish his work, he
began working on a fictionalized version
of the family’s life in Xinjiang instead.
No sooner was Ai Qing’s “right-
ist” label removed in 1961 than Mao
began to foment more mass movements
against a so- called “bourgeois resto-
ration.” As a free-spirited poet Ai Qing
was exactly the kind of “bourgeois el-
ement” Mao now wanted to extirpate.
“The world could not be put to order,”
Clifford Ross
writes his son, “without first being
thrown into chaos.” For as Mao had
proclaimed, “Without destruction there
can be no construction (不破不立).”
As China careened toward the Cul-
tural Revolution, Ai Qing found him-
self under renewed attack. Red Guards
put banners outside their shack that
read, “Expose Ai Qing’s True Counter-
Revolutionary Colors!” Then the sons
and daughters of many other exiled
“literary types” who’d once been reg-
ular guests in the Ai home began ran-
sacking their house.
“Now that the political storm had ar-
rived, they were first to trim their sails
to the wind, betraying and slandering
people around them, in the hope of
enhancing their own position,” writes
Ai Weiwei. Things became so desper-
ate that Ai Qing was driven to burn his
remaining books, papers, photos, and
letters. The loss of his father’s most
precious things would, his son recalls,
“forever impoverish my imaginings of
family and society.” “At the moment
they turned to ash,” he remembers,
a strange force took hold of me.
From then on, that force would
gradually extend its command of
my body and mind, until it matured
into a form that even the strongest
enemy would find intimidating. It
was a commitment to reason, to
a sense of beauty—these things
are unbending, uncompromising,
and any effort to suppress them is
bound to provoke resistance.
As the Cultural Revolution reached
its apogee in 1967, Ai Qing was being
paraded through the streets of their
labor camp in a dunce cap and mocked
at “denunciation meetings (批斗大会).”
And to remind the Ai family that po-
litically speaking they belonged to the
lowest of the low, they were forced
again to move, this time into a primitive
 Princeton University Press supports #BreakTheBias
International Women’s Day 2022

March 10, 2022 5

“underground dugout (地窝子)” on the
edge of the desert.
It was not until 1975 that Ai Qing was
finally allowed to return to Beijing, and
then only for medical treatment. But
he was by then a broken man. Ai
Weiwei soon followed. “One of my
father’s eyes was blind and the other
was nearly clamped shut in reaction to
the bitter cold,” he writes of walking
through Tiananmen Square with him
one winter day.
He was an old man, with no fixed
home and no apparent prospects
for improvements in his life. He
stood alone under a gray sky gaz-
ing around in grief and loss. The
atmosphere in the square was
heavy with sadness. . . .
I was now nineteen, and though
my ideas were often fuzzy, on one
point I was clear: nobody could
possibly look forward to a change
more than I did. Anything would
be better than the current state of
affairs. . . . The entire society was
stifled, depressed.
In 1978 the party decided to officially
“rehabilitate (平反)” many “Anti-
Rightists,” Ai Qing among them. After
all, as Deng Xiaoping began opening
China up, more and more foreigners
were arriving in Beijing and asking after
its most celebrated twentieth- century
poet. So the party leadership not only
restored Ai Qing to his former positions,
it even gave him a proper house. The ab-
surdity of first seeking to destroy him for
decades only to later “rehabilitate” him
without explanation was not addressed.
Ai Weiwei wryly observes, “Never forget
that under a totalitarian system cruelty
and absurdity go hand in hand.”
As Ai Qing began trying to write
poetry and essays again, his nineteen-
year- old son was looking for a path of
his own. In Beijing he’d begun draw-
ing and painting, because “it offered
the prospect of self-redemption and a
path toward detachment and escape.”
And he soon started to think of be-
coming an artist. Then he was ad-
mitted to the newly reopened Beijing
Film Academy. However, he’d been so
deeply affected by his experience in
the camps that he never felt comfort-
able in this elite school. “I did not fit in
with the new post-Mao order any more
than I had fit in with the Maoist order
that had shaped—or deformed—my
childhood,” he writes. He found the
“spinelessness and hypocrisy of Beijing
society repellent.”
So, as his father was feeling more ful-
filled after his rehabilitation, Ai Weiwei
was “moving in a different direction
and becoming more disenchanted.” He
says he was feeling “untamed blood
flowing through my veins: it came from
the endless desert, from the white salt
plains, from the pitch-black dugout and
the helplessness of those long, humili-
ating years.”
In 1979 the fifteen-year prison sen-
tence given to the Democracy Wall
activist Wei Jingsheng deepened Ai
Weiwei’s “understanding of the cynical
and brutal nature of the Chinese state,
and the Communist Party’s fundamen-
tal opposition to freedom of expres-
sion.” Of Deng’s reforms, Ai Weiwei
remarked to one interviewer, “I could
see so many luxury cars, but there was
no justice or fairness in this society.”
Desperate for a different environ-
6 The New York Review
ment, Ai Weiwei decided to seek per-
mission for “self-funded study” abroad.
Only after he overcame endless obsta-
cles—including a course in mandatory
“patriotic education” and a “training in
keeping secrets”—did the Chinese gov-
ernment grant him permission to leave.
“I wasn’t going to America because I
hankered for a Western lifestyle,” he
remembers. “It was more that I couldn’t
stand living in Beijing anymore.”
In 1981 he left for the US. In New
York he did sidewalk art in Greenwich
Village for handouts, befriended Allen
Ginsberg (who admired his father’s po-
etry), enjoyed what he describes as “a
boundless expanse of aimless and un-
structured life,” and learned from Andy
Warhol’s example how to arm himself
with a camera as a way to document
the moment, the political protests, the
police violence, and the counterculture
around him to bear witness to injustice.
In 1989, after watching the events in
Tiananmen Square unfold on CNN, he
marched and staged a hunger strike in
front of the UN. But he also soon be-
came “increasingly weary” of his sit-
uation in New York. “Freedom with
no restraints and no concerns had lost
its novelty,” he writes. “People said I
would be the last person to go back to
China, and I thought the same. But we
were all wrong.” Although he claims to
have had “no illusions about my native
land,” he finally could not completely
escape its pull. Besides, things seemed
to be changing in China, and he wanted
to see his aging father again.
So in 1993, after twelve years abroad,
he returned home and immediately
fell under the tutelage of his younger
brother, Ai Dan, who introduced him
to the outdoor antiques markets that
had sprung up around Beijing. Soon
he was collecting miscellaneous tradi-
tional artifacts. “We were still living
in a culturally impoverished era,” he
writes, “but art had not abandoned
us—its roots were deeply planted in
the weathered soil.” They were also
planted within Ai Weiwei. After hav-
ing first been excluded and then absent-
ing himself from his own society for so
many years, collecting things from Chi-
na’s past was a way for him to reattach
himself. But it was an ambivalent re-
connection, as he graphically illus-
trated in the triptych he shot of himself
willfully dropping and shattering a
Han Dynasty (202 BCE –220 CE) clay
pot. Then he painted a Coca- Cola logo
on another pot, stunts that many saw
as cultural desecrations. “These little
acts of mischief,” he writes, “marked a
starting point in my reengagement with
the making of art.”
Such provocative artworks were at-
tracting more and more official atten-
tion. As Ai Weiwei tried to reintegrate
himself into Chinese life, he was also
concluding that whereas the party was
all about convincing people to toe its
“correct line (正确路线),” his conception
of an artist was about becoming a per-
son who would “make no effort to please
other people.” Art should be “a nail in
the eye” that “destabilizes what seems
settled and secure.” He’d become even
less ready to fit into the existing scheme
of things than before. “No matter how
strong a power,” he writes, “it can never
suppress individuality, stifle freedom, or
avert contempt for its ignorance.”
Despite his aversion to Tiananmen
Square, he found himself going there
“again and again, as though drawn by
some irresistible force.” If it was the
symbolic center of China, it also evoked
such “a mixture of helplessness and
humiliation” that in 1995 he shot what
was to become one of his most con-
frontational and famous works of art:
a photo showing him giving Tianan-
men Gate and its giant portrait of Mao
the finger. Caught in what Mao would
have characterized as “an antagonistic
contradiction (敌我矛盾)”—one that
could not be solved without conflict
and struggle—Ai Weiwei viewed this
“unambiguously scornful gesture” as
an admonition to all those who “learn
submission before they have developed
an ability to raise doubts and challenge
assumptions.”
Henceforth he refused to remain
silent. “It’s a painful fact,” he writes,
“that today, as we import science and
technology and Western lifestyles, we
are unable to introduce spiritual en-
lightenment, or the power of justice, or
matters of the soul.”
After his father’s death in 1995, Ai
Weiwei’s artistic career began taking
off. At the same time, he was also be-
coming more resolute in his opposi-
tion to injustice. “My inspiration and
boldness came from disgust and exas-
peration, from the dogged resilience
that New York had nurtured in me, as
well as my impatience with the timidity
of my father’s generation,” he writes.
“Now I had no intention of hanging
back. I openly declared my opposition
to the status quo, reaffirming, through
the act of non- cooperation, my respon-
sibility to take a critical stance.”
In the relatively open climate of the
1990s Beijing art scene, he was chosen
to represent China at the 1999 Venice
Biennale. He also published several
art books and set up an architectural
firm, FAKE Design, that worked on the
National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) for
the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. But
nothing he did could resolve the funda-
mental contradiction between China’s
one-party state and his stubbornly in-
dependent spirit. “Civil society poses a
challenge to autocracy, and therefore,
in the eyes of our rulers, it is an object
of fear,” he writes. “The Chinese gov-
ernment, accordingly, seeks to erase
individual space, suppress free expres-
sion, and distort our memory.”
In his endless joust with the party, Ai
Weiwei became increasingly active on
the Internet. At the same time, he saw
that his “enemies in the Chinese state
grew surer that I was a threat.” There
was no way they would countenance
someone like him repeatedly poking
fingers in their eyes in such a public and
unrepentant way.
When the Wenchuan earthquake
hit Sichuan Province in 2008, Ai Wei-
wei attacked the shoddy “bean curd”
construction of the collapsed schools
and buildings in which thousands of
children died, as well as the corrupt
officials who had allowed them to go
up. His incendiary digital attacks and
then a documentary film, Little Girl’s
Cheeks, about those who’d died led to
repeated altercations with police, in-
cluding one in which he was beaten so
badly that he needed brain surgery. For
his exhibition “Remembering,” which
opened in 2009 in Munich, he hung
nine thousand children’s backpacks on
the façade of the Haus der Kunst that
spelled out in Chinese, “She lived hap-
pily in this world for seven years.” By
then he’d concluded that it was neces-
sary to “say goodbye to autocracy, no
matter what form it takes and no mat-
ter how it’s justified, because the result
is always the same: denial of equal-
ity, perversion of justice, warping of
happiness.”
Then his blog was shut down. He wrote
that it was becoming clear that “there
was no further space for negotiation with
the Chinese government.” Summoned
by the police for “a cup of tea (被喝
茶)”—a euphemism for being politically
warned—his response was predictable:
“Reject cynicism, reject cooperation, re-
fuse to be intimidated, refuse to ‘drink
tea.’” He counterattacked against the
party’s practice of “intimidating you and
weakening your resistance” until you
censor yourself. “If everyone spoke,”
he observes, “this society would have
transformed itself long ago.”
In November 2010 he joined a group
of artists protesting the seizure of their
homes by local officials, and marched
with them into Tiananmen Square. “If
in a pitch-dark room I find a single can-
dle, I will light that candle,” he defiantly
proclaimed. “I have no choice. No mat-
ter how the government tried to shut me
down, I would always seek to make my
voice heard.” Then, to prevent him from
attending the opening of his new studio
in Shanghai, he was put under house ar-
rest and the studio was bulldozed. Then
they put his Beijing compound under
around-the-clock police surveillance.
“I thought of my father, and began to
understand what protracted suffering
he must have endured, for in a Com-
munist system, to be constantly under
observation is the normal state of exis-
tence,” he writes.
To someone with an independent
streak, this incessant surveillance
means that life itself is like a term of
penal servitude. In my case, as time
went on, the intrusions afflicted
me with a nameless exhaustion, as
though some unidentifiable foreign
body had been planted inside me.
Ai Weiwei’s blunt language and defi-
ant actions were so offensive to the party
that in 2011 he was detained as he tried
to board a flight for Taipei. After being
handcuffed and hooded, he was driven
to a remote prison and held under an ex-
trajudicial detention provision—called
“residential surveillance at a designated
location (指定居 所监视居住)”—that
allows the state to hold someone for six
months without charges. “I had been
kidnapped by the state,” he writes with
his usual candor.
While in detention, he was interro-
gated daily, threatened with myriad
but ever- changing charges, endlessly
pressured to confess, and monitored
constantly by cameras as well as two
guards who stood inside his cell twenty-
four hours a day “like wooden statues.”
Accused of exhibiting an “intolera-
ble insolence,” he responded with yet
more insolence. “Even if you threaten
to drag me out now and shoot me, my
position won’t change,” he told his cap-
tors. However, as the weeks wore on,
“doubts crept in as I lay awake in the
late hours—about how this all would
end, and about the path that had led me
here. . . . I didn’t need sympathy—what
I needed was justice. But justice was
nowhere to be seen.”
Eighty- one days later he was re-
leased on bail, for reasons that were
 Mark Fox
Vale, 2021
Oil on prepared paper on panel
28.5 x 22.5 in, 72.4 x 57.2 cm

info@pazdabutler.com

March 10, 2022 7


FROM THE AUTHOR OF
OUT STEALING HORSES,
BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF
THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY PRIZE
MEN IN MY SITUATION
Per Petterson
The evocative and moving new
novel from Per Petterson, translated
from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey
“Petterson has written a beautifully
nuanced, deeply felt, and powerful
story of survival.”
—Library Journal, starred review
NEW POETRY FROM
GRAYWOLF PRESS
THAT WAS NOW,
THIS IS THEN
Vijay Seshadri
Now in paperback from
Pulitzer Prize–winning author
Vijay Seshadri
“Seshadri’s intellectually graceful
poems offer refuge in emotionally
turbulent times and invite readers
to cross the sacred threshold
typically separating the poet
from his rapt audience.”
—Shelf Awareness, starred review
GRAYWOLF PRESS
g r a y wolfp ress.o rg
8 The New York Review
ECHOLAND
Per Petterson
Per Petterson’s first novel now
available in the US, translated from
the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
“This early work from a master
leaves an indelible mark.”
—Publishers Weekly,
starred review
THE KING’S TOUCH
Tom Sleigh
New poems from Tom Sleigh offer
profound encounters with
our time’s hyperreality of global
upheaval, violence, and pandemic.
“Sleigh makes poetry go
beyond itself. . . . There’s an
imperative beneath the line,
words as a consequence
of fine-grained thought.”
—Washington Independent
Review of Books
“just as opaque as the reason for my de-
tention.” He was ordered to stay in Bei-
jing and not use the Internet or interact
with the media. Out of deference to his
mother, partner, and son, he remained
silent for over a month. But “to me the
loss of the freedom to express myself
was itself tantamount to captivity,” and
soon Ai Weiwei was tweeting about his
prison experiences. Since the party al-
most always retaliates against criticism,
he was charged with owing over 15 mil-
lion yuan in unpaid taxes. His response
was to post a proclamation about his
tax problem online.
On the first day he received some
five thousand contributions totaling
over two million yuan. Supporters even
began flying paper airplanes made of
banknotes over the walls of his com-
pound. Ultimately he not only received
more funds than he needed, but later
paid everyone back.
Then, as a mocking “gift” to the
Public Security Bureau, he installed a
surveillance camera system in his stu-
dio, recorded every aspect of his daily
life, and streamed it online. He also
sculpted a surveillance camera out of
marble as satirical artwork. And in a
final act of lèse-majesté, he constructed
a replica of his prison cell complete
with wax figures of himself and his
guards as an art installation for muse-
ums around the world. “Any artwork,
if it’s relevant, is political,” he chided.
Otherwise it’s “just some kind of deco-
ration, or for money making.”
Still, he could not but feel enervated
at being in such a state of constant ad-
versity. “Power, spreading its tentacles
everywhere, revealed my vulnerabil-
ity,” he writes. “But it was not directed
solely at me—its attention was directed
at every individual, for everyone has
soft, hidden places that they don’t want
others to touch.”
In China almost every dissident is
forced to mix some measure of sub-
mission with their defiance in order
to survive. But in Ai Weiwei’s case,
his enfant terrible side was prevailing.
He’d already concluded that “if you’re
not prepared to make a name for your-
self through resistance, the only way to
win distinction is through bowing and
scraping.” He adds, “I myself do not
have it within me to compromise.”
When in 2015, four years after his
release from prison, his passport was
finally returned, Ai Weiwei was able to
follow his partner and their young son
to Berlin, where he’d established a stu-
dio. “A sense of belonging is central to
one’s identity, for only with it can one
find a spiritual refuge,” he wistfully
notes. Nonetheless, “my father, my son,
and I have all ended up on the same
path, leaving the land where we were
born.” Still he kept working. His show
Trace, first displayed in 2014 in the old
penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San
Francisco Bay, consisted of Lego por-
traits of 176 people from 33 countries
who’d been imprisoned for speaking
out. In 2010–2011 he brought 100 mil-
JASON EPSTEIN
(1928–2022)
We mourn the death of Jason Epstein, a cofounder of
The New York Review and a longtime contributor and friend.
lion hand-painted porcelain sunflower
seeds (weighing ten tons) to Tate Mod-
ern in London for an exhibit calling
attention to the mode of mass produc-
tion now involved in the label “Made in
China.”
Looking back on his experiences
growing up with his father in labor
camps, he writes of feeling regret about
the lack of empathy and under-
standing I showed when I was
younger. During those long weeks
in secret detention, my fear was
not that I might not be able to see
my son again, but that I might not
have the chance to let him really
know me.
Ai Weiwei’s memoir is an effort to fill
this lacuna, to spell out who his father
was and who he now is himself as a per-
son and a father.
The life of the Ai family composes
a drama whose every act brings ever
more egregious assaults by the state
against it. But whereas Ai Qing’s initial
commitment to socialism made it dif-
ficult for him to ever fully turn against
Mao’s revolution, his son, lacking that
same idealism, slid more easily into
opposition, cynicism, and then finally
resistance. His “intolerable insolence”
meant that Ai Weiwei was fated to be
left with only two paths forward: either
being crushed at home or fleeing into
foreign exile. For as he warned, “When
a state restricts a citizen’s movements,
this means it becomes a prison.” And,
he adds, “Never love a person or a
country that you don’t have the free-
dom to leave.”
It does not take many pages of this
memoir to leave one feeling drowned
in toxic revolutionary brine. But even
as readers will be repelled by the re-
lentless savagery of China’s capricious
revolution, they will be uplifted by
this father-and-son story of humanism
stubbornly asserted against it. Ai Wei-
wei reminds us that freedom is part of
being human in the modern world: “Al-
though China grows more powerful,
its moral decay simply spreads anxiety
and uncertainty in the world.”
How such an open, clear, and uncom-
promising voice as Ai Weiwei’s arose in
such a closed and compromised society
is a mystery. But Ai Weiwei’s defiance
is the dialectical result of the party’s
own unyielding and often destructive
militancy. The tough, resolute critics
to whom China has repeatedly given
rise—such as the Nobel laureate Liu
Xiaobo, the Democracy Wall activist
Wei Jingsheng, the dissident astrophys-
icist Fang Lizhi, and most recently the
law professor Xu Zhangrun—were all
forged on the anvil of the party’s own
extremism. The way that Ai père et
fils sought justice, truth, freedom, and
liberty in the face of the party’s myr-
iad oppressive attacks makes them of a
kind. And Ai Weiwei’s steadfast devo-
tion to free expression and resistance to
the Chinese Communist Party’s unre-
lenting pressures makes this book glow
as if irradiated with righteousness. Q
 New England Ecstasies
The Transcendentalists
and Their World
by Robert A. Gross.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
836 pp., $40.00
In 1840 a slightly bewildered and
grumpy John Quincy Adams observed
in his diary that a young man named
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “after failing
in the every- day avocations of a Unitar-
ian preacher and schoolmaster, starts a
new doctrine of transcendentalism.”
And along with this transcendental-
ism, Adams complained, “Garrison
and the non-resistant abolitionists. . . ,
phrenology and animal magnetism, all
come in, furnishing each some plausi-
ble rascality.”
Rascality delighted Emerson. “We
are all a little wild here with number-
less projects of social reform,” he wrote
to his friend Thomas Carlyle. “Not a
reading man but has a draft of a new
Community in his waistcoat pocket. I
am gently mad myself.” Of course Em-
erson was not mad, far from it, even
though some thought so after he re-
signed from his pulpit at Boston’s pres-
tigious Second Church in 1832. By 1840
he was well known both as a public lec-
turer and as the titular head of that new-
fangled doctrine, transcendentalism.
Bronson Alcott
If anything was a transcendental
doctrine, it was Emerson’s small, pow-
erful book Nature, published four years
earlier in 1836. “As a plant upon the
earth, so a man rests upon the bosom
of God,” Emerson explained. “He is
nourished by unfailing fountains, and
draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.
Who can set bounds to the possibilities
of man?” Pretty heady stuff.
Heady rascals like Emerson had
been seeking a more humane form of
belief than what was damply offered
in stodgy churches, academies, and
political councils—a form of belief
that squarely placed divinity in the
soul of the individual, where goodness
already dwelled. Unitarians may have
rejected the fire-breathing Calvinist no-
tion of original sin, predestination, and
damnation in favor of a more rational
and gentler view of human nature, but
the transcendentalists went further: all
human inspiration was divine, all nature
a miracle. “The currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or
particle of God,” Emerson declared in
March 10, 2022
Brenda Wineapple
Orestes Brownson
Nature. That was heretical. “Cast behind
you all conformity, and acquaint men at
first hand with Deity,” he then scandal-
ously bid the graduating class at the Har-
vard Divinity School in 1838; he wasn’t
asked to return for almost thirty years.
A fter Emerson’s theology school ac-
quaintance Frederic Henry Hedge left
Cambridge in 1835 to accept a pulpit in
Maine, he suggested the rascals meet
occasionally when he was back in town
to discuss the ideas of Immanuel Kant
or such topics as theology, morality,
mysticism, and education. “Hedge’s
Club,” also dubbed the “Transcenden-
tal Club,” met sporadically depending
on who was available, and over time its
members included the Reverend James
Freeman Clarke, founder of the period-
ical The Western Messenger; the Rever-
end George Ripley, editor of Specimens
of Foreign Standard Literature, in
which he published his translations of
French and German philosophy; his
wife, the educator Sarah Bradford Rip-
ley, who with her husband started the
Brook Farm communal experiment in
West Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the
steely Orestes Brownson, considered
by the historian Arthur Schlesinger
to be Karl Marx’s American precur-
sor. Also attending was the oracular
teacher Bronson Alcott (Louisa May’s
father), whose Conversations with
Children on the Gospels scandalized
proper Bostonians with its allusions to
sex and eventually forced him to close
his progressive Temple School. Joining
them before long was the young, fierce
Reverend Theodore Parker, an anti-
slavery advocate who later kept a brace
of pistols in his desk to protect Ellen
and William Craft, two Black fugitives
he was secretly harboring.
There were women too, and not just
wives, among them Elizabeth Pea-
body, who taught in Alcott’s school and
whose West Street foreign-language
lending library and bookshop oper-
ated as an informal meeting place for
the group; and the brilliant Margaret
Fuller, the first editor of their publi-
cation, The Dial: A Magazine for Lit-
erature, Philosophy, and Religion. Its
inaugural issue in 1840 announced
their intentions:
To make new demands on litera-
ture, and to reprobate that rigor
of our conventions of religion
and education which is turning us
to stone, which renounces hope,
which looks only backward, which
asks only such a future as the past,
which suspects improvement, and
holds nothing so much in horror
as new views and the dreams of
youth.
During its four-year run, The Dial
published essays, poems, and reviews
by Fuller and Emerson, its next editor,
as well as by Alcott, the artist and poet
Christopher Cranch, the music critic
John Sullivan Dwight, the poets Ellery
Channing and Ellen Sturgis, and Em-
erson’s young friend Henry David Tho-
reau, who occasionally attended the
get-togethers. According to Emerson,
all of them were surprised that a rumor
began to circulate about a school of
thought called “Transcendental” and
equally surprised that it was pilloried
as sentimental, abstract, incompre-
hensible. To Emerson, it was merely a
point of view, and it was not really new.
In one of his many Boston lectures,
aptly called “The Transcendentalist,”
he explained that a transcendentalist
believes in inspiration, intuition, emo-
tion, and ecstasy, all of which radiate
from the individual, who is in turn im-
manently connected to a divine spirit
and “the inviolable order of the world.”
Yet Emerson warned, “there is no
such thing as a Transcendental party.”
That would defeat the purpose. “Act
singly,” he charged in his essay “Self-
Reliance.” “Nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of your own mind.” When
asked to join the Brook Farm commu-
nity, he characteristically demurred.
The more prickly Thoreau, when in-
vited, declared that he’d “rather keep
batchelor’s hall in hell than go to board
in heaven.” Still, he boarded for a while
with the Emersons in what Emerson
half hoped was his own communal
experiment. And though the relation-
ship between the two men was compli-
cated, they shared a goal: to remove us
from our quiet, desperate getting and
spending by revealing our connection
to all living things. “Shall I not have
intelligence with the earth?” Thoreau
wonders. “Am I not partly leaves and
vegetable mould myself?”
Thoreau was as yet unknown, but
Emerson’s reputation grew. “I had
heard of him as full of transcenden-
Ralph Waldo Emerson
talisms, myths & oracular gibberish,”
Herman Melville wrote the editor
Evert Duyckinck after hearing Emer-
son lecture. “To my surprise, I found
him quite intelligible. . . . I love all
men who dive. Any fish can swim near
the surface, but it takes a great whale
to go down stairs five miles or more.”
Nietzsche too admired Emerson and
reputedly traveled with a copy of his
essays. The transcendentalists inspired
people all over the world, from Charles
Baudelaire to Leo Tolstoy, from Char-
lotte Forten to Adam Mickiewicz,
and from D.T. Suzuki and Jawaharlal
Nehru to Robert Kennedy. Emily
Dickinson called Emerson’s Represen-
tative Men “a little Granite Book you
can lean upon.” And of course Gandhi
read Thoreau.
Margaret Fuller
Not everyone was on board. Much
as he admired Emerson “as a poet of
deep beauty and austere tenderness,”
Nathaniel Hawthorne said he “sought
nothing from him as a philosopher,”
and as for The Dial, it put him to
sleep. Louisa May Alcott, in an essay
humorously called “Transcendental
Wild Oats,” satirized her orphic fa-
ther Bronson as expecting orchards to
spring from his head. Virginia Woolf’s
father, Leslie Stephen, defined tran-
scendentalism as the vague yearning
for an “intellectual flying machine—
some impulse that would lift you above
the prosaic commonplace world,” and
Henry Adams found it all hilarious.
But Emerson can produce an effect of
exaltation, “as though the disembodied
mind were staring at the truth,” Woolf
wrote. “The beauty of his view is great,
because it can rebuke us, even while we
feel that he does not understand.”
By and large, transcendentalism was
a literary movement, which is why we
continue to read Emerson and Tho-
reau and to a lesser extent Fuller. The
prose remains. They were all conscious
stylists. “The writer must direct his
sentence as carefully and leisurely as
the marksman his rifle,” Thoreau in-
structed himself in his journals. “My
book should smell of pines,” Emerson
exclaimed, and if he can sometimes
be annoyingly abstract, often his lan-
guage is succinct, precise, concrete,
and unforgettable; the images fresh
and flinty. “Cut these words, and they
9
would bleed,” he writes of Montaigne.
Or take his description of Socrates:
He affected a good many citizen-
like tastes, was monstrously fond
of Athens, hated trees, never will-
ingly went beyond the walls, knew
the old characters, valued the
bores and philistines.
Socrates hated trees? And then there is
the more skeptical register. “I am con-
tent with knowing,” Emerson writes,
“if only I could know.” And Thoreau
said, “The miracle is, that what is is,
when it is so difficult, if not impossible,
for anything else to be.”
“I desire to speak somewhere with-
out bounds,” Thoreau wrote in Walden,
whose style is barbed, pungent, and
often expressively poignant, as in this
well-known sentence, with its balanced
phrases and alliterations: “I went to the
wood because I wished to live deliber-
ately, to front only the essential facts of
life, and see if I could not learn what it
Elizabeth Peabody
had to teach, and not, when I came to
die, discover that I had not lived.” Both
Emerson and Thoreau revised their
work over and over in order to recon-
cile the observable fact with something
more intangible, to realize—and re-
cord—a “living poetry like the leaves
of a tree . . . not a fossil earth but a liv-
ing earth.” As Thoreau reminds us,
“Not an inch of it can be spared by the
imagination.”
For the transcendentalists, writing
was also an ethical act, whether they
were mulling self-reliance, Napoleon,
the hoeing of beans, or, in the case of
Fuller, the capacity of women to be
more than tufted upholstery. “If you
ask me what offices they may fill; I
reply—any,” she wrote in Woman in the
Nineteenth Century, famously adding,
“Let them be sea- captains, if you will.”
“We but half express ourselves, and are
ashamed of that divine idea which each
of us represents,” Emerson proclaims in
“Self-Reliance.” His aspirational task,
like that of all the transcendentalists, is
thus reclamation, a spiritual awakening
to the transformative power of imagina-
tion and a faith in the better, moral an-
gels of our nature. At once democratic
and aristocratic, representative and sin-
gular, they had a mission. As Thoreau
announces in Walden, “I do not pro-
pose to write an ode to dejection, but
to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the
morning, standing on his roost, if only
to wake my neighbors up.”
The transcendentalists, then, were
writers who believed that through the
word, they could inspire the self, and
10
through the self, the country. “The
use of symbols has a certain power of
emancipation and exhilaration for all
men,” Emerson wrote in his essay “The
Poet.” “Words are also actions, and ac-
tions are a kind of words.”
“I was simmering, simmering, sim-
mering,” Whitman memorably re-
sponded. “Emerson brought me to a
boil.”
E merson and Thoreau are the repre-
sentative transcendentalists in Robert
A. Gross’s The Transcendentalists and
Their World, his eight-hundred-page
excavation of life in Concord, Massa-
chusetts. Drawing a circle around this
New England village, population circa
two thousand, where Thoreau was born
in 1817 and where Emerson moved in
1834 at the age of thirty- one, Gross,
an emeritus professor of history at the
University of Connecticut, claims that
“the American Renaissance was a town
as well as a national achievement.”
The title of Gross’s book is thus
somewhat misleading, for its subject
is neither “the transcendentalists” as
a whole (in Boston or elsewhere) nor
Emerson’s and Thoreau’s transcen-
dental fellow travelers, like Alcott and
Ellery Channing, who also lived in
Concord. Nor does “their world” in-
clude writers who influenced Emerson
and Thoreau, such as Carlyle, the En-
glish Romantics, Goethe and Schiller,
the Greek and Persian poets, or Hindu
sacred texts. Rather, as Gross explains,
he regards his book as a sequel to his
Bancroft Prize–winning The Minute-
men and Their World (1976), a social
history of Concord that documents
the lives of the ordinary, often voice-
less members of a romanticized village
where, on April 19, 1775, a shot was
fired that was heard around the world.
Then, as now, Gross immersed him-
self in tax lists, land transfers, pension
records, probate files, local newspa-
pers, and whatever vital records were
tucked away in various parishes. Even
with the assistance of undergraduate
and graduate “data gatherers and com-
puter consultants” (the book contains
almost two hundred pages of notes),
he admits that during fifty years of
research, he “could and did get lost in
the abundance of materials.” None-
theless, his intention is a “community
study of Concord” that demonstrates
how that community shaped Emerson’s
and Thoreau’s “understanding of the
broader society and culture.” At the
same time, arguing that the Boston
version of transcendentalism, most no-
tably articulated by George Ripley and
Ezra Ripley
Henry David Thoreau
Orestes Brownson, “linked self- culture
to social reform,” Gross suggests that
the Concord transcendentalists “stood
apart from the moral crusades of the
day,” with Emerson reluctant to get
involved in the antislavery movement
and Thoreau preferring “to go his own
way.”
This may be because Gross does not
venture beyond the late 1840s and so
does not take account of Emerson’s
fierce denunciations of the Compro-
mise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave
Act. “Liberty is aggressive,” Emerson
wrote. “It is only they who save oth-
ers, that can themselves be saved,” he
encouraged a friend after the failed
attempt to spring the fugitive slave An-
thony Burns from a Boston jail in 1854.
In 1859 Emerson reportedly said that
John Brown’s execution “will make the
gallows as glorious as the cross.” Tho-
reau called Brown “a transcendentalist
above all.”
Gross does successfully present the
local life of Concord and its many in-
habitants, including Black families.
The first three hundred pages of his
book teem with stories about the in-
ternecine parish conflicts, land grabs,
political rivalries, and church schisms
of the 1820s and early 1830s, a “dawn-
ing era of change.” Among the many
characters—such as Lemuel Shattuck,
John Keyes, Mary Brooks, and Samuel
Hoar—is Concord’s long-lived divine,
Emerson’s step-grandfather Reverend
Ezra Ripley, the occupant of the gray
parsonage known as the Old Manse,
where Emerson briefly boarded and
where he apparently wrote Nature.
Hawthorne, who rented it for a short
time, said, “It was awful to reflect how
many sermons must have been written
there.” Ripley must have written about
three thousand.
To Gross, Ripley represents the de-
sire to maintain a bulwark of shared
community and institutional values to
stem the divisions created by indus-
trialization and capitalism. “The ties
that once bound together the rural
community frayed,” he writes, as “the
chain of community was giving way to
the claims of cash.” Advances in hus-
bandry, for instance, came at a price:
though beneficial commercially, the
conversion of the wetlands into pro-
ductive meadows, the cultivation of
more marketable crops, and the use of
chemical fertilizers threatened the ex-
istence of the independent farmer, who
had once been part of a supportive net-
work with a “widely held commitment
to ‘good neighborhood.’”
The temperance movement too was
a mixed blessing: “In the name of pu-
rifying morals, it could set neighbor
against neighbor.” That in turn “set in
motion” conflicts that “would prove to
be a crucible for Transcendentalism,”
for “as greater opportunities for some
individuals opened up”—particularly
through public education—“the ties of
interdependence loosened still more”;
Concord was “more open and less cer-
tain, more promising and less stable.”
Similarly, the populist uprising
against the order of Masons repre-
sented, Gross claims, “a force for
equality of opportunity and individual
possibility.” Poor Reverend Ripley was
on the losing side, that of the Masonic
fraternity with its institutional hierar-
chies, elitism, and secrecy. “Nothing
could be more antithetical to Transcen-
dentalist individualism than Masonic
fraternalism,” Gross observes. Again,
“the stage was set for a new chapter in
Concord’s history,” he writes, although
he also points out that Emerson ignored
the entire anti-Masonic brouhaha.
The lyceum movement also undercut
the “rhetoric of community.” This new
venture in popular education—part
lecture bureau, part debating society—
soon featured speakers who urged the
audience “to shed older ways of think-
ing.” The abolitionist Wendell Phillips
really shook the place up.
Gross admits that his Concord tran-
scendentalists “were not alone” in
deploring a nation increasingly com-
mercialized, materialistic, pitiless, and
criminal. After a mob in Alton, Illi-
nois, murdered the abolitionist editor
Elijah Lovejoy and tossed his print-
ing press into the Mississippi River in
the fall of 1837, even Emerson spoke
out. Formerly reticent, if not dubious,
about the abolitionists, in his lecture
“On Heroism” he declared that “brave
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets
of a mob, for the rights of free speech
and opinion, and died when it was
better not to live.” In 1838 Emerson
composed a public letter to President
Martin Van Buren protesting the relo-
cation of the Cherokee peoples and the
seizure of their lands, and in 1844, at
the commemoration of the tenth anni-
versary of the British emancipation of
slaves in the West Indies, he described
the cruelties of slavery in graphic terms
and implicated the North in the perpet-
uation of an evil institution.
Gross is hard on Emerson, pointing
out that he regretted sending that let-
ter to Van Buren: “Emerson was loath
to engage in a moral protest—what
he called a ‘holy hurrah’—for its own
sake, as if to put his superior sensibil-
ity on parade.” Like many scholars, he
criticizes Emerson’s seeming endorse-
ment of manifest destiny and his appar-
ent laissez-faire optimism, particularly
in his speech “The Young American”:
Emerson
spared not a thought for the dis-
possession of native peoples nor
for the disappearance of wildness
in nature that Thoreau would so
compellingly indict. The spread of
slavery and the Cotton Kingdom
never came up.
Emerson did justify himself, for bet-
ter or worse. “We have our own affairs,
our own genius, which chains us to our
proper work,” he explained.
The New York Review
 We cannot give our life to the
cause of the debtor, of the slave,
or the pauper, as another is doing;
but to one thing we are bound, not
to blaspheme the sentiment and
the work of that man, not to throw
stumbling-blocks in the way of the
abolitionist, the philanthropist, as
the organs of influence and opin-
ion are swift to do.
One contributor to the National
Anti- Slavery Standard identified as
“G” (Sydney Howard Gay? William
Lloyd Garrison?) approved of Emer-
son’s West Indies speech:
In all the true influence he has ex-
erted, embraced the essential prin-
ciples of Anti-Slavery, though he
has not been an active worker in this
special reform. When called upon
to work at all, or to speak at all, he
has done both with and for the Ab-
olitionists, and not against them, as
has been the case with some who
have claimed to be governed by the
Anti- Slavery sentiment.
As the scholar Albert von Frank has
pointed out, Emerson’s vacillation and
Parallel Mothers
a film written and directed
by Pedro Almodóvar
When the Spanish parliament
enacted an amnesty law in
1977, two years after the death
of General Francisco Franco,
it seemed to fulfill a demand of
prodemocracy groups. After
all, one of the main slogans
roared out by demonstrators
in marches throughout Spain
was ¡Amnestía y Libertad!
Amnesty was associated with
freedom; it meant that politi-
cal prisoners could be released
and many enemies of the old
regime could return from
exile.
It was an exciting time in
Spain. I remember being in a
taxi in Barcelona one Saturday
night in April 1977 when the
driver let out a huge, joyous cry
and started to honk the horn
in excitement. It felt as though
his team had won the soccer
championship. Soon I discov-
ered, however, that he was excited be-
cause news had just come in that the
Communist Party had been legalized
in Spain and its candidates would run
in the forthcoming elections.
The previous year, the government
had grudgingly allowed the Catalans to
celebrate their national day. In 1977 an
estimated million people marched for
Catalan autonomy, some even demand-
ing Catalan independence. At this
time, the Spanish Socialist Workers’
Party, led by Felipe González, became
the main opposition party and would
take power in 1982.
It made sense that no one wanted to
talk about the past. The present was
March 10, 2022
early silences should not keep us from
understanding the ways in which his
ideas made a difference to the aboli-
tionists, and no amount of scolding will
deny his influence as a social thinker
and slippery writer who believed that
the time for revolution had come. “This
time, like all times,” Emerson said, “is
a very good one, if we but know what to
do with it.” He was of the party of hope.
Gross is far more sympathetic to
Thoreau, praising him for his need
to “get back to basics” and “go it
alone.” He had “shown his mettle” in
the summer of 1844, when the Con-
cord ministers had refused to let their
meetinghouses host the West Indian
emancipation ceremonies. Since the
sexton of the First Church would not
ring the church bell to alert the crowd
to assemble at the courthouse, Thoreau
entered the belfry and pulled the rope
himself. That “independent course,”
Gross claims, somehow inspired Tho-
reau—that and Emerson’s suggestion
that he undertake his experiment in
self-reliant living on the land Emerson
had just purchased near Walden Pond.
To Gross, Thoreau bids other people
“pare their needs, curb their wants, and
follow nature’s way.” And yet what are
The Secrets of Others
Colm Tóibín
Milena Smit as Ana, Penélope Cruz as Janis, and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón as Teresa
in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, 2021
too filled with possibility. And politics
somehow allowed people to ignore pol-
itics. I remember a wild party in Bar-
celona on the night that Franco died. I
remember that no one even mentioned
the dead dictator. There was too much
else to talk about. Even referring to
him and his cohorts in passing would
have breached an important code.
It seemed that Spaniards in their late
teens and early twenties had shrugged
Franco off. They had worked out a way
of growing up under a repressive re-
gime without paying much attention to
it. Their parents, a generation before,
had also worked out a way of surviv-
ing. One of the main tools was silence.
the ways of nature? Thoreau noted that
“no humane being, past the thoughtless
age of boyhood, will wantonly murder
any creature, which holds its life by the
same tenure that he does.” Though he
loved the wild in nature no less than the
good, he staked his life on the higher,
more evolved side of being. He left the
woods after his two-year experiment;
leaving Walden was as important as his
going. “Perhaps it seemed to me,” he
wrote, “that I had several more lives to
live, and could not spare any more time
for that one.”
Gross says Thoreau emerged from the
woods with the first draft of a manuscript
that was “the record of one man’s rebirth
and the story of an American town.” In
detailing the life of that town—its ly-
ceum, its reformers, its farmers—Tho-
reau “never sloughed off the heritage of
Ezra Ripley and the message of commu-
nity” because, Gross claims, in the end,
“in his mind he was never alone. The
community came with him.”
Though Gross emphasizes only the
manuscript that Thoreau composed
during his stay in the woods, he re-
worked that draft seven times before
the final, eloquent creation, Walden,
was ready for publication in 1854,
Again and again, as though it were a
kind of alibi, people insisted that the
civil war was never mentioned in their
houses, even if their parents or grand-
parents had been involved.
The amnesty law of 1977, approved
with an overwhelming majority of both
left- and right-wing parties, also cov-
ered crimes committed by the Franco
government. At the time, no one saw
the dangers of this. There was, in any
case, no appetite for endless show tri-
als of elderly generals. This would have
soaked up energy that was needed to
create a civil society in Spain.
A generation was emerging that
really had no interest in what happened
eight years later. Searching for some
basic spiritual order beneath the flux
of the everyday, some order of mean-
ing outside of time and certainly out-
side of place (even Concord), he, like
Emerson, was a careful verbal archi-
tect whose prose is ferocious, angular,
unsettling, and lastingly lyrical. “I am
thankful that this pond was made deep
and pure for a symbol,” he concludes.
As a symbol, so it remains, shimmering,
bottomless, and elusive. Or as Emerson
once observed, “What is fit to engage
me and so engage others permanently,
is what has put off its weeds of time &
place & personal relation.”
Since Gross’s passion lies in the tran-
sitive, not the literary, quality of Em-
erson and Thoreau, he meticulously
entangles them in time and place; to
him, they’re historical sojourners in
civilized life, rooted among facts and
figures. During a ten-month period in
1812 Ezra Ripley purchased more than
four gallons of rum, brandy, cognac,
and wine, which means he was no tee-
totaler. All well and good. It may be a
good idea, too, to heed Thoreau: “If
you stand right fronting and face to
face to a fact, you will see the sun glim-
mer on both its surfaces.” Q
before they came of age. Once,
Sony Pictures Classics
when a young Spanish poet
discovered that I had written a
sad novel about the aftermath
of the civil war, he shook his
head in pity and said, “No one
has any interest in the sad af-
termath of the civil war.”
Soon after the arrival of de-
mocracy, Pedro Almodóvar
became the high priest of brash
drama, high color, and great
excitement in the new Spain.
His characters invented them-
selves and the world around
them. They took the sexual
revolution as seriously as oth-
ers did the political changes.
In Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other
Girls Like Mom (1980), his
first feature film, one character
notes the “wave of eroticism
sweeping the country.” As if
making a declaration of inde-
pendence, there is a competi-
tion called General Erections.
When Pepi (Carmen Maura) is
raped by a policeman, the revenge she
and her friends plan is to discover the
strange, secret sexual longings of the po-
liceman’s wife, and thus to undermine
his marriage. Rather than going to the
authorities or protesting in the streets,
they make it sharply personal. When
the film was first shown, these images
of a policeman’s wife and the sort of
sexual excitement she really wanted
caused much laughter and were deeply
subversive.
Motherhood is one of Almodóvar’s
great subjects. In What Have I Done to
Deserve This? (1984), Gloria (Maura)
has to put up with her mother-in-law,
as in Matador (1986) Ángel (Antonio
11
Banderas) has to deal with his religious
mother. In High Heels (1991) Rebeca
(Victoria Abril) is living in the shadow
of her mother (Marisa Paredes), a fa-
mous singer, having married her moth-
er’s ex-lover. In these films, mothers
are not haunting presences or aspects
of the past that must be reckoned with,
but a sort of nuisance, someone who
needs to be pushed out of the way. In
later films, however, such as All About
My Mother (1999), Almodóvar drama-
tized motherhood with much greater
complexity.
His characters have a habit of brush-
ing aside problems that on their own
might seem too obvious. For example,
in Law of Desire (1987), in which two
characters in a love triangle are gay,
they suffer none of the guilt or repres-
sion that might be easily imagined.
They have other things on their minds,
as do characters in his work who are
victims. They evade the claims of their
victimhood in order to do something
more interesting.
In Volver (2006) Almodóvar allows
the bygone generation, including a dead
mother, to haunt those still alive. Pain
and Glory (2019) is elegiac and self-
interrogating. One of the characters, a
version of the director himself played
by Banderas, is solitary, melancholy,
uneasy. In both films, Almodóvar, hav-
ing spent much of his career disrupting
the very notion of home, seems ready
to deal with the possibility that he and
those around him actually have a past,
a place they come from that is not just a
result of their dreams.
In 2019 Almodóvar was one of the
producers of a documentary, The Si-
lence of Others, about the effect of
“We love love love our Vitsœ system.
The build quality and easiness of
assembly is amazing, but it was
your service that made the whole
process such a joy.”
‘Love’ is a word we hear a lot at
Vitsœ. Other verbs just don’t seem to
cut it. Like in this heartfelt message
from Melvin in Sydney, Australia to
his personal Vitsœ planner Sophie in
London, England.
As with any customer, Sophie ensured
that every detail was considered so
that Melvin’s shelving was perfect for
his needs.
Like everybody at Vitsœ, she’s
passionate about good service, and
communicates with all her customers
12
the amnesty law of 1977. Written and
directed by Almudena Carracedo and
Robert Bahar, it dealt with the silence
and secrecy imposed on Spain after the
civil war.
All over the country, to this day, are
unmarked mass graves of people exe-
cuted during the civil war by Franco’s
forces. In 2007, with the Socialists in
power, the Historical Memory Law was
enacted; its aim was
to recognize and broaden the
rights favoring those who suffered
persecution or violence—for polit-
ical, ideological, or religious rea-
sons—during the Civil War and
the Dictatorship, [and to] promote
moral reparation and the recovery
of personal and family memory.
The Socialists then began to fund the
search for mass graves and to support
the exhumation and reburial of the
dead. But this was discontinued by
Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing govern-
ment, which held power between 2011
and 2018. Last year, it was announced
by the Socialist government, which re-
turned to power in 2018, that grants for
exhumations would be resumed.
In The Silence of Others, we see an
old woman getting a mouth swab so
that her DNA can be checked against
that of her father, who may be buried
in a mass grave. We see the king and
two right-wing prime ministers, in-
cluding Rajoy, denouncing the idea of
revisiting the past. We see another old
woman, María Martín, point to a road
and declare that it is built on top of a
mass grave where her mother, executed
in the civil war, is buried.
Photo by
Melvin T
directly, wherever they are in the world.
Whether in-person, or on the other side
of the globe, our planners hold your
hand throughout the whole process.
Time and again we prove that long-
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Be it planning your first system, moving
it to a new home or adding an extra
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A lmodóvar’s latest film, Parallel
Mothers, begins with Janis (Penélope
Cruz), a trendy photographer living in
Madrid, consulting Arturo (Israel Ele-
jalde), a forensic anthropologist, about
the possibility of getting private funding
for the opening up of the mass grave in
which her great-grandfather is buried.
Soon, courtesy of Arturo, she is preg-
nant and sharing a hospital room with a
teenage girl, Ana (Milena Smit), who is
also about to give birth.
This new film begins as a story
about mothers. Ana’s mother (Aitana
Sánchez- Gijón) is an actress who is too
busy to bother with her. Janis’s mother
was a hippie who died of a drug over-
dose. They are both motherless women
venturing uneasily into motherhood.
But this is also a film about identity
and notions of belonging. When Janis
begins to suspect that the child she has
taken home from the hospital may not
be hers, she swabs her mouth, that of
her child, and that of Ana, just as the
old woman in search of her father’s re-
mains in The Silence of Others has her
mouth swabbed.
Before moving Janis and the film
itself into new territory, Almodóvar
creates her and the world she inhab-
its with the sort of flair and zeal we
have become used to in his films. Her
apartment is like a character, with its
ornaments, red furniture, and sense of
brazen newness.
Because of the way she dresses and
the style of her apartment, because of
her friendship with the fashionable
Elena (Rossy de Palma) and her line
of work, Janis has all the trappings of
a classic Almodóvar heroine. Slowly
it becomes clear, however, that she
has not gained strength from any pro-
cess of self-invention. She is as fragile
as Salvador in Pain and Glory. She
never knew her father and has no pho-
tographs of him. She has no siblings.
Elena, it turns out, is not a friend from
the Madrid social world but from their
childhood village. There is a moment
when Janis, having found out that she
is not really the mother of the baby she
brought home, appears in shadow, and
that seems right. Much of her presence
is shadowy.
When Janis realizes that she has the
wrong child, her silence, at first, is al-
most understandable, but then it be-
comes shameful when we see it from
Ana’s point of view. This, in a very
subtle and organic way, echoes what
happened to the victims of the civil
war in the new Spain. It is as though
Almodóvar is seeking to show, at the
most personal level, how easy it is, how
tempting, to conceal the truth.
Parallel Mothers is set in 2016. When
Janis asks Arturo for his help finding
the grave, he replies that the govern-
ment has withdrawn all the subsidies
for discovering the bodies of the civil
war dead. “Prime Minister Rajoy,” he
adds, “boasted in an interview that in
the state budget there were zero euros
for historical memory.” Followers of
Almodóvar’s films will notice some-
thing new: he has mentioned the name
of a prime minister.
It is not, however, as though he has
been fully apolitical up to now. Mov-
ing sexual strangeness toward the
light of normality has been for him a
deeply political act. Much of the time,
in his own quirky way, Almodóvar
has been a moralist opposed to dis-
honesty and hypocrisy; his characters
work toward a recognition of aspects
of themselves that were hidden or
forbidden.
D espite his fascination with the pres-
ent moment, in previous films such as
Volver and Pain and Glory Almodó-
var has dramatized the rituals around
death. Volver opens in a cemetery
where the local women are cleaning
the gravestones. It includes the wake
and funeral of an old aunt. In Pain and
Glory, there are many scenes between
the mother and son that are tender,
when all irony has been cast aside. In
one of them, the mother (Julieta Ser-
rano) tells her son with some emphasis
how she would like to be buried, what
she would like to wear on her head,
how she would like to have her feet bare
and unbound as she goes into her grave.
Janis in Parallel Mothers emerges
from shadow most strongly in an ar-
gument with Ana when Ana fails to
understand why she cares so much
about the hidden graves. In her rage,
her passionate response, Janis becomes
Almodóvar’s version of Antigone. She
sees the burial of the dead as a sacred
duty.
Of the older generation of her family,
all the men are dead; only one woman
is still alive, Aunt Brígida (Serrano).
As they go back to the village to wit-
ness the exhumations, for which they
have received private funding, we see
Aunt Brígida, who is old and dying,
surrounded by her family. There is a
wonderful moment when one of her
granddaughters says that Brígida,
who was four months old when her fa-
ther—Janis’s great-grandfather—was
executed, actually remembers him.
Brígida immediately corrects her. She
remembers only what her mother told
her. She has no interest in mythologiz-
ing the past. And like the mother in
Pain and Glory, she is clear about how
she wishes to be buried. She wants to
be interred with her family, and for this
she will need her father’s body to be
found and exhumed.
Brígida, too, must have her mouth
swabbed. In the scene at the mass grave,
the workers sift clay to locate small ob-
jects such as teeth or buttons, recalling
a similar scene from The Silence of
Others. In a moment of real dramatic
force, the people of the village walk in
unison toward the mass grave where
the skeletons have been numbered.
The group is led not only by Janis
and Ana but also by Elena, who car-
ries a photo of a relative buried there.
The image of Rossy de Palma, whom
Almodóvar has used in the past for
some of his most gorgeously outra-
geous roles, as a woman from a village
seeking justice for the dead gives us
some idea of how far he has come.
In Pain and Glory and Parallel
Mothers, Almodóvar’s protagonists live
alone. They are alert to the power of the
past more than they are interested in
the present moment. In the earlier film,
Banderas plays Salvador as a figure
who has become tired and sad, whose
appetite for life has waned. Penélope
Cruz’s vulnerability and solitude, on
the other hand, make her forceful. She
has not become sad. At the end of the
film, as the graves are opened, we learn
that she is pregnant again. What might
appear to be Almodóvar’s most polit-
ical film gently nudges the characters
back toward private life, just as some
version of harmony or resolution is re-
stored to their broken world. Q
The New York Review
 The Freedom of Historical Fiction
Permanent Evolution:
Selected Essays on Literature,
Theory and Film
by Yuri Tynianov, translated
from the Russian and edited by
Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko,
with an introduction by Daria Khitrova.
Academic Studies Press, 352 pp.,
$119.00; $39.95 (paper)
Lieutenant Kizhe
by Yury Tynianov, translated from
the Russian by Nicolas Pasternak Slater
and with illustrations by Olga Smart.
Look MultiMedia, 51 pp., $9.99 (paper)
Küchlya: Decembrist Poet
by Yury Tynianov, translated from
the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush,
Peter France, and Christopher Rush.
Cherry Orchard, 357 pp., $119.00;
$24.95 (paper)
The Death of Vazir- Mukhtar
by Yury Tynyanov, translated from
the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush
and Christopher Rush.
Columbia University Press,
599 pp., $40.00; $19.95 (paper)
Young Pushkin
by Yury Tynyanov, translated from
the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush
and Christopher Rush.
Overlook/Rookery, 515 pp. (2008)
Why do we read historical fiction? For
one thing, it promises an entry into the
past that is richer and more textured
than straightforward history, which
is obliged to stick to the facts—or, at
least, to preface speculation with a re-
sponsible disclaimer. Good historical
fiction produces a gratifying sense of
immersion in the life of, say, a Roman
emperor or a French queen. They
may not be like us, but they feel close
enough to touch. For a few hours the
boundaries of time and mortality, ge-
ography and class are erased.
Historical fiction can also have an-
other, more slippery purpose: to com-
ment on the present by way of the
past, as sci-fi interprets the present
by imagining the future. This mode
is especially useful to writers who are
restricted in what they are allowed to
say—as in the Soviet Union. Historical
fiction offers a way of writing between
the lines. The attentive reader notices
parallels and patterns, silent gestures
toward the tyranny and absurdity of
the moment of writing: after all, history
repeats itself.
For Yuri Tynianov, who is best
known in the anglophone world—if he
is known at all—as a Formalist literary
critic (along with Viktor Shklovsky,
Boris Eikhenbaum, and Roman Jakob-
son), historical fiction offered a refuge
not only from censorship and political
attacks but from poverty and the stifling
hopelessness of the Stalinist present.
His historical novels Küchlya (1925),
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (1927),
and Young Pushkin (1935–1943), all
now available in English, dramatize a
densely populated world of characters
from Russia’s literary golden age in
the early nineteenth century: Alexan-
der Pushkin, Russia’s national poet;
Alexander Griboedov, the author of
March 10, 2022
Sophie Pinkham
Yuri Tynianov; illustration by Guido Scarabottolo
the seminal comedic play Woe from
Wit; and Wilhelm Küchelbecker, aka
Küchlya, a friend of both Pushkin’s
and Griboedov’s, and a participant
in the failed Decembrist uprising of
1825. These engrossing novels, writ-
ten with an effortless erudition, were
also a proving ground for Tynianov’s
theories, demonstrating how literature
emerges from the web of everyday life
and is transformed by the movement of
history.
Yuri Nikolaevich Tynianov was born
into a Jewish doctor’s family in 1894, in
a small town in the Pale of Settlement,
in what is now Latvia. He attended
secondary school in Pskov, and while
still a teenager knew the whole Rus-
sian literary tradition as well as Greek
and Roman poetry. According to Anna
Kurkina Rush, who cotranslated and
introduced all three of the novels:
He referred to the great Russian
authors by their first names and
patronymics, as if they were mem-
bers of his family. Pushkin was the
writer he most worshipped, identi-
fying with him at one time to the
point of growing sideburns to look
like him.
Tynianov studied at Petersburg
University for about six years starting
in 1912, years of turmoil and revolu-
tion. In 1918 he began collaborating
with Eikhenbaum and Shklovsky in
OPOYAZ , the Society for the Study
of Poetic Language, a precursor of
the Formalist school that had been
founded in 1916 to examine the nature
of literary devices and publish the work
of its members. He married a musi-
cian named Yelena Zilber, with whom
he had a daughter while he was still a
student. In 1921 Tynianov was hired to
teach at the Institute of History of the
Arts, but he was paid a pittance and
had to scrape together a living with a
variety of side jobs: French interpreter
at the Comintern, high school literature
teacher, copy editor, magazine editor.
In the hectic 1920s Tynianov became
one of the world’s first film theorists,
grounding his essays (several of which
are included in Permanent Evolution, a
new collection of his criticism in a lucid,
rigorous translation by Ainsley Morse
and Philip Redko) in his firsthand ex-
periences in the blossoming Soviet film
industry—another, more glamorous
round of side jobs. From 1926 to 1927
he worked at a Leningrad film studio,
Sevzapkino (later Lenfilm), and wrote
screenplays and delivered literary lec-
tures for the Eccentric Actor Factory,
an experimental filmmaking group that
also provided him with clowning and
boxing lessons.
His scripts for The Overcoat, based
loosely on Gogol’s stories, Club of the
Great Deed, about the Decembrists,
and Lieutenant Kizhe, a Gogolian sat-
ire set in the late eighteenth century,
were all made into films. (All three are
available on YouTube, though only the
last has English subtitles.) Lieutenant
Kizhe, from 1934, had a soundtrack
composed by Prokofiev, who later re-
fashioned the music into a gorgeous
suite of the same name. Tynianov also
converted Lieutenant Kizhe into a bit-
ing novella, newly translated into En-
glish by Nicolas Pasternak Slater.
As the political climate became in-
creasingly repressive, Tynianov found
it even harder to practice his trades,
numerous though they were. The For-
malist school—the subject of party ire
since 1924, when Commissar of Ed-
ucation Anatoly Lunacharsky called
them “stubborn relics” and Trotsky
denigrated Formalist theory as “super-
ficial and reactionary”—was effectively
dissolved. The problem wasn’t that the
Formalists had been criticizing com-
munism or the authorities; their sin
was a lack of political ideology. “For-
malism” became a slur used to deride
any art or theory that focused on aes-
thetic elements rather than relying on
Marxist-Leninist theory.
This has contributed—as Daria Khi-
trova writes in her introduction to Per-
manent Evolution—to the mistaken
idea that Russian Formalism analyzes
artistic works as abstract objects di-
vorced from historical, political, or
economic context, in the manner of the
New Criticism. In fact, any encounter
with Tynianov’s work—whether criti-
cism or fiction—shows that he viewed
historical, political, and economic
background as essential, though he did
not consider them adequate explana-
tions in themselves for what he termed
“literary evolution.”
Tynianov preferred the periphery to
the center, misfits to monuments. “I
like rough-edged, unpolished, unfin-
ished things,” he wrote in 1930. The
process of creation interested him more
than the result, and he believed that any
work had to be understood in relation
to the time it was written. As he put it
in his 1924 essay “Literary Fact,” “You
can’t judge a bullet by its color, taste
or smell: a bullet must be judged by its
dynamics.”
The Formalists were especially con-
cerned with genre: its boundaries, its
evolution, and its hybrid forms. In “Lit-
erary Fact,” Tynianov wrote:
When a genre is in the process of
disintegrating, it migrates from
the center to the periphery, and a
new phenomenon moves in from
the minutiae of literature, its back-
woods and lowlands, and takes the
previous genre’s place at the center.
The tumult of the early Soviet years
stimulated the rapid reconfiguration
of genres, with innovations such as the
“production novel” (heroic, inspiring
tales of industry) and “factography,”
in which artists visited industrial sites
and produced photomontages and
texts merging avant-garde artistic
techniques with agitprop. Life was art.
Viewed from an early Soviet perspec-
tive, the current vogue for autofiction is
comically old-fashioned.
Tynianov, Shklovsky, and Eikhen-
baum shrugged off the rigid standards
of academic writing, experimenting
instead with such hybrids as the epis-
tolary essay-novel (in Shklovsky’s Zoo,
or, Letters Not About Love), and a
journal form that included memoir,
poetry, theory, criticism, and literary
history (in Eikhenbaum’s My Annals).
Tynianov’s film scripts and histori-
cal novels blended literary-historical
research and fiction and doubled as a
means of elaborating his ideas about
literary evolution and parody.
In a letter to Shklovsky, Tynianov
called his historical novels “experi-
ments in scholarly fantasy.” He drew on
an encyclopedic knowledge of the eras
he depicted, but sought to move past
fact into something even more real.
In a draft introduction to his Pushkin
novel, Tynianov wrote, “What I want
13

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to do in this book is to get as near as
possible to artistic truth about the past,
which is always the goal of the histor-
ical novelist.” Elsewhere, he observed
that “literature differs from history not
by ‘invention’ but by a greater, more
intimate understanding of people and
events, by deeper concern about them.”
Tynianov’s historical fiction began
with Küchlya. It was hastily commis-
sioned by a publishing house as an edu-
cational novella for teenagers in honor
of the centenary of the 1825 Decembrist
uprising, which the Soviets commem-
orated as a crucial early step in Rus-
sian revolutionary politics. Tynianov
was given mere weeks to complete the
book, but it feels fully imagined. Much
later, Shklovsky observed that Küchlya
had “already lived in Tynianov’s imagi-
nation and he only flung open the door
to where it had been waiting for him.”
Available in English for the first time
thanks to Anna Kurkina Rush and
her cotranslator Christopher Rush,
Küchlya is based on Tynianov’s own
extensive research into Küchelbecker,
a relatively obscure figure who was
arrested for his involvement in the up-
rising. Küchelbecker had started writ-
ing poetry while still a student at the
St. Petersburg Imperial Lycée, where he
was a member of Pushkin’s circle, but
little of his work was published before
his arrest, and afterward he was banned
from publishing. (This edition includes
an appendix of his poems, translated
by Peter France.) A lively, often funny
tale offering an intimate, unfamiliar
perspective on a legendary period of
Russian history, Küchlya proved pop-
ular among readers and critics, and it
remains a much-loved minor classic.
“Küchlya,” which sounds like a man-
gled version of the Russian word for doll
(kukla), was Küchelbecker’s nickname
at the Imperial Lycée, a progressive in-
stitution founded by Alexander I in 1811
to educate his younger brothers, Nicho-
las and Michael, and to produce a new
generation of literate Russian aristocrats
who would make enlightened, compe-
tent civil servants and help lift Russia
out of its darkness. There was no corpo-
ral punishment, teachers acted in loco
parentis, and, crucially for the often im-
poverished aristocracy, tuition was free.
The prodigiously gifted and self-
confident Pushkin was already well on
his way to celebrity when he studied
at the lycée, a time he immortalized
in poetry as the most idyllic in his life.
Küchlya, on the other hand, was the
butt of all the jokes. He was gangly and
half deaf, and he stammered; his Rus-
sian was weak, as he had spent years
in a German-language school; and he
had a passionate, volatile temperament
that made him easy to tease. But he
was an idealist, possessed by fantasies
of revolution and martyrdom—unlike
Pushkin, who devoted most of his ex-
traliterary energy to seduction.
The lycée was short-lived, as was
the blossoming of rationalist educa-
tion in Russia. Alexander I turned re-
actionary, exiling his progressive state
secretary, Mikhail Speransky, the mas-
termind of the educational reform, to a
trivial post in Siberia and replacing him
with the draconian artillery general
Count Aleksey Arakcheyev. As would
happen again and again in Russian his-
tory, dashed hopes bred revolt—and in
this case, the revolt grew in the heart of
the lycée’s alumni body.
The Decembrist conspirators, several
of whom were Pushkin’s friends or for-
mer classmates, originally intended to
assassinate Alexander I on March 12,
1826, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his
reign, and then march to Kiev and Mos-
cow, gathering troops along the way, to
demand a constitutional monarchy and
the abolition of serfdom. They moved
forward prematurely because of the em-
peror’s unexpected death from typhus
in Taganrog, in southern Russia.
Alexander did not wish to be suc-
ceeded by his brother Constantine,
next in line for the throne; in Küchlya,
Tynianov depicts Constantine, then
Alexander Pushkin;
drawing by David Levine
lieutenant general of the Kingdom of
Poland, as a sadist responsible for sev-
eral casual murders. Alexander wrote a
testament making his brother Nicholas
his heir instead—but he didn’t make
the document public, in part because
Nicholas, who had inherited the family
obsession with military drills, was so
unpopular.
Constantine had accepted the plan,
but only in private. He was in Poland
when news of Alexander’s death ar-
rived, and thus unavailable to make a
statement of abdication in St. Peters-
burg. The Decembrist plotters raced
around the city, trying to foment rebel-
lion by spreading rumors that Nicholas
had mounted a coup against Constan-
tine. But they were disorganized and
divided; some chose to move forward
with the half-baked plan at any cost,
eager to give up their lives for freedom,
while others made themselves scarce.
Küchelbecker took a shot at Grand
Duke Michael, but, in Tynianov’s ac-
count, his powder was wet with snow.
The plot fi zzled and five leaders were
hanged, the others—among them sev-
eral former lycée students—impris-
oned or exiled.
Drawing on the new cinematic tech-
nique of montage, Tynianov offers a
thrilling, darkly funny account of the
botched uprising. He imagines the
streets and squares of St. Petersburg as
arteries in a human body: when the reg-
iments push through the vessels, the city
experiences “a rupture of the heart in
which genuine blood was spilled.” The
almost slapstick missteps that take place
during the uprising give added power to
the gruesome ending of the sequence:
Fan-shaped splatterings of blood on
the walls of the Senate. Corpses—
in heaps, singly, black and blood-
ied. Carts covered with matting,
dripping with blood. On the Neva
River—from St. Isaac’s Bridge to
the Academy of Arts—surrepti-
tious stirrings: corpses are being
lowered into the narrow ice-holes.
Sometimes groans are heard among
the corpses—the wounded being
pushed down into the narrow holes
together with the dead. . . .
Later that winter, when people
are hacking the ice, they will fi nd
human heads, arms, and legs in the
clear bluish ice floes.
Despite Küchlya’s origins, it is too
grim for children and too serious for
hackneyed celebration. Rebellion seems
an inglorious affair. Küchelbecker, the
holy fool of the embryonic Russian rev-
olution, is held in solitary confi nement
in a series of fortresses, nearly going
mad. He is eventually exiled to Siberia,
where he continues to write energeti-
cally. Death comes when he loses faith
in his talent, the only hope he had left to
sustain him.
Tynianov’s next full-length novel, The
Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, available in a
new translation by the Rushes and, co-
incidentally, in a recent translation by
the late Susan Causey,1 is far more dif-
ficult and experimental than Küchlya.
It takes up a subject that even the most
creative Soviet propagandist couldn’t
spin into an inspiring tale: Griboedov’s
diplomatic mission to Persia, which
ended in his murder by an angry mob
in Tehran in 1829. He has the distinc-
tion of being the only great Russian
writer to have died as a result of jihad.
Unlike the prolific Pushkin, Griboe-
dov earned his place in the Russian
literary canon with a single play in
verse, Woe from Wit, a satire of Rus-
sian high society that was censored
and never performed in Russia during
his lifetime, though it was widely cir-
culated and admired. Many of its lines
have passed into common usage, as
with Shakespeare in English.2 Griboe-
dov was a few years older than Push-
kin and Küchelbecker, and he didn’t
attend the lycée, but he shared their
penurious aristocratic background
and moved in similar circles. He is a
poignant secondary character in Küch-
lya: noble-hearted and despairing,
feeling trapped in a society that offers
him no real hope—a dark leitmotif of
Tynianov’s novels and a reflection of
his own predicament.
Vazir-Mukhtar begins with the fail-
ure of the Decembrists, suggesting that
this was the event that set in motion
the tragic course of the rest of Griboe-
dov’s abbreviated life. Though he was
in Georgia during the revolt, he had
sympathized with the conspirators.
His punishment, Tynianov suggests,
was to be sent to force a peace treaty
on Persia, so that Russia could send its
troops to Turkey to face a more formi-
dable and significant opponent. (Other
1
Edited by Vera Tsareva-Brauner (Look
MultiMedia, 2018).
2
For more on Griboedov, Woe from
Wit, and The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar,
see Gary Saul Morson, “Casting Pearls
Before Repetilovs,” The New York Re-
view, March 25, 2021.
The New York Review
Decembrists were sent to fight as low-
ranking soldiers.)
Decembrists and their enemies
haunt the novel. In one scene, Griboe-
dov finds himself sitting at dinner in
St. Petersburg with a man who was in
command of the artillery that helped
squash the revolt, a judge who inter-
rogated the rebels—including Griboe-
dov himself—and, worst of all, the
man who oversaw the botched hanging
(using rotten rope) of five conspira-
tors, three of whom were Griboedov’s
friends. They eat, drink, and smile as if
nothing had happened.
In Tehran, Griboedov pines for the
world of the theater, for the literary
circles he left behind in St. Petersburg.
But the boundary between his two pro-
fessions is often blurred. The diplomat,
who is “extraterritorial, detached,”
profits from the writer’s subtle powers
of observation, and Griboedov often
finds himself imagining his interactions
as scenes in a play. Sometimes he dis-
appears back into literature, overtaken
by trances of composition, while at
other moments he seems to vanish into
his official role as vazir- mukhtar, or
minister plenipotentiary. (Lieutenant
Kizhe, which Tynianov wrote at the
same time, deals with a similar idea of
the disappearance of the individual.)
He finds relief in unfamiliar customs,
which help him forget the unhappiness
and frustration he felt in Russia.
The novel is full of people who have
crossed geographic, religious, cultural,
and sexual boundaries, often against
their will. The most striking are the
novel’s many eunuchs, most of whom
are kidnapped Georgians or Arme-
nians. Griboedov’s murder results
from his decision to repatriate, accord-
ing to the terms of the new treaty, an
intellectual young Armenian who was
kidnapped by the Persians and made a
eunuch in the shah’s harem. The man
has sought refuge in the Russian Em-
bassy. When the mob, incited by clerics
who have declared Griboedov’s act a
violation of sharia law, approaches to
kill Griboedov, he hears the din as the
howling of an audience in a theater. His
head is put on a stake and his dismem-
bered corpse is thrown in a rubbish
heap along with those of his colleagues.
This is a story of political repression of
writers and rebels—of symbolic as well
as literal dismemberment—but it is also
a sharp-eyed account of the struggle of
empires to maximize their economic
clout through colonialism, a fascinat-
ing example of an anticolonial Soviet
historical novel. Tynianov’s critical ap-
proach is consonant with Soviet attacks
on imperialism—but it might also be a
veiled criticism of the new flavor of im-
perialism embodied by the USSR. (A
reference to the mass deportation of the
Tatars is chillingly prescient.)
Russia and Persia played tug- of-war
for a century over the port city of Der-
bent, which Russia needed in order to
profit from the Caucasus, until Persia
ceded it in an 1813 treaty that also gave
Russia control over Georgia and parts
of present- day Armenia and Azer-
baijan. England, meanwhile, stood
to benefit from these tensions, which
distracted Persia from English activi-
ties in India and helped prevent Persia
from developing textile, silk, and paper
factories or sugar refineries that would
compete with England’s. (An earlier
translation of Vazir-Mukhtar, Alec
Brown’s 1938 Death and Diplomacy in
Persia, was substantially abridged, in
March 10, 2022
part to remove the sections about En-
gland’s involvement in encouraging the
mob uprising against the Russian Em-
bassy.) As Tynianov puts it, “Persia in
itself was a tattered scrap of paper, but
that scrap of paper was a banknote.”
Contemporary reviewers denounced
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar’s dark
take on history, so alien to Bolshevik
forced optimism. But like Küchlya, it
was a popular success. This is a testa-
ment to the remarkable willingness of
readers during this period to engage
with modernist literature. In contrast
with the easier, more conventional
pleasures of Küchlya, Vazir-Mukhtar
is deliberately fragmented and often
enigmatic, recalling the style of An-
drei Bely’s 1913 masterpiece Peters-
burg, which is itself often compared to
Ulysses. Fascinating though it is, Vazir-
Mukhtar can be confusing, especially
for a reader who is unfamiliar with
the Russian or Persian background; it
incorporates many Persian words and
is packed with references to Russian
history and literature. A more exten-
sively annotated and carefully edited
scholarly edition would be desirable—
but the new translations are an excel-
lent start, a gift to those interested in
Tynianov, Griboedov, or Russian impe-
rial history.
With Pushkin, Tynianov reached the
pinnacle of his historical-biographical
fiction—despite the fact that he died
before he was able to finish the novel,
which was meant to extend from Push-
kin’s birth to his death but only reaches
his youth. Around 1928 Tynianov had
been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis;
the knowledge that his life would be
brief seems to have spurred him to even
greater productivity. The first two in-
stallments of Pushkin were published
serially in a literary journal between
1935 and 1937. By 1940, Tynianov could
hardly move. He and his family were
evacuated from besieged Leningrad in
1941, and by 1943 he was losing his sight
and falling in and out of consciousness.
That April he entered the hospital for
the final time; in August the unrevised
final section of Pushkin was published
in another literary journal.
Even then, Kurkina Rush writes, “the
very mention of the name of Pushkin
would revive him somewhat and cause
his lips to move,” as if he were trying
to recite the beloved poems. Having
survived the Russian Revolution, the
Russian Civil War, Stalin’s purges, and
the siege of Leningrad, Tynianov died
of complications from multiple sclero-
sis at the end of 1943. Two suicide notes
were found among his possessions, at
least one of them dating from the ter-
rifying year of 1937—the centenary of
Pushkin’s death. From a certain per-
spective, Tynianov was lucky to die of
natural causes; many of his peers were
not so fortunate.
Young Pushkin, as it is titled in a fine
2008 translation by the Rushes, was
conceived, according to Tynianov,
not as a fictionalised biography, but
as an epic on the origins, develop-
ment and death of our national
poet. I don’t distinguish in the novel
between the hero’s life and his work,
and I don’t distinguish between his
work and his country’s history.
Tynianov recreates the whole world—
food, fashion, games, decor, manners,
folklore, literary controversies and
fashions, social scandals, political de-
bates, and even natural phenomena
(a minor earthquake in Moscow, the
comet of 1811)—that fed Pushkin’s
writing and that of his contemporaries.
Anyone acquainted with Pushkin’s
oeuvre will delight in Tynianov’s sly, art-
ful way of introducing familiar themes—
for instance, observations about the
gendered use of French and Russian:
“Female guests spoke quickly, inter-
spersing their Russian with French
phrases like fine round peas.” Pushkin’s
volatile, frustrated parents, his beloved
nanny, his buffoonish poet uncle, and
his schoolmates become fully formed
literary characters, along with a whole
host of figures who would otherwise be
mere historical footnotes. In exquisite
detail, the novel captures the process
of a child’s slow discovery of his poetic
vocation (at age seven, “what he adored
most of all was poetry. Rhyme was a
kind of proof that the events described
had really happened”) and an adoles-
cent’s process of self-invention.
We are also treated to wonderful, id-
iosyncratic portraits of major political
and literary figures of the era. Alex-
ander I still feels guilty about his pas-
sive involvement in the assassination
of his father, Paul I, by his own offi-
cers; since then, his figure has sagged,
his vanity has demanded a corset, and
his face has “lost its character in con-
stant travelling like a world-famous
actor’s.” The aging Gavrila Derzhavin,
who once wrote odes to Catherine
the Great, recognizes Pushkin’s ge-
nius at first sight, or rather at first
hearing, during a performance at the
lycée:
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Proof of vaccination required for
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His eyesight had long since started
to betray him but nevertheless he
saw as if in a mist: the schoolboy’s
eyes were bright and burning. No-
body read poems like this: with lit-
tle swellings and lingerings at the
ends of lines, as in song. And as if
listening to Bach, he raised his old
and sinewy index finger and, obliv-
ious of everyone, just perceptibly
started to point the metre.
Tynianov’s interweaving of the do-
mestic and the historical has a strong
whiff of Tolstoy, but, as Kurkina Rush
notes in her introduction, without the
didacticism.
The reader might never guess that
the novel was written during a pe-
riod of life-threatening censorship, as
many of the author’s colleagues and
friends were arrested and killed, or
that it was the work of a dying man:
it exudes life, grace, and freedom,
even as it documents the beginning
of an era of renewed political repres-
sion after the brief period of enlight-
enment during Alexander I’s early
reign.
Tynianov’s fiction and scholarly work
went out of print until the political thaw
that began in 1956, with Khrushchev’s
denunciation of Stalin. Now that all
three of his novels are accessible in En-
glish, along with Permanent Evolution
and Lieutenant Kizhe (plus two other
historical novellas), it is to be hoped that
Tynianov will finally get the recognition
he deserves outside of Russia. As Daria
Khitrova writes in her introduction to
the essays, “A hundred years have al-
most passed; Tynianov has yet to be
discovered.” Q
Olivia Drake
15

Sibyl and Cyril:
Cutting Through Time
by Jenny Uglow.
London: Faber and Faber,
399 pp., £20.00
(to be published in the US
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
in December)
Modern Times:
British Prints, 1913–1939
an exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City,
November 1, 2021–January 9, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition by Jennifer
Farrell, with contributions by Gillian
Forrester and Rachel Mustalish.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
200 pp., $50.00
“A decent home, a temperate climate,
and a moderate nation. It has its dis-
advantages in art,” Nikolaus Pevsner
observed in 1955. The moderate nation
was England, the German-born Pevs-
ner’s adopted home, a place that had
fostered
no Michelangelo, no Titian, no Rem-
brandt, no Dürer or Grünewald.
There are no vast compositions in
the churches, and only bad if vast
compositions in the palaces, but
there are exquisite water-colours
and miniatures, things on a small
scale. . . . England also produces a
nice crop of amateur painters from
maiden aunts to Prime Ministers.
It is a snarky comment, but not without
admiration or, for that matter, a mea-
sure of truth.
Jenny Uglow has brilliantly illumi-
nated just this sort of Englishness in
biographies of Edward Lear, Thomas
Bewick, and William Hogarth—mas-
ters of the exquisite watercolor, the
miniature, and things framing human
folly on a small scale, in that order.
Her new book, Sybil and Cyril: Cutting
Through Time, moves into the twen-
tieth century, when Picasso reigned
as the master of pictorial disruption
in France and Dada was sowing wild
oats all over the Continent. Britain had
great modern artists as well—Henry
Moore for a start—but Pevsner was
not wrong in predicting that England
would not rank among the “principal
contributors” to painting in the first
half of the twentieth century: “The
reason is not far to seek. . . . Art in her
leaders is violent today, it breaks up
more than it yet re-assembles. England
dislikes violence.”
There had been a moment, before
the Great War, when Italian Futur-
ism and English jingoism teamed up
in the movement of Vorticism, with
its push toward abstraction and its call
for “Civil War among peaceful apes.”
In the face of actual carnage, however,
once-radical artists like C. R.W. Nev-
inson and Edward Wadsworth turned
back to the depiction of the observable
world, while others took the Futurist
fascination with speed and dynamism
and domesticated it.
Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power are
known (to those who know them at all)
for buoyant and brisk pictures of Tube
trains, sporting events, and kaleido-
scopic crowds, all made using a humble
16
Dynamism, Domesticated
Susan Tallman
Cyril Power: The Eight, 1930
medium—the linoleum cut—borrowed
from children’s classrooms. Sybil and
Cyril arrives subsequent to the Metro-
politan Museum’s superb recent exhi-
bition “Modern Times: British Prints,
1913–1939,” in which Andrews and
Power took a star turn as part of the
Grosvenor School of linocut.1
Everything in these prints is in mo-
tion: carnival rides swing elliptically
into the air, horses unfurl their legs like
ribbons, cars swell and surge. In Pow-
er’s Lifts (1930), cherry-red elevator
cars hurtle into the air, unconstrained
by pulleys or pistons. In Andrews’s
Speedway (1934), motorcycles bear
down ferociously. In Lill Tschudi’s
Tour de Suisse (1935), bicyclists bank
on a careening road. The prints seem
lit from within. In her catalog essay, the
conservator Rachel Mustalish disman-
1
“Modern Times” marked the muse-
um’s acquisition of more than seven
hundred British prints from the collec-
tion of Johanna and Leslie Garfield.
Nothing if not thorough, the Garfields
spent forty years locating finished
prints, studies, proofs, artists’ corre-
spondence, and toolkits. The Met’s
print study room, open to the public
by appointment, is now one of the most
important repositories of this material
on the planet. (I worked with the Gar-
fields on The Garfields Collect, a book
privately published in 2021.)
Osborne Samuel Gallery, London
the story Uglow tells. The other part
concerns a relationship that stubbornly
refuses discovery. Andrews and Power
met in 1920, when she was a twenty-
two-year-old schoolteacher with artis-
tic aspirations and he was pushing fifty,
a not overly successful architect who
had written the three-volume History
of English Medieval Architecture, il-
lustrated with his own assiduous draw-
ings. After working through the war
at an airfield in Kent, he had rejoined
his wife and four children in her home-
town of Bury St. Edmunds.
Andrews had also grown up in Bury
(the two families were loosely related)
and had returned there from Bristol,
where she had worked as a welder,
building planes for the military. She
was not a femme fatale (“all very
plain,” a woman who knew the family
described them, “and all eccentric”),
but Uglow paints her as a force of na-
ture, with “her floppy fringe and flash-
ing blue-green eyes, her rapid walk
and her fierce immersion in her art.”
She and Power bonded over plein air
sketching of local views. His infatua-
tion, Uglow suggests, was “a post-war
crisis as much as a mid-life crisis,” a
sudden need to live life to the fullest
in a precarious universe. In any case,
when she moved to London to enroll in
art school, he followed.
For the next twenty years Andrews
and Power would spend most of their
time together, though he kept separate
rooms. Her family seems to have ac-
cepted the situation with no fuss, and
his to endure it with almost baffling
equanimity. Neither Power nor An-
drews seems to have spared his wife
and children much thought, and Uglow
notes his cavalier willingness to move
them around “like chess pieces.” For fi-
nancial reasons his son Toby had had to
forgo Cambridge when his father left;
tles The Eight (1930)—Power’s picture then, having settled into an amenable
of rowers bent in unison like parts of situation in a bank, he found himself
a pinnate leaf—to show how this effect suddenly transferred—“a result of a
was accomplished. Gillian Forrester request from my father to the bank”—
and the show’s curator, Jennifer Far- and told to rent a house and look after
rell, provide background about the po- his mother, sister, and two brothers.
litical and economic crises amid which While Toby noted his father’s “failure
the artists were working, but such trou- to be an adequate Provider, and his
bles are all but invisible in the prints somewhat ‘Gauguinesque’ behaviour,”
themselves. They effervesce with com- neither he nor his mother forced a per-
mon pleasures in a way that would not manent rupture.
be seen again until Pop Art. Friends treated Andrews and Power
as a couple, but the exact terms of that
coupledom remain elusive, since their
The Eight, along with Bringing in the mutual correspondence has not sur-
Boat (1933), Andrews’s image of oars- vived. Power was a convert to Cathol-
men lifting their scull from the water, icism, which would have complicated
was the prompt for Uglow’s book: “I any idea of divorce—but were they
have known them all my life—in my even that kind of couple? Andrews’s
father’s study, then my mother’s hall, father had decamped permanently to
blasted by sunshine, and finally on the Canada when she was a child, so per-
stairs in my own home.” Her father had haps Power—twenty-six years older,
rowed at Oxford, and the prints were a knowledgeable, and encouraging—
wedding gift: “I walked past them with- filled a father-shaped void. In the ab-
out a thought for years, hardly even sence of any intimate account of their
reading the signatures.” She was not emotional, never mind physical, inter-
alone. After a flurry of popularity in action, it’s all guesswork. And Uglow is
the Thirties, when linocut exhibitions too principled a biographer to force an
crisscrossed the globe, the prints all but interpretation.
disappeared from public view. In the Instead she traces the surface activity
light of coming war and its aftermath, of their lives through appointment dia-
they came to seem cute but insubstan- ries and scrapbooks: there was theater
tial, the kinds of things, a friend once (lots of Shakespeare), music, lectures,
told me, you hang in the kitchen. exhibitions, and a surprising amount of
How this art came to be, and how jam making. (“Very hot. 12 lbs Morello
it came to be forgotten, is one part of [sour cherries] . . . prints of Tennis,”
The New York Review
reads a typical diary entry from July
1933.) Power picked up occasional ar-
chitectural work and checked in on his
family every couple of months. In the
meantime he and Andrews drew to-
gether, painted together, “printed each
other’s work, used each other’s sketch-
books.” On the beautifully designed
cover of the UK edition of Sybil and
Cyril, leaping horses from one of her
prints meld seamlessly with an escala-
tor from one of his.
To earn money, they began making
etchings in the precise yet atmospheric
manner popularized by Whistler in the
1850s and still a marketable staple of
the method was too time-intensive to
be both affordable for workers and
remunerative for artists. He was right,
however, that linoleum’s material prop-
erties could galvanize visual invention.
In the vast interior of Queen’s Hall
(later destroyed in the Blitz) Andrews
recalled “the whole place crammed
with people—tremendous swirling
patterns, with rows of lights, a huge
storey swirling up to the next.” It was
an inspiration and also a frustration:
“I’d been trying to get it in paint and
couldn’t. And then along came lin-
ocuts.” The process had no room for
incidental particularity, so she stripped
Andrews’s rondel of geometric heads
and hats, was hailed as “the very soul
of modern London.” Of Power’s Tube
Staircase (1929), in which the daunting
spiral at the Russell Square station curls
in on itself like a living thing, the Sunday
Times wrote, “It is extremely decorative,
and at the same time an illuminating
and intimate study of the beauty to be
found in an aspect of hyper-modernity.”
“Decorative” was not yet a term of
condescension, not yet the foil of high-
brow modernism. In Britain, William
Morris’s ideal of integrating art and
everyday life still held sway: Blooms-
bury artists had made lyrical, painterly
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%
middle-class interiors in the 1920s. Trav- the building of its painted cherubs, gilt housewares at the Omega Workshops,

50
eling in Britain and sometimes while Vorticists at the Rebel
New York

VE
Sybil Andrews/Glenbow Museum, Calgary
abroad, they sought out ancient Art Centre did so in an edgier,

buildings and modern wharfs
or bridges that would render re-
warding plays of smudgy shadow
and overexposed whites.
B ut their interest in art was
eclectic: they admired Van
Gogh, Cézanne, and Han Dy-
nasty reliefs; they bought Afri-
can fabrics and a carved door
from Nigeria, and sketched
“stitching techniques and pat-
terns from Turkey, Syria, Pal-
estine, Mesopotamia.” The
jejune manifesto they wrote in
1924 lauds “the titanic, savage,
satanic strength” of industry,
but also “the Eternal Spiritual
Reality behind material things
that no camera can give.” While
their plea for art as a spiritual
and reforming force echoes
Ruskin, their assertion that
“the Primitive is always Modern
and Eternal” was entirely of its
moment.
When their friend Iain Mac-
Nab founded the Grosvenor
School of Modern Art with
anti-academic ideas about self-
discovery and expression, An-
drews came on board as school
secretary and Power agreed to
teach architectural history. To-
gether they signed up for the
weekly class in linoleum block
printing taught by Claude
Flight.
Flight was something of a
legend, a former engineer and
beekeeper who had turned
to art and spent his summers
in a cave. (“A very attractive
cave apparently,” wrote the
artist Dorrit Black, “but still
a cave.”) He had sympathized
with Futurism’s industrial
vigor, though not its bellicosity.
Artists should, he felt, respond to the
“hustle” and “restlessness” of modern
life, but he evoked these qualities in
compositions that were fluid and re-
solved rather than jangly and anxious.
The sinuous line of his double-decker
buses in Speed (1922) is closer to Art
Nouveau than Vorticism.
For Flight, linoleum was not just a
medium but a mission. Inexpensive and
industrial, it had the potential to bring
artists “nearer to the spirit of their age”
and to democratize the making of art.
(For gouging the surface, he recom-
mended an umbrella rib.) Producing
prints that were modest in size (for the
average home) and cost (for the aver-
age buyer), lino would, he believed, fi-
nally bring modern art to the masses.
He was wrong about the economics—
Sybil Andrews: Hyde Park, 1931
ornament, and fountain of goldfish. In
Concert Hall (1929), the big balconies
turn like cogs looming over an orderly
swarm of silhouetted heads—the thrill
of the crowd and the hush of anticipa-
tion hang suspended in blue shadow
and yellow light.
For Power also, Uglow writes, Flight’s
teaching brought out “technical daring
that one would never have expected
from his watercolours a few years be-
fore.” Nor indeed from either artist’s
work in other media, earlier or later:
their drypoints continued to recall the
nineteenth century; the oil paintings
and monotypes reproduced in Uglow’s
book are competent but unremarkable.
Shown in the “First Exhibition of
British Lino-cuts” at the Redfern Gal-
lery in London, Straphangers (1929),
SA
more aggressive mode. Flight
and Edith Lawrence ran a de-
Review
sign business that applied their
art to “everything from murals
Calendar
to pyjamas,” Uglow notes. The
first gallery to show Picasso and
Matisse in London was located
in Heal’s furniture store. Uglow
cites a 1926 article in Colour
magazine casting the distinction
between fine and applied art as
mollycoddling: “This metaphys-
ical business can be overdone.
Art is made of sterner stuff, of
more substantial matter. It can 2022 David Levine Calendar
and does exist in lower regions,
This handsomely printed calendar
where common mortals dwell
and earn their living.” includes 13 David Levine caricatures
Under the visionary direction drawn exclusively for the Review. The
of Frank Pick, the Tube had be- 12½" x 9½" wall format with large
come the nation’s most accessi- date blocks makes it ideal for record-
ble venue for new art: Edward ing notes and appointments.
McKnight Kauffer produced
posters of such remarkable ty- Shipping is FREE within the US!
pographic and pictorial inven- At just $14.95 $7.48 each, why
tion as to beggar the distinction not order one for yourself and
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call (646) 215-2500
well as the composite persona
of “Andrew Power” (though
Andrews claimed that Power’s
contribution was limited to se-
curing the commissions).
Between-the-wars has become
a popular trope of film and tele-
vision—cloche hats and peo-
ple huddled before enormous
radios—but Uglow gives us
something else: thinking people
navigating a world that was not
just different from our own but
also different from the one that
nostalgia had imposed on them.
THE WORLD OF JAMES JOYCE:
Sybil and Cyril may have been
1,000-PIECE PUZZLE
adventurous and “modern,” but
This detailed illustration of Joyce’s Dublin is
they spent as much time looking
packed with real people and fictional char-
backward as looking forward.
acters to seek and find. While working on
The same year their pictures were
the puzzle you travel back to 16 June 1904
hailed as “the very soul of modern Lon-
and join Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan
don,” Andrews acquired her mother’s
in their Martello tower, Blazes Boylan jingling
fifteenth-century cottage in the medie-
along in his carriage, Molly Bloom in her cham-
val village of Woolpit, near Bury. With
ber and a host of other iconic Dubliners.
her brother, a free spirit who spent
Whether you’ve got a well-thumbed copy of
much of his time living in a caravan,
Finnegans Wake or you’ve never read a word
they dug into local legends and painted
of Joyce, you’ll delight in following Bloom
pseudo-medieval murals on the walls.
on his odyssey through ‘dear dirty Dublin.’
She turned to rural subjects for her
Also included is a fold-out poster with an
linocuts, but if the people still look like
image of the completed puzzle; on the opposite
they were constructed from tangrams,
side is a glossary of various scenes within the
all hard edges and sharp angles, they
puzzle.
2
#05-WJJ73 • 19" x 27" • $19.99
“Underground Modernist: E. McKnight
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New York City, until April 10.

March 10, 2022 17

are busy with tasks that can be seen in
Brueghel—plowing with horses, carry-
ing baskets to market. With its broken
color softening the furrowed earth and
feathery trees, Fall of the Leaf (1934)
suggests a mash-up of the Romantic vi-
sionary Samuel Palmer and the Futur-
ist Giacomo Balla.
Uglow devotes a chapter to Andrews
and Power’s engagement with early
music. They purchased recorders and
a viola da gamba; their friends brought
lutes and they played together at par-
ties. Early music could be seen as an
extension of modernist impulses—the
bombast of full orchestras suddenly
feeling like the bombazine of Victo-
rian clothing, insufferable in its weight.
The clarity of parts and instruments
seemed, paradoxically, “the sound
of their own age,” Uglow writes, and
“the paring down and preoccupation
with pattern seemed akin to their own
craft.” But early music also served
atavistic and nativist impulses, and
“gained a nostalgic nationalist tone, a
distinct form of ‘Englishness.’”
Power sought out ancient spiritual
wisdom, copying “Hindu designs of
Shiva, ideographs of Peruvian sym-
bolism, the stepped, zig-zag symbol
of fecundity from Central Asia and
figures from Jain rock statues.” His
Matriarchy (1931) is an Escher-like tes-
sellation of interlocking female figures
borrowed from any number of cultures.
And then there was Christianity. An-
drews was drawn to Christian Science
and its belief in the material world as
an illusion overlaying spiritual reality;
Power continued to find meaning and
purpose in Catholicism. In their exhibi-
tions, “a print of the Crucifixion might
appear next to one of show-jumping
or a Tube station or umbrellas in
a gale.”
In 1937 Andrews sold her cottage
in Woolpit and bought one in the New
Forest, near Southampton, where there
was room to expand. (Claimed as a
royal hunting ground by William the
Conqueror, the New Forest included
villages and pasture as well as wood-
land.) The popularity of linocuts was
fading as a new war loomed. Power had
taken a full-time architectural job with
the London County Council but came
to the cottage on weekends, building
an extension to the house and tend-
ing the garden. When the war started
in earnest, Andrews again chose to do
her part, training as a boat builder and
going to work making torpedo boats.
Uglow tells us that the name of Wal-
ter Morgan, a widowed carpenter four
years her senior, first appears in her
diary in August 1943. By November
they were married: “In the week after
her wedding she took two days off,
sorting out all Power’s things. Then she
sent them off, as fast as she could.”
Perhaps she was fed up. In the end,
Power comes across as a rather hapless
figure, in thrall to his Mr. Toad–like en-
thusiasms but deficient in mettle. In her
old age and perhaps in an ungenerous
mood, Andrews wrote, “In some way I
gave him a sense of purpose & security
which he lacked,” adding, “He followed
me, not vice versa.”
Now seventy, he returned to his wife,
who apparently took him back “with-
out a murmur.” He painted flowers,
restored churches damaged in the war,
and settled into grandparenthood, but
made no more prints. He and Andrews
stayed in touch, and she continued con-
tact with his children and grandchil-
18
dren after his death in 1951. By that dead trees and cratered earth, those
time she and her husband had immi- in Power’s Air Raid (1935) swoop
grated to Canada and were living in a and roll. They may be falling to their
small town on Vancouver Island, where demise, but the arabesque of curved
she gave art classes in her studio and wings and smoke trails would not
continued to make linocuts. Her style be out of place on a children’s duvet
did not change much but she added cover. Weirdest of all are the religious
new subjects—forests, First Nations prints—in Andrews’s Golgotha (1931)
dancers, the loggers in her local café, the crosses erupt like fireworks. Pow-
“so beautifully Canada,” she wrote, “in er’s 1931 depiction of the murder of
all those plaid shirts.” She had brought Thomas à Becket is a jewellike plea-
her old linoleum blocks from England. sure to behold, a romp with swinging
(The editions were usually limited to swords and a gleaming tonsure that
fifty or sixty impressions each, but the holds the center.
impressions were often only printed as The very things that make their li-
need arose—a sale or an exhibition.) nocuts so captivating—the transfor-
She was able to print more, but no one mation of specificity to pattern, the
showed much interest. brilliant color, the elliptical motion
splayed across the flat surface—also
limited their range. They could do won-
Why were these works so ignored? ders with people in the aggregate, the
Jennifer Farrell mentions the medi- coordinated movements of teams and
um’s links to craft and decoration and crowds, but intimacy escaped them.
its association with children’s art, and “The greater the abstract convention
the fact that so many of the artists were the greater is the artistic creation!”
women certainly did not help. Ad- they pronounced in their 1924 mani-
ditionally, small works on paper are festo, but to feel the pain of martyrdom
easy to overlook, sleeping unseen in one needs to perceive a real, not ab-
drawers and boxes. But it is also true stracted, body.
that Grosvenor School prints were a Then, in the Seventies, eyes began to
mismatch with the direction art took, change. Pop Art had made bright color
whether the freighted emotion and am- and hard edges acceptable once again,
bition of Abstract Expressionism or the the feminist critique had chipped away
quieter desperation of postwar British at the prejudice against pattern (and
art (a time, as the artist Joe Tilson put women themselves), and the “print
it, of “tiny, brown, sad paintings”). An- renaissance” made works on paper
drews and Power had no language to exciting. In London, the gallerist Mi-
approach the Holocaust or the prospect chael Parkin took an interest in the
of nuclear Armageddon. Grosvenor School, and he sought out
Though not everything in their work Andrews in Canada. A few years later,
is cheery, their pictures never reach Gordon Samuel found prints by Power
into real darkness. Power’s Escalator and Flight in storage drawers at the
(1929), with its lone traveler facing off Redfern Gallery and began organizing
against an esophageal ascending stair, exhibitions. In New York, Mary Ryan
pulses with film-noir foreboding, but it showed Andrews and Lill Tschudi in
is a curiously bright and colorful noir. her new gallery. The British Museum’s
And while the biplanes in Nevinson’s 1990 exhibition “Avant-Garde British
desolate 1918 etching That Cursèd Printmaking, 1914–1960” established
Wood hover like pestilential flies above the Grosvenor School as a distinct
NOT FOR EVERYBODY
Look where I reach
is only some can come—
not even plenty some.
Just few. Me, you
and who we say.
Ask any market woman
how tomato stay
when every Quaco
and him cousin
touch-touch it up.
How I did fool!
One mango
to one mouth
me say one time.
How I could
think good
fruit could be
for everybody?
—Pamela Mordecai
group, 3 and Stephen Coppel’s book
Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude
Flight and the Grosvenor School (1995)
gave readers a definitive reference.4
Andrews, who died in 1992, lived
long enough to enjoy this rediscovery,
though not all the attention was wel-
come. In 1986 she wrote Parkin, “It has
come to my knowledge that there is a
suggestion going round that Power and
I were lovers. Would you please deny
that absolutely and utterly.” To Samuel
she insisted, “Power was a good friend
but he had no studio of his own & never
could afford one so he worked in my
studio. The Truth is as simple as that.”
Truth, Uglow points out, “is rarely
so simple,” but she does not argue the
point. “Who can deny her the right to
possess the facts of her own life? There
are many kinds of couples. If this story
is, in the end, a love story, it may not be
the kind we expect.”
In his lectures on “the Englishness
of English art,” Pevsner considered
creations ranging from Celtic metal-
work to Salisbury Cathedral and Wil-
liam Blake, and concluded that “the
most significant single formal quality in
English art” was its lack of interest in
the human body. The genius of English
gothic lay in its flat, “unfleshly” repeti-
tion, in contrast to the “swelling rotun-
dity” of the French. And his description
of English medieval painting might
have been written about Power’s and
Andrews’s linocuts: “a watchful inter-
est in the life of line . . . —zigzag at first,
undulating later; violent at first, tender
later—but always line, not body.”
Uglow’s book follows suit: she gives
us the patterns of daily life, intricate
and unexpected, along with occa-
sional forceful ruptures, but without
the “swelling rotundity” of corporeal
existence. If it is a romance, it is a ro-
mance without bodies—neither the
sweaty mess of bodies in contact nor
the yearning of bodies kept apart. In
her introduction Uglow explains:
All the letters that they wrote to
each other over the years have dis-
appeared, burnt, destroyed, lost. I
have a vision of smoke rising from
braziers in back gardens, scorched
pages fluttering and curling, hand-
writing vanishing into air.
It is a very Sybil-and-Cyril image—the
energy, the curvature, the élan—but
with a critical addition: loss.
Andrews and Power were, in Pevs-
ner’s terms, perfectly English. They
were not Michelangelo or Titian. The
framework of their art could not stretch
to encompass the full breadth of human
experience. But step for a moment into
Andrews’s magical Hyde Park (1931),
where fractals of people and clothing
and greenery are suspended in sun-
shine; or hang above Power’s boat,
the oars in perfect synchronicity, even
without a coxswain (whose presence
would have spoiled the symmetry).
It is enough. Q
3
Grosvenor School prints were also
shown in 2019 at the expansive exhibi-
tion “Cutting Edge: Modernist British
Printmaking,” Dulwich Picture Gal-
lery, London.
4
In conjunction with Print Month 2021,
the International Fine Print Dealers
Association hosted a series of online
discussions about Grosvenor School
prints, their making and their market,
all of which can be viewed on YouTube.
The New York Review
 Covid’s Economic Mutations
Shutdown:
How Covid Shook
the World’s Economy
by Adam Tooze.
Viking, 354 pp., $28.00
Geopolitics for the End Time:
From the Pandemic to
the Climate Crisis
by Bruno Maçães.
London: Hurst, 222 pp., £18.99
The coronavirus has made fools of us
all. Show me a commentator who de-
nies any seriously bad calls over the
past two years—predictions that look
embarrassingly off in retrospect—and
I’ll show you someone who is delu-
sional, dishonest, or both.
This has obviously been true for the
epidemiology; remember when Covid-19
was going to be a serious problem only in
densely populated metropolitan areas?
It has also been true for the economics,
where there have been huge surprises
both good and bad. In April 2020, when
the US unemployment rate shot up to
almost 15 percent, few would have ex-
pected to see it back below 4 percent by
the end of 2021. On the other hand, I
don’t know of anyone who predicted
the supply- chain crisis that has, among
other things, caused inflation to soar,
especially but not only in the United
States.
It’s difficult, and arguably foolhardy,
to write at length about events that are
both fast-moving and twisty. You can
see this very clearly in Adam Tooze’s
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the
World’s Economy, a book completed
in early 2021 and published in Septem-
ber. It displays all of Tooze’s virtues as
a writer and analyst; it’s full of valuable
insights and telling details, and may
well be the best thing to read if you
want to know what happened in 2020.
Yet that was then, and this is later, and
Tooze’s book already seems hugely
dated, overtaken by events.
Tooze has established a stellar rep-
utation by combining a solid grasp of
economics and quantitative methods
with the skills of a serious, primary-
source historian. His 2006 book, The
Wages of Destruction, about the Nazi
war economy and how it fell apart, shed
a completely new light on World War
II; I, at least, will never think about
that war the same way. His 2018 book,
Crashed, about the 2008 financial crisis
and its aftermath, was less revelatory
to those of us who had been immersed
in those events, but it added many new
insights into both the nuts and bolts
of economic crisis and the sausage-
making of economic policy.
Those books were written long after
the storms they described had passed.
Shutdown, by contrast, was written
in what now looks like the eye of the
storm. It more or less ends with Joe
Biden’s inauguration; yet more Amer-
icans have died of Covid-19 since In-
auguration Day than before, and it’s
still very much up in the air whether
economic management during the pan-
demic will ultimately be viewed as a
success story or a huge failure.
I understand, I think, why Tooze
chose to rush this book out, and it
wasn’t wasted effort. As I said, it may
be the best source for understanding
March 10, 2022
Paul Krugman
Gabriel Orozco: Covid 30.7.20, 2020
what happened to the world economy
in Year One of the pandemic. But so
much has happened since that we will
surely need another Tooze or Tooze-
like book a few years from now, re-
visiting the story once we know how
it actually turned out. Maybe title it
Snarled?
I t’s true that some stages in the his-
tory of Covid-19 economics are clearly
behind us, and Tooze does his usual
excellent job of conveying what hap-
pened, including important stories that
I suspect even generally well-informed
people missed. For example, in March
2020, amid vast uncertainty over the
economic impact of the coronavirus,
world markets briefly experienced a
meltdown worse than the one that fol-
lowed the implosion of Lehman Broth-
ers in 2008. In that year investors fled
anything remotely risky and plunged
into the perceived safety of US govern-
ment debt. In 2020, even the market
for US Treasuries virtually shut down,
with buyers unwilling to accept any-
thing but cash.
Since the world financial system es-
sentially runs on Treasuries, this could
have led to a collapse of global com-
merce. But as Tooze documents, the
Federal Reserve responded by setting
up a sort of wall of money, buying ev-
erything from government bonds to
corporate debt. And the financial crisis
suddenly faded away.
Tooze also documents the huge surge
in public spending that took place in
early 2020 in both the United States
and Europe, although I was a bit dis-
appointed that he didn’t offer much
new insight into the political aspects
Gabriel Orozco/Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
lenge to our understanding. True, some
economists warned that large govern-
ment spending would lead to inflation,
and inflation duly arrived. But the way
this happened didn’t match anyone’s
predictions.
Normally, we expect inflation to
materialize when the economy “over-
heats”—when high spending pushes
output and employment above sustain-
able levels. As I write this, however,
real GDP in the United States is only
roughly back to its prepandemic trend,
while employment is still below trend.
Other advanced economies like the
UK haven’t done even that well. Yet in-
flation has shot up to levels not seen in
decades, and wages are rising rapidly.
What happened?
We’re not completely in the dark;
at this point everyone knows about
the problems of overstretched supply
chains and the Great Resignation of
workers unwilling or unable to return
to the workforce. But few saw those
problems coming. For example, surely
the great majority of economists, to the
extent that they thought about the issue
at all, believed that global logistics
were far more resilient than they have
turned out to be.
And on the really crucial question
of policy response, everything hinges
on whether this inflation is becoming
“entrenched,” so that it will continue
even once pandemic disruptions fade
away. Unfortunately, it will be months
or even years before we know the
answer.
of this. Why, for example, did US Re-
publicans go along with a plan that in
major respects looked as if it had been O f course, you can’t exactly blame a
devised by Democrats? (A Democratic book written midway through a crisis
senator, Ron Wyden, came up with the for failing to address issues that didn’t
$600-per-week unemployment supple- become salient until the second half.
ment, for instance.) My guess is that But Tooze does draw one overarching
Republicans simply lacked alternative lesson from the pandemic—a lesson
ideas, that it was something like the old laid out even more starkly and crudely
joke from Yes Minister—“We must do in Bruno Maçães’s Geopolitics for the
something. This is something. There- End Time: From the Pandemic to the
fore we must do it.” In any case, the Climate Crisis. This is that societies
radicalism of the US response remains with top- down, centralized social con-
something of a mystery. And while trol—societies like China—are better
Tooze presents striking data on Euro- able to cope when confronted with a
pean responses, he doesn’t tell us why, crisis like Covid-19 than Western-style
exactly, the famously austerity-minded liberal social orders. That’s a conclu-
Germans ended up offering more sion that would be disturbing if true.
money in grants and loan guarantees as But it hasn’t aged well.
a share of GDP than anyone else. Tooze lays out this theme early, in
Tooze’s early draft of history suffers a chapter titled “Wuhan, Not Cher-
from its earliness in at least two im- nobyl.” Chernobyl, he suggests, was
portant ways. First, while the shocks of deeply discrediting for the Soviet
2020 were amazing and unprecedented, Union, where lack of accountability
the economic story of the pandemic’s and the unwillingness of an authori-
first year didn’t actually present much tarian government to accept awkward
of a puzzle or, as it turned out, much facts contributed to disaster. But faced
of a challenge to economic thinking. with a pandemic, China “turned the
The need to slow the virus’s rate of tables on its foreign critics,” because
transmission, to “flatten the curve” to it was able and willing to do whatever
avoid overwhelming health systems, it took to contain the coronavirus’s
forced governments to put their econ- spread, enforcing harsh lockdowns in
omies into the equivalent of medically a way few Western countries could or
induced comas; they for the most part would. Maçães goes further, arguing
prevented extreme financial hardship, that China’s all-in pandemic response
in effect keeping those economies on demonstrated that it is “now ahead of
life support by providing generous aid. the West on many dimensions of what
All of this wasn’t like anything we’d constitutes a modern society.”
seen before, but it worked out pretty By early 2022, two factors have
much the way conventional economic made these conclusions look dubious.
models would have predicted. On one side, the miraculously fast de-
By contrast, economic events since velopment of effective vaccines has
early 2021—that is, since the end of made harsh social control seem less es-
Tooze’s story—have posed a huge chal- sential to pandemic response. China,
19

MEMORIES OF
STAROBIELSK
ESSAYS BETWEEN
ART AND HISTORY
Józef Czapski
Introduction by
Irena Grudzińska Gross
Edited and translated from the
Polish by Alissa Valles
Paperback • $17.95
On sale March 1st
VIRTUAL EVENT
Thursday, March 3rd, 7:30pm ET
Alissa Valles, Irena Grudzińska Gross,
Anka Muhlstein, and Eric Karpeles
discuss the work of Józef Czapski
Hosted by Community Bookstore
Register at communitybookstore.net
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
RUMI’S GOLD
A new translation from the Farsi
by Haleh Liza Gafori
Paperback • $14.95
On sale March 8th
Gold is the March 2022 selection of
the NYRB Classics Book Club.
“I have been longing for these transla-
tions of Rumi’s poems my whole life.
Haleh Liza Gafori has taken Rumi’s
original Farsi text and unleashed its
fire. My soul soars reading each one.
Sublime, clean, crisp, deep, luxurious,
funny, soft, and kind, these transla-
tions are a great and graceful gift.”
—Elizabeth Lesser,
co-founder of Omega Institute
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
20
A new translation of the work of Józef
Czapski, painter, writer, and an eyewitness
to the turbulent history of the 20th century
Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the
Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in Sep-
tember 1939, Józef Czapski was one of a very
small number to survive.
Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed
men, some with the detail of a finished portrait,
others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with
respect, as Czapski describes their struggle to
remain human under hopeless circumstances.
Essays on art, history, and literature complement
the memoir, showing Czapski’s lifelong engage-
ment with Russian culture. The short pieces on
painting that he wrote while on a train traveling
from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s
strategic base in Central Asia stand among his
most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.
“What distinguishes Memories of Starobielsk and
deepens our understanding of the events Czapski
lived through is the vision he imparts of a Europe
that the Soviets (and the Nazis) had attempted
to destroy. . . . Memories of Starobielsk shows
the victims not as soldiers but as doctors, pro-
fessors, engineers, writers, translators—people
of education and character, products of a civili-
zation that Stalinism could not accommodate.”
—Philip Ó Ceallaigh, Los Angeles Review of Books
ALSO AVAILABLE
INHUMAN LAND: SEARCHING
FOR THE TRUTH IN SOVIET
RUSSIA, 1941-1942
by Józef Czapski
LOST TIME: LECTURES ON
PROUST IN A SOVIET PRISON
CAMP by Józef Czapski
ALMOST NOTHING: THE 20 TH-
CENTURY ART AND LIFE OF
JÓZEF CZAPSKI by Eric Karpeles
“Haleh Liza Gafori’s energetic translation
highlights the timelessness of Rumi’s work,
delivering unforgettable phrases. Rumi’s
introspective nature. . . cosmic vision. . . and
deeply contemplative yet accessible poems star
in this worthy translation.” —Publishers Weekly
Rumi’s poems were meant to induce a sense
of ecstatic illumination and liberation in his
audience, bringing its members to a condition
of serenity, compassion, and oneness with the
divine. They remain masterpieces of world lit-
erature to which readers in many languages
continually return for inspiration and succor, as
well as aesthetic delight. This new translation
preserves the intelligence and the drama of the
poems, which are as full of individual character
as they are of visionary wisdom.
“Haleh Liza Gatori’s ecstatic and piercing trans-
lation has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into
the quick of our present. Each poem is a divine
invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.”
—V (formerly Eve Ensler)
IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL EVENTS TO
CELEBRATE THE PUBLICATION OF GOLD
Tuesday, March 15th, 7pm (In person)
Book launch with Haleh Liza Gafori
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, NYC • bowerypoetry.com
Wednesday March 19th, 1pm ET (Virtual)
Ecstatic Embodiment: Rumi and Radical
American Poetics With Haleh Liza Gafori,
Holly Melgard, and Leonard Schwartz
Hosted by The Brooklyn Rail’s New Social
Environment Series • brooklynrail.org
Wednesday, March 23rd, 7pm (Virtual)
With Haleh Liza Gafori and Swarthmore College
professors Sibelan Forrester and Steven Hopkins
Hosted by Main Point Books, Wayne PA
mainpointbooks.com
Thursday, March 31st, 8pm (In person)
A musical performance with Haleh Liza Gafori
Wild Birds
951 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY • wildbirdsbk.com
however, has a problem on the vac-
cine front: its domestically developed
and produced vaccines appear to
be less effective than their Western
counterparts.
Yet China—unlike, say, France,
which abandoned its Sanofi vaccine
after shots from Pfizer and Moderna
proved more successful—is still push-
ing its own vaccines. At one level this
isn’t surprising: refusing to admit that
your homegrown technology appears
to be less effective than foreign alterna-
tives is exactly the kind of thing you’d
expect from an authoritarian, nation-
alist regime that tries to suppress po-
litically damaging information. But it
suggests that China’s Covid response is
turning out to involve more Chernobyl
syndrome than the first year might
have revealed.
Second, the evolution of the virus it-
self seems to be making China’s social-
control approach less sustainable. The
Omicron variant appears at the time
of writing to be less dangerous than
earlier strains, especially for the fully
vaccinated, but far more transmissible.
The problem for China is that the gov-
ernment is still pursuing a zero- Covid
policy—locking down whole cities at
the first sign of new cases—at a time
when new cases keep popping up even
though people have been taking many
precautions. As a result, China’s econ-
omy and society are now suffering a
steady drumbeat of disruption, while
highly vaccinated Western nations are
limping back toward something like
normal life.
Which is not to say that the West is
doing well. Indeed, there seems to be a
recurrent rhythm in which nations that
seem to have been doing a good job at
limiting the damage from Covid-19
suddenly turn into problem cases.
For example, in September Denmark,
with its high vaccination rate, lifted
social restrictions; it appeared to be
one country that, thanks to good man-
agement and public trust, had dealt
effectively with the pandemic. But so-
cial restrictions came back as the na-
tion experienced a huge surge in new
cases.
And then there’s the United States,
in which the coronavirus has brought
out a whole new range of pathologies
going far beyond the purely medical.
You might have expected m RNA vac-
cines to solve the problem of dealing
with a pandemic in a liberal society.
Unlike lockdowns and social distanc-
ing, vaccines don’t require that individ-
uals make sacrifices for the common
good. Being vaccinated does reduce
your chance of infecting others, but the
big reason to take your shots is that they
reduce your personal chance of getting
severely ill. That is, vaccination is even
less problematic than mask-wearing,
which is something you do primarily
to protect others and only secondarily
to protect yourself. Vaccination is
something you do mainly out of self-
interest.
But anti-vax sentiment, fed by med-
ical disinformation, caused a drastic
slowdown in the pace of US vaccina-
tions by June 2021, just in time for the
deadly onslaught of the Delta wave.
Many Republican politicians and,
even more crucially, right-wing media
figures fiercely opposed vaccine man-
dates, then turned to attacks on the
science behind the vaccines and the
medical experts urging Americans to
get their shots. And opposition to vac-
cines became a badge of conservative
political loyalty.
The effect has been dramatic. As of
November 2021, 91 percent of Demo-
crats had received at least one shot, ver-
sus only 59 percent of Republicans. In
vaccine terms, the US is practically two
countries: blue states have vaccination
rates comparable to Western Europe,
while red states lag far behind. So if
we’re comparing the ability of politi-
cal systems to cope with a pandemic, it
makes an immense difference whether
you consider New York or Texas to rep-
resent America.
What next? At this point, anyone
making confident predictions about
the course of this crisis should slow
down and think about how well past
predictions have panned out. Still,
2021 seemed to teach us one new lesson
and remind us of two important older
truths.
The new lesson is that the twenty-
first- century economy, which until
recently seemed like a marvel of or-
ganized complexity, is a lot less robust
than anyone realized. Much of the
recent surge in inflation seems to re-
flect a shift in demand away from con-
sumption of face-to-face services that
seemed risky toward goods like house-
hold appliances. My guess is that if you
had asked economists three years ago
how the world would respond to such
a shift, they would have predicted an
efficient, fairly smooth reallocation
of resources. What we actually got
was clogged ports, factories idled for
lack of crucial parts, and plunging
confidence.
The first of the two older truths we’ve
had to relearn is what Thomas Hobbes
tried to tell us: To succeed, society must
be a “commonwealth.” Letting people
put others at risk by refusing to wear
masks, practice social distancing, or
get vaccinated is qualitatively the same
as letting individuals use the threat of
violence to get what they want; in both
cases, government has a crucial role—
it constrains destructive individual
behavior.
But the other truth we’ve relearned is
that while autocratic governments may
initially seem highly effective at provid-
ing security, they eventually suffer from
their lack of openness: nobody dares
tell their leaders when they’re wrong,
or can force them to change policies
that aren’t working, whether it’s the use
of inferior vaccines or an unsustainable
policy of repeated lockdowns.
So if, like Tooze and Maçães, you
want to view the pandemic through
the lens of great-power rivalry, you
need to accept that the simple criteria
that seemed to make sense a year ago
no longer do. “Disciplined China does
better than the disorganized West”
has stopped working as a story line.
At this point some of the best per-
formers in both fighting the coronavi-
rus and recovering from its economic
effects are Western democracies with
relatively high levels of public trust in
science—not just small nations like
New Zealand, but bigger nations like
France.
And if America is in deep trouble—
which it is—it’s not because we allow
too much freedom, but because our
society is being threatened by deep
currents of hostility and irrationality
that won’t go away even if Covid-19
recedes. Q
The New York Review
 ‘I Have Quite Lost My Heart’
Love Letters:
Virginia Woolf
and Vita Sackville-West
with an introduction by Alison Bechdel.
London: Vintage, 280 pp., £9.99 (paper)
When Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-
West in December 1922, she had just
published, at the age of forty, the first
of her distinctive novels, Jacob’s Room,
which followed the more traditional
The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and
Day (1919). Most of her published writ-
ing consisted of unsigned book reviews,
so she was known to very few people.
Virginia belonged by descent and
marriage to Britain’s elite of arts and
letters: her father, Leslie Stephen, had
been a distinguished intellectual whose
first wife was Thackeray’s daughter.
Julia Margaret Cameron, the great
Victorian photographer, was her aunt.
Her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell,
was married to a prominent art critic,
Clive Bell, though she lived with an-
other painter, Duncan Grant. Their in-
timate circle included Lytton Strachey,
E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes,
and Roger Fry. Virginia’s husband,
Leonard, was a political journalist and
editor. This was the Bloomsbury group,
named after the unpretentious area of
London where many of them lived; it
was a world of plain living and high
thinking—“Gloomsbury,” the high-
living, plain-thinking Vita would call it.
Treasured by her family and friends
as a brilliant, witty, and original pres-
ence, Virginia also had enormous
mood swings and terrible headaches,
was sociable until she collapsed, was
depressed until she was writing, then
depressed again as a book was finished
and publication loomed. The doctors in
charge of her treatment had nothing to
recommend but bed rest and cessation
of mental activity.
Her husband had become a dedi-
cated caregiver, and, partly as occupa-
tional therapy for Virginia, they ran a
publishing house, the Hogarth Press,
with the printing press in their base-
ment. That, along with her reviewing,
kept her in touch with the leading writ-
ers and critics of the day. Their life was
austere but full, their house in London
always lively, and for rest they had a
cottage in the country. In 1922 Virginia
was at the beginning of the most fruit-
ful part of her career, although she felt
herself to be behind where she should
be: she ought to be considered, she
said, thirty-five, not forty, at least five
years having been wasted in bed.
Most of the year preceding her meet-
ing Vita was lost to repeated bouts of
flu, which left her heart so weakened
that doctors warned Leonard she might
not live much longer. A sickroom-
bound invalid in 1922 could not pick up
the phone and chat with friends. Letters
provided the only relief from isolation,
and even that writing drained Virgin-
ia’s energy. Still, she loved hearing from
friends and, when she could manage it,
answering. Her letters, along with her
diary, offer unusual access to the pri-
vate life of a great writer. So what was
it like when she finally fell in love with
Vita, after living in a stable but sexless
marriage with Leonard for so many
years, when her imagination was more
March 10, 2022
Phyllis Rose
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; illustration by Joana Avillez
aroused by women? To find out, we turn
eagerly to Love Letters: Virginia Woolf
and Vita Sackville-West, which tells
the story through their letters to each
other, supplemented by extracts from
both women’s diaries and Vita’s letters
to her husband. And who exactly is tell-
ing the story? We do not know, as no
editor is cited on the title page. Buried
on the copyright page we find “selection
by Lily Lindon,” but Alison Bechdel’s
introduction sheds no light on how this
selection was made or what it offers that
cannot be found in the letters as mas-
terfully edited in 1985 by Louise De-
Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska.
Vita, now the less celebrated of the
couple and known primarily as the co-
creator of the magnificent gardens at
Sissinghurst, was in the early 1920s by
far the more famous writer. Although
ten years younger than Woolf, she was
an established literary figure in Lon-
don. Rich, aristocratic, sensual, free-
living, polyamorous, commanding,
self- confident, boisterously healthy,
she was Woolf’s opposite in many ways,
and not the least of her appeal lay in
her family history.
Her father, the 3rd Baron Sackville of
Knole, belonged to the de la Warr fam-
ily (as in Delaware), whose titles dated
back to the fourteenth century. Knole,
the family seat in Kent, a manor house
as large as an entire village, had been
gifted to Thomas Sackville, the 1st Earl
of Dorset, by Queen Elizabeth I. Vita
grew up at Knole without siblings, with
a beautiful, eccentric mother, who had
been born illegitimate but nonetheless
a Sackville. Since Vita’s grandfather
had no legitimate offspring, the house
and title passed to Vita’s father. Had
Vita been born male, she would have
inherited Knole, with its four hundred
rooms. As it was, on her father’s death,
it passed to his brother.
When she chose to marry Harold
Nicolson, a diplomat from a family
of diplomats, Vita’s family was not
pleased. They considered him a dis-
reputable intellectual, not at all a good
match, without even the saving grace
of money. But compared to most men
Vita had met, Harold had a lively mind
and tremendous vitality. It was a love
match. Neither of them seemed to
realize at the time of their marriage
how deeply they were attracted to peo-
ple of their own sex. After producing
two sons, they constructed what in later
days would be called an open marriage.
Unshakably committed to each other,
they were free to have other sexual
partners. They wrote to each other
every day they were apart, sharing ev-
erything, even accounts of their love
affairs.
In general, Vita proved to be good at
keeping her affairs relatively short and
unthreatening to Harold. But at about
the time he was in Paris working on
the Treaty of Versailles, she got caught
up in the most passionate affair of her
life, with Violet Keppel (later Trefu-
sis), whose allure and lack of discipline
threatened the Nicolsons’ alliance.
The details are to be found in their son
Nigel Nicolson’s enthralling book Por-
trait of a Marriage (1973), an elegant
melding of autobiographical writing
by Vita and parental biography by her
son, which should be required reading
for anyone who thinks that marriage of
any kind is effortless.
Both in London and in Paris, Vita
and Violet went out together in public
with Vita cross- dressed as a recently
repatriated soldier with a head wound
requiring a bandage. She had never
known such freedom. But eventually
Violet’s fiancé and Vita’s husband re-
trieved the two runaways from France,
and Vita’s passions were subsumed into
the pleasant regularities of country life.
Fundamentally upbeat, she got enor-
mous pleasure from her house, house-
hold, garden, and dogs.
And she wrote constantly. By the
time she met Virginia, Vita had pub-
lished five volumes of poetry and two
novels, one of which, The Dragon in
Shallow Waters, was a best seller. She
had written an account of her family
and its estate, Knole and the Sackvilles,
and had found her great theme in the
connection between real estate and a
person’s sense of identity, explored first
in a novella, The Heir. She had also
written a fictionalized account of her
affair with Violet, Challenge, which her
mother convinced her was too scandal-
ous to publish in the UK. She was still
only thirty.
Virginia’s first impulse on meeting
Vita at a dinner party at Clive Bell’s was
to look down on her as a facile writer:
“She writes fifteen pages a day—has
finished another book—publishes with
Heinemanns.” What attracted her was
above all Vita the aristocrat. “The aris-
tocratic manner is something like an
actress’s—no false shyness or modesty—
makes me feel virgin, shy, and school-
girlish,” she wrote. Vita’s long, languid
face, which Virginia later found so beau-
tiful, did not at first appeal to her, but
“all these ancestors and centuries, silver
and gold, have bred a perfect body.” In
Virginia’s imagination, Vita was often
striding—through fields, across plains,
in Turkish pants, in emeralds—the su-
premely competent and self-assured
woman, managing children, nannies,
gardeners, butchers, dukes, duchesses,
and motorcars with equal ease.
Vita’s feelings about Virginia were
clear from the start and not quite so
fanciful. “I simply adore Virginia
Woolf, and so would you,” she wrote
to her husband after their first meeting.
You would fall quite flat before
her charm and personality. . . . She
is utterly unaffected: there is no
outward adornments—she dresses
quite atrociously. At first you think
she is plain; then a sort of spiritual
beauty imposes itself on you. . . .
She is both detached and human,
silent till she wants to say some-
thing, and then says it supremely
well. . . . Darling, I have quite lost
my heart.
Not many pages of Love Letters go
by between their meeting in 1922 and
their becoming lovers in late 1925.
But, of course, that is three years—
three years in which they were hardly
focused on each other. Three years
in which Vita had a love affair with a
man, Geoffrey Scott, author of The Ar-
chitecture of Humanism (1914), which
resulted in the breakup of his mar-
riage. Three years in which Virginia
published both a fiction masterpiece,
Mrs. Dalloway, and a nonfiction mas-
terpiece, The Common Reader, began
to make some money from her work,
and became famous.
They became friends before they
were lovers. Vita took Virginia to lunch
with her father, Lord Sackville, in the
family home: “His Lordship lives in the
kernel of a vast nut. You perambulate
21
 The world’s linguistic diversity is diminishing, with more than two hundred languages declared extinct
and thousands more endangered. As these languages disappear, deep stores of knowledge and cultural memory
are also lost. The scholarly significance of these threatened languages and literacies provided the impetus for a
collaborative initiative between the University of Nebraska Press, the University of Oklahoma Press, and the
University of Texas Press, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and commemorated here at its conclusion.

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Louis Headman with Sean O’Neill
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Chehalis Stories
Edited by Jolynn Amrine Goertz with the
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Collected and Translated by Franz Boas
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Neil Alexander Walker
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22 The New York Review

 UNIVERSITY
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A W H I R LW I N D

Cherokee
PA S S E D T H R O U G H
OUR COUNTRY
R E F E R E N C E G R A M M A R
Translating Maya Hieroglyphs
SCOTT A. J. JOHNSON
LAKOTA VOICES
OF THE GHOST DANCE

RANI-HENRIK ANDERSSON
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March 10, 2022 23

miles of galleries; skip endless trea-
sures—chairs that Shakespeare might
have sat on. . . . Then there is Mary
Stuart’s altar, where she prayed be-
fore execution.” Virginia asked Vita to
write something for Hogarth, and Vita
tossed off the novella Seducers in Ecua-
dor while on a walking trip in Italy with
her husband. Who was doing whom a
favor in this case is unclear. Vita had
a good commercial publisher, Heine-
mann, but being published by the Hog-
arth Press represented a different kind
of prestige, and in return she brought
with her a large fan base. Seducers in
Ecuador sold well, and the two women,
now with an editorial relationship, be-
came closer. Vita was a guest at Monk’s
House, the Woolfs’ place in Sussex;
Virginia was a guest at Long Barn, the
Nicolsons’ country house in Kent.
In December 1925 Vita and Virginia
spent three days together at Long Barn.
Harold had been posted to the British
Legation in Tehran, where Vita was to
join him later that winter. It was the first
time they had been alone overnight,
and something happened that marked a
turning point. Vita’s references to this
night suggest that Virginia declared
herself or threw herself at Vita, but
Virginia did not see it that way. “These
Sapphists love women,” she wrote in
her diary upon returning home.
Friendship is never untinged with
amorosity. I like her and being with
her, and the splendour—she shines
in the grocer’s shop in Sevenoaks
with a candle-lit radiance, stalking
on legs like beech trees, pink glow-
ing, grape clustered, pearl hung. . . .
In brain and insight she is not as
highly organised as I am. But then
she is aware of this, and so lavishes
on me the maternal protection
which, for some reason, is what
I have always most wished from
everyone.
Whatever happened changed their
relationship forever, deepening it, al-
lowing Virginia to think of Vita as her
lover and to be jealous of all the other
women with whom she continued, over
the years, to have affairs, while Vita
had to reassure an increasingly nervous
and jealous Harold that she would not
be swept away by Virginia as she had
been by Violet Trefusis.
Their feelings for each other became
even more intense when Vita left to join
Harold in Persia and they were in merely
epistolary contact. I say “merely,” but
there is nothing negligible about the
arousal capacity of letters from distant
friends, the traveler treasuring the con-
nection to home with the desperation
of a drowning swimmer, and the stay-
at-home living on the traveler’s passion.
On the long voyage through the Med-
iterranean and Red Seas and across
the Indian Ocean to Bombay, Vita had
time to contemplate, with characteristic
generosity, her beloved’s talents and
difficulties, telling her, “I don’t know
whether to be dejected or encouraged
when I read the works of Virginia
Woolf. Dejected because I shall never
be able to write like that, or encour-
aged because somebody else can?”
Three days later she wrote:
You are the only person I have ever
known properly who was aloof from
the more vulgarly jolly sides of life.
24
And I wonder whether you lose or
gain? I fancy that you gain,—you,
Virginia,—because you are so con-
stituted and have a sufficient fund of
excitement within yourself, though I
don’t fancy it would be to the ad-
vantage of anybody else.
Once arrived in Tehran, after the over-
land journey from Baghdad, Vita wrote
letters that later helped Virginia create
the fabulous shape-shifting adventurer
Orlando:
I have been stuck in a river, crawled
between ramparts of snow, been
attacked by a bandit, been baked
and frozen alternatively, travelled
alone with ten men (all strangers),
slept in odd places, eaten wayside
meals, crossed high passes, seen
Kurds and Medes and caravans,
and running streams, and black
lambs skipping under blossom,
seen hills of porphyry stained with
copper sulfate, snow-mountains in
a great circle, endless plains, with
flocks on the slopes. Dead camels
pecked by vultures, a dying don-
key, a dying man. Came to mud
towns at nightfall, stayed with odd
gruff Scotchmen, drunk Persian
wine. Worn a silk dress one day,
and a sheepskin and fur cap the
next.
The grueling journey and the aus-
tere, otherworldly beauty of Persia pro-
duced Vita’s wonderful Passenger to
Teheran and vivid letters to Virginia.
Virginia responded with childlike de-
votion. Vita’s departure seems to have
set off a kind of panic in her, and she
clung to the letters for reassurance.
T heir reunion, after months apart, was
awkward. Expected physical passion
did not immediately materialize. Still,
the period of their greatest intimacy
followed. Vita had to reassure Harold
again that she was not having a love
affair with Virginia, and this time she
was more explicit. Yes, they had been
to bed together twice, but Vita did not
consider their relationship sexual. To
have sex with Virginia, she said, would
be playing with fire. She was “scared
to death of arousing physical feelings
in her, because of the madness.” In
any case, Virginia was not the kind of
woman she was sexually attracted to.
There was something “incongruous
and almost indecent in the idea.”
Vita had every reason to pull her
punches with Harold, downplaying
her passion for and with Virginia. Still,
there was a difference between her pro-
tective love for Virginia and her phos-
phorescent love for Violet Trefusis.
She adored Virginia for her brilliance,
beyond any she had ever known, and
for the touching contrast between her
intellectual power and her physical
fragility, but that cerebral appeal did
not provoke the same kind of passion
as Violet’s wildness and flamboyance.
Vita and Virginia loved each other’s
company. They looked forward to the
precious times they had alone, which
certainly included physical intimacy.
They sympathized with each other’s
problems, encouraged each other’s
work. Reading the proofs of Passenger
to Teheran, Virginia reports to Vita,
“I kept saying ‘How I should like to
know this woman’ and then thinking
‘But I do,’ and then ‘No, I don’t—not
altogether the woman who writes
this.’ I don’t know the extent of your
subtleties.”
Fittingly, their relationship was
consummated in a work of the imag-
ination—Orlando, a wholly original
account of Vita’s lineage embodied
in the title character, who begins as a
male aristocrat, in the Renaissance,
lives through centuries, and becomes
at some point a female aristocrat—to
no one’s surprise, least of all her own.
When the idea for the book came to
Virginia, she immediately wrote to
Vita to ask if she minded. Vita was
thrilled. She sat for photographs of
Orlando in modern times, which were
included in the design of the first edi-
tion. Dedicated to Vita, in every sense,
Orlando was a monument to their rela-
tionship, almost a brag, claiming Vita
for Virginia while Vita fell repeatedly
for other women and Virginia experi-
enced jealousy, the most easily recog-
nized form of love.
Nigel Nicolson described Orlando
as a charming love letter to his mother,
but it can be seen more precisely as a
love letter to Vita’s inherited certainty
about who she was, a dazzlingly imagi-
native and enjoyable transformation of
Vita’s dutiful book on the same subject,
Knole and the Sackvilles. The change
of gender is one among many magic
tricks the novel performs, the greatest
of which is the protagonist’s endurance
in time. Tilda Swinton’s performance
as Orlando in the 1992 film directed
by Sally Potter captures this perfectly:
nothing surprises her. She is the same
person no matter what. That certainty
about continuity of self is what Vita
had that Virginia most wanted, and
in writing Orlando she momentarily,
imaginatively acquired it.
By 1934, the friendship was tapering
off. Virginia’s closest friend became
Ethel Smyth, and Vita’s her sister-in-
law Gwen St. Aubyn. Besides, Vita,
upon Harold’s retirement from the For-
eign Office and commencing work as a
journalist, had bought the property at
Sissinghurst, and the couple embarked
on their joint project of turning it into
one of England’s most beloved locales,
famous the world over for its gardens.
Vita, now less interested in social life
than Virginia was, spent most of her
time in the country, and Virginia found
her less exciting. “My friendship with
Vita is over,” Virginia wrote in her
diary in 1935. “Not with a quarrel, not
with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls.”
Like any selection, this volume is
partial, and different readers, from
the same mass of correspondence and
diary entries, would construct a differ-
ent story. I did not find the title Love
Letters justified. The volume might
better have been called Portrait of a
Friendship, showing how many differ-
ent forms intimacy might take, how
it can change with time and circum-
stance, how even the most intense and
satisfying friendships may end. The
emphasis on a love story seems forced,
and somehow prurient.
Woolf is one of the great letter writ-
ers of all time, full of wit and kindness,
crafting her letters as personal re-
sponses to each friend and never send-
ing out blanket recaps of events in her
life. Teasing, flirtatious, charming, so-
phisticated, fun to spend time with even
if you don’t know half the people she
talks about or refers to, for sheer liveli-
ness and joie de vivre, she can be com-
pared as a letter writer in English only
to Byron and Keats. Her descriptions
of the people she sees in the course
of her day are offhandedly novelistic,
and her constant socializing gave her
lots of material: “She [her cousin, Dor-
othea Stephen] said how d’y do in her
condescending way, and began to eat
like a poor woman at a charity tea, fast,
stealthily, every crumb, thanking me
with insincere sweetness.” And all of
a sudden you hear her speaking voice:
“What a bore it must be to be a painter,
and need light and landscape, instead
of a fire and a book!”
Her best, fullest letters, the most like
conversation polished by a master styl-
ist, were written to her sister through-
out her life and to Vita in the time of
their great intimacy. The letters twist
and turn, from lively reports of Virgin-
ia’s own doings to vivid imaginings of
Vita’s, wherever she happens to be, sur-
rounded by animals and flowers at her
country home or traveling in Persia.
They throw off sparks of observations
about life and art:
I had wanted to go into the matter
of profound natural happiness; as
revealed to me yesterday at a fam-
ily party of an English Banker;
where the passion and joys of sons
and daughters in their own society
struck me almost to tears with self-
pity and amazement. Nothing of
that sort do we any of us know—
profound emotions, which are yet
natural and taken for granted, so
that nothing inhibits or restrains—
How deep these are, and unself
conscious. There is a book called
Father and Son, by [Edmund]
Gosse, which says that all the coast
of England was fringed with little
sea anemones and lovely tassels
of seaweed and sprays of emerald
moss and so on, from the begin-
ning of time till Jan 1858, when,
for some reason, hordes of clergy
and spinsters in mushroom hats
and goggles began collecting, and
so scraped and rifled the coast that
this accumulation was destroyed
forever—A parable this, of what
we have done to the deposits of
family happiness.
The phrase “family happiness”
makes her think of Anna Karenina, so
she pivots from the thought of how so-
phistication has destroyed simple emo-
tion, embodied in the metaphor of the
lost sea anemones of the English coast,
as described by Gosse, to an observa-
tion about the Russian novel:
Its growing unreality to us who
have no real condemnation in our
hearts any longer for adultery as
such. But Tolstoy hoists all his
book on that support. Take it away,
say, no it doesn’t offend me that
AK. should copulate with Vron-
sky, and what remains?
The version I just quoted is from
Woolf’s complete correspondence, and
all that gets quoted in Love Letters
from this delicious and revealing letter
about bourgeois happiness and Virgin-
ia’s private moral code is this:
How odd it is—the effect geog-
raphy has on the mind! I write to
you differently now you’re coming
back. The pathos is melting. I felt
The New York Review
 it pathetic when you were going
away; as if you were sinking below
the verge. Now that you are rising,
I’m jolly again.
By focusing so relentlessly on their re-
lationship, Love Letters narrows our
A spread from Gilles Peress’s Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, from the chapter ‘Saturday,’ 2021
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
by Gilles Peress,
with texts by Chris Klatell.
Steidl, 3 volumes, 1,960 pp., $480.00
On January 30, 1972, Gilles Peress
was in Northern Ireland photograph-
ing a march against internment with-
out trial when British soldiers shot
dead thirteen men (a fourteenth died
later in the hospital). The event came
to be known as Bloody Sunday, and
it marked a turning point in Irish
history, resulting in direct rule from
Westminster and a section of the pop-
ulace being driven away from the con-
cept of civil rights and into supporting
the IRA . Throughout the 1970s and
1980s Peress returned sporadically to
Northern Ireland, and Whatever You
Say, Say Nothing (the title is from an
IRA poster, and was made famous by
a Seamus Heaney poem) presents his
work from those years. Volumes 1, 2,
and 3—the first two hardcover vol-
umes measuring fifteen inches across
and together comprising more than a
thousand pages of photographs, and
the third an “almanac” of accompa-
nying texts, half as wide but just as
thick, called Annals of the North—are
packed in screen-printed cardboard
boxes and delivered in a screen-printed
tote bag. It is expensively and beauti-
fully done.
Peress, who joined Magnum Pho-
tos in 1971 and has twice served as its
president, is professor of human rights
and photography at Bard, and senior
research fellow at the Human Rights
Center at Berkeley. His awards include
a Guggenheim, NEA grants, and the
International Center of Photography
Infinity Award. He styles himself as
not being interested in “good photogra-
phy”: he says he is “gathering evidence
for history,” and his previous books in-
March 10, 2022
sense of who Vita and Virginia are to
each other, as though a person on a
beautiful hike, instead of sending pic-
tures of the landscape, merely sent a
string of GPS coordinates. The helter-
skelter of style, which is to say, their
full selves, is edited out, and each let-
Partial Reports
Nick Laird
clude The Graves: Srebrenica and Vu-
kovar, The Silence: Rwanda, Farewell
to Bosnia, and Telex Iran.
In Annals of the North, Peress writes
that in Northern Ireland his “intent
was to describe a totality in all its
simultaneities”:
I wanted to describe EVERY-
THING —and yes, maybe this was
a folly doomed to failure. I tried
every possible visual strategy
known to me at that time to DE-
SCRIBE : I tried multiple camera
angles, camera formats, day, night,
rain and sun, and I went back again
and again to the same places, the
same street corners over and over,
hundreds of times over the years.
What he didn’t try much of was color
film: among these 1,056 pages, there
are only thirty- one color photographs.
You come away from the books with a
sense of monochrome griminess and
half-light, of all the varieties of gray—
concrete, ashes, lead- colored skies.
The photographs span from 1971 to
2006, but the bulk of the pictures are
from the 1970s and 1980s, and the sta-
sis of those decades is distressingly ap-
parent here.
A mid the shades of gray, the obdu-
rate darkness of blood occurs occasion-
ally, shockingly, and the most shocking,
though familiar, work here relates to
Bloody Sunday. Peress arranged the
pictures in a section called “Days of
Struggle.” (“Struggle” was the Irish
Republican word for their armed cam-
paign.) They seem like newspaper pho-
tos, the quality blurred, rushed, urgent,
and the images are extremely pow-
erful and distressing: a mass of men
using a sheet of galvanized roofing as
ter tends to be used as a marker on the
path of intimacy.
“The accent falls differently from of
old; the moment of importance came
not here but there,” Woolf wrote in her
essay “Modern Fiction.” What makes
her original in both fiction and non-
a makeshift shield, injured men lying
beneath the graffitied imperative to
“JOIN YOUR LOCAL IRA UNIT,” the
body of Barney McGuigan (though not
named), who’s been shot in the head
by the British army, a priest giving Mc-
Guigan the last rites.
Most of the thousand- odd pho-
tographs focus on similar territory,
though among the street riots, the pet-
rol bombers, the adolescent soldiers,
the shaggy teens in Seventies denim, the
men in balaclavas with Kalashnikovs,
the bombed- out wastelands and bon-
fires, there are moments when a differ-
ent reality creeps in: boys at a beach, a
day at Ballycastle fair, the Croagh Pat-
rick pilgrimage, a cattle market, pigs in
yards, Friesians dappled with shadow
from hedgerows (“camouflaged cows,”
Peress writes). But even the “fictional”
day (as Peress terms it) in the country
gives way to “shards of anger” when
he encounters an IRA-made sign com-
memorating two men, “B.Burns” and
“B.Moley,” “killed on active service on
29th Feb 1988.” (The monumental his-
tory Lost Lives1 reveals that they were
killed when a bomb they were making
exploded prematurely in a barn.)
What stands out in Peress’s work is
its expressive detail—the feet of four
men in a row standing on the edge of
a pavement, all with the same slip- on
loafers and white socks, or a boy shield-
ing his eyes against the sun, unknow-
ingly repeating the gesture of a woman
who might be his mother, standing far
behind him. But the grim imagery is
1 who believe in violence in order to
Mainstream, 1999. A mammoth un-
dertaking, this landmark book by
David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters,
Brian Feeney, and Chris Thornton
tells “the stories of the men, women
and children who died as a result of the
Northern Ireland troubles.”
fiction is that the accent falls not here
but there. Love Letters tries to make the
accents fall squarely where we would ex-
pect them to be—two people meet, they
fall in love, they become lovers—and
sends one back to the original material
to make up a love story of one’s own. Q
Gilles Peress Studio
relentless. Graffiti, desolate lots, empty
back streets, barbed wire, human sub-
jects tending to their pain or suspicion.
Those were bad years. A few of the pic-
tures spark with unexpected combina-
tions and angles: to the right is a man
leaning in a doorway, looking for all
the world like a country farmer, while
in the foreground we see huge, shiny
Doc Martens and jeans, the lower parts
of a man standing on a gatepost, and up
in the far left corner the ever-present
army helicopter hovering in the sky.
A note on the history of Northern
Ireland may be useful. Ireland was par-
titioned in 1921 into Northern Ireland
and Southern Ireland, which became,
in 1922, the Irish Free State, and in
1949 the Republic of Ireland. Northern
Ireland had a Protestant and Unionist
majority who wanted to maintain ties
to Britain, and a significant minority of
Catholics and Irish nationalists. South-
ern Ireland had a Catholic, nationalist
majority who wanted self-governance
or independence. Following parti-
tion, discrimination against Catholics
in Northern Ireland was widespread
in housing, gerrymandering, employ-
ment, and voting rights: in order to vote
one had to be a house owner, or head of
a household, which disproportionately
disenfranchised Catholics. In 1967 a
diverse group of reformers created the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Associa-
tion (NICRA) to protest discrimination
and campaign for civil rights for all. It
was formed not by Republicans—those
bring about a united Ireland—but by
nationalists, who believe in Irish unifi-
cation but reject violence.
NICRA demanded changes in vot-
ing and in the allocation of houses
and jobs, and the disbandment of the
25
B Specials, a Protestant reserve po-
lice force that had a history of brutal
behavior. Their campaign imitated
tactics from the American civil rights
movement, and in 1968 NICRA held its
first protest march. Other groups (Peo-
ple’s Democracy, the Derry Housing
Action Committee) formed and mass
unrest followed. In mid-1969 the prime
minister of Northern Ireland, James
Chichester- Clark, announced the in-
troduction of “one man, one vote,” the
movement’s central demand, but on
August 14, 1969, after rioting spread
and culminated in the Battle of the
Bogside in Derry, the British army ar-
rived in Northern Ireland.
The army arrived initially to protect
the Catholic population from sectarian
retribution, but relations deteriorated
quickly. Confrontations and civil dis-
A spread from Gilles Peress’s Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, from the chapter ‘The Last Night,’ 2021
obedience became more frequent. The
situation became polarized and milita-
rized: in these circumstances the Provi-
sional IRA could assume a leading role
and, particularly after Bloody Sunday,
emerged as the dominant force. Irish
Republicanism became the principal
political position for those seeking rad-
ical social change.
Yet the actual conditions altered a
great deal in ways not apparent from
photographs of riots or IRA volun-
teers or abandoned streets: by the mid-
1970s a series of reforms ensured that
NICRA’s original aims would largely be
achieved. The 1971 Housing Executive
Act dealt with discrimination in the
allocation of housing. The 1971 Local
Government Boundaries Act pro-
vided for a commissioner to deal with
boundaries for district councils and
wards, to stop gerrymandering. The
Fair Employment (NI) Act of 1976 set
up an agency to promote equality and
opportunity for employment and elim-
inate unlawful discrimination on the
grounds of religion or politics. Never-
theless, Northern Ireland had stumbled
into the morass of the Troubles, where
it would be stuck for decades.
In his 1972 essay “Photographs of
Agony,” John Berger discusses Don
McCullin’s war photographs from
Vietnam, which are unsparing, show-
ing up close the cost of war: disfigured
corpses, wounded soldiers and civil-
ians. Berger argues that these pictures
of suffering—though their subjects
are the consequence of political deci-
sions—go beyond the political, and be-
come “evidence of the general human
26
condition.” They accuse “nobody and
everybody.” Peress, for his part, is keen
for his photographs to accuse some-
body, to stand within a political setting,
within “the structure of history that
he was trying to articulate”—to quote
Chris Klatell, the American lawyer and
Peress’s close friend, who wrote most
of the text in Annals of the North—
and Peress’s “structure of history” is
one entirely sympathetic to violent
Republicanism.
It’s hard to know what to make of the
intensive scaffolding that is Annals of
the North, shadowing and obscuring,
as it does, the edifice beneath. Susan
Sontag thought photographs strong as
evidence but weak in meaning, and I
suppose Annals of the North is an at-
tempt to ensure that the photographs
are packed with meaning. Images that
might have been able to evoke or sug-
gest are now required to tell or explain.
Annals contains short “chapter notes”
by Peress, commenting on the images
in volumes 1 and 2, but it’s mostly a
sprawling compendium of Klatell’s
trawling of the archive, his retelling of
Peress’s stories, and his own meander-
ing and skewed thoughts on Northern
Ireland.
In the chapter notes, Peress writes a
long (free verse?) recounting of his en-
gagement with the two British govern-
ment inquiries into Bloody Sunday, the
1972 Widgery Inquiry (which he rightly
calls the “whitewash of Ted Heath’s
government”) and the subsequent Sav-
ille Inquiry, ordered by Tony Blair in
1998. The Saville Inquiry requested
Peress’s negatives so they could scan
them in high resolution
to establish the truth. Was there
an IRA gunman in that crowd?
Was there a gun? (Maybe that last
part is in my head)
In any case I realize they have no
intent to establish the truth:
That with the blessing of the
government and the Crown,
One Para killed 13 unarmed
civilians in cold blood.
They are still looking for the god
damned gun that will exonerate
them of the crime,
Of the murder
Verbatim (with a heavy French
accent): No, never. Go and fuck
yourselves.
The photographs corresponding to
Peress’s notes on Bloody Sunday are of
documents from the inquiry: a map of
Peress’s route that day; part of his wit-
ness statement; strips of his negatives;
X-ray diagrams of the trajectories of
bullets as they passed through the vic-
tims John Young (a seventeen-year- old
shop assistant, shot while attempting
to help another teenager who’d been
shot), William Nash (a nineteen-year-
old dockworker whose father saw him
being shot and went to help him, before
being shot himself), and Michael Mc-
Daid (a twenty-year- old barman who
was shot near a barricade after escap-
ing from an army vehicle); soldiers’
log sheets claiming they had been fired
on; the heavily redacted witness state-
ment of an informant who claimed
the IRA “were planning to attack the
army”; photographs of the crowd, ri-
oting; close-ups of hands, feet, the
shattered head of a man bleeding out
on a pavement, a hand waving a white
handkerchief . . .
T he Saville Inquiry, which lasted
twelve years and cost more than £400
million, resulted in a 2010 report that
concluded that British paratroopers
“lost control,” shooting fleeing civilians
and those who tried to aid the injured.
The violence was not found to have
been premeditated, though the inquiry
did conclude that British soldiers had
lied in their efforts to hide their acts,
that none of the shots fired by soldiers
were provoked by stone throwers or
petrol bombers, and that the civilians
were not posing any threat. The British
prime minister, David Cameron, apol-
ogized for the “unjustified and unjusti-
fiable” killing of the thirteen men. (The
fourteenth who had been shot died
four months later in the hospital, and
though his death was formally ascribed
to an inoperable brain tumor, many
consider him the fourteenth victim of
Bloody Sunday.)
After extensive legal arguments and
appeals, only in 2019 was a former
member of the Parachute Regiment,
Soldier F, charged with the murders
of James Wray and William McKin-
ney, as well as five counts of attempted
murder that day. These charges were
withdrawn in July 2021, following the
collapse of the trial of two other former
British soldiers charged with murdering
the IRA leader Joe McCann in Belfast
in 1971. (A judge found that statements
given by soldiers to the Royal Military
Police in 1972, which were relied upon
in the McCann case, were inadmissible
because of how they were obtained.)
Given the similarities, the Public Pros-
ecution Service of Northern Ireland
reviewed the case against Soldier F
and, concluding there was “no longer a
reasonable prospect of key evidence . . .
being ruled admissible,” dropped the
charges. The situation is absurd: prose-
cution of a member of the British army
has halted because its own investiga-
tion was so flawed.
There is no truth-and-reconciliation
process in Northern Ireland, and the
only long-term plan seems to be to wait
until the perpetrators and victims die.
The Northern Ireland Office, a British
ministerial department whose mission
is to “ensure the smooth working of
the devolution settlement in Northern
Ireland” (i.e., to keep Stormont, the
Northern Irish parliament, function-
ing), recently proposed an amnesty for
Gilles Peress Studio
crimes related to the Troubles, a sugges-
tion that was met with criticism from all
parties in the North. Sinn Féin leader
Michelle O’Neill tweeted, “There can
be no amnesty for those who murdered
citizens on the streets of Ireland and for
those who directed them.”
But many people feel that Sinn
Féin (the political wing of the IRA)
is demanding a partial and selective
approach to history. Republican terror-
ists—the IRA, the Irish National Lib-
eration Army (INLA), and associated
groups—were responsible for 58.8 per-
cent of deaths in the Troubles, loyalists
for 28.9 percent, and the security forces
for 10.1 percent. The greatest single
taker of life was the IRA itself, which
accounted for almost half of all deaths:
the IRA killed almost 1,800 people, in-
cluding more than four hundred Catho-
lics. The majority of IRA members who
died in the Troubles were killed not by
British forces but by internecine war-
fare or premature explosions or were
executed by the IRA itself.
The Historical Enquiries Team, a
unit of the Police Service of Northern
Ireland set up in 2005 to investigate
the 3,269 unsolved murders commit-
ted during the Troubles, was shut down
in 2014 due to budget cuts. Some feel
that if those who committed atrocities
against Northern Irish civilians will not
be prosecuted—some of the alleged
and convicted killers are now govern-
ment officials—the soldiers who mur-
dered the marchers on Bloody Sunday
shouldn’t be either.
P erhaps infected by this sense of
thwarted reckoning, in Whatever You
The New York Review
Say, Say Nothing, Peress and Klatell
insist that Northern Irish history is an
inescapable spiral. Peress organizes his
photographs across “22 fictional days”
to articulate the “helicoidal structure”
of history “where today is not only
today but all the days like today; days
of violence, days of marching, of riots,
of unemployment, of prison, of mourn-
ing, and also days of ‘craic’ where you
try to forget your condition.”
In the section “The Book of Hours
and Days,” Klatell presents events from
1689 and 1922 and 1998 as happening
in some sense coterminously, depict-
ing a country trapped in a time of no
time, where nothing changes. History,
to echo Joyce, is the nightmare from
which we can’t awake. The effect of
the anachronistic presentation of the
photographs as all belonging to “22
fictional days” is to disfigure actual
history, which is stubbornly real to the
people who lived it.
Apart from photographers, those
acknowledged by Peress for “their
hospitality, generosity and advice” are
nearly all IRA members and Republi-
can activists: the Duffy family (iden-
tified in the “Cast” chapter as “led by
Ann, a former Republican prisoner”
with whom Gilles Peress lived in the
1980s), the Donaldsons (as in Denis,
Peress’s “close friend,” an IRA volun-
teer, Sinn Féin administrator, and, it
turned out, a British spy), Tom Hartley
(a Sinn Féin mayor of Belfast), Danny
Morrison (the long-term publicity di-
rector for Sinn Féin) . . .
Klatell’s wife’s family also makes the
“Cast” list, an abbreviated dramatis
personae of a thousand years of his-
tory. He’s married to Fiona Doherty, a
Derry native whose father’s work with
DuPont meant she moved to the US as
a teenager; she is now a criminal law
professor at Yale (and “served as the
conscience of the North,” according
to Klatell, in the making of the book).
We learn the Dohertys are “a sprawling
Catholic clan originally from Donegal
with branches throughout the North,
many only distantly related. . . . If some-
one is Catholic and from Derry, his or
her gran is likely to be a Doherty.”
Klatell’s commentary often has this
rambling, excitable, personal flavor,
and though Annals of the North is
wide-ranging in some ways and often
surprising, thanks to its collage-like,
random structure, it’s also, as you might
imagine from the close friendship Per-
ess had with IRA volunteers, deeply
partial, and by turns incomplete, ill-
informed, outdated, and patronizing.
Klatell dutifully follows Peress’s
sympathies, though he seems less en-
amored with casual glorifications of
murder: Klatell recounts Peress de-
scribing how, back in 1985, Daithi de
Paor, an IRA man, had told him a story
of the IRA bombing a costume store:
“For some reason, or maybe for no
reason, the Volunteers decided they
had an issue with the Indian man who
owned the costume shop” and decided
to blow it up. After setting a bomb on
the counter they drove away, but saw
in the rearview mirror “the fucking
Indian guy, calmly carrying the bomb
out of his shop and chucking it into
the street.” So the following week they
went into the shop, “froze the owner
at gunpoint, and glued the bomb
to the counter. Then they all stood
round in awkward silence, holding
the bomb down, waiting for the glue
to dry.”
March 10, 2022
After recounting this story, Peress
laughed:
No one else did. That’s a terrible
story, they said. What happened to
the poor Indian man who owned
the shop?
Gilles looked around in puzzle-
ment. “That story wasn’t about the
man who owned the shop,” he said.
“It was about the glue.”
Realizing that murdering an immi-
grant “for some reason, or maybe for
no reason,” might strike readers as de-
spicable, Klatell tries here to put some
daylight between himself and Peress,
though with its black humor, casual
gangsterism, and purposeless violence
this anecdote is somehow one of the
truest things in the book.
Klatell does not in general raise
awkward questions about the book’s
overwhelming narrative of Republi-
can heroics, and he can be surprisingly
loose with the facts. In another essay
he describes Peress photographing an
IRA funeral:
1985 was a gruesome year, a shoot-
to-kill year, a year when the state’s
forces abandoned the exhaustingly
blunt instruments of the law for the
short, sharp crack of bullets.
One day during that brutal sum-
mer word arrived in Derry about
three Volunteers who had been
executed the night before in a field
outside Strabane. They’d been
moving a cache of arms when the
army surprised them. They’d im-
mediately surrendered, and then
they were killed.
To locate the incident Klatell refers
to, I looked at the killings from the
summer of 1985. From May 1 to the
end of September that year, nineteen
people were killed in the Troubles.
Sixteen were shot or blown up by the
IRA (one British soldier, six Protestant
policemen, one Catholic policeman,
two Protestant civilians, five Catholic
civilians, and one IRA man who acci-
dentally killed himself with a grenade
launcher), two Catholics were killed by
the INLA, and one (a Protestant petty
criminal) was killed by the Ulster Vol-
unteer Force.
The incident Klatell must be refer-
ring to happened in February 1985: five
IRA men set up an ambush by a road
in Tyrone and waited for a vehicle be-
longing to the security forces to appear.
After several hours, when none did, the
ambush was abandoned and two of the
men went home. The other three were
returning the weapons to the arms
dump, each carrying an automatic rifle,
when three British Special Air Service
soldiers hidden in the field opened fire
on them and killed them.
To describe the killings as an exe-
cution might be legitimate (forensics
showed the IRA men had not fired,
though one soldier claimed they heard
someone say, “They’re over there—get
them”), but there’s no evidence either
way as to whether the dead “immedi-
ately surrendered,” and to characterize
the incident, as Klatell does, as “mov-
ing a cache of arms” shows that his
lack of interest in the complications of
reality extends beyond the date of the
incident to its actual circumstances. (In
the notes, Klatell reveals his source:
“A Republican account of the killings
can be found in the February 23, 2015,
issue of An Phlobacht,” the Sinn Féin
newspaper.)
Klatell cannot imagine a Protestant
sensibility that is anything other than
grotesque. Orange marches are “sadis-
tic victory parades of the Prods, ecstatic
in their imposition of humiliation.”2 To
many people, not just Protestants, this
might seem not only a caricature but a
gross misrepresentation. Ulster Union-
ist MPs at their annual dinner are pre-
sented by Peress as literally negative
images, their heads black and ghoulish.
THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE:
Compare that with the photograph of
1,000-PIECE PUZZLE
Gerry Adams frolicking with kids in Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century world is
a bouncy castle, although there’s no illustrated in absorbing detail in this puzzle
room to mention Adams’s admission depicting the London of his day. The setting:
of knowing about his brother Liam’s As A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being
pedophilia and still allowing him to rehearsed at the Globe, actors wander the
work at a youth center in Gerry’s own streets, along with an expansive cast of extras
constituency. (Liam Adams was later and local characters who may well have
convicted of repeatedly raping his provided the Bard with inspiration. From
daughter when she was between the lovers ascending ladders to tavern brawls
ages of four and nine.) and summer fairs, there is something to
Most of the pages in the Annals have delight in every detail. The Thames, tim-
no numbers, and it is impossible to bered houses, towers and turrets, and end-
navigate the book easily. Perhaps this less intricate features make this puzzle one
is deliberate. It makes cross-checking to work again and again, each time with
sources almost impossible. In rela- discoveries anew. Also included is a fold-
tion to Denis Donaldson, for example, out poster with an image of the completed
pages that appear to be from legitimate puzzle; on the opposite side is a glossary of
newspaper sources are presented with various scenes within the puzzle.
the headings “The Facts,” “The Con- #05-WS425 • 27" x 19" • $19.99
text,” “The Myths,” and so on, though
only by counting forward thirty- eight
pages from the last page number and
checking the notes at the back is it pos-
sible to ascertain that the documents
have in fact been “provided by and
courtesy of the Donaldson family.” No
other source for them is given.
Klatell and Peress’s attempts to situ-
ate the photographs in Peress’s “struc-
ture of history” leads to occasional SHAKESPEARE’S BRITAIN
absurdities. Some are distasteful, some The beautiful image on this 1,000-piece
ignorant, some inadvertently comic. In puzzle is a pictorial map of Britain as it
the “Cast” chapter, for example, Fran- was in 1583, with the geographical settings
cis Hughes, a hunger striker, is gush- of Shakespeare’s history plays labeled. The
ingly described as map is decorated with symbols and icons
of towns and abbeys, castles, battlefields,
a charismatic and tenacious young forests, and heaths, and includes panoram-
member of the Provisional IRA ic insets of London showing the Globe
referred to as the “most wanted Theatre, and another inset of Stratford-
man in the North of Ireland.” The upon-Avon. Also on the map is a list of
authorities captured him in a ditch Shakespeare’s plays with British settings.
after a shootout with the SAS, #05-NPZNG • 26½" x 19¼" • $29.95
looking like a rock star with dyed
blond hair even though he was
gravely injured.
What Klatell doesn’t mention in
this lively biographical sketch is that
Hughes was convicted of killing three
people, and reputedly killed more than
a dozen, with some sources alleging
he was responsible for at least thirty
deaths. Among the deaths he was
linked to were those of a seventy-seven- SHAKESPEARE PLAYING CARDS
year- old grandmother and a ten-year- Play your favorite card games with Romeo
old girl. For many people in Northern and Juliet as King and Queen of Hearts,
Ireland, this kind of encomium to those Lady Macbeth as Ace Villain, Ariel as the
who killed their relatives is not just em- Joker, and more. This artist-illustrated deck
barrassing but deeply offensive. of playing cards features 54 of Shakespeare’s
And tellingly, Hughes was not called most famous characters, arranged in four
the “most wanted man in the North suits: hearts=lovers; clubs=fools; diamonds=
of Ireland,” as the book’s quotation heroes and heroines; and spades= villains.
marks suggest. Those who wanted to The deck includes a booklet with text about
arrest Hughes were the security forces, each character and their place in literary
and they referred to him as the “most history.
#05-75936 • Size: Poker • $14.99
Prices above do not include shipping and handling.
2
“Prods” is helpfully defined in the TO ORDER, go to shop.nybooks.com, call
“Languages” section as “a pejorative 646-215-2500 or email orders@nybooks.com.
term for Protestant(s).”
27

New York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics, NYRB Poets,
The New York Review Children’s Collection,
NYRB Kids and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank
Executive Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae,
Lucas Adams
Associate Editor: Alex Andriesse
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During,
Publicity Director; Abigail Dunn, Senior
Marketing and Publicity Manager;
Alex Ransom, Assistant Marketing Manager;
Evan Johnston, Production Manager;
Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.
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“I remember the feeling I had only a
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THE DOOR
Magda Szabó
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Translated from the Hungarian
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28
wanted man in Northern Ireland.” The
book’s “Languages” section, a glossary
of events and terminology, states that
the phraseology “North of Ireland”
indicates the speaker believes in a
united Ireland and tacitly or explic-
itly disapproves of the union with
Great Britain, whereas Northern
Ireland can be used neutrally (it
is the internationally recognized
name for the territory) or affirma-
tively to embrace the union.
Klatell and Peress eschew what they
define as the neutral term and use
“the North of Ireland” throughout,
even when, as with Hughes, it leads to
senselessness.
Klatell continually repeats the Sinn
Féin/ IRA line. Here’s the definition
provided for Direct Action Against
Drugs (DAAD): “An operation by the
Provisional IRA to combat drug use
and anti-social behavior in Catholic
neighborhoods, both to uphold the so-
cial order and to cut off opportunities
for infiltration by Crown forces.” Well,
yes, that’s what the IRA said, but let’s
look at what they did. DAAD was a
cover to allow the IRA to continue op-
erating after they’d declared a cease-
fire in 1994.
Take the case of Paul Devine, shot
six times in the back by the IRA as he
walked to his car on December 8, 1995.
Devine was a former IRA member
who’d been expelled for keeping the
proceeds of a robbery. (He’d recently
been released from prison after serving
three years for handling stolen goods.)
Or Francis Collins, a father of five and
former IRA member shot ten days
later, on December 18, in the fish-and-
chip shop he and his wife had recently
opened. Two men entered through the
back door, and one shot Collins in the
knees with a handgun before shooting
him in the chest. DAAD claimed re-
sponsibility, though Collins’s wife said,
“I firmly believe that he was murdered
as a direct result of a personal vendetta
by individuals from within the repub-
lican movement.” The police told the
inquest: “There is no evidence that the
deceased was involved in drugs.”
What is Klatell, a lawyer, thinking
when he parrots the idea that DAAD
was upholding “social order”? Nine
days after Collins was murdered, on
December 27, a small-time drug dealer
named Martin McCrory was shot dead
through the window of his living room.
His three-year- old son, sitting beside
him, was also hit by a bullet. Gino
Gallagher, a member of the INLA, al-
legedly took part in the Devine murder
to allow the IRA to claim it was uphold-
ing its cease-fire, and was arrested for it
before being shot dead a month later, in
January 1996.
Fallout from the subsequent feud
led to many more dead, among them
a nine-year- old Catholic girl, Barbara
McAlorum. The dead girl’s father said:
She was only an innocent little
child. They are nothing but cow-
ards, complete scum. . . . My wife
was screaming, “Get up, Barbara,
get up,” but we could see she was
dead. Her head was lying in the jig-
saw puzzle I bought her.
But one can imagine Peress looking
up here “in puzzlement,” explain-
ing that the story isn’t about Barbara
McAlorum. Though Seamus Heaney is
invoked repeatedly in these volumes—
he provides an epigraph (along with Ter-
ence MacSwiney and Bobby Sands), and
photographs of his Sweeney Astray are
included—what is missing is Heaney’s
sense of a morally complicated place, a
location where no one was exactly right
but some were clearly wrong: “My sym-
pathy was not with the IRA, but it wasn’t
with the Thatcher government, either.”
Another American has written an
engrossing, informed book, grounded
in reality, about Northern Ireland,
and it takes its name from the same
expression as Peress’s book: Say Noth-
ing (2018) by Patrick Radden Keefe. It
wears its authority lightly and is heav-
ily sourced and footnoted. While os-
tensibly telling the story of how Jean
McConville, a Protestant mother of
ten, was disappeared by the IRA on the
orders of Gerry Adams, Say Nothing
actually explains much of the Troubles,
detailing, for example, Bloody Sunday,
the hunger strikes, the Gibraltar kill-
ings, Michael Stone, the Denis Donald-
son affair, the Boston tapes. . . . It’s a
masterpiece, and one of the best intro-
ductions you’ll find to the twisted state
of Northern Ireland.
Today, as Sinn Féin takes the lead in
politics in the South, preaching a pop-
ulist leftist gospel and promising solu-
tions to everything from the housing
crisis to investigations into the deaths
at mother-and-baby homes, it’s import-
ant to also remember other, more re-
cent deaths. Among Americans the list
of useful idiots for the Irish Republican
cause is long, and Klatell, though he
has clearly steeped himself in the his-
tory and culture of the North, has also,
in the end, let himself be a tool for vi-
olent Republicanism. He is attempting
to cement a story that simply isn’t true,
the reality being more complicated and
demanding than his scrapbook admits.
It is, of course, possible to believe in
the inevitability and desirability of a
united Ireland without supporting or
romanticizing Irish Republicanism. It
is possible to think that partition was
a disaster and that Northern Ireland
practiced systematic discrimination
against its Catholic minority for many
years while also refusing to justify, glo-
rify, or accommodate the horrific ac-
tions of Republicanism. That’s why the
Social Democratic and Labour Party
exists—to advocate for Irish reunifica-
tion, though it has been largely eclipsed
by Sinn Féin since the 1994 cease-
fire—and why the SDLP’s John Hume,
a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was an
admirable moral leader while Martin
McGuinness and Gerry Adams have
the blood of thousands on their hands.3
It is also possible to think that the
British security forces interned and
tortured their own citizens in the 1970s
and 1980s, that they authorized shoot-
to-kill policies, and that Bloody Sun-
day was never properly investigated or
concluded, without extolling or vali-
dating the destruction wrought by the
IRA. (Another excellent, well-sourced,
3
The IRA never had popular support for
its murderous campaign: in 1992, at the
last general election before the cease-
fire, not a single candidate of Sinn Féin’s
was elected. They polled at 10 percent,
far behind the Ulster Unionist Party at
34.5 percent, the SDLP at 23.5 percent,
and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist
Party at 13.1 percent.
and definitive book is Anne Cadwal-
lader’s Lethal Allies: British Collusion
in Ireland (2013), about the collabora-
tion between Crown forces and loyalist
paramilitaries.)
It’s not a morally complicated po-
sition to think that killing people is
wrong, regardless, and that what the
people of Northern Ireland have had
to witness and accept in the years since
the 1998 Good Friday Agreement has
been extremely difficult. Terrorists on
both sides were released back into the
community after serving only a year or
two, and live side by side with the rel-
atives of their victims, who see them
alive and well in supermarkets and bars
and waiting rooms while their own hus-
bands or children or parents are still
dead. Or see them in the government,
appearing on television, endowed with
well-paid jobs as special advisers or
administrators.
In any event, Northern Ireland may
be entering another paradigm alto-
gether. Following the tensions of Brexit
and the possibility of an independent
Scotland, questions of allegiance and
identity that the Good Friday Agree-
ment had pushed off into the distance
are being revived.4 The Northern Ire-
land Protocol in the Brexit withdrawal
agreement avoided a hard border on
the island of Ireland, but meant that
Northern Ireland effectively remained
within the EU’s single market and sub-
ject to its custom rules, and therefore
created a regulatory border in the Irish
Sea, between Northern Ireland and the
rest of the United Kingdom.
There are currently food shortages
and angry farmers, and increased trade
between the Republic and the North.
Under the Good Friday Agreement, a
border poll on a united Ireland would
involve referendums in both Northern
Ireland and the Irish Republic, and the
agreement states that a decision to hold
a referendum rests with the UK secre-
tary of state responsible for the region.
While support for unification in polls
has consistently remained below the
triggering criteria, broader statistics
suggest there might already be a Cath-
olic majority in Northern Ireland, and
though religious affiliation does not
necessarily denote political affiliation,
if the results of the 2021 census confirm
such a situation, it would make calls for
a border poll difficult to ignore.
It is vital, in an era when Sinn Féin
is on course to become the largest
party on both sides of the border, that
we don’t forget the reality of what
they did. It is not beside the point to
ask about the Indian man blown up
by the glued- down bomb, about the
actual consequences of the “heroics.”
While Peress sits at the bar, puzzled by
questions about the victims (if the vic-
tims are those killed by the IRA), and
Klatell is at his desk in his New York
law firm, excitedly typing on his laptop
that Northern Ireland is a “conceptual
heart of darkness,” there are other
images that deserve their part in the
picture, not reproduced here: what’s
conjured by this collaboration is par-
tial, both in the sense of being prej-
udiced and in the sense of being
fragmentary and incomplete, a bit like
the jigsaw puzzle the nine-year- old
Barbara McAlorum was doing when
the IRA shot her in the head. Q
4
See my “Blood and Brexit” in these
pages, December 10, 2019.
The New York Review

The Strudlhof Steps,
or, Melzer and the Depth of the Years
by Heimito von Doderer,
translated from the German
by Vincent Kling and with an
afterword by Daniel Kehlmann.
New York Review Books,
850 pp., $24.95 (paper)
I began reading Heimito von Doder-
er’s The Strudlhof Steps at the start of
the Omicron surge, when the threat of
another winter lockdown made it seem
like the perfect moment for a dense
and demanding 850-page Austrian
novel. This hugely original book re-
quires intense concentration to follow
its switchback plot turns, to navigate its
confusing leaps in time, to untangle its
page-long metaphors, but most of all to
keep track of its enormous cast of char-
acters. A classic of German-language
literature, first published in 1951, it is
only now appearing in English, in Vin-
cent Kling’s deft translation.
Set in 1908–1911 and 1923–1925, The
Strudlhof Steps introduces us to a Vi-
ennese circle of bright young and not-
so-bright-or-young things: ingénues,
soldiers, students, musicians, petty
crooks, all entwined by decades of flir-
tations and romances, deep philosophi-
cal friendships and family connections,
infidelities and breakups. We know
what these bankers, lawyers, writers,
bureaucrats, and civil servants do for a
living, but we rarely see them at work.
They’re too busy enjoying the fast life,
at cafés and parties, in sports cars, on
country walks, at tennis games and
in bedrooms. They drape themselves
around the louche apartment of Cap-
tain Eulenfeld, an alcoholic Prussian
aristocrat, former cavalry officer, and
cigarette smuggler whose contaminat-
ing influence is so widespread that a
character describes him as “a kind of
disease.” Everyone is seducing every-
one else, or already has, or is plotting a
future seduction.
The book offers all the rewards of
nineteenth- century fiction: we know
what these people wear, how they dec-
orate their homes, what kind of ciga-
rettes they smoke. We can measure the
distance between their social personae
and their authentic selves. Lengthy
set pieces transport us to a bear hunt
in Bosnia, a rock- climbing expedition,
a diplomatic mission to Constantino-
ple, married life in Buenos Aires, a
drunken dance party at a country hotel
where a love affair of many years comes
to a humiliating end. Doderer’s Vienna
is as lovingly mapped as Balzac’s Paris,
Joyce’s Dublin, Dickens’s London.
But the more traditional elements are
scrambled by his modernist disregard
for the conventions of chronology, in-
troduction, and explanation, his lack of
interest in the helpful signposts and di-
rections that orient readers in time and
space. (Where did we meet that charac-
ter before? When is this party happen-
ing?) As in Proust, people vanish and
reappear in different guises, hundreds
of pages later, or exit the novel, unmen-
tioned, never to return.
Only slowly do we learn to distin-
guish the principal actors from the
walk- ons, and that only after we’ve
March 10, 2022
L’Esprit de l’Escalier
Francine Prose
Heimito von Doderer; illustration by Sophia Martineck
sorted out their vaguely similar names:
Grauermann, Geyrenhoff, and Grab-
mayr; Editha Pastré, later Editha
Schlinger; Etelka Stangeler, later Frau
Etelka Grauermann. We meet a lot of
characters in a very short span. And
yet the novel’s daring wit and its swift,
assured transitions between metaphys-
ics and gossip kept me reading content-
edly through the 150 or so pages that it
took me to get my bearings. The book
begins:
When Mary K.’s husband, a man
named Oscar, was still alive and
she was still walking around on
both her beautiful legs—the right
one was severed above the knee on
September 21, 1925, not far from
her apartment, when a streetcar
ran over it—a certain Dr. Negria
turned up, a young Romanian phy-
sician undergoing further training
at the well-known medical school
here, as a resident at the Vienna
General Hospital.
It’s a nervy opening sentence, like one
of Kafka’s or Kleist’s, but its true bra-
vado will reveal itself only much later.
Streetcars rumble ominously through
the background, but if you’re waiting
for Mary’s accident, you’ll need to be
patient for another 770 pages.
Many things happen in between, yet
Mary’s misfortune never completely
leaves our minds. On that fateful Sep-
tember 21, 1925, each of Mary’s every-
day actions—getting dressed, inviting
her friend for tea—fills us with dread.
Hundreds and hundreds of pages in,
we’re braced for catastrophe to befall a
woman who, by now, is only one of the
many female characters we have come
to know.
At the start we might assume that
Mary—appearing so early and suf-
fering so tragically—will be the nov-
el’s heroine. But though she figures in
Doderer’s later two-volume novel The
Demons (1956), she’s not quite central
here. She plays tennis, studies piano, is
happily married to Oscar, whose death
“of some kind of cancer” gets a sen-
tence or two. She has two redheaded
children; she worries about a friend’s
marriage and a neighbor’s troubled
engagement.
One thing we do learn about Mary
is that she was once involved with a
certain Lieutenant Melzer, whom she
remembers as “pretty stupid.” Mary’s
version of how the affair ended is that
Melzer left her to rejoin the military
and go bear hunting in Bosnia:
Lieutenant Melzer’s eventually
decamping—taking his stupidity
along with him—had, in a man-
ner of speaking, canceled out that
stupidity and with it her own supe-
riority. . . . He hadn’t a care in the
world. She would have deceived
him later on. . . . Because of his
being so even-tempered.
The reader may be surprised when
Melzer, so unflatteringly remembered,
emerges as one of the novel’s most im-
portant characters. We are often asked
to consider, as Mary does, the ques-
tion of his stupidity. If he is so stupid,
why does he respond so eloquently
to beauty? Why does he find it so im-
portant to think like a civilian and
not a soldier? Meanwhile, Doderer is
slyly setting us up for Melzer to do the
smartest thing that anyone does in the
book. Melzer “never had a ghost of a
thought,” he writes.
As far as we know, the first time he
ever thought anything at all came
on one particular occasion, and
then only at a very crucial time
and very far advanced phase in his
life—we will find out more about it
later. Once he finally did it, he did
it all the way; he didn’t waste his
powder with little displays of agil-
ity and ability.
I n between the novel’s two time peri-
ods, World War I has been fought, the
Habsburg Empire has crumbled. Mel-
zer has watched his close friend and
mentor, Major Laska, bleed to death
in his arms. René Stangeler, another
of his friends, was a prisoner in Sibe-
ria. But when the novel resumes, no
one talks much about the war, the col-
lapsed empire, or the political and eco-
nomic stresses undermining Austria’s
stability. It is 1925, yet everyone’s still
partying like it’s 1911. They take the
temperature of old passions, recall past
alliances, epiphanies, and betrayals.
They’re more concerned with a long-
ago public scandal that erupted on the
Strudlhof Steps (an incident involving
a couple who had been caught embrac-
ing in the bathroom at a garden party)
than with, say, the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The steps that give the novel its name
are one of Vienna’s art nouveau trea-
sures, a monumental outdoor staircase
built in 1910. This landmark is a pow-
erful presence throughout the book
and in the lives of the characters who
ascend or descend it, admire its grace,
meditate on its significance, and imag-
ine how it will look after the end of civ-
ilization. The curving and converging
flights of steps also suggest the book’s
many braided or helical plot twists, its
mirroring and doublings. The landings
and terraces evoke the rare moments
when the characters meet and pause,
as if to catch their breath, before set-
ting out in opposite directions that will
eventually bring them together again.
Melzer is the one who rhapsodizes
most eloquently about this “feat of
engineering”:
It mounted up, or rather it reached
down, placing into orderly ar-
rangement the steep drop- off,
truncated and abrupt by nature, of
the terrain here, dividing the tight-
lipped, nearly barren, all-too-pat
statement the terrain made into an
abundance of graceful turnings,
which the eye could no longer just
dart downward in a fast swoop to
follow but instead had to lower its
gaze as gently as a falling autumn
leaf swaying softly through the air.
Perhaps one reason the novel requires
such focus is that its characters are so
distracted, which makes the narrative
often seem propelled by their fits and
starts of attention. Dr. Negria, a pedi-
atrician, activist, and lothario, hopes to
seduce Mary K., whose marital fidelity
he finds pretentious and annoying. She
finally agrees to meet him at a café, but
en route she is distracted by a tennis
game. She stands the doctor up, but it
hardly matters, because he has already
been distracted himself by a pretty
woman at another table. He leaves the
café with his new friend, who turns out
to be Editha Pastré- Schlinger, one of
the novel’s main characters.
In a thoughtful afterword to this
new English edition, Daniel Kehlmann
cites the writer Martin Mosebach, who
29
compares the experience of reading
Doderer to attending a party: “Many
things happen, you have numerous
encounters, but afterward you can re-
member only a little, and in retrospect
at once a great deal and nothing at all
has occurred.” It’s the kind of party at
which the guests are always looking
past one another in search of someone
more interesting or sexually available.
T hese alliances, dalliances, and de-
ceptions are like islands of plot emerg-
ing from the sea of musings, opinions,
ramblings, and extended metaphors
that flood the novel. The obsessively
loquacious narrator is its real main
character, the biggest personality in a
book full of divas. He asks a lot from
us, first of all that we adjust to the
novel’s alternately breakneck and gla-
cial pace. A lot happens quickly, then
nothing happens as the narrator talks
and talks. Reading those pages can feel
like having a mad genius whispering in
your ear for days without much caring
whether you’re listening—and finding
it hard to break away from a soliloquy
about wearing suspenders, or what it
means when a character undresses be-
fore swimming.
Much of what the narrator says is
at once lyrical and astute. “A limited
imagination promotes failure of the
memory,” he muses,
because there are no luminous and
scarcely touched places back there
in one’s past, no votive altars of a
private religion, so to speak, nor
small hooks in the heart attached
to lines reaching far back, such
that any connection at all in the
imagination, or anything that one
happens to see, can exercise a gen-
tle tug.
When a married man, E. P., tells his
friend Melzer about a past heartbreak,
the narrator wonders what such per-
sonal confessions actually accomplish.
Self-revelation is
invariably based on self- deception,
on a desire to escape from one’s
own center, culminating in a sys-
tematic effort to make perfectly
clear to some other person, rather
than to our own selves, how mat-
ters stand. . . . Of course he’s going
to feel easier for the moment, like
a sick man who changes the way
he’s lying in bed. But still the emp-
tiness remains when he looks back
into the swirling, smoky cloud of
his own words and is now forced to
realize that it has not borne away
one gram of the mass weighing on
him. . . . They’re two jolly good fel-
lows, Melzer and E. P., but nothing
is coming out of this, at least not
for them.
Not only imaginative and perceptive
but vain and self- critical, the narra-
tor apologizes for making spiteful re-
marks, yet can’t stop:
Melzer didn’t obtain from [Editha]
even one iota of what he really
wanted, albeit unconsciously—
to receive back from her, now
wrapped in the warmth of her
person, things of his own that he’d
opened up to her. (And while we’re
at it, most people don’t want any-
thing other than exactly that when
30
they speak to us; hence the method
of taking part in a conversation
that will be of most benefit to all
is to say back to people, with some
slight variation, whatever they’ve
just finished saying to us. This is
the way to make the most cordial
relations come about with the least
expenditure of energy.)
There are also passages so obscure
that I gave up trying to figure out what
they meant. At times the experience is
a bit like reading Pynchon; we’re pretty
sure we can lose the thread and catch
up with the novel later. But there is al-
ways the chance that a misunderstood
reference will turn out to be crucial.
One wonders if Doderer is testing
his readers or if he’s just having fun
when, in the second half of the book,
he introduces a series of improbable
B-movie plot twists. One subplot con-
cerns Editha’s twin sister, Mimi. First
we hear that Mimi is probably dead,
then that she’s definitely dead. But ac-
tually she’s alive, married, and living
in Argentina. On occasion she’s been
visiting Vienna, where she and Editha
have been secretly swapping places.
The twins are totally indistinguishable
except for a faint appendectomy scar
and the fact that only one witnessed
and remembers the public scandal on
the Strudlhof Steps. The existence
of “duplicate ladies” comes as a big
surprise to everyone, especially their
lovers. Ultimately the twins put on
identical dresses and appear together,
as a joke, to shock their duped friends
and victims.
The reader too is astonished to learn
that it was Mimi and not Editha who
precipitated one of the novel’s nastier
scenes—the bullying and slapping of
a vapid young would-be actress, Thea
Rokitzer. In love with and “protected”
by the sleazy Captain Eulenfeld, the
passive, unthinking Thea followed his
orders and used a stolen passport to
claim, from the post office, a damaging
letter that drives Editha (that is, Mimi)
into in a violent rage.
Like Melzer, Thea, who has zero
acting talent, is considered stupid. In a
brilliant passage that captures how de-
sire can be masked with fake contempt,
the husband of Thea’s friend describes
Thea as a
fruit which—provided its type at-
tracts a man to begin with—seems
to be just made to bite into as long
as all one does is look at it, but if
it is bitten, one can only despair of
having done it, because it tastes like
food in a dream—like air, that is.
Elsewhere the narrator argues that
Thea is missing the two traits required
by the times to be really stupid: bra-
zenness and hostility. By now it should
be obvious how much of the book still
seems accurate today, how recogniz-
able its characters. Each generation has
its Captain Eulenfelds, surrounded by
younger women and admiring club kids.
Each group has its Etelka Stangeler-
Grauermanns, imagining that the next
lover will cure her sadness.
In what may be this very verbal nov-
el’s most meaningful conversation,
René Stangeler—who comes closer
than anyone to speaking for the au-
thor—expounds on the metaphysics of
stupidity:
The captain once said to me that a
stupid person who realizes his stu-
pidity is demonstrating great intel-
ligence by that token alone. Such
a person would even be capable of
asking the question—and probably
would ask it—what actual signifi-
cance his own stupidity is supposed
to have, why it should have fallen
to his lot. The very question places
him outside his limitation.
One may wonder why Doderer was
so obsessed with stupidity. Facing the
consequences of one’s stupid mistakes
is a basic narrative arc, as it was with
Adam and Eve. But evidence suggests
that Doderer might have wanted to re-
visit his own unwise decisions. A year
before his death in 1966, he wrote, “My
real work consists, in all seriousness,
neither of prose or verse, but in the rec-
ognition of my own stupidity.”*
Born into a wealthy Viennese fam-
ily in 1896, Doderer was recruited into
the Imperial Dragoons in World War I.
Captured by the Russians in 1916, he
was sent to prison in Siberia. He made
his way, with great difficulty, back to
Vienna, where he worked as a journal-
ist. In 1933 he joined the (then illegal)
Austrian Nazi Party. Though it’s been
suggested that this was an opportu-
nistic move to aid his unpromising lit-
erary career, he appears to have been
a genuine anti- Semite and believer in
National Socialism. Raised as a Prot-
estant, he converted to Catholicism in
1940, possibly as a response to his dis-
affection with Nazism, though he never
fully repudiated the party or apolo-
gized for his loyalty to it. Recruited
into the Wehrmacht during World War
II, he was posted to France, then Vi-
enna, then Oslo. (References to Oslo
appear in The Strudlhof Steps.)
After the war, the denazification pro-
gram prohibited Doderer from publish-
ing. When these restrictions were lifted
in 1951, The Strudlhof Steps appeared,
and it became a critical and popular
success. Other novels and volumes of
short stories followed, most famously
The Demons, translated into English
by Richard and Clara Winston and cur-
rently out of print.
There is no Nazi Party in The Strudl-
hof Steps, though one existed in Austria
after 1918. The narrator does complain
about rich Eastern Europeans getting
the nicest apartments, but that’s how
New Yorkers talk about Russian oli-
garchs, and it doesn’t mean they’re fas-
cists. There is no overt anti- Semitism in
Doderer’s novel, nothing even remotely
close to the odious caricatures one
finds in, say, Hemingway and Wharton.
In one of his stories, “The Trumpets of
Jericho,” there’s a beard-pulling epi-
sode that seems coded but presumably
refers to the daily humiliations visited
on Vienna’s Jews; it’s horrifying, and
it’s meant to be. Early in The Demons,
a novelist, Kajetan von Schlaggenberg,
a minor figure in The Studlhof Steps,
complains about his estranged wife’s
Jewish origins. In The Strudlhof Steps,
Melzer tells us, “My mother doesn’t ob-
ject to Jews,” but it’s not clear what he
means.
One possible reason for the novel’s
popularity is that it denazified Vienna
*Ivar Ivask, “Heimito von Doderer, an
Introduction,” Wisconsin Studies in
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 8, No. 4
(Autumn 1967).
and restored it to a brighter era, when,
at least for the privileged, suffering
entailed what Nadezhda Mandelstam
called “ordinary heartbreak.”
P erhaps some readers will refuse, on
moral grounds, to read an 850-page
novel by an Austrian Nazi who never
publicly recanted. Perhaps they’ve
stopped listening to Wagner. It is, as
they say, a personal choice. I was sorry
to learn about Doderer’s politics, but
I remained enraptured by the novel,
even when it occurred to me that its au-
thor may have been denazified but not
completely demilitarized. Consider the
moment when Melzer saves Mary K.’s
life:
Melzer turned left and raced to-
ward the middle of the square.
Exactly like charging full on
in battle: hurtling fully into it as
if one’s own will were a gigantic
hairy fist whose force a man has
been trained all his life, however
small and insignificant it has been,
to receive.
At her side. With blood spurt-
ing red everywhere, spattering
the man’s knees. But the man was
a professional soldier, a soldier
who’d weathered many different
battles. He pulled off his belt and
moved her shredded and bloody
clothing aside. He felt around the
wound, calmly and clearly realiz-
ing within mere seconds that the
leg had been severed almost com-
pletely above the knee. . . : that’s
where he applied a tourniquet. He
skillfully thrust his walking stick
(along with its gold knob) through
his belt as he was tightening it, and
now he gave it a twist. The blood
that had been gushing out at even
intervals now stopped.
Melzer knows what to do because he
has been in the war. When your leg is
under the trolley, the veteran’s the guy
you want. The irony is that poor Melzer
has spent years believing that the secret
of intelligence is to stop thinking like
a soldier. But now Melzer wins on all
counts. He and Mary used to be in love,
so it’s perfect that he saves her. Then
the ingénue, Thea Rokitzer, shows up
at the accident scene. With remarkable
courage and calm, she helps Melzer
administer first aid, and they fall in
love as they kneel together in Mary’s
blood. And so the novel’s two “stu-
pid” characters have been brave and
ingenious, saved a life, and found each
other.
The novel ends—or nearly ends—
with Thea and Melzer’s wedding,
though the narrator can’t help mocking
novels that end with marriage:
People seem to consider such a
wrap-up an ending and not a be-
ginning. . . . The truth is, however,
that such an ending furnishes
nothing but an unusually good op-
portunity—a splendid one, for that
matter—to reinstate emptiness by
way of fulfillment, removal of sus-
pense. . . . Here, then, a legitimate
reason becomes discernible for
closing novels at the point of “hap-
pily ever after”—to leave our dear
readers with the precious legacy of
emptiness, even though it may last
for only a brief, ideal moment, to
leave them in their virginal state,
The New York Review
 as it were, and that is why the au-
thor will now slip away at this point
and insist to the publisher that his
manuscript is finished.
But the narrator can’t end by prais-
ing emptiness. So there’s a coda that
takes us back in time to the couple’s
engagement party, at which they are
toasted by Civil Service Council-
lor Julius Zihal, the epitome of the
deadly dull bureaucrat. As Vincent
Kling pointed out during an informa-
tive online discussion promoting the
release of this translation, the speech
is a muddled version of the song from
Die Fledermaus that dear Major Laska
sang when he and Melzer first met on a
train. “Happiness,” mumbles Zihal,
is much more likely to occupy the
domain of a person the extent of
whose own demands remains so
far behind the decisions reaching
said person from a higher quarter
that a considerable residue of con-
tentment naturally ensues.
The narrator gets the last word, tell-
ing us that it’s a perfect description of
Melzer.
I was sorry when I finished the book.
I’ve heard people say that when they
read the last sentence of In Search of Lost
Time, they wanted to start all over from
the beginning. Similarly, The Strudlhof
Steps invites instant rereading. You
want to reenter its cinematic world, like
an epic film directed by Douglas Sirk in
partnership with Béla Tarr, Fassbinder,
and Visconti. You want to reflect on
one of the narrator’s observations that
you might have missed before, to reg-
ister a repeated sentence or detail that
turns out to be portentous, and, this
time, to be sure which of the duplicate
ladies wakes up in the captain’s bed
and has her passport stolen. Q

The End of the Terror

David A. Bell
The Fall of Robespierre:

Private Collection/Stefano Bianchetti/Bridgeman Images

24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris
by Colin Jones.
Oxford University Press, 571 pp., $32.95

Imagine a government divided between

two ferociously opposed political forces,
both of which claim the right to power.
A crisis develops, with many officials
caught between the two sides, confused
and uncertain which to support. There
are threats of violence, previously invi-
olable political spaces are invaded, and
blood is shed. Anxious onlookers pre-
dict civil war. The United States experi-
enced a crisis of this sort on January 6,
2021, when pro-Trump rioters attacked
the Capitol to halt the certification of
Joe Biden’s election as president.
The pattern is a familiar historical
one, but such crises have often had far
more devastating outcomes than the
one in Washington did. In England in
the 1640s, King Charles I dramatically
invaded the meeting hall of Parliament
in an attempt to arrest its insubordi-
nate leaders. In Russia in 1917, Bolshe-
viks stormed the headquarters of the
Provisional Government in the name
of the popular councils called Soviets.
In both cases, an enormously destruc-
tive civil war followed.
Then there was the crisis immortalized
by its date in the short-lived French rev-
olutionary calendar: 9 Thermidor Year
II (Sunday, July 27, 1794). On that day, Jean-Lambert Tallien threatening to kill Maximilien Robespierre at a meeting of the National Convention,
the National Convention—the effec- Paris, 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794); eighteenth-century engraving
tive revolutionary government—voted
to purge several of its members, most militants who claim to speak for “the today regard as the legitimate and even their stories deftly, allowing the reader
prominently the radical leader Maximi- people” ever have the right to defy or heroic ancestor of their own Fifth Re- to follow along with ease. He also has
lien Robespierre. The men managed to perhaps even overthrow democratically public. The sans- culottes took up arms an eye for the telling detail—the way a
escape to the Paris Maison Commune elected governments, as Robespierre at several other points during the Rev- man’s handwriting “gets wild and shaky
(the revolutionary name for the Hôtel de and his allies tried to do? The rioters olution, and many of the French look as he scribbles down his orders”; a dep-
Ville, or city hall), where the municipal who stormed the US Capitol on January back on these risings, too, with consid- uty recklessly demanding to be arrested
government, proclaiming itself the true 6 asserted that, because elected federal erable sympathy. On 9 Thermidor, it along with Robespierre, and his friends
representative of the French people, and state governments had acted in a was the failure of most sans- culottes to “surreptitiously . . . tugging at his coat-
called for an insurrection. corrupt and tyrannical fashion by allow- back the municipality’s call for insur- tails to force him to sit, so firmly in fact
Both sides appealed to the urban ing Democrats to steal the presidential rection that, more than any other fac- that his jacket has torn.” And Jones
militants known as sans- culottes. After election, true patriots had no choice but tor, spelled Robespierre’s doom. can summon up striking and humorous
hours of considerable confusion and direct action in the people’s name. In turns of phrase. Robespierre has “egg-
scattered violence the Convention pre- this case their claims were outrageously shell amour-propre”; “There is nowhere
vailed, and the next day Robespierre and transparently false. T he story of the Ninth of Thermidor that [Bertrand] Barère feels more com-
and his allies went to the guillotine. But during the French Revolution, has been told many times, but never fortable than on the fence.”
This spelled the end of the most rad- matters were not always so clear. No- so well as in Colin Jones’s The Fall of Jones’s narrative experimentation
ical phase of the French Revolution, tably, on August 10, 1792, sans- culottes Robespierre. Jones offers a new inter- is all the more welcome because it is
which the victors quickly labeled the and other radical militants stormed pretation of the events, but this is not so uncommon in his field. Few histo-
Terror. Civil war did not follow, but rev- the Tuileries Palace and overthrew the what makes his book remarkable. He rians today consider history a literary
olutionary turmoil continued, and five constitutional monarchy established has chosen to take his readers through art as well as a scholarly exercise, and
years later Napoleon Bonaparte seized less than a year earlier. King Louis the day literally hour by hour, starting most hew to an unimaginative expos-
power in a coup d’état. XVI had in fact been plotting against at midnight and ending at midnight, al- itory style that has changed little in
The victorious “Thermidorians” said the Revolution—in June 1791 he had though with a considerable epilogue for the past century—as Hayden White
they had acted to protect France from a even tried to flee the country and join the following day. The chapters, some pointed out, to little avail, nearly fifty
monstrous, bloodthirsty dictator, but in up with an enemy army across the fron- no more than a paragraph long, all begin years ago. Jones, in his acknowledg-
truth the day boasted few heroes. Still, it tier. The August insurrection led to with a time stamp and are written in the ments, claims inspiration from the Ou-
did pose, very explicitly, a central ques- the proclamation of the First French present tense. Jones has marshaled a lipo group, twentieth- century French
tion of modern democratic politics: Do Republic, which most French people huge cast of characters but interweaves writers who sought to produce striking

March 10, 2022 31

literary effects with various forms of
“writing under constraint.” George Pe-
rec’s novel An Attempt at Exhausting a
Place in Paris consists entirely of ob-
servations from a specific location over
three consecutive days, complete with
date and time stamps at the start of
each section. The three hundred pages
of his A Void (in French, La dispari-
tion) do not contain a single letter “e.”
It will not escape connoisseurs of clas-
sic French theater that, like Racine and
Corneille, Jones has also divided his
text into five acts and obeys the three
classical unities of time (a single day),
place (the city of Paris), and action (the
fall of Robespierre). Like the tragic
playwrights, he manages to generate
considerable suspense, even though the
audience knows the bloody outcome in
advance.
J ones was fortunate to draw on one
of the richest seams of information
that we possess about any eighteenth-
century event. In its aftermath, the
Thermidorians called on Parisian offi-
cials to send in detailed reports on what
had transpired, and nearly two hun-
dred responded. An official commis-
sion also produced a report, in addition
to which voluminous memoirs, newspa-
per accounts, and police dossiers have
survived, along with transcripts of pro-
ceedings in the Convention. Jones has
mined this material in a meticulously
judicious fashion. Unlike many histo-
rians of the French Revolution, he has
no desire to fight its battles over again.
His Robespierre is neither the blood-
drenched monster of Thermidorian
legend nor the visionary hero that some
on the French left still believe him to
have been. He is a complex character:
idealistic and inspiring, but also rigid,
ruthless, thin-skinned, and increas-
ingly paranoid; a brilliant thinker and
strategist, but a terrible manager who
lacks any sense of how to lead others
in a crisis.
Jones’s weaving of a coherent narra-
tive also benefits from the fact that the
events mostly played out in a very small
area—barely a square mile of central
Paris, along what are now just four stops
of Metro Line One. Nearly all the par-
ticipants lived and worked there. The
execution of Robespierre and his allies
took place just to the west, in what is
now the Place de la Concorde. Today
wide, airy boulevards cut through this
area, but in the late eighteenth century
it was a maze of small, dark streets that
were unbearably fetid in the summer
heat of Thermidor. Even so, news and
messages could spread in a matter of
minutes, and a tocsin of church bells
could sound an immediate alarm.
The start of the book poses the great-
est challenge for Jones. Because of the
constraint he has imposed on himself,
he must recount the surprisingly busy
early-morning hours of 9 Thermidor
while at the same time introducing his
characters and providing background
for the events that were starting to un-
fold. This background was anything
but simple. French people frequently
remarked that since the start of the
Revolution in 1789, time seemed to
have become compressed, so thick
was it with events. Robespierre, barely
a month before his fall, wrote that in
the previous five years, the French had
leapt two thousand years ahead of the
rest of the human race. These chapters
occasionally make for heavy going, but
32
Jones leavens them with considerable
humor and piquant detail. He notes
that a deputy in prison, threatened with
execution, nonetheless managed to live
luxuriously, requesting “salad, cabbage,
carrots, asparagus, artichokes, grapes,
chocolate, sugar lumps, mackerel, sau-
sages, grilled songbirds, rice, pork and
mutton, a bottle of wine a day.” Intro-
ducing Robespierre’s somewhat dim
younger brother Augustin, Jones quotes
another revolutionary’s devastating ver-
dict: “All lungs, no brain.”
The density of events stemmed from a
process of apparently unstoppable rad-
icalization. In 1789, most of the French
had assumed that the Revolution would
quickly conclude with the transforma-
tion of the country’s absolute mon-
archy into a moderate constitutional
one. Instead, ferocious political battles
developed over the pace and extent of
reform, with outbreaks of popular vi-
olence repeatedly breaking stalemates
between more conservative and more
radical political factions in the latter’s
favor.
By the spring of 1793, the old regime’s
legal structure had been largely swept
away, the king had been executed, the
Catholic Church had seen its property
expropriated and its privileged status
abolished, and a republican National
Convention elected by universal adult
male suffrage was trying to rebuild the
country almost from scratch. France
was also at war with a large pan-
European coalition, and a dangerous
revolt was out of control in the western
departments. The Convention itself fell
prey to bitter factional infighting, and
at the end of May 1793 a radical group
around Robespierre, nicknamed the
Mountain (they occupied the highest
seats in the meeting hall), forged an
alliance with sans- culottes who staged
an armed insurrection and forced the
expulsion and imprisonment of rival
Girondin deputies.
Over the next year the Convention’s
Committee of Public Safety, dominated
by members of the Mountain, assumed
increasingly dictatorial powers in order
to fight the war and the civil war, and
to eliminate alleged counterrevolu-
tionaries. Their campaign of bloody
repression accelerated dangerously in
the spring of 1794, when thousands of
men and women were hauled before a
hostile Revolutionary Tribunal, often
on flimsy charges, and in many cases
executed after perfunctory trials.
Robespierre, the dominant figure
on the Committee, purged enemies on
both the right and the left, including
the great revolutionary orator Georges
Danton, who went to the guillotine in
April. By 8 Thermidor, many other
deputies were fearing for their lives,
and on that day, Robespierre gave a
violent, two-hour speech in which he
promised further purges. Worn down
by the crushing demands of revolution-
ary politics, assassination threats, and
recent illness, he was nonetheless capa-
ble of remarkable flights of eloquence
and remained something of a popu-
lar idol. Several other members of the
Committee now suspected that they
had become his targets.
Jones argues that while Robespierre
was almost certainly planning a new
purge of the Convention, he did not
intend for it to happen immediately.
Armed support from the sans- culottes
could take weeks to organize. Nor were
his possible victims ready to act against
him. What happened on 9 Thermidor
was in large part a chaotic, confused
accident. With his careful, minute-by-
minute reconstruction, Jones shows
just how much depended on sheer
chance, on odd twists of fortune, and
on “a million micro- decisions made by
Parisians across the expanse of the city
and through the 24 hours of the day.”
A t the center of the events, improb-
ably, was a romance. Theresa Cabar-
rus was the beautiful twenty-year- old
daughter of an aristocratic Spanish
financier—and therefore, in the eyes
of radical revolutionaries, an enemy
aristocrat herself. But a twenty-seven-
year- old member of the Convention,
Jean-Lambert Tallien, while leading a
mission to suppress and punish provin-
cial counterrevolutionaries, had fallen
in love with her and protected her. In
early 1794 Robespierre and his allies
started to accuse Tallien of “modera-
tionism,” or an insufficiently hard-line
attitude when it came to the guillotine.
For the moment, his status as a dep-
uty shielded him, but not Cabarrus,
who was imprisoned on Robespierre’s
orders. By 8 Thermidor her trial and
execution looked imminent. Frantic to
save her and fearing for his own life,
Tallien spent the early-morning hours
of 9 Thermidor crisscrossing the cen-
ter of the capital, visiting deputies and
imploring them to join him in attacking
Robespierre in the Convention.
The crucial moment came shortly
after noon, in the Convention’s meeting
place: the Tuileries Palace in central
Paris (adjacent to the Louvre, it was
destroyed in the nineteenth century).
Robespierre’s closest ally, twenty-six-
year- old Louis-Antoine Saint-Just,
was giving a speech when Tallien burst
into the hall, demanding to speak on a
point of order. A sympathetic chair let
Tallien have the floor, and he immedi-
ately attacked Robespierre for seeking
to hurl the country “into the abyss.”
Theatrically, he whipped a dagger out
of his coat, promising to kill Robes-
pierre if the Convention did not order
his arrest.
Tallien’s newly recruited allies
shouted their support and, emboldened,
the threatened members of the Com-
mittee of Public Safety joined in the
attack, denouncing Robespierre as a
tyrant. He tried to get to the rostrum to
speak, but deputies physically blocked
his way. For nearly two hours, Robes-
pierre struggled to make himself heard,
while deputy after deputy, sensing the
sudden change in the wind, denounced
him. Finally, the Convention ordered
his arrest, along with that of his brother,
Saint-Just, and several others.
But the day was far from over. Robes-
pierre had always counted on staunch
support from the Commune—the mu-
nicipal government—of Paris. Its lead-
ers, in turn, had the ability to mobilize
armed detachments of sans- culottes
and other militants from the forty-
eight districts of the city. A crucial
figure was François Hanriot, the foul-
mouthed, choleric commander of the
Parisian National Guard. When news
of the Convention’s actions reached the
Maison Commune, Hanriot called for
an uprising and sent a messenger from
the Convention back with the words
“we are going to hurry along to rid
them of all the fucking traitors to the
fatherland.”
As policemen delivered Robespierre
to the gates of the Luxembourg prison,
a crowd forced his release, and munici-
pal officials brought him to the Maison
Commune. By early evening, over three
thousand armed men had assembled
there, while the Convention remained
largely undefended. One official de-
clared that “the Convention only exists
in the form of a factious few. The people
has taken the reins of government.” It
seemed that Robespierre and the Com-
mune might yet win the day.
In the evening, the tide turned. Al-
though used to taking up arms for the
Commune, the sans- culottes had until
now also given enthusiastic support
to the Convention, under whose lead-
ership France’s armies had recently
scored major military victories. Con-
flicting messages from the two institu-
tions left many of the district assemblies
in confusion. But the Convention acted
more quickly to print and distribute
wall posters and broadsheets denounc-
ing Robespierre and the Commune for
conspiring against the Revolution.
In addition, at a crucial moment,
Hanriot flinched from ordering a full-
scale assault on the Convention—pos-
sibly, Jones suggests, because “beneath
Hanriot’s bravura exterior beats a
cowardly heart.” Robespierre, in a
state of shock, failed to rally his fol-
lowers despite having written, in a 1793
Declaration of Rights, that “when the
government violates the rights of the
people, insurrection is for the people
and for each portion of the people the
most sacred of rights and the most in-
dispensable of duties.” He began to
sign a document demanding armed ac-
tion against the Convention and then
stopped, leaving just the letters “Ro”
(it survived and can still be seen in the
French National Archives).
Meanwhile, the Convention named
Paul Barras, a tough, experienced
deputy and former military officer, to
organize its armed response. It also
formally declared Robespierre, his al-
lies, and the leading municipal officials
to be outlaws, subject to immediate
execution without trial (in doing so,
ironically, it relied on legislation orig-
inally pushed by Robespierre himself).
By midnight, and the end of 9 Thermi-
dor, the Commune’s supporters were
hedging their bets and returning home,
while the Convention prepared its own
assault. Two hours later, Barras’s men
stormed the Maison Commune and
met little resistance. One of Hanriot’s
subordinates, furious at his erratic con-
duct, threw him out of a window onto
a dung heap. Robespierre sustained a
dreadful bullet wound to the jaw—pos-
sibly self-inflicted in a botched suicide
attempt. Less than twenty-four hours
later, he, Saint-Just, Hanriot, and
nineteen others went to the guillotine.
Eighty-three more men, mostly munic-
ipal officials who had supported the
attempted insurrection, followed over
the next two days.
T he meaning attached to this incred-
ible story has changed significantly
over time, and Jones has revised it yet
again. In the immediate aftermath of 9
Thermidor, the victors portrayed what
had happened as the joint triumph of
the Convention and the people of Paris
over a bloodthirsty tyrant. By 1795,
however, they were trying to move
the Revolution away from egalitarian
social reform, writing a new constitu-
tion that would limit suffrage to men
of property, and brutally suppressing
The New York Review
two attempted insurrections by the
sans- culottes. In accordance with these
new positions, they cast 9 Thermidor
as an action by the Convention alone
to stop a radical movement that had
careened out of control into what they
now labeled the Terror. Inventing two
words with an impressive future, they
condemned “terrorism” and sent ad-
ditional “terrorists” to the guillotine,
while writing the people of Paris out of
the story entirely.
Modern historians have, to a surpris-
ing extent, followed their lead, arguing
that the people of Paris failed to save
Robespierre because they had been
shell-shocked by the Terror or disap-
proved of the Mountain’s attempts to
rein in the volatile sans- culottes. Jones
will have none of this. “Parisians might
have tired of Robespierre,” he writes
convincingly, “but they had not tired of
political life.” The Ninth of Thermidor
played out the way it did because mil-
itant Parisians, in the chaos and con-
fusion of the day, ended up supporting
the Convention over the Commune.
Doing so required them to believe that
Robespierre, until then their hero, had
been unmasked as an evil counterrevo-
lutionary. But Robespierre himself had
made this reversal easier by supposedly
unmasking many earlier revolutionary
heroes, most prominently Danton, in
the same fashion. He was devoured by
the machine of terror he had done so
much to set in motion.
If Jones’s book has a weakness, it is
that the imaginative focus on a single
day makes it harder to see 9 Thermidor
in the larger setting of the Terror. He
reinforces this tendency by deferring
to recent French scholarship (notably
by Jean- Clément Martin) that ques-
tions older understandings of the Ter-
ror as a concerted national campaign
of bloody repression that spun madly
out of control and ended with 9 Ther-
midor. This new work puts emphasis
on the post hoc invention of the term
“Terror” by the Thermidorians, on the
highly uneven patterns of repression
across France, on the fact that many
victims were armed rebels against the
Convention, and on the continuation of
widespread if more spasmodic blood-
shed throughout the rest of the 1790s,
including brutal episodes of revenge
against radical officials and their allies.
However one understands the Terror,
though, it is important to recognize that
something horrific took place in France
in the year before 9 Thermidor and
came to an end as a result of it. During
that year, the Convention decreed that
anyone fitting into a broad category of
“suspect,” including anyone who had
allegedly written or spoken against the
Revolution, was subject to immediate
arrest and trial. Aided by a network
of thousands of Jacobin societies im-
planted even in small villages, the au-
thorities imposed a regime of draconian
surveillance in much of the country and
encouraged anonymous denunciation.
Newspapers were shut down or intimi-
dated. Robespierre boasted that “every
new faction will discover death in the
mere thought of crime.”
In the rebellious west of the country,
the army carried out indiscriminate
mass killings, with an overall death toll
that may have exceeded 200,000. In the
spring of 1794, the Convention stripped
political defendants of most legal protec-
tions and streamlined trial procedures,
greatly accelerating the pace of execu-
tions. It was not just Robespierre’s en-
emies in the Convention who lived in
constant fear during this time. Jones
quotes a conversation between an ap-
prentice printer and friends that was
recorded by police spies: “‘If they guillo-
tine people just for thinking, how many
people will die?’ ‘Don’t talk so loud.
They could hear us and take us in.’”
The men who overthrew Robes-
pierre had participated in this repres-
sion. They ended it in large part to save
their own heads and to prepare the
way for the more conservative revolu-
tionary government they established
in 1795. But end it they did—not im-
mediately and not fully, perhaps, but
untold numbers of lives were saved.
Had the Commune succeeded in its
insurrection on 9 Thermidor and re-
turned Robespierre and his allies to a
position of dominance, there is little
doubt that the bloodshed would have
increased dramatically. Tallien and his
impromptu allies on the Committee of
Public Safety may have been anything
but righteous, but it does not always
take righteous people to accomplish a
righteous end.
And legality, in the end, also mat-
tered. The Convention may have for-
feited much of its claim to legitimate
authority by its deliberate destruction
of legal norms over the previous year,
but it remained the elected government
of France, chosen for the first time in
European history by universal adult
male suffrage. The insurrectionary
Parisian officials had no legal basis
to argue that “the people has taken
the reins of government”—only their
own conviction that they incarnated
the true spirit of the Revolution better
than their opponents did. On very rare
occasions, when an elected government
has entirely forfeited its legitimacy, vi-
olent insurrection may be justified. On
9 Thermidor Year II, as on January 6,
2021, it was not. Q


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Maggi Hambling
Edge XIV, 2021
oil on canvas
Cameron Welch, Fugue State, 2021, marble, glass, ceramic, stone, 84" x 36"
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March 10, 2022 33

 What We Owe Our Fellow Animals
Mama’s Last Hug:
Animal Emotions and What
They Tell Us About Ourselves
by Frans de Waal.
Norton, 325 pp., $27.95; $16.95 (paper)
Dolphin Communication
and Cognition:
Past, Present, and Future
edited by Denise L. Herzing and
Christine M. Johnson.
MIT Press, 310 pp., $40.00
Deep Thinkers:
Inside the Minds of Whales,
Dolphins, and Porpoises
edited by Janet Mann.
University of Chicago Press,
192 pp., $35.00
Becoming Wild:
How Animal Cultures Raise Families,
Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace
by Carl Safina.
Henry Holt, 368 pp.,
$29.99; $19.00 (paper)
The Cultural Lives
of Whales and Dolphins
by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell.
University of Chicago Press,
417 pp., $25.00 (paper)
The world we share with the other an-
imals is stranger and more wondrous
than we humans have typically real-
ized. Consider three recent scientific
findings:
In 1996 a single humpback whale
off the eastern coast of Australia
was heard singing a new song, with
a dramatically different melodic and
rhythmic structure from the songs the
eastern whales had been singing. Com-
paring notes, researchers realized that
this was a song that whales off the Aus-
tralian west coast were already singing.
By 1997 all the eastern whales were
singing the new song. Whale song, it
turns out, changes rapidly, even fad-
dishly, by imitation.
A group of dolphins in Shark Bay,
Australia, were seen swimming around
with what looked at first like odd ap-
pendages on their snouts. They were
actually sponges, and scientists later
observed the dolphins using them to
scrape edible prey loose from the rough
marine floor—apparently to safeguard
their soft snouts. Only some of the local
dolphins—mostly females—are “spong-
ers.” They learn the technique from their
mothers and use it the rest of their lives.
In a laboratory experiment at the
Max Planck Research Station for
Comparative Cognition on the island
of Tenerife, off the coast of Morocco,
both macaws and African gray parrots
learned to take a nonedible token in-
stead of food, trading it later for food
they liked better. Researchers con-
cluded that the birds understood both
delayed gratification and the value of
“currency.” “Parrots are capable of
making a rational decision and maxi-
mizing the benefit to themselves,” said
the lead researcher, Anastasia Kra-
sheninnikova, noting that the birds
performed just as well as chimpanzees
in similar experiments.
It is important for all of us to try
hard to understand what scientists
34
Martha C. Nussbaum
Nancy Friedland: Night Deer #5, 2022
have been discovering. Animals have
long been seen as mere property, as
“brute beasts.” Now a revolution in
knowledge is revealing the enormous
richness and cognitive complexity of
animal lives, which prominently in-
clude intricate social groups, emotional
responses, and even cultural learning.
We share this fragile planet with other
sentient animals, whose efforts to live
and flourish are thwarted in countless
ways by human negligence and obtuse-
ness. This gives us a collective respon-
sibility to do something to make our
ubiquitous domination more benign,
less brutal—perhaps even more just.
But to think clearly about our re-
sponsibility, we need to understand
these animals as accurately as we can:
what they are striving for, what capaci-
ties and responses they have as they try
to flourish. Knowledge will help us to
think better about the ethical questions
before us and, especially, to develop a
good theoretical orientation toward
animal lives, which can direct law and
policy well, rather than, as in the past,
crudely and obtusely.
We humans have cognitive prejudices
to overcome. One obstacle is a bias in
favor of our nearest evolutionary rel-
atives. Ape intelligence has long been
acknowledged, but the intelligence of
Nancy Friedland
birds, cetaceans, and rodents has been
denied. With this obstacle goes a bias
in favor of biology similar to our own:
thus even expert scientists have long de-
nied the extent of the abilities of birds,
who have no neocortex and therefore
(many have thought) cannot be very
bright. But evolution does not take
just a single route. In the case of birds,
“convergent evolution” has produced
abilities very similar to those of apes
(tool use, complicated social strategies,
the ability to deceive others) through a
totally different biological path.
We are also impeded by what one
could call the false lure of language,
the tendency to think that humans
are the only creatures with language,
and that this sets us utterly apart from
the rest of sentient life. This is a dou-
ble error. First, it overstates the cen-
trality of language in human life.
Despite what novelists tell us, most
of our daily mental life is not lived in
words. Often we think in pictures or
tunes, and when we think in language
it is in choppy fragments, far from the
prose of Henry James. The second part
of this error is that it neglects the tre-
mendous richness of animal communi-
cative systems, most of which are still
poorly understood. But we can at least
begin to grasp that whale song is amaz-
ingly complex as well as beautiful, that
the lowly chickadee has a vocal reper-
tory that experts credit with syntactic
combinations, that dolphins, with their
signature whistles, far outdo us in indi-
viduality and uniqueness of voice.
Then there is what we may call the
false lure of metacognition: the idea
that reflexive self- consciousness is the
be-all and end-all of intelligence, and
that we humans are unique in possess-
ing it. Again, this error is double. First,
we ourselves reflect about our own
mental states much less than we often
claim. Most of our lives are lived with
simpler first- order awareness. (The
philosopher Michael Tye has made this
case convincingly in his writings about
animals.1) Second, any creature who is
capable of deceiving another creature
is capable of metacognition, since to
deceive you must be able to think about
the mental state of another. Dogs,
squirrels, many birds, and no doubt a
long list of other animals have this abil-
ity, which is crucial to survival when
you have to hide your food where your
competitors won’t find it.
Behind these biases lies a more
general failing, which the Dutch pri-
matologist Frans de Waal calls “an-
thropodenial”: the denial that we are
animals of a certain type (the anthro-
poid type), and the tendency to imag-
ine ourselves, instead, as pure spirits,
“barely connected to biology.” This
mistaken way of thinking has a long
history in most human cultures; it re-
mains stubbornly lodged in people’s
psyches even when they think they are
examining the evidence fairly. An-
thropodenial has led, until recently, to
a reluctance to credit research findings
that show that animals use tools, solve
problems, communicate through com-
plex systems, interact socially with in-
tricate forms of organization, and even
have emotions such as fear, grief, and
envy. (This is a bait-and-switch: emo-
tions have long been denigrated on the
grounds that they are not pure spirit,
and yet humans also want to claim a
monopoly on what they despise.)
Even when scientists and their col-
laborators avoid these errors, it is ex-
tremely difficult to get things right
about animal lives and capacities. Con-
trolled experiments are very difficult
to do outside of captivity. And confin-
ing large social animals such as orcas
and dolphins in zoos and theme parks
is increasingly recognized as uneth-
ical. De Waal believes that with great
apes, ethically acceptable research is
possible if the facility is very large, con-
taining a typical habitat and a diverse
social group of animals who can inter-
act freely rather than being stuffed into
cages. He points out that we should be
suspicious of results that are obtained
by penning animals up and separating
them from their fellows. If the habitat
is built in an animal-friendly way, and
if the experiment involves engaging
tasks, he says, the animals will come.
But even if this is right for apes, it can-
not be the solution for animals such as
elephants, dolphins, and whales, since
for them a normal social life involves
1
See Michael Tye, Tense Bees and
Shell- Shocked Crabs: Are Animals
Conscious? (Oxford University Press,
2017).
The New York Review
not just a large social group but also a
vast expanse of land or sea in which to
move. (A possible exception might be a
group of dolphins who happen to stay
in a naturally partly enclosed coastal
bay, and these settings have proven to
be prime sources of research oppor-
tunities.) But, apart from its ethical
problems, captivity distorts natural
behavior. In most cases, then, observ-
ers must go out and live near the ani-
mals they study for extended periods of
time, learning how to become accepted
as nonthreatening, perhaps even as
honorary members of the group. This
has produced excellent results for stud-
ies of animals as diverse as African
parrots, elephants, and baboons. But
what about whales? The closest scien-
tists can come to “living with” them is
shown in Hal Whitehead and Luke Ren-
dell’s The Cultural Lives of Whales and
Dolphins in a photo of the small yacht
on which these two intrepid scientist-
sailors spend half of each year, aided by
technology to record and photograph
whales underwater. It is also impractical
for humans to “live with” most birds,
although here, too, audio and video re-
cording have opened new doors.
T he books discussed here vary greatly
in style. Carl Safina, the author of Be-
coming Wild: How Animal Cultures
Raise Families, Create Beauty, and
Achieve Peace, is a science writer who
accompanies research scientists as they
work; he writes with grace and flair.
De Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug: Animal
Emotions and What They Tell Us About
Ourselves is the latest in this major sci-
entist’s series of eloquent explorations
of animal lives. Deep Thinkers: In-
side the Minds of Whales, Dolphins,
and Porpoises, edited by Janet Mann,
is a gorgeous picture book at the very
highest level, in which leading research
scientists tell us about the current state
of knowledge in their subfields. Denise
Herzing and Christine Johnson’s Dol-
phin Communication and Cognition:
Past, Present, and Future is a collection
of cutting- edge scholarly articles, ac-
companied by a first-rate introduction
to the field’s ethical issues by the phi-
losopher and dolphin expert Thomas
White. Whitehead and Rendell have
written a dense, rigorously argued, and
witty treatise about cetacean culture
that manages to be both scientifically
important and accessible to nonexperts
who have genuine curiosity and are
willing to work hard.
All these books show how scientists
confront the limitations of their research
with ingenuity and imagination; but they
also acknowledge, Socratically, their
own considerable ignorance. Here’s
where we are: the animal world contains
a kaleidoscopic diversity of life-forms
and types of cognitive awareness. Ani-
mals have evolved to be extremely good
at survival strategies, and these strate-
gies vary with the environment, as they
must. As de Waal puts it in a preface to a
book about birds by Nathan Emery:
We used to think in terms of a
linear ladder of intelligence with
humans on top, but nowadays we
realize it is more like a bush with
lots of different branches, in which
each species evolves the mental
powers it needs to survive.2
2
Nathan Emery, Bird Brain: An Explo-
ration of Avian Intelligence (Princeton
March 10, 2022
Animals who look sort of like us are
stranger and more complicated than we
thought, and those who look nothing
like us (whales, birds) turn out to have
some of the most sophisticated cogni-
tive equipment. Nor are humans “at
the top” of any ladder. Some animals
have senses that we utterly lack. Many
birds have a strong sense of magnetic
fields and, through that, can navigate
the world with an accuracy of which
we can only dream. Dolphins have the
capacity for echolocation, a form of
perception akin to sonar, which can in-
form them not only of the contours of
an object but also of its insides. (One
dolphin researcher was informed of
her own pregnancy by a dolphin, who
noticed something strange inside the
woman’s body before the woman her-
self had thought to get a test! 3)
As for emotions: so long as re-
searchers thought of emotions as sub-
jective feelings, it was difficult to get
evidence for fear and grief in other an-
imals. (The same problem, of course,
impedes the ascription of emotions
to other humans to whose subjectiv-
ity we do not have direct access, but
nonphilosophers rarely notice that
problem.) Now, however, in neurosci-
ence and evolutionary biology, emo-
tions are understood as important
pieces of animal survival equipment,
with clear links to behavior. In effect,
they are ways of processing informa-
tion about how a creature’s import-
ant goals are being met in the world;
they ascribe salience or importance
to objects to which creatures are
attached.
The ancient Greeks and Romans
knew all this: Aristotle, and especially
the Greek and Roman Stoics, devised
rich theories of emotion based on these
ideas, and modern philosophical the-
ories often allude to a rediscovery of
these ancient insights, which had been
dislodged by more recent mechanistic
University Press, 2016). This book is an
excellent resource, along with Jennifer
Ackerman, The Genius of Birds (Pen-
guin, 2016) and The Bird Way: A New
Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play,
Parent, and Think (Penguin, 2020).
The Bird Way was reviewed in these
pages by Robert O. Paxton, February
25, 2021.
3
See Thomas White, In Defense of Dol-
phins: The New Moral Frontier (Black-
well, 2007). White heard the incident
from researchers at the Dolphin Re-
search Center in Florida. The dolphin
was herself pregnant and was fond of
comparing her belly with that of a visi-
bly pregnant researcher. She later made
the same gestures to a researcher who
did not know that she was pregnant and
subsequently discovered that she was.
philosophies.4 The Stoics argued that
all emotions involve thoughts about the
great importance, for our lives, of ex-
ternal objects that lie beyond our con-
trol. (For this reason they concluded
that we should get rid of emotions by
ridding ourselves of these attachments,
sources of so much pain; but we can
keep their insightful analysis while dis-
agreeing with their recommendation,
contending that excising these attach-
ments impoverishes our lives.)
A turning point came with the re-
markable work of the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio, who had the luck
of treating a patient named Elliot, for-
merly a successful businessman, whose
brain had been injured (by necessary
surgery for a tumor) in the area that
New York Public Library
seems to be the seat of emotions. After
the surgery, he simply had no emotions
at all. Elliot was highly intelligent. He
could perform complicated calcula-
tions. But he had no clue what to do
with himself. The world provided him
with no guidance. Nothing stood out as
more significant than anything else. So
he dithered and was basically incapable
of action. Damasio knew that the same
problem had been observed in Phineas
Gage, a nineteenth- century railroad
worker who was injured in the same
region of the brain after an errant iron
spike pierced his skull.
What emotions do, Damasio con-
cluded (along with numerous cognitive
psychologists), is give us a map of goals
and meanings so that we can chart our
course through life. But of course all
animals—apart from those Aristotle
called “stationary” (sponges, corals)—
need that ability. De Waal concludes:
As a result of Damasio’s insights
and other studies since, modern
neuroscience has ditched the whole
idea of emotions and rationality as
opposing forces, like oil and water,
that don’t mix. Emotions are an es-
sential part of our intellect.
By “our” he means the wide range of
animals he considers in the book, from
chimpanzees, bonobos, and monkeys
to elephants, dogs, and parrots, and
4
For example, the great cognitive psy-
chologist Richard Lazarus, in Emotion
and Adaptation (Oxford University
Press, 1991), says that scientists are just
now attaining the insights contained in
Aristotle’s Rhetoric. And both I and
other current writers allude to the Sto-
ics: see Robert Solomon, The Passions:
Emotions and the Meaning of Life
(Hackett, 1976); and my Upheavals of
Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(Cambridge University Press, 2001).
humans. (His inclusive treatment of
animal emotions is not an innovation:
by now there is a long list of studies of
animal emotions, by both research sci-
entists and top science writers, includ-
ing an earlier book by Safina. 5)
Perhaps these books’ most fascinat-
ing new insights are those into animal
social cognition and social complexity,
which in many cases include learning
that is culturally, not just genetically,
transmitted. Safina clearly describes
the evidence for the cultural transmis-
sion of knowledge in three very dif-
ferent species: sperm whales, scarlet
macaws, and chimpanzees (known al-
ready through de Waal’s pathbreaking
work on both chimps and bonobos).
Sometimes the evidence comes from
controlled experiments. Where that
is not possible, scientists rely on con-
textual variation, cases in which two
genetically similar subgroups display
different strategies in response to dif-
ferent environmental challenges. Such
conclusions must be reached one case at
a time, showing rigorously that a given
behavior could not have been produced
by genetic transmission alone.
Whitehead and Rendell argue both
skeptically and rigorously for instances
of cultural transmission in marine
mammals, often using illuminating
comparisons to birds. Defining culture
as “information or behavior—shared
within a community—which is ac-
quired . . . through some form of social
learning,” they proceed to sift through
the evidence that whales and dolphins
demonstrate cultural learning. Despite
their rigor and skepticism, they find
quite a lot. After all, they conclude,
staying alive in the ocean is tough, and
these mammals use the group as an im-
portant mechanism of survival.
A clear case is whale song, where
change passes from one group to an-
other through imitation. (Birdsong,
they note, is also largely cultural.)
Similarly cultural are instances of tool
use, such as that dolphin group’s use
of sponges to help its members forage
on a rough ocean floor. (Again, some
birds also learn tool use culturally,
such as the blue tits who learned how
to open the foil caps of old-style British
milk bottles to drink the milk, and then
taught this behavior to other tits.)
More generally, the cohesion of many
groups of whales (including sperm
whales and orcas) and dolphins clearly
involves social learning and commu-
nication. Whitehead and Rendell’s
book and the essay collections edited
by Mann and by Herzing and Johnson
describe in great detail the process by
which scientists have learned about
these social networks and established
that some aspects are clearly cultural.
With dolphins, many controlled ex-
periments have been performed. With
whales, the typical process is to look
for contextual variation in behavior
and communication among biologi-
cally similar groups.
Here’s something I was surprised to
learn: the part played by menopause
in the lives of orcas. Orca society, like
sperm whale society, is matriarchal.
But what is the use of females who
are too old to be fertile but are still
5
Beyond Words: What Animals Think
and Feel (Henry Holt, 2015); reviewed
in these pages by Tim Flannery, Octo-
ber 8, 2015. Flannery’s review also dis-
cusses Whitehead and Rendell’s The
Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins.
35
healthy? Both orcas and pilot whales
first give birth at age ten or so, cease
giving birth in their forties, but live
into their eighties. Why? Scientists
currently believe that the presence of
healthy older females, not depleted
by recent pregnancies or distracted by
nursing, has a knowledge-transmitting
function: they can, in effect, serve as the
group’s resident professors! “It seems,”
conclude Whitehead and Rendell, “that
menopause may be wrapped up with cul-
ture and has evolved in both humans and
the matrilineal whales because cultural
information is so important in both.”
T he new learning about animal lives
and their complexity has large ethical
implications. At the most general level
we must face up to the fact that many,
if not most, animals are not automata
or “brute beasts” but creatures with a
point of view on the world and diverse
ends toward which they strive—and
that we interfere with these forms of
life in countless ways, even when we
do not directly cause pain. We deplete
and reduce habitats, we fill the seas
with plastic trash that often becomes
lethal food for whales (once ingested
it remains undigested, filling up their
stomachs until the whales can no lon-
ger eat nutritious food), we disrupt
marine mammal life by noise pollution
(military sonar, air guns used by oil
drillers to chart the ocean floor), we
build brightly lit skyscrapers into which
small birds crash—and the list goes on
and on. If injustice involves wrongfully
thwarted striving—and I think that’s
a pretty good summary of the basic
intuitive idea of injustice—we cause
immense injustice every day, and in-
justice cries out for accountability and
remediation.
Even when we think that we are tak-
ing care of animals, so often we do it un-
ethically. Many companion animals are
given insufficient exercise and cognitive
stimulation. But it’s far worse for ani-
mals taken from their environment and
kept in zoos. There are some animals
who can ethically be kept in some type
of captivity: for example, de Waal’s large
island research colony at Arnhem, with
room for a large social group of apes,
free to roam outside of cages. Most apes
in zoos, however, are cut off from their
basic form of highly social life.
Elephants and whales can never
be ethically kept in captivity. An ele-
phant life involves hundreds of miles of
walking and a large matriarchal herd.
Whales, too, need wide expanses of
open ocean and a group in which to
learn their identities. When a young
orca is snatched from its pod and put
into a marine zoo, this is not just an
impoverished environment. It also cuts
the orca off from learning how to be an
orca. Tilikum, the orca central to the
documentary film Blackfish (2013),
was no more able to learn the culture
of his species than were the rare feral
children who had been raised without
human nurture. His pathological be-
havior (killing his trainer) should have
come as no surprise.
Once we realize that these ani-
mals are not genetically programmed
mechanisms, but learn by accultura-
tion, we see that they cannot grow up
healthy without their groups. Similarly,
the killing of a postmenopausal orca
grandmother cuts off knowledge that is
needed for younger generations to sur-
vive and be themselves.
36
The test for whether captivity is eth-
ical should always be to ask whether
creatures can exercise their character-
istic activities in attractive and typical
surroundings. Captivity is potentially
acceptable for many fish, for most
smaller animals (always provided that
the environment is spacious and well
structured, permitting characteristic
group interactions), and some birds
(parrots, for example, don’t need a large
group and prove content to live in pairs).
If humans are to make progress in
helping animals flourish—and remov-
ing the many barriers to flourishing
that we have long maintained—we will
need, in addition to good science, cou-
rageous activism. But we also need an
ethical theory to direct our efforts in
policy and law. Until recently, the avail-
able theories have been pretty crude
and unhelpful.
One theory that is widely used in
law I like to call the “So Like Us” ap-
proach, associated with the lawyer Ste-
ven Wise and his Nonhuman Rights
Project. It seeks the status of “person,”
and associated rights, for a small group
of animals whom judges are likely to
view as close to humans on the grounds
of that similarity. The focus has typi-
cally been on apes, although elephants
have recently been included.
Wise is no dogmatist, and his use of
the “So Like Us” idea is more strate-
gic than theoretical, but it is surely a
mistaken theory. First, it neglects the
sheer complexity and strangeness of
animal lives, focusing on facile asso-
ciations rather than learning as much
as possible about animal sentience and
sociability. More importantly, though,
similarity to humans cannot by itself be
a good reason for an ethical conclusion.
This focus on similarity neglects the
many surprising things animals do that
are totally unlike human abilities and
activities: echolocation, flight using an
internal magnetic field sensor, complex
forms of cultural learning that involve
only females.
If we search for a more adequate the-
oretical basis, what the new learning
immediately suggests is that we might
begin by looking at what matters to
each animal. Surely the reason not to
keep an orca isolated in a pen is not
that humans don’t like isolation (after
all, some do!) but the fact that orca
society is intensely social, and crucial
learning is transmitted through group
interactions. The “So Like Us” the-
ory short- circuits curiosity, when the
question we ought to ask is what each
creature strives for and needs, and how
various arrangements made by humans
foster or impede that striving.
Far more helpful is the Utilitarian
approach pioneered by Jeremy Ben-
tham in the eighteenth century and
championed today by Peter Singer, one
of the best philosophical advocates for
reform in animal treatment. This the-
ory holds that pain is the one bad thing
and pleasure the one good thing. Ben-
tham thought pain was single, varying
only in intensity and duration, and
Singer has recently moved close to
Bentham in this view. Benthamites see
animal lives as, basically, containers of
pain or pleasure and seek to maximize
pleasure and minimize pain.
Utilitarianism looks like a begin-
ning: if we were only to get rid of the
torture to which we subject animals
daily—through the manifold harms
of the meat industry, through habi-
tat destruction, through lethal pollu-
tion—we would improve animal lives
considerably.
Still, Utilitarianism has many short-
comings—most of which were already
seen by John Stuart Mill. First, it lacks
curiosity about the diversity of goals
each animal life pursues. An elephant
in a zoo enclosure, or an orca in a
pen, might possibly lack pain if well
cared for, but she would still lack free
movement over a large terrain and the
company of a large social group. Each
animal needs many different things,
and different animal species need dif-
ferent things. Furthermore, Utilitarian
theories neglect the individual crea-
ture (whether human or nonhuman),
pursuing an aggregate of pleasure or
well-being and treating the individual
as a container of goods that contribute
to that aggregate. Finally, the theory
neglects agency, treating animals as
vessels of experience rather than ac-
tive beings who move toward what they
want and need.
P eople who care about animals have
therefore increasingly turned to a
theory known as the Capabilities
Approach (CA), developed in differ-
ent ways by me and by the economist
Amartya Sen. In the CA the central
question is “What is this creature ac-
tually able to do and to be?” The the-
ory—which got its start in development
economics—focuses on the ability to
select valued activities and to avoid
the frustration of choice. Sen uses the
approach for comparative purposes:
it is more illuminating to compare ca-
pabilities than to compare utilities, or
GDP per capita. My version is different:
it creates a theory of basic justice, fo-
cusing on the duty of nations to create
sufficient opportunities for significant
activity in some particularly import-
ant areas, including life, health, bodily
integrity, emotional health, choice
and affiliation, and leisure time. With
valuable input from a group of younger
members of the international Human
Development and Capability Associ-
ation, I have recently been developing
my theory into a theory of justice for
nonhuman animals.6
The theory is, of course, species-
specific. For each species, it must iden-
tify the most significant activities and
a minimum threshold beneath which
we should judge an animal’s life to be
unjustly thwarted. It must also allow
plenty of room for the individual
choices of different members of the
species. And then we must propose
strategies for achieving that threshold
in law and policy.
Recently, for example, I have used
my theory to argue in an amicus brief
that Happy, an elephant kept in a
small enclosure without any elephant
company in the Bronx Zoo, should be
transferred to an elephant sanctuary,
where she could enjoy greater mobility
and social interaction. (The case has
not yet been heard.) And I have also
pointed to legal decisions that already
follow what my version of the CA rec-
6 elephants, parrots, and so many other
I sketched this extension in my Fron-
tiers of Justice (Harvard University
Press, 2006), and the fully developed
version will appear in my Justice for
Animals: Our Collective Responsi-
bility, to be published by Simon and
Schuster in December.
ommends without using it explicitly,
just by showing a concern informed by
knowledge of animal behavior.
A favorite case of mine is Natural
Resources Defense Council v. Pritz-
ker (2016), in which the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals invalidated the US
Navy’s sonar program on the grounds
that it violated the Marine Mammal
Protection Act by impeding several
characteristic marine mammal ac-
tivities—foraging, breeding, migra-
tion—and induced stress responses.
This novel interpretation of the statute
is exactly what the CA would recom-
mend. Even though the sonar did not
cause physical pain, the fact that the
whales were unable to live their char-
acteristic lives was sufficient to make it
a violation of the statutory requirement
to avoid “adverse impact” on marine
mammal species.
I’ve been happy to see that scien-
tists grasping for an ethical approach
to complement their work have been
turning to the CA. Thus, for just one
example, in the Herzing and Johnson
collection, Thomas White’s essay rec-
ommends that approach to marine sci-
entists (citing some of my earlier work),
and argues that it fits well with their
discoveries. He writes:
The best approach should be spe-
cies specific and grounded as much
as possible in facts. . . . The concept
of the “flourishing” of a being (and
its relationship to the concept of
moral rights) forms an appropriate
foundation for an ethical standard.
And he shows in detail how the ap-
proach can be used to argue for an
end to whaling as currently permitted
under international law, for an end to
captivity for both whales and dolphins,
and for restrictions on sonar and other
disruptive human activities. I whole-
heartedly agree.
Because White was asked to guide
these scientists in the area of ethics, I
am hopeful that they may use the ap-
proach in their future work. Whitehead
and Rendell, who visited a law and phi-
losophy seminar I was teaching at the
University of Chicago, have grown en-
thusiastic about the CA, saying it shows
them a new way of thinking. And at
least one animal welfare organization
has used the CA as its central theory:
Friends of Animals, an organization
doing legal work for both domestic and
wild animals. Its Wildlife Law Pro-
gram, which until recently was directed
by the lawyer Michael Harris, currently
uses the CA in legal work on behalf
of wild horses, elephants, American
bison, and many other creatures.
Achieving even minimal justice for
animals seems a distant dream in our
world of casual slaughter and ubiqui-
tous habitat destruction. One might
think that Utilitarianism presents a
somewhat more manageable goal:
Let’s just not torture them so much.
But we humans are not satisfied with
non-torture. We seek flourishing: free
movement, free communication, rich
interactions with others of our species
(and other species too). Why should we
suppose that whales, dolphins, apes,
animals seek anything less? If we do
suppose that, it is either culpable ig-
norance, given the knowledge now so
readily available, or a self-serving re-
fusal to take responsibility, in a world
where we hold all the power. Q
The New York Review
 ‘The Spoils of a Savage War’
At Night All Blood Is Black
by David Diop, translated from the
French by Anna Moschovakis.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
145 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper)
White War, Black Soldiers:
Two African Accounts of World War I
by Bakary Diallo and Lamine
Senghor, translated from the French
by Nancy Erber and William Peniston,
edited and with an introduction and
annotations by George Robb.
Hackett, 189 pp., $49.00; $17.00 (paper)
The French writer David Diop man-
ages to recount a war he never experi-
enced with the intimacy of a witness.
A historian at the University of Pau,
in southwest France, Diop studies
European depictions of Africa in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and his slim novel At Night All Blood
Is Black, which won the International
Booker Prize last year, turns what lit-
tle is known about African soldiers’ in-
volvement in World War I into a potent
testimony on violence and guilt.
In the first half of the nineteenth
century, African soldiers under French
colonial rule were deemed unfit for
regular combat. They were merely
captifs-hommes-de- corvée—indentured
military laborers who were purchased as
slaves and exported to fight wars of con-
quest in other parts of the French em-
pire. But in the 1850s, Louis Faidherbe,
a newly appointed governor of Senegal
who sought to expand France’s territo-
rial control, decided to raise the social
standing of the Senegalese soldier. At
Faidherbe’s urging, Napoleon III signed
a decree on July 21, 1857, establishing
the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, a regiment
in the French armed forces of Black
Africans originally recruited from the
area around the Senegal River. As
Myron Echenberg writes in Colonial
Conscripts (1991), his excellent study
of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, “The de-
cree brought local troops in Senegal to
battalion strength by doubling the ex-
isting companies from two to four and
by segregating the Africans into their
own units, with their own distinctive
uniforms.” The terms of service for Af-
rican soldiers were almost identical to
those of their European counterparts.
During World War I, an estimated
140,000 men fought in the Tirailleurs
Sénégalais on the western front. (The
name of the troop, however, was some-
thing of a misnomer by that time: a
good number of the Black men who
served came from Mali, Chad, and
Gabon.) Approximately 30,000 of the
fighters died.
While reading wartime letters by
French soldiers, Diop wondered if there
were similar letters written by Senega-
lese infantrymen. As African soldiers
convalesced in military hospitals, older
Frenchwomen, encouraged by their
government, went to visit them, giving
gifts of food and tobacco and writing
letters on their behalf. (These women
were known as marraines de guerre,
wartime godmothers.) The letters do
not survive in any significant quantity,
and those Diop did find were, as he told
The Guardian last year, “impersonal,
administrative.” It’s unclear why so few
remain. “You have to remember,” Diop
March 10, 2022
Emmanuel Iduma
David Diop; illustration by Xia Gordon
said, “that letters were monitored to
keep up the morale of the troops and
the country. It’s also possible there was
a form of self- censorship among the
African riflemen.” He decided to try
to fill this gap in the record through
fiction, “to burst into the character’s
thoughts—no filter, no intermediaries.”
At Night All Blood Is Black, trans-
lated by Anna Moschovakis, begins
with an ellipsis, as if the main character
is already in the middle of a thought:
“. . . I know, I understand, I shouldn’t
have done it. I, Alfa Ndiaye, son of the
old, old man, I understand, I shouldn’t
have. God’s truth, now I know.” With
this opening admission of guilt, the
narrator establishes his commitment
to candor and reflection, despite, as we
later learn, speaking from a military
hospital to which he has been admitted
for insanity.
Alfa is haunted by the death of his
adopted brother and fellow soldier, Ma-
demba Diop, whose final moments are
described in vivid detail: as Mademba
lies dying on the battlefield at the
hands of a “blue- eyed enemy,” he cries,
“like a small child . . . pissing himself,
his right hand groping at the ground
to gather his scattered guts, slimy as
freshwater snakes.” All the while, he’s
asking to be finished off: “By the grace
of God and of our marabout, if you are
my brother, Alfa, if you are really who
I think you are, slit my throat like a sac-
rificial sheep, don’t let the scavengers
of death devour my body!”
But Alfa does no such thing, feeling
constrained by the bond between them
and the imagined judgment of Madem-
ba’s parents. He hears a voice com-
manding him, “Do not kill your best
friend, your more-than-brother. It isn’t
for you to take his life. Don’t mistake
yourself for the hand of God. Don’t
mistake yourself for the hand of the
Devil.” After Mademba’s slow death,
Alfa is racked with guilt for prolonging
his suffering. The rest of the novel is a
confessional account of how he turned
to brutal revenge to redeem this mo-
ment of failure. It culminates in his and
Mademba’s reunion in a possibly hallu-
cinated, possibly spiritual meeting.
Alfa was born to Bassirou Coumba
Ndiaye, an elderly peasant farmer, and
Penndo Ba, the beautiful daughter of a
nomadic herdsman. After Bassirou let
Penndo’s father’s cows drink from his
wells, her father offered her in mar-
riage. “A Fula who has been given a gift
he can’t return may die of shame,” she
later told Alfa. Penndo came to love
her husband, but she was always rest-
less. When Alfa was nine, she went in
search of her father, brothers, and their
herd, after they failed to show up in the
village, as was their yearly practice. She
never returned to Gandiol, a village
near the provincial capital, Saint-Louis,
and the consensus was that she was kid-
napped by a roving band of Moors, who
kept Black people as slaves.
Mademba, whose family lived in
a neighboring compound, asked his
mother to adopt Alfa, with his griev-
ing father’s unhesitant blessing. It was
Mademba who, when they both turned
twenty, planted in Alfa’s mind the idea
of going to war:
School had put it in his head that
he should save the motherland,
France. Mademba wanted to be-
come a somebody in Saint-Louis,
a French citizen: “Alfa, the world
is big, I want to see it. The war is a
chance to leave Gandiol. God will-
ing, we will return safe and sound.
When we become French citizens,
we’ll move to Saint-Louis. We’ll
start a business. . . . Once we’re rich,
we’ll look for and find your mother,
and we’ll buy her back from the
Moorish horsemen who took her.”
Alfa agreed, but he imagined that, in
the event of an encounter with the ma-
rauding Moors, his approach wouldn’t
be as benign as Mademba suggests:
I bought into his dream. . . . And
yet I said to myself that if I also
became a somebody, a Senega-
lese rifleman for life, it could be
that in the company of my detail
I might one day visit the tribes of
the northern Moors with my regu-
lation rifle in my left hand and my
savage machete in my right.
The two are an unlikely pair. Ma-
demba’s magnanimity makes them
brothers, though in adolescence Alfa
physically outstripped him: “I became
tall and strong and Mademba remained
short and frail.” People in the village
took note of their differences, telling
Mademba:
You see how Alfa Ndiaye is bloom-
ing with beauty and how you are
skinny and ugly. It’s because he’s
absorbing all of your power and vi-
tality to your loss and his gain, for
he is a dëmm, a devourer of souls
who has no pity for you.
They remained inseparable, even after
a girl they both loved chose Alfa. Yet
a certain amount of envy had entered
their relationship.
This friction was compounded by a
far more consequential conflict: a long-
standing rivalry between their families.
Both men, while at war, routinely joke
about their family totems, “cleansing
old insults with laughter and mockery.”
Still, they can’t fully overcome their
shared history. “The Ndiayes’ totem is
the lion, it’s nobler than the totem of
the Diops,” says Alfa to Mademba of
his family’s peacock totem. “The Diops
are shortsighted egotists, like peacocks.
They act proud, but their totem is just an
arrogant fowl.” (Diop, the author’s last
name, is fairly common in Senegal.)
One morning on the western front, after
Alfa again brings up the supposedly ig-
noble fowl totem, Mademba is eager to
prove his courage and rushes out of the
trench before the captain whistles for
the attack. He ends up disemboweled by
an enemy soldier, leading to his agoniz-
ing death. Alfa blames himself:
Mademba had the rib cage of a
runt, but he was brave. Mademba
had absurdly narrow hips, but he
was a real warrior. I know, I under-
stand that I should not have pushed
him with my words to demonstrate
a kind of courage I knew he al-
ready possessed.
O ne of the few members of the Tirail-
leurs Sénégalais with a robust histori-
cal record, described in Echenberg’s
book, shares a name with one of Diop’s
characters and might have informed
the novel: Abdel-Kader Mademba.
Stationed in France after World War
I, Mademba rose through the ranks of
the French military to become a major,
the only African to do so before World
War II. The two sides of his family had
starkly different experiences of co-
lonialism. His maternal grandfather,
37
Al-Hajj Umar Tal, was an Islamic re-
ligious leader who opposed French
expansion in Senegambia; his paternal
grandfather, M’Baye Sy, took the op-
portunities offered by the French, put-
ting his entire family at the disposal of
the colonizer. His oldest son, Madem-
ba’s father, sent all seven of his sons
to a lycée in Algeria. When Mademba
turned twenty- one, in 1914, he volun-
teered for the army. He was wounded
in the Verdun campaign, the longest
battle of the war, awarded the Cross of
the Legion of Honor, and promoted to
lieutenant. Sixteen years later, in 1932,
Mademba died in a military hospital in
Briançon of a respiratory disease, and
his funeral was attended by the African
deputy to Paris.
Although the fictional Mademba dies
on the battlefield without having earned
as many decorations as his historical
namesake, the two Madembas share
the fate of colonial subjects who died far
from home, fighting on behalf of their
colonizer. I wonder if some of these sol-
diers felt torn by their decision—I do not
presume that all Senegalese men were
naive about the political implications of
going into battle. In Diop’s novel, Alfa
is clearly aware of the complexity of his
position. “The captain’s France needs
for us to play the savage when it suits
them,” he says.
They need for us to be savage be-
cause the enemy is afraid of our
machetes. I know, I understand,
it’s no more complicated than that.
The captain’s France needs our
savagery, and because we are obe-
dient, myself and the others, we
play the savage.
In 1910 Charles Mangin—a
lieutenant- colonel in the French Colo-
nial Army, later promoted to general—
published La force noire, making the
case for establishing a large unit of
Black soldiers in service to France. He
based his argument on two proposi-
tions: that Black Africa was full of ser-
viceable men, and that these men were
natural soldiers. In a 1911 issue of the
French ethnographic journal La Revue
anthropologique, he made his position
clearer: “The nervous system of the
black man is much less developed than
that of the white. All the surgeons have
observed how impassive the black is
under the knife.”
A poster by the French artist Lucien-
Hector Jonas depicted an African sol-
dier charging into battle, unfazed by
German gunfire. “Propaganda lay be-
hind both French efforts to strike fear
in the enemy and German efforts to
project Africans as savages so as to dis-
credit the French for having used these
troops,” Echenberg writes. “Both sides
seem to have succeeded.” Mangin suc-
ceeded in his campaign to create an ex-
panded unit of Black soldiers. In 1912
the French government set up a system
of partial conscription in its colonies, re-
quiring men aged twenty to twenty-eight
to serve four years in the army. When
war broke out in 1914 Blaise Diagne,
Senegal’s first African deputy, argued
that willing recruits from Senegal should
be offered a path to French citizenship.
His policy was enacted and resulted in
an increase of men voluntarily signing
up. They were sent off to fight the war in
inhospitable, wintry terrains, with most
seeing combat for the first time.
Thinking of the Black soldier as in-
capable of pain may have informed
38
Mangin’s military strategies: several When he returns with his first three World War I. At the end of the story he
thousand African soldiers lost their hands, his captain and trench-mates describes a revolution in which “King
lives in his all- out offensives. Yet his are pleased. But by the fourth hand, Colonialism was delivered to the ten-
belief in the ferocious capability of they begin to find him strange. der mercies of the angel of death.”
Black bodies was shared on both sides There is now a marked difference David Diop scarcely allows Alfa’s
of World War I. The Tirailleurs Séné- between his bravery—unregulated, mind to linger on the magnitude of
galais on the western front were consid- self-directed—and that of other “Choc- colonialism’s disruption of Senegalese
ered to be headhunters, fighting with olats of black Africa,” as the French society. The novel is focused on war,
desperate fury and brandishing big call them. “Don’t tell me that we don’t on the human mind in extremis. But
combat knives. need madness on the battlefield,” Alfa like roads converging at a junction,
For their part, what image did the says. “Temporary madness, in war, is Alfa’s derangement is caused no less
African recruits form of the blue- eyed bravery’s sister. But when you seem by Mademba’s death than by multiple
men for whom, and with whom, they crazy all the time, continuously, with- indignities—his mother’s enslavement
fought? How did they cope? In the out stopping, that’s when you make by Moors; the mandatory labor, men-
novel, after Mademba’s horrible end, people afraid, even your war broth- tioned only glancingly, that his father
Alfa attempts to alleviate his guilt ers.” Rumors begin to circulate that and the other villagers were subjected
by becoming a more violent and un- he is something other than a soldier: a to by the colonial government—that
conventional fighter, embracing the soldier-sorcerer, a man who has become preceded his journey to Europe.
inescapable violence and accepting death. After he returns with a seventh Diallo, just like Mademba and Alfa,
savagery as his lot: hand, he is sent to a mental institution. did not leave for war resenting the
French or understanding himself as a
The only difference between my passive victim. Enlistment is an oppor-
friends the Toucouleurs and the As far as we know, of all the hun- tunity for the men to make something
Sérères, the Bambaras and the Ma- dreds of nonfiction books published in of their lives and to satisfy the restless-
linkés, the Soussous, the Haoussas, the decade after World War I, only one ness of youth. “The God of nature is
the Mossis, the Markas, the So- was written by an African about his calling me. He wants me to know the
ninkés, the Senoufos, the Bobos, wartime experiences: Bakary Diallo’s wide expanse of the universe. I’ll an-
and the other Wolofs, the only dif- Force-Bonté (Strength and Goodness, swer his call,” writes Diallo in Strength
ference between them and me is 1926). Last year, Diallo’s book was and Goodness, sounding much like
that I became savage intentionally. reissued together with one of the few Mademba: “Alfa, the world is big, I
other works by a Senegalese World War want to see it. The war is a chance to
On several occasions, he is the last man I veteran, Lamine Senghor’s 1927 pro- leave Gandiol.” Mademba imagines
to return to the trench after a retreat is paganda pamphlet La violation d’un that after the war ends and he and Alfa
called, waiting to kill one of the enemy pays (The Rape of a Country), under become French citizens, they would
soldiers. When he does so, he brings the joint title White War, Black Soldiers. run a successful business as wholesal-
back “the spoils of a savage war,” “an Diallo and Senghor were both ers distributing food to shops in north-
enemy rifle, along with the hand that wounded during the war, Diallo in 1914 ern Senegal, including Gandiol.
went with it.” He repeatedly reenacts (a shattered jaw, reconstructed after- Senghor, writing after the war, points
his friend’s death by disemboweling ward by surgery) and Senghor in 1917 to a different outcome: the French gov-
German soldiers before giving them (permanent damage to his lungs from a ernment, the queen in his fable, was
the mercy blow he denied Mademba. mustard gas attack, from which he later bankrupted by the costs of the war, yet
He describes his method as follows: died). They had very different views her former allies wanted to be compen-
about the empire for which they fought. sated for their wartime contributions.
The enemy from the other side Diallo believed in France’s civilizing Since she “wasn’t inclined to pay the
gasps and screams, now in stark si- mission. “France’s power is so vast that indemnity required,” she decided that
lence because of the gag I’ve cinched it could protect all of Africa,” he wrote, “all her subjects, whether they were
around his mouth. He screams in recalling his time in Morocco, where dark-skinned, white, or yellow, would
stark silence when I take all the in- he had been posted to quell a rebellion. have to be penalized.” In effect, France
sides of his belly and put them out- “France has a noble heart and a spirit of failed to keep the promises made
side in the rain, in the wind, in the absolute fairness. That’s why it’s been during the recruitment drive, asked its
snow, or in the bright moonlight. If given a mission of utmost importance, to colonial subjects to pay higher taxes,
at this moment his blue eyes don’t ensure good relations and understand- and paid African veterans far less than
dim forever, then I lie down next to ing among people.” Senghor’s pamphlet, their white French counterparts.
him, I turn his face toward mine on the other hand, written during his Alfa survives the war, but in terribly
and I watch him die a little, then time as a member of the French Com- altered form: by the end of the book he
I slit his throat, cleanly, humanely. munist Party, is a dystopian fable about has become schizophrenic, or, possi-
At night, all blood is black. the twin evils of French imperialism and bly, spiritually inhabited by Mademba.
“Alfa left me a place in his wrestler’s
body out of friendship, out of compas-
sion,” says the chilling voice of his dead
friend. The same voice recounts using
Alfa’s body to enter the room of one of
WHITNEY ELLSWORTH the nurses, Mademoiselle François, to
sexually assault her: “I plunged into her
Whitney Ellsworth drives up in his early the way one plunges into the powerful
1950s Citroën, the French black classic current of a river one wants to cross,
You see in old French movies, swimming furiously.”
Super exotic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, How does a novel like At Night All
And says, “Want to go for a ride?” A blond boy. Blood Is Black—with its harrowing tri-
The year is 1955 or 1954. angulation of horrific murders, mental
illness, and, at the end, rape—negoti-
There is no Arthur Whitney Ellsworth no more. ate the legacy of West Africans fighting
for France in World War I? It confronts
He was the nicest human being my life has produced,
the historical image of Black soldiers
With a father, it appeared, as the source.
by stretching barbarism to its ironic
Kindly Duncan Ellsworth had a beautiful house limits; Alfa, self- consciously embrac-
In Connecticut and another in Vermont and another on ing the role of executioner, is not the
Fishers Island. noble savage he is expected to be.
I have many memories of each place. What seems most pointed in Diop’s
novel is its exploration of what it meant
Do you want to take a ride? And I get in for West African men to fight side by
And as we drive off, I wake from my dream. side, and to grieve one another. The
war breached the companionship Alfa
—Frederick Seidel Ndiaye shared with Mademba Diop,
but says the narrator as he concludes:
“God’s truth, I swear to you that now,
whenever I think of us, he is me and I
am him.” Q
The New York Review
 Politicians in Robes
The Authority of the Court
and the Peril of Politics
by Stephen Breyer.
Harvard University Press,
101 pp., $19.95
Justice on the Brink:
The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett,
and Twelve Months That
Transformed the Supreme Court
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., $28.00
From Plato’s Republic to Ibsen’s The
Wild Duck, from Pascal’s Pensées to
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karama-
zov, writers have pondered the Noble
Lie—the morality of resorting to false-
hood and delusion to conceal, usually
from the masses but sometimes from
oneself, truths whose revelation would
wreak havoc, or at least do more harm
than good. It is a question that Jus-
tice Stephen Breyer, the dean of the
Supreme Court’s liberal wing and its
fiercest proponent of the Enlighten-
ment values of truth and reason, might
have taken up in his latest book, The
Authority of the Court and the Peril of
Politics, published a few months before
his recent announcement that he in-
tends to retire from the Court.
After all, the book’s implicit theme is
that the Court—and by extension our
republic and the rule of law, which de-
pend, he argues, on the Court retain-
ing its current influence—would be
threatened if fears that it has become
too politicized were voiced out loud.
He could have grappled with the idea
that protecting the Court from a loss
of public trust might require purvey-
ing the Noble Lie that its decisions are,
despite all appearances, truly apoliti-
cal in character, and that all nine of its
justices can be trusted to abide by the
oath they take to “support and defend
the Constitution of the United States”
and to “administer justice without re-
spect to persons, and do equal right to
the poor and to the rich.”
Unfortunately Breyer’s book, surely
the least impressive of his consider-
able body of extrajudicial writings,1
is not a thoughtful exploration of the
virtues and vices of well-meaning
deception.2 In his stubborn avowal
that the Court—even with its cur-
rent far-right supermajority—remains
an apolitical body, he perpetuates a
lie that is anything but noble. I have
written much that is entirely pos-
1
See, for example, Breaking the Vi-
cious Circle: Toward Effective Risk
Regulation (Harvard University Press,
1993); Active Liberty: Interpreting
Our Democratic Constitution (Knopf,
2005); Making Our Democracy Work:
A Judge’s View (Knopf, 2010); and The
Court and the World: American Law
and the New Global Realities (Knopf,
2015).
2
Sissela Bok has written perceptively
about the moral philosophy of decep-
tion. See her Lying: Moral Choice in
Public and Private Life (Pantheon,
1978). For a sophisticated if not alto-
gether convincing defense of judicial
self-deception, see Scott Altman, “Be-
yond Candor,” Michigan Law Review,
Vol. 89, No. 2 (November 1990).
March 10, 2022
Laurence H. Tribe
Justice Stephen Breyer; illustration by Andrea Ventura
itive about his judicial opinions, 3
so it pains me to say that his book reads
as though it had been written by some-
one oddly unaware of the implausibil-
ity of its factual claims.
I nvoking Cicero, Breyer opens by not-
ing that legal obedience, the kind a so-
ciety needs if it is not to descend into
chaos and what Tennyson called the
law of “tooth and claw,” requires either
fear of punishment, hope of reward, or
belief that the law is just even when it
doesn’t deliver what you hope for. The
central thesis of his book is that the rea-
son Americans have over time abided
by the Supreme Court’s interpretations
of the law, even when disagreeing with
them—he emphasizes that he himself
has written any number of dissenting
opinions—is that they have accepted
the view that the justices are not acting
“politically.” By “politically,” he seems
to mean in accord with the positions of
the political party to which they or the
president who appointed them belongs.
But from Breyer, a former Harvard
Law School professor with nearly three
decades of experience on the nation’s
highest court and with a well-deserved
legacy as its leading pragmatist, one
hoped for something more nuanced if
not more genuinely original.
Instead, Breyer’s own accounts of the
most famous episodes in the Court’s
history appear to undercut his thesis
3
Along with other colleagues from
Harvard Law School, I published a
tribute to Justice Breyer to honor his
first twenty years on the Court: “Peek-
A-Boo: Justice Breyer, Dissenting,”
Harvard Law Review, Vol. 128, No. 1
(November 2014).
about the source of its power. Writing
about Brown v. Board of Education
(1954), for instance, he recalls that that
monumental ruling was met not with
compliance by those who disagreed
with it but with outright defiance. Pres-
ident Eisenhower had to deploy the
101st Airborne Division to integrate
Central High School in Arkansas over
the opposition of Governor Orval Fau-
bus and the state police.
Breyer recounts a conversation he
had with the late civil rights leader Ver-
non Jordan in which he asked whether
Jordan thought “the Court had actu-
ally played a major role in ending seg-
regation” given that, “even absent the
Court . . . there [would] have been enor-
mous pressure to end that system—
pressure from civil rights leaders, from
the rest of the country, indeed from
the entire world.” Jordan “answered
that of course the Court had been criti-
cally important” in “at the very least . . .
provid[ing] a catalyst,” thereby win-
ning “a major victory for constitutional
law, for equality, and above all for jus-
tice itself.” That’s exactly the story that
constitutional law teachers have been
telling their students about the Su-
preme Court for generations. I am no
exception.
Much serious scholarship, none of
which Breyer calls to the reader’s atten-
tion, tells a far less idealistic tale about
the power of the Court.4 But even if
that rosy version were largely accurate,
it leaves open the question of whether
the success of Brown, such as it was,
actually depended on persuading peo-
4
The seminal work is Gerald N. Rosen-
berg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts
Bring About Social Change? (Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1991).
ple that the Court’s decisions in that
and other controversial cases were not
basically expressions of political and
moral views filtered through legal cat-
egories and conveyed in a legal voice.
Did the public’s appreciation for what
Breyer depicts as the strictly “legal”
(as opposed to “political”) character of
the unanimous ruling in Brown signifi-
cantly help “to promote respect for the
Court” and increase “its authority”?
His answer is yes: “I cannot prove this
assertion. But I fervently believe it.”
If we are looking for something more
than one seasoned judge’s hunch, we
won’t find it in Breyer’s book.
The same must be said of every other
story he tells, including most promi-
nently that of Bush v. Gore. There were
vociferous nationwide protests against
the Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision to
halt the Florida recount in the 2000
presidential election and effectively
make Governor George W. Bush of
Texas the next president, even though,
at the time, he led Vice President Al
Gore by only 537 votes out of nearly
six million cast in Florida—in a nation-
wide election in which Gore was over
half a million votes ahead of him.
Nor were those protests utterly with-
out legal merit, as a mountain of aca-
demic writing in the two decades since
that decision attests. 5 In Breyer’s ac-
count, the reason the nation accepted
the outcome without bloodshed was
the accumulated respect for the Court
as an impartial, apolitical arbiter of the
most contentious questions, an attitude
“so normal that hardly anyone notices
it,” much like “the air around us, also
unnoticed,” that “allows us to breathe.”
Most of us would accept the far
simpler explanation that after the
protracted legal wrangling and bal-
lot recounts that took place between
the election on November 7 and the
Court’s decision on December 12,
people had become exhausted and
were prepared to accept certainty over
continued vote-counting in an elec-
tion in which every recount of millions
of paper ballots with their infamous
“hanging chads” was likely to make
physical changes in some of the bal-
lots themselves—an all but impossible
situation in which the margin of error
in each recount probably exceeded the
margin of victory.
Nonetheless, Breyer prefers to assert,
without evidence, that acceptance of
that decision is another corroboration
of his thesis that the Court’s capacity to
secure popular obedience and preserve
the rule of law is a result of belief in the
apolitical character of its decisions, even
in the most politically charged cases.
He says nothing to explain the coun-
terexamples, like the Court’s decisions
5
My own contribution to that moun-
tain, as someone who cannot claim to
be a disinterested observer (I argued
the first of the two Supreme Court
cases culminating in Bush v. Gore), in-
cluded “eroG .v hsuB and Its Disguises:
Freeing Bush v. Gore from Its Hall of
Mirrors,” Harvard Law Review, Vol.
115, No. 1 (November 2001); reprinted
in Bush v. Gore: The Question of Le-
gitimacy, edited by Bruce Ackerman
(Yale University Press, 2002).
39
in the 1960s banning mandated prayers
in public schools, which were all but
ignored in many parts of the country
despite the force of the legal reasoning
underlying them and the fact that Pres-
ident Eisenhower—a Republican—had
appointed three of the six justices who
made up the majority in the most im-
portant of them, Engel v. Vitale (1962).
B reyer’s dubious defense of his claim
that the Court’s judgments are funda-
mentally apolitical and need to be per-
ceived as such in order to be accepted
by the public is flawed in other respects
as well. He barely scratches the surface
when considering whether the methods
of legal interpretation increasingly used
by different groups of justices are likely
to produce conservative or liberal out-
comes in particular cases. Breyer cannot
deny that the insistence on interpreting
constitutional provisions—about such
matters as liberty, due process of law,
equal protection of the laws, unreason-
able searches and seizures, or the right
to bear arms—in accord with their
“original meaning” emerged as a major
theme in Supreme Court decisions with
the growing influence of conservative
justices appointed by Republican presi-
dents, such as Antonin Scalia and Clar-
ence Thomas, or the three appointed by
President Trump, Neil Gorsuch, Brett
Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Nor can he deny that an emphasis on
the evolving meaning of constitutional
guarantees and a willingness to weigh
the social consequences of competing
constitutional interpretations are more
typical of justices like himself and his
two liberal colleagues on the current
Court, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena
Kagan. He seemingly cannot deny that
the partisan splits within the Court on
matters like abortion, voting rights,
criminal justice, and business regula-
tion reflect distinct political ideologies
couched as methodological differences.
And yet he is content to express his be-
lief that “jurisprudential differences, not
political ones, account for most, perhaps
almost all, of judicial disagreements”—
even while conceding that “it is some-
times difficult to separate what counts
as a jurisprudential view from what
counts as political philosophy, which,
in turn, can shape views of policy.”
What accounts for these so-called
jurisprudential differences? To what
degree are they mere window dressing,
attached after the fact to conclusions
consciously or unconsciously reached
on other grounds? And even if these
differences are genuine, mustn’t we
explore the extent to which they are
politically and morally neutral? After
all, we’re talking about different world-
views, different perspectives on the
nature of legal institutions and the pur-
pose of law in people’s lives.
In part, what’s at stake is the differ-
ence between believing that social and
cultural change tends naturally toward
deterioration and division and thus is
best held at bay with rigid legal rules,
and believing that such decay is the re-
sult of rules that fail to evolve. When
a growing body of serious scholarship
supports the view that those different
beliefs are more likely today than in
times past to map onto demographic
and/or partisan differences, 6 it’s sim-
6 9
The best account is Pamela Karlan,
“The New Countermajoritarian Dif-
ficulty,” California Law Review, Vol.
40
ply not enough to note with charm-
ing, almost romantic innocence that
“most judges [don’t] see themselves or
the judiciary” as “unelected political
officials or ‘junior varsity’ politicians
themselves, rather than jurists.”
In perhaps the most revealing pas-
sages bearing on what Breyer means by
“political” in connection with the work
of the Court, he explains that the word
brings to mind his time on the staff of
the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired
by Edward Kennedy. In that setting,
Breyer observes, many choices were
most sensibly made on the basis of who
elected any particular official, to which
major political party that official be-
longed, and which position was more
popular with the voters on whom that
official depended. Apart from Breyer’s
failure to add the powerful factor of the
New York Public Library
The Supreme Court Building,
Washington, D.C.
official’s sources of funding and what
positions those sources might be likely
to support, this is a perfectly fine list.
But when he uses this same list to
draw the conclusion that “politics in
this elemental sense is not present at
the Court,” Breyer exposes the shal-
lowness of his definition. To be sure,
politics “in this elemental sense” is
unlikely to be present in a body whose
members serve for life and have no
pressing need to please either those
who appointed them or those who
might be generous to them in the fu-
ture. When Breyer turns to “ideology,
as apart from partisanship,” however,
he acknowledges that this “is a tougher
question, because we all have our pre-
dispositions.” Not to worry: if he ever
catches himself “headed toward decid-
ing a case on the basis of some general
ideological commitment,” he knows
he has “gone down the wrong path”
and “correct[s] course,” as do his “col-
leagues,” all of whom “studiously try to
avoid deciding cases on the basis of ide-
ology rather than law,” something his
experience tells him “is true of judges
as a group, whether they serve on the
Supreme Court or any other court.”
It’s hard to know where to begin de-
constructing this self-serving series of
what can only be called platitudes. For
one thing, judges serving on lower fed-
eral courts have a different task from
justices serving on the Supreme Court:
if they want to avoid having their de-
cisions reversed, as virtually all judges
do, they must largely adhere to rules
and precedents laid down for them
from above. The skills and predispo-
sitions that enter into that task are far
less dependent on what Breyer calls
“ideology” than is the case for justices
109, No. 6 (December 2021). See also
Thomas B. Edsall, “Whose America Is
It?,” The New York Times, September
16, 2020.
on our highest court, whose judgments
can be reversed in matters involving
constitutional interpretation only by
the deliberately difficult—many think
too difficult—process of amending the
Constitution.
Beyond the differences between
lower court judges and Supreme Court
justices—whose task is more one of
leading than of following and whose
decisions are influenced but certainly
not determined by precedent—Breyer
seems oblivious to the well-known phe-
nomenon that beliefs are shaped by
what people want to think is the truth
and to the commonplace understand-
ing that people are rarely fully aware of
what drives their decisions and actions.
Or maybe he isn’t all that oblivious:
his recognition that “each judge must
look to his or to her own conscience”—a
source manifestly linked to one’s inner
moral compass—to determine when to
make compromises rather than insist
on one’s own legal position reveals that
Breyer, like most of us, understands
that the exercise of judgment in difficult
cases is invariably driven by currents
more deep-seated than reference to any
external source could explain. Indeed,
his fascination with the works of Proust,
whom he has called “the Shakespeare
of the inner world,” is hardly consistent
with the embarrassingly unrealistic
suggestion that, upon noticing the influ-
ence of one’s worldview or general ideo-
logical orientation on one’s approach to
a case, one need only “correct course”
and return to the true path of the law.
B reyer condescendingly supposes
that the reason “political groups so
strongly support some persons for ap-
pointment to the Court and so strongly
oppose others” is that they “typically
confuse perceived personal ideology
(inferred from party affiliation or that
of the nominating executive) and pro-
fessed judicial philosophy.” He tells
us that judges who place “major inter-
pretive weight upon the law’s literal
text, for example,” might or might not
“over time come to legal conclusions
that we can characterize as more con-
servative.” But even when such judges
do lean in a rightward direction,7 he
insists that their “sworn duty to be
impartial,” which he assures us all his
colleagues “take . . . seriously,” should
suffice to quiet doubt about whether
politics, broadly defined, enters into
their decision-making process.
Part of me—the part that respects
Breyer as a highly sophisticated, in-
deed often brilliant, thinker and as
the author of the most devastating and
candid dissents of the modern era 8 —
7
The most dramatic modern counter-
example, Justice Gorsuch’s majority
opinion for a 6–3 Court in Bostock v.
Clayton County (2020), surprised most
Court observers when it treated the
Title VII ban on discriminating “on
the basis of sex” as literally covering
antitransgender discrimination. Chief
Justice Roberts joined the majority;
Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito, and
Kavanaugh dissented.
8 majority . . . substitutes judicial diktat
See, for example, his dissents in Par-
ents Involved in Community Schools
v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007):
“To invalidate the plans under review is
to threaten the promise of Brown. The
plurality’s position, I fear, would break
that promise. This is a decision that
the Court and the Nation will come
to regret. . . . I must dissent”; and in
believes he may innocently hope that
enough people will accept that notion
to protect the Court from the loss of
trust he fears it will incur once its ines-
capably political character is revealed
for all to see. He seems so obsessed
with what people think of the Court
that he is willing to prioritize appear-
ances over candor, even when it comes
to the matter of individual justices ex-
plaining their views. Breyer sounds a
bit like Emperor Joseph II criticizing
Mozart for having “too many notes”
in his musical compositions when he
makes the disquieting suggestion that
justices should avoid writing “too many
dissenting opinions,” recommending
instead that they join opinions with
which they disagree, lest the public lose
“confidence in Court decisions.”
In supposing that ordinary people
cannot wade through what amounts
to a handful of differing views, Breyer
again reveals how dense he must think
his readers are. This condescension be-
comes a regular theme in such lines as
“the Constitution is a brief document”
or when, in asking “where are judges
and justices to find those ends, those
ultimate objectives, that must guide
them,” he answers, unhelpfully, “in the
Constitution itself.”
To his credit, Breyer does offer some
fairly sensible—if obvious—guidance
to lay readers, including his insistence
that students spend more time learning
about civics and government, and his
emphasis on the importance of civic
participation to democracy. On the
other hand, at a later point in his book
he lays out banal nostrums to guide
other judges, such as “Just do the job,”
“Do not seek or expect popularity,”
and “Clarity in writing is a professional
necessity.”
This apparent contempt for his read-
ers leaves me confused: For whom,
exactly, is he writing this book? He
tells us that his aim is to “supply back-
ground, particularly for those who are
not judges or lawyers,” in part so that
“those whose reflexive instincts may
favor significant structural . . . changes,
such as forms of court packing, think
long and hard before embodying those
changes in law.” Here, at least, Breyer
is being candid: he is admitting that
his book is in no small part a reaction
to the mounting national call for en-
larging a Court that many—including
me—believe has been “packed,” by
means of dubious legitimacy, with too
many right-wing justices.
F rom comments that Breyer made on
his book tour and in answer to jour-
nalists’ questions about why he wrote
the book,9 we might conclude that
one of his aims was to rationalize his
persistent refusal to heed the lesson
of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who
gambled with the actuarial tables too
long and thus enabled President Trump
to choose a successor with a radically
NFIB v. Dept. of Labor (2022), which
concerned occupational safety rules re-
garding Covid in the workplace: “The
for reasoned policymaking . . . squarely
at odds with the statutory scheme. . . .
Without legal basis, the Court usurps
a decision that rightfully belongs to
others.”
A recent example was Breyer’s inter-
view with CNN Supreme Court reporter
Joan Biskupic.
The New York Review
different judicial approach. It’s as
though Breyer were telling everyone,
both by remaining on the Court and
by writing this book, “See, we judges
aren’t influenced by politics—our own,
those of the president who appointed
us, or those of whoever will take our
place. It’s law all the way down.”
Yet he is too savvy not to recognize
that his announcement that he would
retire at the end of the Court’s current
term, in late June or early July, “as-
suming that by then [his] successor has
been nominated and confirmed,” could
not have looked more political. And far
from being faulted for taking politics
into account, Breyer has been widely
praised for announcing his retirement
early in President Biden’s second year
in office, even though many of his ideo-
logical allies had urged him to retire
earlier still. He could have made his
announcement when he turned eighty-
three, soon after the Court took its
summer recess in 2021, a point at which
President Biden and a Senate in Demo-
cratic control could have nominated his
successor without the complications
that the looming midterm elections
might pose for a smooth confirmation.
But of course there’s a world of differ-
ence between letting politics, even par-
tisan politics, affect a judge’s personal
decision when to leave the bench and
letting political or ideological factors
shape judicial decisions, as Breyer in-
sists they do not.
A more plausible motive for writing
this book—one Breyer revealed quite
openly on his book tour—is his wish
to discourage people from paying too
much attention to the findings of the
Presidential Commission on the Su-
preme Court of the United States (of
which I was a member), which sub-
mitted its report in December. The
commission was charged by President
Biden last April to assess public con-
cerns about the Court and proposals to
reform it. Yet Breyer offers no basis for
evaluating his assertion that popular
respect for the authority of the Court
would be dangerously jeopardized by
various proposed changes—such as
enlarging the Court, limiting the terms
of its justices, restricting its power to
invalidate acts of Congress, limiting its
discretion over which cases to review,
altering its treatment of emergency
matters on what has come to be known
as its “shadow docket,” imposing a
code of ethics, or requiring it to oper-
ate in a more transparent manner—
whose merits he steadfastly refuses to
address but whose adoption he darkly
insists “could affect the rule of law
itself.” Nor does his book meaning-
fully engage with any of these difficult
questions:
(1) Does the ability of the Court to
serve as a politically independent
guardrail against despotism or
anarchy actually depend on prop-
agating the myth that its members
are immune from influence by
their cultural and political orienta-
tions and occasionally their parti-
san affiliations?
(2) To what degree is any such
myth sustainable in the face of cur-
rent experience? As Justice Soto-
mayor said acerbically, during the
December 2021 argument in the
abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson
Women’s Health Organization, the
Court was earning the “stench . . .
March 10, 2022
in the public perception that the
Constitution and its reading are
just political acts.” In his fine book
The Case Against the Supreme
Court (2014), Erwin Chemerin-
sky, dean of the law school at the
University of California at Berke-
ley, recalls that Sotomayor, like
Chief Justice John Roberts, found
it useful in her confirmation hear-
ings to describe what justices do as
“calling balls and strikes,” when in
fact we know they do much more
than that, including, as Chemerin-
sky notes, deciding the rules of the
game and defining the strike zone.
(3) Finally, if a “balls and strikes”
myth of apolitical adjudication is
indeed sustainable, is attempting
to sustain it morally justifiable? Put
otherwise, is it an example of the
Noble Lie we must tell ourselves
in order to avoid disaster—or just
another Big Lie that threatens our
democracy?
As a member of the commission, I
couldn’t help asking myself questions
like these—or hoping that Breyer’s
book would help us grapple with them.
No such luck. I did sense in some of my
fellow commissioners the belief that
we’d best avoid being too open about
our conviction that a majority of the
justices had become dangerously wed-
ded to a political perspective inherently
hostile to the premises of a flourishing,
inclusive democracy representing all
persons equally, and that three mem-
bers of that majority had been added
to the Court by political processes that
lacked democratic legitimacy.10 The gen-
eral mood seemed to be that the Court
should be spared the slashing critique
I was coming to believe it deserved—a
critique best put forward by Chemerin-
sky and in powerful testimony before
the commission by the constitutional
scholars Nikolas Bowie, Michael Klar-
man, and Samuel Moyn.11
These scholars made a persuasive
case that throughout our history, and
especially in its current configuration,
the Supreme Court has by no means
been a friend to politically under-
represented minorities, an ally to the
rights of the least powerful among us,
or a defender of the rights of all to full
and equal participation in the project
of self-government—the only reasons
sufficient, in the minds of many, to
warrant entrusting a power so vast to
so politically unaccountable an insti-
tution. They have argued that giving
10
The final report of the commission,
which in accord with President Biden’s
charge made no policy recommenda-
tions but only described the history of
various reform proposals and analyzed
them, summarized this perspective on
pp. 74–79. Even though the arguments
for Court expansion were noted, the
need to generate a consensus docu-
ment that all thirty-four commissioners
could agree to submit to the president
without any published dissents invari-
ably led to relatively anodyne state-
ments of those arguments.
11
Nikolas Bowie, “The Contempo-
rary Debate Over Supreme Court Re-
form: Origins and Perspectives,” June
30, 2021; Michael J. Klarman, “Court
Expansion and Other Changes to the
Court’s Composition,” July 20, 2021;
and Samuel Moyn, “Hearing on ‘The
Court’s Role in Our Constitutional
System,’” June 30, 2021.
the nation’s highest court not just the
power of judicial review but of judi-
cial supremacy—the final word on the
meaning and application of a flawed
but aspirational Constitution—has re-
peatedly been harmful to the cause of
freedom and equality, with infamous
decisions being the rule rather than the
exception.12
Chemerinsky and the scholars who
testified before the presidential com-
mission have not been alone in their
assessments. Justice on the Brink by
the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
and now lecturer at Yale Law School
Linda Greenhouse, the finest modern
observer of the Supreme Court, does
not take as panoramic a view of the
Court’s role as these other scholars do
and avoids the polemical cast of Brey-
er’s book. Instead, Greenhouse uses a
single, pivotal year in the Court’s his-
tory as a strikingly revealing window
into what it has become. Her book is a
splendid account of how the Supreme
Court that she covered for The New
York Times for almost thirty years was
on the verge in 2021 of cementing a
profoundly undemocratic legacy.
It diluted voting rights in cases like
Brnovich v. Democratic National Com-
mittee, a 6–3 decision gutting what re-
mained of the Voting Rights Act. It
eroded the wall separating church and
state in cases like Fulton v. City of Phil-
adelphia, in which the Court accepted
a Catholic social service agency’s re-
ligious liberty challenge to the city’s
termination of its contract because the
agency violated the contract’s antidis-
crimination requirement by refusing
on religious grounds even to consider
same-sex married couples as foster
parents.13 It undermined the autonomy
of women as fully equal citizens in a se-
ries of decisions dealing with abortion.
Greenhouse recognizes these decisions
as foreshadowing the Court’s disingen-
uous approach to the recent Texas law
outlawing all abortions taking place
after the first six weeks of pregnancy,
but deviously removing almost all state
officials from the law’s enforcement in
12
For example, Dred Scott v. Sand-
ford (1857), denying citizenship and
full personhood to Black slaves and
their descendants; Plessy v. Fergu-
son (1896), upholding “separate but
equal” public facilities for Blacks and
whites; Korematsu v. United States
(1944), affirming the wartime power
of the president to round up and re-
locate American citizens of Japanese
ancestry without proof of subversion
or disloyalty; Citizens United v. Federal
Election Commission (2010), striking
down virtually all legislative efforts to
limit corporate spending and contribu-
tions in political campaigns; and Shelby
County v. Holder (2013), striking down
the provision of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 that required state and local
voting changes with obvious discrimi-
natory potential to be submitted for ap-
proval by the Justice Department.
13
Greenhouse explains—as only some-
one so steeped in the Court’s history
and so adept at reading between the
lines could—the way Barrett, the new-
est justice, opted to side with Chief Jus-
tice Roberts over Justice Alito to yield
a 5–4 decision in the Catholic agency’s
favor that paved the way to weakening
the separation of church and state in
subsequent cases without prematurely
tackling precedents that stood in the
way, as Alito was eager to do.
order to make it virtually impossible to
challenge in federal court.
In her analysis of Brnovich, Green-
house dissects the briefs and oral argu-
ments with scalpel-like precision. She
follows the history of both the Voting
Rights Act and the case itself, lay-
ing bare the logical tricks underlying
Justice Samuel Alito’s “grudging and
ahistorical” majority opinion to demon-
strate just how disingenuously and pro-
foundly it ignored the purposes of the
Voting Rights Act. And in a discussion
that could not contrast more starkly
with Breyer’s obfuscatory approach,
Greenhouse says that “of course Ful-
ton v. City of Philadelphia had almost
everything to do with politics.”
Greenhouse took great care while
reporting on the Court’s decisions over
the decades to keep her own opinions
of their merits to herself. In this mas-
terly book, she continues that restraint,
but she is far more forthright now in
describing the apparent influence of the
religious backgrounds and affiliations
of the justices, six of whom are Catho-
lics, one of whom is Protestant, and two
of whom are Jews, and in identifying the
powerful influence of the right-leaning
Federalist Society and even more
right-leaning individuals and groups
that have financed the four-decade
project of turning the federal judiciary
in general, and the Supreme Court in
particular, toward the hard right.
She perceptively explores the ap-
pointment of Barrett, an avowedly anti-
abortion and indeed anticontraception
jurist. Barrett was nominated by Pres-
ident Trump to the seat that had been
occupied by Ginsburg, a legal pioneer in
the quest for gender equality, less than
two months before the presidential elec-
tion and only a week after Ginsburg’s
death. Justice Barrett, who has greater
tact than Justices Gorsuch and Alito
and thus will perhaps have a longer-
lasting impact on the Court’s rightward
turn, is revealed by Greenhouse to be a
substantial threat to democratic values.
T hrough most of the Court’s history,
we have seen it rule in ways that un-
dermine those values. The only sig-
nificant exception was the remarkable
period from the mid-1950s to the late
1970s. Today the Court appears once
again set on an antidemocratic trajec-
tory, one more deeply entrenched and
less amenable to a change in course. In
light of that dismal prospect, I hoped
that something in Breyer’s book could
enable me to join those who continue,
in the face of their apprehensions,
to sing the praises of the Court as an
imperfect but nonetheless admirable
institution rather than endorse Justice
Sotomayor’s remark about the “stench”
of its politicized decisions. Far from it.
Unfortunately, Breyer’s failure to grap-
ple with the Noble Lie—as part of a
candid appraisal of the current Court’s
threats to law and reason—comes at a
moment when another lie looms.
The “Big Lie” that the 2020 election
was stolen and that the administration
governing the nation is illegitimate
menaces the future of the Supreme
Court and our republic, threatening to
deceive the populace while the cynical
enablers of a charismatic despot seize
power, aided and abetted rather than
halted by a Court whose composition
he has radically altered. I wish we could
take solace from the fact that even this
Court has turned back several attacks
41

on the operations of government so
manifestly lacking in legal substance
that any other result would have been
an obvious embarrassment, but I fear
we cannot.14 Such decisions reveal only
14
A recent example is Trump v. Thomp-
son (2022), an 8–1 unsigned opinion
requiring the National Archives to turn
over Trump’s presidential papers to the
House special committee investigating
the January 6, 2021, insurrection be-
cause “President Trump’s claims would
have failed even if he were the incum-
bent president . . . and under any of the
tests he advocated” in light of the com-
LETTERS
UNCERTAIN IN LOVE
To the Editors:
Responding to a critique as condescending
as the one penned by Anahid Nersessian
about my book The End of Love is a chal-
lenging spiritual exercise. Hence I begin with
an attempt to understand how someone who
teaches in the department of English litera-
ture at UCLA could have so vastly misread
this book. The most plausible explanation I
can find is that the critic is not only untrained
in sociology, but unaware she does not have
the basic tools of the discipline within which
the book was written. Sometimes these dis-
ciplinary encounters offer delightful sur-
prises; and sometimes, as is the case here,
they only offer the spectacle of someone’s
most entrenched intellectual routines. This
obligates me to state some basics.
The purpose of this book is to understand
why there is a malaise in heterosexual rela-
tionships and to explain this in sociological
rather than psychological terms. Doing re-
search always entails hard choices: studying
unhappy people means having to forgo the
study of happy people. It does not mean we
do not know happy people exist; only that,
like doctors, we find it more urgent and
perhaps more interesting to understand
unhappiness. Moreover, rigorous method-
ology demands its object to be focused by
not introducing too many variables, such as
race or sexual orientation.
But Nersessian will have none of it. She is
on a mission to track the unstudied groups.
Queer or homosexual sexuality should have
been my topic. I am equally and bizarrely
indicted for not having included Black
people. The book was written in Israel, a
country in which there are very few Black
people, except for Jews of Ethiopian ori-
gins whose lives are so traditional that they
are outside the compass of my study (in the
same way that other religious Jews were
outside of it). I want to hope that living out-
side the US and choosing for oneself one’s
own object of interest remain legitimate.
Reading Nersessian, I was no longer sure.
She thus misses a key point: turning
heterosexuality into a puzzle enables me
precisely not to make it the default con-
dition of sexuality. With this self-declared
purpose, I focused on women. Here again
Nersessian finds plenty to lament about.
Why did I choose women? Because study-
ing men would have muddied the analysis
and because women have expressed most
vocally discomfort, unease, and perplexity
if not downright rage about their sexual and
romantic relationships.
Trying to skirt the familiar views that “men
are all pigs” and women hapless victims, I
precisely try to establish a structural analysis
of the sets of forces that have changed the
terms of the heterosexual encounter and
argue that uncertainty has significantly trans-
formed the formation and the maintenance
of intimate bonds. Uncertainty is a key con-
cept in economics and sociology: it implies
42
that the justices are, in the end, masters
of their craft and know that their power
requires them to act as lawyers. But the
sad truth remains that law’s constraints
are no match for power’s voracious
appetite.
In his book On Tyranny (2017), the
historian Timothy Snyder offers this
as the tenth of his “twenty lessons
from the twentieth century”:
Believe in Truth: To abandon facts
is to abandon freedom. If nothing
mittee’s urgent need for the materials
sought.
the difficulty of predicting a course of action
and figuring out the rules of an interaction.
When and how did the shift to uncertainty
in intimate relationships occur and what
are the cultural, technological, political, and
economic forces that shaped it are the two
key questions of this book.
Such uncertainty is also (but not only)
an outcome of sexual freedom. To an ex-
istentialist, this should not come as a grand
scoop or groundbreaking news. In existen-
tialist philosophy, freedom entails a funda-
mental uncertainty and even anxiety. The
book does not leave this claim in the sky of
philosophical abstractions: it documents the
minute ways in which these women struggle
with the emotional uncertainty entailed by
detached and autonomous sex.
Nersessian finds it distasteful that these
women do not speak like Sappho. Come
on, she says, aren’t people more diverse and
more interesting than this? Cherry-picking
her examples from past and highly literate
people (and thereby assuming the unchang-
ing nature of sexual desire and love), Ner-
sessian scolds us into celebrating, à la Marie
Antoinette, our sexual brioches. Such dis-
missal of the phenomenon of sexual and
emotional misery is uncomfortably reminis-
cent of the dismissal of economic misery by
those who have had the privilege to know
social life through its pleasurable luxuries.
To rebut my analysis, she finds no better
example of the delight of casual sex than in
the encounter of Godwin and Wollstone-
craft. Oblivious to any sense of cultural
analysis and historical difference, Nerses-
sian uses the passionate affair between the
two to deride my discussion of the ways in
which modern casual sex introduces uncer-
tainty in romantic affairs. Wollstonecraft
met Godwin after two suicide attempts
when Gilbert Imlay callously abandoned
her; Godwin and Wollstonecraft had a long
and slow courtship; Godwin had read Woll-
stonecraft and admired her; they ultimately
married. The difference between this and
anonymous sex is lost on Nersessian.
I neither deny that many are happy in love,
nor that sex can be pleasurable. The world
does not need me to report the trivialities
Nersessian finds necessary to repeat. The
point is to understand why a significant group
of women experience heterosexuality as a
form of emotional misery. Nancy Chodorow,
Carol Gilligan, Catharine MacKinnon, and
Shulamith Firestone have long been preoc-
cupied with just this question. My modest
contribution to their work has been to un-
derstand how the combined effects of patri-
archy, sexual freedom, technology, and the
consumer market create a new experience of
indeterminateness that has turned heterosex-
uality into a field rife with struggles.
Eva Illouz
Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Anahid Nersessian replies:
Although Eva Illouz is a sociologist, The
End of Love is not a work of sociology
is true, then no one can criticize
power, because there is no basis
upon which to do so. If nothing is
true, then all is spectacle.
At this moment, it falls to each of us to
preserve truth wherever possible and
to call out falsehoods however com-
forting. Breyer’s book has left me more
persuaded than ever that we have more
to lose than to gain by continuing to
praise the Court even when we see the
trajectory of its decisions as destructive
of what we hold most dear about our
constitutional order. Q cancel, at its sole discretion, any advertising
—February 10, 2022
in the traditional sense. It contains nei-
ther quantitative analysis nor a robust
ethnography; if it did, I would not be in
a strong position to evaluate it on its own
terms. As it happens, however, a great
deal of the evidence for Illouz’s claims
comes from novels, films, TV shows, and
stories that people have shared anon-
ymously on the Internet. As a literary
critic, I am fairly comfortable on this
terrain.
In her letter, Illouz notes that her book
was “written in Israel, a country in which
there are very few Black people.” However,
in The End of Love, she says she has based
her analysis on “interviews with ninety-two
people in France, England, Germany, Is-
rael, and the United States from the age of
nineteen to the age of seventy-two.” If all of
these interview subjects were white, that is
an interesting and important fact about her
sample population, since France, England,
Germany, and the United States are quite
diverse places.
Finally, I did not indict Illouz “for not
having included Black people” in the study.
I noted that she did not appear to have
interviewed any people of color. Needless
to say, not all people of color are Black—
not in the US, and not in the Middle East.
The suggestion that they are speaks for
itself.
QUERY
Were you affiliated with the Village Pres-
byterian Church, the Brotherhood Syna-
gogue, or the Greenwich Mews Theatre in
the West Village during the 1950s–1970s?
I am seeking members of these congrega-
tions, as well as colleagues of Reverend
Jesse Stitt, Reverend William Glenesk,
Rabbi Irving J. Block, and the theater pro-
ducer Stella Holt, for a research project
about the Greenwich Mews Theatre, lo-
cated in the church basement at 141 West
13th Street.
Hillary Miller
Assistant Professor of English
Queens College
English Department
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Klapper Hall 607
Flushing, New York 11367
mewsresearch@gmail.com
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PERSONALS
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 Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

SEEING RED RACE, REMOVAL, AND FAMILY, SLAVERY, AND

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understanding of the early republic. As her title our view of settler colonialism.” communities they called home. Seeley brings a volume displays Lewis's creative and wide-
suggests, insurance companies not only —Christina Snyder, Pennsylvania State much-needed perspective to these intercon- ranging reinterpretation of the founding era.”
supported the expansion of American mari- University nected histories of race, rights, and migration.” —John Lauritz Larson, Purdue University
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